America turns 250 this weekend run by men who wrap themselves in the founders’ flag while selling off the one inheritance meant to belong to every citizen, and this week the president stood at a shrine to Theodore Roosevelt and bragged about the theft.

At a $450 million monument to the conservation president, Trump boasted that he’d pulled the ground itself out of the Forest Service Roosevelt built, ripping it “right out of the federal government.” Then the punchline, to a laughing crowd. “They don’t know it’s missing. They still haven’t figured out what the hell happened.” He signed the law that took it himself, and the thing that delights him is that you never looked up while your own land changed hands.

Medora was one honest afternoon in a project that runs through every agency he touches. Republic comes from res publica, the public thing, and the fullest proof of it left in American life is 640 million acres owned in equal measure by a billionaire and a kid who’s never left her county. Burgum calls that inheritance a “balance sheet” and the companies lining up to strip it “customers.” They know exactly what they’re taking and exactly whom they’re taking it from.

Here’s what they’re counting on you to forget. The overwhelming majority of that inheritance is still here, still yours, still held in common with every American who ever disagreed with you about anything. This country took the oldest instinct there is, that land belongs to whoever can seize it, and set aside the best of a continent to be kept for everyone instead. That’s worth celebrating, and it’s worth defending, because loving this country and defending its best idea have always been the same act.

So do both things this Fourth. Go stand on some of the land that’s still yours, then share this with someone who’s been handed a little flag to wave while they empty the till. The shame is theirs. It becomes ours only if we look away.