Monday’s PBS News Hour marked America’s upcoming 250th anniversary in typically perverse fashion, turning the national story inside out and showing, in the words from the introduction by substitute anchor William Brangham, how “America's celebrations have always been plagued by a deeper contradiction, a nation devoted to liberty while repeatedly denying it to millions of its own people.” Brangham introduced News Hour co-host Geoff Bennett’s taped interview with left-wing Princeton prof Eddie Glaude Jr. about his new book America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation's Anniversaries. CO-HOST GEOFF BENNETT: This book, you open it with a striking line. You write: "I do not love America and never have, especially now." Why did you choose to begin there? What are you asking readers to reconsider about their relationship to this country? The author responded with a sad anecdote from his childhood involving being called a racist slur, then used it as an excuse to ditch patriotism for life. EDDIE GLAUDE: ….So I'm really asking the question, how can you expect me to love the country, given the reality of my experience and the experience of race in the country? Asked by Bennett why criticism can’t be “an act of love,” he responded by casting aspersions on patriotism: GLAUDE JR.: ….I'm more interested, Geoff, in loving closer to the ground, not the abstractions, because whenever I hear a certain kind of invocation of patriotism, it sounds to my ear like a Rebel yell. Asked why criticism of the United States can’t be “an act of love,” author and professor Eddie Glaude Jr. responded by likening patriotism to white supremacy "....whenever I hear a certain kind of invocation of patriotism, it sounds to my ear like a rebel yell." pic.twitter.com/RNonT97Xp3 — Clay Waters