The Patriot Post® · Patriots, Real and Pretend

In the headline of his column on Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal’s Dan Henninger asked a question to which the answer seems obvious: Who owns the Fourth of July?

All Americans own it, of course, but many will choose not to celebrate it — at least not beyond claiming a free day off. And there’s a particular party affiliation common to the vast majority of those who won’t be celebrating our Independence Day: the Democrat Party. It’s been that way for some time. Take last year, for example, when, as Henninger writes:

In the weeks leading up to last year’s Fourth of July — since 1776 always a time of planning for patriotic parades — a significant slice of the U.S. political left decided the moment had arrived to deface statues and monuments dedicated to the country’s most revered figures. Among those hauled down or hammered were George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Jackson, Thomas Jefferson, Ulysses S. Grant, Francis Scott Key, Christopher Columbus and Father Junípero Serra.

All were accused of racism of some sort. Indeed, the argument being made a year ago was that America was born not on the Fourth of July but in slavery in the early 17th century and that the country’s defining characteristic for 400 years had been systemic or structural racism.

The Democrats realize that they’re fast becoming the anti-America party — the party of kneelers, rioters, statue-topplers, and those who claim that our National Archives are imbued with “structural racism” because they laud “wealthy White men in the nation’s founding while marginalizing BIPOC [Black, Indigenous and other People of Color], women, and other communities.”

To this list we might also add American presidents who scold us by saying, “We must address what remains the stain on the soul of America,” and that the hate which prompted the Tulsa massacre “never went away,” and that “terrorism from white supremacy is the most lethal threat to the homeland today.”

We’re not sure who’s putting words into Joe Biden’s mouth, but they’re clearly not the words of a Patriot.

Perhaps the Democratic National Committee senses the very real weakness in its party when it comes to patriotism, when it comes to loving this, the greatest country on earth. And perhaps that’s why it’s trotting out a 60-second TV ad that celebrates July Fourth — inasmuch as it’s able to celebrate it. The ad, for example, doesn’t use the word “Independence,” nor does it show even a fleeting image of our Founding Fathers, or of Independence Hall, or of the document for which the holiday is named.

As Henninger writes, it’s an ad “depicting a shoulder-slapping Joe Biden as the main reason Americans feel better than last summer.” It’s titled “America’s Coming Back,” and the end of the video features Joe and Jill Biden overlaid with those words and a new, more ironic word: “Together.” This comes from the party that endlessly drives us apart — over race, over income, over sex, over morals.

This is Joe Biden. The guy who didn’t say “boo” last summer when those on his side were wrecking our cities and defiling our monuments — indeed, when his own future vice president was actually encouraging the riots, saying, “They’re not gonna let up, and they should not.” In fact, the whole party spent the last year waging war on “systemically racist” cops and looking the other way as BLM and antifa thugs tore apart our cities.

Rather than address this rise in crime honestly, Democrats want to take away guns from law-abiding Americans. And last week, Joe Biden derided our Second Amendment while taunting us with fighter jets and nuclear weapons. “Independence,” indeed.

They’re the party of Critical Race Theory and “equity,” racist and Marxist ideas meant to divide Americans. They’re the party of open borders — a policy that mocks our immigration laws, floods our country with illegal migrants, costs many Americans their jobs, and drives down the wages of many others. They’re the party that turns a blind eye to the trafficking of children and the smuggling of drugs that devastate our communities.

They’re the party of destroying women’s sports and putting men in women’s locker rooms. They’re the party of forcing Catholic adoption agencies and convents to violate church teachings.

These are not the precepts and policies of a party that loves its country.

In his farewell address of 1796, George Washington warned his fellow Americans to “guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism,” and that “the name of American … must always exalt the just pride of patriotism more than any appellation derived from local discriminations.”

And what better embodiment could their be of “pretended patriotism” than this 60-second spot, this desperate effort by the Democrats to claim some share of our Independence Day holiday, while at the same time denouncing the very country that it celebrates?

Real Patriots love this country, warts and all. And they honor its Founding Fathers, and its Constitution, and its Declaration of Independence.