I wonder how many Americans were impressed by the bravery of the Ukrainian people in their fierce opposition in the streets to the predators of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, and then wondered how Americans would react in such a situation. The answer to this question is depressing, but the numbers are telling.
A recent Quinnipiac University poll asked Americans if they would stay and fight, or leave the country, in a similar situation. Only 40% of Democrats said they would stay and fight, compared to 68% of Republicans and 57% of independents.
Patriotism is a slippery term to pin down (some think that supporting every war the United States starts makes you a patriot), but wouldn’t the bare minimum to qualify as a patriot be a determination to fight against patriotism? aspirant to Peter the Great? It’s no secret that a large percentage of progressives despise this nation (check out statements from The Squad), that discredit New York Times The “1619 Project” tells them that it was founded on the defense of slavery, the original sin that America can never erase, despite all efforts to remedy it since the end of slavery.
But suddenly, the Ukrainian invasion turned a group of reckless, attention-seeking Democrats into “patriots”—“paper patriots,” that is, rather. There is now a concerted effort from the left to label anyone who comments on Ukraine in a way they don’t like a “traitor”. The same party that tolerated the myriad acts of violence (they destroyed my favorite cafe in Richmond, Virginia) and the disruption of the George Floyd protests tolerates no dissent on this issue.
Democrats love dissent, but only when they do.
Given that the United States is not directly involved in this war and that progressive love for America lukewarm, one has to wonder where this sudden patriotic fervor is coming from. Treason is a crime punishable by death, so it is not a charge brought against a political opponent without serious evidence to support it. Donald Trump has called people traitors at least 24 times during his presidential tenure, and the left has lost its mind each time.
Should Fox News host Tucker Carlson be investigated for treason? Yes, according to former Democratic US Senator Claire McCaskill, who recently said, “If you are a foreign asset to a dictator, that should be investigated.” She continued, “Tucker Carlson and others are really, really close to betrayal in terms of what they say and repeat.” Carlson’s offense of “treason” is that the way he talks about US-funded Ukrainian biolabs is too close to Vladimir Putin’s propaganda efforts to portray these labs as facilities to produce biological weapons, which which is a lie. Carlson is a once respectable reporter who contracted the disease from Fox News and cannot be trusted on this issue. But what he’s doing is reminiscent of the days when Malcolm Nance peddled Trump-Russia conspiracy theories on an overnight basis for MSNBC on pure speculation. Nance weighed in on Carlson and Tulsi Gabbard (another suspected traitor) and said, “These people are almost collaborators. I would call them an asset.” Nance, a former US Navy intelligence officer, knows that an “asset” in the intelligence community is a covert source of information or operational assistance, making his targets more than “almost collaborators”. Nance says Carlson and Gabbard are secretly working with Russia, possibly for compensation. Having no evidence to back up his wild claims has never stopped him before.
Ana Navarro, representing the progressive side on ABC View, said the US government “should investigate people who are Russian shilling propagandists for Putin. If you are a foreign asset to a dictator, that should be investigated.” So is LeBron James a ‘foreign asset’ to Chinese dictator Xi Jinping because he attacked Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey as ‘ill-informed’ and ‘uneducated’ when Morey tweeted in support of protesters from Hong Kong in 2019? Should the DOJ investigate the basketball superstar for echoing Beijing talking points to ensure his continued flow of millions from China?
The views Whoopi Goldberg, speaking of Carlson, said: “They used to arrest people for doing things like that.” Who are “they” and in which country – the USSR? While the confused and overly opinionated expert did not mention when an American journalist was once arrested for spreading summary information in favor of a nation with which the United States was not currently at war, she argues the criminalization of American journalists she does not like.
A perpetually enraged Keith Olbermann tweeted that there was a case to be made for “Russian assets like Carlson and Gabbard to be militarily detained”. The former MSNBC host didn’t elaborate on his absurd outburst that would presumably lead to Carlson and Gabbard being imprisoned at Gitmo.
Republicans are not immune to this recent moral panic. US Senator Mitt Romney, still stung by Trump’s humiliation of him, also lost his mind when Gabbard, a Democrat, said labs should be closed as a wartime safety measure. “Tulsi Gabbard’s treacherous lies could well cost lives.” Gabbard didn’t lie about anything. He’s a silver spoon guy who’s never been used to assassinate the character of anyone who’s served in the US military in combat zones.
According to New York Timesthe are US-funded biological labs in Ukraine, but they are used to prevent the manufacture of biological weapons, not to produce them. Saying the labs should be shut down is a debatable point, but it has nothing to do with treason. Occasional users of MSM probably think there is no American-funded biolabs in Ukraine, due to the tenor of media coverage of the issue. If you only read the headlines, as most do, that’s the spin you’ll get.
All this ‘betrayal’ madness from the left reminds me of when they claimed that anyone who said the coronavirus came from a lab in Wuhan was a racist. There will be no excuses when it turns out that is exactly where the virus started. There is a compulsion on this political side to slander political opponents that goes hand in hand with their cancel culture and focus on obligation and prohibition.
None of the fulminations of these day-trip “patriots” about “traitors” and “trumps” are fact-related. Via the First Amendment, journalists have the right to express their opinions, even if they contain factual errors. On the surface, all of this performative nonsense is inexplicable, given that this nation is not currently at war. Ukraine is not a NATO country, despite what the Vice President may believe. “The United States is standing firm” noted Kamala Harris, “with the Ukrainian people in defense of the NATO alliance”.
The only way to understand the left’s bizarre behavior on this issue is to see it as a legacy of the post-election Democratic panic over the alleged Trump-Putin collaboration, a point punctuated by the fact that just last week – buried in paragraph 24 -laTimes finally admitted that the laptop found in Delaware was that of Hunter Biden. When the story broke, Democrats and the media vehemently agreed it was a Russian plot against the Biden family. the new York To post reported in October 2020, with strong supply, that the laptop belonged to Hunter, prompting Twitter to temporarily ban that newspaper’s Twitter account. Now, it’s onto the next Russia-related craze for rabid traitor hunters.
