I recently recorded an episode of The Right Take podcast with our very own Mark Tapson discussing the release of my new book, ‘Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight Against The Left’.
(Subscribe to Mark’s podcast here.)
Domestic Enemies does contain untold stories of pivotal moments in American history, but it’s also very much today’s story. As I told Mark, my original inspiration for the book came out of our very own ‘annus horribilis’, our year of hell, 2020, and seeing the events reflected and refracted from the earliest days of our nation’s history.
So much of the sense of helplessness that a lot of us suffer from comes from the mistaken beliefs that…
- The Left is a new threat that we never had to deal with before
- It’s an unstoppable force that is perpetually gaining strength
- Our past has nothing to teach us about how to fight it or survive it.
None of these things, as I discuss in, ‘Domestic Enemies, is actually true.
We’ve had to struggle against the Left throughout the entirety of our history. The Left was there trying to bring down George Washington and stop the adoption of the Constitution.
It was there acting as agents of the French Revolution to subvert and take over America.
We’re not faced with a new threat but a very old one.
Consider this letter from Abigail Adams.
“France has setled her plan of subjugating America: her system is fully known,” First Lady Abigail Adams wrote, describing French “Agents and Emissaries, whom with truth & reason she [France] bosts of having thickly scatterd through our Country, saving her Principles, her depravaty of Manners, her Atheism in every part of the united States” so that “she will seduce the mind & sap the foundation of our strongest pillars, Religion & Government.”
These are not visionary Ideas of future events, they are now active. They have already proceeded to a most allarming height,” she warned.
“If the progress of Jacobinism is to be arrested at all, it is by fighting it,” the added message read. “And if there be a Nation on Earth capable of going the necessary lengths, and making the proper Sacrifices to stop its course,—it must be one that is already possesed of substantial Liberty, that knows how to appreciate it, & how to distinguish between it, and that Sort of Liberty which France is trying to propogate throughout the World.”
Apart from the differences in spelling and terminology (swap Marxism for Jacobinism and the Soviet Union for France), these sentiments are very familiar.
We’re not facing a new war, but a 200-plus-year leftist war against America.
It’s a war we’ve been fighting from our very founding. And it’s a war we can win.
