Bill Maher to Young Democrats: Stop Hating America Already

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I feel like he’s said this before, but Bill Maher hones in on a real problem here:

Here’s the Daily Caller piece from last month:

A recent Harvard poll revealed a stark divide in national pride among young Americans, with only 24% of young Democrats expressing pride in being American compared to a striking 76% of young Republicans who share that sentiment.

The poll found a significant divide between young Democrats and Republicans, as well as independents. The poll surveyed 2,096 Americans from 18 to 29 years old nationally. The pollsters carried out their surveys from March 14 to March 25.

Among Democrat respondents, 54% said they are embarrassed to be Americans while 21% said they are neither. For Republicans, it was 8% and 16% respectively.

The poll’s findings indicate broader trends of declining trust in government institutions and diverging views on what it means to be American. A mere 19% of young Americans trust the federal government to consistently act in the best interest of the public, according to poling. 18% of respondents expressed trust in Congress, 23% in the president and 29% in the U.S. Supreme Court.

When asked about values central to American identity, 35% of respondents across party lines selected “individual rights and freedoms” as the most important. However, sharp partisan differences emerged beyond this shared priority. Young Democrats identified “diversity and inclusion” — 28% — and “democracy and civic participation” — 22% — as central to American identity, whereas young Republicans focused on “economic opportunity and upward mobility” — 27% — and “Christian values” — 21%.

And as if on cue to prove Maher right, here’s The Daily Show’s Ronny Chieng on U.S. citizenship:

Ronny Chieng, a Malaysian-born correspondent and host for The Daily Show, recently became a United States citizen.

He described the experience as akin to “joining an evil empire” on Friday’s Variety‘s Awards Circuit Podcast.

Chieng said he moved to the US in 2015 to pursue his comedy career and applied for citizenship while President Barack Obama was still in office.

Almost a decade later, now as an American citizen, the stand-up comedian said he routinely turns down international gigs – in part because he does not know if he could come back if he left.

“It’s kind of 30 years in the making, in the sense that I’ve been trying to come back to America since I left in ’93 when I was seven years old,” he said on the podcast. “I’ve been trying to come back to do stand-up comedy, and I finally got to come back in 2015, 10 years ago, and then citizenship nine years later.”

He added that “it’s a weird time to do it,” because it was America’s cultural exports that attracted him, not things like the Iraq War.

“So it’s weird to join,” he said. “It’s like you’re joining this evil empire, but that’s not why you joined it. It just so happened, the evil empire had some really nice TV shows, and they do stand and they do stand-up comedy in The Death Star.”