The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –

WASHINGTON, D.C. — After Donald Trump faced arraignment on charges Tuesday for mishandling classified documents critical to national defense, conspiracy to obstruct justice by concealing the possession of said documents and making false statements to the FBI, there was only a small contingent of Trump supporters gathered outside the federal courthouse in Miami.

Related: Trump Indicted for Mishandling Classified Documents and Conspiracy to Obstruct Justice

But television news crews on the scene could not resist interviewing some of them.

What caught my attention was this often repeated phrase that Trump himself has repeated over and over again, with these racist white nationalists claiming anyone who doesn’t love, bow down to and support Trump must “hate America.”

You’ve heard Trump say it.

“These are people that hate our country,” he says in every stadium rally rant he gives. “They hate our country. They hate it, I think, with a passion.”

This has been repeated so many times on Fox News that there are YouTube videos showing it over and over.

Trump has also often uttered a rephrased trope from the Vietnam war days, reframing “Our country: Love it or leave it.”

A Vietnam war protest in the late 1960s or early 1970s: NAJ screen shot

“As far as I’m concerned, if you hate our country, if you’re not happy here,” Trump likes to say, “you can leave.”

I’m scratching my head and thinking: What the fuck are y’all talking about?

It’s Republicans who have been verbally assaulting the United States government for decades, cutting taxes every chance they get to rob it of revenue, winning elections with anti-U.S. government slogans including calling it an evil “Deep State” and a “Swamp.” And on Jan. 6, 2021, they physically attacked it, trying to overthrow American Democracy to replace it with a fascist dictatorship.

So what are they talking about? Do they have any idea?

Trump simply stole Ronald Reagan’s campaign slogan and made it into an icon of the far-right: Make America Great Again has now become MAGA Republicans, which in a more accurate description of the political factions involved in politics these days could be called a combination of anarchists and Neo-Nazis. Those of us in the news media are trying to be fair and balanced and even nice when we call them white nationalists or Christian nationalists.

So with the Fourth of July coming up soon, our Independence Day, I’ve spent some quality time outdoors thinking about what makes anyone love this country, or hate it?

I even tried several Google searches, but just found the Artificial Intelligence lacking. I don’t think an algorithm or a bot can do this justice. It takes a living, breathing, thinking human being with some education to articulate this properly.

So here is a list of things that make the United States of America unique, and worthy of patriotic love, along with a list of ambitions on the part of the real haters to change and even destroy it to serve their hostile ideology.

Number One

Conserving Nature. It has been said, by documentary film maker Ken Burns, that setting aside some of the most ecologically important and scenic parts of this country as National Parks was “America’s Best Idea.”

I’ve argued in the past that national parks may not be number one, but it is at least in the top 10, if not the top five ideas our country has contributed to the world over the past 246 years. Our commitment to conservation of natural resources is certainly one thing to love, an idea that has spread around the globe, a clear demonstration of the cultural power of our democratic republic at its best.

The continuation of this goal, trait or value tends to be supported by a large majority of Democrats and a plurality of independent voters. But almost no Republicans support it anymore. There was a time when they did, but not anymore.

Trump himself was so anti-education, anti-science, and anti-environment that as president, he gutted the federal agencies charged with protecting our natural resources, especially the Environmental Protection Agency.

I love this country and I’m as patriotic as any of these MAGA fascists claim to be, and I’ve spent much of my adult life writing about protecting American nature from the polluting corporate ba-ba-bastaads who would destroy it. The Republicans are in league with the oil and gas companies, the power companies and any greedy developer who would exploit America’s natural resource wealth for a greedy private profit.

So who loves America and its natural resources? It sure ain’t Marjorie Taylor Green, Matt Gaetz, Tommy Tuberville, Kevin McCarthy, Mitch McConnell or Donald Trump.

Number Two

Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. I’ve often argued that what truly makes America great are the ideals imbedded in our founding documents, as flawed as the implementation of those ideas has been at times.

Take the ideas of a “natural right” of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” written by Thomas Jefferson and approved by the Continental Congress in Philadelphia in 1776, facing the threat of being hanged as traitors to an English King.

So I don’t know what these right-wing militia movements committing domestic terrorism are talking about when they bandy about the flag and the phrase 1776. We know what the American Revolution meant, and what it stands for today. How dare they try to claim a monopoly on the use of our flag and historical dates for their anti-democratic, nefarious purposes?

Let them fly the Nazi flag, or the Confederate flag, the defeated “stars and bars” — not our “Stars and Stripes” or “Old Glory.”

This our flag, not the Neo-Nazis: NAJ screen shot

Number Three

Government by The People. A right of “the people” to govern themselves, with a separation of church and state and with no bishops or monarchs controlling what laws we pass, how we live our lives or how we earn a living.

The First Amendment (Amendment I) to the United States Constitution prevents the government from making laws that regulate an establishment of religion, or that prohibit the free exercise of religion, or abridge the freedom of speech, the freedom of the press, the freedom of assembly, or the right to petition the government for redress of grievances. It was adopted on December 15, 1791, as one of the 10 amendments that constitute the Bill of Rights.

This is the ultimate gift of the United States of America to the world, a “government of, by and for the people,” which Abraham Lincoln codified and consecrated and vowed it “would not perish from the Earth.”

It is embodied in the First Amendment to the Constitution, and every amendment subsequently adopted, including the Thirteenth Amendment, granting freedom to slaves brought to America against their will to work the cotton plantations, sugar plantations and factories in the North.

The Thirteenth Amendment (Amendment XIII) to the United States Constitution abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime. The amendment was passed by the Senate on April 8, 1864, by the House of Representatives on January 31, 1865, and ratified by the required 27 of the then 36 states on December 6, 1865, and proclaimed on December 18. It was the first of the three Reconstruction Amendments adopted following the American Civil War.

So this is what Republicans so hate about America? The idea that people with a dark pigment in their skin should be slaves to lighter skin people? That is fucking absurd on the face of it, and is an abomination to evolutionary science. There is no genetic difference between light and darker skin people, except for one gene controlling skin pigment. It evolved over centuries making the skin of people darker in hotter climates, and lighter in cold ones.

Is that really something to fight a war over?

I say it is not. Certainly not in the 21st century.

Number Four

Diversity. The diversity of America is a governing strength, as well as an evolutionary advantage, not a disadvantage. It has been with us from the start, and is of course celebrated on the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, facing the ships of immigrants who have been coming here from all over the world for more than 500 hundred years.

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…”

Democrats tend to embrace this ideal. Trump and his MAGA Republicans hate this about America.

They like to make immigration a major political-campaign issue, arguing that people who strive to come here and be part of this experiment in democracy across our Southern border are “criminals and drug dealers” who hate us and want to kill us, arguing that Democrats love them because “they want to change America” from its alleged “white, Christian roots.”

Never mind that there is no such thing as an America with white, Christian roots. It never existed, and doesn’t exist now. Even the Baptists knew that, being the most vocal advocates of “freedom of religion” and a “separation of church and state,” knowing that if we did not have that codified into law, the Catholic monarchs would take over and run the government just like they did in Europe for centuries.

In terms of evolutionary science, diversity is not only a good thing, it is critical to the survival of a species. Without it, too much inbreeding would lead to a collapse of the species.

Which leads us to the related value of equality.

Number Five

Equality. For some this might not mean “equality in all things,” as argued by Congressman Thaddeus Stevens in the Congressional debate about the 13th Amendment at the time. But certainly we must agree that there must be “equality under the law.”

I would argue that we have lost this battle on many fronts, since there is no doubt that justice in this country is scewed to those who have means, and often denied to those who don’t.

But at least it is an ideal we should still be striving for, not trying to dismantle before the conservative U.S. Supreme Court.

Number Six

Liberty. According to Merriam-Webster, the word liberty is a noun, basically meaning “the quality or state of being free.”

Also implied is “the power to do as one pleases,” and “the freedom from physical restraint.”

Perhaps more importantly for this discussion, and this is where America contributed to the debate, it also means “freedom from arbitrary or despotic control.”

It also includes the privilege of “a right or immunity enjoyed by prescription or by grant.”

Even conservative commentators like to tout America’s commitment to “liberty,” and often also include “equality” and “justice.”

In this case it also includes “the power of choice,” as in the power for women to choose their own health care options. A so-called “Right to Life” advocated by the Christian Right stops at birth. This is NOT the right to life in the First Amendment. They are the first to volunteer to kill in war, and the first to scream “death” to anyone accused of a crime. They are a modern day Lynch Mob, so they also do not really favor another American value:

Number Seven

Justice. Justice is the ethical, philosophical idea that people are to be treated impartially, fairly, properly, and reasonably by the law and by arbiters of the law, that laws are to ensure that no harm befalls another, and that, where harm is alleged, a remedial action is taken — both the accuser and the accused receive a morally right consequence merited by their actions.

See also “due process,” a right explicitly granted in the Fourteenth Amendment.

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

Justice is also a legal structure or system that is designed to judge in a general sense who should be accorded a benefit or burden when the law is applied to a person’s factual circumstances.

Democrats tend to favor justice, and back down when someone is convicted in a court of law by a jury.

MAGA Republicans, on the other hand, do not believe in the law as it concerns their perceived righteous leader, and say over and over again that Donald Trump is the subject of a “witch hunt” by a corrupt and tyrannical “deep state.”

This is prima facie absurd on the face of it.

If anything, President Joe Biden, Attorney General Merrick Garland and the Democrats in general are bending over backwards and being light on Trump, for reasons that baffle many commentators on the left, including me.

If it was left up to me to dispense justice in Trump’s case, he would have been perp walked and locked up a long time ago.

There’s Only One Way to Stop the Violence Threatened by Donald Trump and his Followers: #LockThemAllUp

So don’t tell me or any of my friends that you love America and that we hate America.

We love it more than you ever will. To love is to understand.

“Understanding is the essence of love. If you cannot understand, you cannot love,” it has been said. “Without understanding, love is an impossible thing.” It has also been phrased as “Love is a true thing if it is made up of a substance called understanding.”

Even Google bots know that.

What Do They Want?

On the face of it, it appears to be a very shallow agenda, put forward by people without much of an education. I call it the “Three Gs: God, Guns and Gays.”

Is this what an intelligent, 21st century population in this most important democracy in the history of the world should simply value above all else?

God

What they seem to want instead is open talk of God over government, a Christian God no less, clearly an unconstitutional idea.

Guns

They want guns flooding our society, as if a misinterpretation of the Second Amendment gets to dominate or trump all other laws.

What Do They Not Want?

Equal Rights for Gays

They don’t want nothing to do with no gay people, so they must be denied basic rights. Another unconstitutional idea, even by the standards of today’s conservative Supreme Court.

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