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THE SPIRITUAL AND POLITICAL BATTLE OF OUR TIMES, PART 3: THE ANGLO-AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE TRADITION

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Title: Glen Cove, watercolor by Craig Gallaway, copyright 1970. After getting lost as an eighteen year-old in the free-wheeling idealism of the 1960s in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, I returned to my family in Texas and began to try to “re-member” what had been the deeper soil of my life, my upbringing, and my faltering faith. This painting was an attempt to remember and to honor the first fruits of that legacy from my grandparents little farm in West Texas. Remembering and honoring that legacy was a crucial step in my own recovery of our national heritage, and a preparation for the battle now at hand.

[In the last part, we looked at a number of abuses of power that have characterized the Biden administrative state. We have, perhaps, already begun to suggest how and why the administrative state operates in a way that is inherently antithetical to the principles of our founding, such as separation of powers and checks and balances. In the next two parts we shall look at five of those original principles and try to discern why and how their recovery will necessarily require a large scale reconfiguration of the administrative state itself.]

The Anglo-American Conservative Tradition

I am borrowing the title for this section from Yorum Hazony’s recent and very important book, Conservatism: A Rediscovery. In this book, Hazony explores the history, philosophy, and the ongoing struggle for what he calls the “Anglo-American Conservative Tradition” (AACT). The AACT reaches back, according to Hazony, at least to the sixteenth century in England, to writers such as John Fortesque, John Selden, and Edmund Burke. It was later deployed (along with its clear precedents for our Bill of Rights, our three branches of government, and our checks and balances) as a model for the US Constitution by our founding leaders such as George Washington and John Adams. This is the tradition of political order that Woodrow Wilson disavowed, and that the Biden state with its manifold “crises” has consistently found ways to violate. What would it mean to recover this tradition today? How might such a recovery redefine the issues of our time, over against the chaotic and destructive results of the Biden state? Hazony describes five basic principles that define the AACT in its long historical development. Let us look at each of these in turn and consider just a few examples of the benefits such a recovery might produce.[i] 

1.  Historical Empiricism

2.  Nationalism

3.  Religion

4.  Limited Executive Power

5.  Freedom

1. Historical Empiricism. The AACT is historical and empirical because its conception of political order is grounded in the most basic and concrete relationships of human life—in families, clans, tribes, congregations, and larger groups that overcome conflicts, clarify justice, and ban together to work for common interests and to defend themselves against common enemies. From this empirical foundation (hard won through the ancient and early medieval history of warring clans and petty kings in Britain) arose the English historical tradition of common law (e.g., the Magna Carta) which led eventually to a national system of parliamentary checks and balances, limited monarchy, petition of rights, and the “Glorious Revolution” of 1685. This is the tradition that our American founders (such as Washington, Adams, and Madison) embraced as the archetype for our US Constitution. This is the tradition conserved by the AACT.

Over against this, and consciously opposed by the framers in 1787, was the very different model of the French Revolution based on the rationalistic ideals of natural equality, universal reason, and individual freedom as these were defined by John Locke and Jean Jacques Rousseau.[ii] These ideals are exalted today in the liberal tradition of the administrative state, including the Biden state, where political order is attributed to the role of reason (“experts”), equity, and individual consent, not to the traditional values and obligations of family, congregation, community, and nation. We see this model at work in the contempt of the Biden state for our national borders, for parental authority, for principles of traditional moral conscience and religious freedom, not to mention the other basic First Amendment rights that his agencies have trampled. The eventual blood bath of the French Revolution, like the riotous breakdown today of our national borders and of our large crime-ridden urban centers, all demonstrate the terrible disconnection that separates the rationalism of the liberal model from the empirical realities of concrete human life and experience. 

To recover the historical and empirical character of the AACT today will involve embracing again the foundations of our national identity in the family, the congregation, the religious and moral tradition, the rule of law, and the separation of powers, all of which have been trampled by the actions of the Biden state. It will also require recovering again the voice of the people in representative government to debate and decide in Congress important social questions of race, gender, and public health policy, rather than cancelling or censoring that voice by an overreaching and imperial executive branch with its attending administrative state, media, and other institutions.   

2. Nationalism. What does it mean to be a nation state in the AACT—that is, to practice the virtue of nationalism? The answer to this question is not at all self-evident today since the concept of nationalism itself is regularly skewered and condemned by the advocates of the Biden state.[iii] According to them, nationalism leads to racism and xenophobia (hatred of strangers or other nations). Moreover, Hitler’s “National” Socialist (NAZI) Party is offered as a prototype for the racism and aggression that nationalism is supposed to produce. But the meaning and practice of nationalism in the AACT runs in direct opposition to all of this. Indeed, for anyone acquainted with the AACT, Hitler could never represent the political order of nationalism, despite his use of a cognate term. Rather, he embodied the imperial order of the German state, the political desire to absorb and dominate other nations (not to live in peaceful coexistence with them).[iv] This was in keeping with the long and aggressive history of the German Empire dating back to Roman times. In this regard, ironically, the Biden administrative state, with its dictatorial style at home and its globalist aspirations abroad, has much more in common with Hitler’s mentality (and with the imperial objectives of cultural Marxism and the CCP today) than with the political order of the independent nation state as envisioned by our founders.[v]  

A recovery of nationalism in America today, on the other hand, will require turning away from the racist and imperial policies of the Biden state. We shall need to recover, for example, Martin Luther King Jr.’s emphasis on individual character, merit, and equal opportunity as the foundation for our multi-ethnic national identity while, at the same time, boldly rejecting the racially divisive polices of the Biden administrative state such as DEI, which judge people as collectives and set them against each other as rival tribes and clans. Likewise, we will need to rebuild and restore our national borders while opposing the terrible effects on our nation’s life and character by the unvetted, open-border immigration policies of Joe Biden. Unlike Biden, we should care about the readiness of legal immigrants to speak our language, understand our history, respect our laws, and embrace our values. As a nation in the AACT we will continue to make room for different ethnic groups, clans, and tribes within our borders so long as they are loyal to the basic legal, religious, and moral values that bind us together. Moreover, we respect the same process at work in other nations as they work out the beliefs, values, and laws that embody their own history and traditions. Racial and international cooperation are both strengthened, not weakened, by the political order of the nation state in the AACT. 

3. Religion. When our founders had completed the framing of our Constitution in 1787, they made a point of emphasis to declare that this form of government would require “a religious and a moral people” to make it work.[vi] They had in mind, of course, the Christian religion of the Bible, for that was empirically the religion both of the American colonies and of their English predecessors in the AACT.[vii] They did not, however, try to establish a particular denomination as an official national church. Indeed, they forbade this in the First Amendment of the Constitution itself. This was due in part to the fact that most of the newly formed states already had officially recognized churches. But it was also due to the principle of government “of, by, and for the people.” The founders knew that the formation of strong religious and moral convictions depends above all on the living practice of individuals in families, clans, and congregations. The strength of religious and moral conscience arises not from a government office, nor from a declared statement, but from the living practices of faith, prayer, and a history of shared stories and experiences (working out the meaning of justice, correcting and improving faults, and defending the nation against its enemies) among the people themselves. This is the natural soil of “a religious and a moral people” from which alone can spring the moral reasoning, the informed voting, and the public service of good government.[viii]

To recover the religious dimension of the AACT in America today will require nothing short of a religious and moral re-awakening among the families, clans, tribes, congregations, and communities that make up our nation. This national fabric has been unwound and unwoven since at least the post World War II era by what Hazony calls “liberal democracy,” before which a former “Christian democracy” had still been at work in the nation and its institutions. As Hazony writes, “The Supreme Court’s decisions in Engel v. Vitale (1962) and Abington School District v. Schempp (1963) . . . overturned centuries of common practice by abolishing organized prayer and Bible reading in public schools across the country.”[ix] This trend has now been aggressively expanded by the Biden administrative state with its policies that separate children from the moral and religious guidance of both their parents and their religious heritage. 

The resulting situation in our culture today finds those in power seeking to replace the moral foundations of the AACT with pseudo-scientific claims about gender fluidity, systemic racism, climate alarmism, and Bidenomics, based on the flimsy and unreliable notions of “pure reason” and “natural equality.” And those who resist this ideology stand to be accused of anti-democratic “extremism.” This is precisely the cultural situation described in C. S. Lewis’s prescient 1945 book, The Abolition of Man. Having turned away from the moral and religious foundations of our country (in faith, family, and congregation) our culture and its institutions (including a politicized “science”) now flounders in a moral morass of ideological and biological nonsense that is forced upon us by the coercive power and control of a liberal “elite” in the administrative state.

The solution will require what some may regard as an impossibility at this time in American history: a great repentance and reawakening to our need for God, his guidance, judgement, and deliverance in our lives as families, congregations, communities, and individuals.[x] Even for those who are not religious or who embrace another religious tradition, the moral foundations of this recovery should be recognized and embraced. We shall have to learn again to live as a people of faith and moral conviction if our national experiment in representative democracy is going to recover and thrive. So thought Washington and Adams. And history itself shows us that this kind of awakening can in fact occur.[xi]

Looking ahead to Part 4

In Part 4, we shall continue these brief reflections on the principles of the AACT, focusing on the last two: Limited Executive, and Freedom. As you think about today’s post, and look forward to the next, consider the following additional questions: 1) Why is it that the administrative state seems to run by default toward the dangers of authoritarian power? and 2) How is the concept of “freedom” related to or connected with the principles of moral order?

Endnotes

[i] Yoram Hazony, Conservatism: A Rediscovery (Regnery, 2022), pages 336-337. 

[ii] See Hazony’s discussion of John Locke and Edmund Burke in Conservatism: A Rediscovery, pp. 21-29. Among the founders, Thomas Jefferson alone was seduced for a short time by the idealistic claims of the French Revolution. But then he was also absent in France while the others were writing our Constitution, and he returned to America when the failure in France became undeniable. See endnote 23 for further discussion of the “fantasy” status of the Enlightenment principles of “pure reason,” “natural equality,” and “individual freedom.” 

[iii] The repeated attacks by Joe Biden himself on MAGA Republicans as “extremists” who threaten “democracy” are a case in point. With this encouragement from their figurehead, many others have followed suit, such as members of the “squad” who accuse Donald Trump of racism for opposing illegal immigration. And in the wider culture the mantra has been taken up by Hollywood celebrities such as Rob Reiner (known appropriately as “Meathead” on the Archie Bunker TV series) who has been particularly outspoken, though poorly informed, in his attacks on what he calls “Christian Nationalism.”

[iv] See Yoram Hazony, The Virtue of Nationalism (Basic Books, 2018) for a full discussion of the three major distinctions of political order that we see at work and at odds in the world and in our own country today: 1. Tribalism, 2. Imperialism, and 3. Nationalism. Tribalism is characterized by the constant warfare of independent tribes. Imperialism is characterized by the imposition of coercive power by one tribe or a strong man over all other tribes. And Nationalism is characterized by a coming together of tribes for mutual benefit and defense around shared principles of language, religion, morality, and law.

[v] We should note very strongly, in this regard, that the Biden state has shown a willingness to cede national sovereignty to a variety of global organizations and geo-political bodies including the WHO (on public health policy), the WEF (on economic policy), the UN (on climate and gender policy), and even the CCP (with Biden’s soft foreign policies in relation to China and Iran). Meanwhile, the “unrestricted warfare” ideology of the CCP has captured many of the elites who currently lead the agencies of the Biden state. This points to a whole second level of geo-political activity that hides within the political structure of the Biden state. See Frank Gaffney and Dede Laugesen, The Indictment: Prosecuting the Chinese Communist Party and Friends for Crimes Against America, China, and the World (Skyhorse Publishing, 2023).  

[vi] In his “Letter to the Massachusetts Militia, 11 October 1798,” John Adams wrote that “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Likewise, in his farewell address of September 1796, Washington spoke of “religion and morality” as the “indispensable supports of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity.”    

[vii] They could not have been thinking of other religious traditions such as Hinduism, Islam, or even Judaism, in this context, for that would have been to disengage from the actual people who made up the nation; but they were also aware, in keeping with the AACT itself, that there is a central core of moral order that is evident in all religions, and that each nation should be free to work out the meaning of this order in keeping with its own religious history and traditions. See Hazony, Conservatism, p. 18. See also, C. S. Lewis’s discussion of the Tao (his name for this shared moral order) in The Abolition of Man (Macmillan, 1947).  

[viii] In The Abolition of Man, Lewis writes at some length about this process of education in the family, a process that conveys to children, even prior to the age of reason, the habits of the heart, the values of human life that Lewis calls the Tao, and for which he finds evidence in all of the world’s great religions. Lewis also writes about how this sense of moral order and tradition has been undercut by modern educational notions of individual freedom, reason, and “applied” science which reject the traditional, familial, and religious foundations of the Tao. Over the course of three chapters, Lewis traces the modern educational process to its consequences in a society led by elites who are driven by their own individualistic impulses because they are no longer shaped by the honorable values of religious and literary tradition. This seems a rather precise description of our society in the Biden administrative state today. 

[ix] Hazony, Conservatism, p. 266-67.

[x] This does not mean that everyone must join a particular denomination, nor even that everyone must become full-fledged believers and practitioners of biblical faith. It does mean, however, that even unbelievers, and those of other religious traditions, should understand how the rule of law and our constitutional rights in America, as well as the practice of reliable scientific research, arise from and are strengthened by the religious worldview of the Bible. Even Richard Dawkins, the well-known atheist, has recently made confession of this creed.

[xi] I am thinking in this instance of the Wesleyan Awakening in eighteenth century England and the Great Awakening that took place in nineteenth century America. Both of these made significant contributions to the spiritual capital of American culture and political order that are still unfolding in the battle to recover the AACT today. 

THE SPIRITUAL AND POLITICAL BATTLE OF OUR TIMES, PART 2: THE EXPANSION OF THE STATE UNDER JOE BIDEN

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Title: Glen Cove, watercolor by Craig Gallaway, copyright 1970. After getting lost as an eighteen year-old in the free-wheeling idealism of the 1960s in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, I returned to my family in Texas and began to try to “re-member” what had been the deeper soil of my life, my upbringing, and my faltering faith. This painting was an attempt to remember and to honor the first fruits of that legacy from my grandparents little farm in West Texas. Remembering and honoring that legacy was a crucial step in my own recovery of our national heritage, and a preparation for the battle now at hand.

[In the first Part of this series, we looked at how the administrative state grew from its ideological beginnings under Woodrow Wilson to the massive collection of government agencies today with millions of staff and trillions of budgetary dollars under Joe Biden. We also recognized that the power of this unelected bureaucracy has kept pace with its size and budget over all these years, and now operates in many cases to displace the basic moral principles and constitutional rights of the American people. How has this happened? And how does it continue to happen in the Biden state today?]

How the Administrative State Gains and Expands Its Power

How has the administrative state been so successful in expanding its control and consolidating its power? In an early chapter of his 1996 book, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Public Policy, Thomas Sowell describes the methodology by which the administrative state has for many decades successfully consolidated its own power and wealth. Sowell’s reference to the “anointed” in his title corresponds of course to the “experts” of Woodrow Wilson’s and Frank Goodnow’s now 100-year-old “progressive” project, and to what others today describe as the “elite unelected oligarchy” of our massive federal agencies currently led by Joe Biden.[i] 

Sowell’s analysis identifies four steps that are typical of the administrative state’s methodology: 1) Identify a social problem that needs improvement (such as racial disparities in housing, education, or income). 2) Propose a government program as the solution. 3) Ignore statistics that show how the program has failed (usually because it misconstrues both the causes and the solution), in order 4) to increase funding for the program in the next year’s federal budget. The remainder of Sowell’s book, chapter by chapter, examines various programs of the welfare state since the late 1960s (for example, housing, education, teen pregnancy, and single-parent welfare programs) that amply demonstrate the steps of this failed methodology.[ii] In keeping with his own distinguished career—as an economist, statistician, mathematician, and sociologist—Sowell backs up his conclusions with in-depth statistical analysis at every point. 

This method of garnering power through misconstrued or even fabricated crises is very much alive in the current administrative state of Joe Biden. The bell weather example in recent memory is, of course, the great harm caused by the government’s handling of the COVID fiasco.[iii] The best analyses now pouring forth from various investigative sources both in Congress and in the wider world show that our government’s declaration of emergency powers was part of a very successful corporate/government campaign (Big Pharma plus the captured elites in the FDA, NIH, NIAID, CDC, etc.) to consolidate both wealth and power into their own hands. It worked to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. And all of this was accomplished, moreover, with the cooperation of corporate and social media and of our federal justice and security agencies (FBI, DOJ, CIA) to censor and silence independent voices of responsible science (such as The Great Barrington Declaration) who tried to expose the scheme.[iv] All of this has had the distinct aroma, it should be well noted, of that coercive alliance between government and corporate power known as fascism. 

The pattern of falsely defined issues, based on poorly designed research, that demand government action to avert a misconstrued crisis, is evident in nearly every policy and program of the Biden administrative state. The Biden state tells us, for example, that we have a climate crisis that requires the government to take direct command and control of our energy resources and our economy. And yet responsible scientists such as Stephen Koonin (former Obama EPA lead scientist) in his book Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters, tells us that the so-called crisis is based on an abuse by activist officials (including Obama) of raw data from the members of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC of the UN). The data, properly evaluated, however, do not support the claim of a climate crisis at all.[v] Indeed, if we follow the Biden state’s mandates for green energy and electric vehicles, we will do nothing to improve the climate, while making an absolute wreck of our own economy, as well as making ourselves dependent on other hostile economies around the world—in particular, China. This kind of miscalculation, as Sowell has observed, is a typical outcome of the command-and-control style of the administrative state.

Similarly, the Biden state tells us that we are in a racial crisis caused by systemic racism, and that this requires the government to impose programs such as DEI, CRT, ESG, and SEL in our schools, businesses, and corporate offices, if they are to lead the nation out of the legacy of slavery. And yet, responsible black leaders from the civil rights era, who currently lead successful programs of racial uplift and dignity in some of our worst inner cities, tell us that these government programs are more inwardly debilitating for American blacks and for society as a whole than the old ugly and unjust outward legacy of overt racism in the south.[vi] Indeed, if we keep following the lead of the Biden administrative state (“If you don’t vote for me, you ain’t black”) we can only expect the now fifty-year-old legacy of the dysfunctional welfare state in Democrat-led inner cities like Chicago, Baltimore, and Washington DC to become more violent and destructive.[vii] The progressive state usually makes worse the very “crises” it claims to improve.

Likewise, the Biden state tells us that we have a gender and sexual orientation crisis that requires teaching our children, against their own parents’ moral guidance, that boys can be girls, that males should compete in women’s sports, and that the practices of sex in the LGBTQ movement are just as normal and natural as the traditional moral vision of the Bible regarding the sanctity of marriage and the command to be fruitful and multiply. And yet, responsible scientists and counselors tell us that the gender and sexual experiments of the Biden state are not consistent with mental and social health, nor can they be promoted except by imposing the power of the state to undermine the role of the family and of religion in American life and culture.[viii] Even more concerning, this programmatic attack on religion, the middle class, and the traditional family clearly demonstrates the affinity of the Biden state for the subversive strategies of cultural-Marxism.[ix]

Bundling all of these “crises” together, there is at least one more crisis that is being fabricated and promoted by the Biden state, and that is the so-called crisis of democracy. According to Biden and his supporters, if we do not submit to their doubtful agenda for government programs and mandates to solve the various faux crises of public health, climate alarm, systemic racism, sexual orientation, gender identity, and others, then the health of our democracy is at stake. In other words, if we insist on following the rule of law, the separation of powers, and the free market policies of Donald Trump and others in the conservative movement, then we will fall into an authoritarian state that forces us to accept rules and a way of life that we do not freely choose based on our own values and consciences. Talk about bait-and-switch!   

In reality, it is not the conservative tradition that has censored free speech and cancelled genuine open scientific debate about these issues, or shut down our schools and businesses in the name of a false COVID emergency. And it is not the conservative movement that threatens to remove children from the moral guidance of their parents in order to promote a strange and ill-founded sexual and gender ideology. Indeed, if we follow the best principles of the conservative tradition, we shall find just the opposite. There will be room for public debate, for traditional moral principles, and for dissent. And there already is a big-tent tradition of American enterprise and innovation that is open to all, regardless of race, gender, or ethnicity. It is to the legacy of this positive vision of our American heritage that we now turn. What would it mean, in response to the cultural disintegration now churning within the Biden state, to recover the principles and traditions of our historic founding?

Looking ahead to Part 3

In the next post, “Part 3: The Anglo-American Conservative Tradition,” we will look at the tradition of religious, moral, and constitutional principles that our founders followed in designing our own constitution and cultural heritage. This is the legacy of the “Anglo-American Conservative Tradition” as explored by Yoram Hazony in his important book, Conservatism: A Rediscovery. And it is the tradition now largely defamed and dismantled within the Biden administrative state. The aim of Part 3 will be to consider what it would mean to recover the founder’s vision in our time? As you think about today’s post, and anticipate the next, consider the following questions: 1) How might a recovery of constitutional checks and balances between the branches of government correct and improve the activity of the administrative state with respect to how so-called “crises” are identified and how rules and laws are imposed on society? and 2) How might the recovery of the original biblical, religious, and moral traditions of our founding redefine and reconfigure the various “crises” that currently drive and dominate the Biden state? How would this recovery be accomplished?

Endnotes

[i] These themes are developed extensively in Thomas Sowell, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Public Policy, (Basic Books, 1996), and in his Social Justice Fallacies (Basic Books, 2023). In the latter, for example, Sowell describes the “knowledge fallacies” by which surrogate decision-makers in the government (that is, “experts”) think in terms of abstract mechanisms that do not comprehend the complex relationships of human life and economic activity (pp. 71-81).

[ii] On the issue of teen pregnancy, for example, Sowell observes that unwed pregnancies among black teens have soared in the post 60s era of the welfare state (68%) due to the increased benefits made available to single-parent families, and the subsequent breakdown of the black family in America. By contrast, during the unjust era of Jim Crow laws and segregation, when the black family was nonetheless still intact, unwed pregnancies averaged fewer than 17 percent. Sowell’s research thus reveals the serious and often tragic results of government programs for which the state is usually not held to account. See Social Justice Fallacies, pages 127-129.

[iii] It should be acknowledged, of course, that Donald Trump was also involved in the early stages of the COVID tragedy, along with Anthony Fauci and others in the NIAID, FDA and CDC, not to mention China’s Wuhan Lab. Based on grossly overestimated rates of infection and death, the Fauci team called for unprecedented and harmful restrictions on the constitutional rights of American citizens such as freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, and freedom to protest. Government censorship of so-called “misinformation” ran rampant on social media and in society at large. In 2021, Biden doubled down on these restrictions when he came into office. Trump, by contrast, had often advocated for things that would have helped (such as early treatments) but these went against the well-planned narrative of the Fauci cohort. And Trump, like others in Congress without a science background, was at a disadvantage to offer real-time criticism of Fauci’s authoritarian declarations. Nevertheless, Trump would do well, in my opinion, to revisit his account of those events and to acknowledge that he was over his head and made some serious mistakes by deferring to Fauci’s often pseudo-scientific leadership.

[iv] See, for example, Aaron Kheriaty, The New Abnormal: The Rise of the Biomedical Security State (Regnery, 2022), and Ramesh Thakur, Our Enemy, the Government: How COVID Enabled the Expansion and Abuse of State Power (Brownstone Institute, 2023). See also, Rand Paul, “Lessons from the Great Covid Cover-Up,” Imprimis, Vol. 52, No. 12, December 2023.

[v] Stephen Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters (BenBella Books, 2024). See also, Michael Schellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All. Also noteworthy in this regard are the recent comments of Noble Laureate John Clausner on the great climate “hoax.”

[vi] Corey Brooks, “America Works: DEI Doesn’t,” Tablet Magazine, January 16, 2024. Robert L. Woodson, Sr., Lessons from the Least of These, 2020. 

[vii] Shelby Steele and Eli Steele, What Killed Michael Brown (Man of Steele Productions, 2020): an historic documentary film about the fallacies of systemic racism as demonstrated in the 2014 case of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

[viii] Mariam Grossman, You’re Teaching My Child What? A Physician Exposes the Lies of Sex Education and How they Harm Your Child, (Regenery, 2023). Liz Wheeler, Hide Your Children, (Regenery, 2023). Dr. Jay Richards, Fight the Good Fight: How an Alliance of Faith and Reason Can Win the Culture War (Salem Books, 2024).  

[ix] See “Groomer Schools 1: The Long Cultural Marxist History of Sex Education,” New Discourses Podcast, Episode 54, November 19, 2021. This audio discussion examines the influence of Marxist activists such as Georg Lukacs and Herbert Marcuse (Repressive Tolerance, 1965) on our American educational system. See also, Dr. Ben Carson, The Perilous Fight: Overcoming Our Culture’s War on the American Family (Zondervan, 2024).