This past Independence Day, social media like Twitter were
teeming with joyful appreciations of and gratitude for our freedom and
America’s bounty, in spite of threats to both under the Obama administration.
But there were also plenty of bitter, divisive messages from progressives, who
can’t bring themselves to celebrate this country; instead, they spent the
holiday ramping up their relentless racial grievance-mongering.
Leading the pack, predictably, was one of the Hollywood One-Percenters, who can always be counted on to pretend to side with the mythical 99%. Ostensibly an actor and comedian, Obama apologist Chris Rock has become rich and famous in the country that he routinely trashes as racist. Showing his solidarity with violent Occupy-types, in March Rock assaulted a camerawoman with a journalist who asked about Rock’s slanderous comment that the Tea Party was “insane” and “racist.” His latest hateful jab came on Twitter in the form of this racist, historically ignorant, punctuation-deficient holiday tweet, which went viral:
Chris Rock @chrisrock
Happy white peoples independence day the slaves
weren't free but I'm sure they enjoyed fireworks
It’s possible that Rock’s tweet was simply a publicity ploy calculated
to stir up controversy and boost his flagging, uninteresting career. Of course,
if he really wanted to boost his career and endear himself to millions of
Americans, he could simply have tweeted happy birthday wishes to America and his
gratitude for the freedoms he enjoys that countless Americans have died for and
continue to die for. But leftist celebrities are actually contemptuous of their
American public; they care only about their standing among each other. So in
fact, Rock’s tweet was calculated not only to aggravate proud Americans but to earn
him high-fives among fellow entertainers like black actor Don Cheadle, who
approvingly “retweeted” Rock’s “joke.”They weren’t the only ones. Zach Braff, another celeb with a stalled career, tweeted a similar sentiment (at least Braff understands the basics of capitalization and punctuation, unlike Rock):
Zach Braff @zachbraff
Slaves weren't freed for another 90 years. So maybe just enjoy some of the
fireworks...
To get some perspective on the value of such celebrity
opinion about history and politics, remember that these are people who in
centuries past were court jesters. But thanks to the omnipresence of cinemas,
television, the internet, and tabloids which serve as megaphones to push their
words and deeds into the forefront of public consciousness, the uninformed blather
of celebrities is given disproportionate weight here and around the world.
With Hollywood leading the way, near-illiterate progressives
tried to clog the Twitterverse and sour everyone else’s holiday with irrelevant
denunciations of American slavery. Here is a prime example, albeit refreshingly
free of obscenities and spelling errors (and yes, those are the hammer-and-sickle
symbols of communism in this person’s Twitter name):
☭Ｓ♀Ｏ☭Ｐ♀Ｈ☭Ｉ♀Ｅ☭ @dotcormunism
happy 4th of july. america is a violent racist nation built upon slavery
and genocide. enjoy your hot dogs and fireworks
Plenty of social media patriots were quick to counter the
nonsense. One Twitterer calmly explained to Chris Rock where he went wrong:
Ariel
Dove @gWellaReiki
@chrisrock
July 4th has nothing to do with slavery; it's to do with Independence
from Britain.
Another stated things a bit more bluntly:
Carl
Jackson @holyslant
Morons like Chris Rock don't
understand that July 4th
1776 marked the beginning of the end of slavery.
The “America was built on slavery and genocide” meme is a
central pillar of leftist anti-Americanism. For example, one July 4th
message that “trended” on Twitter was a link to the Independence Day commentary
by MSNBC’s weekend host and Jeremiah
Wright apologist Melissa Harris-Perry, one of that network’s stable of America-hating attack dogs,
about
whom I wrote recently for FrontPage. She said in her
monologue that “Independence Day is more aspirational than actual,” and that
on this day we should meditate on our failings as well:
It’s ours, all of it. The
imperialism, the genocide, the slavery, also the liberation and the hope and
the deeply American belief that our best days still lie ahead of us… So on the
4th of July… I’m going to wave a flag without hesitation — not
because I’ve forgotten my nation’s many wrongs, but because I remember them.
Though she tries to
dress it up in a sort of patriotic optimism, this is not a celebration of
America – certainly not of American exceptionalism, which Obama and the left
refuse to acknowledge. It is typical of the left’s insistence on viewing this
country’s history through the lens of racial victimization in order to
perpetuate divisive grievances, generations after America rose above its failings.The message that the left wanted to hammer home on this 4th of July and every other day is that rather than celebrate our independence and meteoric rise to the most prosperous, egalitarian, and beneficent power in world history, Americans today should never cease flagellating themselves in guilt over slavery, even though we officially ended it in America nearly 150 years ago, and even though it’s not even a uniquely American phenomenon. Slavery has been perpetrated in every culture by every race throughout history (including Native Americans and black Africans, though you’ll never hear the left discuss that). It is still being carried out today by Muslims in Africa and the Middle East (which the left will also never admit).
The multiculturalist left fantasize that nonwhite indigenous
peoples everywhere lived in Edenic harmony with each other and their habitats
until the genocidal, environment-raping Christian white man came along and
enslaved them all, and that Eden will be restored only when that Christian
white imperialist is destroyed – or fundamentally transformed.
The right does not
argue that America should whitewash its history; on the contrary, it is the left that would like to whitewash the
fact that it took that Christian white man to end slavery, at the cost
of hundreds of thousands of white (and black) lives in a war that nearly
collapsed this country. But that inconvenient truth doesn’t advance the left’s
race-baiting, America-hating agenda.
(This article originally appeared here on FrontPage Mag, 7/17/12)
