This July 4, I need to declare something that I hope a lot of you are thinking even if you fear being judged for saying it out loud.

I am proud to be an American.

Furthermore, I do not apologize for it.

America isn't perfect and never has been, but it's the greatest country on Earth. I bet most of you agree and, apparently, so do most of the rest of the world.

People vote with their feet, some with their lives. From every corner of the globe, immigrants are sacrificing everything to come to America. Not to France. Not to China. Not to Cuba, but here.

That's not an accident. That is a verdict.

I hear reactions of World Cup visitors from dozens of countries walking our streets, meeting our citizens, eating our food, seeing our cities and experiencing America firsthand.

'We owe America a huge apology, it's nothing like what the media tells us. Everyone is so friendly, so accommodating.'

'It's amazing how free people are here. You go state to state as you please.'

'You own this land? Wow! Incredible!'

They're right, yet many of us take our country for granted.

Consider this: In 1976, America celebrated the Bicentennial. Six million people lined the Hudson River in New York City to watch tall ships sail by. The nation was optimistic with nearly 75 percent saying that the country had already lived up to a fair amount of its founding promise… but that summer things were a mess.

Gerald Ford was the only president to serve without ever being elected. Nixon and his VP had both just resigned in disgrace. American had recently lost the Vietnam war after nearly 60,000 Americans were killed or went missing. Inflation was in double digits. Unemployment was near eight percent. Economists had to invent the word, 'stagflation,' to describe how stuck we were.

But Americans threw a party anyway.

Jump forward 50 years to today.

More than 60 percent say the country is headed for a crisis, in a new Daily Mail/JL Partners poll. Nearly a majority say they are more fearful for America's future than they were a year ago. One in four believe America used to stand for the right values, but now represents the wrong values. And 46 percent believe the American Dream is harder for them to achieve than it was for their parents.

Here's my problem: people don't react to what's happening around them, they react to what they tell themselves about what's happening. And what they tell themselves is being shaped, deliberately, by people and organizations with an agenda, who profit from others' despair.

Americans must be careful to not listen just to the loudest voices as opposed to the best voices, so, let's ignore the 'programmed perception' of America and look at the facts.

This country is objectively, materially better off than it was 50 years ago and it's not even close.

Life expectancy: 72.6 years in 1976. 79 years today. Across 340 million Americans, that's over two billion years of additional life created.

Smoking: 37 percent of adults smoked at the Bicentennial. Today, one in ten. Heart disease and lung cancer dropped right along with it.

Big City Crime: New York City: 1,622 murders in 1976. 309 last year. Five times safer.

The environment: Rivers caught fire. Lake Erie was declared dead. Leaded gasoline poisoned the air over every American city. We fixed all of it. We cleaned the water, cleared the air and got the lead out, literally.

Education: 14 percent of Americans held a college degree in 1976. Nearly 36 percent today. Women represented about barely 30 percent of college students then, now they're the majority.

The economy: GDP per capita is over $70,000. Poverty is near historic lows — even with 100 million more Americans than we had in 1976.

Are there real problems? Yes. Trust in government has collapsed, some of it earned, some of it engineered.

Polarization is dangerous and real. Economic gains haven't been shared evenly. Housing costs are squeezing families. But these are the exceptions to a 50-year trend of documented, measurable progress.

The people cheering in New York Harbor in 1976 were cheering for a country that was sicker, dirtier, more dangerous, and less free than the one we live in today. And they were right to cheer. The line was already bending the right way.

Now consider what America, as a nation, has achieved over 250 years.

We put a man on the moon with less computing power than the phone in your pocket. A target almost a quarter million miles away. Off course by even one degree and you miss by 4,000 miles.

We beat the Nazis and the Japanese Empire at the same time and then rebuilt both nations. That's grit, that's character.

We gave the world the airplane, in fact, an entire airline industry that now moves 900 million passengers a year in the US alone. We invented the lightbulb, the cotton gin, the computer, the internet, the iPhone, air conditioning, the Pacemaker, the assembly line, the MRI, not to mention the chocolate chip cookie.

We discovered the polio vaccine and how to mass produce antibiotics. The world runs on American innovation.

We wrote a constitution that's lasted 250 years, so radical, so visionary that the rest of the world copied our homework.

We're the most generous nation in human history. When disaster strikes anywhere on Earth, the first question is always: where are the Americans?

We gave the world Abraham Lincoln, Marie Curie, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Jackie Robinson, Jonas Salk, Amelia Earhart and Martin Luther King Jr.

And here's one people forget: religious freedom in this country is stronger and broader in America today than it has ever been. So are civil rights.

Huge progress has been made on both fronts, with admittedly a lot of work left to do. For example, we still fight against antisemitism every day, but fight we do.

Did every American in every era live up to our founding ideals or modern standards? No, they did not. But judging George Washington or Thomas Jefferson by the moral rulebook of 2026 isn't wisdom, it's just wrong and unfair. It's called presentism: dropping people who lived in a different time into our moment and grading them on a test they never took.

The right question isn't 'did they meet our standard?' It's 'did they move the ball forward?' And the answer, overwhelmingly, is yes.

We don't honor our country or the great Americans who came before us by toppling statues. We honor them by learning from their mistakes, embracing their accomplishments and being worthy of what they handed us.

That's what I want you to take from this. Not blind cheerleading, informed pride, and evidence-based patriotism. The kind that knows the problems, fights them, and still says, without apology, this is the greatest ongoing experiment in self-government the world has ever known.

The story being sold is that we're failing. The facts say otherwise. Ask yourself who benefits if you believe it.

So, here's what I want you to do today: Fly the flag. Say you're proud and say it loud. Teach your kids why it matters to love and support America.

One of my proudest days as an American was 9-12-2001. That's right, the day after the tragedy of 9-11. I felt every American come together as one. There were no Democrats or Republicans, no left or right, black or white, just Americans, proud Americans standing together. 

I saw it after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and Hurricane Helene in North Carolina. I saw it after the horrific fires in LA. Neighbors reaching out to neighbors. No left or right, no black or white, just RED, WHITE AND BLUE. America at its best. Won't it be great when we don't need a tragedy to remind us: we are all in this together.