Over on the other coast, the Seattle Times went out of its way recently to run a skeptical article about whether it was appropriate to cheer for the USA in the World Cup, given the awfulness of Trump. This reflects leftists’ sense that they must deprecate their country and also oppose anything Trump does so as to avoid implying that their country isn’t going to the dogs. This imperative overrides any other consideration.

Actor Robert DeNiro, an archetypal left-wing lovey who was a fine actor a few decades ago, spoke in New York at a “collective” of malcontents and said, “Our country isn’t so lovable right now.” He offered a litany of shallow and tendentious complaints about war, millions losing healthcare, and dollars flowing to the “Trump-Epstein class.” He denounced masked militias, by whom he meant law enforcement officers, shooting citizens and torturing neighbors. He lamented America’s “racist, misogynist, xenophobic tyrant.” He wailed, “I want to love my country again. I want my country back.”

All this might suggest that discontentment on the Left is a temporary phenomenon, due simply to the fact that the political pendulum swung against Democrats and put Trump back in the White House and Republicans in charge on Capitol Hill. But it would be a mistake not to realize that leftist anger and militancy go much deeper. Nor will it be relieved by an election that goes their way. It is, rather, a top-to-bottom matrix of grievances — yes, current politics, but also a lasting, visceral, and deadly loathing for America itself.

As we reach this year’s Fourth of July, leftists will not merely refuse to celebrate their country. Many will wish it ill. They or their parents might have been among those who delighted in bicentennial celebrations 50 years ago, such as the sight of the massive flotilla of thousands of boats in the sunshine of New York City’s harbor.

But they would not join such an event now. Instead, many will wear faces of irritation and hatred on July 4, and they are not concerned merely with the pendulum of politics. They want a wrecking ball that swings only one way and decisively smashes the America that has gone before.

Democrats in New York have just nominated a 32-year-old socialist named Darializa Avila Chevalier to represent them on Capitol Hill. She is a keffiyeh-wearing convert to Islam who has posted on social media that she uses the American flag as a napkin to wipe her dirty hands. She sums up her politics as “revolution must continue,” refers to “the fascism ingrained in the American consciousness,” and declares “we are Westerners fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization. We stand in full solidarity with every movement for liberation in the Global South. Our Intifada is an international one.”

These are not the thoughts of someone who would like America to thrive for another 250 years. And Avila Chevalier is, of course, hardly an isolated case. She was one of three socialists endorsed by socialist New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani who won their primaries on June 23. All the energy of the Democratic Party and the wider Left is with these radicals and their ilk. Some are already in Congress, and more will be after the November elections.

DeNiro’s desire to have his country back is, ironically, MAGA language. People yearning to have their country back were those who elected and reelected President Donald Trump.

It is hard to square the Left’s agenda with any desire for a restoration or return to an America we have all known and loved. It is obviously directed toward making America something it has never been before. A large and growing corpus of those on the blue half of the spectrum want carte blanche — year zero. That is clear in the rhetoric of the socialists, but has also been apparent for a long time in the agenda of the Democratic Party as a whole.

Both want to eliminate the Electoral College and elect the president by popular majority vote. This would let a few heavily populated states dominated by lefties ignore the concerns of the majority of more conservative states with fewer people. Tyranny of the majority is a Marxist idea — it is not what the founders had in mind.

The “kinda blue” party has also wanted for many years to pack the Supreme Court with permissive justices eager to waive the Constitution’s checks and balances and rubber-stamp the Democrats’ agenda.

It wants statehood for the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, calculating that this would add four permanent Democrat seats in the Senate, establishing a monopoly over policy and the confirmation or rejection of senior officials and federal judges. The Left, in other words, wants an end run around the Constitution. How is that getting its country back?

It wants to end the filibuster in the Senate, which requires 60 votes to pass most legislation. Trump also wishes this. But it is Senate Republicans who are preventing such constitutional vandalism from proceeding.

All these things and more suggest that what the Left seeks is not a return to the original vision of the country in which change was possible only with broad approval among the public and elected officials, and therefore required politicians willing to compromise. In this respect, the original vision of the country is definitionally conservative. The founders’ constitutional structure is built for stability and for evolution that is gradual and driven by something close to consensus. This is anathema to the Left, which wants revolution.

The Democratic Party is now effectively socialist with a deepening jihadi tinge. Socialism is a political creed of forced equality of outcome rather than equality before God and the law. It is about big government and top-down control. It is inimical to the founding idea of America, which is freedom — “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The Left is not temporarily disenchanted with but fundamentally alienated from America, not just with its present government and policies but with the very idea of our nation.

Today’s Democratic Party contains hardly any moderate or centrist opinion. Much of it is candidly motivated by a sub-Marxist detestation of America’s most cherished values. It is almost a tautology to note that free people choose to live their lives and govern themselves, and they choose ways diametrically at odds with how the Left wants things arranged.

For the Left, America is not a shining city on a hill, a light unto nations and peoples everywhere, but an irredeemable force for ill. This was made plain by the mendacious historical textbook, The 1619 Project, which, though it is not much in the news these days, still expresses the Left’s prevailing views that America’s traditional ideals are hypocrisies and that the nation was founded for the enslavement of one racial minority and white supremacy over all others.

Because the socialist Left wants a new and wholly different America, and because socialists are rapidly taking over the Democratic Party, their combined forces attack every element of the nation and its traditional values.

They no longer respect or protect property, wanting to cut the prosperous down to size with extra taxes, especially levied against billionaires, the bugbears of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), the godfather of American socialism.

They don’t want America even to be fully a nation, which explains efforts that reached a nadir during the Biden administration to erase the nation’s borders and open them to as many people from alien cultures as possible. Democrats and the Left reject the moral imperative of democracy that citizens must have the right to decide who should and who should not be allowed to come and live with them as their neighbors.

Now, on the nation’s 250th birthday, the Left believes Americans must accept strangers who they do not want and who, as dictated by multicultural mumbo jumbo, are encouraged to reject our ways after the wretched government in Washington has let them in through the back door.

These are not the aims of a movement that loves its country. And it is not just the aims but also its methods that reveal the Left’s malice and deceit. It has built a sophisticated network of grantmakers, nonprofit organizations, and political action committees that push liberal ideologies at all levels of government and society with deliberate subterfuge and concealment.

It moves money through networks to activists on the front lines, hiding where the money comes from. Hundreds of millions of dollars sluice through pop-up groups that are made to look like grassroots organizations, a simulacrum of popular democracy, but are in fact conduits for wealthy activists who funnel their dollars through clearinghouses such as the nonprofit groups in the Arabella Network, which can hide the front groups’ true source of funding.

Take the Sixteen Thirty Fund, one of the largest dark money groups on the Left. It was previously part of the Arabella Network, a massive leftist web of nonprofit organizations. In 2024, it spent more than $310 million, according to its tax filings. The Arabella Network rebranded as Sunflower Services after Trump’s 2024 victory, and Sunflower Services has obfuscated whether it acquired Sixteen Thirty Fund.

Donors include Swiss billionaire Hansjorg Wyss, George Soros, Pierre Omidyar, and Mark Zuckerberg, each one giving to the group’s pass-through infrastructure via their foundations, according to Capital Research Center’s Influence Watch. It also receives significant funding from teachers unions, labor unions, and other leftist groups.

Some of the money in 2024 went to traditional Democratic political action committees such as Future Forward USA, which was originally Joe Biden’s PAC. It got $3 million directly from Sixteen Thirty Fund in 2024. In other cases, Sixteen Thirty Fund sends grants to independent leftist groups, such as the Black Voters Matter Fund, which received a $100,000 grant in 2024, and the Sierra Club, which got $3.84 million in 2024 and has filed many lawsuits trying to prevent the development of American energy resources.

What Sixteen Thirty Fund mostly does is “fiscally sponsor” pop-up groups that don’t have to file separately with the IRS as nonprofit groups because they are under the Sixteen Thirty Fund umbrella. There are 104 such “projects.” One was Demand Justice, set up in 2018 under Sixteen Thirty Fund’s umbrella to fight Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court before it registered as its own nonprofit organization years later.

Another is New Jersey for a Better Future, a group with a name that sounds local but is not, created to fight Trump’s first-term tax cuts. Such groups don’t exist outside Sixteen Thirty Fund’s fiscal sponsorships, but they take pains to make themselves appear like spontaneous and thus democratic movements. Michigan Families for Economic Prosperity and Secure Michigan Elections are two other independent-sounding groups created by the Sixteen Thirty Fund to push liberal priorities in a battleground state.

Other nonprofit groups in the former Arabella Network were the Hopewell Fund, the New Venture Fund, the North Fund, and the Windward Fund. Each takes big-donor money and funnels it down to left-wing causes.

The Ford Foundation, which, like so many other foundations, was founded on wealth created by American free market entrepreneurship, has morphed into a source of riches for socialist causes. It gives money that facilitates violent protests — for example, $425,000 in May 2025 to Make the Road New Jersey. This organization helped organize violent protests outside the Delaney Hall immigration detention center in Newark. Make the Road New Jersey also coordinated taxpayer-funded legal services to illegal immigrants facing deportation in New Jersey, an overall effort to which Gov. Mikie Sherill (D-NJ) has also committed $20 million.

The Ford Foundation gave $4.6 million between 2016 and 2024 to the Southern Vision Alliance, which supported groups involved in political violence. One was Charlotte Uprising, which sparked turbulent protests in North Carolina around the Republican National Convention in 2020.

The Ford Foundation gave $300,000 to Linda Sarsour’s MPower from 2019 to 2023, though it has scrubbed this from its website. MPower organizes anti-Israel protests and engages in other forms of activism, such as stirring unrest within Microsoft to force the company to cancel contracts with the Israeli government.

The Ford Foundation gave more than $17 million between 2020 and 2025 to the Center for Popular Democracy, which, among other things, paid people who stormed congressional offices. The foundation gave $1.6 million to Dream Defenders, which blocks traffic.

Soros, a billionaire whom radicals love, has donated heavily to people whose explicit purpose is not to restore America but to reshape it into something new.

A 2025 Capital Research Center report found that Soros’s philanthropic network has given more than $80 million to groups “tied to terrorism or extremist violence.” That includes $23 million to seven groups that “engage in or materially assist violence, property destruction, economic sabotage, harassment, and other criminality that meets the FBI’s definition of domestic terrorism.”

Among these is the Center for Third World Organizing, which got $400,000. It has supported the Ruckus Society, which provides training and support for such disruptions as blocking roads, occupying buildings, and destroying property. Soros money went via the same channel to BlackOUT Collective, which was active in the 2020 George Floyd riots.

Soros gave seed money in 2017 to Indivisible, the group behind the No Kings protests and the Tesla Takedowns. He did so via the Tides Foundation, which raised $33 million for Black Lives Matter amid the 2020 race riots. Tides takes money from the same left-wing foundations and people as other major grantmakers and funnels it to unsavory causes such as the aggressively anti-Israel WESPAC Foundation. WESPAC previously sponsored Students for Justice in Palestine, the main body that organized anti-Israel campus protests, occupations, and intimidation of Jews.

Since August 2015, the two largest teachers unions, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, have poured $660 million into left-wing causes. They fund state and local affiliates that place union-picked candidates on school boards and bend the curriculum toward radical indoctrination. Teachers union money is dumped into the dark money network that hands out grants to fake grassroots groups. The AFT and NEA gave Sixteen Thirty Fund $4,4 million between 2015 and 2026, according to Defending Education. The unions gave $500,000 to the Hopewell Fund and $535,000 to the New Venture Fund, parts of what was Arabella’s network that trickled money down into fake grassroots groups.

Left-wing money poured into local district attorney races starting in the mid-2010s, helping dozens of radical district attorneys win low-cost contests and pursue soft-on-crime practices. This began with Soros in 2015: He calculated that a revolution within the justice system could be achieved more effectively by focusing on local races below the radar than it could by splashing bigger bucks into Washington policy debate.

By 2022, Soros had spent $40 million on district attorney races and elected at least 75 “social justice” prosecutors, according to the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund. District attorney races are typically low-dollar affairs, which is why this left-wing money returns so much bang for each buck.

Larry Krasner in Philadelphia is a Soros-backed prosecutor still in office, although many have been ousted amid public outrage at their ways. Soros spent $1.45 million backing Krasner in 2017. Within weeks of his inauguration, he stopped prosecuting marijuana possession and prostitution, and he diluted charges against retail thievery, carrying a gun without a permit, and facilitating marijuana sales. Auto theft, burglaries, and murders all jumped under Krasner, according to the Heritage Foundation, including a 130% increase in commercial burglaries in 2020.

One could expiate on the well-funded malignities of the Left until the crack of doom, but suffice it to say that those of us who love and honor America, especially now on the 250th anniversary of its miraculous founding, face an unvanquished enemy determined to trash most of the ideas that brought it such success and made it the envy of the world.

The Washington Examiner began its Restoring America project nearly five years ago, and it is good to see that some of the cultural forces of the Left are in retreat. Patriotism and religious practice have rebounded. Many people have thrown off the dampening blanket of self-doubt that was laid upon them by the Left with its sermons about national guilt and white supremacy. The charge of racism, like crying “wolf,” has lost its potency. More people realize it is just a way of shutting down discussion where traditional American values have the upper hand in logic, reason, and dignity.

The violence to which the Left’s money and energies flow is itself a measure of desperation. Its boundless hostility to Trump is due not simply to his manifest faults but to the fact that some of his instincts, especially that for patriotism, have proved resonant with the general population and have given permission for ordinary people to reject leftist browbeating. The realization has dawned on America that it is not the nation’s radical antagonists who are, as the saying goes, “on the right side of history.”

This realization, combined with the increased radicalization on the Left, is creating wider and wider splits in the nation. America is deeply divided. And the Left continues to make gains in its destructive agenda. Schools are failing children worse than ever. Economic growth and affordability are hobbled by red tape and excessive government spending. The resultant affordability crisis, which argues soundly for less regulation and more economic freedom, is instead stoking support for extreme leftists and socialist solutions that will only make it worse.

THE DESCENT OF BRITAIN IS A WARNING TO ALL

On its 250th birthday, America is still the strongest, richest nation in the world. There is much to celebrate — visitors to the World Cup find themselves amazed at the prosperity and plenty, the generosity and friendliness, of our country. Many say they don’t want to leave. Some have commented that we don’t know how lucky we are.

There is truth in that. We have a nation for which we should be thankful and which we should strive to preserve. But we cannot ignore a growing political movement that wants to tear it down.

Hugo Gurdon (@hgurdon) is editorial director of the Washington Examiner. With reporting from Sarah Bedford and Mia Cathell.