The Patriot Post® · No Longer the Land of the Free

By Burt Prelutsky ·
https://patriotpost.us/opinion/81414-no-longer-the-land-of-the-free-2021-07-26

There are so many areas in which America has declined, it is fast becoming impossible to find any exceptions.

For openers, we can start with professional sports. Having heard that the NFL has decided to open each game with a rendition of the Black National Anthem, I fear to ask if the other anthem will also be played. Clearly, football has decided that black Americans form its base, just as the NBA has decided basketball has a lot more fans in China than it has in the U.S.

Then we have TV, which is flooded with commercials that would have you believing that bi-racial couples are the norm.

Movies, as I think everyone has noticed by now, are so woke, they put the New York Times newsroom to shame.

In Washington, D.C., it almost doesn’t matter who is in the Oval Office. It’s the critters swimming in the toxic Potomac who get to call the shots at the IRS, the State Department, the FBI, the NSA, the CIA and even, God help us, at the Pentagon.

Who would have ever believed that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff would be a left-winger who thinks there may be a lot to learn from the BLM and its Critical Race Theory? Who would have ever imagined that such a man, General Mark Milley, would compare the brouhaha on January 6th to “A Reichstag moment” and describe President Trump’s speech that day as “The gospel of the Fuhrer”?

In preparation for Joe Biden’s inauguration, Milley promised that the Army would put “a ring of steel around this city and the Nazis aren’t getting in.”

Those Nazis the head of the Pentagon was talking about weren’t the members of Antifa, as you might have thought. No. he was referring to you and me.

Those who read the book or saw the movie might recall the chilling “Seven Days in May,” although, giving Hollywood its due, Burt Lancaster made a far more impressive general than Mark Milley.

While a great many politicians have been dismissed as empty suits, I think it’s fair to describe Milley as an empty uniform.


Now that we’ve all heard about Facebook’s working with Joe Biden to push for mandated vaccinations, promising to censor anyone who questions the safety of shots that have not yet cleared the usual hurdle at the FDA, it’s proof that Mark Zuckerberg can serve two masters simultaneously: one in Washington, D.C., the other in Beijing.


I am curious why Fox insists on playing rap music at the end of Bret Baier’s opening segment. It is as annoying as the awful music that the technical support people torture you with when they put you on hold. But at least in their case, I assume it’s all part of their strategy to make you hang up before you get to speak to the one guy in New Delhi they hired to service their 500 million customers.

But what the heck is Fox’s excuse?


It seems that a record 93,000 people died in this country during 2020 from drug overdoses. Frankly, I was shocked that the number was so low, as I figured that a lot more people than that die in a typical year.

In any case, the blame is laid at the feet of the isolation created by the Covid lockdown. The killer, it seems, is fentanyl because the dealers are lacing heroin with it in order to make it more potent and, therefore, more appealing to their weak-minded clientele.

That struck me as an odd marketing strategy because it leads to the deaths of their customers. But what do I know? Heck, I could never figure out why CNN, MSNBC and America’s newspapers all went out of their way to express open contempt for half of their potential viewers and readers.

By the way, it turns out that the Covid virus isn’t the only Wuhan export. It seems that Wuhan is the place where the world’s supply of fentanyl is manufactured. And its source is a lab, and not the wet market, famous for its wide assortment of bats, snakes and skunks.


I don’t mention the following as a form of judgment, but only because I find it fascinating that so many homosexuals and lesbians have found employment as TV news commentators. My list contains 10 of the better-known names, most but not all of them of the liberal persuasion, but there are dozens more.

In alphabetical order, they are Guy Benson, Tammy Bruce, Anderson Cooper, Rich Grenell, Don Lemon, Rachel Maddow, Robin Roberts, Jessica Savitch, Shepard Smith and Amy Walter.


Like Tucker Carlson, I never expected to be interested in Britney Spears’ conservatorship. But once I began hearing the details, even though I’m not sure I ever heard her sing and certainly never saw her perform, I realized this has been a blatant example of legalized malfeasance.

The woman is pushing 40 and, thanks to the California legal system, her father has been allowed to turn her into a puppet. She is taken out of her box when she needs to perform and make millions but is then quickly returned to her shelf in the closet.

Those defending her greedy dad point out that she has used drugs and acted irrationally in the past. Well, duh, she is a rock star. I don’t see Keith Richards’ dad running his life.

So I add my voice to those demanding that the court “Free Britney!”


Speaking of women in the limelight, I haven’t mentioned Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez lately. Part of the reason is because the ditz might as well be walking around with a “Kick Me” sign taped to her butt, and I really hate to pile on.

Plus, a lot of the memes that people send me are pictures of her with quotes attributed to her that she never said. All by herself, by being a brunette, she has made blonde jokes all but disappear.

But, sometimes, she just asks for it. Such an occasion arose recently when she actually said, “If we want to reduce the number of people in our jails, the answer is to stop building more of them.”


I just learned about something called the Hawthorne effect. It was coined after a group of researchers in the 1920s studied the workers at the Hawthorne Works in Cicero, Illinois. They found the level of productivity increased irrespective of the change in the direction of the variable. That meant that the performance improved under brighter lights in the factory, but also improved to a similar extent when the lights were dimmed.

The researchers attributed this phenomenon to the workers’ perception that they were being given some attention. The mere realization of being singled out for study motivated them.

I like this because it conforms with my belief that most people prefer being disliked to being ignored.

So if you feel your spouse isn’t giving you the attention you deserve, provide him or her with a reason to think you’re either a saint or a swine, but don’t let them remain oblivious.

You just might find that he’s noticing what you’re wearing once in a while, and she might actually pretend to be listening when you tell her about your approach shot on the 16th green.


You can email Burt directly at [email protected].