revolution

It’s hard to narrow down the best of any category to only one favorite. That’s true whether we’re talking about the greatest football player of all time, the best actor, or the top musical artist.

Choosing the most outstanding artificial intelligence (AI) stock is difficult, too. What is the single best stock to buy for the AI revolution?

Image source: Getty Images.

Multiple worthy contenders

Answering that question isn’t easy because there are multiple worthy contenders. Nvidia (NVDA -0.77%) absolutely makes the list. It’s the largest company in the world based on market cap. Nvidia’s GPUs remain the gold standard for training and deploying AI systems. The company’s technology is also used in AI-powered robots and self-driving vehicles.

I like Microsoft (MSFT 0.26%), too. Its Azure is the second-largest cloud platform. The company has embedded generative AI into its software products that are used by millions of people across the world. Microsoft also arguably represents the best way to invest in ChatGPT developer and AI pioneer OpenAI, which doesn’t trade publicly at this point. The two companies are close partners, and Microsoft has invested in OpenAI.

If you’re thinking about the next frontiers for AI, Meta Platforms (META -2.29%) especially stands out. The Facebook and Instagram parent is going all-in on developing artificial superintelligence (ASI). Meta also leads the fast-growing AI glasses market.

Ark Invest’s Cathy Wood and Wedbush analyst Dan Ives think that Tesla (TSLA -1.41%) is the best AI stock. Tesla ranks as the largest holding in Wood’s Ark Invest portfolio. Ives views Tesla as the most undervalued AI stock on the market. Tesla is best known for its electric vehicles (which feature AI self-driving technology), but CEO Elon Musk predicts that its Optimus humanoid robots will be the company’s greatest growth driver in the future.

Checking off all the AI boxes

I think solid cases can be made for Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, and Tesla as the single best AI stock to buy. However, my vote goes to another AI leader — Google parent Alphabet (GOOG -0.04%) (GOOGL -0.14%). This company checks off all the AI boxes, in my view.

Alphabet’s Google Cloud is the fastest-growing major cloud provider. The unit uses Nvidia’s GPUs, but has also developed Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) that can be more cost-effective in specific machine learning operations.

Like Microsoft, Alphabet has integrated generative AI into many of its products, including Google Search and Google Workspace productivity software. Its Google Gemini large language model (LLM) competes against OpenAI’s GPT-5. Google’s research into transformers (the “T” in GPT) paved the way for today’s LLMs, by the way.

Google DeepMind is actively working on artificial general intelligence (AGI), a critical stepping stone to ASI. Google Glasses were a predecessor to Meta’s AI glasses. Google teamed up with Warby Parker to develop smart glasses using the extended-reality operating system Android XR that will compete against Meta’s devices.

Alphabet’s Waymo unit has a solid head start on Tesla in the autonomous ride-hailing market. Google DeepMind is developing humanoid robots that use the Gemini 2.0 AI model. And, with apologies to Wedbush’s Ives, Alphabet’s stock appears to be more attractively valued than Tesla on every commonly used metric.

Is Alphabet the single best stock to buy for the AI revolution?

Are there risks for Alphabet? Absolutely. Rivals are hoping to chip away at Google Search’s market share. Some industry observers have even predicted that generative AI presents an existential threat to Google Search. Alphabet’s dominance in multiple arenas makes it a big target for regulatory agencies in the U.S. and Europe.

However, Google’s integration of generative AI into its search engine appears to be paying off so far. The regulatory threat against Alphabet also doesn’t seem nearly as concerning after a federal judge didn’t impose the worst-case penalties against the company in a recent decision in an antitrust case.

Multiple stocks will be big winners in the AI revolution, probably including all of the ones discussed earlier. However, if I had to pick the single best AI stock to buy, it would be Alphabet.

A trio of assists by star forward Lionel Messi helped Inter Miami crush New England Revolution in Major League Soccer.

Jordi Alba and Tadeo Allende each scored two goals to lead host Inter Miami to a 4-1 victory over the New England Revolution in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

Saturday night’s victory snapped a two-match winless streak for Inter Miami (17-7-8, 59 points), which moved into third place in the Eastern Conference’s Major League Soccer (MLS) standings. With two matches to play, Miami trails FC Cincinnati by three points for second place. Cincinnati has one match left.

Dor Turgeman scored the lone goal for New England (9-16-8, 35 points) as the Revolution came up short for the fifth time in their past six matches.

Argentinian star forward Lionel Messi did not score for the second consecutive match, but he contributed by assisting on three of Inter Miami’s goals.

On the first goal contribution under a torrential downspout late in the first half, Messi delivered a precise through ball on the run to Allende, who fired the ball past New England goalkeeper Matt Turner in the 32nd minute.

Just before half-time, Messi intercepted a clearing attempt by New England near its own goal. He then dropped it back for Alba, who proceeded to bury it in the back of the net in the third minute of first-half stoppage time.

The Revolution put themselves back in contention for a victory in the 59th minute on a brilliant shot by Turgeman after he took the ball just past midfield from Carles Gil. As Turgeman worked the ball near Miami’s box, he fired a line drive past Inter Miami goalkeeper Rocco Rios Novo to cut the deficit to 2-1.

Rios Novo got the start in favour of Inter Miami’s regular starting keeper Oscar Ustari, who allowed a season-high five goals last Tuesday in a 5-3 loss to the Chicago Fire.

Inter Miami answered almost immediately. Within less than a minute, a rush up the field ended with Allende streaking towards the goal and finishing off another assist from Messi.

Three minutes later, Alba tacked on another score off a great pass from Telasco Segovia.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has taken the world by storm in what seems like the blink of an eye. It’s also played a huge role in pushing the stock market to new record highs.

While there has recently been some data that’s raised questions about the level of profitability that businesses are getting from AI integration, the technology is still just starting to change the world — and long-term investors who back the right players could score huge wins.

With that in mind, read on for a look at two stocks identified by Fool.com contributing analysts as standout buys even among other top artificial intelligence investment opportunities.

Image source: Getty Images.

The largest cloud provider, the most to gain

Jennifer Saibil (Amazon): Amazon (AMZN -1.16%) disappointed investors with its second-quarter report released two weeks ago, but if you can focus on the future, you can take Amazon stock’s dip as a buying opportunity. There are many reasons to imagine it can keep growing over the next few years and become one of the top players in AI.

It’s already the biggest cloud services provider in the world, with 30% of the market, according to Statista. One of the updates that alarmed the market after the report was growth in Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s cloud segment. Sales increased 17% in the quarter, only half the growth of its closest competitor, Microsoft‘s Azure. It may be somewhat of an overreaction, since AWS sales are much higher than Azure’s, at nearly $120 billion over the trailing 12 months, while Azure’s were $75 billion, and Amazon’s dollar share gain was still higher.

There were other things that bothered the market, such as tariff uncertainty and an outlook that didn’t quite match expectations. But these are short-term bumps along the road, and investors should be able to look past them and see the long-term opportunity, especially in AI.

As the largest cloud company, Amazon has incredible potential in building its generative AI business, which is primarily on the cloud. It’s investing more money than competitors, which CEO Andy Jassy upped to more than $100 billion this year in the second-quarter release. It offers a slew of services to meet demand at every level, from the small player who needs plug-in solutions to some of the biggest companies in the world, which employ a full staff of developers to create custom large language models (LLM).

Amazon’s trademark service is called Bedrock, and it offers a large array of LLMs and tools for developers to create AI apps that fit their needs. These include the gamut of LLMs, from high-cost to free, as well as Amazon’s own Nova LLMs. Amazon acquired a stake in AI company Anthropic last year, which has some of the best LLMs available. It’s even creating its own hardware, with budget chips for smaller needs, but it also has a robust partnership with chip powerhouse Nvidia.

CEO Andy Jassy keeps reminding investors that 85% to 90% of information technology (IT) spend is still on the premises, but that’s going to flip to the cloud over the next 10 to 15 years. As the largest cloud provider, with the most competitive set of options in place, Amazon is well-positioned to benefit from a windfall when that happens.

Up more than 140% over the last year, this stock is still flying under the radar

Keith Noonan (Unity Software): When most people think of hot AI stocks, Unity Software (U -1.95%) is probably a name that doesn’t come up much. The company specializes in video game development tools and digital marketing services, and it’s generally had a rough go of things since going public nearly five years ago. The company’s share price is down 41% from market close on the day of its initial public offering (IPO) and 80% from its all-time high.

Some poorly conceptualized and executed growth bets and monetization strategies caused the company to lose ground in its key markets, but the company has switched up its leadership team and is moving forward with renewed focus on profitability and strategic innovation. The turnaround initiative has helped the company’s share price surge more than 140% over the last year, and the comeback rally could still be in its early innings.

Sales increased 1.4% on a sequential quarterly basis in Q2, and management is guiding for mid-single-digit sequential growth in the current quarter. Compared to other companies with substantial exposure to AI trends, that may not look like much — but the relatively modest top-line expansion is obscuring the bigger comeback picture. Along those lines, the company’s new AI-driven ad network powered 15% sequential sales growth in Q2 and is likely still in the very early stages of making an impact.

Unity’s AI digital marketing platform looks poised to reenergize the business, and that’s far from the company’s only AI-related opportunity. Software and data that’s used to help nonplayable game characters navigate virtual worlds could wind up proving very useful when it comes to training robots to navigate real-life space.

Unity also provides the leading development platform for creating augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) applications, and its data and software tools could prove very valuable as tech giants look for the next big hardware platform after mobile.

For over 40 years, Scott Anderson has been one of America’s most incisive foreign correspondents, filing dispatches from trouble spots around the world with a novelist’s eye and a talent for disentangling complex issues. The author of seven previous books, Anderson’s latest is “King of Kings,” an immersive history of the events that led to the 1979 downfall of the shah of Iran and the rise of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s theocratic republic. Anderson traces the roots of the Iranian revolution to the U.S. government’s sponsorship of the 1953 coup that restored Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to power. A creeping co-dependency between the U.S. and Iran followed, abetted by massive military and oil contracts, at the same time that U.S. representatives in Iran turned a blind eye to the shah’s abuses of power and, later, Khomeini’s anti-Western jihadism.

I spoke with Anderson about his book, and the long tail of missteps that led to the occupation of the United States Embassy by Khomeini’s followers on Nov. 4, 1979.

(Please note: The Times may earn a commission through links to Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.)

✍️ Author Chat

Author Scott Anderson.

(Nanette Burstein)

The overall feeling I get reading the book is fecklessness and foot–dragging on the part of the American government in the service of protecting our oil sales and military contracts with Iran. There seems to be a complete misunderstanding of, well, just about everything.

Even after the revolution when Khomeini had come in — that nine month period before the hostages were taken — the Americans pretty much replicated the mistakes they’d made with the shah. There’s this whole idea of like, well, they’re going through this revolutionary anti-American fervor right now, but they need us. They’re going to come back around because our economies are so intertwined. All their weapons are American, so they’re going to need us to service them. So there’s just this manner that everything was going to work out and, of course, that became institutionalized.

With a few exceptions, none of the U.S. officials in Iran even spoke Farsi. You talk about how they had all those cassettes of Khomeini’s speeches in the drawers at the CIA and no one bothered to translate them.

So Khomeini comes back from exile on Feb. 1, 1979, with 4 million people greeting him. He goes to the cemetery to give his inaugural speech and the Americans don’t even send an embassy worker. They don’t even send a local out to the cemetery to hear the speech. They didn’t know whether it is a pro- or anti-American speech. It was just astonishing.

Do you feel like 1972 is the turning point? This is the year that President Nixon lifted all restrictions for arms sales to Iran.

I really do. And for what I think is a pretty interesting reason. The shah was a congenitally insecure man. He could never be affirmed enough. And it doesn’t matter how many presidents said, “You’re our man,” he always needed to hear more and more. So what happened in ’72 was the shah’s dream came true. He had knelt at the feet of FDR in 1943. Kennedy was dismissive of him. He had always been trying to push in the door with the Americans. He’d been humiliated again and again. And now he’s got carte blanche from Nixon and Kissinger. This is when you saw the huge escalation in arms purchases and the catapulting of the Iranian military into the first tier of militaries around the world.

Do you think the revolution could have been prevented?

I spent a lot of time studying the revolution as it unfolded, and what struck me was how mysterious the whole thing was, how it came to be. There were so many moments where the outcome might have been different. If the shah’s confidante Asadollah Alam hadn’t died in the early days of the revolution, for example, because he was decisive and the shah was not. There were so many odd quirks that took things down a certain path.

📰 The Week(s) in Books

Justin Currie, lead singer of Scottish rock band Del Amitri, chronicles his struggle with Parkinson’s in the book “The Tremolo Diaries.”

(Colin Constance)

“Helen Oyeyemi’s books are getting weirder — and I mean that in the best way,” Ilana Masad writes about the author’s new novel, “A New New Me.” “Such whimsy … could be overwhelming, but Oyeyemi is such a confident writer … that you know you are in good hands.”

R.F. Kuang’s new novel, “Katabasis,” is “a dark academic fantasy” that is “more mature and less showy” than the author’s earlier works, according to Valorie Castellanos Clark.

David Baron has written a book called “The Martians” about the frenzy over extraterrestrial life that gripped America at the turn of the 20th century, and Chris Vognar approves. Baron “approaches his subject with clarity, style and narrative drive,” he writes.

Finally, Stuart Miller talked with Justin Currie of the band Del Amitri about his new book, “The Tremolo Diaries,” about Currie’s struggles with Parkinson’s disease.

📖 Bookstore Faves

Malibu Village Books is the only general interest bookstore in Malibu. We spoke to owner Michelle Pierce about the beachside literary hub.

(Malibu Village Books)

Malibu Village Books is the first new bookstore to arrive in the beach city in 15 years. A small yet inviting space with a well curated selection of books, the store has had its share of challenges over the past year. I spoke to the store’s owner, Michelle Pierce, about it.

This is the first new bookstore to open in Malibu in quite some time. How did you come to open it?

I also own Lido Village Books in Newport Beach, and the owners of the Malibu Village Mall came by and liked what I was doing there, so they asked me if I wanted to open a store in their mall.

What is selling right now?

“My Friends” by Fredrik Backman, “The River’s Daughter” by Bridget Crocker and a big preorder for “By Invitation Only” by Alexandra Brown Chang.

How have the fires affected business?

The fires have affected us enormously. With the Franklin fire, we lost so much of our holiday book sales, and then the Palisades fire shut down PCH for six months. So our sales are definitely down, and the summer tourism traffic has not been what it should be, so yes, we are definitely in a challenging period.

What about the locals? Are they shopping in your store?

Local residents are really excited that we’re here. We have a lot of active book clubs, and we’re working with the library on a lecture series at the Soho House, where we will bring in authors to speak. We’re still fighting, and the community is definitely supporting us. It’s true what they say — bookstores are all about community.

Malibu Village Books is located at 23359 Pacific Coast Highway #23359, Malibu, 90265.

WASHINGTON — President Trump greeted Lee Jae Myung, the new president of South Korea, by asserting that a “Purge or Revolution” was taking place there and threatening to not do business with Seoul as he prepared to host the new leader at the White House later Monday.

Trump elaborated later Monday that he was referring to raids on churches and on a U.S. military base by the new South Korean government, which they “probably shouldn’t have done,” the president argued.

“I heard bad things,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Monday morning. “I don’t know if it’s true or not. I’ll be finding out.”

The warning shot previewed a potentially hostile confrontation later Monday as Lee, the liberal leader and longtime critic of Seoul’s conservative establishment, sits down with Trump to discuss Seoul and Washington’s recent trade agreement and continued defense cooperation. Lee leads a nation that has been in a state of political turmoil for the last several months after its former leader, the conservative Yoon Suk Yeol, briefly imposed martial law last December which eventually led to his stunning ouster from office.

Trump did not identify specific raids. But earlier this month, South Korean police conducted a raid on a church led by a conservative activist pastor whom authorities allege is connected to a pro-Yoon protest in January that turned violent, according to Yonhap news agency. A special prosecutor’s team that is investigating corruption allegations against Yoon’s wife, former first lady Kim Keon Hee, also raided the facilities of the Unification Church after allegations that one of its officials gave Kim luxury goods.

Meanwhile, Osan Air Base, which is jointly operated by the United States and South Korea, was also the target of a raid last month by investigators looking into how Yoon’s activation of martial law transpired, according to the Chosun Ilbo newspaper. South Korean officials have insisted the raid was in the areas controlled by Seoul.

“WHAT IS GOING ON IN SOUTH KOREA? Seems like a Purge or Revolution. We can’t have that and do business there,” Trump posted on social media Monday morning. “I am seeing the new President today at the White House. Thank you for your attention to this matter!!!”

Yoon, who was elected to a five-year term in 2022, was considered more ideologically aligned with Trump and had even taken up golfing again after the U.S. president was reelected last November to try to forge a bond with him.

The liberal Lee, an outspoken critic of Seoul’s conservative establishment who had narrowly lost to Yoon in that 2022 election, led the South Korean parliament’s efforts to overturn Yoon’s martial law decree while impeaching him. The nation’s Constitutional Court formally dismissed Yoon in April.

Before Trump’s Truth Social post Monday morning, the first in-person meeting between Trump and Lee had been expected to help flesh out details of a July trade deal between the two countries that has Seoul investing hundreds of billions of dollars in the U.S. The agreement set tariffs on South Korean goods at 15% after Trump threatened rates as high as 25%.

Trump declared at the time that South Korea would be “completely OPEN TO TRADE” with the U.S. and accept goods such as cars and agricultural products. Automobiles are South Korea’s top export to the U.S.

Seoul has one of the largest trade surpluses among Washington’s NATO and Indo-Pacific allies, and countries where the U.S. holds a trade deficit has drawn particular ire from Trump, who wants to eliminate such trade imbalances.

Lee’s office said in announcing the visit that the two leaders plan to discuss cooperating on key manufacturing sectors such as semiconductors, batteries and shipbuilding. The latter has been a particular area of focus for the U.S. president.

On defense, one potential topic is the continued presence of U.S. troops in South Korea and concerns in Seoul that the U.S. will seek higher payments in return.

Ahead of his visit to Washington, Lee traveled to Tokyo for his first bilateral visit as president in a hugely symbolic trip for the two nations that hold longstanding historical wounds. The summit with Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba was interpreted by analysts as a way to show unity and potential leverage as Japan and South Korea face new challenges from the Trump administration.

Lee was the first South Korean president to choose Japan for the inaugural bilateral visit since the two nations normalized ties in 1965.

Elected in June, Lee was a former child laborer with an arm deformity who rose his way through South Korea’s political ranks to lead the liberal Democratic Party and win the presidency after multiple attempts.

Lee faced an assassination attempt in January 2024, when he was stabbed in the neck by a man saying he wanted Lee’s autograph and later told investigators that he intended to kill the politician.

Lee arrived in the U.S. on Sunday and will leave Tuesday. He headlined a dinner Sunday evening with roughly 200 local Korean-Americans in downtown Washington on Sunday night.

Kim writes for the Associated Press.

Interim leader says first national polls since overthrow of Sheikh Hasina to be held in February.

Bangladesh’s interim leader, Muhammad Yunus, has unveiled a roadmap of democratic reforms as the nation marks a year since a mass uprising toppled Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina.

Rallies, concerts and prayer sessions were held in the capital, Dhaka, on Tuesday as people in the South Asian nation celebrated what many called the country’s “second liberation” after its independence from Pakistan in 1971.

The anniversary culminated with Yunus, the 85-year-old Nobel Peace Prize laureate presiding over Bangladesh’s democratic overhaul, announcing that he would write to the chief election commissioner requesting that national elections be arranged before Ramadan in February.

“We will step into the final and most important phase after delivering this speech to you, and that is the transfer of power to an elected government,” he said.

Yunus had previously said elections would be held in April, but key political parties have been demanding he hold them earlier and before the Islamic holy month in the Muslim-majority nation of 170 million people.

“On behalf of the government, we will extend all necessary support to ensure that the election is free, peaceful and celebratory in spirit,” the interim leader added.

Hasina’s rule saw widespread human rights abuses, including mass detentions and extrajudicial killings of her political opponents.

Protests against Hasina’s rule began on July 1, 2024, with university students calling for changes to a quota system for public sector jobs. They culminated on August 5, 2024, when thousands of protesters stormed Hasina’s palace as she escaped by helicopter.

Hasina, 77, fled to India and remains there. She has defied court orders to attend her ongoing trial on charges amounting to crimes against humanity.

On Tuesday, Yunus called for people to seize the “opportunity” for reform. He also warned about people whom he said sought to undermine the nation’s gains, saying, “The fallen autocrats and their self-serving allies remain active, conspiring to derail our progress.”

“Dialogue continues with political parties and stakeholders on necessary reforms, including the political and electoral systems,” he added.

Those gathered in Dhaka included families of those killed in the  crackdowns on last year’s protests. Police were on high alert throughout the city with armoured vehicles patrolling the streets to deter any attempt by Hasina’s banned Awami League party to disrupt the day’s events.

Protesters also welcomed Yunus’s move to formally read out the July Declaration, a 28-point document that seeks to give constitutional recognition to the 2024 student-led uprising. He added that trials for those responsible for the July killings of 2024 were progressing swiftly.

Fariha Tamanna, 25, said it was “deeply satisfying” to hear the government “acknowledge the uprising”. “There’s still a long road ahead. So many wrongs continue,” she told the AFP news agency at a rally. “But I still hold on to hope.”

It’s the 249th birthday of the United States. And as Americans begin to prepare for our nation’s grand semiquincentennial celebration next year, it is worth reengaging with the document whose enactment marks our national birthday: the Declaration of Independence.

The declaration is sometimes championed by right-libertarians and left-liberals alike as a paean to individualism and a refutation of communitarianism of any kind. As one X user put it on Thursday: “The 4th of July represents the triumph of American individualism over the tribalistic collectivism of Europe.”

But this is anything but the case.

We will turn to lead draftsman Thomas Jefferson’s famous words about “self-evident” truths in a moment. But first consider the majority of the text of the declaration: a stirring enumeration of specific grievances by the American colonists against the British crown. In the declaration’s own words: “The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.”

One might read these words in a vacuum and conclude that the declaration indeed commenced a revolution in the true sense of the term: a seismic act of rebellion, however noble or righteous, to overthrow the established political order. And true enough, that may well have been the subjective intention of Jefferson, a political liberal and devotee of the European Enlightenment.

But the declaration also attracted many other signers. And some of those signers, such as the more conservative John Adams, took a more favorable view of the incipient America’s inherited traditions and customs. These men thought that King George III had vitiated their rights as Englishmen under the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the Bill of Rights that passed Parliament the following year.

It is for this reason that Edmund Burke, the famed conservative British statesman best known for his strident opposition to the French Revolution, was known to be sympathetic to the colonists’ cause. As my Edmund Burke Foundation colleague Ofir Haivry argued in a 2020 American Affairs essay, it is likely that these more conservative declaration signers, such as Adams, shared Burke’s own view that “the Americans had an established national character and political culture”; and “the Americans in 1776 rebelled in an attempt to defend and restore these traditions.”

The American founding is complex; the founders themselves were intellectually heterodox. But suffice it to say the founding was not a simplistic renouncement of the “tribalistic collectivism” of Britain. There is of course some truth to those who would emphasize the revolutionary nature of the minutemen and soldiers of George Washington’s Continental Army. But a more historically sound overall conception is that 1776 commenced a process to restore and improve upon the colonists’ inherited political order. The final result was the U.S. Constitution of 1787.

Let’s next consider the most famous line of the declaration: the proclamation that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” We ought to take this claim at face value: Many of the declaration’s signers did hold such genuine, moral human equality to be self-evident.

But is such a claim self-evident to everyone — at all times, in all places and within all cultures?

The obvious answer is that it is not. Genuine, moral human equality is certainly not self-evident to Taliban-supporting Islamic extremist goat herders in Afghanistan. It has not been self-evident to any number of sub-Saharan African warlords of recent decades. Nor is it self-evident to the atheists of the Chinese Communist Party politburo, who brutally oppress non-Han Chinese ethnic minorities such as the Uyghur Muslims of Xinjiang.

Rather, the only reason that Jefferson — and Locke in England a century prior — could confidently assert such moral “self-evidence” is because they were living and thinking within a certain overarching milieu. And that milieu is Western civilization’s biblical inheritance — and, specifically, the world-transforming claim in Genesis 1:27, toward the very beginning of the Bible, that “God created man in His image; in the image of God He created him.”

It is very difficult — perhaps impossible — to see how the declaration of 1776, the 14th Amendment of 1868, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, or any other American moral ode to or legal codification of equality, would have been possible absent the strong biblical undergird that has characterized our nation since the colonial era.

Political and biblical inheritance are thus far more responsible for the modern-day United States than revolution, liberal rationalism or hyper-individualism.

Adams famously said that Independence Day “ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.” Indeed, each year we should all celebrate this great nation we are blessed to call home. But let’s also not mistake what it is we are actually celebrating.

Josh Hammer’s latest book is “Israel and Civilization: The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West.” This article was produced in collaboration with Creators Syndicate. @josh_hammer