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by Rod D. Martin
July 4, 2026
I appeared on NTD Newsroom with Arlene Richards to discuss why America is exceptional, the principles that distinguish it from other countries, and why its values have remade the world.
We discuss:
The 250th anniversary celebrations in Washington, and the pro-America surprise and enthusiasm of World Cup fans
Why “endowed by their Creator” means that rights come from God not government, making government’s duty to secure those rights not to rule
The unique opportunity and prosperity those freedoms have created
Martin Luther King’s view of the Declaration of Independence and America
Legal vs. illegal immigration, and the high value of citizenship
The greatness and goodness of America
It’s 12 minutes of in-depth analysis you won’t get anywhere else. Watch the interview, and pass it along!
Our full discussion after this:
Nothing matters more than educating the next generation with the values we cherish. The Herzog Foundation is making that possible. Learn more here.
Transcript:
Arlene Richards: We’re going to be joined now by political strategist Rod D. Martin. He’s also the founder and CEO of Martin Capital. Happy Fourth of July, Rod, and thank you so much for joining us.
Rod D. Martin: Great to be here.
Arlene Richards: We appreciate you coming here on this Fourth of July evening. What do you think about this whole celebration and the weather that we’re having here this evening?
Rod D. Martin: It’s wonderful. I’m just barely old enough to remember the bicentennial. I was about six when that happened. I’m hoping to make it to the tricentennial.
But this has been magnificent, weather notwithstanding, heat notwithstanding. The Great American State Fair was just wonderful. The Mount Rushmore thing was wonderful. The flybys are incredible. And we’ve got the World Cup going on at the same time, which is just extraordinary.
I’m certainly not a soccer fan. I’m an American, so I think that’s all kind of a commie plot. They ought to play real football over there, don’t they know?
But we have the World Cup here, and it’s all over America, and it’s just wonderful because people are coming from all over the world and their media lies to them about America. You hear these incredible interviews where they’re going on about how they believed everything in America was falling down and dirty, and everybody was hateful, and everybody wanted to kill everybody, and all this insane stuff that only a bunch of liberal media people in New York and Europe could possibly believe.
Then they come here, and they see the real America, and they’re all going nuts over it. They’re all taking bottles of ranch dressing home and going on about how they want to move here. It’s flawless. It doesn’t matter what the weather throws at us. It is a glorious 250th birthday for the greatest nation on Earth, and the whole world is seeing it.
Arlene Richards: You’ve said you’re an American. Dave and I here, we’re both Americans, born and raised. What are you reflecting on this July 4th?
Rod D. Martin: The biggest distinction between the American Revolution and all the others is really this idea that we hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, that they’re endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.
Of course, we know the unalienable rights. Everybody can quote the rest. But “endowed by their Creator” is really the crucial difference between our revolution and the French Revolution, or the Russian Revolution, or the Chinese Revolution. Because what it says is that rights are prior to government.
Government did not give you your rights. Government, therefore, may not take away your rights. And crucially, and the Founders to a man understood this, government exists not to rule you, but to secure your rights.
That’s exactly why America has been so successful. We were just 3 million people huddled against the Atlantic coast 250 years ago. That is literally just three full lifetimes. And 3 million people have become nearly 350 million people.
We’re 4 percent of the world’s population, but we’re 26 percent of the world’s economy, the most powerful military in the world, all these different things. But the reason is that we’re free. We’re free on a fundamental level that goes beyond government just doling out what it wants us to have, where maybe we get some benevolent rulers.
No. Government here serves the rights of the people, which means that somebody like Elon Musk can come here and become the world’s first trillionaire, and we can solve huge problems all over the world.
America has been a blessing to the whole world. When America became independent, 86 percent of the world's population lived in extreme poverty. That number is now just 9 percent, and it’s going to shrink dramatically from there in the 21st century because of the ingenuity and goodwill of Americans.
Arlene Richards: You talk about how great America is, but we’ve had some naysayers, some people who are not happy being American or living in America, or don’t like American values. What do you say to those people on a day like today, with this big celebration going on for weeks now and going to continue after today?
Rod D. Martin: I would start by referring them to Martin Luther King, who had every reason to hate America. He grew up in segregation. He was mistreated. He was thrown in jail wrongly. All kinds of terrible things happened to him.
And yet he consistently proclaimed the vision of our Founding Fathers: that the Declaration of Independence was the greatest human document in the history of the world, that it established this enormous promise to all mankind, and that what he was working for was not to overthrow the American system, but to make it live up to its promise.
In point of fact, it has. The civil rights movement succeeded. Segregation ended. And we welcome people from all over the world.
We do ask that they actually come legally. We ask that they come through the door, not break in the window. But we are an incredibly welcoming country. As all those European soccer fans discovered, we let in 1.1 million legal immigrants every single year and have since before I was born, which is just incredible. There’s no other country in the world that does anything like that.
They come here for a reason. We absolutely can’t let enough people in for there not to be more who want to come, precisely because they understand in their bones there is opportunity here that doesn’t exist anywhere.
So I would encourage some of our socialist friends in this country, Mr. Mamdani, all of his followers, AOC: they should go spend some time in Cuba or North Korea or Venezuela, or any other socialist country they choose, and just live there for a while under the sweet, tender mercies of these socialist regimes and see how well that works out for them.
Arlene Richards: You talk about all the people that we let in and all the people that have come here who want to stay here. A lot of people that have come for the World Cup are bragging about America on social media.
But our Declaration of Independence, and what our forefathers did, was based on Christian values. I think President Trump, we were talking earlier about how resilient he is and how nothing gets him down, and we’re expecting him to come and speak this evening. What do you think the president is going to say this evening if he is allowed to come out and speak?
Rod D. Martin: I don’t think anybody can prevent him from speaking. This man is so resilient. It’s unbelievable. Y’all were just talking about that.
If you’ll recall, before I think the 2024 election, but it might have been the 2016 election also, he was doing Election Day rallies that began at two in the morning. The man is just a machine. I don’t know when he sleeps.
So he’ll be out there, and when he does, he will testify yet again to the greatness of America and the opportunity for anyone who chooses to be part of it lawfully. Lawful is the key. We can’t have the kind of flood of migrants that the Biden team let in. He stood strong against that because it cheapens citizenship.
The people who come through the door and don’t break in the window go through a lengthy process. They are vetted. If they choose to become citizens, they study American history. They take an oath of allegiance. Why should we cheapen what they do for people who don’t do any of that and don’t love our country?
So he’ll probably talk about that. He will talk about not just the greatness of America, but what the greatness of America means for the world, because this is a unique country.
This is a country that flattened Germany and Japan during World War II and immediately went in, didn’t treat them as conquered provinces, went in and rebuilt them, gave them hope, handed their children chocolate bars, gave them democracy, and then defended them from the Soviet Empire for all of the Cold War.
This is a unique country. There’s nothing else like it. I’m so grateful to get to be a part of it.
Winston Churchill said that if you were born an Englishman, you had “won the lottery of life.” I beg to differ. I think if you were born an American, you were. And if you get to come here and be a citizen, equally so, if not more so.
Donald Trump pronounces that better than most American leaders have in memory. There are a few others, like Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, who do a great job of it. But really, not since Reagan have we had a president who could articulate the idea of America as strongly as this president.
Arlene Richards: Dave and I were talking earlier about how, when we were in school, we didn’t learn so much about why we should be so proud of our country. We didn’t learn about why this country is so much greater than, say, a communist country. There are differences, but we didn’t understand that.
And now, schools don’t require the students to salute the flag in the morning like we did. What is happening with our schools? When did that change? Do you know?
Rod D. Martin: It’s just a grave mistake. And it’s been very deliberate because the left got control of education in this country, and they don’t love America.
We don’t have to look far when we have the Gallup poll that just recently came out that shows that about 92 percent of Republicans are proud of being an American, and about 36 percent of Democrats are. That’s just mind-boggling.
When I was a kid, it was more or less equal. Everyone pretty much agreed that, hey, this is a great place. We want to make it better, of course, and we want to make it better now. But they weren’t absolutely opposed to the idea of America in the way that Senator Tim Kaine was recently, when he just scoffed at the idea that rights would come from God rather than government.
His focus, of course, was not primarily on the idea that rights transcend government. It was that government should be able to take away anything it chooses. That’s a socialist mindset that does set us apart.
We are not greater because people in Russia or China or Venezuela are somehow inferior. We love them. We’re all for them. We want them to share in what we have. America is greater because it’s freer, and it gives expression to the different callings of all of its people.
Anybody can become anything in America. That’s unique in all the world.
Arlene Richards: Well said. We thank you so much for coming out on this Fourth of July. I’m sure you’re celebrating it today as everyone else is. We appreciate it, and continue to enjoy your Fourth.
Rod D. Martin: Yes, ma’am. Happy Fourth.
Arlene Richards: Happy Fourth.
