What ‘America First’ Really Means

Economic security is national security.

J.B. Shurk | August 9, 2026

I have a dream that American farmers, drillers, miners, industrialists, and manufacturers produce everything that American consumers need.  I have a dream that anything worth building is built in America, that any job worth doing is done in America, and that anything worth buying can be found and shipped within the United States.  

Why did we allow ourselves to be convinced that Americans should make only a few select things and buy everything else from foreign markets?  Why did we allow politicians and Wall Street investors to convince us that “free trade” requires slave labor from faraway lands?  Why did we spend a century ensuring safer work environments and more dependable wages for our skilled tradesmen only to export those jobs to adversarial nations that care nothing about worker safety or providing above-subsistence standards of living?  Why did we fight a Cold War in defense of freedom only to subsidize Chinese communism?  Why do we regulate ourselves to death in the name of “fighting global warming,” while China and India inflict the worst environmental damage on the planet?

Prove these statements wrong: There is no worker on the planet more capable than an American.  There is no nation of people more innovative than the United States.  There is nothing that Americans import from other nations that Americans can’t discover, create, grow, or produce on their own.  There is no country on the planet with more educational infrastructure than the United States.  There is no country on the planet with a greater incentive to defend its way of life.

I believe that Establishment politicians and multinational investment firms sold us a bill of goods when they told us that “free trade” deals, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement, would provide American households greater prosperity.  I believe that those politicians and Wall Street investors lied when they told us that the United States would become a “service economy” and that blue-collar workers would find personal fulfillment as customer service representatives, real estate agents, telephone operators, data........

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