BRENT BOZELL AND TIM GRAHAM: Trolling the Fourth of July.

Liberals are loudly denouncing President Trump for his plans to insert himself into Fourth of July festivities in the nation’s capital, He’s announced he’ll deliver a speech, as if that is unique, and provide tanks for the parade, as if that’s controversial. And so they compare Trump to Kim Jong Un.

But then there are others who are using this anniversary to take it in the opposite direction. Those same leftists are using the celebration of our nation to attack her. Their actions are deliberately designed to offend…to grab everyone’s attention…to please the people who really can’t stand the thought of American exceptionalism. This nation needs to be diminished. Why not do so on her birthday? Here’s some evidence.

Speaking of diminishing the nation, Rod Dreher writes that it’s a form of battlefield preparation by the left:

I can hear the squawking from liberals now: How can you blame the entire Left for this? How can you actually believe that a corporation’s decision about a shoe, and a city council’s decision about a local holiday, matters? Nike has a right to do what it did, and so does the Charlottesville city council! Anyway, what about this terrible thing Trump did, and this one, and the other one? Et cetera.

I have to chuckle. This is profoundly ignorant of how ordinary people think. Don’t you people get it? Little things like this are part of a developing narrative, one that emerges from the actions of people like campus activists, media and academic figures, city councils, and Woke Capitalists in corporate boardrooms. The narrative is this: the American nation is illegitimate, the American nation is wicked at its roots, America is loathsome. If we are going to dissolve this old, bad America, and replace it with something better, then we are going to need to start by teaching her people to hate her through and through. Meanwhile, let’s open the borders to let in a better class of future American. 

Attacking figures like Jefferson, and symbols like the Colonial-era flag — again, not the Confederate flag, but a Colonial-era flag — make it clear that what’s under assault now by the Social Justice Warriors — not fringe campus hotheads, but institutionalists like senior corporate executives and city council members — is the symbolic core of America herself. Not Southern secessionists who fought to preserve slavery, but the Founders and the Founding. These symbols are as close as the secular realm gets to sacred. Elementary psychology says that you do not profane what is sacred to a tribe, unless you want war.

Fortunately, as Paul Mirengoff writes at Power Line today, “I don’t think the culture wars are over. I think we have just begun to fight.” Let’s hope so.