Leftists hate fathers and men. They hate mothers and women, too, as is evident from their relentless push to redefine them out of existence, but they hate fathers and men more than they hate anything, even capitalism and freedom, because strong, godly males are the first and last defense against the Left’s totalitarianism and their obsession with abolishing the nuclear family.

A case in point is the Father’s Day just past, when the reliably subversive New York Times chose to run an op-ed celebrating, in comic-book panels for its mentally challenged Progressive base, a trans woman cosplaying as a dad. An even more recent example is a new opinion piece in the Times with the literally triumphalist headline, “The Boy Scouts Let In Girls Almost a Decade Ago. It’s Been a Triumph.”

The article was written by Erica Song, a mother and Girl Scout troop leader who gushed about how some of the girls, including her 8-year-old daughter, signed up for what used to be known as the Boy Scouts (it went co-ed in 2017 and changed its name to Scouting America a year ago). Song wanted her daughter to experience the same physically demanding challenges and learn the same outdoor adventure skills as her son: building campfires, backpacking, rafting – becoming leaders.

Apart from the passing mention of her son as a Cub Scout, she refers to boys in the article only negatively: when complaining about how the girls “were sometimes treated as intruders” and “catcalled by boys in other troops”; and when she contemptuously dismisses objections that scouting should be a space just for boys (“[T]he logic that a girl’s excellence is a threat to a boy’s development has nothing to do with fairness,” she proclaims. Instead, “it only protects mediocrity.”).

Song claims “girls invigorate scouting rather than weaken it” because they model, for both girls and boys, “what it looks like to earn your rank without shortcuts.” Her assumption seems to be that the boys didn’t earn their ranks without shortcuts until girls came along to show them the way.

She concludes by noting that “These young women will grow up to be doctors, engineers, leaders, colleagues,” while the boys “will one day work with them and for them.” [Emphasis added] So, turning the Boy Scouts into a coed space, literally erasing the word “Boy” from the organization’s name (the same has not been done for the Girl Scouts), “means we are preparing them for the real world.”

Tragically, she is right about that. Scouting America now shows boys that they serve no purpose or function in a “real world” that has been feminized by more than a half century of cultural Marxism, because girls and women have been, and continue to be, socially engineered to replace them. The message boys have been battered with for decades is that their sex is an unnecessary obstruction to female self-actualization.

The narrative presented in this praise of Scouting America’s coeducational “evolution” is as familiar as it is flawed. It relentlessly pushes the late-stage feminist orthodoxy that every male-dominated institution is inherently exclusionary, that girls must constantly break down patriarchal doors to prove their worth, and that any male resistance to this integration stems purely from fragile egos defending mediocrity. This view completely misses the defining socio-cultural crisis of our era: the systemic, pervasive decline of young men.

To claim today that young women are constrained by structural barriers is to willfully ignore reality. By virtually every quantitative metric, women and girls face no systematic barriers to success; if anything, they dominate modern institutions. Girls consistently outpace boys in primary and secondary education, graduate from high school at higher rates, and comprise nearly 60 percent of college undergrads. They earn the majority of master’s and doctoral degrees. Corporate boardrooms, government initiatives, and academic grants specifically target, promote, and elevate female talent at every level. The narrative of female disadvantage is a long-outdated framing that refuses to acknowledge that young women have won, and the playing field is entirely open to them.

Meanwhile, young men are falling off a cliff. As other writers have noted before me for many years, we are witnessing an historic, quiet collapse of the American male:

• Educational alienation: boys are overwhelmingly more likely to be diagnosed with learning disabilities, medicated for behavioral issues, suspended, or simply drop out of the system entirely;

• Economic displacement: millions of young men have exited the labor force completely, trapped in a state of extended adolescence and isolation;

• Mental health catastrophe: men account for roughly 80 percent of all deaths by suicide in the United States, driven by a profound lack of purpose, community, and belonging.

Yet, when the all-devouring feminist gaze targeted the traditional Boy Scouts, it saw not a critical refuge for struggling young men, but another conquest for feminist domination – oops, I mean integration.

The argument that girls “invigorate” boys’ spaces by offering superior discipline and faster maturity misses the fundamental psychological point of single-sex development. It is a well-established developmental reality that girls mature faster socially and biologically than boys during adolescence. Placing girls alongside boys in their formative years does not “elevate” the boys through healthy competition; it frequently crushes their confidence and drives them to withdraw.

Developmental equality requires meeting boys where they are—not forcing them to compete against accelerated female maturation in the very spaces meant for their growth.

Boys require a specific kind of environment to thrive. They learn more readily through action, risk-taking, physical challenge, and unfiltered camaraderie. In a single-sex environment, a boy can fail without the debilitating shame of doing so in front of female peers. He can be unpolished, awkward, and hyperactive, gradually refining those traits into self-command under the mentorship of older men and alongside a brotherhood of peers.

Contrary to the New York Times’ dismissive attitude, male-only spaces foster a unique, indispensable form of brotherhood. True brotherhood is not built on abstract moralizing; it is forged through shared hardship, physical exertion, and collective responsibility among peers who understand one another’s innate disposition. When young men are given a domain of their own, they learn to channel their instincts into constructive service, discipline, and mutual support. By taking away dedicated male spaces, society deprives young men of the specific mentorship and camaraderie required to transform raw energy into mature, responsible manhood.

Introduce girls into those spaces, and the dynamic shifts instantly. The space becomes performative. The natural, messy process of male bonding—what critics dismissively label as “boyish mischief”—is quickly policed, moralized, and replaced by standards of emotional maturity designed by and for girls. To dismiss male objections to this shift as a desire to “protect mediocrity” is a deeply cynical misunderstanding of boyhood. It assumes that the only value of an institution is a hyper-competitive, meritocratic rank, rather than the safe, developmental crucible it provides for those who need time to grow.

Men are not demanding that Girl Scouts open its doors to boys to fix a hypothetical lack of male perspective in female spaces. We recognize intuitively that young women too benefit from strong, supportive, single-sex environments where they can build confidence without male distraction.

Why is that same basic empathy denied to young men? Why is a space dedicated exclusively to the cultivation of young women celebrated as an empowering sanctuary, while a space dedicated exclusively to young men is branded as a bastion of exclusionary patriarchy that must be dismantled? We all know why: feminism demands it. The feminization of society demands it. The abolition of the family demands it. The “queering” of the West demands it.

For more than half a century there has been no lack of programs, cultural narratives, or institutional capital dedicated to lifting up young women. They have every tool, every advantage, and every open door imaginable in the modern world. The feminist pretense that women are oppressed in a Handmaid’s Tale patriarchy is a laughable lie.

The erosion of dedicated male spaces has left a generation of young men adrift, lacking positive male role models, unstructured physical challenge, and authentic brotherhood. When society tells young men that their unique developmental needs are unnecessary—or worse, inherently toxic—they do not simply adapt and thrive alongside young women. They check out. They retreat to virtual worlds, video games, and online subcultures that promise the belonging and status that physical institutions no longer offer them.

It is easy to write a triumphant story about a daughter earning the rank of Eagle Scout. It fits cleanly into the modern cultural mandate. But the real casualty of this narrative is the boy who quieted down, stepped back, and eventually dropped out of his troop because the one space built specifically for his developmental pace ceased to exist, and because society’s relentless message is that girls matter and boys will be working for them.

Until society stops viewing male-specific development as a threat to progress, we will continue to watch more generations of young men sink into despair, alienation, and quiet collapse. As I frequently note, an emasculated civilization is a doomed one, and this is the suicidal future toward which we are hurtling, and which The New York Times is celebrating.

For more than half a century, the Left’s toxic one-world communist vision has dictated the trajectory of Western statecraft, establishing the supremacy of transnational governance over the traditional democratic republic. Globalist elites, radical Left-wing NGOs, and a political class consumed by civilizational self-loathing have pushed toward the shining horizon of a post-nationalist utopia, holding up this ideal as a triumph of cosmopolitan enlightenment. The promise was that by dissolving borders, dismantling shared cultural inheritances, and subordinating national sovereignty to unelected legalistic bodies, the West would enter a post-historical paradise.

Instead, that utopian dream has produced a profound crisis of social trust, systemic lawlessness, and the near-total atomization of Western civic life. From the deteriorating urban centers of Western Europe to overrun communities across the American heartland, the fundamental mandate of the nation-state – the protection of its territory and the preservation of its culture – has been systematically abandoned. What was framed as a compassionate, inclusive, humanitarian doctrine has exposed itself as an ideological assault on the democratic nation-state itself and on its free citizens.

When a nation’s border policy is governed not by statutory law or economic prudence but by a universalist fantasy enforced by activist judiciaries and unaccountable transnational bodies, national sovereignty ceases to exist. A nation that cannot apply commonsense judgment over who enters, stays, or assimilates is not a sovereign republic; it is merely an administrative transit zone with no ability to manage bad actors like terrorists, savage religious fundamentalists, and international criminal gangs.

The foundational lie of the globalist Left is that national borders in the Western world are an arbitrary, inherently xenophobic relic of a white supremacist past. Progressives (i.e., rebranded communists) see the rule of law and a national border not as protective barriers that define a community’s legal and moral parameters, but as unjust obstructions to the free movement of global humanity. So the Left replaced a set of power dynamics based on capitalist opportunity with one driven by economic resentment and racial revenge. They prioritized the flourishing of non-white immigrants, countless millions of them illegal, over law-abiding, taxpaying, social contract-upholding indigenous citizens who were deemed to be the inheritors of unearned white privilege.

Historically, migration into the West functioned because it operated under a rigorous framework of assimilation. Immigrants were expected—and encouraged—to adopt the host nation’s language, honor its constitutional principles, and integrate into its cultural fabric. The radical Left, however, replaced assimilation with a multiculturalist doctrine that views assimilation to Western norms as an act of cultural imperialism.

When a society teaches newcomers (as well as its own rising generations) that its history is evil, its founding principles are oppressive, and its borders are illegitimate, it destroys any incentive for integration. The result is not a harmonious mosaic, but a collection of hostile, parallel enclaves operating under competing value systems.

The consequences of this ideological crusade are evident in the collapsing, increasingly Islamized neighborhoods of European capitals (Australian as well) and the impossible strain placed on communities and infrastructure across American cities.

This anti-assimilation project has shattered the basic prerequisite of any functioning republic: social trust. High-trust societies are built on shared cultural norms, a mutual sense of civic obligation, and a common historical identity. When those foundational bonds are erased in favor of a fragmented, post-national identity, the social contract collapses. Neighbors become tribalized strangers, public institutions lose their legitimacy, and an increasingly totalitarian state happily employs bureaucratic coercion to manage the resulting chaos.

Perhaps the most insidious feature of the post-national project is its overt hostility to democratic accountability. Because the majority of working-class voters oppose the radical Left’s vision of a borderless world, it has been enacted through non-democratic means:

1) Activist Judiciaries: National courts and international tribunals routinely overrule the explicitly expressed will of voters, granting sweeping protection to illegal migrants;

2) Transnational NGOs: Funded by billions in tax-exempt capital and state grants, Progressive NGOs operate as an unchecked shadow government, facilitating illegal border crossings and litigating any attempt by sovereign states to restore order;

3) Insulated Bureaucracies: Unelected administrative bodies in Brussels and Washington insulate migration policy from electoral consequences, treating voter resistance not as a democratic mandate, but as bigotry.

The battle facing the West is resolving the existential struggle between two fundamentally incompatible visions of human organization: a borderless, Balkanized empire governed by feminized, unelected bureaucrats, or a civilization of proud, self-governing, sovereign nations. The populism sweeping both sides of the Atlantic today is a desperate, necessary immune response by citizens attempting to reclaim their right to self-governance.

From America to Australia to Europe, conservative movements must challenge the First World-hating globalist elites, reverse by any means necessary their mass migration priorities, and reclaim national sovereignty. The path forward requires an aggressive, unyielding defense of that sovereignty and cultural heritage, centered on at least three basic paths to restoration:

1) airtight border enforcement (the success of which has been demonstrated here in America under President Trump) and swift, mass deportations;

2) the promotion of mandatory assimilation, patriotic civic education, and cultural cohesion over the corrosion of multiculturalism and historical self-flagellation;

3) the reassertion of constitutional law and national sovereignty, and the total rejection of the influence and authority of transnational bodies and activist NGOs.

If Western liberty, order, and civilization are to survive, the Left’s post-national ideology must be ground into dust, exposing its hollow promises as the destructive illusions they have always been.

An historical biopic about George Washington called Young Washington opened the day before Independence Day, appropriately, which I reviewed for the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s FrontPage Magazine. It centers on a George Washington you don’t often hear or think about: the ambitious, inexperienced young man fumbling his way toward becoming the legendary Father of His Country; Young Washington is about the forging of that heroic character.

Prior to watching the movie I viewed a 45-minute roundtable discussion on YouTube featuring the director and screenwriter of the film, Jon Erwin, and a handful of historians discussing the historical accuracy and fidelity of the film. It was interesting mostly because of the thoughtful perspective of the filmmaker Erwin, who really strove to do Washington justice, but one thing that stood out was how often the word “enslaved” popped up, as in “enslaved people,” “enslaved person,” “the enslaved” instead of the simple word “slave” that non-academics commonly use. You could have made a drinking game out of how often the female historian on the panel said “enslaved,” although if you did you would die of alcohol poisoning by the end of it.

In fact, if you go into a museum today, or an historical exhibit like George Washington’s home at Mt. Vernon or Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, you won’t be able to miss this strange, seemingly innocuous but profound shift. A word that stood at the absolute center of American historical writing for generations has quietly, but intentionally, been almost totally erased, at least in modern historiography.

Over the last couple of decades, the noun “slave” has undergone basically a linguistic retirement. In its place, a new term has stepped into academic parlance: enslaved person. In addition, the traditional term “master” or “slave owner” is also being systematically replaced by the word enslaver.

Why? What is the reasoning behind this quiet, semantic movement? Well, it’s not happening by accident. The only reason Leftists do anything – and the academic activists behind this are indisputably and overwhelmingly Left-wing – is for power. And the manipulation of language is how they impose power over the culture without the use of force. Make no mistake about it: this linguistic shift from “slave” to “enslaved person” is intentional and agenda-driven. It exemplifies the profound, high-stakes manner in which they pervert language to reshape and eventually erase our historical memory. As Orwell wrote: “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”

Weaponizing the Language

To understand this linguistic evolution and the subversive theory that built this modern academic consensus about slavery, we have to look at a concept that has swept through medicine, sociology, and now historiography over the last forty or so years: person-first language.

The philosophy behind person-first language goes like this: an individual’s identity should never be entirely defined by their condition, their medical diagnosis, or their legal status. In modern writing, for example, we no longer refer to someone as “a schizophrenic”; we say “a person with schizophrenia.” We no longer say “the disabled”; we say “people with disabilities.” This is at least ostensibly intended to be more respectful and destigmatizing.

The theory about the noun slave is that it functions as an identity. It implies that being property was the inherent nature of the person being described. It merges the human being with the legal category, or so the argument goes.

But when you switch to enslaved person, “enslaved” becomes an adjective, and “person” becomes the noun. By making “person” the root of the phrase, the language establishes that their humanity comes first. Their legal status as property wasn’t who they were; it was a condition imposed upon them by an external system.

The theorists behind this re-conception of the word “slave” argue that this alters how we assign historical agency. Take the traditional term slave owner. It sounds passive, almost natural, like landowner or homeowner. It frames the relationship as a static state of possession. But when modern historians substitute the more active noun enslaver, derived from a verb, it turns the “slave owner” into a perpetrator. The connotation is that holding someone in bondage is not a passive fact of property ownership but an active choice renewed every day.

The same applies to the infrastructure of slavery. A slave ship sounds like a neutral category of vessel, like a cargo ship or a passenger liner. But calling it an enslavement ship or a transatlantic slave vessel refocuses attention on the function of the vessel—that it was designed or retooled specifically to participate in the stripping of human beings of their freedom.

By restructuring words like this, modern academics purport to be trying to break the habit of uncritically adopting the language of the perpetrators. In fact, what they are trying to do is force a subtle shift in how we think about anyone who owned slaves – specifically the Founding Fathers. The political aim here is to smear the Founding Fathers as, first and foremost, not the pioneer architects of a liberty unprecedented in human history, but as nothing more or less than enslavers, which sounds flat-out evil.

This shift didn’t happen overnight. It bubbled up through decades of – predictably – black feminist scholarship and grassroots academic organizing. The moment the ground began to shift under the feet of the historical profession came in 1985, when an historian named Deborah Gray White published a book called Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South. That book was about – predictably – the intersection of race and gender in the antebellum era.

But in 1999, when the university press was preparing a new edition of the book, Deborah Gray White wrote a new preface in which she admitted, “Were I to write this book today, I would refer to them as ‘enslaved’ rather than ‘slaves’...” because the word forces us to acknowledge that there was someone doing the actual enslaving.

That insight—that the language of history should reflect the active imposition of power—began to spread. (That insight, by the way, is Marxist at its core, because Marx trained the Left to think of every human interaction in terms of power imbalances.) By the 2010s, historians were arguing that if we simply repeat the language of the perpetrators uncritically, we are, in a sense, extending that erasure of human identity into the present day.

Eventually, this movement was codified into a formal tool for the profession. An historian named P. Gabrielle Foreman, alongside a coalition of scholars “of color,” created a community-sourced guide that circulated through universities and newsrooms. It was titled, Writing about Slavery? Teaching About Slavery?: This Might Help. It emphasized that “People weren’t slaves; they were enslaved.”

The Pushback

Some historians, political scientists, and linguists objected that this shift is problematic in terms of grammar, law, and historical reality. They point out that these multi-word adjectival phrases create an awkward clunkiness on the page. Writing “the runaway enslaved person” instead of “the runaway slave” or “the children of enslaved people” instead of “children of slaves” introduces passive constructions that can distance a reader from the propulsive energy of narrative history.

And David Blight, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Frederick Douglass, has argued that the people who actually lived through the nightmare of human bondage did not shy away from the noun slave. When Douglass wrote the book that would shake the conscience of the nation, he didn’t title it The Narrative of an Enslaved Person. He called it Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Critics ask, if Douglass felt it was vital to use the starkness of that noun, aren’t we doing history a disservice by smoothing it over with 21st-century academic prose?

But the critics’ core argument is the simple linguistic distinction that enslavement refers to the actual process, whereas slavery refers to status. Being enslaved is a perfectly accurate description of a free person living in, say, West Africa being captured, forced onto a ship, and inducted into slavery. But this is linguistically distinct from being a slave, and should remain so. Words matter, as the Left knows very well, which is why they are perpetually perverting language to suit their propaganda.

Take, for example, the American system of slavery. The international slave trade had been banned since 1808. Nearly all of the 2-4 million black people living in bondage in the American South in the 1840s, ‘50s, and ‘60s were not literally abducted from freedom. Unlike in places like Brazil or the Caribbean, slavery in the United States had become hereditary. Those people were slaves, yes, but enslaved would literally mean they were seized from a prior state of independence. Similarly, slave owners is not interchangeable with enslavers, which should be reserved for those doing the seizing. This is not at all to minimize any aspect of the practice of slavery; it’s simply a point of linguistic accuracy.

The critics who argue these objections have not been able to prevent the academic embrace of the term enslaved. By the late 2010s, this new terminology had achieved total victory in woke activist institutions like the Smithsonian, major university presses, the Advanced Placement historical curriculum, and now AI. It’s virtually ubiquitous at historical sites across the country, where patrons who are excited to visit landmarks such as the aforementioned Monticello or Smithsonian have to endure lectures and exhibits about the evils of slavery from Left-wing activists who want to demonize the Founding Fathers as enslavers.

Resist

The patriots visiting these places know full well that a majority of the Founding Fathers owned slaves. We don’t approve of it; we’re not ignoring it; but unlike the Left, we understand that human beings are not perfect and that history is the agonizingly slow process of humans struggling to overcome their flaws and their brokenness. We don’t make idols of the Founding Fathers, but we do revere them for their literally unprecedented wisdom and efforts to create a nation which has striven more than any other in human history to rectify those flaws.

Here is a clue for the historically illiterate who have been indoctrinated to believe slavery was a uniquely American or even white practice inflicted on black and brown people: human bondage was universal. As has often been noted: everywhere throughout history, people have enslaved others. Ancient Meso-Americans enslaved each other. The ancient Egyptians enslaved Jews and other conquered peoples. When the Mongol armies swept across Asia and into Eastern Europe, they enslaved captives. Native American tribes enslaved other conquered tribes. Arab slavers enslaved white Europeans. The blacks ensnared in the transatlantic slave trade were largely enslaved by other black Africans, then sold to white and Arab slavers. And on and on. It was a ghastly but universally accepted practice.

Another point worth noting: 95% of slavery throughout history was tribal, not racial. A tribe or a people made slaves of their enemies simply because they belonged to a different tribe or group of people, not because of the color of their skin.

Slavery continues today in places like China and North Korea and in many Muslim countries, although the Left cares nothing for those enslaved people because their plight can’t be weaponized against Western civilization.

No reasonable or sane person in the West today thinks of slavery as anything but an abomination, but the reason for that is that 19^th century white Christian Americans and British forced an end to the practice – in America, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of white lives in the Civil War – because it was immoral and because in America at least, abolishing slavery was a fulfillment of the unprecedented truth in our Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal. That truth was a world-changing statement from the Founding Fathers, whose attitude toward slavery (except for Deep South colony delegates) ranged from being deeply conflicted about it to outright wanting to end it. To make slave ownership the central focus of our perspective on the Founding Fathers, and then to condemn them as enslavers is a grotesque, Marxist-driven distortion intended to subvert American patriotism and to twist the knife of white guilt. They were slave owners, yes, but not enslavers, a term more appropriate to the black Africans who enslaved each other, and which is designed to demonize the very men who launched the country that would declare all men free.

We must push back against this Progressive agenda to perpetuate racial division in America wherever it rears its ugly head. That’s why I was pleased when the White House issued, on Independence Day, no less, a report blasting the once-respected Smithsonian Institute for woke propagandizing, about which I wrote last week for FrontPage Mag’s paid subscribers. The report concluded that, as I wrote, “presenting such tragedies as slavery as a defining characteristic of the United States—while entirely erasing major historical achievements, foundational documents, and unifying figures—is a distortion that generates national shame rather than informed citizenship.” When entering an historical site like Monticello, the public has a right to expect neutral stewardship rather than Left-wing ideological conditioning. Bravo, Trump administration, for calling out the Smithsonian.

Resist. Refuse to use the Left’s preferred terminology except in mockery. Call them out on it when they use it. Show zero tolerance for Leftist subversion. Zero tolerance for their weaponization of language. Zero tolerance for their divisive hate. We are in a war for the soul and future of America with an enemy that, as my culture critic friend Michael Walsh always reminds us, never rests. Their goal is permanent, totalitarian, one-party hegemony and the eradication of our freedoms and prosperity. We will win only by demonstrating greater conviction and tenacity in defense of this great nation than they can muster to destroy it.

Photo credit: The Declaration of Independence, by John Trumbull from the US Capitol at Wikimedia Commons.

On June 14, 2026, the White House hosted an historic and unconventional, albeit quintessentially Trumpian, celebration called UFC Freedom 250, kicking off the upcoming 250^th anniversary of the U.S. Declaration of Independence. It featured a seven-bout UFC card and a musical performance by the Zac Brown Band, which opened the event with Brown singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” live on the White House South Lawn, backed by the United States Marine Band.

The unabashedly patriotic spectacle predictably sparked controversy and Trump-hating outrage. At least one scheduled performer pulled out of the event rather than appear to be aligned with Trump’s politics, but Zac Brown defended his presence there by noting, “This is patriotism, not politics. F--k all the division. I don’t believe in that. I love this country.”

A couple of weeks later, in an episode of ABC’s daytime talk show The View, co-hostess Joy Behar played a clip of comedian Larry David calling the White House event “a travesty,” adding that it made him “embarrassed to be an American.”

“And of course Larry is embarrassed to be an American,” Behar chimed in. “In that way, we should all be.”

This contrast – between Americans who put patriotism over politics on the one hand, and on the other, Americans who have swapped out love of country for love of Party – highlights the volatile state of America today as we mark 250 years as the freest, most prosperous country on Earth.

That contrast has been confirmed by recent polls quantifying the gaping chasm between Republicans and Democrats regarding their perspectives on how they feel about America.

An Elon University/YouGov America 250 National Survey, for example, performed between April 30^th and May 4^th, 2026, asked respondents, “Is there any other country on Earth you would rather live in than the United States today?” to which a jaw-dropping 55 percent of Democrats replied yes. A still-shocking 38 percent of Independents also said yes while only 10 percent of Republicans gave the same answer.

Asked how true or untrue the statement “I am proud to be an American” is, a whopping 83 percent of Republicans declared “very true”; only 26 percent of Democrats agreed.

Can a nation survive when such a significant percentage of the population has little-to-no allegiance to it?

As further evidence of a partisan divide, the poll also asked, “Who has been the best President in United States history?” Democrats overwhelmingly voted for the radical Leftist Barack Obama, while Republicans put Donald Trump at number one, with more than twice as many votes as George Washington received. Trump received a total of zero votes from Democrats, while only two percent of Republicans named Obama.

Another poll, a mid-June survey from the Economist/YouGov, asked respondents to rank how they feel about America among the world’s countries. Opinions were predictably divided sharply along party lines. A mere eight percent of Democrats believe America is “the greatest,” while more than five times as many Republicans, 44 percent, said the same. Only 14 percent of Democrats categorize America as “among the greatest,” as opposed to 31 percent of Republicans; another 12 percent of Republicans rank the country as above average, meaning the vast majority of the GOP (87 percent) rank America as either the greatest, among the greatest, and better than average in status compared to other countries.

A plurality of Democrats, 25 percent, believe America is “worse than average” when compared to other countries. Another 14 percent of Democrats said America is “among the worst” countries, and six percent deemed it “the worst.” That means nearly half, or 45 percent, of Democrats think America is at best worse than average. By contrast, only 12 percent of Republicans categorize America as worse than average or the worst. (Opinions among independents were more widespread, as 16 percent said America is among the greatest, and 16 percent said it is worse than average).

Overall, 42 percent of respondents reported they are “very proud” and 18 percent “somewhat proud” to be Americans. Republicans, at 78 percent, were the most likely voters to say they are “very proud,” with 15 percent saying they are “somewhat proud.” Only 3 percent of Republicans declared they are ashamed to be American, and only 4 percent said they are “neither proud nor ashamed.”

By contrast, the survey found that over a quarter of Democrats, 26 percent, are “somewhat ashamed” to be an American, with 12 percent “very ashamed.” That is nearly twice the number of all U.S. adult citizens polled.

***

This May, the reliably Left-leaning The New Yorker chose to publish a lengthy piece by Arthur Krystal asking, “How Problematic Is Patriotism?” What’s problematic about loving one’s homeland, you wonder? Well, Krystal spends 4000 words trashing it as a mere “[a]ttachment to a parcel of land [that] can easily harden into isolationism, jingoism, and racism.” As reasons why no one should be proud of this country, as Joy Behar put it, Krystal predictably runs through a litany of America’s “sins” from slavery to the “profoundly un-American” chaos of the FBI-orchestrated “insurrection” of January 6, 2021. He dredges up every quote the internet can disgorge demonizing the love of country, from Borges to Zinn.

Krystal declares that “Patriotism just isn’t cool anymore” – at least, not since the watershed moment of the election of Donald Trump in 2016. The teaser to the New Yorker article reads, “National pride in America has plummeted in the Trump era. Is it worth trying to salvage?” First, the truth is that in the Trump era, it is Democrat pride in America has plummeted; conservative pride has risen, spotlighting the unbridgeable divide between the American Left and Right today. Second, today’s Democrat Party is congenitally anti-American, but what really grinds the Left’s gears is America under Trump, who for all his flaws, is unabashedly and genuinely pro-American. There is no way that the New Yorker would have felt compelled to publish Krystal’s subversive message during a Joe Biden or Kamala Harris regime. It would have been unnecessary.

The Left is incapable of distinguishing the country from whatever its current government happens to be because the Left believes in the totalitarian lie that government can save us, especially big government – the bigger the better. That is why Democrats feel comparatively more pride in the nation when Barack Obama or Joe Biden sits in the White House, but want to burn America to the ground when Donald Trump resides there. The Right, on the other hand, maintains a love for this country no matter which party is in power, because we know that America is bigger than any one administration, any president, any party.

The New Yorker article encapsulates the Left-wing attitude that America doesn’t deserve our love, that Americans who claim to be patriots have a jingoistic “amnesia” about our checkered history; after all, didn’t the Constitution exclude women, the poor, and the “enslaved”?

Instead of feeling jazzed about celebrating the nation’s 250^th, Arthur Krystal is bracing himself for “an excess of foolish excess” under the Trump administration. Indeed, President Trump has promised the “largest fireworks show in history” this July 4 – and why not? He is leading a movement to Make America Great Again, and the 250^th anniversary is a special milestone. Krystal no doubt feels the UFC America 250 event, which galvanized so many patriots across the country, qualified as “foolish excess” as well.

The New Yorker concludes with this advice: “Forget the word ‘patriotism.’”

***

How did we arrive at this patriotism gap? We got here via more than a half century of the cultural Marxist assault on the culture, the “long march through the institutions” which resulted in the radical Left takeover of every influential arena from the news media to the entertainment industry to education. Through those organs spread the anti-American narrative that our nation’s origins were rooted in racism and slavery, not liberty; that our country has historically been a fount of oppression, exploitation, and genocide, not a force for good in the world; and that, as Barack Obama put it, “American exceptionalism” is no more exceptional than British exceptionalism or Greek exceptionalism.

That toxic narrative has successfully poisoned generations of Americans and driven a widening wedge between Left and Right, between young and old, between urban and rural. And American now finds itself, on its 250^th birthday, teetering on a brink. Which way we fall – toward chaos and collapse, or toward renewed unity and vibrancy – will depend upon which party prevails in the current cold civil war – a cold civil war that has already turned hot – in which we are deeply engaged.

How do we begin to close the patriotism gap? It will take a concerted, multi-pronged effort involving a wholesale recapture of the institutions still under Leftist control, retooling them from purveyors of indoctrination to defenders of truth.

It will require rebuilding public trust in the institutions such as the media, the healthcare industry, and higher education that we have come to realize betrayed us.

It will require a transparent government wielding cultural influence and legal power to root out and disempower subversive elements in our schools, human resources departments, corporate boardrooms, and government itself.

It will require everyday citizens becoming more engaged in local politics, especially on school boards, in order to counter the radical activists.

It will require dismantling the entrenched power of far-Left unions and the subversive network of the Deep State.

It will require leaders committed to selfless service rather than the lust for power. All this and more.

And this will be an uphill, possibly generational battle, not least because there is precious little optimism on either side of the political aisle about America’s future. The Elon University/YouGov America 250 National Survey referred to above notes that 59% of Republicans feel that, looking ahead to 2076, the United States will likely be more divided politically than it currently is; 69 percent of Democrats feel the same.

On the semiquincentennial anniversary of our exceptional nation, true patriots are gearing up for a glorious spectacle of celebration across the country. Meanwhile, the Democrat Party wants you to forget patriotism, to stay bitterly focused on our country’s historical faults and missteps, and to let one’s Trump Derangement Syndrome-driven rage come to a boil. This, tragically, is where we currently are as a nation.

Beginning this Independence Day, our mission as Americans must be to work passionately and relentlessly to defend our country against the cynicism, the self-loathing, the racial division, and the wars on faith and family that have been inflicted upon us in recent decades. We must do the hard work to close the patriotism gap, reclaim a unified drive toward greatness, and make the next 250 years of American preeminence even more exceptional than the first.

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