Quisling with a borrowed workshirt

Unlike citizens of foreign lands, Americans enjoy the liberty to criticize government figures without fear of punishment. That's as it should be - on our own soil. 

There was a time when blasting America and its president while on foreign soil simply wasn't done. The Dixie Chicks never recovered, professionally, after their 2003 London scandal. 

But judging by the uncritical (sometimes fawning) reportage of Bruce Springsteen's recent overseas spewing of disloyalty, the seditious trio may simply have been ahead of its time.

Springsteen ranted to a Manchester, England audience that President Trump and his administration were "corrupt, incompetent, and treasonous." And the faded star charged Trump is an "unfit president" and that ours is a "rogue government."

He wasn't hindered by the reality that Trump and his common-sense inclinations were overwhelmingly chosen by American voters. That's called "Democracy."

Springsteen attained major prominence in the 1970s with "Born In the USA." But to whatever extent his blue-collar posture might once have been authentic, it is today as counterfeit as the "Scranton Joe" character Biden once pretended at.

(Remember, the 2024 Trump candidacy attracted a dramatic upswell of working people's ballots. And the UAW has praised Trump's tariffs tactic to bring manufacturing jobs back to America.)

The Gateway Pundit nailed it: "Springsteen had a tantrum overseas because the American people overwhelmingly rejected his politics of open borders, social tyranny, high (ticket) prices and economic stagnation, transgenderism, racially divisive DEI policies, climate cultism, and weak foreign policy that put the globe on the edge of World War III."

His is a repugnant attitude often flaunted by Democrats. Whether lying to the American people about Biden's mental acuity, firebombing Tesla dealerships, numerous vain machinations to impeach President Trump during his first term, or later attempting to have reelection candidate Trump removed from state ballots, Democrats' unambiguous ambition is to sabotage any political effort not their own. 

By any means necessary. That's called "Undemocratic."

Do not be surprised if Springsteen next pens a reverential anthem to Thomas Crooks or Luigi Mangioni.

Now, let's turn our thoughts from Springsteen and others of his unpatriotic ilk. Better to recall instead a time when healthy nationalism was a sturdy bridge that united even Americans of divergent pursuits.

In 1941 film Roar of the Press, reporter Wally Williams (Wallace Ford) and numbers racket boss Sparrow McGraun (Paul Fix) discuss an anti-American network active in their hometown of New York:

Sparrow: "Me, I'm mixed up in a good, clean racket. But there's some people runnin' around loose who ain't. They're out to get this country into trouble. And that's the mob you're runnin' up against. They're tough. Plenty tough. Foreigners, mostly. And they won't stop at nothin'!"

Wally: "How do you know about this?"

Sparrow: "They propositioned me. Wanted to know how much you know about their set-up. They figure you're gettin' too nosy."

Wally: "Wait a minute. Did they send you to scare me off?"

Sparrow: "Certainly not! I don't want any part a them. They're un-American. They're against this country, and they oughtta be exposed. Me, I got me a racket, sure. And the cops don't like it. But that ain't nothin' against this country."

Wally: "Thanks, pal!"

Sparrow: "Ah, it's nothin'. Us Americans gotta stick together."

In advocacy of intellectual evolution

I once encountered the following online assertion (which I'm paraphrasing):

'My politics today are the same as when I was in junior high, in the 1960s.'

It was perhaps the saddest sentence I've ever read. The writer was bragging about intellectual and philosophical stasis, of pride in not having evolved.

(But it was dispiritingly reflective of the anti-intellectual, anti-Trump 'feelings' mob that prizes ill-considered emotions and primitive instincts over sophisticated reasoning.)

Changes are inevitable as years pass. Intellectual grasp develops. Base values are clarified and perhaps even re-evaluated. New information appears. Divergent perspectives of which one may not have been previously aware are paid heed, their counsel duly incorporated into ongoing consideration. Unfolding events can prompt particular analyses that may, in turn, reorder larger conclusions. 

And outright epiphanies can change fundamental thinking, turning avowed partisans into their opposites; examples include Christopher Hitchens, Michael Horowitz, Ariana Huffington, David Brock, and Tammy Bruce.

Growth is positive and to be cultivated; spending one's entire life in the same spot as when you first qualified for a driving license is cause for head-hanging embarrassment.

A healthy, open mind accepts that juvenile assumptions and prejudices may not have been thoroughly sound. It celebrates maturation. That is as it should be.

For my part, I've made tremendous strides. I've been a 1980s/90s Democrat Party loyalist who submitted county caucus platform planks and volunteered for campaigns; 2000 co-founder of the Iowa Green Party; independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader's 2004 Iowa coordinator; and current-day enthusiastic supporter of President Trump and the Make America Great Again movement.

I sometimes adopted different attitudes, but in other instances merely continued adhering to traditionally held, fundamental ones despite partisan permutations. I stuck with basic values and was unimpressed as liberals and the Left jettisoned them in willy-nilly rush.

I realized external phenomena had changed. I rethought earlier assumptions and occasionally found them wanting. I came to better understand different approaches to reaching preferred destinations. And I made appropriate changes.

The Democrat Party's most visible and influential figures once championed free speech, equality, patriotism, a strong national defense, and rigorously maintained citizenship standards and borders. They no longer do. 

I didn't move; they did.

The late Nat Hentoff was internationally recognized as a civil libertarian, First Amendment authority, and tireless participant in the momentous civil rights movement of the 1960s. Today's discourse would be of greater intellectual heft, and much more rewarding, were Hentoff yet a participant.

In one column toward the end of his illustrious writing career, he observed that he would in contemporary times be more inclined to support a Republican presidential candidate than a Democrat one. The former party, he wrote, was likely to honor and defend the Constitution and Bill of Rights to whose advocacy Hentoff had devoted his adult life in the streets, the classroom, and on the printed page.

The Democrats, he concluded, had become so destructively radical that they could be expected to rip up America's founding document and deny its important safeguards to citizens.

It is to Hentoff's credit that he didn't cease intellectual and philosophical growth when his morning school bells rang. 

Of noble duty shirked

During an edition of his podcast, professor, attorney, and author Alan Dershowitz waxed acidic: "The newspapers say, 'Oh my God, we're so worried the Supreme Court may take away our right to free speech and deny us the protection of malice!'

"You have frittered away the trust of the American public," he then charged. "Your Trump Derangement Syndrome has so influenced and affected the way you're reporting, it's deserving of nothing but great contempt!"

The famed barrister's brickbat was of a piece with President Trump's dismissal of legacy press venues as "enemies of the American people."

Those dubious of such critiques should ask themselves how many of the following, widely disseminated press falsehoods they've encountered:

Biden was "sharp" / Trump-Russian collusion / Jussie Smollet 'hate crime' / Hunter's laptop was Russian disinformation / Musk nazi-salute hoax / "very fine people" / Hands up, don't shoot / Trump trashes troops as "suckers and losers" / policemen were killed on J6 / ICE on horseback whipping illegals / Trump grabbed Beast's steering wheel / Trump advised drinking bleach / "bloodbath" threat. 

(A record of those and many more examples of media deceits was compiled by Breitbart's John Nolte.)

When reporters confront officials, they ideally represent us, and ask probing questions on our behalf. Questions whose full, honest answers we who would direct government must have.

To whatever extent that laudable model might once have been reality, though, it has in recent decades been strangled. Trumpeting of the supposed superiority of authoritarian elites has become the media standard.

Since the populist MAGA Revolution first threatened status quo sensibilities, its patriotic adherents have been ridiculed as unlettered, oafish, and detrimental to refined society. Toward that scurrilous end, reporters, on-air talking heads, editors, columnists, producers, analysts, and even cartoonists were pressed into monotonously impious service.

Dodgy news partisans sometimes portray themselves in the revered tradition of storied muckrakers. Beaming with self-congratulation, they hail theirs as an endeavor without whose hawk-eyed watchfulness and unflinching analyses the public would fall prey to bureaucratic and commercial manipulations.

Stirring indeed are romantic tales of dogged reporters rope-swinging into darkened-windows planning lairs of swinish barons of high finance and unscrupulous agents of dominion. And of an ethically unimpeachable investigative press ripping away pretenses of propriety, bravely speaking truth to power, and advocating for rank-and-file citizens who would otherwise lack meaningful access to ensconced prominence.

Don't be mislead by such mawkish fancy spinning. Inky dirt-doers have a mission, and it is not objective reporting. They promulgate slants, deceptively incomplete renditions, and even shouted deceits, so that partisan predominance and the crushing of opposing factions be realized, and that unnatural cultural deviances be championed.

Print and electronic outlets miss no opportunity to smear the popular movement, headed by President Trump, to wrest back control of America from backstairs overlords who desire its recreation as an effete component of grim globalist machinery. 

Regular assaults on Trump and his average-citizen base are effected in manners sometimes insidious, but in other episodes, jarringly bold. But regardless of visibility or volume, the clear message is that the desires of elites alone should determine our shared future. The well-being and wishes of rank-and-file Americans are of less import than the ideological fancies of upper-crust popinjays in gated demenses.

Cushion-chaired media poohbahs and bylined perpetrators do not share average Americans' values. They promote a reptilian ideology of control. 

We the people are waved away by newsroom-perched bigots who reek of elitist prejudice. We are falsely classed as racists, sexists, xenophobes, or whatever other lurid sobriquet might be handy.

In order to best chart our country's course, citizens require objective accounting of essential information. Our effective participation in the political process is sabotaged by skewed reportage and commentary. 

Rather than penning high-hat editorials, mainstream scribes, who are not honest enough to report frauds and abuses perpetrated by their pinky-raised fellows, should hang low their heads. 

President Trump and Professor Dershowitz were bang on.