Kyle, you have an kindred spirit in Japan who has sent us an open letter:

A recent X post by “Nobunaga” - “How did Japan stay Japan?” The post begins this way:

“I was going to write that no Japanese classroom ever taught us our civilization was a crime. That's not quite true. After 1945, a lot of teachers taught a very guilty version of the war, and Japanese conservatives have been fighting over those textbooks for decades. But the guilt stayed inside the history lesson. It never became a theory of everything, the way it did in your universities. Nobody told us our language was oppressive, or that the family was a structure of domination, or that being good at math was a form of privilege.

Foreign residents are still about 3 percent of the population. When outsiders called us closed, most people shrugged and went back to work.

For a long time I thought that shrug was a weakness, a kind of stubborn provincialism. I've changed my mind. I think it's most of what a border actually is: a people quietly sure it has something worth keeping.

So American conservatives are right about Japan. Confidence in your own culture works. We are the proof.

Japan shows you can keep your culture without apologizing for it. Don't let anyone tell you that pride in your country is the problem.

Japan also shows that a nation can get culture right and still lose, if it protects its old companies, its old voters and its old arrangements against its own young people. It dies politely, with clean streets and trains on time.

You still have what we lost: a system that lets things fail and lets new things be born. Bankruptcy, startups, people who move across the country for a better job. Elon is a product of that system. Every bailout, every subsidy for a company that should have died, every rule that protects the insider against the newcomer moves you a little closer to us.

If you know someone who says "America should just be more like Japan," send them this. Both halves.

A nation isn't saved by preserving its past. It's saved by having someone to hand it to.”