Shunning and shaming? It's a good thing!

By Meta-Content Generator A.J. Liebling with
Scott V. Sandford in Washington

Well, that didn't take long.

Less than a week after telling us uncouth mortals not to shun and shame those whose political or other views we find abhorrent (because they are), the same New York Times opinion page now tells us that, wait for it, it's OK to shun and shame some people.

Like a Supreme Court Justice and his bats**t crazy wife.

Mrs. Clarence Thomas

A thousand years ago (actually, Sunday March 20) the Times Sunday Review devoted 2,500 words to the ongoing collapse of free speech in this country because intolerant liberals say mean things on Twitter.  We covered this as recently as last week (see below).

For those of you too busy to glance down for five seconds, here's the money quote:

"For all the tolerance and enlightenment that modern society claims, Americans are losing hold of a fundamental right as citizens of a free country: the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned," the diatribe about mean tweets begins.

The pain of being shunned or shamed for saying dumb s**t is unendurable (unlike the pain of being fired from your teaching job for reading a kid's book to kids), unless of course it's inflicted on someone approved for the torment by the New York Times Editorial Board.

Let's let them explain it:

Ms. Thomas’s efforts, and her husband’s refusal to respond appropriately, have been haunting the court for years, but this latest conflagration shouldn’t be a close call. ...
Yes, married people can lead independent professional lives, and it is not a justice’s responsibility to police the actions of his or her spouse. But the brazenness with which the Thomases have flouted the most reasonable expectations of judicial rectitude is without precedent.

So you're shunning and shaming Ginnni Thomas just for expressing a few opinions.  What were those opinions, by the way?  The Washington Post reprinted one opinion she offered to Mark Meadows, no longer living in a trailer in North Carolina but then Chief of Staff to the Tangerine-Faced Loser:

You would think that the President's Chief of Staff would already know whether the guy that just shellacked him in the election and thousands of others had been jailed, but in fairness Mark was often the last to know. 

OK to shun and shame this guy?

You also might think this was an obviously ridiculous tale repeated by an alkie whackjob, but could a booze-addled fabulist make up a tale like this?  She even knows where detainees are being held at Guantanamo: in barges parked in the bay, rather than in the vast illegal encampment used to illegally hold the poor schmucks picked up anywhere from Amman to Islamabad after being tortured in by the CIA.  It's the details that sell the story.

And yet the Times now thinks Ginnie and Long Dong Thomas should be shunned and shamed!  Oh, the humanity!

Speaking of shunning and shaming very fine people just for speaking their minds, the news operation of the Times had this to say on A1 about Tucker “Where's Mommy?” Carlson:

After President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia claimed that action against Ukraine was taken in self-defense, the Fox News host Tucker Carlson and the conservative commentator Candace Owens repeated the assertion. When Mr. Putin insisted he was trying to “denazify” Ukraine, [Former CBS News Correspondent] Lara Logan, another right-wing commentator, mirrored the idea.

...As war has raged, the Kremlin’s talking points and some right-wing discourse in the United States — fueled by those on the far right — have coalesced. On social media, podcasts and television, falsehoods about the invasion of Ukraine have flowed both ways, with Americans amplifying lies from Russians and the Kremlin spreading fabrications that festered in American forums online.

By reinforcing and feeding each other’s messaging, some right-wing Americans have given credibility to Russia’s assertions and vice versa. Together, they have created an alternate reality, recasting the Western bloc of allies as provokers, blunderers and liars, which has bolstered Mr. Putin. 

Accusing a TV talking head of parroting Kremlin disinformation? That sounds pretty shaming to us, but no one has offered us a lifetime of ease on the Times editorial board, so our views can be shunned and shamed into oblivion without any offense to the goddess of speaking freely, or her brother Kevin. 

Or this one?

Of course the effort to hold white men to account for subverting U.S. national security in wartime by repeating Putin's lies got some pushback from the usual white male suspects on the Times editorial page.  Both Bretbug and Ross (no links to pisspoor content, per Spy policy) now tell us how important it is to respect criticism of U.S. foreign policy.  We don't recall hearing much about this in 2003, when their brother in platitudinousness, David Brooks, was busily engaged in humiliating the few lonely lefties who correctly said the Iraq War was a fraud and a catastrophe. 

In fairness, in 2003, little Ross was in his mid-twenties and still figuring out how to parlay his brilliant undergraduate career as an anti-abortion rights raver in the Harvard Salient into a lifetime of ease.  (Spoiler alert: he figured it out!)

But let's leave those hacks to one side (or perhaps, in tribute to Soprassata Dave, on both sides), and consider whether it's a good idea to shun and shame those who are paid many millions a year to beam Russian disinformation into American homes, and those, like Rupert Murdoch, doing the paying.

After due deliberation, we think shunning and shaming those who propagate repellent views is an excellent idea.  If we shunned and shamed everyone who repeated the subversive lie that the 2020 election was stolen, like Mrs. Pubic Hair on the Coke Can, we might successfully remove them to where they belong: the lunatic fringe of society.  That would mean that appealing to those anti-American hatemongers would spell political doom, and we'd rid ourselves of the likes of Cancun Ted Cruz and Fist of Fury Josh Hawley. 

Imagine the benefit to American society if it no longer tolerated the view that fake voters were barged into Milwaukee to swing Wisconsin for Biden, or whatever nutball theory the seditionists are passing around.  We might even be able to attach a few more threads to keep democracy from plunging into the abyss.

More generally, we remember our old friend Herb Marcuse who wrote about what he called “Repressive Tolerance” 60 years ago.  He was raked over the coals by the white male warmongers of the day, but his point was unexceptionable.  He noted the danger of pretending that truly terrible ideas, like racial segregation or the Vietnam War, were good and worthy ideas that should be respectfully discussed, rather than immoral drivel whose propagators should be shunned and shamed.

The danger was these ideas would take root in Establishment (that is, white male) circles and thereby endure, as would the harm to the lives of millions of persons of color in America not to mention millions in Indochina.

Even the most cursory review of American history will reveal terrible evil ideas (slavery for one) whose awful cruelties still haunt our days today.  If you don't believe us, ask Trayvon Martin.

Or the guy in the doorway?

So we say bring on the shunning and shaming of vicious garbage.  We don't mean that the Government should criminally prosecute Tucker and Josh and Cancun Ted.  We mean that the rest of us must make it clear that racist ideology, sedition, and Russian disinformation have no place in our discourse.  Not at a rally of yahoos.  Not on the New York Times op-ed page.  Not at 8 p.m. Eastern five nights a week.

To anticipate the reaction of Bretbug and his fellow white men, let's just note that shunning and shaming horrible speakers and ideas doesn't require or justify the shunning and shaming of people who offer non-evil views like we shouldn't invade Iraq or all children, cis and trans, have the right to be treated with respect.

Shunning and shaming is like any other social remedy: it has to be used in a discriminating way.   Incarcerating the innocent is a bad idea. That doesn't mean we should empty all the jails; it means as a society we should be sure to direct the unpleasant remedy at the proper targets.

Our targets for shunning and shaming?  Here's a start:

• Traitors passing along Kremlin disinformation
  
  
• Insurrectionists devoted to tearing down American democracy
  
  
• Advocates of and apologists for the dreadful history of racism
  
  
• Tormentors of children wrestling with sexual preference or identity
  
  
• Cancun Ted Cruz.  (On general principles.)

Let's play "Cancel or Culture" with The New York Times!

By Meta-Content Generator A.J. Liebling
with Nellie Bly in New York

The late winter gloom was pierced by a bit of good news, when birdwatchers reported that Minerva's owl, having fled its winter perch in Alma Mater's robes, was found in a tree just outside the Main Reading Room of the New York Public Library in Bryant Park:

A beautiful barred owl in Bryant Park last night, perched outside the Rose Main Reading Room of The New York Public Library. #birds #birdwatching #urbanwildlife #wildlife #nature #birdcpp pic.twitter.com/SNNXoCDTYl

— David Lei (@davidlei) March 19, 2022

Well-informed ornithologists said that the bird had originally tried to perch two blocks west near Eighth Avenue and 42d Street, but, finding no wisdom anywhere in the vicinity, fled east.

And now we know why.  Print subscribers will have to wait until Sunday, but online readers of The New York Times have been treated to a 2,500 word hissy fit (we don't hyperlink to pisspoor content) from Times editors who have had it up to here with people being mean to them on Twitter:

the New York Times editorial board published an editorial equating actual government censorship with the "fear of being shamed or shunned" for expressing an opinion in public.

Really, "equating" is an overstatement. The editorial makes it quite clear that the board sees shaming-and-shunning as exponentially worse than actual government censorship.

"For all the tolerance and enlightenment that modern society claims, Americans are losing hold of a fundamental right as citizens of a free country: the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned," the diatribe about mean tweets begins.

Many thanks to Salon's Amanda Marcotte for actually reading all the way through this pos, so we (and you!) don't have to.

Lest you think the great minds of the Times editorial board are not being fair and balanced, they get to other random threats to free speech, like state censorship laws, eventually:

For one thing, the issue of actual censorship at the hands of conservatives is not addressed in any depth until paragraph 30 — long after most people have stopped reading. And even then, it's only glancingly discussed before the writers get back to the cancel culture handwringing. In this 2,500 word essay — not including multiple polling charts — 413 words are dedicated to legislation passed by Republican-controlled legislatures to ban books and silence educators.  

We're not going to rattle on at endless length about the ridiculous argument that the left's supposed “cancel culture” is somehow an attack on free speech, because of course it isn't. You have the right to say something stupid. We have the right to say you said something stupid, like masks don't help prevent the spread of pandemic (a current Times favorite). That's how free speech works, or should work.

Another reason we're not going to spill millions of pixels on this is because we already did, just over a year ago:

As Jane Coaston of The New York Times pointed out, there's always been guardrails defining the limits of acceptable discourse in America; the question is what they are.

We'd say the question isn't just what those limits are, but who gets to set them.  For generations, the boundaries of permitted speech were set by white male supremacists.  Any idea that threatened their supremacy, or any person who articulated such sentiments, had to be canceled.  Ask Paul Robeson, or W. E. B. DuBois, or Colin Kaepernick.  They were all silenced as “un-American.”

If you are pushing to remove Critical Race Theory from the universe of acceptable discourse, that's because you don't want to hear, and you don't want anyone else to hear, the stories of people who suffered from systemic American racism, or people who look like them.

What has given rise to all the nonsense about the supposed threat of Cancel Culture is that the rules about who gets to place the guardrails have changed.  The power of the white men who silenced generations of social critics, especially women and minorities, while exalting the character and glory of racists and hatemongers like Robert E. Lee, Strom Thurmond, or even St. Ronald of Bitburg, is under assault.

That's what's intolerable – it's not that there should no limits on acceptable discourse, it's that those limits are being set by those who have no business issuing orders, or even requests, to fine innocent fragile white folks like that Smith librarian or Matt Schlapp or those who recall how funny Rush Limbaugh was.

The only consolation for the propagandists of Cancel Culture: those who claim they are being silenced, whether it's Bari Weiss or Bretbug Stephens (who bemoaned Cancel Culture while trying to fire a professor who made a joke at his expense), or Marjorie Taylor “Time for my Training Session, Rodolfo!” Greene, do not in fact shut up, nor do they appear to suffer any adverse economic consequences for speaking nonsense.  

They just, like Ol' Man River (but unlike Paul Robeson), keep rolling along.

The Times editorial can best be understood not as argument but as an example of a privileged class whining about its loss of privilege, in this case the privilege to define what's acceptable discourse and what isn't.

They really would have done better to make their, um, case not in a crapcan editorial package accompanied by a bs push poll but in their long suit: the gaming section.  

Since they couldn't or wouldn't, we'll do it for them:

 

It's simple and fun, and best of all, no matter how many times you play, you can never win!

Let's Make a Deal, Life-or-Death Edition

By War Correspondent Douglas MacArthur
with Spy Archivist Aula Minerva

In December of 1940, Great Britain stood alone in a war against a brutal dictatorship bent on conquest and mass murder.  While many Americans sympathized, few wanted to declare war on Nazi Germany.

In response to desperate pleas from Prime Minister Winston Churchill for weapons that it could not pay for, President Franklin D. Roosevelt thought about it for a while and came up with something called “Lend-Lease,” under which the United States would “lend” the weapons and presumably get them back, like a length of garden hose, after the war.

Any questions?

The ruse was transparent but it worked: the United States paid U.S. businesses to build weapons for Britain and then shipped them across the Atlantic.  It kept the UK in the war, which, spoiler alert, they and we won, with the assistance of a few others, like the Soviet Union (who also received copious amounts of Lend-Lease aid).

Flash forward 82 years, when another democratic ally (Ukraine) is under relentless assault by a brutal dictatorship bent on conquest and mass murder.  What can we do?

One option would be to engage in active hostilities with Russia whether through a so-called no-fly zone patrolled by the U.S. Air Force and our NATO allies or some other direct intervention.  This would certainly send a message but has a downside we might want to consider: starting World War III against a major nuclear power.  Before you sign off this option, watch “The Next Day” and then get back to us.

Another option would be to side with Vlad the Invader because he embodies the anti-democratic white nationalist values you treasure.  Let's call this option the “Tucker Carlson.”

A third option would be the one traditionally favored by Republican deep thinkers, including many pundits you can read or watch every day at 5 Eastern: invade a country that has nothing to do with the threat to demonstrate how big and strong we are. Pro: Iraq remains available.  Con: in practice this option demonstrates the opposite of the intended effect.

A fourth option would be the one chosen by F. D. Roosevelt: rush massive amounts of lethal and other aid to our ally to allow it to defend itself.  Thus far President Biden, who, unlike his predecessor, is not a demented Russian-owned grifting white supremacist, has chosen this path.

Which brings us to last week. As Russia transitions to a pure war crime strategy of bombing civilian targets like maternity hospitals to maximize civilian casualties, the Ukrainian Government has asked for the means to defend itself: (Based on our extensive experience playing “Call of Duty,” we understand that there are two ways to defend cities against bombers: anti-aircraft guns and missiles, and fighter planes, which are designed to shoot down bombers)

If Poland gets modern F-16's....

Ukraine has pilots ready to fly and fight Russians, but it can’t compete with Russia’s air power. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told U.S. lawmakers that fighter jets are his country’s top priority, even over antiaircraft missiles that Ukraine has been getting from its allies.

“If you can’t do [a no-fly zone], at least get me planes,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told members of Congress in a call this weekend....

So when Ukrainian President Zelensky asked for warplanes, he was not told to provide dirt on Biden's political opponents, but the response he got was hardly more helpful:

The administration is facing backlash over its decision earlier this week to scuttle Poland’s proposal that would have sent a number of its MiG-29 fighter jets to Ukraine via a transfer “free of charge” to the United States. Washington, citing concerns that Russia would view the move as a provocation, said the offer from Warsaw was not “tenable.”

Ukrainian officials, including President Volodymyr Zelensky, have pleaded for the MiG-29 transfer. 

Free jets?  Who would turn down an offer like that?   More specifically, the deal announced by Poland was that they would turn over their entire fleet of 28 MiG-29's to the United States in Germany so that the U.S. could in turn lend-lease them to Ukraine.  In exchange, Poland asked the U.S. for an equivalent number of U.S. made F-16 fighter, which have been around for some 40 years.

At first glance, this deal seems like a no-brainer: Ukraine gets the jets its pilots know how to fly, and Poland gets some modern fighters to buttress NATO defenses.  And it's not like sending 28 F-16 to Poland would leave us defenseless.  At last count, the US Air Force was down to its last 1017 F-16's, exactly zero of which are doing any useful work anywhere in the world.  By the way, it's their third string fighter in case you were worried about the skies over Cleveland.

In response, the Biden Administration mictorated over the whole idea:

...it will send its old MiG-29's to Ukraine

It would shift the responsibility for delivering the fighter jets — and the risk of confrontation with Russia — on to Washington in a very public way. ...Poland’s offer would require the United States and NATO to play a lead role in getting the planes to Ukraine. Even in the context of broad Western effort to arm Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin could easily construe jets taking off from a NATO base in Germany to eventually fight Russians as NATO fighting Russians. That, Kirby said, “raises serious concerns for the entire NATO alliance.”

Left unsaid is that if Washington does find a way to get fighter jets into Ukraine, it wants to do it as quietly as possible.

Yes, that's the whole f***in' idea: instead of leaving Poland to face Vlad the Invader's wrath, transfer his ire to a country that's too big to pick on, even if it was reduced to only 989 F-16's.

And why do we care how Vlad the Bomber of Maternity Hospitals construes Ukrainian Air Force pilots flying Ukrainian Air Force jets (note to NATO: make sure paint dries before handing over the keys) into Ukraine?  How is that different from any other weapons like anti-aircraft missiles we are happy to supply to Ukraine?  Don't they do the same thing?

Vlad the Murderer thinks so:

In response to American efforts to supply the Ukrainian military with antitank weapons and other matériel, Russia issued a new and more direct threat on Saturday, warning the United States that convoys with weapons sent to Ukraine would be “legitimate targets” for the Russian military.

Time to unleash our secret weapon

Is that how this war will work?  We'll give Vlad the Terrible Strategist a veto over what weapons NATO can and cannot provide to the desperate Ukrainians?  We wonder what Franklin D. Roosevelt would have said to that.

The other lame rationalization offered by Pentagon gasbags is that the MiG's won't do much good anyway:

American officials believe that the jets, given Russia’s increasing anti-air capabilities in Ukraine, would have limited value to Ukraine and that they are not worth the risks they could pose to more effective means of bolstering the Ukrainian military.

Maybe we should let the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense decide that for itself, rather than a bunch of crew-cut paper pushers wondering if they can get out of the Pentagon parking lot before traffic really backs up on the 14th Street Bridge.

Let's see if we can help the Pentagon's Nervous Nellies untangle this supposedly insoluble problem.  Our suggestion:

• Move principal production of “Top Gun III: Send More Oxygen” to Poland.  
• Sign Ukrainian-born Mila Kunis to play the role of Tom Cruise's flight instructor (she's shorter than he is so she won't have to slouch for 90 minutes unlike poor Kelly McGillis).
  
• The U.S. Government leases the Polish MiG-29 fleet for second unit shooting.  
• The day the shooting is over, the Polish Government asks for its MiG's back and is told that Mila Kunis sold them all to the Ukrainian Air Force, which repainted them and flew  them back to Ukraine.
• An apologetic U.S. Government sends 28 F-16's to Poland as compensation. 

Problem solved!  No way Vlad the Stewardess Whisperer wants to take on Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher!

You may say that this idea is a ridiculous travesty of military support.

To which we say, to paraphrase Otter, it's gotta work better than our government's current position of no planes for you while Ukrainian civilians die of thirst in the bombing of Mariupol.

Patriot Games

By A. Cahan
Board of Editors

The juxtaposition of coverage of Ukrainians fighting for the right to live against relentless Russian war criminals with stories about idiots in trucks diving in circles around the DC Beltway has gotten us to thinking about patriotism, real and performative.

The real thing, now on display from Lviv to Kharkhiv, needs no further encomiums from us.  Instead, let's take a look at performance of patriotism on the home front.

If you still have cable TV (and why?), you can savor the continuing spectacle of highly-paid cable news gasbags on a channel claiming to speak for “patriots” now shilling for American adversary and war criminal Vlad the Invader Putin, while at the same time falsely smearing the United States Government's deft and firm response, especially when carried out by other than white men (like the Vice President). 

Source: Media Matters for America

What kind of American “news” operation would pass off obvious Russian propaganda as real information and subvert U.S. Government efforts to respond to Russian aggression?

 Is it the same operation that spends its time cloaking its disloyal sentiments in ostentatious displays of its supposed patriotism and endless condemnation of those who do not share its white-supremacist perspective as lacking in patriotism?

Fun fact: it’s the exact same operation, owned and controlled by naturalized expatriate American Rupert Murdoch. And it operates under the superintendence of one Viet Dinh, its chief legal and policy officer, whom this country took in when his family fled Vietnam after the collapse of its US-backed government in 1975. Dinh has been a powerful figure in conservative Republican circles for two decades, rising to prominence by, in the aftermath of Bush’s 9/11 debacle, the well-loathed “PATRIOT” Act. There’s that word again. 

For decades the Republican Party and its media outlets, like Fox “News”, have used patriotism as a cudgel to bash anyone who disagrees with their agenda, which encompasses white supremacy, tax cuts for the rich, suffering for the poor, destruction of the environment, hatred of those with different gender identities or preferences and until recently squandering American lives and treasure in pointless foreign wars from Vietnam to Afghanistan.

Speaking of Vietnam, who remembers the attack on anti-war protesters on the grounds of patriotism?  (In those days the confusion may have been excusable in part because for a generation Americans had seen their armed forces as fighting for liberty, as was indeed the case in World War II).

But from 1946 through today, no one has yet to articulate a reason to fight and die in Vietnam. Those who pointed out this inescapable fact were smeared as “unpatriotic.”

Here's only one example from Rhodes Scholar Dean Rusk (with bipartisan support in the next column) from The New York Times, April 17, 1967:

To show unwavering support for the pointless slaughter in Vietnam, supposed loyal Americans slapped this sticker on their bumpers to make the point that those who wanted to save Americans (and Vietnamese) from the bloody business were unpatriotic and un-American:

The dirty business of white Republicans deciding who was and who wasn't a patriot based on their support for Republican policies, no matter how ridiculous or contrary to American interests (we'll get to the Iraq War in a minute), has become so deeply ingrained in American thought that we don't even notice it anymore.

But why?

Why is the right-wing disinformation channel on Sirius branded as
 

?  Breitbart? Patriotic?  That anti-Semitic fact-free sewer:

Source: Media Matters for America

What's patriotic about racism and bigotry? They may be as American as apple pie and grabbing 'em by the pussy, but that doesn't mean they're patriotic.  

And yet down the decades generations of white Republicans have draped their violence and hatred in the American flag. Here's one example of Nixon-incited mob violence (lest you think that Republicans were full of sweetness and light prior to 2017):

The New York Times, May 9, 1970.

Then as now the victims were blamed for provoking their attackers.

A mere 33 years later, those who opposed George W. Bush's senseless invasion of Iraq (perhaps as a bad precedent) were similarly branded as disloyal.  Ask the Dixie Chicks:

[Early in 2003] as the country was barreling toward war with Iraq,.. Natalie Maines, lead singer of the Dixie Chicks, stood in front of a packed house in London and said:

“Just so you know, we’re on the good side with y’all. We do not want this war, this violence. And we’re ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas.”

 It didn’t matter that the evidence to invade Iraq was questionable or that Maines later apologized. The damage was done, and one of the most popular acts in the country became its most hated. Its music was banned from radio, CDs were trashed by bulldozers, and one band member’s home was vandalized. Maines introduced “Soldier” with a call for peace, but she would soon find that the group needed metal detectors installed at entrances to shows on its stateside tour because of death threats.

Patriots on parade

It was a classic case of freedom of speech meeting the irrational repercussions of that speech....If anything, Maines and company should be viewed as prophets, not pariahs, considering that the weapons of mass destruction the Bush administration led the country to believe Saddam Hussein was housing were never found. Or that since 2006, the majority of Americans have felt the invasion was a mistake to begin with.

And yet, despite all that we now know, the Chicks remain ostracized in the world they came from, as if they were the ones who presented false information to the United Nations Security Council; as if they waged a war Tony Blair’s right-hand man now says “cannot be justified”; as if the misguided attack were their fault.

Before the group was set to do an interview with Diane Sawyer in late April 2003 – with hopes of stopping the public relations bleeding – they questioned why they needed to grovel and beg for Bush’s forgiveness.... And somehow, folks remain mad at the Chicks.

Last week, in marking the 10-year anniversary of Maines’ comments, Country Music Television asked fans whether the Chicks should be forgiven, and more than a third of responders said “no.”

The violence, the ostracism, the bullying, the threats – amazing that the m.o. of white “patriots” never changes, culminating in a patriotic attack on the U.S. Capitol with the goal of overthrowing the lawful government of the United States.

Since the real patriots are Democrats, why not embrace the flag (figuratively, not literally, unlike the Tangerine-Faced Russian-owned Grifter)?  I'd slap these babies on my bumper, wouldn't you?

Here's what we should tell the white bigots, including the ones with Rupert Murdoch's arm shoved up their blowholes, who still claim to decide for all who's a patriot and who isn't:

If you don't support a tolerant, democratic America that respects others, welcomes diversity, protects the rule of law, supports the efforts of free people everywhere to resist Russian aggression, demands that its leaders obey the law and set an example of honesty and integrity, and tries to save America from environmental catastrophe and its citizens from a pandemic close to claiming 1,000,000 lives, then you're not a patriot.  If you can't love what America really is when it tries to live up to its own values, then you can leave it and move someplace more congenial to your hate-addled views, like Vladimir Putin's colon.  

If you need directions on how to get there, just take your big rig down to the Capital Beltway and keep driving.  As far as we're concerned, for-f***in'-ever.