Defying the Desecrators - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
Defying the Desecrators
by

The Desecrators: Defeating the Cancel Culture Mob and Reclaiming One Nation Under God
By Matt Schlapp and Deal W. Hudson
(TAN Books, 232 pages, $27.95)

Matt Schlapp and Deal Hudson have written a must-read book about how the Left seeks to destroy this country and what we must do to ensure this doesn’t happen. The book is called The Desecrators, and that’s just what has happened to America in the last few years.

Matt is the chairman of the American Conservative Union and the fellow who runs CPAC. Deal is the radio host of Church and Culture and the secret behind Trump’s successful outreach to Catholic voters in 2016. And what they’ve given us is an eye-opening account of just how bad things have gotten.

Today’s Left attacks America with an astonishing and never-before-seen ferocity. In the past, it loved our country, or said it did. In the 1930s, the U.S. Communist Party spied on us for Russia, but party leader Earl Browder was constrained to say that “communism is 20th century Americanism.” Protestors took to the streets but told us that that was how we began as a country and assured us that dissent was true patriotism.

In the last two years, however, we’ve seen the rise of a cancel culture that seeks out conservatives and religious believers with the goal of getting them fired. Left-wing prosecutors have allowed hardened and dangerous criminals to remain on the streets. And in our liberal cities, looting has become accepted as a form of social justice.

For this, part of the blame can be attributed to the New York Times’ 1619 Project, which asks readers to rethink all our history from the perspective of slavery: “Out of slavery grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional: its economic might, its industrial power, its electoral system.” That naturally appeals to people who despise America. Nikole Hannah-Jones, who wrote the Pulitzer-winning essay kicking it off, took pride in how she might have encouraged the 2020 riots. She approvingly retweeted a New York Post op-ed entitled “Call them the 1619 Riots.” I’d be honored if that’s what they’re called, she said.

One might have expected the 1619 Project to collapse of its own weight by the tendency of hatred to dissipate over time. But the anger didn’t go away. Instead, it was the impetus for the abandonment of America’s traditional liberalism. In place of this, the Left embraced an explicitly anti-liberal ideology called Critical Race Theory.

CRT is a congeries of radical demands, but what unites its adherents is a single-minded focus on race and the totalitarian’s rejection of liberal principles of fairness and liberty. It is the creed of primitive vandals. It denigrates Western civilization, its great works of art and literature, Judeo-Christian ethics, the Enlightenment, free markets, and America’s Founders. Who knew that, 50 years after the Kenneth Clark miniseries, civilization would become a dirty word?

Every patriotic instinct is scorned, and every hallowed institution mocked. Everything, everything you loved is dirty, said the Left. And Schlapp and Hudson call it for what it is — a desecration of everything America has stood for.

“The sacred is that which we value above all else,” they write. The Left is “intent on ending the influence of traditional morality, the primacy of the family, and respect for all human life.” The desecrators treat the meaning of life as an empty blackboard upon which they can redefine gender, family, community, politics, and truth.

They want to destroy the backbone of American culture and its commerce, increase taxes, regulate everything except abortion, educate our children to hate our country, destroy clear gender distinctions, encourage globalism while undermining the U.S. military, and coddle a rising communist China.

The Chinese launch a hypersonic missile, and we throw at them a transgender four-star admiral.

That’s where we are. But the authors remind us that, where there are Desecrators, there are also saints and everyday heroes who believe in the goodness and glory of God and will save America.

“As we survey this moment in the history of America and our Church, the element most missing is hope. When everyone becomes focused on narrow temporal means — this candidate, that policy — the long view of history, the conviction that God remains active in history, is forgotten.” But we’ll remember it, and can have the confidence to hope that the desecration will be washed away. After all, we have God’s promise on that.

F.H. Buckley teaches at Scalia Law School. His forthcoming book is Progressive Conservatism: How Republicans Will Become America’s Natural Governing Party (July 2022).

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