Have you met Freddy?
He's a German soccer fan who flew into Atlanta for the World Cup, rented a car, and just started driving south and posting everything he experiences.
Waffle House at 1am: "great food, great prices, great staff." Buc-ee's: "DUDE LMAO THIS IS A GAS STATION." Bass Pro Shops: "They were selling rifles in there."
His follower count went from 11,000 to nearly 380,000 in about four days as the rest of the world has jumped on to see America through Freddy’s eyes.
The State Department reposted his Tennessee photos. J.J. Watt offered to personally show him around Houston. Sean Duffy shared his account with the caption "HAVE YOU SEEN THIS?"
Good. I love it.
Not because Buc-ee's is some crowning achievement of civilization (though the brisket is legitimately excellent), but because of what Freddy's reaction is exposing. He's not discovering anything new. The Tennessee sunrise has always looked like that. The Bass Pro shooting range has been there for years. The Waffle House has been slinging eggs at 1am since before many of us were born.
It’s just that he's now seeing it, and most Americans have simply stopped looking.
I've been thinking about why that is. Why it takes a guy from Germany to post a photo of an American highway at dusk and caption it "what a country" before Americans look up from their phones and go, "Oh. Yeah. That is actually pretty cool."
I think it's because most Americans genuinely do not know their own history.
Not the dates—they know at least some dates. I mean the ideas. The arguments. The specific, hard-won, almost-didn't-happen intellectual fights that produced the country Freddy is currently losing his mind over.
They don't know why the Founders were so paranoid about concentrated power—not as a talking point, but as something they'd actually thought through, traced back to Rome and Greece and every republic that collapsed under its own ambitions. They don't know that the Bill of Rights almost didn't exist or that what we ended up with was a compromise, a deal, something that took years of argument to produce, and that the arguments were fascinating.
They learn that Columbus was bad, that the founders owned slaves, and in a lot of cases, that's about where it ends.
So when someone tells them this country was never great, or was founded in sin, or is just one nation among many with nothing particularly worth protecting or defending—there's nothing to push back with because the case was never made. You can't defend what you don't actually know.
And of course that’s not an accident. An ignorant citizenry is a useful citizenry if what you want is compliance.
Freddy from Germany doesn't have that problem. Nobody taught him to be embarrassed by American abundance. He just got here and started noticing.
Warts and all (and they’re certainly there), the United States was built on a set of ideas the world had genuinely never tried to systematize before.
Not just "freedom is nice," but the specific claim that rights pre-exist government—that government's only legitimate job is to protect those rights, and that power has to be distributed and checked and answerable to ordinary people, or it will inevitably eat them.
That framework has produced more human flourishing than anything else in recorded human history.
More escape from poverty; more voluntary exchange; more innovation—not because Americans are a superior people, per se, but because the ideas that formed the foundation of this nation are right.
And when a country actually organizes itself around the right ideas, remarkable things happen.
That's what our America's History series was created to teach. Volumes 1 and 2 take kids from the Magna Carta to the Bill of Rights—not as a list of events to memorize but as a story of ideas.
Why did these specific people, at this specific moment, manage to build something that the Greeks, the Romans, and many others before and since have tried and failed to build? Ours is genuinely one of the most consequential stories in human history, and most kids have never heard it properly told.
Volume 3 pre-orders are now open, with first orders shipping at the end of the month. It covers 1791-1849, the period when the fledgling country finally got to stretch its legs and see how these ideas worked in practice.
(Spoiler: it was a pretty shaky start)
As part of our America 250 celebration, we’re also running a fun contest. A letter-to-the-editor competition where the winner gets a family trip to Charleston for an immersive American history experience!
You can learn more here!
Look, it’s no secret that I’m not a big sports guy. I’d rather spend my free time outdoors with my family, or tending my bees, but I’m enjoying watching World Cup revelers from around the world discover my country.
All my life I’ve heard that Europeans think we’re boorish, ignorant, and rude. And maybe that’s what they came here thinking, but I have a suspicion that by the time this summer is over, a lot of soccer fans are going to head home with a new perspective on the United States.
And who knows, maybe a lot of Americans will be inspired to learn about their own country after seeing it through the eyes of people like Freddy?
Our America’s History books are a great place to start.
— Connor
