Apparently I’m a Patriot!! I don’t think I would ever have known that, were it not for Caleb Lee, Newt Gingrich, Tom McHugh, Matt Gaetz, Lara Trump, Ronna McDaniel, Mike Johnson, Customer Care at The Patriot Depot, and Cory Brown at Tactical Wholesaler.
All of these fine people – and I must presume, Patriots!! – have messaged me by email and/or text over the course of the Trump Political Phenomenon (TPP) to praise my support of political candidates who oppose attempts to control in any way the use of firearms. Please note that the ‘P’ should always be capitalized, and exclamation points are optional.
The free and unfettered exercise of the Second Amendment turns out to be an absolute litmus test for qualification as a Patriot!! At least according to conservative political candidates and paranoid citizens who own guns, or at least say they do.
This came as something of a surprise to me because I have never supported a candidate who opposes rational gun control, and my only support to any conservative candidate in the age of TPP has been, I believe, a total of probably seven dollars, in one dollar increments, in order to remain fully informed about and familiar with the rhetoric and reasoning of self-proclaimed Patriots!!
Caleb Lee is proprietor of the Prepared Gun Owners website which recently featured a video on how to reload a shotgun while in the middle of a firefight. I have to admit that trading shotgun blasts with agents of the Deep State was a little outside the range of my imagination. But, hey, Caleb called me a Patriot!!
So did former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who led the impeachment effort against the adulterous Bill Clinton while he himself was having an adulterous affair. Is adultery Patriotic!!?
The Patriot Wholesale Club greeted me as a Patriot!!, so did Tacticaladay, Tom McHugh (Concealed Patriot.net – “fighting for our rights”), disgraced Congressman Matt Gaetz (1776 Project PAC); Leland Moore of MooreAmmo.com (“Everybody needs MooreAmmo”), Lara Trump, who offered me, in exchange for a modest donation, the “MAGA Living Legend Award – Patriots!! Only”; the True Patriot Supply Company, offering t-Shirts proclaiming “God, Guns and Guts Made America;” current House Speaker Mike Johnson (“Yours in Patriotism!!”), and finally, Tactical Wholesaler, a website that offered to sell me “The MAGA Patriot AR-15 – the rifle Trump would choose to defend America.” “Only,” $2,997.”
This tsunami of patriotic passion left me slightly numb, so I took refuge in Wikipedia where I found a kinder, gentler and – to my Patriot!! eyes, – a much more fulfilling definition of the term. Patriotism, said the website, “is the feeling of love, devotion, and a sense of attachment to a country or state. This attachment can be a combination of different feelings for things such as the language of one’s homeland, and its ethnic, cultural, political or historical aspects.” No mention of AR-15s.
This being Wikipedia, there was of course more. A further definition defines a patriot (no exclamation marks) as, “a person who loves, supports and defends their country and its interests with devotion … a person who values individual rights, especially one who attempts to defend those rights against presumed interference by the federal government.”
Hmmm. That seems to be the collision point between “Patriots!!” and true patriotism. Unless I’ve missed part of the narrative, it seems clear that the “Patriots!!” who are knocking at my email door are the same “Patriots!!” who tried to steal the 2020 election by falsely claiming, with no evidence, that the election had already been stolen by the Democrats. And wasn’t that January 6 Capitol riot an attempt to steal the election by raw, brute force?
All of which set me thinking about what true patriotism looks like here, at the local level, where there is abundant love and devotion all around us. So I look at SOS, F.I.S.H., La Luz, Vintage House, Mentoring Alliance, Boys & Girls Clubs of Sonoma Valley, the Rotary Clubs, Transcendence Theatre Company, Sonoma Arts Live, The Catalyst Fund, Impact 100, the Education Foundation, the Field of Dreams, and many more, all organizations that love, support and defend this Valley and its interests, with devotion. That’s true patriotism. It couldn’t be more real. And it works without a single AR-15.
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