You can’t hate America and be a patriot.

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical left and Islamic terrorism.

If anyone doubts that patriotism really is the last refuge of a scoundrel, a recent CNN article boasts that liberals are reclaiming patriotism. After going through their musty attics, tossing aside copies of Howard Zinn’s revisionist Marxist history of America and all the “U.S. Out of Everywhere” buttons, they found their patriotism, moth-eaten, covered in dust and a little worse for the wear. But otherwise intact.

That’s right, progressives are patriotic again. Again refers to the brief period between the end of the Hitler-Stalin pact when the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union necessitated a sudden outburst of pro-war sentiment and the beginning of the Cold War when the Communists became the enemy again.

When the left acts as if WW2 was the only good war, it’s because it was the only war that didn’t force them to choose between their sympathies for Communism and their United States citizenship.

Every time they did have to make that choice, history records their duplicity and sordid treason.

The new left-wing patriotism doesn’t consist of actually loving this country. Or discarding their conviction that America is the worst thing that ever happened to this continent and this planet.

Instead, conveniently, the new patriotism consists of hating President Trump.

When Hillary’s people decided to shift the blame for losing the election from their unlikable candidate, their incompetent campaign operation and the good sense of the voters to a vast Russian conspiracy, the left became patriotic. And by “patriotic”, they mean blaming the results of an election on Russia.

It’s not that the left actually hates Russia. Before Hillary decided to blame the Russians for her own unlikability, she was mugging for the camera with one of Putin’s henchmen and wielding a misspelled Reset Button.

Why a reset button?

Back then the born-again patriots of the left had accused President Bush of alienating Russia (and the rest of the world) with his cowboy diplomacy. Obama and his team of sensitive diplomats would replace cowboy diplomacy with cowardly diplomacy. That was why Hillary’s people pried a swimming pool button out of a pool so she could show off the new “Reset” with Russia. It was why Obama sold out traditional allies to appease Putin. It was why he was caught on a hot mic telling another of Putin’s people that he would have more flexibility to appease him after the election.

All this has been forgotten in a rush of revisionist patriotism. Traitors now masquerade as patriots. Last year’s appeasers now stick out their chests and act as if they’re Ronald Reagan, not Jimmy Carter.

Don’t expect it to last. If you doubt that, Al Gore once attacked Bush for being soft on Saddam.

As tensions with Russia grow over Syria, the born-again patriots will be reborn as appeasers. The next Democrat will run for the White House promising to restore our relationship with Russia. And he’ll blame President Trump for ruining our previously congenial relations with cowboy diplomacy.

History will once again be rewritten. Russia was always our friend. Lefties were always advocates of diplomatic relations and opponents of wars. But we will have always been at war with Eastasia.

That’s the disgusting farce of the new lefty Russia hawks. They don’t hate Russia. They hate America. Give it two years and they’ll be on television explaining how Putin will love President Elizabeth Warren because she won’t offend or provoke the rest of the world by insisting on American greatness.

After eight years of betraying America to Chinese hackers, Iranian nuclear negotiators, Islamic terrorists from Iraq to Libya, Cuban Communists, Columbian narcoterrorists and yes, the dreaded Russians, the left wants us to believe that they have left behind the error of their ways and love this country again.

The lefty patriot has a lot in common with Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny: he doesn’t exist.

There’s more to patriotism than hating your political opponents. It’s not a negative emotion. It’s a positive one. It demands the degree of feeling that I heard from a man on a twilight porch in Montana as Fourth of July fireworks filled the sky, “God, I love this country!”

The difference is easy to spot.

Republicans stand by their country against foreign enemies no matter who is in the White House. Lefty patriotism however is a rare phenomenon that had previously only occurred when Democrats were in office. And even then, lefty patriotism is as unreliable as solar panels and wind turbines in January.

Every time we have fought a war, cameras could reliably spot leftists protesting against it. And yes, that even includes WW2.

Patriots don’t announce that they will move to Canada if the wrong guy wins the election.

The new progressive patriot doesn’t love this country. Even his newfound resentment of Russia is incidental. He hates Russia because of Trump. Once CNN and the New York Times detach Trump from Russia, he’ll see the wisdom of liking it again. Russia, like every other country except Israel, must be better than America. It’s better than the horrifying orgy of capitalists plundering the planet, racist police randomly shooting young black men, fundamentalists hating women, militarists plotting to bomb brown people and all the other hysterical leftist fantasies which are traced back to this country’s original sins.

America was founded by racist, capitalist slave-owners who stole the land from the Indians so they could open fast food franchises. That’s what the average college student is taught. It’s what the average leftist believes. How much love can he be expected to feel for America? About as much as you feel for Iran.

The new lefty patriotism is really anti-patriotism. It doesn’t really resent Russia. Instead it resents President Trump’s call for national greatness. Tying him to Russia is a cynical bid by traitors seeking their last refuge outside of their safe spaces and pronoun-free toilets in the sacred space of patriotism.

History tells us that lefty patriotism has a shorter life than some of the world’s rarest substances which can only be created in labs and whose very existence continues to be debated by feuding scientists.

This current phenomenon in which lefties briefly confuse their hatred of America, with their subsidiary hatred of President Trump and a sudden subsidiary resentment of Russia for foisting him on us by cleverly causing the Democrats to nominate a candidate with all the popular appeal of spoiled supermarket tuna, will pass. And it will pass quickly.

When the Washington Post fails to deliver their Watergate on time, when even the dimmest follower of Occupy Democrats realizes that pigs will fly into his front yard and uproot his Bernie 2020 sign before impeachment happens, they will turn to something else.

And the new tattered lefty patriotism will go back up to the attic to lie under their moldering American flags and their defaced copy of the Declaration of Independence. Sic transit gloria moonbat.