I am old enough to remember when the left attacked conservatives and populists as “culture warriors.” The left’s rationales for the allegation were as numerous as they were duplicitous, voiced solely for political advantage.

Their incessant projection—the ascribing of their own vices unto their victims, their ideological rigidity, and their political and social insularity result in a delusional sense of moral and intellectual superiority that has, despite all evidence, both rendered the left the “culture warriors” and prevented them from realizing and admitting it.

As is often noted, the left’s default smear involves projecting their sins upon their victims. For example, even as the left erects and imposes the elitist, bureaucratic Administrative Leviathan upon a decreasingly sovereign citizenry, that same left claims it is their opponents destroying “our democracy.” In their disordered, distorted view, the left feels no compunction to reconcile their actions with their allegations as they accrue more power into their anti-democratic hands.

Moreover, the core aim of the left remains the eradication of traditional societal norms and practices, which they believe to be intrinsically and systemically evil. Viewed in their puerile prism of “oppressor vs. oppressed,” the left employs the language of “liberation” to justify their attacks upon verities and virtues. It also allows the left to rationalize—indeed, justify—their patent hatred of the supporters of traditional society and the permanent things as an act of “love.”

As a result, it is exceedingly arduous to penetrate a progressive’s ideological and emotional cocoon of unearned self-esteem and, ergo, make them aware that they are not supremely enlightened. Their hive minds persist in routinely and cavalierly using their fellow citizens as props in their onanistic virtue signaling needed to feed their addiction to external validation from the collective.

By concealing their aim of destroying traditional society by proffering new “rights” and, thus, couching its radical agenda in the language of “license” and “love,” the practical political purpose is patent: the luring of non-leftists into supporting the left’s vision. Yet, such new rights are little consolation when, after attaining power, the left revokes longstanding, God-given, constitutionally recognized rights.

Consider the left’s ideological rigidity in the instance of abortion, which the left assiduously promotes as a question of “conscience,” one that cannot be impaired by another. Nonetheless, the left routinely infringes upon the conscience and religious beliefs of pro-life Americans by compelling them to condone, subsidize, and even perform abortions. Those who dissent against abortion are targeted to be silenced, often being compared to domestic terrorists.

In sum, then, the left has prioritized abortion over the freedom of conscience. Thus does the left’s siren song of “liberation” fall flat: for where there is no freedom of conscience, there is no freedom at all.

Those who point out the left’s dangerous duplicity and hypocrisy are derisively and falsely accused of being “culture warriors” who spew the insidious rhetoric rending American society. Consequently, abetted by their cohorts in the corporate media, the left has cast the defenders of traditional society as the aggressors in the Culture War—and dehumanized them to boot.

In fact, little can reveal more about the left’s hypocrisy than the hateful, neurotic epithets they hurl at their opponents and their efforts to silence all dissent against their own radical agenda. The left’s epithets containing “-phobic” and “-ism” are designed to question not the arguments of their opponents but their mental soundness and craft the narrative that there can be no rational opposition to the left’s insanity.

It needs to be noted, as well, that the left can be ecumenical in its casting of calumnies and “cancellations” upon Democrats who dissent from any part of the radical leftist agenda. To wit: “Transphobic,” which suggests that only hate can compel someone to oppose a child’s genital mutilation done in the service of an insane, inhuman ideology. Be it a MAGA member or a long-time supporter of gay rights (or both), they will be reviled for drawing the line at transitioning children.

The success of the left in branding the right as the “culture warriors” has hopefully reached its zenith. One good indicator is the dwindling number of “Republicans” who claim to be “fiscally conservative but socially liberal.” Perhaps the right has finally grasped that the left’s long march through the institutions to foster cultural Marxism was precisely to create the conditions for the ultimate imposition of socialism. It remains a stunningly naïve illusion among such “socially moderate” Republicans how a left that has replaced God, motherhood, and apple pie with secularism, abortion, and globalism is not hellbent upon replacing capitalism with socialism… Freedom with serfdom.

Ignore the catcalls and cling to the truth, defenders of the permanent things of faith, family, community, and country. There is a republic to be saved!

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An American Greatness contributor, the Hon. Thaddeus G. McCotter (M.C., Ret.) served Michigan’s 11th Congressional District from 2003-2012, he served as Chair of the Republican House Policy Committee; and as a member of the Financial Services, Joint Economic, Budget, Small Business, and International Relations Committees. Not a lobbyist, he is also a contributor to Chronicles; a frequent public speaker and moderator for public policy seminars; and a co-host of “John Batchelor: Eye on the World” on CBS radio, among sundry media appearances.