By Debbie Schlussel

Happy Independence Day. America is 240 years old today. But how many more years will she have? 240 years ago today, we did our own Brexit. Now, we may need another, including an Islamexit. But first, I want to note about how lucky we all are.

Great National Anthem Video Sung by Jewish Choir, “Kol Ish” . . .

If you’re an American today, you are very lucky as am I. I’m lucky to be here, lucky to be alive, and very lucky to be an American. My maternal grandparents were Holocaust survivors. Their parents and most of their siblings were murdered by the Nazis, so I am alive with G-d’s grace. My paternal grandparents came here at the turn of the century to escape European anti-Semitism. But my paternal grandmother was nearly unique of her 11 or so siblings. Her poor parents sent her here to live with her great-aunt and great-uncle, but only one of her brothers survived the Holocaust. So, again, it’s only because of G-d’s favor that I’m here. I’m lucky my four immigrant grandparents made it to America and had the opportunity to work hard and build a life for my parents, and they for me. Only in America. Today, I celebrate that good fortune.

Voices of Glory sing “G-d Bless America” . . .

But today I also look at how precarious that good fortune is because our country could crumble from creeping developments over the last few decades, but especially the last decade and a half. In a few generations we may lose the country my family gained just a few generations ago.

Like you, I’m proud to be an American. So lucky and so grateful. But I’m also depressed and disturbed by where we are going. I fear it won’t last another 240 years. We no longer have immigrants like my grandparents who were given nothing when they came here but worked hard and sacrificed and adopted American culture as their own. They idolized the “dead old White European men” who founded this country–the ones who are now reviled. Yes, dead old White European men built this country (some of them Jews, who were present at the founding, contributed to America’s advancement, and fought in every war America fought, including the Revolutionary War), not the Muslims that kids are now being taught created America in some way (that never happened).

Christians and Jews created and built America, not Mohammed and La Raza. Oh, and they were usually married and had their kids within that marriage. Men were men, women were women, and the family was nuclear before there was anything actually nuclear. America had religion, not hip-hop. It had assimilation and liberal democracy, not multi-culturalism and endless tolerance for the most intolerant of religions (the culture of hijabs and niqabs and burqas and Jew-hatred and mass murder of Christians).

But, sadly, on this 240th anniversary of America’s independence, none of that is the case anymore. And it’s not for the better.

Today on my Twitter feed (follow me on Twitter), I noticed many tweets retweeted by Citizenship and Immigration Services (CIS), the part of Homeland Security that is supposed to vet the backgrounds of immigrants seeking citizenship and barely does the job, spending less than five minutes on average per application. The tweets CIS people were promoting were those lauding swearing-in ceremonies held today for new citizens. I asked myself: of the thousands of new citizens sworn in today, how many were from Muslim countries? How many of them hate Jews and Christians and are here for what they can harvest from America, including jihadist recruits and converts to Islam? How many of them morally support HAMAS and ISIS? If it’s even one, it’s far too many. And we know it’s many more than one.

How many of them support jihad? #tcot #gop #FourthofJuly Happy 4th of July https://t.co/tQenfDxejy #islam #jihad

— Debbie Schlussel (@DebbieSchlussel) July 4, 2016

How many Muslims sworn in today as U.S. Citizens hate Jews and morally support ISIS & HAMAS? A lot more than you think #tcot #gop #islam

— Debbie Schlussel (@DebbieSchlussel) July 4, 2016

So while many Americans cheer on Brexit as a sign of hope for the West, while many cheer on Donald Trump for saying what they want to hear on immigration and the economy, we’ve lost our country. Lost it long ago. The new Americans, who’ve been coming here in droves since at least 9/11–they got rewarded for murdering 3,000 of us–and many of them are jihadists in mind and spirit if not in deed.

We’re often lectured about how America is a “land of immigrants,” how the Statue of Liberty has that Emma Lazarus poem welcoming them in. But America was a land of immigrants who were European inventors and great minds who advanced American science and technology and thought. Last week, Alvin Toffler died. Regardless of his dalliance with Marxism, he was an example of one of those minds–a Jewish European immigrant to America. He predicted future trends and opened the American mind for advances. At the end of May, Andrew Grove–the father of the semiconductor revolution as the head of Intel–died. He was an immigrant and Holocaust survivor from Hungary. These were the kinds of immigrants that used to make up America.

Not any more.

They were men like Alexander Hamilton. Yes, the hip-hop musical on Broadway wants you to think Alexander was a “Black” hip-hop artist and rapper. And the musical’s creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda, has said he wants you to think of immigrants today as you watch his play about Hamilton. But Alexander Hamilton was a great man who wrote most of the Federalist Papers, founded the New York Post, and was the first Treasury Secretary. He was a Founding Father, a promoter of the Constitution, the founder of the National Bank, and founder of the Federalist Party. Regardless of what you think of his expansion of the federal powers, this was a great man. This was a prized immigrant. Today’s immigrants are not like him. Not even close.

Today, the immigrants are Middle Eastern Muslims who immediately get on public assistance and include ISIS and Al-Qaeda terrorists. Terrorists who killed our military men over there and terrorists in waiting over here. They are believers in sharia and extremism who want America to bend to them, not the other way around. They no longer assimilate. There is no melting in the melting pot, other than them forcing us to melt into them. And there are several-time criminals from Latin America who keep coming back. And, yes, there are hard-working immigrants from the Latino countries, but they take jobs from Americans. So do Indian and Pakistanis who come here under H1-B visas that are meant only for jobs that cannot be filled by Americans (though that’s never how it works).

There are no Andy Groves or Alvin Tofflers. There aren’t inventors or philosophers. There is only a lower-level, unskilled, uneducated group of new citizens who do not care about our culture and who subvert it. A group of people who do not respect our civil liberties and want to take them away. That’s who Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg wants more of in our country. Have you been Zucked yet? America has.

The people we are bringing in are no different than the Muslims, er . . . “foreign youths,” who gang-raped 35 young women aged 12-17 at a Swedish music festival over the weekend. They do it there. They do it here. Just as they do it all over the Muslim Middle East.

And then there are the Americans who are native-born citizens. A growing number of them are Muslim. A bigger group–the dominant group–are Hispanic. Nothing wrong with Hispanics, many of whom are also upset about the immigration problem. But it seems everyone–especially the media–is celebrating that a shrinking number of Americans are White Europeans because the new racism says we are to be pilloried and our end cheered. We must preserve our common heritage and culture, but we aren’t. And America as we know it is disappearing. Not for the better.

And the largest group of native-born Americans are those who are more likely to be able to name every Kardashian and Jenner (and his/her current gender self-identification) and every unreal but “Real” housewife, but cannot name a single founding father and have no idea what today is about. A poll says 60% of Americans have no idea why we are celebrating today, other than to eat hot dogs, watch fireworks, and go to sales.

For most Americans today, their “independence” is from common sense or actual deep thought about anything. They say the IQ for critical thinking is 120. But about 80% of Americans have an IQ below that. If you’re reading this site, congratulations: you’ve got a brain and a higher IQ than four out of every five Americans. Sadly, the other four of the five often vote. They brought us eight years of Bush and told us he was a “conservative” and “tough on terrorism” (he was neither), during which both Muslim immigration and the Muslim population of America at least doubled along with the number of mosques here. And they brought us eight years of Barack Hussein and Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama, during which these problems and many others got even worse and now we have a healthcare system that is truly broken. How the heck is your paying through the nose for Lakeisha in the ghetto’s healthcare while you now struggle to pay for your own, “independence” of any kind? It isn’t. And, now, they will bring us probably eight more years of Clintonista Disease, during which we will lose even more of our country, our freedoms, and our independence.

Another “independence” we sadly have in America today: independence from fathers and any sense of personal and familial responsibility in America. We now have nearly half of American babies being born out of wedlock and growing. America’s welfare system has caused our society to be “independent” of fathers, decent moral and social values, and a stable family life and fully dependent on welfare and entitlements. The more you the taxpayer have to pay for that, the less independent you will be.

And for those who tell us that America is about freedom and that this somehow means opening up the gates to millions of those who hate us and whose cultures hate our culture, I ask them, how “independent” will you be wearing a burqa or paying the jizya and being treated as a second-class citizen because you are not Muslim? That is what will happen. We will keep losing more and more of our independence until ultimately we will have none in just a few generations. All because we were not independent enough to say no and to close our borders and kick those who are unwanted out.

Britain did a Brexit just last week. We did a Brexit 240 years ago. Maybe it’s time for another. Sadly, the very malefactors we need to exit from are here. We need them to exit us. And they won’t.

So on this 240th anniversary of our independence from tyranny, enjoy this false sense of independence while you still can. We’re free today, but our grandchildren and great-grandchildren may not be. And they will certainly be less free than we are today, just as we are less free than our parents were.

Happy 240th America. Let Freedom Ring. While It Still Can.

***

Even though it’s not Memorial or Veterans Day, we still must remember the reason we are free and independent today: the members of our Armed Forces serving here and around the world, many of whom have given life and limb. Thanks for your service and helping ensure our freedom.

The other reason we’re free: the Second Amendment. Without that, forget about the rest of the freedoms in the Bill of Rights, including and especially the First Amendment.

***

Remember, below is what today is all about–these men were real men, sadly unequaled by most Americans (if any) today. Great men made America great, not the other way around. Now, we have mediocre and worse men, women, and CaitlynJenners who make America mediocre . . . or worse.

The Declaration of Independence

Adopted by Congress on July 4, 1776

The Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

John Trumbull’s Famous Painting of the Great Men Who Made America Great

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. –Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his governors to pass laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of representation in the legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved representative houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the legislative powers, incapable of annihilation, have returned to the people at large for their exercise; the state remaining in the meantime exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavored to prevent the population of these states; for that purpose obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither, and raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands.

He has obstructed the administration of justice, by refusing his assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers.

He has made judges dependent on his will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies without the consent of our legislature.

He has affected to render the military independent of and superior to civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation:

For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by mock trial, from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these states:

For cutting off our trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing taxes on us without our consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of trial by jury:

For transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses:

For abolishing the free system of English laws in a neighboring province, establishing therein an arbitrary government, and enlarging its boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule in these colonies:

For taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws, and altering fundamentally the forms of our governments:

For suspending our own legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated government here, by declaring us out of his protection and waging war against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burned our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow citizens taken captive on the high seas to bear arms against their country, to become the executioners of their friends and brethren, or to fall themselves by their hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare, is undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms: our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have we been wanting in attention to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace friends.

We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress, assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name, and by the authority of the good people of these colonies, solemnly publish and declare, that these united colonies are, and of right ought to be free and independent states; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as free and independent states, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do. And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.

New Hampshire: Josiah Bartlett, William Whipple, Matthew Thornton

Massachusetts: John Hancock, Samual Adams, John Adams, Robert Treat Paine, Elbridge Gerry

Rhode Island: Stephen Hopkins, William Ellery

Connecticut: Roger Sherman, Samuel Huntington, William Williams, Oliver Wolcott

New York: William Floyd, Philip Livingston, Francis Lewis, Lewis Morris

New Jersey: Richard Stockton, John Witherspoon, Francis Hopkinson, John Hart, Abraham Clark

Pennsylvania: Robert Morris, Benjamin Rush, Benjamin Franklin, John Morton, George Clymer, James Smith, George Taylor, James Wilson, George Ross

Delaware: Caesar Rodney, George Read, Thomas McKean

Maryland: Samuel Chase, William Paca, Thomas Stone, Charles Carroll of Carrollton

Virginia: George Wythe, Richard Henry Lee, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Harrison, Thomas Nelson, Jr., Francis Lightfoot Lee, Carter Braxton

North Carolina: William Hooper, Joseph Hewes, John Penn

South Carolina: Edward Rutledge, Thomas Heyward, Jr., Thomas Lynch, Jr., Arthur Middleton

Georgia: Button Gwinnett, Lyman Hall, George Walton

These men disagreed on many things before they signed this and after. They had many long debates about this–the very first “Brexit”–and many wanted to remain a province of the British and their king. That was the easy way out–to have a government encroaching on their lives that also paid for everything, every bit of bad behavior. But they finally realized that independence was the only way. Signing and declaring independence from Britain was not an easy thing. It was a daunting thing, especially in that time in a relatively new land with many unknowns and a lot of unconquered territory to the West. Yet, they showed the courage, the balls to do so. Do we have anyone with that kind of courage today?

The leadership and bravery of these men, with the help of G-d, are the reasons why our country exists and is still here today, well more than two centuries later, and their absence–the absence of men like them–is why we sit on such a precipice today. Let’s never forget their sacrifices and protect our freedom tirelessly. And let’s try to emulate them a little more in a day and age when “sacrifice” is watching “Game of Thrones” on a DVR instead of when it airs.

There are NO men or women in America’s leadership or elected office today who are anything like these men. None. Not even close.

Happy Birthday, America. I hope, G-d*-willing, better days are ahead for us and not behind us.

We need another Brexit. But this time, it may be too late.

* I do not write out the full name of G-d, as this is against the Jewish religion and is considered using the name in vain.