I warned ya’ll, back when they started coming after Confederate statues, that we should stand and defend them — because the attack on those statues had nothing to do with racism or slavery. Not. One. Single. Thing.

Those statues were just easy targets, the jackboot in the door for people who want to trash everything about us and obliterate our heritage. Now once again I’m depressed to see that I was right, as we learn that the Biden regime tried to rip down the statue of William Penn from Welcome Park in Philadelphia. (After a wholesome backlash, the vandals’ plan was abandoned for now.) A Quaker committed to complete religious freedom and fair treatment of the Indians, William Penn embodies everything decent and admirable about America.

And the woke still want to tear him down, as if he were some slave-trader who massacred the Cherokees. Because it’s not about repenting our ancestors’ sins. It never was. It’s about shaming and brainwashing Americans and enslaving our descendants.

They Hate Us. They Hate Your Kids

They straight up hate us. Not just white people and Christians, but anyone at all who personifies the unique American culture of democracy, equal opportunity, class mobility, small government, and cantankerous independence. Remember the white liberals who shed crocodile tears over the death of career criminal and drug addict George Floyd? They sneered and jeered when black entrepreneur and Republican candidate Herman Cain died of COVID after attending a Donald Trump rally. He was the wrong kind of black man, you see. He was an American.

So they hated him, as they hate us and hate our children.

What Does Love Mean? What About Hate?

As Christians we think a lot about love and what it means, how to understand it truly and put it into practice. But in our fallen world every good thing casts a shadow, and the shadow of love is hate. What do such words really mean? It’s far too easy to settle for hollow definitions of words whose density and weight, when dropped in our own time, cast ripples through eternity.

To love a person means to value him as a child of God, of importance in himself, and wish for him the best. You hope that he’s happy in the present life, as much as it’s possible here in this valley of tears. You hope he is close to God, feels Christ’s consolation in daily life, and when his time is up that he spends eternity with Him in heaven.

That ought to be our attitude even toward our enemies. We might well be morally obligated by love of God, country, and neighbor to work for some people’s defeat, to counter their blasphemies and refute their wicked ideas. To mock them, humble them, and expose them as Priests of Baal. Sometimes they force war upon us, and we must literally fight them to the death. But we always hope that they repent before the end. We don’t want to join the Enemy in harvesting souls for hell.

Wipe Out His Heritage, Obliterate His Legacy

From thinking about this definition of love, we can equally understand its antonym. To hate is to find someone not merely annoying or absurd, but to regret his very existence — and therefore to try to ruin it. You want to see him ruined, impoverished, humiliated. You’d like to wipe out his heritage, and obliterate his legacy. You see him, and perhaps the whole group to which he belongs, as a cancer on humanity, a virus that threatens our planet. As I wrote 12 years ago, analyzing the hate that had fueled a mass shooter:

If you are justly enraged at someone, and feel he must be confronted, defeated, even imprisoned lest he commit more injustices that does not mean you hate him. If that question worries you, ask yourself: “Do I wish this person damned? Would I rather see God’s will to save this person thwarted?” If you do, then you have crossed that fiery line inside the human heart, and have begun to side with the Enemy. If it helps, remember this: The same devil who goaded that evil man to sin takes delight in his damnation. The spirit which (Pope Pius XII believed) possessed Adolph Hitler would have been happy to meet him in Hell.

Jews Who’d Won the Iron Cross Were Sent to Concentration Camps

Let’s talk about Hitler. He started off by claiming that Jewish people weren’t loyal Germans, that they’d sabotaged the war effort and were agents both of capitalism and communism. They were the force behind cultural degeneration, and even (he claimed) controlled the illegal sex trade, forcing German women into “white slavery.” Don’t look for too much rationality here—hatred doesn’t require it, and logic gets in the way.

Nevertheless, some sane Germans tried to answer him rationally. They pointed to the thousands of German Jews who’d loyally served in the army, and proven their valor and loyalty by winning the same Iron Cross Hitler had. Since he wasn’t yet absolute dictator, empowered to let his hatred run wild, Hitler had to answer. He said that such Jews were exceptions, and of course would be treated differently. And for a few years they were.

But once the Nazis had gained arbitrary power over Germany and were raping neighboring countries, that all went out the window. German soldiers of Jewish descent who’d earned Iron Crosses for courage under fire defending Germany were sent to die in extermination camps in Poland.

I wonder if Hitler sneered at the thought of their deaths, as the woke sneered when Herman Cain died, and they’re sneering today about the destruction of William Penn and his legacy.

Genocidal Hatred of Americans

That’s what we face across the aisle, in our media and our schools. It’s what drives the FBI to persecute January 6 defendants who never entered the Capitol or lifted a hand to harm. It’s what goads those who wish not just to beat Trump but to imprison him and ruin his family. It’s what drives Biden to open our borders, and Newsom to offer free health insurance to illegal aliens — but not to middle class citizens, whom he hopes to ruin and replace with docile foreign peasants.

It’s genocidal hate, aimed at destroying a nation and its people. It comes from the pit of hell, and we cannot compromise with it. We can’t buy it off with concessions, slake its thirst with more blood in the water. We simply have to face it and fight it, with every molecule of our being.

Those are the stakes of the culture war and the 2024 election. Man up, ‘cause the hour is late.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or co-author of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His upcoming book is No Second Amendment, No First.