Independence—or ‘Hate America’ Day?

By Jane M. Orient, M.D.

The Fourth of July used to be such a fun holiday. The highlight was to sit on the patio wall that Daddy built and watch the fireworks at the University of Arizona stadium.

In those days, we sang “My Country ’Tis of Thee” and “America the Beautiful” in school; read or even memorized the Declaration of Independence; and thanked God for the blessing of being born in the freest and most prosperous nation in history. Here, ordinary people could dream of owning, even building, their own home. No one worried about a midnight knock on the door by the Gestapo or KGB, or constant surveillance by Stasi, which was aided by your neighbors or even your children. We enjoyed “inalienable rights.”

Today, July 4, in a radically changed America, in my very own home town, we are urged to bring not a flag but our anger to a “**** the Fourth” rally. The announcement flew at light speed around the world. I first saw it on the Twitter feed of a Chilean-American residing in Kharkov, Ukraine. It was quickly scrubbed from the Facebook page of the Pima County Democratic Party.

“We are not celebrating until we get our independence back,” the organizers said.

Evidently, these extremists think they got “independence” in 1973, when the U.S. Supreme Court instantly repealed all state laws restricting abortion.

But many Americans who celebrate declaring our independence from the British Empire in 1776 now want independence from what the elitist, tyrannical federal Leviathan has become.

How did this happen?

All civilizations must pass down their values to the young—or perish. Our educational institutions are essential for this purpose. But a cancer has invaded them.

As early as in 1951, William F. Buckley observed that Yale University was no longer producing graduates who had a commitment to fundamental American values. The triumph of Wokeism a.k.a. Critical Social Justice ideology in academia is obvious to all who are awake. Our universities are so infected with Wokeism that conservative scholars have to pretend to be Woke to maintain any type of affiliation with modern academia. The degeneracy at the top has penetrated down to kindergarten and pre-school.

The Woke pseudo-religion is winning over the young as American culture becomes increasingly secular. Increasingly, young people lack a moral code based upon established traditions of faith, and Wokeism fills the spiritual void within them. The Woke have a cultish messianic complex; their obsessive goal is to remake society. From their perspective, those who oppose them are not simply people with a different worldview but “evildoers.”

The Woke neo-religion has been ignored by those conservatives who were shielded from its malice. However, as Wokeism became dominant, it started to hurt more people due to its totalitarian and censorious nature. These newly awakened sleepers are now realizing with horror the huge damage that has been done to our institutions.

There is so little viewpoint diversity in academia that students see no challenge to the pseudo-religious cultish ideology, and no factual analysis. As Niall Ferguson accurately put it: “North American academia is in the grip of a hideous mania, a cross between the early-modern witch craze and Mao’s Cultural Revolution, in which implacable zealots conduct grotesque show trials, innocent individuals have their reputations, careers and sanity destroyed, and everyone else cowers, terrified that they will be next to be ‘canceled.’”

The American education system is teaching students to hate their country and its core values. There should of course be academic critiques of our country, but we have reached a point where there are hardly any academics left to transmit the basic guiding principles that led this country to its greatness.

Opponents of Wokeism have a natural disadvantage. Even a small group of zealots, who seek, with fanatical devotion, to dismantle the current system and replace it with another social order, can be a formidable enemy. Nassim Taleb writes: “It suffices for an intransigent minority…to reach a minutely small level, say three or four percent of the total population, for the entire population to have to submit to their preferences.” The good news is that by the same rule it is still possible that another small faction of equally committed people can ultimately defeat them.

The system must be taken back from Wokies using their own incremental tactics. In the meantime, parents need to immediately remove their children from poisoned government schools to carefully monitored private schools or homeschooling. Attacks on these options must be resisted by parents with the same vigor they showed in Virginia.

We need to fight for our independence from the radical ideology, which is far more oppressive than King George, that is destroying our country.

Jane M. Orient, M.D. obtained her undergraduate degrees in chemistry and mathematics from the University of Arizona in Tucson, and her M.D. from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1974. She completed an internal medicine residency at Parkland Memorial Hospital and University of Arizona Affiliated Hospitals and then became an Instructor at the University of Arizona College of Medicine and a staff physician at the Tucson Veterans Administration Hospital. She has been in solo private practice since 1981 and has served as Executive Director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) since 1989. She is currently president of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness. She is the author of YOUR Doctor Is Not In: Healthy Skepticism about National Healthcare, and the second through fifth editions of Sapira’s Art and Science of Bedside Diagnosis published by Wolters Kluwer. She authored books for schoolchildren, Professor Klugimkopf’s Old-Fashioned English Grammar and Professor Klugimkopf’s Spelling Method, published by Robinson Books, and coauthored two novels published as Kindle books, Neomorts and Moonshine. More than 100 of her papers have been published in the scientific and popular literature on a variety of subjects including risk assessment, natural and technological hazards and nonhazards, and medical economics and ethics. She is the editor of AAPS News, the Doctors for Disaster Preparedness Newsletter, and Civil Defense Perspectives, and is the managing editor of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons.