Commentary: Liberal Patriots Are a Greater Threat than Leftist Revolutionaries

Jun 23, 2025
Jacob Grandstaff
Preserving America's Heritage | Commentary

A Tale of Two Liberal Americas: Institutionalists and Traitorous Revolutionaries. Here's why the institutionalists are worse.

Recent riots and protests display the stark divide within the Left, exemplified by the contrasting optics of the younger, violent anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) riots and the older, largely peaceful No Kings rallies. One seeks to overthrow the U.S.; the other seeks to co-opt it. Those seeking to co-opt it pose the greater danger to America.

On platforms like X and Reddit, many liberals voiced discomfort with the anti-ICE protesters in Los Angeles for waving Mexican flags—among other non-American flags—urging them instead to brandish the Stars and Stripes. These "optics liberals," often affluent and highly supportive of the country's institutions, seek to harness the raw radicalism of leftist street revolutionaries while carefully maintaining their respectable middle-class image to avoid alienating the American electorate.

The problem, however, is liberal institutionalists don't fully understand the revolutionaries or their motives. They mistake genuine radicalism for grievance, and revolutionary aesthetics for Instaworthy fashion.

While the revolutionaries’ violence grabs headlines, the institutionalists pose a greater long-term threat to the nation’s fabric. Institutionalists' worldview enables and emboldens the radicals, fostering an anti-American ideology that undermines the country’s cohesion, sovereignty, and native-born working-class communities.

(READ MORE: American Workers Are Thriving in Trump's Economy)

The Two Faces of the Left

Beginning with the anti-Iraq War protests, which helped Democrats flip both houses of Congress in 2006, Democrats have sought to translate popular discontent into voter mobilization. But after convincing disparate groups that genociders founded the U.S. on stolen land, built it into a rich country through slavery, and their descendants maintain it through capitalist exploitation, it's hard to convince them to settle for preserving Medicaid and a few more green cards.

The institutionalists, often affluent and embedded in the Democrat Party, academia, nonprofit, and corporate spheres, are often former radicals themselves or descendants of pre-Cold War communists. However, they've long since moderated and traded street radicalism for academic and nonprofit positions, boardroom seats, and comfy bureaucratic jobs in Washington, D.C. and its environs.

These middle-class and wealthy insiders justify their opulent lifestyles and privileged positions by reminding themselves and others that they serve the public, whether through academia, government, or nonprofits. Those who partake in the capitalist system often seek to use their positions to reorient companies away from a singular profit motive—BlackRock being the most notorious example.

Their children frequently join street protests, such as the 2020 Black Lives Matter demonstrations or the recent anti-ICE riots, just as many of their bourgeois forebears made common cause with violent union rabble a century ago.

They pay lip service to anti-colonialism, yet they support spreading liberal democracy abroad—often mirroring the colonialism they critique.

The revolutionaries are a heterogeneous group of foreign nationalists and communists who take the institutionalists' worldview to its logical extreme. Inspired by figures like "historians" Howard Zinn and Edward Said, they view the U.S. as an illegitimate nation built on stolen land and maintained by systemic oppression and colonialism.

Some are outright communists, often influenced by Chinese interests. Others are foreign ethno-nationalists who flaunt their foreign identity on American soil. Unlike the affluent institutionalists, these revolutionaries are typically lower middle class or poor, working in service industries and lacking institutional power.

This faction has less to lose and is more likely to turn protests into riots. Unlike liberal institutionalists, these people really do hate America, its history, and its institutions. For them, the U.S. is not a nation to reform but one to dismantle, either through fragmentation or a communist revolution.

Anti-ICE Riots vs. No Kings Rallies

The anti-ICE riots in Los Angeles showcased the revolutionaries’ side. Rioters waving Mexican, Palestinian, and other foreign flags engaged in property destruction and attacked ICE agents and other law enforcement officers.

This provoked widespread online seething by liberals unaccustomed to the total loss of narrative control.

"The radicals on our side are so stupid," complained The Young Turks founder Cenk Uygur. "Why do you need to burn Waymos and American flags? What does that prove, other than what Trump wants to prove, that you are against America, violent and dangerous?"

cenk-uygur.png

As an accomplished naturalized citizen, Uygur suffers from the same misunderstanding as most champagne socialists when it comes to the immigrant Left that seeks to colonize the U.S. rather than assimilate into it.

Travis Akers, a former committee member on Jacksonville Mayor Donna Deegan's (D)'s Military and Veterans Affairs Committee and a retired U.S. Navy Intelligence Officer, reminded the protesters that waiving a foreign flag to avoid deportation would not help them.

Contrary to what many conservatives believe, liberal institutionalists do expect immigrants to conform to American culture and naturalized citizens to assimilate. The difference is that they want immigrants to conform and assimilate to their view of America as a diverse economic zone for international overachievers and an evolving experiment for liberal ideas.

The horrible optics of masked rioters waving foreign flags atop burned-out cars proved too much even for many Redditors, who tried to scold their comrades into compliance.

ice-protest-reddit.jpg

But the very idea of "a nation of immigrants" gives many newcomers the idea they can cling to the feuds, norms, and political systems of their native countries while demanding the rights and financial blessings of their American hosts. Besides, the institutions pursue many of the same goals, albeit incrementally. Corporations replace native-born Americans, universities cater to foreign students, and nonprofits—often taxpayer-funded—facilitate the arrival and resettlement of foreigners, all with no expectation of cultural or ethnic assimilation.

It's only natural that Palestinian nationalist immigrants would take out their ire at Israel on Jewish Americans, or Mexican nationalists would feel entitled to colonize the Southwest.

Native communists, meanwhile, also take the propaganda from the institutional Left to its logical conclusion. If capitalism is destructive and racist, why preserve the system at all?

Keeping a lid on this revolutionary faction of the Left remains elusive to the institutionalists. The anti-white, anti-colonialist view of history remains the dominant historiography that guides American students' understanding of their own history.

Conversely, the No Kings protests showed obvious institutionalist orchestration. Protesters framed their angst in patriotic terms and liberal generalities to paint President Donald Trump as a would-be monarch, akin to Britain's King George III. In rhetoric and actions, the difference between these and the anti-ICE protests could not be starker. Featuring scared, older Democrat voters, they more resembled the weak anti-Trump protests in January and February.

 "The photos of all the Mexican flags at ICE protests are powerful. But can you imagine if the imagery was next to America flags[?]"posted an anonymous supporter of the 50501 Movement, an anti-Trump organization founded by Redditors. "The right is going to use that image of a man with a flag on a burning car as their "why." I think in No Kings Day we reclaim the flag and stand beside the flags of our fellow immigrants and Americans."

50501.jpg

Jeanette Padilla Vega, the CEO of Food Justice Coalition, warned her followers, "This is a super important PSA for anyone who is going to be protesting soon, especially if you're going to the No Kings Protest this Saturday, June 14, please, for now, put away your pride flags, put away your Palestinian flags, put away your Mexican flags. Bring out your American flags. . . . Please consider the optics for this June 14 protest."

Just as the revolutionaries deliver pallets of bricks and anti-riot gear to their comrades, the institutionalists delivered boxes of American flags to their voters.

Leftist revolutionaries, understandably sick of institutionalist elitists' perpetual optics scolding and incrementalism, excoriated her for it. One commenter wrote, "This is like telling the Jews to waive the Nazi flag during the Holocaust."

The Institutionalist Danger

While the revolutionaries’ antics provoke disgust among patriots of all political persuasions, it's important to remember they are here because liberal patriots invited the foreigners and radicalized the natives.

Whether foreign ethno-nationalists or native communists, radicals are at least more sincere than the liberal institutionalists. Their ignorance of optics and disinterest in achieving change through the ballot box make them easier to defeat, deport, and incarcerate. But until patriotic liberals are deinstitutionalized, Americans will continue to see cars burn and foreign flags waive in their streets every five years.

These mostly white liberals continue to be overrepresented in the bureaucracy, academia, media, and think tank world. Despite the internet weakening their grip, their influence on public opinion remains strong, as does their ability to counter-attack after short-term setbacks.

Worse, when liberals become appalled at their tribe's barbarians, they often infiltrate the Right with little self-reflection or political conversion. For conservatives bereft of celebrity allies and intellectuals, hearing liberal turncoats plagiarize Ronald Reagan's "I didn't leave the Democratic Party, the party left me" is all they need to grant VIP access to conservatism's platform committee.

(RELATED: "Conservative Influencer" Lindy Li’s Ties to the CCP Go Deeper than We Knew)

How to Unite the Country Behind Real American Patriotism

For conservatives seeking lasting victory in American politics, defeating liberal institutionalists is paramount.

The revolutionaries, while disruptive, lack the power to enact systemic change outside of a few enclaves like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle.

As long as liberal elitists control the institutions, they will shape public discourse and policy to incrementally turn America into the country the revolutionaries want immediately. Their narrative of America as a country defined by flaws and ideas rather than strengths and soil legitimizes the revolutionaries’ call for dismantling the country conservatives know and love.

The Right can deport illegal and subversive aliens. The institutionalists will simply import more.

The Right can incarcerate and silence native-born communists. The institutionalists will simply create more.

Lasting change will only come when the Right makes the institutions great again by replacing liberal idealism with conservative realism.

Liberal elites' worldview clashes with human nature, denying them a democratic majority despite their institutional grip. To compensate, they try to recreate the Civil Rights moment of the 1960s every few years by weaponizing minorities and immigrants. Once weaponized, however, many of their street radicals get out of hand. This forces them to organize protests like No Kings to rein them in. Those who realize the futility of keeping their radicals in line often abandon the mission but not their ideals, which they try to achieve by infiltrating the Right.

Although street revolutionaries' violence and anti-American outburst capture attention, patriotic, institutionalist liberals pose the more insidious and enduring threat to America's unity and identity. Embedded within the Democrat Party, academia, nonprofits, media and many corporate spheres, affluent liberal elites still wield enough influence to shape public discourse and policy. The recent anti-ICE and No Kings protests displayed this dynamic. Only by dismantling their institutional grip can the Right hope to restore America's cohesion and keep once-great American cities from turning into warzones every five years.

(READ MORE: Tesla Terror Attacks Show Americans Aren’t Buying the Left’s Fake ‘Grassroots’ Game Anymore)

Jacob Grandstaff is an Investigative Researcher for Restoration News specializing in election integrity and labor policy. He graduated from the National Journalism Center in Washington, D.C.

Email Jacob HERE

Related Articles

Get Involved

Join Restoration of America today and receive the latest updates, news, and ways to get involved with our efforts!

By  providing your phone number and checking this box, you are consenting  to receive calls and text messages, including autodialed and automated  calls and texts, to that number from Restoration of America. Message and  data rates may apply. Reply "STOP" to opt-out. Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions apply.