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In the postwar period, the rise of the New Left and its “long march” through the institutions accelerated the erosion of patriotism, particularly among those who spent time in universities. Love of one’s country joined faith as a malign superstition, while sexual restraint and virtue became cultural shorthand for repression, ignorance, unsophisticated gullibility, and fascism. The United States was transformed by the left from the “shining city on a hill” to a cesspool of tyranny, racism, oppression, philistinism, and heartless greed.

But this year Donald Trump’s spectacular successes at home and abroad, the fruits of his Make America Great Again movement, has restored Constitutional order, common sense, and tradition to our government.  Now the “vibe,” as the kiddies of all ages say, is triumphantly patriotic, and the celebration of our nation’s birth, of freedom, and of political equality, is once again exuberant. And our exceptionalism is obvious to all except the enemies of freedom.

Earlier, there were moments of renewal. Ronald Reagan’s presidency marked a powerful pushback against the left’s collectivist trends and policies, and reform of our foreign policy of cringing accommodation of our enemies and rivals. With wit and passionate resolve, Reagan challenged the self-loathing clichés of the cognitive and cultural elites, slaughtering whole herds of their foreign policy, economic, and culture war sacred cows. Most important, he shocked the world and befuddled the foreign policy clerks by engineering the collapse of Soviet communism, freeing millions from tyranny.

But the rot of self-loathing had spread too wide and deep in our culture. The terrorist attacks on 9/11 should have swept away the juvenile leftist conceits and ideologies, and the policies which continued to fail at home and abroad. But the left-leaning Democrats, many of whom blamed the racism and oppression of America for 9/11, attacked and undermined the policies of the Bush administration, which initially aimed at preventing another heinous attack.

Unfortunately, Bush’s administration strayed into globalist “new world order” fever dreams of bringing free market economies, human rights, sex equality, and liberal democracy to cultures for which such advances were anathema. The War on Terror became a feckless “nation-building” series of “endless wars” with no end in sight of American casualties, which gave the left more ammunition for its oikophobic hatred of our country.

What followed was the election of Barack Obama, who publicly dismisses American exceptionalism––the foundation of our patriotism––as a parochial amour propre. A card-carrying globalist and “citizen of the world,” Obama endorsed the antinationalism of the UN and the plutocratic Davoisie, along with their technocratic ambitions, and a hatred of Israel that still reeks of antisemitism.

The result was Obama’s misbegotten “Iran nuclear deal,” which facilitated and advanced Iran’s ambitions to build nuclear weapons in order to realize the jihadist dream of “wiping Israel off the map.” The pallets of cash that Obama and then Biden delivered to the mullahs were spent on enriching uranium, developing missiles, and training and arming proxy forces for battling the “little Satan” Israel, and the “great Satan” the U.S. The blood of American and Israeli citizens and soldiers has stained the mullahs’ hands for nearly half a century––an offense that all patriots should abhor and want punished.

Obama’s “fundamental transformation of the United States” into a globalist technocracy of elites was cut short when Donald Trump took on the bipartisan political borg and defeated its presidential candidate, the ultimate establishment insider Hillary Clinton. During his first term Trump began the restoration of our Constitutional Republic, its free-market economy of growth and opportunity, and the Jacksonian realist America First foreign policy that prioritized our interests and security.

For example, Trump scolded skinflint, free-riding Nato members, and warned them that U.S. citizens would not continue to subsidize their dolce vita welfare states, or put up with their arrogant anti-Americanism. And he walked away from the Iran nuclear grift, moved our embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, and obliterated Iran’s Quds Force honcho Qassem Soleimani. Friends and foes were learning that the old, preemptively cringing Uncle Sam was getting serious about making the United States great again.

Trump’s project was cut short in 2020, when Covid paved the way for electoral anomalies and “trout-in-the-milk-pail” circumstantial evidence of electoral skullduggery to deliver the White House to the worst president in history. President Biden then opened our borders to millions of unvetted illegal aliens, turbocharged the Dems tax-spend-print-borrow-redistribute fiscal policies, imposed illiberal racist policies and regulations like DEI, and brought back the preemptive cringe, appeasing America-last foreign policy.

But a combination of hubris, policy failures, chronic mendacity, and sheer stupidity incited a nemesis, who inflicted condign punishment on the Donks, sending them to suffer one of the worst presidential shellackings (sarcastic HT to Obama) in recent history.

Once again letting an opportunity to change course go to waste, the Dems are now doubling down on policy failures and lunatic ideas like transgenderism, sex-change treatments redolent of Torquemada, and obscene grade-school curricula replete with clownish “drag queens.” And, of course, we must add the sexist, patently unjust enormity of letting biological male mediocre athletes compete against women. Just about nothing during Obama’s and Biden’s presidencies made many patriots eager to celebrate our country’s birth, but rather mourn its besmirchment.

In only a few months, Donald Trump has corrected his predecessors’ Titanic course of our ship of state. But what has galvanized not just American patriots but much of the world has been the bold actions taken in partnership with Israel to destroy Iran’s nuclear program and kill many of its regime’s Luca Brasis. That fireworks display was one of the greatest in American history.

But as much as we enjoy our nation’s quarter-millennium birthday, we need to remember that we still have a long way to go. Too many Democrats are still infected with the “woke” virus and Trump Derangement syndrome. A rich, white socialist, if not communist, racist in New York City has a chance to become its mayor, giving hope to the squabbling, shell-shocked Democrats. And large numbers of them still have disdain for our country rather than pride: a recent Gallup poll revealed that this year only 36% of Democrats are “extremely or very proud” of their country, compared to 92% of Republicans.

These figures don’t bode well for the future, especially when it comes to repairing the damage that Dems, with the help of feckless Republicans, have left behind them. Our multi-trillion dollar, ever expanding entitlement programs–– most paid for by just under half of all of taxpayers––are a few years from insolvency. Our debt is larger than our GDP and we spend more money servicing the debt than on our military––in a more dangerous world of feral tyrants, three of them armed with nuclear weapons. Finally, and most important, every two and every four years, elections are held that can bring on a sea-change in our country’s fortunes.

But this 4^th of July, let us celebrate our country’s birthday, which Trump and his supporters have made great again, and thank the Lord that our nation is back on the road of freedom and unalienable rights––at least for now.