The book The Last Stand, Christ or Chaos: The War for the West is well-researched with heavy footnotes quoting several respectable historians and scholars, and marshalls a convincing argument that the lunacy of today’s left is anchored in the French Revolution. The author argues that western civilization now stands at a precipice from which there will be no coming back unless the church takes a strong stand. (I did not know that the fuze for the French Revolution was lit by the infamous Marquis de Sade.)

“James Billington argues that it was specifically “the revolutionary egalitarianism of Babeuf, Maréchal, and Restif de la Bretonne” that became “the progenitor of modern communism—and of revolutionary socialism.”⁠82 They envisioned and modeled the first full-time leftist occupation, the first model for radicalizing youth as tools of the revolution, the first unelected bureaucratic ruling class, the first comprehensive assault on language through new definitions offered by that ruling class, and the first iteration of activist media. These aspects and characteristics of the modern Left that we take for granted today find their genesis in the shadow of the guillotine. They emerged specifically as instruments of destruction and strategies of sabotage against that Christendom from which Western civilization came. They were engineered to create chaos so that a new world might emerge . . . the Jacobins, led by Maximilien Robespierre. They were radically Leftist in both vision and practice—so much so that their stated aims and priorities closely mirror those found in the modern Democratic Party platform. The Jacobins embraced sexual license in all its forms. They exalted transvestism, glorified moral excess, and reveled in the grotesque. They rejected Christian civilization in favor of a revival of the pagan past, gathering the vices and rituals of the ancient gods into a single political and cultural program. Even time itself was refashioned. The calendar was remade to be centered on man rather than God, a calendar they said reflected “the rationality and simplicity of nature.”⁠2 They wrote parodies of the Lord’s Prayer.⁠3 They sang songs to the sun.⁠4 They worshipped trees of liberty, commemorating the execution of King Louis XVI.⁠5 The cry of these first “make love, not war” hippies was hardly peaceful: “We shall never be free until we strangle the last king with the guts of the last priest.”⁠6 Their ultimate ambition was nothing less than the eradication of Christendom—every tradition, every structure, every remaining trace of a Christian moral order swept away.”