President Trump’s State of the Union (SOTU) address on Tuesday revealed that what most ails our union is the pestilent Democrat Party. Democrats’ moral vacuity, puerile rebelliousness, callousness toward suffering, and elitist disdain for celebrating accomplishments commingle with their unseemly lust for power and odious “oikophobia” to produce the shameful spectacle the nation witnessed.
Like the ignorant leftist teenagers all over the country who have walked out of school while shrieking obscenities at adult authority figures and the anarchists who defy, defund, impede, and attack law enforcement, eighty Democrats boycotted the SOTU address at which American heroes, victims of crime, families of victims of crime, and U.S. Olympic athletes were honored. Those that attended demonstrated their intransigent commitment to disunity and disrespect.
In so doing, childish Democrats didn’t disrespect only the honorees but every American who voted for President Donald Trump. Democrats are so petty, so vindictive, so consumed with rage and hatred that they violate common courtesy and civic tradition. They are sanctimonious, anarchical, hypocritical children undeserving of their offices.
Before addressing the oiks in the crowd—understandably confused with Orcs about whom J.R.R. Tolkien said, “The Orcs are definitely … corruptions of the ‘human’ form. … They are (or were) rational creatures, though horribly corrupted”—let’s spend just a moment reviewing what Dems oppose:
- Prioritizing the protection of American citizens over illegal aliens
- Honoring victims or families of victims of heinous crimes
- Supporting firefighters and law enforcement
- Ending widespread fraud schemes that bilk taxpayers
- Protecting confused minors from dangerous and irreversible “trans”-quackery
- Keeping violent criminals off the streets
The despicable Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib refused to stand to honor 24-year-old National Guard member Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe who was ambushed and shot in the head by an Afghan national three months ago. Nor would they stand to honor the six recipients of Medals of Valor.
These acts of disrespect and destruction emerge from and reinforce what British philosopher and social critic Roger Scruton referred to as “oikophobia,” which has been one of the central animating principles of leftists for decades:
No adequate word exists for this attitude, though its symptoms are instantly recognised: namely, the disposition, in any conflict, to side with ‘them’ against ‘us’, and the felt need to denigrate the customs, culture and institutions that are identifiably ‘ours’. … I propose to call this state of mind oikophobia, by which I mean (stretching the Greek a little) the repudiation of inheritance and home.
Oikophobia is a stage through which the adolescent mind normally passes. But it is a stage in which some people—intellectuals especially—tend to become arrested. As George Orwell pointed out, intellectuals on the Left are especially prone to it. …
A chronic form of oikophobia has spread through the American universities, in the guise of political correctness, and loudly surfaced in the aftermath of September 11th, to pour scorn on the culture that allegedly provoked the attacks, and to side by implication with the terrorists. …
The oik repudiates national loyalties and defines his goals and ideals against the nation, promoting transnational institutions over national governments, accepting and endorsing laws that are imposed on us from on high by the EU or the UN. …
For many years Americans assumed that they belonged to a single society, marked by local variations but with a common loyalty, a common language, and a common law. … They were self-critical and conscious of social problems; but they never lost their hope that these problems could eventually be solved by the democratic process and the rule of law. They expected the schools to encourage some version of the Judaeo-Christian outlook and to instill a measure of respect for America, its people, and its history. If their children went on to college, they assumed that it would be to learn solid, decent, useful things: the kind of things that help you to get on in America and help America to get on in the world. Without being nationalists or xenophobes, they assumed that it is right and normal to be proud of your country, to defend it in war, and to enhance it in peace. …
Whence comes the new negative stereotype of American society? The answer, I suggest, is this. The advocate of multiculturalism is in a state of rebellion against the established order; he is suffering from a pathological oikophobia, a hatred of home, which has been a frequent disease among intellectuals since the Enlightenment. He sees that which is his “own,” his inheritance, as alien; he has fallen out of communication with it and feels tainted by its claim on him. He wants to be free of that claim – free from the pressure to belong, to be with “us,” to love something, believe in something, accept something which is his.
At the same time, he cultivates a promiscuous xenophilia – picking up other cultures in the supermarket of postmodernity and toying with them, as a child toys with the channels on a television set. …[S]o long as he can merely play with alternatives – a possibility which universities eminently provide – xenophiliac fantasies can drift unhindered through his mind, and he can wallow in a luxurious bath of nostalgia for a home that will never be his.
We see oikophobia in queer and feminist support of Hamas. We see oikophobia in the revisionist history of Howard Zinn and Nikole Hannah-Jones used by leftists to indoctrinate gullible children. We see oikophobia in the venomous glare of the thankless Ilhan Omar.
Americans who love this country; who live by true, immutable principles; who have matured out of adolescence; who seek leaders who desire to serve rather than to acquire power, wealth, and fame; who revere military heroes; who revel in the unifying joy of American athletic victories; who believe that the primary duty of our elected leaders and the infrastructure created to facilitate the will of the people need to remember this night when they vote in midterms and the 2028 General Election.
A century ago, William Butler Yeats wrote,
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Oiks, like Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, AOC, and all the unhinged leftists we see in our streets and on social media shrieking obscenities and celebrating Charlie Kirk’s assassination share in common hatred: They detest America, America’s founding principles, American civic traditions, and our Judeo-Christian heritage. Giving morally bankrupt, intellectually impoverished oiks—or Orcs—more power that they will use to continue dismantling everything that has made America great would be tragic.
Correction: An earlier version of this article undercounted the number of lawmakers who boycotted the State of the Union address.