"For most of our non-white citizens, the pious platitude “land of the free” is more a sick, twisted joke than an expression of truth."
My wife is Asian and would strongly disagree as would my daughter-in-law who is Shona and grew up in Africa.
No doubt we are not perfect, but few countries offer minorities the rights and freedoms that America does. More importantly, few countries have legislated against their "majorities" in pursuit of such freedom.
What makes America special is a two-hundred-year history of steady progress towards the goal of creating a society where every human has equal political rights and the ability to succeed based on their talents. More than most countries, talent in the end wins over heredity.
Progressive liberalism and woke thinking have diverted America from its vision of becoming a country where each individual is judged based on the content of their characters. Nothing is more divisive than "identity politics" and nothing contributes to racist thinking more than using skin color instead of talent to allocate rewards in society.
You adopt the elitist view that people are stupid and so true freedom only exists when the elite tell the rest of the people what they should think, rather than belief that the majority of people are smart enough to figure out the truth as long as the marketplace of ideas remains open and uncensored.
The truest patriot is one that embraces the values under which this country was founded. Those ideas are captured in one of the most aspirational documents in history the Declaration of Independence and overtime many of those aspirations have become institutionalized in our amended Constitution.
Our Founding Fathers in their wisdom expressed in their writings, that as long as we had freedom of speech and freedom of the press combined with fair elections, that America would become "the freest nation in the world". I think that remains as true today as ever. It is sad, that you believe that somehow controlling free speech is the way to freedom.
How can we have a free society, when you don't trust the people to be smart enough to figure out fact from fiction? Once you cross that road, freedom is lost.
More importantly, you fail to realize that America has been at this doorstep throughout its history. This failure to trust the masses to figure things out goes back our nations origins and the original debates that took place at the time our Constitution was written.
You think that somehow now is different. Study more history and you will find your arguments are the same as those made by a subset of Founding Fathers including Hamilton and are not exactly new arguments.
The real issue is one of trust. Do you trust people to do the right thing or not. Or are you in the camp that half of American is somehow "deplorable" and mentally bankrupt, so you have to impose your "enlightened" views on them rather than question whether your enlightened views are not as enlightened as you like to think and simply the byproduct of your values, which don't align with half the nation.
Meanwhile, for those that think our current society is "so dysfunctional" that its very existence is at stake... pretend for a second, it is 1850 and that a line unseen by the human eye exists within the same country dividing it between land where slavery was legal and illegal.
A nation composed of pro slavery and ardent abolitionists. Nothing could be more dysfunctional, and yet that country exists today. Society won't collapse because of ideology, if it does collapse it will be because the economics of society are not capable of supporting its cost.
