Dems Have Become Allergic to Patriotism
THE term “America First” gets a bad rap, but at this point Americans should be hoping against hope that the wellbeing of the nation makes it into the left’s top-10 priorities. Last week was an especially bad week for the “dissent is patriotic” crowd — remember that post-9/11 slogan of the left? — as they managed the dissent part without any of the patriotism.
The Pied Piper of wokeness, Colin Kaepernick, kicked off the week by successfully pressuring Nike to recall a shoe adorned with the original 13-star American flag attributed to America’s Founding Mother, Betsy Ross.
For years, polite liberal opinion has lectured us that Kaepernick, who famously kneeled during the National Anthem when he was an NFL football player, didn’t hate America — he just wanted to protest police brutality against African Americans. We were to also overlook the time he wore socks featuring pigs dressed as police officers and the time he wore Fidel Castro on his t-shirt. Hillary Clinton declared those kneeling during the anthem were “not against our anthem or our flag.” Whoops. Now Kaepernick is tossing Betsy Ross into the basket of deplorables, while Democratic presidential contenders like Julian Castro, Kirsten Gillibrand and Beto O’Rourke clap along like well-trained seals.
Kaepernick continued his hateAmerica show by tweeting a quote from the abolitionist icon Frederick Douglass speech. “What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. . . . There is not a nation on the earth guilty of
practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of these United States at this very hour.”
Yes, Douglass said these words — in a speech that went on to praise the American system and constitution. That Kaepernick — the millionaire ex-football player with a Nike contract, who can force a giant company and one of the two major parties to bend to his silly whims — doesn’t find a place for himself in America is his problem.
Not wanting to be left out of the canceling of America’s Founders, Charlottesville, Va., has decided to stop celebrating the birthday of Virginian Thomas Jefferson, whose home Monticello is in Charlottesville. That rewrite of history didn’t get any pushback from Democrats, either.
But liberals weren’t done kicking America around on her birthday. The left-wing Web site Salon, of course, did what Salon does and ran a piece headlined “Fourth of July’s Ugly Truth Exposed: The Declaration of Independence Is Sexist, Racist, Prejudiced.” Commentary magazine’s Noah Rothman mocked this as: “So woke, you’re on George III’s side.”
And it wasn’t just one boring leftist Web site that decided to mark America’s birthday with claims of America’s meh-ness. The New York Times posted an opinion video arguing “the US is really just OK.” The five-minute film, which took eight Times employees to produce, told viewers in the first minute that “of course, there’s no one single way to measure greatness.” Then it proceeded to cherry-pick statistics for the next four minutes, aiming to do just that.
The left also lost its collective mind over President Trump’s “Salute to America” celebration in Washington. Harvard Law professor Lawrence Tribe likened the presence of tanks on the National Mall to the “days before Tiananmen Square,” while MSNBC host Joy Reid said Trump aspires to be a “mini Kim Jong-un.” The parade, she warned, was “a threat to his fellow Americans.” Neither followed up on the fear-mongering after the party was over, no one died and the tanks rolled away.
This is quite the retreat for the party that spent the 2016 election proclaiming that “America is already great.”
Democrats can spend the primary season catering to this nonsense, or they can be brave and say patriotism is something for all of us. If the country really is as bad as the left says it is, then Democrats have no business advocating for the huddled masses clamoring to get in.
Immigrants like me know what makes America great, and no amount of apologizing for our history or glossing over our excellence will change that. In a few days, I’ll celebrate the day my own family arrived to be Americans. We came because America is great and always has been. It’s too bad leftist activists lucky enough to have been born here can’t admit that.
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