They won’t stand for the anthem or for a moment of silence.

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

Congressman Seth Moulton will be boycotting the moment of silence for the victims of the Las Vegas mass shooting. It’s not just NFL football players who take a knee during the anthem. It’s also Harvard grads who like to announce that they were “approached” to run for President of the United States.

The NFL’s millionaire racists are taking a knee to protest America. But why protest a moment of silence for the victims of the worst mass shooting in this country’s history even if you, like some lefties, think they’re a bunch of country-music listening, Trump-voting Republicans who don’t deserve any sympathy?

If you can’t stand for the anthem, can’t you at least stand for the innocent victims of a monstrous killer?

But, Moulton, like many Democrats, will instead take a knee over the bodies of the Las Vegas dead.

According to Moulton, he’s protesting in support of gun control and demanding, what he calls a, “universal background check”.

“There’s a lot of evidence that shows it would reduce the chances of crimes like these,” Moulton insisted. While all the facts aren’t in (and that hasn’t stopped Moulton or Hillary Clinton), but the evidence does show that the killer’s only previous brush with the law was a traffic citation.

How was a background check supposed to stop a guy with nothing in his background? Ask Moulton or Congressman Chris Murphy, who right on cue, is bringing a background check bill back.

Moulton and Murphy don’t know. And don’t care.

Congressman Moulton is however obscenely eager to upstage a moment of silence for the victims of the Las Vegas shootings to get 30 seconds of attention from CNN. And then maybe a gun control donor with deep pockets will ask him to run for the White House. Walking out on the victims of a brutal massacre is a small price to pay for winning the heart of a big billionaire donor like Michael Bloomberg.

His disgusting behavior isn’t an aberration. A number of Democrats, including Moulton, have boycotted previous moments of silence by staging publicity stunts for gun control. After an Islamic terrorist carried out the Pulse massacre in Orlando, Democrats boycotted it and then disrupted the aftermath.

When Paul Ryan asked that, “the House now observe a moment of silence in memory of the victims of the terrorist attack in Orlando”, Democrats began walking out.

It was a shocking and disgusting scene that, unlike the anthem protests, most Americans never saw because professional politics has far fewer viewers than professional football.

And deservedly so.

“As you bow your head and think of what you say to your God when you are asked what you did to slow the slaughter of innocents, there will be silence,” Congressman Himes, another Democrat, had ranted.

What the United States did was bomb ISIS targets. Omar Mateen, the Orlando terrorist, had been acting for the Islamic terror group. What Jim Himes did was fight the Muslim travel ban because slowing “the slaughter of innocents” by those who speak to Allah instead of God was never on his agenda.

As did Congresswoman Robin Kelly, who boycotted the moment of silence after the San Bernardino Massacre by Muslim terrorists, with one of her signature tantrums. “I can’t stand anymore,” Kelly had protested. Joining her in this refusal was Congresswoman Jackie Speier. “I’m not going to stand up for a moment of silence again,” the left-wing politician had insisted.

There were no shortage of Colin Kaepernicks in Congress.

Congresswoman Katherine Clark, who had boycotted the Orlando moment of silence, accused Republicans of having “blood on their hands” for not advancing gun control proposals that “could” prevent tragedies like this one. Instead of participating in the moment of silence, Clark had posed holding up a piece of paper reading “NoMoreSilence”. But sometimes silence is a good thing.

Accusing your fellow legislators of having bloody hands because they didn’t pass bills that you aren’t even sure would do any good, is despicable. Silence “could” be better. It would be far better.

But the entire preemptive gun control push is despicable. Democrat hacks accuse Republicans and conservatives of murder without actually knowing any of the facts. Or caring about the facts.

Hillary Clinton suggested that a measure to streamline the approval process for silencers could have led to an even worse massacre. And blamed the NRA. But a suppressor or silencer for the weapon used in the Las Vegas attack would have been anything but silent. And Hillary was digging into existing agenda items for opponents of the Second Amendment without caring about what had actually happened.

But that’s politics. And politics is often tacky and dishonest. Sometimes we rise above it.

The moment of silence is one of those times. Or at least it’s supposed to be. But like the anthem, the moments of decency and respect that once brought our nation together are being torn apart.

When Dallas County Sheriff Lupe Valdez asked attendees at the Democrat National Convention, “Please help me to honor all of America’s fallen officers with a moment of silence,” cries of Black Lives Matter and jeers filled the silence. The disgusting spectacle was a preview of the ugliness to come.

The Democrats don’t do moments of silence anymore. Respect for the fallen has become a foreign idea.

Especially if they’re the kind of fallen, police officers, soldiers or country music fans, whom you despise for political and cultural reasons. And whose humanity you choose not to recognize or respect.

Those politicians protesting the moment of silence claim that action is better than silence. But it’s in that moment of silence that we find the meaning and resolve to take action. The silence is not an absence. Instead it’s a moment of communion with a higher power, with our inner self and with the community of our fellow men and women. It’s the tradition of a religious people. And it’s alien and incomprehensible to the militantly secular leftist political movement that the Dems have become.

The anthem and the moment of silence were moments of communion that reminded us of who we are.

Democrats don’t just protest them, they don’t understand them. Patriotism and religion have no place in their lives. And silence is threatening because it forces them to be alone with people they don’t like.

Themselves.

When your idea of careerism is walking out on a moment of silence for the victims of a massacre, the last thing you want to do is look in a mirror or spend too much time alone with your thoughts.

If you do, you might realize that there is something wrong with the state of your soul.

As Democrats elbow each other to be the first out of the room for the moment of the silence, and then to be the first to yell about gun control once the moment has passed, as they accuse opponents of having “blood on the hands”, the ugliness inside them goes on pouring out like an endless stain.

When they have finished refusing to stand for the victims of the massacre, they will go back to refusing to stand for the anthem. And then they will find new moments of our common unity to disrupt.

What they hate most of all is the idea that there is a higher ideal than their politics in our national life and that what unites us isn’t party or politics, but our flag, our Constitution and our national community.

There’s always something that they can’t stand and won’t stand for. And that something is America.