The Worst 4th of July in the Most Patriotic City in America

GONZO

A pursuit of unhappiness

By Cam Pain · July 9, 2026 · 10 min read

I’m already half in the bag as I approach the front door of a lakeside McMansion in Branson, Missouri. It was the car beer that did it. Driving through the Ozark Mountains, a beaming smile on my face. It’s America 250! I was exuberant, sun in my eyes. I knew this was our year. The year of the Patriot.

The door of the McMansion opened and there they are: family, family friends, people of multiple generations mingling, getting warmed up for the night’s festivities. My parents rented the house just for the occasion, inviting everyone and their children down to celebrate a quarter millennium of American greatness.

Now, you’ve heard people say they were disappointed this year. Fireworks are illegal in half of the country (Autistic kids can’t handle loud noises). No one likes each other enough to plan a proper party. You’re being filmed constantly. Patriotism is haram. Sobriety’s still in. But why? Why was America 250 such a letdown? I went to Branson, Missouri—”America’s Most Patriotic City”—to find out.

The Most Patriotic City in America

I spent the morning driving through town before heading to my parents’ McMansion, trying to make sense of the place. For a certain kind of American, Branson is attractive because it’s dedicated to pretending our old country still exists. Overt, unapologetic patriotism provides the main attraction. It’s built on the idea that America is a physical thing that you can see and feel.

In 1907, Harold Bell Wright sold America an idealized version of Branson in his book The Shepherd of the Hills. He presented Southern Missouri as a promised land for hardworking Christians. Coincidentally, the Mormons teach that the real Garden of Eden is only about a four-hour drive away—but then again so is the birthplace of William Burroughs.

Readers flocked to Branson looking for faith and flag, and the town eventually figured out how to turn the fantasy into an industry. Silver Dollar City became the main draw. It’s an 1880s frontier-themed amusement park sitting over Marvel Cave, where you descend 300 feet into a subterranean room large enough to fit a hot air balloon. It’s got the Time Traveler, the world's tallest, steepest, and fastest-spinning rollercoaster.

Today, Silver Dollar City has morphed into every other amusement park in America: a sweaty place filled with Indians eating “turkey” legs. Kids hate it because there aren’t screens in their faces or squishies from China. It’s a place that exists right in that middle part of the Venn diagram between Japanese tourists and high-BMI middle Americans. Spending any significant amount of time there will obliterate your attachment to nostalgia. I never want to see anything old again.

The Strip

Head sufficiently rattled from the rollercoaster rides, I took to the streets. Well, one street. The Strip—Branson’s entertainment hub. I walked through the hordes of tourists, deeply inhaling noxious go-kart fumes and sun tan lotion, hoping, somewhere, I’d get that hit of the America I desperately sought.

It was all there, I guess. Everything you’d expect. And maybe that’s enough for most people.

I spotted at least three billboards promising free breakfast buffets, a special add-on to follow the 5-D King David VR Bible experience. I paid the ticket price and honestly, it was impressive. I felt the wind from David’s slingshot brush by, and the ground shook when Goliath finally fell. By the time King Solomon ascended the throne I really looked forward to pancakes.

Small talk in the buffet line left me with the impression most people were just fine with the direction of things, or at least they pretended not to care. They still clung to the idea of Branson, which is the same idea of America Vivek Ramaswamey goes on about.

That’s real degeneration: when supposedly the most patriotic people in the most patriotic tourist destination are capable of casually experiencing America in such a shallow way as the country rots before their eyes. It’s really not about racial disparities or any of the other points of distraction prevalent in corporate media. This is about a country that was once great - that’s still great - but that’s holding on by the barest thread.

It was time to escape, really escape. I needed an out, and I found it right there on The Strip.

The Magician of Branson

By the 80’s, Branson earned the nickname “Evangelical Vegas.” It staged big acts like Loretta Lynn and Johnny Cash, and the Dixie Stampede remains Dolly Parton’s home stage to this day. Everyone plays to a majority-Christian audience. Yakov Smirnoff provided family-friendly anti-communist comedic relief along with the long-running live comedy group The Baldknobbers. But those days are long gone.

Now the biggest draw in Branson is Reza the Magician, a facsimile of Chris Angel but somehow even more gawkish. He looks like the Soviet kid that a nice American family adopted only for him to grow up a gothic twink who works for the KGB. He’s currently the reigning king of Evangelical Vegas despite getting entangled in multi-million dollar child grooming lawsuits.

Reza performs his “craft” – a show called “EDGE of Illusion” – in a theater that bears his name. He kicks off the performance by appearing on stage under a sheet while straddling a street bike. I’m told this is Reza’s way of incorporating his personal hobbies into the show. The remainder consists of him jumping through the blades of a jet engine and recreating old Harry Houdini illusions in a concert setting. Screens surrounding the stage played vignettes of Reza draped in an American flag as rock remixes of patriotic songs drowned out the audience of fat shrieking families.

Is Reza’s Branson superstardom indicative of a nationwide decline in God and country? Does his popularity signify a collapse of American values? Is Reza casting untraceable spells on his audience, hypnotizing them into becoming communists? Perhaps, but as non-denominational Christian churches continue to crank out multi-million dollar stage shows in the name of Jesus, Reza’s silly little act is exactly what Evangelical audiences clamor for.

Show over, I finally head to the McMansion, relieved to be away from the masses, and not suspecting of just how much the same rot I experienced on The Strip had already seeped into the family celebration waiting for me there.

Turd-World Cup 2026

It’s July 3rd and there’s soccer on every TV. This was the first indication that third-world mindset had poisoned our wellspring of patriotism. Argentina versus a country called “Cape Verde,” apparently Africa’s Mexico, which is a little like being your deadbeat cousin’s drug dealer. This was the game that seemed to generate the most excitement around the room.

“It’s only the upset that I care about!” the most backwoods member of the family insisted, cheering loudly for the obscure African team while demonstrating a sudden knowledge of the region, its people and their history. This is the same guy who brought his luggage in a Hefty bag and used to tell me soccer was for fags. Now he was suddenly an expert on the nuances of the game. And let’s face it: when the final score is 1-0 or similar, there really aren’t any nuances.

The next day, July 4th, I assumed the foot fairy nonsense was over. I needed it to be over. But as the afternoon set in and the party commenced I noticed a group of dads escape to a remote part of the house. I rounded the corner and realized this was “the man cave.” “There’s at least got to be a bar in here,” I thought, hoping all the men at the party were as ready for a drink as I was. But the full weight of my mismatched expectations, once again, hit me square in the jaw.

The New American Celebration

You expect certain things when you walk into a room like that: TVs. A pool table. A clammy charcuterie board someone’s wife struggled with. What you don’t expect to see is a group of men standing around a massive TV watching – you guessed it – a foreign soccer match. On the Fourth of July! As my eyes blurred with anger I caught a glimpse of the screen to see it was Canada vs Morocco. This made matters worse.

There were five men including me, four of them wearing various baby carriers, all with their own reusable water bottle within arm’s reach. Seven kids total, doted on by their fathers, who, oddly enough, all sported the same organic juice pouch peaking out of their pockets. “Do you like your juice, buddy?”

“Want me to put it down?”

“Promise you’ll drink more later?”

The kids scurried to the bounce house and the men were left standing together in silent understanding. The moms took over and monitored the bounce house with rabid violence.

At any other point in American history this would be cause to start heavily drinking. But the humiliation ritual continued as the non-drinkers shared their sobriety journeys. Soft discussions of protein and peptides animated the rest of us.

Then, like a thunderclap from Zeus, one of the kids knocked over his dad’s water bottle. A loud clank of thick aluminum punctuated the terror. The other dads clung to their own bottles like Uzis. The air in the room wire-thin, everyone keyed up to level 10.

If sobriety empowers you to control your emotions, then why are all these guys so visibly uncomfortable? In raw-dogging life, they deny themselves a socially acceptable release valve. We’re already expected to suffer in silence, it’s our lot in life, and that’s fine. But cutting yourself off from even that small release, on Independence Day, isn’t making you stronger. Shaping your identity around a lack of alcohol consumption doesn’t give you a better personality.

It’s not just the men. The party was a collection of disconnected islands and unbridgeable gulfs. Men and women, parents and children, old and young, struggled to find common ground. Zoomers and Millennials couldn’t be more uncomfortable with overt displays of patriotism, however shallow. Gen X and Boomers clung to antiquated ideas of what it means to be American. No one could relate.

Even the eccentrics are trapped inside the same cultural conditions that made everyone at the party smaller and flatter. One guy had a knife in a leather scabbard tucked in the back of his pants. Another, a big bearded man in a bowling shirt with a calf tattoo of an anchor spent the day talking about how his family could trace their bloodline back to Vikings. Everyone white-knuckling through life and stressed about money.

Destroying the Fourth of July is a difficult task. It takes infantilizing giant swaths of men and convincing young people to avoid life. This sudden angst you feel isn’t actually so sudden. It comes from knowing they’ve taken the parts of you that actually matter, that your desire to take care of your kids, and to take care of your country, has been hijacked against you. And it is killing you, just like it killed America 250, even in Branson, Missouri, America’s Most Patriotic City.

America might be only an idea after all. But if that’s true, it’s a bad idea. There used to be a common spirit among Americans of what it meant to celebrate the Fourth. It was second only to Christmas in the sensory overload it provided a kid growing up in this country. It was listening to your parents bitch at each other about the food preparations and then watching them make out under the fireworks later on. It was eating soggy Lay’s potato chips that smelled like chlorine from the pool. The bottle rocket hiss going right past your ear as your eyes adjusted in the summer dusk. That should be the test to be an American: whether or not you know exactly what that moment tasted like and smelled like. Not an idea that exists in your mind alone.