The Nation’s Semiquincentennial
Like many of us older folks, I have been discouraged this year, seeing the relative lack of enthusiasm for the 250th anniversary of the passage of the Declaration of Independence.
Young Americans have never really seen a big, long-term burst of patriotism. Even people who annually celebrate Independence Day with fireworks and flag-waving, summer parades, and red, white and blue decorations, have no idea what the Bicentennial fervor was like, fifty years ago.
1776 was the culmination of a national excitement level that had been building for several years. The Broadway musical “1776” was made into a movie. Revolutionary War era historical sites were deluged with tourists taking their families on educational vacations. Every other TV commercial or print ad seemed to be using 18th century themes in their marketing.
The Bicentennial was virtually omnipresent.
And virtually everyone was happy about it.
This year, while there are decent celebrations in the red states, it is shocking how little excitement there is nationally for this anniversary. I suspect that the technical names for it, semiquincentennial or quarter-millenium – being rather cumbersome terms – may be a part of it. “Bicentennial” certainly trips more easily off the tongue – but that’s not the whole cause.
We have seen a couple of generations be consciously raised to disapprove of patriotism. Pride in our national heritage is vocally discouraged by our educational system, and increasingly, by the political class and pop culture as well.
Fortunately, facts are facts, and those facts can’t be changed. The noble establishment of this nation, 250 years ago, by the courageous patriots of the second half of the Founding Era, remains an incredible accomplishment, well worth celebrating.
Birthright Citizenship and the Creativity of the Judiciary
Many imaginary “constitutional rights” have been “discovered” in recent decades. A right of noncitizen parents to have their child become a citizen, a right of foreign people or businesses to contribute to American political campaigns, a right of illegal aliens to claim imaginary asylum (one that means no definition of “asylum” in the law), even a right of foreign indigents or foreign governments to continue to receive American tax dollar largesse, and so many more…
We battle in the courts; and judges and appeals courts, and even the Supreme Court, refuse to see reason on the need to curtail such illogical concepts.
Why does the Constitutional, patriotic, pro-American side always seem to lose these battles in the judiciary, let alone the court of public opinion?
Personally, I do believe that one of our problems is that we tend to make things too complicated, or perhaps more precisely, that we allow others to make them too complicated, and we allow them to drag us into the weeds with them, debating century-old examples, old rulings and countless other red herrings, instead of concentrating on the things that matter.
Frankly, it doesn’t take a law degree – or a lifetime of study and millions of pages of precedent – to understand the fundamentals here.
The Constitution is a contract, plain and simple. It’s just a contract. A contract between the citizens and states of the United States to allow a government to exist, and then to empower that government, to a very limited extent, to manage some certain specific things for us.
And what is a contract? A contract is by definition an agreement between parties. In the case of a constitution, that agreement – the Constitution of the United States” – is between citizens and the fifty state governments.
It therefore does not apply to noncitizens. Period.
The government therefore cannot mandate the granting of any benefits by law to anyone not subject to its jurisdiction as an existing member to the agreement.
You can certainly choose to do things on a one-off basis for them. Congress can give some military aid to Ukraine for example, or a president can send famine relief to Nigeria, or we can offer trial-by-jury to criminal foreigners arrested here for pickpocketing while they’re here on vacation. We don’t have to do these things, but we can choose to, particularly if we agree to do so long-term in a reciprocal treaty with a foreign nation, ratified by the Senate.
We can be generous, even magnanimous, on a one-off basis.
But our courts cannot insist that such issues are required by any stipulated clauses in the Constitution. Foreigners don’t have actual rights under the Constitution, because they simply can’t. They aren’t party to it. It doesn’t apply to them.
Our courts cannot FORCE the application of any such rights to foreigners, from foreign dependents on our aid programs, to foreign mothers about to give birth in our hospitals.
The courts may try, and they may get away with it sometimes, but such rulings are still utterly, morally, ethically, legally illegitimate.
Because no matter how you look at it, you have to admit the most fundamental, Aristotelian conclusion: A is A. To whom does a contract apply? A contract applies to the parties to the contract, period. Foreigners are not party to the Constitution, so they cannot possibly have rights under it.
Period.
The Thuggery of the Modern Left
When news reports started to come out that booked performers – that is, singers who had already been signed to perform in our nation’s various Semiquincentennial events – were beginning to break their contracts and drop out, some of us suspected that it was a concerted effort to embarrass the President, to make him look like a failure because he was somewhat tied to these celebrations as the occupant of White House in this anniversary year.
We were both right and wrong.
It turned out to be true, but there was more to it than that.
As it turns out, there has indeed been pressure applied to these performers. There have been reports – with minimum clarity on the origins – that performers were threatened with the loss of other gigs if they didn’t drop out.
When mafia types applied such pressure to nightclub acts, a century ago, the nation was disgusted, and such tactics were shown to be shameful in books, film and television. The population was horrified that such pressuring went on, and people clamored to stop it.
Today, people shrug their shoulders and say “that’s the way it goes.”
At first, I blamed the performers for giving in to such pressure. But it appears that some of this pressure involves the worst such tactics that we heard of in the past. Performers have been “threatened,” whatever that means, in various ways. How? to have gigs pulled? to have representation dropped? to have regular bookings permanently cancelled? to be thrown out of the union? To have band members or their families threatened with assault or death?
It’s happened before; why shouldn’t it happen today? We should not be surprised, entertainment is heavily ruled by the political left, just look at the recent output of woke Hollywood and woke Broadway.
The modern Left has so much control – over our government, over the entertainment industry, even over the prosecutorial process in our nation’s big cities and counties – that when this happens today, there is little surprise, and little that we can do.
In the 1950s and 1960s, there were Congressional investigations of the thuggery of organized crime.
The thuggery of the modern Left – from forcing performers out of bookings to organizing assaults on federal agents, from stealing elections to organizing political assassinations – is fully deserving of exactly that kind of Congressional investigations and rigorous prosecutions.
The RICO Act, in fact, was designed for exactly such times as these.
Copyright 2026 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance trainer, speaker, and consultant. His book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel), his political satires on the Biden-Harris administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), his first nonfiction book, “Current Events and the Issues of Our Age,” and his brand new collection of stories about the heroes of the American Founding, “The Founding Generation: The Patriots Who Built America,” are all available in either eBook or paperback, only on Amazon. His trade compliance training practice is available either in person or by webinar.
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