As America approaches its 250th birthday, the establishment press can barely hide its contempt for the republic and the men who built it. Their retrospectives tell you more about their hatred of American greatness than any honest reckoning with history.
Fortune marks the semiquincentennial by drawing parallels between Alexander Hamilton's Bank of the United States IPO in 1791 and Elon Musk's SpaceX offering — and the framing is the whole story. The magazine leans hard into Thomas Jefferson's sneering description of the bank subscription as driven by "the appetite for gambling" and "the delirium of speculation." James Madison is quoted calling the oversubscribed offering "a moral certainty of gain" with "scarce a physical possibility of loss," delivered as warning rather than wonder. Dr. Benjamin Rush is summoned to describe Philadelphia exhibiting "the marks of a great gaming house" where speculation allegedly drove men to madness and death.
This is how the establishment press sees the founding: not as a project of nation-building, but as a bubble. Not as the architecture of a financial system that would fund a continent's development, but as a frenzy. Hamilton — an immigrant visionary who built the financial scaffolding of a republic — is reduced to the patron saint of leveraged speculation. The actual achievement, a functioning national bank that stabilized a young country's finances, gets buried under quotes about "stockjobbing" and "gamblers."
Fortune even notes that George Washington saw the oversubscription differently — "pleasing as it related to the confidence in Government" and "an unexpected proof of the resources of our Citizens" — but that quote is positioned as counterpoint, not conclusion. Washington's pride in his countrymen's confidence is treated as naive; Jefferson's disdain is treated as prescient.
Meanwhile, Breitbart carries a sponsored piece from T1 Energy chairman Dan Barcelo that, whatever its commercial motives, at least frames the American story correctly: every generation found the next energy source and built an industry around it. Edwin Drake struck oil. Thomas Edison fired up the first electrical plant. Americans smashed atoms, unlocked fracking, and now manufacture solar. Barcelo calls it "strategic autonomy" — a domestic energy supply "manufactured on American soil" that is "good for the economy, good for national resilience, and good for the workers who build it." That is the language of a country that makes things. It is the language the Founders actually spoke.
The New York Post's own 250th retrospective is essentially a look back at its own front pages — a nostalgia exercise that at least doesn't actively despise the country being celebrated, but doesn't exactly grapple with it either.
Here is the pattern: when the press covers America's founding, it reaches for the most cynical frame available. Hamilton's bank wasn't nation-building; it was a bubble. The Founders weren't architects; they were speculators. Jefferson's agrarian anti-commercialism — which would have left America weak and dependent — is treated as the sober view, while Hamilton's pro-industry vision becomes the cautionary tale.
This isn't history. It's editorializing through quotation. The same press that lectures Americans about the Founders' flaws can't bring itself to credit their achievements. Hamilton built the financial system that made American independence economically possible. Musk is building the launch and manufacturing infrastructure that makes American space dominance possible. Both attracted fierce opposition from those who saw concentrated power as inherently dangerous, as Fortune notes. But opposition is not the whole story — it's just the part the press prefers to tell.
The 250th anniversary of a republic that became the most powerful and prosperous nation in human history deserves better than coverage that treats its founding as a cautionary tale about greed. The Founders argued in taverns about how to build a nation. Today's press argues in air-conditioned studios about why the building was illegitimate. The difference tells you everything about who still believes in this country — and who doesn't.
