The left has developed a genuine "hatred" for America, and nothing triggers it so quickly as reminders about how great the nation is, talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh says.

Such as President Trump's speech last week in Poland in which he praised Western civilization and said the key to its future is its regard for family and values.

Chris Buskirk, co-author with Seth Leibsohn of the new book "American Greatness," praised the speech.

"This is somebody who gets it," he said. "This is somebody who understands that Western civilization is uniquely valuable and the United States has a leading role to play in Western civilization and in the defense of Western civilization. When I heard the president's speech in Poland, I thought to myself, 'This is better than I ever thought!' And I thought he was going to be really good! So it's really exceeded all expectations."

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Buskirk made the comments in a recent interview on the "Freedom Friday" radio show with Carl Gallups, the author of "When the Lion Roars." Both Gallups and Buskirk noted with amusement how fiercely the left-wing media opposed Trump's speech, even though it was in defense of ideals many Americans would define as self-evidently good.

Limbaugh took up the issue on Monday, too.

He noted the left's "singular focus on nothing" and Trump's question whether America "has the will ... the desire to defend Western values, which is who we are and what we are."

Learn the real story behind the intellectual and political movement that stunned the dishonest media and put Donald J. Trump in the White House. THE blockbuster of 2017: "American Greatness: How Conservatism Inc. Missed The 2016 Election & What The D.C. Establishment Needs To Learn" by Chris Buskirk and Seth Leibsohn, available now in the WND Superstore.

"I knew there was objection to it at the time, but it's singularly instructive to note the literal cow that the left is having over the assertion of greatness of Western values. Places in mainstream media, mainstream media, which is indicative of just how far out to the left the mainstream of the American left or Democrat Party has become. The nonsense, the paranoia, the fear, the hate, the unbridled hate over the expression of Western civilization, Western values," he said.

"For those of you that are not quite sure how to define Western civilization, you have to think of people like Winston Churchill, you have to think of the Founders of this country. Western civilization is simply that which led to the United States of America. It's instrumental in the founding, the values, the overall view of humanity and the world. And it has been one of the greatest acknowledgments of the human condition in the history of the human condition, and that being the United States' Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the entire setup of the United States of America," he said.

Liberals, Limbaugh said, have gone too far.

"And I've always known they're extreme, and I've always known they're hateful. But I continually – and I shouldn't be, I guess – but I continue to be surprised over just how far gone they are. There is now a genuine – we have to just call it what it is. There is a genuine hatred for this country and its great traditions and institutions. And it appears at first glance to me like it happened overnight. It hasn't happened overnight; that's the point."

He said it was there when George W. Bush was president, it just wasn't expressed. But when Barack Obama moved into the White House, "it seems like that wing of the party, the people that voted for Obama because of his policy orientation, not because of his race, had become something distinctly not American. And it was like a jack-in-the-box popping up to me. And it was a shock."

He noted that the leftists now are calling Trump's speech on Western civilization "a shining example of racism and bigotry, white nationalism, white supremacy. And in this we are discovering what these people have always thought of this country. It's just recently, relatively recently that for whatever reasons they feel entirely comfortable and confident in going public with it, with no caveats and no qualifiers. It's just stunning."

He cited a long list of negative comments about Trump's address from far-left activists.

"And to me it’s mind-boggling to listen and see some of the reaction to that speech. You realize, as I said, those same values, the same belief, country founded by God, we are all created by God, endowed with certain inalienable rights – life, liberty, pursuit of happiness. This is the stuff that's under assault as white nationalism, as white racism, as the problem with America is, it's been all white too much of the time, and white values. That means Christianity."

He explained drove the left "over the edge" was Trump's reference to family, freedom, country and God.

"That literally sent them over the edge. … These are the people who think our education system needs to be fixed. These are the people who think that Barack Obama was the answer to all of our problems," he said.

Trump's speech earned a rave review from Buskirk.

"I thought the speech was fantastic," said Buskirk. "[But] I'm looking at something on Vox right now and they are saying 'Trump's speech in Poland sounded like an alt-right manifesto' and underneath that they have a quote from the speech where he says 'for family, for freedom, for country and for God.' Now I heard that and of course I was thrilled to hear him say those words yesterday. Now you look at Vox.com, a very left-wing outlet, and this is what they think 'alt-right' is. 'For family?' 'For freedom?' 'For country?' 'For God?' I guess they're opposed to all those things. They say they're opposed to the alt-right, they say that's the definition of alt-right, well, OK, if that's it!

"Most people in this country, when they hear for family, for freedom, for country and for God, they think that's America, and they're thrilled to hear the president talk about it in unapologetic terms with a confidence and really a swagger that we need to get back. And you know, you can tell something about a man from who his enemies are. Washington Post, Vox, The Atlantic, CNN, MSNBC – they hated it. That should tell you everything you need to know. It was a great speech."

Hear the interview:

Buskirk accused Trump's liberal critics of being fundamentally ignorant about the nature of our civilization.

"Not only is it ridiculous, they don't understand what they're talking about," he said. "The concept of Western civilization was built upon natural, God-given rights. And our view in Western civilization is that those rights exist outside of anything the government does but we form government to protect those rights. That should be unobjectionable to all people of good faith. And we find out that it's not and all the left has to offer is identity politics and name calling. And so they hear Donald Trump say words like, 'The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive,' that’s a quote from the speech and they go absolutely bonkers. But remember, these are the same people who drove Western civilization courses out of the university, off college campuses a generation ago. They are opposed to Western civilization."

Gallups, who was an influential evangelical backer of Trump during the primaries, praised Buskirk's book as a must-read and a challenge to conservative movement orthodoxy.

Buskirk suggested Trump’s election could serve as a wake-up call for the conservative movement.

"We got a call from a publisher literally the day after the election who said, 'You guys have to write this book about the election, what went wrong, how did conservatives miss this,'" he said. "And it wasn't WND, by the way. Once we wrote the book, our original publisher I think maybe didn't like everything we had to say. We looked back, and it was self-reflection really in a lot of ways, and said what has gone wrong in the conservative movement in this country when we've got the flagship publications of conservatism, places like the National Review and Weekly Standard, and they have more in common with The New Republic, The American Prospect, The Nation and, you know, all these left-wing journals when it comes to who they want to see elected president.

"Something has gone dramatically wrong here, and it's not the country, it's not the voters. I mean, I live in Phoenix, I'm not a D.C. person. We've got to take a look at where this went wrong and what we can do to recapture the momentum, the intellectual, practical and political vigor, the fire in our bellies, to take the country back."

While many conservatives were shocked at the rise of Trump, Buskirk and Leibsohn defend the president in "American Greatness" as exactly the kind of fighter American conservatism needed. The problem, they suggest, was not with Trump, but with the conservative movement.

"There are really two parts to the book," Buskirk said, describing the book's thesis. "One is to say where did the conservative movement go so wrong that when somebody like a Donald Trump comes along, somebody who espouses all of the things we've been saying we want, all the things that the pundits say they want for years and years and years, and not only did they not support him, they actively work against him. We've got people like Bill Kristol at The Weekly Standard and Jonah Goldberg at the National Review saying we'd rather have Hillary! That makes no sense to me. And so we dug into that stuff when we wrote the book and said, how did we get there? And you know, part of the answer to that is that the D.C. establishment is one thing.



"It's not so much that we have a left/right division in Washington. In this country, we have a distinction between a ruling class and a country class, between a D.C. part of the country and everybody else. And whether you want to be a Republican or a Democrat in Washington, D.C., it's all sort of go along to get along. And now you had people say enough of that, at least for the voters who elected Donald Trump."

But now that Trump is in the White House after the biggest political upset in American history, many are fearful the momentum of his populist campaign will be squandered because there is no intellectual groundwork behind the Trump movement. Providing that intellectual guidance is the second purpose of "American Greatness."

"The other half of the book is, now where do we go?" said Buskirk. "How do we build on this? How do we build on this momentum and have an intellectual reformation that leads to a political restoration of the things that you and I hold dear?"

Ultimately, Buskirk said, the book's simple yet profound title encapsulates the worldview not just of the authors, but of the spirit behind Trump's campaign, a spirit once again expressed in the president's speech in Poland. That's why, after some dispute, "American Greatness" is the title of the book which more than any other explains the intellectual roots of the Donald Trump movement.

"We finally settled on 'American Greatness' because that's really what the book is about," Buskirk said. “That’s what we believe in. We believe in this country.”

Learn the real story behind the intellectual and political movement that stunned the dishonest media and put Donald J. Trump in the White House. THE blockbuster of 2017: "American Greatness: How Conservatism Inc. Missed The 2016 Election & What The D.C. Establishment Needs To Learn" by Chris Buskirk and Seth Leibsohn, available now in the WND Superstore.

Trump's speech in Poland: