President Trump wasn't hitting as much ground as his Olympic-level sprints flattened all obstacles.
He arrived at the Oval Office little earlier than he began signing dozens of executive orders that fulfilled the promises he had given Americans to fight back against the forces destroying the country.
It was an amazing example of how leadership can change the mood and set of assumptions.
A black cloud of forced conformity began to roll.
People were stifled by years of vilification because they wanted to live in America.
Above all, Trump's arrival in office has upended the American narrative and injected instead a moody optimism that America is not just great, but will be great again.
You don't have to agree with everything Trump is doing to acknowledge that he has changed the political dynamic. Thousands of tinpot liberal emperors were suddenly exposed as having no clothes.
The rest of the world was surprised and not a little envious.
In Britain, my birthplace, the Labor government that is destroying the country by refusing to preserve the country's historic culture and values has given rise to a ponderous view of what a true national leader looks like. You can go beyond and cover up helplessly.
The energy of this president could yet spark even more significant revolutions. Repealing the Day, securing our borders, and purging extremists from our campuses and the country are important reforms that speak to voters' most pressing concerns.
But these are all harmful consequences of the way we see the world.
Even if Trump's reforms mean America is once again happy with two genders, white people will no longer be vilified for the color of their skin and universities will return to the free play of ideas. You can repeat the exercise.
That's because they were part of the seismic and disruptive changes in Western society that have been occurring for decades and have captured the hearts of so many cultural leaders.
As I write in my new book, The Builder's Stone: How Jews and Christians Built the West and Why Only They Can Save It, these Western elites It carried out a systematic attack on its own society and therefore on civilization itself.
Ordered that the West was born with the original sins of colonialism and racism, they took x to the foundations of the traditional married family and the foundations of an educational system that transmits culture to the next generation.
That culture was considered racist, so it became a Babel of a culture where Western values had no authority at their core: equality for women, freedom of speech, all laws, etc. It had to be replaced.
Western states were seen as sources of prejudice and war and had to be replaced by transnational laws and institutions such as international human rights law and the United Nations, which stood in the brotherhood of humanity.
This utopian vision was to usher in a brave new world of peace and justice. Instead, it created dire social divisions between groups fighting for power. It deprived individuals of their aspirations by a culture of victimhood based on grievance and resentment, making the West an attractive enemy because, as in John Lennon's famous lyric, it claimed that its elites would not fight or die. I made it a target.
Fundamental to all this was the progressive erosion of the Biblical values that gave the West core principles of right and wrong, personal responsibility and obligation towards others.
This erosion provided a golden opportunity for Muslims. Muslims felt that the resulting spiritual, moral and political vacuum made the West theirs to usurp.
A combination of the increasingly dominant Islamists and the radical left marching in lockstep in pursuit of a common goal of destroying the West, October 7, 2023 vividly illustrated by the grotesque reaction to the massacre. Gaza and the subsequent war.
Instead of supporting Israel's desperate defense against an enemy intended to wipe it out, many in the West saw Gazan as a victim of Israel.
On the streets of Western cities, thousands of Muslim and left-wing demonstrators chanted the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews and jihad against the West. And a tsunami of anti-Semitism was unleashed across Britain and America, Canada and Australia.
It was no surprise that Israel and the Jews were in the eye of this storm. Just as Israel defends the West against the Muslim forces, determined to destroy it, so Western progressives attack Israel and the Jews against themselves, their own society and its core. It attacks Jewish principles.
Judaism, through the vehicle of Christianity, was the source of conscience, justice, and reason that produced the greatness of Western civilization.
What we witnessed after October 7 was the disappearance of conscience, justice and reason. And the explanation lies in the deterioration of Western culture.
Many, especially in Britain and Europe, which are bearing the brunt of all this, despair that the fight for civilization is already lost. But it has not yet been properly fought.
In my book, the West, the Resistance, is a coalition of civilizations made up of people from all ethnic, cultural, and religious groups who fight to continue and fight to uphold the historically rooted principles of freedom and justice. It is recommended to mobilize exercise.
They need to draw on the unparalleled record of Jewish survival to learn how to embed the lessons of the Bible into their daily lives. They need to promote a culture of attachment based on family, nation, tradition and the transmission of cultural memory.
Trump's ruthless defense of American interests has already caused the rest of the world to readjust their actions.
Now he needs to defend this union for civilization and fight the suicidal liberal ideology that has eroded the foundations of the West.
Trump went against historical odds because millions of people denigrated America, weakened it, erased its historical identity, turned it into a battleground between groups, and turned it into a battleground for power. Because they rebelled against change.
They wanted instead to belong to a country shaped by a shared and identifiable heritage in the places they recognized as home. And millions of other people in Britain and Europe, appointed to their political establishment, have long done the exact same thing.
This is why Trump's second term is so important. As he rises to the challenge, America leads the fight to save civilization and strengthens similar popular rebellions in other countries. If he fails, the West may follow the path of ancient Rome.
Above all, the West must make a choice: surrender or survive.
The battle for civilization has begun and there's everything to play for.
Melanie Phillips' “The Builder's Stone: How Jews and Christians Built the West – and Only They Can Save It”” Published by Wicked Son and available on Amazon.
