If you’re on a college campus today—or have a child on campus—there’s a solid chance you’ll hear this: “All white people are racist.” You might hear this, too: “America is founded on white supremacy.”

These two sentences are not mere overheated emotion. They express an ideology called Critical Race Theory—or CRT—which argues that race is a social construct made by white people. Just as race was once used to enslave and terrorize, so it is used today to keep America unequal, unfair, and hostile to minorities.

The Trump administration just took symbolic and courageous action against CRT. It issued a memo to federal agencies calling for the end of the government’s CRT “racial sensitivity trainings,” terming them “divisive, anti-American propaganda.”

Does America have real issues in its past? Yes.

Have we made real progress that we must guard carefully? Also yes.

The White House has led well here.

The California legislature finished its 2020 session by passing Senate Bill 145, which seeks the reduction of penalties for those convicted on charges of pedophilia. The bill’s author, Senator Scott Wiener, said the bill corrects past unfair retribution for homosexual sex with a minor. But a fellow Democrat, Lorena Gonzalez, disagreed:

“Any sex is sex. I don’t care who it is between or what sex act it is. … I cannot … as a mother understand how sex between a 24-year-old and a 14-year-old could ever be consensual … We should never give up on this idea that children are not, should not be in any way subject to a predator.”

The nation needs to be aware of what is happening.

This piece of legislation erodes a key legal reality that the country still overwhelmingly supports: Our kids deserve protection. A 14-year-old does not, and should not, grant consent.

The tremendous violence in America migrated to an unlikely setting recently: The typically quiet city of Kenosha, Wisconsin. According to the Kenosha police department, out of 175 people arrested recently, 102 had a home address outside Kenosha, hailing from no less than 44 different cities.

What this means is that our cities are being torn apart by what amounts to a professional rioting class. These “protesters” are not merely upset; they are not merely decrying what they see as injustices. Those of the rioting class are genuine radicals—believing, per Critical Race Theory—that America is built upon a racist foundation. “White supremacy” represents the structure of this country, and so to cleanse America of it, American civilization must be torn down and rebuilt.

We are not merely witnessing “outrage” today. We are witnessing a focused attack on the fabric of America.

Terrible ideas have terrible consequences.

The recent unveiling of the Republican agenda for a second term gave much encouragement to many who need it. Defeat COVID; create jobs; disentangle from China; provide school choice; teach American exceptionalism unapologetically; defend the police as an institution; oppose human trafficking—these and other measures offer sanity, flourishing, and hope to an embattled country.

No agenda can cover every issue. Two outstanding issues need platforming, however: religious liberty and abortion. The Trump administration has taken stands on both of these momentous matters and to good effect. In days ahead, though, supporters of religious liberty and the unerasable humanity of the unborn need more support, not less.

Religious liberty, after all, is for this gloriously free society the first freedom. Among other righteous ends, it enables a diverse coalition of many voices to speak on behalf of the unborn until the murderous abomination of abortion is a distant memory.

What is happening in America?

Many have asked this question of late. In Portland, Oregon, police recently received some sixty 911 calls, and could handle only a few. A video from the city went viral as it showed a man named Adam Haner attacked by a mob. He was conscious until Marquise Love, a Black Lives Matter protestor, roundhouse-kicked him. It is not known if Haner will survive.

This is merely one example of many from an embattled city. Americans should not miss what is taking place in our country. The foundations of law and order, of justice and social coherence, are shaking.

We should all take responsibility for the future of this country. Liberal policies and decisions are undoing American order. People do not have help when they call 911. Mobs are ruling downtowns.

Alongside other questions, we ask this: what will happen in America? Where policy corrupts, new leadership is needed.

A giant has fallen. J. I. Packer—the great theologian—has died at 93. Packer was spiritually listless as a boy. When he went to Oxford for university, everything changed.

His conversion happened at an evening service at St. Aldate’s Anglican Church in 1944. Initially, he was bored. Then Packer awoke spiritually. He knew “He needed to come in” to Christ, and did. On an unremarkable evening, the modern church gained one of her greatest voices.

Packer was linked with D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Christianity Today, Regent College, and the ESV Bible. He became a one-man publishing house for a brand of twentieth-century theology that was Reformational, biblical, cross-centered, and surprisingly experiential. His book “Knowing God” is a classic.

But Packer was no retiring flower. He wrote at full sail, with all hands to arms. He walked with God, taught us to know God, and then he was caught up to heaven. We honor him.

Irving Kristol famously defined a neo-conservative as “a liberal who has been mugged by reality.” Philosophical commitments crumble when the hardness of everyday life in a fallen world intrudes.

Recently a couple in St. Louis made headlines when they brandished guns against a mob that broke the gate to their private community. Such instances reveal an ironic cultural moment in which talking heads and moralizing activists tell us it is bad for the police to defend us even as they menace public property, cops, and even peaceful citizens.

Law enforcement is not perfect, and every institution must be accountable to the people. Yet we cannot miss today that too often the same people who are telling us the cops are bad are the people who want to do bad things.

Here’s expecting many around us today to be mugged by reality—to watch their ideas give way before hard truths and human depravity.