It's a jungle out there. Chaos reigns. Russia and Ukraine are fighting a bloody war. China has one eye on Taiwan and the other on America. A near-term war in the Middle East seems inevitable while global military spending hits $2.24 trillion. Inflation is eating us alive from the inside. Suicide and drug overdose stats are off the charts. More than half a million of our American brothers and sisters live and die on our streets.

Just when one is ready to give up all hope in America, a few rays of hope shine through, encouraging us to remember that America is less of a place and more of an ideal we strive to achieve. This shining city on the hill has attracted three bright, driven, and controversial immigrants to its shores to demonstrate that the promise of America is still alive and well. 

Today the South African-born Elon Musk’s Tesla is valued at more than all of the other car companies combined, making him one of the wealthiest men in the world. As a side gig, he buys the rarely profitable Twitter for double what it was then worth and proceeds to chop its headcount from 8,000 to 1,500, striving to build another behemoth company as a vehicle for a First Amendment fight. For fun, Elon builds large multi-billion dollar rockets only to watch the maiden flight blow up in less than four minutes, breaking out the champagne in celebration of “the success of our phase one rocket and the millions of pieces of data collected for analysis.” 

Back to the First Amendment ring, the Australian-born Rupert Murdoch, the 92-year-old media-giant billionaire owner of Wall Street Journal and Fox News, managed to get sued by Hootan Yaghoobzadeh, the seemingly-nobody owner of Dominion Voting Machines. Anywhere else, those in power would have had Hootan locked up for rigging the votes (think Jack Ma). Yet, in America, Hootan delivers a knockout punch by settling for a cool $787.5 million. 

Hootan, the Persian-Jewish immigrant majority owner of Dominion Voting, literally feared for his life while deciding whether or not to be the David who would take down the Goliath and thereby preserve the essence of our First Amendment, stating “We were going up against a behemoth. We had to be faster, better and smarter, but we knew we had the truth on our side.”

In my scorecard for America, the shame of the January 6th riots is balanced by the hope of what the Fox News settlement stands for. A cynic might maintain America is so corrupt that a man like Trump could get away with murder and Murdoch could buy his freedom, to which I say while they may be right, we in America hold out the ultimate hope so long as we can still attract the immigrants, innovators, and the underdogs ever striving to reach this shiny city on the hill.

— Sina.