Here’s a quick hitter for you before bed, but be warned. It may cost you some sleep because you’ll be too busy laughing out loud after reading this.

Enter The Los Angeles Times. You see, they’ve decided that the Star Spangled Banner is racist (insert squeaky Tucker Carlson inflection here) and that it’s time to seek a replacement. While this isn’t a new suggestion, as crazed destruction of American history has become a left-wing sport at this point, the Times takes it a bit further with perhaps the dumbest replacement suggestion yet.

It's time to cancel 'The Star-Spangled Banner.' Here's what should replace it https://t.co/O0TsooIBIU

— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) July 14, 2020

The writer begins by noting that Francis Scott Key’s statue in San Francisco was torn down, as if that’s some kind of evidentiary point to his evil nature.

At least this is how the monument used to appear. Today, Francis Scott Key is no longer in Golden Gate Park. On June 20, protesters lassoed the statue with ropes, heaved and hoed, and down came Key, somersaulting off the pediment, head o’er heels. Key was a slave owner, like many of the historical personages whose statues have been defaced and destroyed in the Black Lives Matter uprising that followed the May 25 killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. But it was also Key’s role as a songwriter — his famous ode to the land of the free and the home of the brave — that made him a target for protesters.

Yes, I’m sure the “protestors” were really concerned about the intricate arguments surround the Star Spangled Banner and not, you know, just tearing stuff down. After all, it’s not like they also destroyed monuments to Catholic Missionaries in the same riot. Oh wait, yes they did.

Later, we get to the meat of the article, which is to proclaim that the National Anthem itself is racist.

A petition posted on Change.org advocated dropping the song as the national anthem, pointing to “elitist, sexist, and racist” verses in Key’s poem, “Defence of Fort M’Henry,” from which “The Star-Spangled Banner” was adapted. The poem, written by Key on Sept. 14, 1814, after he witnessed the bombardment of an American fort by British ships in Baltimore Harbor, includes the lines: “No refuge could save the hireling and slave/From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave.”

As is noted, the scholarly interpretation of that line is that the term slave is referring to subjects of the British Crown at the time. Of course, even if he was talking about literal slaves, it’s still a stretch to call it “racist.” In the end, he was simply noting what he saw. Slavery was a reality in 1814 whether those that want to rewrite history are comfortable with discussing it or not.

But it was the suggestion of what to replace the country’s anthem with that was the best part of the write-up. Did they research and find some alternative soaring song that denotes the national greatness of The United States of America? Nah, this is their suggestion.

But if we must have an anthem, it should be far different than the one we’ve got now, positing another kind of patriotism, an alternative idea of America and Americanness. It would also be neat if it was, you know, a decent song, which a citizen could sing without crashing into an o’er or a thee, or being asked to pole vault across octaves.

In fact, there is such a song. The song is “Lean on Me.”

Yes, Lean On Me is what the writer believes should be our new National Anthem. This is real life. Here’s their reasoning.

It doesn’t march to a martial beat or rise to grand crescendos. The lyrics hold no pastoral images of fruited plains or oceans white with foam, no high-minded invocations of liberty or God. “Lean on Me” is a deeply American song — but it’s not, explicitly at least, a song about America.

Well, we wouldn’t want any lyrics which espouse the best parts of America, nor anything that invokes that icky God character, right? Heck, let’s have an anthem that’s not even about the country it’s supposed to be honoring. Instead, we can just sing a 70s soul ballad to each other. Makes sense.

The media have lost their minds, and while I find this entire thing hilarious, I also find it disturbing. These people aren’t going away and every day they continue to spread this drivel is another chip taken out of the current culture. Progressivism never stops by it’s very definition. It just keeps taking and taking. Yesterday it was Confederate generals. Today it’s the Star Spangled Banner. Tomorrow it’ll be book burning parties in Times Square. There is no end game, only subjugation of whatever form their secular ideology takes today. Americans can fight back or they can wake up a decade from now and ask what in the world happened.