It is not like one needs a doctorate in history to know Queen Victoria was a Nineteenth Century monarch, after all, and presumably all members of a party as ostentatiously patriotic as the GOP know when the US revolution was (then again, there was that whole "Paul Revere avoided the British to warn them of the guns they already knew of" thing.... )

Okay, that I might buy; I would not want to try disproving it, anyway. But the LARGEST English dialect? The South is what, maybe 100 million people? India alone has ten times as many people, and all the educated ones speak English as well as you or I (maybe slightly better than you. ) The EU has five times as many people, nearly all of whom start learning English in elementary school, mastering it well enough to move on to Shakespeare and other English lit by high school. Legolas is Belgian, but his written English could easily be mistaken for that of Londoner, New Yorker or Houstonian, and I am pretty sure which of those dialects he speaks. My wife is a natural mimic, so five years of marriage has her sounding like a native US resident much of the time, but she tells me her very proper English English teacher gave her the DIRTIEST looks every time she used a US accent (or dialect) in school.

I have as much US, Southern and Texas honor (not necessarily in that order...) as anyone, but that just means being secure enough not to reflexively shout, "WE'RE #!11111" about everything with no regard for whether we actually ARE #1 in it.