The new "You're either with us, or with the enemy"

The rhetoric from the right has been getting more and more frenzied these past couple years.  I suppose that's what happens when your absurdly racist party is simultaneously confronted with a Scary Black Man President and increasing evidence of your slide into irrelevance as your single priority of "taking care of rich straight cis white Christian male businessmen" becomes ever-clearer at the same time that that particular demographic is shrinking compared to the size of every other demographic that you've made it quite obvious you hate.  So the bit I came across today isn't *surprising*, but it is, I think, something to note.

There's plenty to unpack in this particular off-the-rails screed from Don Feder of World Congress of [Cishet 2-Parent Unlimited-Children White Christian] Families about how Obama is totez gonna start rounding up conservatives and putting them in concentration camps any day now (and what IS it with these people and their Holocaust-appropriation fetish anyway?), but there was one line in particular that jumped out at me.

Recall Obama’s bitter-clinger remarks from the 2008 campaign – identifying resistance to his message primarily among those who cling to religion, guns and "anti-immigrant" sentiment. Think of his anti-nationalism (including the rejection of American exceptionalism) and attacks on the family, via same-sex "marriage" and taking medical decisions out of the family’s hands.

As an aside, "taking medical decisions out of the family's hands" is something to condemn when it's Democrats making it possible for people to even *consider* making medical decisions at all via expanded access to health insurance and health services, but taking medical decisions out of people's hands is awesome when it comes to Republicans legislating pregnancy and reproductive decisions? Uh huh. We see you, hypocrites.
But the part that got me here was the bit about "rejection of American exceptionalism" as equivalent to anti-nationalism.

If you don't believe the U.S. is inherently superior to all other nations on this planet, you are anti-nationalist.  If you do not believe we're better than everyone else, you hate America.  There is no middle ground.  There is no patriotism that allows for any understanding or critical examination of this nation's flaws.  If you don't uncritically laud everything America does as awesome simply because it was done by "the best country on Earth", it's a sign that you hate America and everything the country stands for.

(Considering that, if you look at our history, we have spent a lot of time and effort on standing for greed, corruption, imperialism, colonialism, warmongering, and genocide, I'm not sure why we *shouldn't* hate at least a solid portion of what this country "stands for", but that's a whole other conversation.)

Twelve years ago, Dubya famously said, "If you're not with us, you're with the terrorists."

They've put it in fancy euphemisms and made a dog-whistle of it, but it's the same sentiment.  If you fail to believe 100% that this is God's Country and we can do no wrong, if you fail to uncritically support everything this nation does, you are the enemy.

And they wonder why I'm far more afraid of conservatives in my own country than I've ever been of nebulous "terrorists" halfway across the world.