The existence of America to those who came before this country was willed into existence by our forefathers and those willing to die for their noble cause was a dream: a paradise of freedom away from religious persecution and in harmony with neighbors, a place united by the Christian values that championed the family and preserved individual liberty.
One of the Nation's most famous civil rights heroes later articulated what that meant in a speech for the ages in 1963. He shared a dream just 2 miles west of this Capitol on the grand steps to the monument of the Great Emancipator.
He dreamed `` . . . that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.''
Dr. King was assassinated just 5 years later, but his words carry his legacy as a living memory. A memory which to be both proud and careful of as a warning about our present decade.
The United States is experiencing many of the same stress tests today that we survived through the 1960s.
We are locked in a competitive space race with a nuclear rival.
Our foreign policy is wrapped around countering rival communist, fascist, and totalitarian regimes across the world who have no respect for human life, value, or dignity.
Our university campuses are hotbeds of unrest and disunity with calls to destroy the social contract that has allowed differing groups, religions, and philosophies to not only exist in harmony but to actually thrive, and for our people to love each other like brothers.
We are facing historic divisions in our cities where anarchy, race riots, and political assassinations have returned.
We have faced these trials before.
They are the familiar currents of cultural upheaval with a frightening future, an anxious uprising inspired by the demonic impulses of envy and greed embedded in racial, classist, and sexual resentment. These weaponized emotions threaten to divide us further and represent yet another obstacle to conquer on our crusade to deliver a more perfect union.
This effort to divide us into ever smaller subcategories of humans, to slice and dice us into the smallest subset possible to further a victim mentality, isn't designed to strengthen our core as a country but to conquer us as a united people and to sully our shared society.
Despite these efforts, the same common denominators that unite the American nation have always been our salvation, and it will be the resurgence of our shared Judeo-Christian values on this 250th anniversary that will save us again.
I come from the mountain west. Being born and raised in Wyoming is one of the greatest blessings of my life. There are six generations of my family who have called Wyoming home, and we, along with our extended family, have worked tirelessly to build the State to represent the heart and soul of America's destiny and legacy.
We are the Nation's least-populated State, but we are a mighty herd at the frontier of the American march forward.
Prairie populism carried the banner of progress forward, a new land of opportunity for freedom's endeavor, as we united this country from shore to shore.
Wyoming was the first State to give women the right to vote, passing the Women's Suffrage Act on December 10, 1869, a full 50 years prior to the passage of the 19th Amendment, granting this right to women nationwide.
Wyoming was a haven for free African Americans who enriched our cowboy and Western heritage, coming to Wyoming to homestead and create communities. We are proud to be the home of the Northern Arapahoe Tribe and the Eastern Shoshone Tribe of the Wind River Indian Reservation, whose cultures and traditions have enriched our cultural history.
Our pristine national parks and monuments stand as temples of a shining exceptionalism to our respect for the environment, beauty, serenity, and the sublime. The pulsing geysers at Yellowstone beat the heart of a humble people whose character defines the mission-driven stoicism within the American spirit.
The West has always embodied the ultimate destiny of the American people with its story being told by a proud, bold, patriotic clan in pursuit of prosperity and autonomy. The individual's birthright to self-determination declared in our founding documents characterizes our unapologetic crusade for justice, liberty, and expanding what is possible.
We reached for freedom westward first, piercing the barriers of distance, wilderness, weather, and hostile conditions. Our ancestors survived against harsh elements, and they connected a continent.
As we moved westward, we took our culture and traditions with us, including those promises embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, thereby establishing a country that spans North America from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean, where all people are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.
The American Dream took root in the homestead on our ancestors' Western crusade for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The promise of private land ownership became a uniquely American ambition, available to the calloused hands of hungry settlers who built a nation and a culture shaped by shared trials and a common destiny.
Today, the American Dream stretches coast to coast, united by our heritage to create and sustain a free and just society.
It is this history that draws people from around the world to pursue that American Dream.
The world comes to America not because we are corrupt but because we are not. The world comes to America not because we are racist or sexist but because we are not. The world comes to America not because of the tired mantra that ``diversity is our strength'' but because of our shared culture and history. The world comes to America not because we have nothing to offer but because we are exceptional.
We enjoy a degree of freedom and opportunity like nowhere else on Earth, including in the very European country that birthed America, whose leaders are currently openly renouncing the Magna Carta's civil contract in order to push policies that will ultimately destroy Western civilization if they are not reined in.
There is no German dream or French dream. There is no Guatemalan dream or Haitian dream, and there has never been a Somali dream. It is the American Dream: the idea that anyone can realize success regardless of their circumstances, where race, sex, ethnicity, and background are not barriers to harnessing someone's full potential.
I am an example of that American Dream. When I was born, I was my parents' fifth child, and my oldest sister was just 5 years old. When they brought me home from the hospital, they had just recently bought a ranch, were over $200,000 in debt in 1962, and had $35 in the bank. This is the home where they brought me as a new infant, and our family continued to grow even after that, with more brothers being added later.
We all worked to make that operation a success. I learned to drive when I was 4 so I could help my father feed cows. We were on horseback working cows almost before we could count them. We fixed fences, irrigated, did the chores, and milked cows. I graduated from Lingle-Ft. Laramie High School with a class of around 30 students. We were taught English, literature, history, science, social studies, calculus, and trigonometry. We built pig barns and learned how to weld, although I was not very proficient at the latter.
I had brilliant and compassionate educators who taught me to think and presented we with the rich mosaic of the real world so I could succeed in the real world.
Mr. Speaker, I realized fairly early that I probably was not going to make
I have always wanted to be a long-haul truck driver when I grow up so I could travel every mile of this beautiful country and relish being an American. In the meantime, here I am.
Why is my history important when discussing why we should be proud of our heritage? Because I am absolute proof of what our forefathers sought to implement in showing that it has come to pass.
We are a government of, by, and for the people. I am everyman U.S.A. My history and my story are the history and story of tens of millions of people in this country.
I came from the most humble of beginnings living in this house on the Cheyenne to Deadwood Stage Trail with no telephone and limited access to the outside world, and I am today standing on the floor of the United States House of Representatives speaking on behalf of the millions of my brothers and sisters everywhere. Only in America is my story possible, and I celebrate that every day.
America 250 marks the milestone of a nation born out of grit, a desire for improvement, and a quest for innovation that are ingrained in our pioneer DNA. Our evolution is guided by an unrelenting passion for liberty's progress, 250 years of being guided by our instincts to confront new frontiers.
In 1776, our forefathers had already recognized that it was time to throw off the limits of arbitrary boundaries previously established by a European monarch. The first Americans had already begun pushing West on the eve of our national independence.
Daniel Boone captured the Nation's divine early hunger for exploration with a trailblazing expedition across the Cumberland Gap. The millions who followed over the subsequent 250 years have done so in Boone's footsteps chasing prosperity by conquering the elements and mapping their own future.
By 1826, our country had already developed a strong taste for expansion after having doubled the land mass before turning even 50 years old. The Louisiana Purchase unleashed the budding ambition of American frontiersmen defining a new era of self-determination by driving further westward.
Mountain men like Jim Bridger, John Colter, and Jedediah Smith carried Boone's legacy into the wilderness. Beaver trappers pioneered the first global economy. The next 50 years featured a mass migration to settle the continent. Farmers, builders, artists, intellectuals, gold miners, businessowners, dreamers, second sons, and even some storied outlaws moved West to claim their future in the new frontier.
By 1876, a new national hero emerged to represent the truest form of American individualism, as our Nation settled the West. The lone cowboy riding on the distant horizon staked his claim in the American identity, a male model of resilience epitomizing strength, integrity, and stoicism. The image of his determined drive stays with us as a defining character in American culture, an aspirational figure of self- sufficiency and adventure to guard his herd, his Nation, and his neighbor.
My own great-grandfather joined a cattle drive in 1878, heading north from Texas, eventually settling in Wyoming where he lived for the next 60-plus years and leaving a legacy as an honest cowboy and rancher that continues to impact our State to this day. There are many like him in Wyoming and elsewhere, yet another layer in the glorious traditions and history of our great Nation.
By 1926, the American frontier was transformed by the exponential industrialization of a united continent. New networks of transportation and communication collapsed distance by using innovation. Our expansion reached far beyond our shores. Hawaii and Alaska represented the ripe new territories beyond the edge of the Western frontier.
America's desire for exploration and conquering far-distant frontiers escaped into orbit as we approached our 200th birthday. The mission to the Moon had just been accomplished by the bicentennial of 1976. The Apollo landings became an instant legacy to our pioneering endeavors, delivering the next generation of frontiersmen in the form of a new American hero defying gravity: the astronaut.
His horse of steel and rocket fuel propelled a high-octane expression of American exploration into the future. The new path forward is a trail blazed upward, unlocking space-based industry and a colony on the Moon as America reaches 250.
It was by the will of a collective people, united by a cultural desperation to determine their own story and achieve the impossible that we conquered the first Moon landing--250 years of a nation reaching forward, westward, and upward, escaping gravity, breaking previous realities, and unleashing endless new possibilities. Our national compass stopped pointing West. It started pointing up into the heavens. Our celestial neighbors marked the latest boundary of the American frontier. The sky is no longer the limit. In America, Mr. Speaker, it never has been.
We now choose to go back to the Moon not because President Kennedy said we should 60 years ago but because the Moon represents the next stop as we continue to realize our manifest destiny.
The stars taunt us as the next mythical paradise beyond our horizon to carry the banner of our cowboy legacy, an otherworldly wilderness for American frontiersmen to tame for God and for country.
These stars have been on our national flag since our ancestors went to battle for our freedom. They fly again on the wings of heroes blasting themselves to convey America further than we have ever gone before. Deep human space flight is the ambition of our generation.
We plant our values on triumphant territory in the name of American glory, the banner that waved over Fort McHenry, the flag our heroes raised amid the costly battle at Iwo Jima, the Stars and Stripes planted by the astronaut cowboy on a distant crater.
For 250 years, the flag has been an early symbol of American vigilance, an emblem of our pride and heroism.
In the 1860s, the Gettysburg flag waved among the unbearable noise of wars as our ancestors fought to keep the Union together and abolish slavery. Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong would plant the flag in the vast lunar mare known as the Sea of Tranquility, in almost total silence a century later.
This year, the flag returned to alien gravity, and the Stars and Stripes that draped our most famous 1980 hockey team waved once again at an Olympic triumph over Canada, a miracle on ice in the year of our 250th.
The American flag is the ultimate unifier. We wear them. We hang them, and we pledge allegiance to them as the declaration of commitment to our country, our neighbors, our heroes, our culture, and our history. The colors conceptualize our gratitude for those who are willing to lay down their lives for our great country and for what it means to be connected to each other as Americans.
They cover the caskets of the brave men and women who paid for our freedom.
We honor each other when we honor those servicemembers. The flag has always been the reminder throughout our 250 years of how far we have come, how much it cost, and how much is possible.
It is a reminder to be proud of our American heritage, the freedoms we all share, and a how a price has always been paid, willingly so, by those who believe in everything that America stands for.
Thirteen men and women have now paid the ultimate dues of American liberty this year in Iran. They join the more than 1 million men and women who gave their lives for our country since 1775.
On Veterans Day, we thank those who served and survived. On Memorial
They are why we made it to America 250. They did not die for a mere idea. They died for the values embedded in our flag, the ultimate representation of pride, love, and commitment to our great American Nation, free and united by the best ideas.
We recently celebrated Flag Day, a day to salute the most common banner of our character, the symbol of our shared identity as Americans in pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness, a star-spangled emblem for hope and harmony.
Now, for some reflection on where we are and what ails us, Mr. Speaker, my colleagues on the other side of the aisle have worked mightily to weaponize our history to indict our Nation as irredeemable. Radical academics glorify The 1619 Project so that they may dismiss the miracle of 1620, when our ancestors planted the seeds of our country on their historic voyage aboard the Mayflower, the inaugural expedition westward that would define the direction of American destiny.
It was they who sailed into existence a Nation inspired by our Judeo- Christian values and who began the construction of the shining city on the hill.
The Pilgrim crusade for the right to self-determination reached a new milestone just 167 years after they arrived on our shores, when the Founders kicked off 250 years as an independent nation.
Thirty-five million Americans trace their lineage to the Mayflower. What a legacy, and what a history. What they began based on faith, freedom, and hope has now evolved into a miracle, the miracle of our forefathers creating a country based not on government control, but on individual freedom.
Today, the left reveres 1619 as what they say is the year of America's true founding. The year the first slaves were imported to America has become the defining moment for a new generation of cultural revolutionaries hellbent on tearing our society apart. They lionize past pain to drape themselves in a toxic form of victimhood, antithetical to America's true values.
The perpetual hoax that demands that we view ourselves entirely through the lens of racial injustice, however, dismisses our great legacy and history, as does their characterization that America was built for the sole purpose of oppression.
That is simply not true. Acknowledging the horrors of slavery does not justify ignoring the greatness of America or counsel against celebrating the accomplishments of Americans from all walks of life.
Twisted theories designed to disgrace American exceptionalism come in spite of everything we have done. Yet, it takes very little imagination to recognize that the world would be a dark place, indeed, were it not for America. I mean that both figuratively and literally.
In 1879, Thomas Edison lit up the night when he invented the light bulb in New Jersey, soon after visiting Wyoming to witness the total eclipse of the Sun and enjoy our world-famous fishing.
Alexander Graham Bell made the first successful telephone call just 3 years earlier in Boston.
In 1903, Orville and Wilbur Wright changed our reality with the first powered flight across the Carolina sky. American aviators would pioneer jet age travel within just half a century thereafter.
In 1908, Henry Ford rolled the first Model T out of the garage. His assembly line would unleash the American car as the ultimate freedom machine to explore our wide-open country, while also changing the very nature of manufacturing and, thereby, altering the world forever.
Today, LED smartphones connect places around the globe in a nanosecond. You can charge them in the car or while flying in an airplane.
Mr. Speaker, my mother is 102 years old. I want you to just think of the changes that she has seen in her lifetime. Having grown up on a farm in Minnesota, they spent their days tending the garden, working in the fields, taking care of the animals, chopping wood, and canning food.
Because of American ingenuity and the commercial production of affordable and reliable energy, the last 100 years have seen changes unrivaled in human history: an increase in life expectancy, a decrease in the infant mortality rate, central air, warm homes, and abundant food sources produced right here.
American innovation and freedom are at the center of these advances that my mother has experienced, and we should be forever grateful for those who have dedicated their lives to making our lives better, both with regard to incredible technological and medical advances, as well as creating the arts and music that we so enjoy.
The world's most consequential technologies are products of Americans' advancements. Computers, the internet, GPS, flight, fracking, and vaccines have been delivered from the laboratory of American democracy.
Our form of a republican democracy itself has always been America's best innovation. American free market capitalism has done more to relieve human suffering than any other system in human history, making every invention I just mentioned even a possibility.
Today, Americans enjoy a level of prosperity and equality like nowhere else on Earth and like no time in human history. I encourage any skeptics to look at Iran if there is any doubt, where women are barbarically abused and gays are thrown off roofs.
Marxist countries are no better, with the Cuban people having now been oppressed for over 60 years, while their government overlords have become filthy rich by exploiting their suffering.
America 250 is a reminder of America's world-changing contributions. Our ideas lifted more people out of poverty than any other civilization that has ever existed. Our heroism and bravery saved the world from two global wars. Our values inspired hundreds of millions to rise up for liberty.
The leftist dogma through which today's revolutionaries write off history is a national tragedy and must be exposed as the intellectually lazy pablum that it is.
The left dons the crown of victimhood to erase what it means to be a country of citizens pursuing a common cause. They flood the Nation with third-world immigrants who do not assimilate into our culture, with their militant refusal to do so tearing the American spirit while feeding waste, fraud, and abuse.
The left cheers for the breakdown of the nuclear family, while then using the resulting misery as a way to bolster their own power.
America has a choice on this anniversary, and we should choose to rally around the same glorious flag that we all recognize in the year of our 250th. The Star-Spangled Banner reminds us how there is more that unites us as a nation than there is to drive distrust, envy, and anger among neighbors.
I challenge every American to wrap themselves in our national colors throughout our historic anniversary. Reject the rainbow banners of identity politics and division. Embrace tradition. Embrace America.
The American flag is the banner of our crusade under a shared destiny, a call sign to conquer the frontier, and a symbol of our national redemption.
