A Thanksgiving Letter to My Fellow Americans

This Thanksgiving, I write with a full heart to thank the Americans who still believe this is the greatest country on Earth, who see its flaws yet refuse to betray it, who stand up with clear eyes and calloused hands instead of kneeling to foreign powers or domestic tyrants. You are the reason America endures.

America-first is a fierce campaign of the highest standard of living humanity has ever produced. No other nation protects its children the way we do. We raised the age of consent, ended child labor in dangerous industries, and declared that no 13- or 15-year-old will be treated as an adult in court, relationships, or battlefield. That is moral evolution guided by reason and evidence. Other nations still send kids into war or marriage and call it culture. We call it cruelty, and we refuse to descend back to that level.

Look at the footage coming out of Gaza. Two ancient hatreds burning crueler than love for their own children, demanding we pick a side or face financial punishment, slander, or worse. We reject the ultimatum. Our loyalty is not for sale, and our children are not bargaining chips.

I was raised in Appalachia by people of German and Melungeon blood who lived on hogs, potatoes, prayer, and pride. Politicians never came to our hollows with grocery bags or promises. My family grew food, bartered medicine, built homes, and settled our disputes with the church and common sense. Many still do. When Hurricane Helene tore through, neighbors showed up with chainsaws and casseroles long before FEMA found the address. That is America at its core: people who need no permission to help or to survive.

This is the message Jangled Jester carries across these mountains and across the internet. America still belongs to its people. Not to the President alone. Not to the DOJ. Not to the FBI as cattle to be branded. We are intelligent, self-reliant, and fully capable of determining right and wrong without a bureaucracy of psychopaths telling us what to think.

The path to citizenship in this country should remain open to the world’s most exceptionally talented since this is the reputation of America — but it must be earned by those willing to meet our high standards, not handed out to those expanding places that refuse to raise theirs. Open borders while gangs, traffickers, and ideologues of force pour in is not compassion; it is national suicide dressed as virtue.

We have finite land, finite resources, and infinite problems of our own. There are pedophiles in our schools, addicts in our streets, veterans on waiting lists, children who still go hungry in the richest nation on Earth. Every dollar sent overseas while Americans suffer is a betrayal. Every factory moved to a lower-standard country is a surrender of our birthright. It is time to bring production home, to trust American minds and American hands again.

Objectivism — clear-eyed, evidence-based reason — is the strongest engine of the America-first movement. Objectivism isn’t owned by a single theology. It isn’t a mystic revelation. It is reason, the same reason that built the Constitution, split the atom, and put men on the moon. Jangled Jester is a non-mystic project for those who choose empiricism, evolution, and first-principles thinking, yet JJ stands shoulder-to-shoulder with Christians, Pagans, Hindus, Buddhists, and legal migrants of every faith who also love reason, property, and liberty.

We do not ignore the world out of hatred. We focus here out of love and practical wisdom. There is only so much room at the table, and Americans must eat first.

So what do we do now? Make something. Learn a trade. Fix an engine, bake bread, write code, grow food, tailor clothes, brew medicine. Sell it, trade it, market it proudly. Start a cottage business under Tennessee’s Cottage Food Law or your state’s equivalent. Turn hemp back into the cash crop it once was. Meet your neighbors for supper and talk about real things — politics, philosophy, soil pH, whatever builds you into action.

The government’s legitimate role is borders, defense, courts, and staying out of the rest. Everything else is ours. Local schools, local markets, local solutions. America’s innate pluralism works when it is bounded by reason and loyalty to this country. An atheist should be able to use a church food bank, and a Christian should be able to buy medicine from an atheist chemist without apology or coercion. That is the old American bargain, and it still works when we live it.

This Thanksgiving, celebrate with your hands and your mind. Persist when the work is hard and monotonous. Believe you are capable, because you are. The same blood that crossed oceans and mountains for the American dream runs in you. You were built to preserve it. Objectivism is our unifying fire on the journey: the right to think, to own, to trade, to speak, to build the city together. Politics is not a spectator sport or a paid profession but every citizen’s daily act of participation in the greatest experiment in human freedom.

Keep your eyes on what is noble. Ignore the cynics who say we cannot trade freely with one another, worship differently, and still be one nation. I have seen it work in these hills, and it can work everywhere.

America is still ours to save, to build, to love.
Thank you for still believing that.

With gratitude and unbreakable hope,

@JangledJester