An American Thinker commentary published September 12, 2026, by Chet Hanson under the title “Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps” poses a question its author treats as existential rather than rhetorical: how much longer will Americans have “this blessed country to love and enjoy?” The piece is less a policy argument than a meditation on gratitude — who feels it, who doesn’t, and what the gap between the two might eventually cost.
Hanson builds the essay around a recurring “perhaps,” addressing readers who were either born in the United States or who came here legally and immediately set about assimilating. To those readers, he offers a version of patriotism rooted in inheritance: the idea that the country’s freedoms and prosperity were received as a gift from predecessors who paid dearly for them, and that the present generation’s job is simply to hand it on intact.
The FIFA moment
One of the more unusual elements of the argument is Hanson’s use of the FIFA tournament hosted in the United States. He points to foreign visitors who, by his account, arrived expecting to dislike the country based on what they had read in newspapers or seen on television, and then found themselves “gushing” about the America they encountered in person. What struck those visitors, he writes, was the sheer availability of goods and comforts — air-conditioning above all. Hanson cites the figure that roughly 90 percent of American homes have air-conditioning, compared with about 20 percent in European nations, as an example of a luxury Americans take for granted without noticing.
That anecdote serves as the emotional hinge of the piece. If outsiders can be pleasantly surprised by the country they were taught to distrust, Hanson suggests, then perhaps Americans themselves ought to examine why so many of their own countrymen have stopped registering the same things as blessings.
Who is asked to be grateful
From there the commentary moves through a list of what Hanson considers unappreciated institutions: the armed forces, police, and other law enforcement entities, with Immigration and Customs Enforcement named specifically, all credited with contributing to the nation’s peace, safety, and prosperity. He also argues that a basic grasp of what a nation is — and of the serious effort required to sustain and protect one — ought to be common knowledge, directing readers who lack it to “any history book.”
The sharper turn comes when Hanson describes what happens when someone openly expresses gratitude for these things. Such a person, he predicts, will be accused of racism and of not caring about other human beings. That reaction, in his telling, is a form of willful blindness, and it is where the essay’s real target lies.
Claims about trafficking and costs
Hanson asserts that more than 300,000 children were trafficked into the country and still cannot be found, and asks pointedly whether those who oppose enforcement march in the streets demanding that these children be located and returned to their parents. The commentary does not cite a source for that figure. He goes on to describe what he characterizes as needless suffering among Americans caused by allowing, encouraging, and “bribing” millions of undocumented immigrants to enter without vetting, and by spending billions in tax money to accommodate them.
He also raises a broader national-security concern: that several foreign nations and cultures would like to destroy the United States but recognize they cannot do so from outside, and therefore seek to infiltrate and erode the country from within.
A hypothetical for the unconvinced
The most concrete passage in the piece is a thought experiment Hanson proposes readers use on friends or relatives who don’t share his view. He suggests asking them to imagine having earned an advanced degree — possibly still carrying thousands of dollars of debt for it — or, alternatively, working as a chef, server, or anything in between, and having parlayed that effort into a safe home and a good job.
Then, he writes, imagine a pair of strangers entering that home uninvited, making themselves comfortable, consuming the food, electricity, gas, heat, air-conditioning, and water, and expecting the resident to pay for all of it — people whose language the resident does not speak and whose presence makes him unsure of his own safety. Further, imagine those newcomers offering their labor to the resident’s boss for far less money, forcing him either to accept a pay cut or lose the job outright. If the job goes, and rent becomes unaffordable along with other obligations, he must move out — and because the law of supply and demand does not disappear, the same number of homes with more people seeking them means rent rises.
In the scenario, the resident is relieved to learn a government agency is rounding up the people who illegally took what was rightfully his. But a group of people untouched by the intrusion demands that the agency be stopped and abolished — the same people, Hanson writes, who otherwise want more government control because they believe government is exempt from the evils that afflict human behavior. They take to the streets, sometimes violently.
The closing question Hanson would put to such a person is deliberately blunt: “Would you be comfortable with that in your home?” He anticipates, perhaps from experience, that the question may provoke anger before it can even be finished.
The stakes as the author frames them
Hanson ends by tying the entire argument to a single worry: whether this willful blindness marks the beginning of the end for what he calls the most wonderful nation for the average man, woman, and child the world has ever known. It is a question he leaves hanging rather than answering, and the essay’s very structure — a cascade of possibilities rather than a program of remedies — reflects that.
The commentary appears in American Thinker’s opinion section, which is dedicated to commentary and analysis rather than straight news reporting. The piece carries no original reporting and cites no sources for its statistics; its power, such as it is, rests on the familiarity of the resentments and loyalties it describes, and on the reader’s willingness to supply the answers Hanson only gestures toward.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/09/perhaps-perhaps-perhaps/