Vicious vandalism at NYC’s 9/11 Memorial reveals the depth of leftists’ hatred

America’s left-wing fringe, which is increasingly indistinguishable from the Democratic Party mainstream, absolutely hates our nation.

Take the latest example: Jonathan Andrew Tijerina, the punk who just desecrated the 9/11 Memorial Reflecting Pool in downtown Manhattan.

Earlier this week, Tijerina was arrested and charged for an act of brazen, iconoclastic vandalism.

In broad daylight, the 31-year-old spray-painted — over the engraved names of dozens of those killed on that terrible day 25 years ago — a plug for his silly little anti-gun website: “Juststopkillingkids.com.”

Tijerina made no attempt to hide his dirty deed.

On the contrary, he boasted about it on social media, saying he was “trying to spread awareness” about gun violence.

One imagines Hamas’ paragliders said the same thing as they donned GoPro cameras before swooping into the Nova music festival.

But if the goal was to spread awareness of Tijerina’s utter callousness, then he was successful.

The human atrocities of 9/11 are not from a distant past — something we’ve only encountered in a history textbook.

Real families continue grappling with the fallout: Husbands are still grieving fallen wives; young adults are still mourning lost fathers.

It appears Tijerina targeted panels 70 and 71 of the memorial, which list the names of the murdered workers from Windows on the World, the dining complex at the top of the North Tower.

They were average Joes and Janes who just went to work as chefs and waiters on that pristine Tuesday morning.

Tijerina defaced them heedlessly.

He should rot in jail for a while, but he probably won’t, not while Soros-backed Alvin Bragg remains Manhattan’s district attorney.

But the issue is much bigger than one dim-witted and attention-starved punk.

We can — and should — draw a direct line from Tijerina’s stunt to the sacrilegious monument and statue vandalism that was a staple of the 2020 Black Lives Matter uproar.

During that dreadful summer’s “1619 Riots,” leftist agitators defaced or tore down statues of Christopher Columbus, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Ulysses S. Grant, Francis Scott Key and countless others.

Not even preserving the Union and ending slavery was enough to satiate the anarchists: They went after Abraham Lincoln, too.

In 1861, the Great Emancipator praised “the mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land.”

With the nation on the cusp of ruinous carnage, Lincoln appealed to “the better angels of our nature.”

It didn’t work. Fort Sumter was attacked just over a month later.

But Lincoln made a profound point: A nation needs a shared memory and a shared consciousness.

It needs shared cultural touchstones, and it needs a shared sense of that which is sacred and that which is profane.

Do we share any of those things today?

Many on the left are summoning the worse angels of their nature to answer resoundingly: “No.”

The left is now dominated by an anti-American movement that hates our history — even its most uncontroversial heroes, as the Washington and Lincoln defacements show.

It hates our people — and perhaps especially our working and middle classes, as Tijerina’s Windows on the World slip proved.

It hates all of it — and all of us.

It rejects our particular “mystic chords of memory” for the Marxist fantasy of a universal revolution of the proletariat.

It rejects our biblical inheritance for the unholy “red-green” stew of ersatz-religious wokeism and fanatical-religious Islamism.

It rejects our constitutional order for what Lincoln, in an 1838 speech, decried as the “mobocratic spirit.”

In each era of American political, civic and cultural life, there is at least one defining divide.

In Lincoln’s own time, the divide was between free and slave — between Union and secession.

In our own era, the defining divide is between civilization and barbarism.

A Third Worldist mind virus is metastasizing like a cancer on the American left.

The Third Worldists have nothing but scorn for the nation that is the economic, entrepreneurial and cultural envy of the whole world — the rest of the First World included.

They want to tear it all down.

And some of them, like Tijerina and the 2020 rioters, take that sentiment quite literally.

The American right is far from perfect, but it is a basically pro-America, pro-Western movement.

Given the stark dichotomy of the moment, let’s fervently hope that will be more than enough to prevail in the elections this Tuesday.

Josh Hammer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and author of “Israel and Civilization: The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West.”