by Ben Shapiro
The statement was infinitely precious. It was also infinitely long, running a behemoth twenty-five thousand words (the entire Constitution of the United States runs only 4,440 words). Since everyone who wrote it was likely smoking dope, it undoubtedly made lots of sense at the time. It was mental masturbation of the highest order.
But it was mental masturbation that brought mental venereal disease.
The Port Huron statement was the launch of the great anti-patriotic bullying campaign. The statement beats patriotism half to death. It rips “super-patriotic groups” that represent “ultra-conservatism” (specifically citing Senator Barry Goldwater) and calls such super-patriotic movements a “disgrace [to] the United States.” It complains about anticommunists who are “patriotically willing to do anything to achieve ‘total victory.’ ” It blames patriotism for the “boondoggling, belligerence, and privilege of military and economic elites.”
With a philosophy like that, it’s no wonder that the anti-patriotic crowd felt the moral necessity to bully patriots. And they found their critical cause in the Vietnam War.
While SDS had been launched prior to the escalation of action in Vietnam, the Vietnam War quickly took on all the characteristics that the new anti-patriotic left hated: flag-waving citizens backing their boys to prevent the takeover of communism in a far-flung nation. The Vietnam War was bad because flags were bad, American judgmentalism was bad, white people were bad, and soldiers were bad. There were plenty of good reasons to oppose the Vietnam War—and the left skipped right past all of them in search of a blowtorch to wield against American nationalism. The sentiment was spelled out best by leftist Vietnam vet Oliver Stone in Platoon. As neophyte Chris Taylor (Charlie Sheen) and saintlike Sergeant Elias (Willem Dafoe) sit under the stars discussing the war, Elias tells Taylor that America will lose the war. “Come on!” says Taylor. “You really think so? Us?” “We’ve been kicking other people’s asses for so long, I figured it’s time we got ours kicked,” Elias replies. America, the bully, was going to get what was coming to her.
Vietnam is precisely the sort of war that liberal patriots like Woodrow Wilson and FDR would have embraced—it was dedicated to helping those who couldn’t help themselves fight for freedom against overbearing tyranny. And it couldn’t even be perceived as American imperialism, since there were no oil or territorial interests. But the anti-patriotic left hated the Vietnam War. Remembering their catechism that patriotism was rooted in capitalistic self-interest and exploitation of Third World peoples, the left quickly decided that the Vietnam War was immoral and racist, even though white Americans were dying in the thousands largely on behalf of nonwhite Vietnamese a world away.
But to the left, the war wasn’t just immoral. It was unpatriotic, because it was patriotic. And thus citizens who supported it had to be fought, tooth and nail. The left didn’t just want America out of Vietnam. They wanted America to lose.
Thus the SDS eventually embraced violence against normal patriotic citizens. In 1969, the Weathermen faction of the SDS, headed by flag-haters like Bill Ayers and his future wife, Bernardine Dohrn, led the “Days of Rage” protests in Chicago. The slogan of the event: “bring the war home.” John Jacobs, one of the leaders of the protests, spelled out its goals clearly: “Weathermen would shove the war down their dumb, fascist throats and show them, while we were at it, how much better we were than them, both tactically and strategically, as a people. In an all-out civil war over Vietnam and other fascist U.S. imperialism, we were going to bring the war home. ‘Turn the imperalists’ war into a civil war,’ in Lenin’s words. And we were going to kick ass.”25 In preparation for the “Days of Rage,” the Weathermen met with representatives of North Vietnam in Cuba to train them in tactics. The North Vietnamese promptly asked them to start a war on U.S. soil. The Weathermen would be only too happy to oblige.26
The Weathermen eventually became the Weathermen Underground, bombing police stations, the Pentagon, the homes of private citizens—all while decrying America. “We’re against everything that’s ‘good and decent’ in honky America,” said Jacobs. “We will burn and loot and destroy. We are the incubation of your mother’s nightmare.” In 1969 and 1970, the Weathermen and their allies were responsible for approximately 250 attacks.27
It wasn’t just the Weathermen. Students across America engaged in acts of bullying, spitting on, cursing, and abusing soldiers returning from Vietnam; radical leftists, enraged by the traditional liberal patriotism of presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey, rioted at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968. John Kerry, returning from the Vietnam War, made himself famous by using the floor of Congress as a propaganda tool against soldiers in Vietnam, testifying comtroversially: “They told the stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.”28
America was evil. Patriotism was a symptom of that evil.
ESTABLISHMENT ANTI-PATRIOTISM
Today, the anti-patriotic bullying of the left has softened dramatically. The anti-military fervor of the left dried up after the Vietnam War; the anti-patriotic bullying went into hiding with the rise of Ronald Reagan. But it is present, both in ideology and in practice.
It is cleverly hidden. After the left’s atrocities during the Vietnam War era, the left has recognized that its open radicalism simply won’t fly with regard to the military—America loves its soldiers too much. Loyalty to the military is perhaps the one area where the left has been unable to cow Americans into submission.
And so the left has abandoned open anti-military language. Instead, they wrap themselves in the flag while pushing the most anti-patriotic views imaginable.
Thus, in June 2008, then-senator Barack Obama spoke of patriotism in glowing terms: “For me, as for most Americans, patriotism starts as a gut instinct, a loyalty and love for country rooted in my earliest memories. . . . As I got older, that gut instinct—that America is the greatest country on earth—would survive my growing awareness of our nation’s imperfections.” Patriotism, said Obama, “is always more than just loyalty to a place on a map or a certain kind of people. Instead, it is also loyalty to America’s ideals—ideals for which anyone can sacrifice, or defend, or give their last full measure of devotion.” And Obama didn’t stop there. As it turned out, the members of the military were now sacrosanct again, too—especially our Vietnam veterans. Vietnam, said Obama, was “one of the most painful chapters in our history. Most particularly, how we treated our troops who served there. . . . Patriots can support a war. Patriots can oppose a war. And whatever our view, let us always stand united in support of our troops, who we placed in harm’s way.”29
Obama hit all the right notes.
Yet it didn’t ring true.
Obama’s political allies are the same folks who spit on the troops as they arrived back home from Vietnam. They are the same folks who see America as an imperialistic evildoer on the world stage.
In ideology, the radicals of yesteryear have become today’s establishment. The pathetic Port Huron statement is now considered a classic American document—even though it’s actually a classic anti-American document. The New York Times quoted historian Michael Kazin calling the document “the most ambitious, the most specific and the most eloquent manifesto in the history of the American left.”30
On its fiftieth anniversary, SDS cofounder and statement drafter Tom Hayden—now a former state senator in California—wrote an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times in which he called the signing of the document a “holy moment.”31 Hayden, along with then-wife Jane Fonda, had traveled routinely to Hanoi during the Vietnam War,
giving the Viet Cong advice about how to defeat the United States and labeling American POWs in Vietnam “liars.” But now he was a mainstream political figure.
And he hadn’t changed a bit. After 9/11, Hayden in familiar language accused George W. Bush of patriotic treason: “[T]hey are playing patriot games with the nation’s future,” he scoffed. More importantly, he bullied American soldiers who were fighting in Iraq. “The strategy,” he said, “must be to deny the U.S. occupation funding, political standing, sufficient troops, and alliances necessary to their strategy for dominance.”32
During the 2008 race, Hayden named Obama his ideological successor. “Is Barack the one we have been waiting for? Or is it the other way around? Are we the people we have been waiting for? Barack Obama is giving voice and space to an awakening beyond his wildest expectations,” he wrote.33
The same held true of figures like Bill Ayers, now a respected educator in Chicago and confidant of President Barack Obama. On September 11, 2001, the New York Times printed an interview with Ayers in which Ayers doubled down on his Weathermen-era terrorism. He ripped the Vietnam War soldiers, including war hero and former Democratic senator Bob Kerrey. The interview was especially ill-timed, given that Ayers was pictured stomping on an American flag, as Americans leaped from the flaming World Trade Center.34 But President Obama still attended a July 4, 2005, barbecue at Ayers’s house. What better way to celebrate Independence Day than by munching a hamburger and waving a flag with a domestic terrorist and flag-burner?
There is a difference between Obama and the Haydens and Ayerses of the world, however. Obama’s left is Anti-Patriotism 2.0. The Hayden/Ayers strategy was to attack not just soldiers as war criminals but also civilians as xenophobic pigs. Predictably enough, that alienated both soldiers and civilians, and drove them closer together.
The Obama strategy is more clever. It’s to bully both soldiers and civilians into silence. Soldiers will be undercut on the battlefields abroad while being lauded as heroes at home; civilians will be told that true support of the troops lies in abandoning patriotism (and its corollary, militarism) so the troops can come home.
This isn’t lunch-money bullying. It’s psychological warfare.
And it works.
MULTICULTURAL BULLIES
Civilians have to be convinced, first and foremost, that it would be wrong to stand up for traditional patriotic values. Such values cause conflict. Instead, the left tells Americans that they should embrace a more positive notion: multiculturalism. Multiculturalism puts a happy face on flag-burning—it suggests that all cultures are equal, so those who wave our own flags are a bunch of Hitler-wannabes without the funny mustache. Greek patriotism is the same as American patriotism. Any slight differences can probably be ironed out via diplomacy, the United Nations General Assembly, and unilateral disarmament.
The battle for international multiculturalism starts at home.
In that battle, symbols matter.
It’s not rare these days for leftists to crack down on patriotic symbolism out of “respect” for other cultures. Never mind that those other cultures wouldn’t have a place to plant their roots without the soil of American values—American values are patriarchal. If that cabby from Pakistan is insulted by your flag pin, you’d best take it off. If the Pakistani cabby wants to play headache-inducing music with ululating banshees, however, you’d best sit back and shut up. In fact, double your tip, you colonialist rube.
In Denair, California, a thirteen-year-old boy was forced to remove an American flag from the back of his bicycle by his school; the school said that the flag had raised “racial tensions.” The school district superintendent explained the prevailing leftist thought: “Our Hispanic, you know, kids will, you know, bring their Mexican flags and they’ll display it, and then of course the kids would do the American flag situation, and it does cause kind of a racial tension which we don’t really want. We want them to appreciate the cultures.”35 The school later retracted its order, explaining that it wasn’t really responsible for the anti-flag action—in reality, the student had been threatened by other students for having an American flag on school grounds. That’s actually more of an indictment of leftism than anything else: the notion that flag-wavers have to back down thanks to coddled anti-American thugs.36
California is a state just insane enough to elect Governor Jerry Brown—twice. Brown’s main policy proposal these days is a $68 billion high-speed rail from heavily populated Northern California through barren Central California. In California, this is perceived as “visionary.” So it’s no surprise that the largest spate of anti-flag activities spring from there. In May 2010, at Live Oak High School, in the town of Morgan Hill, several students were thrown off school grounds after they wore shirts with American flags on them, then refused to remove them at administration behest. What was the school administration’s problem? The students had the temerity to wear the flags on Cinco de Mayo, a Mexican holiday. So while the administration allowed students to parade around in body-painted Mexican flags, students who wanted to wear the star-spangled banner were told to go home. When an offended parent asked the assistant principal about the ban, the principal spat back, “Not today. We need to give them [celebrants of Cinco de Mayo] their day today.”37 The students, with the help of the Thomas More Law Center, sued the school . . . and lost. The possibility that the students would be attacked, said the court, was great enough to allow the school to ban the clothing.38 The court neglected to mention whether bars could ban women from wearing short skirts, since it might encourage rape.
At California’s Gavilan View Middle School in Santa Rita, a teacher told a student not to draw a picture of the flag with the words “God Bless America.” “You can’t draw that—that’s offensive,” said the teacher. Another student, fortunately, provided a more palatable picture for the teacher: a red, white, and blue drawing of President Obama. She loved it.39 Undoubtedly, the latter student will grow up to be a higher-up in the Democratic Party establishment, mocking the former for being a “bitter clinger.”
In Albany, Oregon, management of the Oaks Apartments told Jim Clausen that he had to take a flag off his motorcycle. Said management, “Someone might get offended.” Other residents were told they couldn’t fly any flags on apartment premises. Several residents fought back by carrying around American flags and wearing flag pins;40 eventually, the management backed down. The property manager did admit, however, “What we were trying to do was to keep the peace. Obviously, we were wrong. If the peace needs to be kept, it belongs to the police department.” She was offended that one of the residents had gone to the media. “He’s just a romping, stomping patriot,” she said with some scorn. She refused to say who had originally complained about the flags.41 Hint: it might have been the woman who describes pro-flag residents as “romping, stomping patriots.”
In Oshkosh, Wisconsin, an Iraq War veteran was told to remove an American flag from the window of his apartment. If he didn’t, he was told, he’d be evicted. The management company explained, “This policy was developed to insure that we are fair to everyone as we have many residents from diverse backgrounds. By having a blanket policy of neutrality we have found that we are less likely to offend anyone and the aesthetic qualities of our apartment communities are maintained.”42 Wouldn’t want any multicultural apartment residents getting huffy over a man who risked his life to protect their rights flying the flag that represents those rights. That’s just bigoted.
In the Coney Island section of Brooklyn, New York, Greta Hawkins, principal of the Edna Cohen School, stopped kindergartners from singing Lee Greenwood’s “Proud to Be an American” at their graduation. During a rehearsal, she showed up and stopped the CD player. “We don’t want to offend other cultures,” she said. One of the teachers said, puzzled, “I’ve never come across anyone who felt it insulted their culture.” But that teacher obviously didn’t get it—diversity trumps Americanism. That’s why the students were allowed to sing both Justin Bieber
’s “Baby” and “The World Is a Rainbow,” with lyrics that state: “The world is a rainbow / That’s filled with many colors: / Yellow, black, and white, and brown.” Not coincidentally, this was the same principal who told teachers upon arriving at the school, “I’m black. Your previous principal was white and Jewish. More of us are coming.”43
These are somewhat minor incidents of bullying, of course. But they’re not all that rare. Fifty years ago, you’d be hard-pressed to find one such incident. The anti-flag phenomenon is indicative of something far deeper and broader: the general sense that the American flag itself is a representation of something nefarious. Flags are dangerous. Wearing branded designer labels while rocking out to Green Day in a flea-infested tent in downtown Los Angeles next to a homeless man with meningitis—now that’s patriotic.
That’s not a joke. Tea Party patriots are derided on a regular basis for donning Revolutionary War garb; the media gleefully realized that “teabagging” was a slur for a fringe sexual act often linked with gay men, and began calling Tea Partiers “teabaggers.” Rachel Maddow, who knows nothing about the practice, used it as a substitute for “Tea Partier”; Bill Maher did the same. (Not coincidentally, Maher also said to the applause of his audience of trained primates, “Would it be better if the country just got over this notion of American exceptionalism? Oh, I think it would.”)44 Even President Obama has reportedly used the term teabagger. The Oxford English Dictionary actually labeled the term its second most popular word of the year.
The NAACP characterized the Tea Partiers’ dress this way: “The Revolutionary War–era costumes, the yellow ‘Don’t tread on me’ Gadsden flags from the same era, the earnest recitals of the pledge of allegiance, the over-stated veneration of the Constitution, and the defense of ‘American exceptionalism’ in a world turned towards transnational economies and global institutions: all are signs of the over-arching nationalism that helps define the Tea Party movement.”45 Cue the spooky music—those Tea Party Jasons are all donning their star-spangled hockey masks. They carry the flag. They like the Constitution. Now they’re coming for your children.
