A change:
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Melanie Phillips is one of my journalistic heroes.
Melanie Phillips
Claims of moral equivalency are bogus. Bigotry is based on falsehoods, not fact. The double standard used to minimize or deny antisemitism is itself further evidence of the anti-Jewish feeling that so frighteningly continues to poison the West.
One of the most obvious characteristics of antisemitism is the double standards it perpetrates, through which Jews are singled out for harmful assumptions and treatment directed against no other people in the world.
Yet the practice of double standards is perpetrated against antisemitism itself, as has been demonstrated recently in disturbing developments in both America and Britain.
In America, Republican congresswoman Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) has been accused of Islamophobia because of remarks she made about Muslim Democrat congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.).
Last month, Boebert referred to Omar as a member of the "jihad squad." She also made a crack about an anxious police officer having nothing to fear from Omar because she wasn't wearing a backpack, the signature apparel of a human bomb terrorist.
Boebert later apologized to "anyone in the Muslim community I offended with my comment," but has not publicly apologized to Omar and went on to accuse her of anti-American rhetoric.
As a result, the heads of five Democratic caucuses have called for Boebert to be stripped of her committee assignments.
For her part, Omar said Boebert's remarks were "not just an attack on me, but on millions of American Muslims across this country," and that "Islamophobia pervades our culture, our politics and even policy decisions." She also drew attention to threats she has received as a result of this furor.
Boebert's comments were offensive and wrong. And deaths threats and other abuse directed at Omar are obviously totally unacceptable.
Yet Omar herself is guilty of perpetrating anti-Semitic tropes suggesting that the Jews exercise malign control over the world and financially manipulate individuals and events. In 2012, she tweeted: "Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel."
In 2019, after House Minority leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) criticized her for attacking congressional support for Israel, she tweeted, "It's all about the Benjamins baby," and said the American Israel Public Affairs Committee backed Republican candidates expressly to buy support for Israel.
Later that year, she said in reference to Israel: "I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is OK for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country."
Yet despite her repeated anti-Semitic remarks, the Democrats have refused to take any action. The party hasn't personally censured her; its members haven't fulminated that she has contributed to the record number of attacks taking place against American Jews; no Democrat has called for her to be removed from committee assignments.
A similar double standard over antisemitism has been on recent display in Britain. At the end of last month, a group of ultra-Orthodox Jewish teenagers on a bus tour of central London dismounted in order to dance on the sidewalk in celebration of Hanukkah.
They were promptly spat upon and abused by a group of men – some of whom at least were Muslim who also performed Nazi salutes and hit the bus with their shoes (an Arab insult) as it drove the boys away to safety.
This horrible scene was recorded by someone on the bus. The BBC, however, included in its report of this attack the claim that "racial smears" were heard from inside the vehicle. This was later amended to one "anti-Muslim" smear that the BBC said was clearly audible.
But no one else who has watched that video has heard any such smear. Against a lot of background noise, the only words that have been detected appear to be Hebrew words tikra lemishehu, ze dachuf, which means, "Call someone, it's urgent."
So astoundingly, the BBC seemed to be falsely tarnishing these young Jewish victims in order to spread moral opprobrium and thus lessen the stain of antisemitism.
With the BBC doubling down on its claim, a former Labour MP, Lord Austin, who has a record of decency towards the Jews, has written in outrage that he "can't imagine an incident involving any other group being reported in this way."
A number of important points emerge from these episodes. The first is that Boebert's remarks about Omar were not an attack on Muslims in general but on Omar personally because of her record. Omar's claim that America is institutionally "Islamophobic" is untrue (indeed, it's yet another example of her anti-American rhetoric).
Certainly, some people have truly bigoted views about Muslims, just as there is bigotry against all minorities. The offense of "Islamophobia," however, was created to shut down legitimate criticism of Islam or any misdeeds committed by Muslims.
While many Muslims are model citizens, it remains a demonstrable fact that an alarming number support terrorism; an even greater number who are opposed to terrorism nevertheless support its ends, whether this is the destruction of Israel or the West in general; and these dangerous attitudes are rooted in an interpretation of Islam that is currently dominant in the Muslim world.
The point is that these observations are grounded in factual evidence. And observations grounded in fact cannot be classified as bigotry, because bigotry rests on falsehoods, distortion and an eclipse of reason.
That's why antisemitism is, by contrast, the purest form of bigotry because it is created entirely by falsehoods, distortion and an eclipse of reason that demonizes the Jewish people as well as the collective Jew in the State of Israel.
And it's also why antisemitism is entirely different from Islamophobia. Yet despite this crucial distinction, they are said to be equivalent (tragically, many liberal Jews say precisely this). Such false equivalence serves to inflate unfounded accusations of "Islamophobia" while simultaneously denigrating the unique and murderous malice of antisemitism.
An assumption of just such moral equivalence was on display in the BBC report of the London bus attack. Even if its journalists genuinely thought they heard an anti-Muslim slur on the video, they nevertheless recklessly failed to verify such an explosive claim before transmitting it.
Their reasoning became clear from an interview with one of the journalists involved, who said that his team "thought it important to reflect there was abuse going both ways."
In other words, they thought they needed to demonstrate a notion of balance. Yet it is only where an antisemitic attack is concerned that the BBC seems to think balance involves diminishing the significance of the attack by suggesting that its victims were morally culpable in some way.
Moreover, the BBC report involved a further double standard – for it described the visibly anti-Semitic attack as merely "allegations," while the alleged anti-Muslim smear was presented as fact.
The West in general has a problem with acknowledging antisemitism. There are various reasons for this.
Unable to cope with the fact that the Holocaust took place in the epicenter of high European culture, the West tries to bury the persistent evidence that much of it still has an innate prejudice against the Jewish people.
Although the anti-Semitic far-right exists, much of today's antisemitism comes from the left, which assumes itself to be the acme of virtue and therefore incapable of bad things, and from Muslims, whom the left deem to be victims and therefore incapable of bad things.
Moreover, admitting the enormity of antisemitism within the Muslim world would shatter the fiction Western liberals believe as unchallengeable truth that, in the Middle East, the Jews of Israel are human-rights abusers while Palestinian Muslims are their victims.
The worst reason of all is that those who think that claims of antisemitism are exaggerated do so because they believe that the Jews really do dominate the world through money, media and politics, and try to manipulate it in their own interests.
In other words, the double standard used to minimize or deny antisemitism is itself further evidence of the anti-Jewish feeling that so frighteningly continues to poison the West.
Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.
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Putin's potential invasion of The Ukraine will not begin WW 111 because The West has no intention of engaging other than through some feckless sanctions. It would, however, be an ominous sign of the future.
Tensions continue to rise at the Russian/Ukraine border as tens of thousands of Russian troops anxiously await Putin’s order to turn their neighbor into an uninhabitable wasteland.
Moscow has warned NATO to keep its fork out what it’s about to serve the Ukrainians on a ballistic platter.
Here’s What Biden Must Do to Stop WWIII!
Fighting for Freedom,
By Charles Nelson
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Could not happen to a bigger bigot nor soon enough:
BREAKING: Don Lemon CAREER Bombshell - He Could Lose Everything
Don Lemon Up Next
And:
| Race, Justice, And The Old-Fashioned Liberal Spirit |
| by Peter Berkowitz via Real Clear Politics The partisans going to the barricades on opposing sides of America’s gaping political divide are united in the conviction that the old-fashioned liberal spirit has outlived its usefulness. A system that is rotten to the core and requires a radical overhaul, say the rabble rousers on the left, precludes toleration, civility, and the disposition to consider the merits of contending perspectives. |
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It would appear increasingly one cannot trust anything they hear from government, those in government, those who testify before Congress as well as those who are in Congress. No wonder we are coming to totally distrust our government and that reaches to the current occupant of the
highest office in the nation. Sad indeed.
Former DC Guard colonel accuses Army generals of pushing ‘propaganda’ Jan. 6 timeline
The Army said they "stand by all testimony and facts provided to date."
BY HALEY BRITZKY |
NEWS ARMY
Maj. Gen. William J. Walker, Commanding General, District of Columbia National Guard, hosts the promotion ceremony for Lt. Col. Earl G. Matthews, on Nov. 3, 2018, on the drill floor of the D.C. National Guard Armory, in Washington, D.C. (U.S. Army/Sgt. Tyrone Williams).
The former lawyer for the commander of the D.C. National Guard has accused Army leaders of lying to Congress and the Pentagon’s inspector general about how they responded to the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.
Col. Earl Matthews, the staff judge advocate for retired Maj. Gen. William Walker, who oversaw the Guard on Jan. 6, wrote in a Dec. 1 memo that he identified “myriad inaccuracies, false or misleading statements, or examples of faulty analysis” in a report from the DoD Inspector General. Matthews specifically targets statements made by Lt. Gens. Walter Piatt and Charles Flynn, the former director of Army staff and deputy chief of staff for operations, respectively.
The memo was first reported by Politico.
“Discerning what happened on 6 January is too important to get wrong,” Matthews wrote. “If we do not fully comprehend and analyze what occurred on 6 January, the danger is that history will repeat itself. Our collective goal as a government and an American people should be to ensure that what occurred on 6 January does not happen again.”
Army officials disputed Matthews’ memo in a statement on Monday, saying that the Army’s actions on Jan. 6 were “well documented and reported on.”
“Gen. Flynn and Lt. Gen. Piatt have been open, honest and thorough in their sworn testimony with Congress and DOD investigators,” said Army spokesman Michael Brady. “We stand by all testimony and facts provided to date, and vigorously reject any allegations to the contrary.”
In a statement on Monday, Megan Reed, a spokeswoman for the DoD Inspector General, said the DoDIG “welcomes inquiries and discussion regarding our oversight work,” but that they “stand behind the conclusions in our review of the Department of Defense’s role, responsibilities, and actions to prepare for and respond to the protest and its aftermath at the U.S. Capitol campus.”
Former DC Guard colonel accuses Army generals of pushing ‘propaganda’ Jan. 6 timeline
U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Walter E. Piatt, Director of the Army Staff, poses for a command portrait in the Army portrait studio at the Pentagon in Arlington, Va., Sept. 5, 2019. (U.S. Army photo by Monica King)
According to Matthews, the Army formed an alternate version of events in the wake of the attack to give senior leaders cover. Piatt, he says, “was so upset with MG Walker that he directed the development of an Army ‘White Paper’ to retell events of 6 January in a light more favorable” to Army leaders.
Piatt and Brig. Gen. Christopher LaNeve, the director of operations and mobilization under Gen. Flynn, “literally changed facts and recollections overnight,” Matthews alleges in his memo. “The end product, a revisionist tract worthy of the best Stalinist or North Korean propagandist, was close hold.”
Matthews, who is now in the Army Reserve, also alleges several times in his memo that Army leaders, including Piatt and Flynn, “repeatedly and deliberately” lied about what happened that day to lawmakers. Matthews points out multiple statements from Piatt and Flynn during their congressional testimonies that he says are untrue, including that the D.C. National Guard was “not positioned to respond with immediate” support in the wake of the attack. He also criticized the claim that McCarthy directed Walker to prepare to move the quick reaction force to the Capitol, but remain at the D.C. armory until he got approval from Acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller.
The Inspector General report released last month included an assertion by an unidentified witness who claimed McCarthy had to call Walker twice to “reissue the deployment order” for the D.C. National Guard, “30 minutes after he originally conveyed it,” which directly contradicts Walker’s testimony to Congress earlier this year.
Former DC Guard colonel accuses Army generals of pushing ‘propaganda’ Jan. 6 timeline
The commanding general of the District of Columbia National Guard, Army Maj. Gen. William J. Walker, briefs the media, the Pentagon, Washington, D.C., Jan. 25, 2021. (DoD photo by Lisa Ferdinando)
Matthews also pushed back on that claim, saying it was “as insulting as it is false.”
“MG Walker believes that if the foregoing narrative was true, and he really did fail to move after being directed to do so at 4:35PM by the Secretary of the Army, then he should have been fired immediately,” Matthews wrote.
The Pentagon’s response on Jan. 6 came under scrutiny almost immediately after supporters of former President Donald Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol building. Pentagon and Army officials maintained in the days following the attack that the Pentagon had been slow to react because of faulty intelligence from law enforcement that failed to warn officials of the severity of the situation ahead of time. As rioters overran the Capitol, military officials said they were scrambling to assist law enforcement in getting control of the mob.
“Over the course of an hour or so, it was clear there was tremendous confusion coming out of the Capitol,” Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy said in January. “And that’s where leaders all descended and put a hasty plan together, and moved very quickly to clear the Capitol and get the Congress back in there by 8 p.m. so we could certify the election.”
Former DC Guard colonel accuses Army generals of pushing ‘propaganda’ Jan. 6 timeline
An Oklahoma Army National Guard Soldier stands watch at the U.S. Capitol building, Jan. 19, 2021. (U.S. National Guard/Sgt. Anthony Jones)
The IG said the Defense Department’s actions “were appropriate, supported by requirements, consistent with the DoD’s roles and responsibilities for [DSCA], and compliant with laws, regulations, and other applicable guidance.” It said that Pentagon officials “did not delay or obstruct” the department’s response to law enforcement’s request for assistance on Jan. 6.
Investigators interviewed 44 witnesses for their investigation, including Miller, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark Milley, Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville, Chief of the National Guard Bureau Gen. Daniel Hokanson, and D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser. The IG’s investigation also included a massive trove of emails, memorandums, reports, calendars, and briefings, as well as phone records, call logs, and text messages from Defense Department officials before and on Jan. 6.
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Kamala meets:
Kamala Harris Meets With Black Women to Boost Her Flagging Support
(JustPatriots.com)- On Monday, Vice President Kamala Harris held a private Zoom meeting with about 20 black women activists, ostensibly to discuss how the Biden administration could unilaterally and unconstitutionally enact the Democrats’ voting legislation by executive order since the bills are dying in Congress.
But that was just the pretense.
The real reason for this meeting, according to Politico, was for Kamala to appeal for support from a segment of the population who doesn’t find her repulsive.
In short, the assembled black women were there to find ways they could help boost Kamala’s public profile and serve as her “ambassadors.”
One of the women who attended this commiseration meeting, Shavon Arline-Bradley, told Politico that Kamala’s failure is not an option. These women can be deployed as Kamala’s ambassadors to the country, promoting her “entire person, the politician, the leader, the wife, the mother.”
In other words, the hit-pieces are starting to get to Kamala, so she ran to a sympathetic group in hopes they will help boost and soften her image.
According to Politico, the talk during Monday’s Zoom meeting “was half-strategic, half-cathartic for the group.” You know, like a bitch session with your girlfriends — a sort of White House version of “Sex in the City.”
Carrie Bradshaw Harris wanted these women to “give it to her straight” and tell her what people are saying about her.
Is she in high school? She’s the Vice President of the United States. She shouldn’t be bothering with what people are saying about her behind her back.
But the women obliged. They told Kamala that she needs to provide more public updates about what’s she is working on.
Yes, please. The more Kamala is in the public, the worse her approval rating gets.
You can read the Politico piece HERE. . But here’s the upshot of it:
The constant hit-pieces and her cratering approval are getting to Kamala Harris. She asked these Beltway black women to tell her what she can do to appear more in touch with “everyday American rank and file who may or may not be living Beltway life like we do.”
Meanwhile:
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In essence, this article touches on many things I agree with, but the author remains too biased in his liberal thinking and believes, because he thinks and says what he does, it becomes gospel.
His hatred of Trumpism is blatant but totally misused to support his continued warped thinking which leads to his biased conclusions.
Bless his soul.
Try Patriotism
There's a pro-American majority out there with no one to represent them
The basic idea of “popularism” is that Democrats should emphasize the issues on which they agree with a majority of the American public, and de-emphasize the issues on which they disagree.
There are a number of problems with this. First, the unreliability of issue polling means it’s damn hard to tell what the American people actually want. Witness this train wreck of a poll.
The fact is, this is a very rich country, and though people certainly have their economic problems, we care a lot about the upper rungs of Maslow’s: "Hierarchy of Needs." Who gets acceptance, respect, and status in our society is of great importance to us. And when it comes to sociocultural issues, one thing that Americans very consistently seem to love is patriotism. That’s something neither of the two main political movements in this country seem to understand.
Americans love America. American pride took a hit during the Trump era. But even in the darkest days of 2020, a solid majority of Americans still said that they felt “very” or “extremely” proud to be an American.
Though American “exceptionalism” isn’t as popular among the younger generations, a 2018 Pew poll found a whopping 77% of Millennials believed America is one of the greatest countries in the world. Here’s an extremely recent PRRI poll from just a couple of weeks ago that shows even more striking results: You find this same patriotic sentiment in poll after poll; I won’t go through a whole exhaustive list. Everywhere the same result obtains — though the current bitter era of unrest has damaged Americans’ love of their country to a moderate extent, that love is still very robust.
There are two pieces of literature that have informed my thinking on this topic recently. The first is George Orwell’s 1941 essay: “The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius,” which I wrote about here. Basically, he argues because Brit's love their country, socialism had to appropriate that love of country in order to succeed politically (a strategy that seems to have been used to good effect by Clement Attlee).
Of course, Orwell is talking about the UK rather than the U.S., but many of the same lessons seem to apply.
The other thing that’s been on my mind is Rick Perlstein’s: "The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan." This book, is about American politics in 1973-1976. It has deeply influenced my thinking regarding the current era. It describes how America’s self-image took a big hit from Vietnam and Watergate, but ultimately bounced back pretty quickly.
Perlstein espouses the sheer pageantry of the bicentennial celebration in 1976 reminded people how much they actually loved their country, despite all its stumbles. (Note that in five years, America will celebrate its 250-year anniversary.) Resurgent patriotism ended up defining the Reagan era and propelling Republicans to victory. The lesson here is a general one, I think. People want to like their country. They can be disappointed in or mad at it or frustrated with it, but ultimately they want to think they’re part of something good. That desire can be used to great effect if a political movement manages to capture, uphold, and validate it.
Unfortunately, neither of America’s two political movements seem especially interested in harnessing or validating the American majority’s love of country these days. Left Progressives get very touchy if you tell them they’re anti-patriotic. The reason they get touchy is they remember (or instinctively realize) how devastating that image was for them in previous eras. Yet although it’s painful to hear, ultimately the progressive movement will be stronger if it realizes how deeply anti-patriotic it has become in the last decade.
Progressives have always been more reluctant than conservatives to express jingoistic sentiments. That remains true to this day. But in the past, progressives have been able to muster a variety of liberal nationalism that acknowledged the country’s shortcomings while believing idealistically in its innate capacity to do better.
Bill Clinton expressed this idea best when he declared: “There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America.” Patriotism was key to the ideologies of Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Barack Obama as well. Joe Biden still tries to summon some of that old liberal patriotism. But in the age of social media, the progressive movement is defined less by the President and more by the collection of journalists, professors, and lower-level politicians who dominate Twitter and major publications and news networks. And here I’ve seen a remarkable and pervasive vilification of America become not just widespread but de rigeur among progressives since unrest broke out in the mid-2010's.
This vilification generally takes the form of “history.” The general conceit among today’s progressives is that America was founded on racism, never faced up to this fact, and the most important task for combatting American racism is to force the nation to face up to that “history.”You can see this in the fight over “critical race theory.” When conservatives decry the teaching of “CRT” in schools, progressives could simply triangulate this push and declare that each locale has the right to teach what it wants. This would blunt the electoral advantage of people like Youngkin. But instead, progressives — at least, the ones on social media, cable news, and major publications — have opted to defend “CRT” to the hilt, casting it not as a battle over any sort of sociological theory, but as a battle over the teaching of “history.”
Even if it loses them elections, progressives seem prepared to go down fighting for the idea that America needs to educate its young people about its fundamentally White Supremacist character. So why am I putting the word “history” in quotes (along with "CRT?" Because the version of “history” that progressives want to teach young people, generally speaking, is a cartoonish story in which America is the villain — a nation formed from racism, founded the day the first slave stepped onto our shores, dedicated thereafter to the repression and brutalization of people of color. This “history” ignores America’s deep and powerful tradition of anti-racism, the universalistic egalitarian ideals of the Declaration of Independence, the abolitionist movement that was present from the very beginning, the Founders’ conception of the U.S. as a nation of immigrants, America’s role in the ending of European colonialism, its position at the forefront of liberal democratic reforms and experimentation, the promotion of global standards of human rights following WW2, and so on.
Every nation has good and bad in its history, and America has plenty of both. But by insisting — or even just accepting — that a cartoon of American evil is the true “history” and the good parts merely puffed-up propaganda, progressives put themselves on the wrong side of patriotism.
One small example of this is when Nikole Hannah-Jones — the architect of the Pulitzer-winning 1619 Project, which has been practically canonized by progressives despite substantive objections by academic historians — insisted that the U.S. used nuclear weapons in WW2 simply because they wanted to justify the money spent on developing the Bomb. Hannah-Jones declared all other reasons for dropping nukes constituted “propaganda”, while her own represented “history.”
This assertion was roundly condemned by progressives and conservatives alike (a good sign!), and people with a better knowledge of the relevant history stepped in to educate the public: Will Quinn @wc_quinn,
There’s a complex set of historical debates about why the atomic bombs were dropped and moral debates about whether it was justified. This explanation is far closer to fact-free “propaganda” than any of those arguments. November 11th 20211,729 Retweets13,362 Likes, progressives were willing to push back on Hannah-Jones’ assertions bodes well — it’s a sign the American left may start to balk at the cartoonish tales of American villainy they’re being urged to employ to proselytize young generations. That, in turn, suggests progressives may eventually move back toward the liberal nationalism of Obama, Clinton, Kennedy and Roosevelt. But it’s going to be a long road back.
The anti-patriotism of the Right if this were the 70s again, the conservative movement could capitalize on the progressive movement’s paroxysm of anti-patriotism by waving the flag and singing the praise of ‘Murica. But this is not the 70s, and the Right has been captured by its own form of anti-Americanism — one that’s actually far more dangerous to the country than anything the Left has planned.
The Trumpist conservatives of 2021 don’t hate the idea of America — they hate the America that actually exists. As Anne Applebaum recently wrote in a review of a documentary by Tucker Carlson, the Trumpists have turned hatred of American institutions into their own sort of post-Christian religion. Rightists hate corporations because they’re “woke.” They hate the U.S. Military because it’s “woke” (and because it wouldn’t support a Trumpist coup). They hate universities. They hate schools. They hate the media, of course.
They hate essentially every institution that makes America America, except for possibly churches, but if and when those start praising diversity, they’ll hate them as well.
This nihilistic hatred of American institutions makes the modern Right willing to strike at their own country. It supports the toxic, suicidal madness of anti-vax. It undergirds the shameful defense of the shambolic coup attempt of January 6th, as well as Trump’s efforts to overturn the result of the 2020 election. And it is behind Republicans’ declining faith in democracy itself.
But even beyond hating American institutions, the dominant Trumpist wing of the conservative movement despises the actual polity of America as it exists today. We can argue all day about whether Trumpism is fundamentally about a desire to bring back White Supremacy (it is), but there’s no denying the exclusionary, anti-pluralistic impulses that lie at the heart of the movement: Ron Filipkowski @RonFilipkowski Michael Flynn tonight: “If we are going to have one nation under God, which we must, we have to have one religion. One nation under God, and one religion under God.” November 13th 20214,140 Retweets11,935 Likes. This exclusionary, restrictive vision of what constitutes a Real American cuts directly against the patriotism that most Americans feel for their nation of immigrants. Among all generations, Americans see the country’s openness as core to its national identity.
By turning against openness — by making opposition to immigration and diversity the core of their movement — the Trumpists, who now dominate the conservative movement, have repudiated a core belief Americans like about their own country. In doing so, conservatives repudiate the patriotic legacy of Ronald Reagan, who in his farewell address declared: "Yes, the torch of Lady Liberty symbolizes our freedom and represents our heritage, the compact with our parents, our grandparents, and our ancestors. It is that lady who gives us our great and special place in the world…Other countries may seek to compete with us; but in one vital area, as a beacon of freedom and opportunity that draws the people of the world, no country on Earth comes close."
This, I believe, is one of the most important sources of America’s greatness. We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people — our strength — from every country and every corner of the world. And by doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation….Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we’re a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier. This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.
Not only are the Trumpist's intent on closing that door, they’re willing to overthrow electoral democracy in order to do it. Americans may be divided, they may be partisan, but they’re too patriotic to go for that.
Hopefully new Republican leaders like Glenn Youngkin can wrest control of the movement back from the people who are taking it in a dark, doomed direction. But as long as Trump is around, I’m not optimistic about the patriotic silent majority.
So here we have a situation where most Americans love their country and have no one to represent that love in the political arena. They’re forced to choose between one movement that vilifies the idea of America, and another that vilifies the America that actually exists.
The patriotic silent majority is politically and ideologically homeless right now. Whichever movement can reverse course and tack back toward patriotism first will, I predict, encounter a deep and eager reservoir of positive energy and support. Obviously, being on the progressive side of things myself, I hope Dems come up with the next JFK before Republicans come up with the next Reagan. But someone needs to try patriotism soon, because to not do so would be madness. And I am sick and tired of madness.Share9437 KBNov 15Liked.
This is FANTASTIC and articulates way better than I can, what I feel! As a first generation immigrant, and a politically involved citizen, I went from unabashedly believing in "American Exceptionalism" (heck I worked hard to get here!) and that we were truly a "shining city on the hill" to a more "jaded" but realistic view that "America is the worst country in the whole world, except for all others".
As a "social progressive", the current public face of the Democratic party, which absolutely belittles the US in every way with little understanding of the state of the rest of the world, annoys me to no end.
Does systemic racism exist? Absolutely! Does any country debate it with such public fervor? No! Having traveled the world, many times over, my personal experience is that others places are actually more stratified and racist. Harping on the former (existence of systemic racism in the US) without acknowledging the latter is specious ! Can the US do better? Absolutely.
Finally, does the hair stand up on the back of my neck each time I have to interact with the police no matter in how innocuous a circumstance? Absolutely. And yet, should the occasion arise, I would rather trust my fate to US justice than in almost any other country. The list can go on and on! What I am hopeful of is that the larger, moderate center of the Democratic party is pushing back against the excesses of "The Squad" wing of the party and they will correct sooner. What's the proof? Look at the recent city election results in Seattle, which is as progressive as you can get. The darling of "The Squad" wing, Lorena Gonzales got crushed (65-35) by the much more moderate Bruce Harrell. The fact that Gonzales's attempted to paint, Bruce Harrell, a mixed race (Japanese mother, African-American father, I believe) as "Trumpist" back fired. Additionally, for city DA, Seattle elected a nominal Republican, albeit one who was a moderate Democrat till she got "chased out" in 2020. The city resoundingly rejected the Seattle version of Chesa Boudin, the SF DA facing recall.
It's mind-blowing to me that I don't see more left wing flag waving. It's as close to a truism, "one simple trick" as you can get in politics. After all, America's pretty great, look at all the people who want to join!
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