America250: Their Foresight Gave Us Today

Hello and welcome to Friday, July 3, 2026. The Fourth is tomorrow, which means today is the day everyone actually does the cookout, buys the beer, and drives somewhere — with the federal government's blessing, since the Federal Government says Independence Day is officially observed today.

My magic calendar says it's Disobedience Day, National Fried Clam Day, and Air Conditioning Appreciation Day. So defy something, pine for Howard Johnson's fried clam sandwich, and stand directly in front of the vent. In that order, ideally.

Today in History:

1608: Samuel de Champlain founds Quebec City, establishing the first permanent European settlement in what would become Canada. Two days ago was Canada Day. The French were there first and would like you to remember that.

1754: George Washington, then a 22-year-old Virginia militia colonel, surrenders Fort Necessity to French forces in Pennsylvania. His first military command, his first defeat. He files it away and gets better.

1775: Washington gets a second chance, riding out before his troops at Cambridge Common and formally taking command of the Continental Army. The upgrade from militia colonel to commander-in-chief suits him considerably better.

1863: The final day of the Battle of Gettysburg ends with the catastrophic failure of Pickett's Charge — roughly 12,500 Confederate soldiers walking across open ground into massed Union fire. Some 6,000 are killed or wounded in under an hour. Lee retreats the next day. The war has turned.

1884: Dow Jones & Company publishes its first stock average — eleven railroad stocks and two industrials, summarized in a customer newsletter. The number was 40.94. It has had some ups and downs since.

1886: Karl Benz officially unveils the Benz Patent-Motorwagen — the first purpose-built automobile. It has three wheels, a single-cylinder engine, and no horses. The world will never again require horses to get anywhere, though it will take a while to fully process this.

1890: Congress admits Idaho as the 43rd state.

1969: Brian Jones, founder and original guitarist of the Rolling Stones, is found dead in his swimming pool in England at 27. Two years later to the day, Jim Morrison, frontman of the Doors, dies of heart failure in a Paris bathtub. Also 27. Rock and roll was not always kind to its founders.

1985: Back to the Future opens in American theaters. It becomes one of the highest-grossing films of the year, spawns two sequels, and lodges itself permanently in popular culture. The DeLorean has never recovered its dignity.

1988: The USS Vincennes, a Navy guided-missile cruiser, shoots down Iran Air Flight 655 over the Strait of Hormuz, killing all 290 people aboard. The crew had misidentified the commercial airliner as a military aircraft. The U.S. government eventually paid $61.8 million in settlements. No one was disciplined.

Birthdays today include: George M. Cohan, composer and playwright ("Give My Regards to Broadway," "You're a Grand Old Flag," and "Over There") — a man so patriotic, he was born on the third and always claimed the fourth; Franz Kafka, Czech novelist (The Metamorphosis, The Trial); Charlotte Perkins Gilman, author and social reformer ("The Yellow Wallpaper"); Dave Barry, humor columnist and Pulitzer Prize winner; Tom Cruise, actor (Top Gun, Jerry Maguire, and the Mission: Impossible franchise); Yeardley Smith, actress, voice of Lisa Simpson since 1989; and Sebastian Vettel, Formula One driver.

If today's your day as well, hope it's a great one.

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This column's a little different — I wrote it to fit the America 250 mold. I'm writing and filing it today, the day before the Fourth, because tomorrow you'll have better things to do than read me, given what day it is. So I'm handing you these thoughts now, so they're rattling around in your head for the weekend.

In a way, I'm leaning on the past while eyeing the future. If that sounds confusing, I get it — it sounds intellectual, doesn't it? It isn't. And thank God, because we all know intellectuals: people who graduated from venerable institutions like Columbia or Berkeley, who can look at a glass of water, correctly identify it as a glass of water, and then torpedo any further progress by demanding to know why it's a glass of water. Such people will die of dehydration mid-debate, still wrestling with that all-important question.

Relax — I'm no intellectual, and my reason for straddling past and future is a lot simpler than that. I'd argue the people who founded this country 250 years ago built it with every intention of providing for a future they knew they'd never live to see. And I intend to prove it, with a little help from their own words.

Adams wrote his wife the following day, expounding on the idea that people not yet born would benefit from what he was about to lose sleep over: He predicted the day would be "celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival," complete with parades, bonfires, and bells "from this Time forward forever more." He admitted the war would cost blood and treasure, but insisted "Posterity will tryumph in that Days Transaction, even altho We should rue it."

He wrote again, a year later, sounding less triumphant and more like a guy hoping his sacrifice wasn't for nothing: "Posterity! You will never know, how much it cost the present Generation, to preserve your Freedom! I hope you will make a good Use of it." He even threatened to haunt you from heaven if you blew it.

Then there’s then-General George Washington. In his orders to the army right before the British attacked New York, he laid the entire weight of future generations on his soldiers' shoulders: "The fate of UNBORN MILLIONS will now depend, under God, on the courage and conduct of this army."

Then we have Elias Boudinot, President of the Continental Congress, framing liberty as an inheritance with strings attached: A resolution he signed called it "an indispensable duty which we owe to God, our country, ourselves and POSTERITY… to maintain, defend and preserve those civil and religious rights and liberties, for which many of our fathers fought, bled and died, and to hand them down entire to FUTURE GENERATIONS."

Even Daniel Webster, some decades later, was still worried about the future, saying the whole project could unravel if future generations didn't hold up their end: "If we and our POSTERITY reject religious instruction and authority, violate the rules of eternal justice, trifle with the injunctions of morality, and recklessly destroy the political constitution, which holds us together, no man can tell, how sudden a catastrophe may overwhelm us."

And the preamble to the Constitution itself expressed that purpose, saying that the Constitution was ordained "to secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity." They wrote it right into the founding document's opening sentence, in case anyone missed the point.

Related: 'No Kings' and the DSA

So with all of that in mind, I now come to the point: Who is now looking forward to our future and that of our country? I hope and trust you are, because each individual, including you and I, is where it starts.

It is true that we have a lot of issues threatening to tear us apart, and an annoyingly large number of people, even within our county, bent on doing just that. I've written extensively on such people in the past, so there's no point on expounding further on it here. All I will say to that point is that our pushback needs to be equally strong. The future — which, like the Founders, we cannot hope to see — depends on it.

Thought of the day: Freedom isn't just what you're given; it's what you defend, build, and pass on.

VIP members, hit the heart and speak up. Freedom of speech, ya know.

Take care, gang. And yes, I'll be posting a couple articles tomorrow. See you then.

There's a new sale brewing at PJ Media. Call it our Independence Day celebration — the America 250 Sale! You get 74% off a new one-year VIP membership when you use the code word AMERICA250. Nice, huh?