With his usual flair for hyperbole and indifference to factual details, Donald Trump last week tweet-blasted the so-called “Squad” of female freshman Congressmen “of color” for slandering America as racist, sexist, xenophobic, Islamophobic, and numerous other empty epithets. Though Trump was careless for suggesting, “Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came”––since only one, Ilhan Omar, was born abroad––his sentiment is still valid, and has been shared for decades by millions of Americans angry over their homeland being demonized by immigrants and fellow citizens alike.
This sentiment was memorably captured by country singer Merle Haggard in his hit “Fightin’ Side of Me.” Released in December 1969, the song expressed the anger of the “Silent Majority” that had just put Richard Nixon in the White House. And the lyrics identified who Americans were angry at: the free, comfortable New Leftists, college students, bougie hippies, and liberal elite fellow-travelers who burned the American Flag, slandered our soldiers as baby-killers, and called their country “AmeriKKKa.” Haggard especially targeted the antiwar activists who insulted our troops even as they were fighting and dying, and who “love our milk and honey” but “preach about some other way of livin’.” Sound familiar?
But it was one line in the chorus that summed up many Americans’ attitude: “If you don’t love it leave it.” This blunt phrase became that era’s ultimate “trigger” of leftist spluttering rage and hysterical spouting of the same question-begging epithets that today inundate the rhetoric of progressive politicians and pundits––exactly the response to Trump’s later suggestion to the “Squad,” “If you’re not happy here, then you can leave.” And like today, for self-proclaimed sophisticated cosmopolitans who fancied themselves too smart for patriotism, such a déclassé love of country was fit only for the xenophobic deplorables clinging to their guns and religion.
As usual, the common sense of the masses is smarter than the received wisdom of the credentialed elite. Haggard’s line “they love our milk and honey” exposed the moral idiocy of American anti-Americanism: its hypocrisy and shameless ingratitude. So too some immigrants today, whether first or second generation, are despicable hypocrites and ingrates. Their lives in their countries of origins would have been “nasty, brutish, and short,” as Hobbes put it. But after being welcomed into our country, they now enjoy freedom, opportunity, wealth, leisure, nutrition, and health care unprecedented in human history.
Omar, as do many anti-American Americans, tries to hide her failure of character and virtue by protesting that she is just criticizing the U.S. in order to help it achieve its noble ambitions for “social justice” and equality for all: “It [Trump’s charge] is that I am anti-American because I criticize the United States. I believe, as an immigrant, I probably love this country more than anyone that is naturally born and because I am ashamed of it continuing to live in its hypocrisy.”
In 1933 Winston Churchill had the answer to similar attacks by some Britons on their own country: “Our difficulties come from the mood of unwarrantable self-abasement into which we have been cast by a powerful section of our own intellectuals. They come from the acceptance of defeatist doctrines by a large proportion of our politicians. But what have they to offer but a vague internationalism and the promise of vague utopias?”
George Orwell, a socialist and internationalist, still understood that in the face of an evil, expansionist ideology like Nazism, denigrating and undermining patriotism weakened the morale and solidarity a people need to answer that threat. In 1941 Orwell wrote:
England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution.
In the Thirties, Orwell went on, “left-wingers were chipping away at English morale, trying to spread an outlook that was sometimes squashily pacifist, sometimes violently pro-Russian, but always anti-British.” Moreover, foreshadowing how today anti-Americanism has spread from the elite of intellectuals and professors to the curricula of grade schools, and as such is seen as decadence by our rivals and enemies, Orwell linked the way intellectuals sneered at ordinary, patriotic Englishmen––called “Blimps” after Colonel Blimp, a cartoon caricature of middle-class imperialists––to “systematic Blimp-baiting” which “affected even the Blimps themselves and made it harder than it had been before to get intelligent young men to enter the armed forces.” Indeed, if the British Empire, or America today, is so wicked and oppressive, why should any citizen fight and die for it?
This danger of weakening morale and civic identity is the main problem with American anti-Americanism, a potential danger evident in the disasters wrought by England’s and France’s collapse of morale and failure of nerve in the Thirties. No people can survive without the bedrock conviction of a critical mass of citizens that they deserve to survive because their way of life is superior to others–– not because they are superior people, but because the political principles of their government like unalienable rights, personal freedoms of speech, religion, and association, political freedom, and the right to choose their political leaders and hold them accountable, are superior to the alternatives and are open to all those who desire to enjoy those goods.
These principles and our history––with all its betrayals of those principles and convictions––are part of who we are, of what identifies us as Americans. To paraphrase the Greek orator Isocrates, the name “American” denotes not a race or ethnicity or tribe, but a way of thinking and living––as free men and women.
And those ideals, as well as freedom and economic opportunity, were (and still are) what have brought millions of immigrants to our country. Once here, most were free to honor their home country and its cultures, but there was no question that if they wanted their children to have the opportunities and political freedom of America, they had to assimilate to those principles, and abandon or relegate to civil society those customs and mores that contradicted the American way. They were expected to learn English and American history, including learning about their new country’s heroes and political principles. That was the price for full enjoyment of American freedom and opportunity. If one did not want to pay that price, one could return home, and indeed many did; between 1901 and 1920, half of Italian immigrants from that period returned to Italy.
Not my grandfather, Antonio Gigantiello. He came to America in 1906, an “illiterate peasant,” according to Ellis Island records. In America, he owned a little land and a grocery store in the rural San Joaquin Valley. When his two sons spoke Italian at grammar school, they were scolded and whacked with a ruler. He made his youngest, my mom, speak only English at home so he and my grandmother could learn it, though their English was broken and accented. When my grandmother offered meek praise for Italy, my West Texas father, who left home at 15 and came to California in a boxcar, would say, “If it’s so great, go back.” (Exactly what Californians told him when he praised Texas.) In the Fifties, my grandparents took the train to New York and crossed the Atlantic to visit their relatives in Italy. My grandfather cut his stay in half because he was homesick for America. When he got off the train in Fresno, he kissed the ground and thanked God.
That’s how immigration worked back in the day, before a specious “multiculturalism” and “diversity” turned assimilation into a betrayal of a superior identity and culture that immigrants had abandoned. Now expecting loyalty to America and gratitude for its freedom and opportunities is xenophobic, nativist, and racist. Now it’s all about what America can do for me and my political tribe, rather than what we can do for America. Now some immigrants wave the flag of the dysfunctional country they escaped, and burn the flag of the free, prosperous country they voted for with their feet.
These criticisms don’t mean that the immigrant, like every American, doesn’t have the right to criticize his adopted country. But criticism without context, without realistic expectations, without acknowledgement that America’s sins are outweighed by its achievements and good deeds, without recognizing that equality of opportunity does not guarantee equal success–– without that mature realism, criticism is nothing but anti-Americanism, a spiteful ingratitude that bespeaks a lack of character, and a childish anger that one’s utopian expectations of “social justice” have not been met.
But freedom in America means being free to express your spite and flawed character in the public square, and to do so in whatever way you choose. Anti-American Americans are exercising their First Amendment right, and no matter how hypocritical, ignorant, incoherent, hateful, and insulting their speech, it is protected by law and legal precedent.
And this brings us to the final, most shameless hypocrisy. American anti-Americans freely indulge their First Amendment rights, but they and their social media tech-allies don’t want their opponents to have the same freedom. Thus their calls for “hate-speech” exclusions to the First Amendment, which as our universities have demonstrated for decades, mean censorship based on political ideology and standards of offense determined by the subjective or neurotic feelings of politically favored “victims.” Thus the barrage of question-begging epithets like “racist” and the rest, which by now are empty of meaning and function as verbal smog intended to shut people up and pollute political discourse with toxic emotionalism and bathos.
As for Trump, once again he has said what many Americans think, but seldom hear from the Republican elite. And he has stood up for those same Americans who love their country, not because it’s perfect, not because they think its history is sinless, but because it has in word and deed shown itself to be the “last best hope” we fallen mortals have in a tragic world. And most of all, we love America because it is who we are, its ideals the unum that allows the pluribus to become a people yet keep its diversity. There’s not much more we can expect from imperfect human beings.
_____________________________________________________________
THE ANTI-TRUMP HOUSE DEMOCRAT RESOLUTION
Democrats rally around the anti-American, Jew-hating squad
BY JOSEPH KLEIN
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational and research purposes:
House Democrats are rallying around the four far-left congresswomen who have collectively become known as the “squad.” The House Democrat majority has put aside legislative business to debate a resolution condemning President Trump for his allegedly “racist” tweets denouncing Reps. Ayanna Pressley (Mass.), Rashida Tlaib (Mich.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), nicknamed AOC, and Ilhan Omar (Minn.). Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who just last week was on the receiving end of the race card played so often by the squad, is now referring to these hate-mongers as “our sisters.” As President Trump tweeted Tuesday morning, “now they are forever wedded to the Democrat Party.”
Speaker Pelosi got so carried away defending her "sisters" and condemning the president's tweets as "racist" that she broke House protocol and sparked a floor fight. Her fellow Democrats saved her from a ruling that would have barred her from speaking the rest of the day. They also kept her "racist" reference to the president's tweets in the record. The final resolution, entitled "H. Res. 489 — Condemning President Trump’s racist comments directed at Members of Congress," passed along largely partisan lines by a vote of 240-187. All Democrats voted yes, along with only four Republicans.
The resolution begins by mythologizing the supposed unalloyed embrace of immigration by the founding fathers, citing Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison as examples. In truth, Jefferson, Hamilton and Madison all expressed reservations about opening the door too widely to foreigners. The resolution then cherry picks pro-immigration quotes by past presidents, including Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, without acknowledging the limitations they sought to impose on immigrant entry into this country. On FDR’s watch, the U.S. government turned away thousands of Jewish refugees, claiming they were a potential security risk. Ronald Reagan did sign the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which provided immigrants who had entered the country illegally the opportunity to apply for legal residence if they met certain conditions. However, the law also contained provisions intended to deter future illegal entry, including criminal penalties to be imposed against anyone who “conceals, harbors, or shields from detection, or attempts to conceal, harbor, or shield from detection” illegal aliens. The Trump administration has tried to enforce these provisions.
After the resolution’s build-up of the virtues of an open-door immigration policy, without acknowledging the challenges that even Barack Obama, the deporter in chief, recognized, the resolution proceeds to demonize President Trump with a series of gross distortions. The resolution falsely charges that “President Donald Trump’s racist comments have legitimized fear and hatred of new Americans and people of color.” It twists the president’s actual words to caricature him as an unredeemable nativist bigot who detests all people of color and thinks that, according to the resolution, “our fellow Americans who are immigrants, and those who may look to the President like immigrants, should ‘go back’ to other countries.”
President Trump was addressing only the four radicals who he correctly believes want to drastically transform for the worse the political, economic and legal systems of this country. He took them to task for their rhetoric constantly denigrating America and blaming it for the world's ills. As for his views on immigration, the president said during his last State of Union address that he wants “people to come into our country in the largest numbers ever, but they have to come in legally.” He added, “Legal immigrants enrich our nation and strengthen our society in countless ways.” These are not the words of a bigoted nativist. Rather, they are the words of a president sworn to faithfully execute the nation’s laws, including its immigration laws.
By turning the resolution into a victim versus oppressor narrative on behalf of their “sisters,” the Democrats are letting the four radical squad leaders off the hook for their own hateful conduct. They should be held to account, as President Trump has tried to do, for fueling racial division, anti-Semitism, contempt for the rule of law in America, and incitement of hatred against immigration law enforcement agents that has put their lives in danger. The Democrats, on the other hand, are gutless in the face of real bigotry in their own ranks. Speaker Pelosi showed her cowardice, for example, by agreeing several months ago to water down a resolution intended originally to specifically condemn anti-Semitism in response to Rep. Ilhan Omar’s anti-Semitic tropes.
The Democrat-controlled House has another chance if it wants to pass a useful resolution. It could focus its ire on the terrorist acts of violence committed by members of Antifa, instead of playing spiteful partisan games. One such act of domestic terror was the firebombing of an immigration detention center in Tacoma, Washington last weekend by an Antifa member who used AOC’s "concentration camps" canard in his manifesto. Another resulted in the brutal beating of a journalist,
Andy Ngo, whose parents came to this country from Vietnam by boat in 1978. Antifa, which claims to be fighting fascism, is in fact a fascist organization that glorifies violence against anyone or any institution it believes deserves to be punished. “Wake up wake up, it's not too late. Burn down the masters house,” Chicago Antifa tweeted on July 13th.
Nancy Pelosi herself has condemned Antifa violence in the past. Back in 2017, following the outbreak of violence at Berkeley, she said, “The violent actions of people calling themselves antifa [sic] in Berkeley this weekend deserve unequivocal condemnation, and the perpetrators should be arrested and prosecuted.” All to no avail. Antifa has not gotten the message. The violence continues. Now, the Democrat leaders, including Speaker Pelosi, are looking the other way.
When asked by reporters whether they were willing to denounce the Antifa member’s attack on the Tacoma, Washington immigration detention center, AOC and Omar declined to answer. At the same time, AOC has no problem vilifying Republicans who choose not to condemn President Trump for his tweets against the squad.
“Until Republican officials denounce yesterday’s explicitly racist statements (which should be easy!), we sadly have no choice but to assume they condone it,” AOC tweeted. “It is extremely disturbing that the *entire* GOP caucus is silent. Is this their agenda?”
What’s your agenda, AOC? Allowing violence against an immigration detention facility you believe is akin to a “concentration camp” to become an acceptable form of “resistance”? Apparently so.
_______________________________________________________________
A RADICAL SQUAD'S JEW-HATE
The cancer of anti-Semitism takes firm root in the Democratic Party
BY ARI LIEBERMAN
This week’s brouhaha between Donald Trump and the radical left-wing of the Democratic Party or the so-called “Squad,” has exposed deep fissures within the Party itself, with centrist Democrats becoming an ever increasing rare breed. The Democratic Party is eating itself alive, the result of open warfare between moderates and radical progressives, and the extremists appear to have the upper hand. More troubling is the level of anti-Semitic rhetoric routinely spewed by the radicals and the deafening silence of Party leaders in response to this deleterious trend. The Democratic Party of today, with its Jew-hating, Israel-bashing rhetoric is sounding more and more like its Labour cousin across the Atlantic.
The British Labour Party itself has experienced some rough sailing these last few months. In May, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) announced it had launched an investigation into antisemitism in the Labour Party. It’s not every day that the EHRC opens an investigation of this type against a major British political party. In fact, it is unprecedented. Last week, three senior Labour lawmakers in the upper house of the parliament resignedfrom Labour because the Party’s failure to address its antisemitism problem.
The trio join a steady stream of Labour MPs who have resigned in disgust over what they termed as Labour's turning a blind eye to, or even encouraging antisemitism within the Party. One of the resignees, David Triesman, referred to Britain’s Labour Party as “institutionally anti-Semitic,” and further noted that UK Labour was “no longer a safe political environment for Jewish people.” Harsh words for a former hardcore Labour loyalist.
Last Wednesday, the BBC’s current affairs documentary program Panorama aired a damning exposé featuring a number of former Labour Party members who either experienced anti-Semitic attacks by fellow Labour members or witnessed attempts by Labour Party leaders to quash and suppress investigations into Labour antisemitism. Six of those who were interviewed braved non-disclosure agreements in an effort to draw attention to the seriousness of the situation.
Instead of addressing the problem, Labour is demanding that he BBC remove the Panorama documentary off iPlayer and is attacking the credibility of those interviewed. Rather than take responsibility for its hideous actions, Labour is attacking the messenger.
This tact by Labour is unsurprising. Its party boss, Jeremy Corbyn, is anti-Semitic to his core. He has referred to Hamas and Hezbollah as his friends. In September 2014 he laid a wreath over the graves of terrorists responsible for orchestrating the 1972 massacre of 11 Israeli athletes in Munich. He defended a mural depicting Jewish bankers (with grotesquely exaggerated facial features) exploiting minorities, and actively participated in Facebook groups in which anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and memes were casually tossed about. He offered praise for Raed Salah, a rabid Muslim preacher who referred to Jews as “germs” and claimed that Jews used the blood of non-Jewish children for ritualistic purposes. After 16 Egyptian soldiers and policemen were killed in an ISIS ambush in Sinai, Corbyn, in an interview with an Iranian propaganda site, blamed Israel saying that the Israelis had most to gain from the deaths of Egyptians. He also offered praise and wrote the foreword for a reprint of a book whose author alleged that Jews control world economies through their domination of the financial and banking sectors.
This is the mere tip of the iceberg for Corbyn. Unfortunately, Corbyn’s malign ideology has not only infected his Party, it has metastasized to the United States Democratic Party. The so-called progressive wing of the Democratic Party, led by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib have repeatedly engaged in anti-Semitic tropes, propagated ahistorical fiction and dabbled with Holocaust revisionism.
Omar and Tlaib are unapologetic anti-Semites who have couched their hatred for Jews in terms of anti-Zionism. Their constant demonization and delegitimization of Israel places them squarely within the State Department’s definition of antisemitism.
Omar, whose history and social media feed is replete with anti-Semitic invective, outraged Jews and supporters of Israel when she implied that support for Israel is driven by Jewish money and that Jews maintain divided loyalties. Even the left-leaning Anti-Defamation League condemned her remarks. But the Democrat-controlled congress, pressured from the radical left, could not bring itself to condemn her expressions of hate. Instead, it made do with passing a meaningless, watered down condemnation of antisemitism, which looped this insidious form of hate with “Islamophobia” and about a dozen or so other expressions of racism. It was a shameful, craven display of the workings of a political party wholly influenced by the Squad with its toxic agenda.
In June, AOC trivialized the horrors of the Shoah when she compared ICE detention facilities meant to house illegal aliens to the Nazi concentration camps. This comparison is beyond asinine and is a form of Holocaust denial. AOC is either ignorant of the horrors of the Holocaust or deliberately mendacious. I suspect it’s the latter as shortly after making the comparison, she refused an invitation by Holocaust survivor Edward Mosberg to tour a Nazi concentration camp.
I always feared that the potential existed for the Democratic Party to be subsumed by the radical agenda pushed by extremist socialists within their ranks but never imagined that the descent into Corbynism would be so swift and devastating. Democrats have a serious antisemitism problem that mirrors British Labour. If the current ideological trajectory continues, Democrats will not only face insurmountable odds in 2020, they will lose a vital constituency and cause irreparable harm to their Party.
Another force – Derbyshire Police (central midlands) – sent drones to a remote walking spot in the Peak District, an area known for its beautiful views, and captured actual footage of … dog walkers. There is something very disconcerting about police filming innocent people without their permission.
This is utterly untrue. This is not government advice. It is made up. It is a fabrication and an abuse of power by British police.
