I was born in 1976 - our nation's Bicentennial. And maybe at least partially because of that, I've always been patriotic and have always been interested in politics. I was a Reagan baby, a Rambo kid, and later, a Rush adolescent. As a kid, I watched movies like Red Dawn as if they were instructional videos, thinking I would one day grow up to have to fight the Soviets in a WWIII, and around the time I was hitting puberty, I watched the Berlin Wall come down with a sense of ultimate victory over the world's communist threat.
Though I never lost my patriotism, by the mid to late 90's, as I moved into adulthood and the many pursuits that go with it, I paid less and less attention to politics. But some time around 2010, as I was starting my family, I began to become vaguely aware that the nation around me seemed to be changing in an almost imperceptible way.
I was stunned to realize that my country had elected a man named Hussein to the presidency less than a decade after watching Islamist terrorists slam planes into the twin towers. I began to pay attention again, sometimes with growing dread over how the nation was changing. The more I paid attention, the more I became concerned with the state of things.
By 2015, when President Trump first announced his presidency, I was all in from the first moment. More than just the patriotic aspect of the Make America Great Again message, for me, it was the way Trump said the things that people like myself said -- he sounded less like a politician and more like an everyday American than anyone I had ever seen run for office.
In the growing age of social media, I spent hours online arguing with both liberals and neocon never-Trumpers, becoming increasingly aware that we didn't only have a different point of view on political issues, but an entirely different point of view on America itself. I'm a veteran of the Meme Wars of 2016, making patriotic American friends from around the nation, and when the dust settled on election night in 2016 we congratulated ourselves on the unbelievable Trump victory, knowing that we had played a small role in making it happen. During Trump's first term, I believed once again, that the forces aligned against Americanism had been defeated, and I enjoyed the prosperity of the growing Trump economy, the resurgence of American liberty, and communist opponents in retreat.
And then came covid. The covid era was the last piece of my American reawakening. My mind was blown away watching how many of my fellow Americans had been conditioned over the previous two decades to welcome -- even beg for -- the subjugation of forced masking, and shutting down small businesses. This was not the America I thought I knew, and these were not the freedom-loving Americans I thought were my countrymen.
The fraudulency of the 2020 election was another huge blow. The complete subversion of the election process that the American left pulled off, using covid as cover, was something that I never thought I would see happen in my country. As the Biden years began, and the suffering that came with it, my eyes were ever widened to just how un-American the rank and file leftist voter in this country had become. As the borders were thrown wide open and as the looting of the treasury intensified, as the left-wing fascism of the Biden administration increased - weaponizing the justice department and FBI against Trump, the J6ers, and Americans going to PTA meetings and their churches -- I was in the first wave of those who realized that this had moved beyond politics and had become a situation where the survival of my very nation was at stake.
I believe the political landscape is no longer a left vs right debate. Today, we face an existential tug of war between the Normals - patriotic, every-day citizens who embrace the norms of Western Civilization, and the freaks and malcontents of the left who seek to tear down everything great about this nation, subverting our children against our own values and filling the nation with third world barbarians to bring about collapse.
By the grace of God, we won the election in 2024, and again, the forces that seek to destroy my nation are in disarray. But my nearly 50 years on this planet has taught me that the battle never ends. The last decade has taught me that there are still LOTS of patriotic Americans who still believe in American exceptionalism but also that many of them just want to live their lives while, for the vocal minority of leftist malcontents, activism IS their life.
And that's how the Patriot T-Shirt Company was born. I decided that the best way I could help to spread the message of Americanism and western values was to give other patriotic Americans a chance to 'Wear Their Voice'. The Silent Majority is STILL the majority, but most of that majority has no interest in activism while the pop culture narrative has been lost to the vocal malcontents of the nation. Our Patriotic T-Shirts are designed to be a way to change that dynamic. Walking around with your favorite patriotic message is a way to show others like you, that they are not alone in their beliefs and that America is still a nation of Patriots.
So thank you for your patronage and thank you for your patriotism. Every purchase from our shop helps to support an American, family owned enterprise, helps to spread the message of patriotism and American exceptionalism, and helps to let the malcontents know that there are still more of us than there are of them.
Long live the Republic