This is a letter to the editor of the Altamont Enterprise in Altamont, NY. We have reprinted it here with permission of the author. Readers might wonder how it relates to our threefold mission of Biblical earth stewardship, economic development for the poor, and the gospel of Jesus Christ. All three are undermined by the intellectual and political movement described here—a movement that handicaps people from being able to think rationally about arguments pro and con about the environment, economics, and religious faith. We offer this, then, as food for thought in hopes that it will help readers to understand the larger intellectual battles of which our own are a part.

What have the liberal-left Progressives been doing to America?

We live in a time that has disturbingly significant parallels to the decline and disintegration of the Western Roman Empire, in having largely abandoned both objective truth and reason in favor of subjective truth, moral relativism, feelings, scientism, and much of our personal freedoms and viewing humans as randomly evolved Darwinian social animals.

Rod Dreher in his, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation, writes, “Living in today’s America is to dwell in a society that not only can no longer agree on what constitutes virtuous state of mind and conduct but also doubts that virtue exists.”

We are at the stage of social disintegration, writes Dreher, that includes “abandoning objective moral standards; refusing to accept any religiously or culturally binding narrative originating outside oneself” and “repudiating memory of the past as irrelevant.”

There are no longer common grounds for deciding what is true, false, right, or wrong. Common sense is no longer common.“This state of mind,” Dreher concludes, “approximates the condition known as barbarism.” Barbarians are governed only by their will to power, and neither know nor care about what or who they are destroying.

So defined, we in the modern West, are experiencing growing barbarism. Many of our elites in the universities and schools, judiciary, foundations and think tanks, mass media (news, Hollywood, movies, TV, music), elected officers and senior bureaucrats, and corporate globalists, are at work demolishing the Constitution, our God-given individual rights (in favor of manmade group rights), our Christian heritage, the family, and gender.

David Kupelian recently observed in his essay, “The New Barbarians,” “…. abandoning even what it means to be human. Our barbarians have exchanged the animal pelts and spears of the past for designer suits and smartphones.”

Tucker Carlson, author of Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class Is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution, says of the fanatic, ongoing coup attempt against President Donald Trump, “It’s as if facts no longer matter at all — only emotion, ambition and the overriding will to power. These apparently are the new rules in Washington.”

This new barbarism is fragmenting America in many ways: identity politics dividing our nation into competing tribes, gender obliteration leading males to use female showers and bathrooms, and to triumph in women’s sports, normalizing pedophilia, and non-Muslim Islamophiliacs remaining ignorant of the implications of the long-running conflicts between Sharia Law and the United States Constitution.

Again, David Kupelian, author of The Marketing of Evil: How Radicals, Elitists, and Pseudo-Experts Sell Us Corruption Disguised As Freedom and columnist for  World Net Daily’s Whistleblower magazine is most insightful in his recent essay.

Six of Kupelian’s themes, in my modified form, include:

1. Godless Utopias: World history reveals a barbarian takeover of a country is impossible without discrediting and eliminating the shared values, history, and key institutions that have unified that society and enabled it to work — as well as eliminating large swaths of the population. Twentieth-Century revolutionary genocides were launched, not by untutored savages, but by true believers being morally superior in their godless utopian ideologies who contemptuously held the values, history, and institutions of the society they were  “reforming” or “transforming.”

2. Universities: The most radically progressive institutions in America today are the once-great colleges and universities, which in many majors are increasingly a waste of time and money, particularly in the social sciences and humanities. Worse, they are transforming a sizable segment of the next generation into hysterical, entitled narcissists obsessed with faux-victimization, gender anarchy, pansexual hookups, and a collectivist, borderless global citizenry.

3. Public Education: Progressive Ed School activists have been eliminating America’s historical memory, including toppling Civil War statues across the country. Howard Zinn’s irredeemably dark history book, A People’s History of the United States, and many other texts are widely used in public high schools and colleges nationwide to turn American children against their founders and ancestors, painting all previous generations as racists, slaveholders, and genocidal monsters.

Joel Skousen in his weekly World Affairs Brief writes, “This nation’s traditional conservative majority has been under incremental attack by the twin evils of unlimited immigration and the dumbing down of our children through the insidious lure of ‘free public education.’ Public education was long ago captured and converted into a tax-paid propaganda machine by those who conspired to convert America into a socialist democracy.

“Few parents can articulate the arguments of why raw mass democracy and social redistribution were evil and why they corrupted people. Thus, as newer generations were subjected to the indoctrinations of public education, from an ever-more leftist academia, more were converted.

“They, in turn, became parents and did less to counter what their children were learning in the one-sided curricula of ‘social studies.’ The restrictions of the Constitution on government were derided or never taught at all.

“Now, a vast majority of public-school students come out socialist in orientation, even though few can actually recognize that what they have absorbed is the John Dewey’s Fabian variety of evolutionary socialism — private ownership but heavy government control.

“They have all been subjected to an avalanche of social doctrines and political correctness that enforces a kind of uniformity or ‘group think.’ Critical thinking is only allowed when targeting traditional moral values and conservative thought. No one is allowed to think critically about other’s flaws, let alone flaws that might be associated with classes, cultures or race.” (See Charlotte Iserbyt’s book The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America.)

4. First Amendment: The right to free speech and the free exercise of Biblical Christianity is under assault from the liberal-left, which totally controls social media — America’s  Electronic Public Square. Every day, conservatives, Christians, and other center-right voices are banned, suspended, de-platformed, de-monetized, shadow-banned, branded “hate speech,” and suppressed in search-engine results.

5. Second Amendment: Many 2020 presidential candidates unapologetically favor infringing on law-abiding Americans’ right to keep and bear arms. Representative Eric Swalwell (D-CA) literally advocates forcing law-abiding citizens to surrender their legally purchased semi-automatic firearms (derisively labeled “assault weapons”) or else go to prison.

6. Progressivist Endgame: What do societies look like historically after they’ve been invaded and ultimately conquered by people who dishonor their cultural roots, values, and their God? When a culture’s past is obliterated, its former culture and value system is replaced by competing languages, beliefs, moral standards, political restraints, and its key institutions are subverted and transformed if not outright destroyed outright; little respect remains for the transcendent value of individual human life because reverence for God has all but vanished.

All that was previously cherished is gone — or gone underground, to live in fear.

Going, going — gone?