By Alex Kirshner

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June 25, 202612:12 PM

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European tourists having a great time in America have been a recurring bit on my social media feeds lately, and perhaps on yours too. They’re driving on interstates. They’re trying ranch dressing. They’re eating at Taco Bell. But nobody has been a bigger sensation than a German man who goes by @FreddyLA7 on X. Freddy has gone megaviral for being a really good tourist and getting lots of fun gifts along his journey to watch the German soccer team (and others) all across North America.

Freddy has a keen sense of how to ride a social media trend, and because he’s a huge Cristiano Ronaldo fan, it’s reasonable to question his authenticity and morality. He’s modeled a great tourist spirit, though, showing similar excitement for a range of our big cities, small towns, and corporations. Freddy is doing the thing all tourists should do when practical: seeing more of his host country than just one or two big places and looking really excited about all of it.

This internet fame has earned Freddy a corporate and governmental love-bombing, as all kinds of American organizations compete to offer him their hospitality. He posted about listening to Ella Langley in the car, so the breakout country artist invited him and his friends backstage at a concert. He posted about flight delays causing him to miss a Germany match, so several private aviation firms and the governor of Utah reached out to let him know they wanted to help. He posts about eating breakfast in the parking lot of a Walmart, then Walmart’s official account asks if he’ll be back tomorrow. Every influencer marketing specialist wants in on Freddypalooza.

So Freddy has become a canvas. The Trump administration’s Special Presidential Envoy for American Tourism, Exceptionalism, and Values Nick Adams has been trying to set up a White House visit. “Freddy is one of hundreds of thousands of visitors coming to the USA and experiencing the incredible hospitality and generosity of the American people,” he said. The New York Post deemed him “America’s newest tourism ambassador.” ESPN host Pat McAfee holds Freddy up as an example of our national success hosting the tournament. “It feels like America’s killing it. I’m being honest,” he said on his show last week. “It feels like America is crushing it thus far. They’re falling in love.” This is not a broader reflection of how Europeans are feeling about the United States right now, but McAfee wants it to seem like one.

This is where people have started to get it wrong about Freddy, and about a lot of the ranch-flavored tourism content that has surrounded the World Cup. The audience for this kind of posting is not Europeans who might now consider a pilgrimage from Brussels to Buc-ee’s. The audience is us, right here in America. We have the chance to absorb an interesting story from it, as long as it’s not the shallow one above.

The World Cup tourism trend that Freddy leads appears to be an inversion of the way countries usually set narratives around their major sporting showcases. Typically, the messaging about the sporting event spotlighting the country’s greatness comes from the top down. At the benign end of the spectrum, you might see your government spend a bit more money on event infrastructure than it all turned out to be worth to the locals. At the malignant end, you get the 1936 Berlin Olympics. The government sets the agenda and tries to make the sporting event shine properly for the world’s cameras.

This year’s social media tourism boom around the World Cup has been a different, bottom-up sort of thing. Its leaders are people who have loved their trips, seen the ability to get lots of followers by selling patriotism back to Americans, or a bit of both. There is no question that some of this lovefest is the result of algorithmic opportunism, but there’s also no question that it works. Freddy is definitely riding a tail wind from being on Elon Musk’s personal social media platform, which he has designed to be friendly to Trumpism and the Republican Party. You can get a lot of retweets by referring to the “land of the free” with bald eagle and American flag emojis as you drive over the bridge from Canada. But I doubt Freddy has appealed only to Americans working a partisan angle cloaked in patriotism. The thing about America is that it is an extremely cool country with countless cool places. How many people have either forgotten that or found themselves in the market for a little reassurance from a faceless German? Some, at least!

We can learn something, then, from Freddy’s success. It’s that for various reasons, a lot of Americans are lusting after proof that America is good. Whether you are rolling around like a pig in slop at this political moment or devastated about it, you can find a reason to be jazzed about the German guy discovering joy in every little corner of the country. This is what Walmart, the publicists for the nation’s hottest rising country act, and many politicians have noticed too. There is currency right now in reminding Americans of something that I thought was pretty obvious to even the most doomerist segments of the U.S.: Not everything is bad. Like almost anywhere in the world, a tourist can have a fun time on vacation here.

What we can’t learn from this moment of World Cup tourism buzz is, well, anything else. That would seem like an obvious point if you put the shoe on the other foot: I had a great trip to Vietnam earlier this year. I traveled the country by plane, train, and automobile and spent 17 days eating some of the best food I had ever encountered. “Americans are falling in love with Vietnam and its dual communist–capitalist system of government and economics,” some guy in Hanoi could have said after I gushed to him about how much fun I was having. (I really was having fun.) This is an easy category error for anyone to make when talking about tourism, mistaking a country’s boundless beauty and hospitality toward visitors for anything else. Almost every country in the world is an awesome place to take a few weeks off work.

We’re especially primed, right now, to make this mistake. Some people will make it on purpose, because they want to advertise a happy World Cup visitor as proof of what the country is doing right. (Naturally, this tourist is a white German whom the federal government did not bar from visiting.) Others will make the mistake because they’re eager for a wholesome reminder that not everything here is that bad. To have forgotten that in the first place, you’d have to be spending way, way too much time on social media apps. You can see where this virtuous cycle begins. The people most likely to experience the biggest emotional lift from boosterish World Cup tourism content are the ones already shopping at the store. If we learn the right collective lesson from Freddy’s 15 minutes of fame, it won’t be that we’re living through a moment of American cultural revival. It will be that this is still a pretty good place to occasionally go outside.