This week, Yale gave a glimpse of the left's plan for celebrating America 250: by sulking through it.

The Yale Political Union invited left-wing Twitch streamer Hasan Piker to campus for a talk titled "End the American Empire." That tells you almost everything you need to know about elite culture in 2026. One of America's most storied universities now hands the microphone to a professional internet loudmouth so he can trash the country that made his whole career possible.

In one booking, Yale managed to capture the reigning pathology of the elite leftist, grievance-peddling, globalist scolds: embarrassment about America and indulgence of countries with body counts in the tens of millions.

America does not promise equality of outcome; it delivers equality of opportunity, whether your ancestors came on the Mayflower or landed at Ellis Island with just the clothes on their backs.

In case you missed it, Piker's major takeaway at Yale was: "The fall of the USSR was one of the greatest catastrophes of the 20th century." Sadly, Piker isn't alone, and the intent of these hall monitors of American guilt couldn't be clearer: Stop with the fireworks, the parades, and the idolizing of Jefferson and Franklin. Put on your black, mourn communism, and pine for a return to Stalin.

Before we turn off Twitch and tune out Yale, we must understand their rhetorical trick: The ideal of communism, they say, is just and righteous. That makes its downfall in the USSR (and everywhere else it's ever been tried) tragic.

The reality is bleaker. Communism's supposed ideal is unattainable. People differ in ability, ambition, discipline, and desire. Any system that insists on equal results must override individuality, and that only happens at the tip of a spear. Today's champions treat the millions killed under communism as an inconvenient footnote, along with the predictable enrichment of a ruling elite and the familiar rise of tyranny.

That's no ideal to which to strive. And its failure should be openly and widely celebrated — as it has been by its own repressed peoples as much as by those of us who are free and watching from afar.

That is the rhetorical trick. When leftists discuss communism, they speak in the language of ideals. When they discuss America, they speak only in the language of failures.

The ignorance is difficult to miss. America does not promise equality of outcome; it delivers equality of opportunity, whether your ancestors came on the Mayflower or landed at Ellis Island with just the clothes on their backs. Opportunity, even, for people getting paid to play video games on livestreams.

Of course, America has experienced its failures. The Declaration of Independence said all men are created equal, but the Constitution constricted that promise. America's bloodiest days weren't akin to Stalin's great purge of political enemies; it was a civil war to see the promise of freedom all the way through. As communist regimes have been crushed under economic and cultural failure, America is on a never-ending, constant march closer to its stated ideals. Not perfectly. Not easily. But undeniably.

So where did this American pessimism come from? There have always been socialists at the fringes — figures like Mr. Piker are just the most visible version of an old idea. The real danger is the left's rank and file, who have, over the last 50 years, made vilifying America a key cultural issue.

There must be something in the water during anniversary years. As the 1976 bicentennial arrived with genuine patriotic fervor, it exited with a people divided by two sharply different visions. While tens of millions of Americans celebrated with fireworks and flag-waving, Jimmy Carter rode to the White House on a platform of regret. He and his followers decided that America could lead only by apologizing and expressing doubt about the moral legitimacy of our system.

With Carter's election win, the American left transformed. Instead of reading this as a desire for calm after years of turmoil, the American left increasingly interpreted it as a rejection of patriotism itself.

Yale's decision to engage Hasan Piker is the legacy of that 50-year shift. Yale has surrendered its right to proudly boast of 25 graduates who served in the Continental Congress and five who signed the Declaration of Independence. And Twitch? It's contributed less to society than the cheap plastic fork in your takeout order. As in 1776, patriots will prevail. So let the Yalies sneer and Twitchers scold. The rest of us will wave the flag, light the fireworks, and celebrate the country that gave those folks the freedom to complain in the first place.