by Matthew Boose
In an odd echo of Patrick Buchanan, the godfather of Trumpism, Joe Biden has called this election “a battle for the soul of the nation.” The path forward for President Trump is again to take up Buchanan’s mantle, as he did so boldly four years ago. The sudden death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has put a sharper edge on the point: this is a culture war that must be won.
In a speech at the National Archives on Constitution Day, President Trump put things in the starkest terms possible: America is facing a leftist insurrection that rejects the American Founding. This movement controls our institutions, and through them, it looks to crush the spirit of America and propagandize our people so they will meekly accept the yoke of leftist tyranny.
The radicals burning American flags want to burn down the principles enshrined in our founding documents, including the bedrock principle of equal justice under law. In order to radically transform America, they must first cause Americans to lose confidence in who we are, where we came from, and what we believe. As I said at Mount Rushmore—which they would love to rip down and rip it down fast, and that’s never going to happen—two months ago, the left-wing cultural revolution is designed to overthrow the American Revolution.
This followed a heartening push by Trump to rid government workplaces of critical race theory, and public classrooms of the New York Times’ 1619 Project.
Trump’s decisions followed some intrepid reporting by Christopher Rufo, who has been tracking the spread of critical race theory throughout the federal government. Among its teachings are that America is “systemically racist” and that whites are sinful by nature. Concepts like these have taken a powerful hold in American society, and they are at the heart of what is left of our vanishing public “discourse,” one which seems to exist almost exclusively to browbeat Americans for historical crimes in which they personally did not participate and do not now endorse.
In answer to critical race theory and the “1619 Project,” which posits that America was founded on slavery and that therefore 1776 is not our national birthday, Trump said he would create a “1776 commission” to restore “patriotic education” in classrooms.
This is very courageous of the president. We should take a moment to appreciate what he is doing here: he is the first, and possibly the last, president in our lifetimes to challenge the Left’s anti-American propaganda at the institutional level.
Of course, the same Left that spent months calling Black Lives Matter riots “peaceful protests” called his speech “dark” and “extreme”—the work of a fascist. The Left had the same response to Trump’s Mount Rushmore speech this summer, and for precisely the same reason: Trump is telling the truth about their desire to overthrow the country. They have become partisans of the 1619 narrative, determined to destroy what is left of the republic of 1776. More to the point, Trump is drawing a direct (and correct) connection between the “mostly peaceful” riots and the propaganda he is trying to shut down, which holds that America is nothing more than a racist hierarchy and that police are not people, but inhuman sentries of this system of repression.
We are not allowed to acknowledge these connections. The Left is outraged not because they think Trump is lying, but because they reject his proposition that their plans are optional.
Americans have no right to resist this revolution, or even to acknowledge the true nature of it, according to the Left. We must accept living in their world, a world where our children will learn to hate their country and, if they are white, to hate themselves because of their race. Why? Because America is racist. QED.
The country is in the middle of a painful “reckoning,” one “long overdue,” that cannot be stopped. Atonement begins with recognizing that America has sinned. Judging from current events, there is a heavy price to be paid. Even public safety would seem to fall under the bill of reparations.
As they would have it, there can be no peace until the account has been settled. Until then, “everything is on the table.” The Left is threatening more riots over the Supreme Court vacancy, and they are prepared to erase every remaining stumbling block to their power, from the filibuster to the Electoral College.
They have embraced not just the ruthless “cancellation” of dissenters, but political violence for those marked enemies of social justice. Americans have already been told to put up with the destruction of property and lives, with harassment, looting, and vandalism, with assassinations of Trump supporters and near-assassinations of cops, and—to top it off—relentless lying and gaslighting. First they told us that none of this was happening, and then they demanded that we believe Trump and his supporters were to blame.
Joe Biden, having reached the apogee of political thuggery, says the president is “raising the temperature.” The implication seems to be that Trump, and those who want to take America back from the partisans of 1619, should stop resisting.
If “raising the temperature” means putting up a fight, then by all means, let’s keep going.
Trump’s not perfect, but if America is going to win this culture war, it would be hard to find a better champion in this moment of profound national peril. He’s doing what he was elected to do: defend America from those who would destroy it. And he has already signaled his intention to fill that Supreme Court seat, rather than stand on ceremony while the Left continues to plot the country’s demise.
The Left has done a good job taking over America. Their propaganda has infected our institutions and poisoned the country for decades with virtually no opposition. Perhaps the damage is irreversible. But if America can still be saved, we should be glad to have somebody like Trump in our corner.
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Matthew Boose is a Mt. Vernon fellow of the Center for American Greatness and a staff writer and weekly columnist at the Conservative Institute. His writing has also appeared in the Daily Caller. Follow him on Twitter @matt_boose.
