26 Feb America’s 250th Birthday: Answering the Call of Duty
Among the many gems of wisdom and spiritual insight delivered by Winston Churchill, this one stands out:
The destiny of man is not measured by material computations. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we’re spirits—not animals…. There’s something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty.
In 2026, a call of duty to unflinchingly defend and preserve America and her founding ideals is reverberating throughout the nation. Because we are ‘spirits—not animals’.
No other nation on earth anchored its founding in the existence of the God of the Bible; in the nature of that God as essentially loving, endowing men and women with the right to be treated with a presumption of dignity—‘all men are created equal’—and with unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; and in the confidence that these ideals represent ‘self-evident’ truth.
The American nation, so anchored, has an unmatched 250-year history of productivity, innovation and achievement, with an ever-restless collective resolve to do and be better in ways relevant to fairness and justice and overall societal advancement. Not a perfect history; not a straight-line trajectory of improvement with no setbacks or existential challenges; and by no means a completed history. But objectively, a 250-year history to be proud of. And a history that shows men and women, for all their moral flaws and shortcomings, to be capable of great virtues such as courage, bravery, selflessness, mercy and humility—i.e., to be much more than animals defined and consumed by basic, primitive instincts.
‘Americans’—who are properly understood not as a race or ethnicity but as human beings who intuitively embrace and relish living the freedom afforded by American ideals—and ‘America’—which is best understood not as just another nation but as Abraham Lincoln put it, ‘the last best hope of earth’—have throughout the first 250 years of the nation’s history been the target of relentless attacks from every form of thought that hates America’s founding ideals.
Which is another way of saying: America is the target of relentless attacks from every form of thought that hates the idea of God and of transcendent, unchanging, ‘self-evident’ truth. Slaveholding secessionists hated the truth that all men are created equal; Nazis in World War II hated Judaism and Christianity; Cold War communists hated any claim of divine authority apart from and more powerful than themselves.
Whether or not one subscribes to the social science construct called the Fourth Turning, the ongoing convulsions in America surrounding:
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- Antisemitism (and the ridiculous, stunningly ignorant corollary of Islam-isn’t-so-bad-ism);
- Anti-law and order (a sitting Congresswoman wearing a ‘f*** ICE’ pin to the SOTU),
- Anti-nuclear family (transgenderism, LGBTQ+++ off-the-rails, pride-in-every-perversion fanaticism);
- Anti-biblical morality (massive governmental fraud and corruption, including but not limited to Ukraine money-laundering, the ‘Epstein Files’ and Minneapolis ‘learing’ centers); and
- Anti-Christian militancy (the assassination of Charlie Kirk)
…these are hateful, often coordinated and already violent attacks on America as founded, and there is a corresponding call to all Americans to recognize them, rise up and decisively defeat and destroy them.
President Trump’s default setting is to call the Democrats/leftists/Marxists attackers of today ‘crazy’ rather than evil or hateful, but the stark contrasts he drew in his monumental SOTU address between the ideas and heroes he honored and stood up for vs. the attackers who would denigrate those ideas and heroes had the desired effect: American patriots heard the call of duty.
It’s not yet clear how many American patriots heard the call or, among those who heard it, how many are willing to step up and answer the call, or, among those are willing to step up and answer the call, how many are willing to go all the way to the founders’ standard of pledging their lives, fortunes and sacred honor to fulfill that duty.
But there is reason for optimism. The consensus of historians is that only a third of the American colonists—facing the initial call of duty in 1776—heard it, answered it and were willing to put everything on the line to achieve independence from England and the American founding. Another third of the colonists heard the call but answered wrongly—they supported England. And the last third—whether or not they heard the call, just didn’t care or want to take sides.
The 77 million Americans who voted for Trump in 2024 have not gone away, and no matter how hard the legacy/dinosaur media pushes a narrative that various Trump supporters are now disengaging from MAGA, don’t buy it. Even a CNN post-SOTU poll showed 64% of viewers (much more than a third) agreeing that Trump’s agenda is putting America on the right track. (The post-SOTU mid-terms are looking decidedly redder.)
So…President Trump in his unique way has made the call of duty clear, and more than enough Americans have heard it. Their Judeo-Christian heritage assures them they are more than animals with no higher purpose than eating and procreating; American patriots seem to intuit that they are what Churchill described as spirits, with a higher purpose acknowledged and supported by the American founding. They just need to feel the deep sense of compelling duty that Churchill understood, and America’s 250th birthday celebration will help them feel it. Then it’s a matter of meeting that duty in effective ways adequate to the times.
Stand by for more and more clarity as to what those effective ways will be.
Eric Georgatos