The Ugly American

Let me get this straight.

You fly to Europe. You refuse to bow to their customs, their queues, their quiet little judgments about how loud and free you are. You’re the Ugly American. Case closed. The locals sneer, the media nods, and you’re told to shut up and assimilate - or go back home. They’ll literally scream it at you.

Now flip it.

You’re home. In your own country. You watch people from other cultures plant themselves here and refuse the most basic American norms—our language, our laws, the idea that public space isn’t a third-world bazaar. Maybe we still go to Target and actually pay for the merchandise. We get prayer horns blaring over neighborhoods that never asked for them. We have open borders turning cities into something unrecognizable. But don’t dare open your mouth. Suddenly you’re the Ugly American again.

Same label. Opposite direction. The rule is simple: American identity must now dissolve on contact.

This didn’t fall out of the sky. The progressive era of today was rocket-fueled during the Obama White House. Obama and his clan turned apology into official US policy. Go back and read the record - 2009 to 2017. It doesn’t feel that long ago, yet it reads like messaging from some odd alien land. We were told America had too much to atone for—too much power, too much pride, too much of America itself. The message landed hard: your culture is the problem. Your confidence is suspect. Your preference for your own way of life is proof of moral defect.

Hell, Michelle Obama stated she had not been proud of her country for most of her adult life until 2008. What kind of life is that? I’m sorry to inform you that you have failed Michelle Obama once again. This is a woman you could invite over to dinner, serve her a corn casserole, and all of a sudden you’re a racist because slaves used to pick corn and casseroles are a vestige of the south to designed keep the black man down at the dinner table. Then the NYT will pick up on her ire and run a story with the headline “Casseroles: The South’s Dining Mainstay is a Racial Holdout to the Plantation Days.” You’re chuckling because this does not sound far-fetched at all. It’s highly plausible because this insane progressive messaging is designed to work exactly like this.

We’re trading the hard edges of American culture for DEI soft-serve. Everything distinctive gets sanded down in the name of “inclusion.” Statues torn down, literature eradicated, historic artifacts hidden away, even foundational documents deemed unacceptable — it’s all in play. Pride in our own flag becomes optional, then gauche, and then suspect. Entire political factions treat the Stars and Stripes like a hate symbol while they wave every other flag under the sun in our face and demand we salute. The same people who demand you respect every imported custom turn around and treat our own native customs - the ones that have been around for over two centuries - like radioactive waste.

The [mainstream] Democrat candidate for governor in Wisconsin once wrote: “Cancel Thanksgiving. Should have done this in 1621. If it takes a worldwide pandemic for us to realize we should stop celebrating colonialism and the original superspreader event that killed Indigenous folx and women so be it.” - you cannot make this stuff up!

The same girl said: “My proximity to whiteness continues, right... My son is biracial. He is half-white and half-Korean. I think navigating what his identity is and how people perceive him is always at the back of my mind.” - Proximity to whiteness, you say? SHE HAD SEX WITH A WHITE GUY!!!! LIKE, HOW MUCH MORE PROXIMITY DO YOU NEED??? You’re killing me, Smalls!

Remember assimilation? Come here, join the project, or don’t come at all? Now the demand runs 180 degrees the other way: the host must now contort itself until the guests feel right at home - home being the dismal shanty-towns they left behind to live the American Dream. Complain about illegal immigration flooding the system? You’re a xenophobe. Point out the cultural friction? You’re the problem. Defend the idea that a nation is more than an airport surrounded by an economic zone? The digital megaphone brands you: Ugly American.

It’s a con. A one-way ratchet designed to make the historic American majority ashamed of itself while every other identity is celebrated for staying intact and unapologetic.

The men who built this place never apologized for taking up space. They wouldn’t recognize the posture. They didn’t beg the world for permission to exist on their own terms. They demanded newcomers meet the standard—not rewrite it.

We’re past polite disagreement. The double standard is the point. It keeps the traditional culture permanently on the defensive so it can be managed, diluted, and eventually replaced by something softer, more manageable, and more controllable. Some of the things I see white men—America’s traditional power brokers—bowing to are unimaginable. Some of them are men I know from past lives in business, church, or earlier careers look like lab rats today - wholesale infected by the progressive experiment. It’s sickening.

Why do we insist on this culture of suicidal empathy? As Gad Saad put it: a society dies when it cares more about exhibiting infinite tolerance and empathy than invoking its survival instinct.

Refuse the label. Do not apologize. It’s ok to be a Zionist. It’s ok to be an Islamaphobe. Don’t let these new “hot” labels of the progressive left scare you.

The only thing uglier than an American who won’t adapt abroad is a country that won’t insist its own people adapt at home.

Without apology, now is the time for those who are proudly American—and yes, for those who are proudly white and American—to stand. Why does this scare people?

-Todd