On July 6, President Donald Trump made a speech in Poland defending Western civilization. Read this portion:

The world has never known anything like our community of nations. We write symphonies. We pursue innovation. We celebrate our ancient heroes, embrace our timeless traditions and customs, and always seek to explore and discover brand-new frontiers. We reward brilliance. We strive for excellence, and cherish inspiring works of art that honor God. We treasure the rule of law and protect the right to free speech and free expression. We empower women as pillars of our society and of our success. We put faith and family, not government and bureaucracy, at the center of our lives. And we debate everything. We challenge everything. We seek to know everything so that we can better know ourselves. And above all, we value the dignity of every human life, protect the rights of every person, and share the hope of every soul to live in freedom. That is who we are. Those are the priceless ties that bind us together as nations, as allies, and as a civilization.

The left’s response? “It was a White America, America first speech,” said CNN’s Jeff Zeleny — formerly the fawning New York Times reporter who asked Barack Obama what “enchanted” him about the presidency. The Washington Post ran an opinion piece by a WaPo editorial board member headlined: “Trump’s white-nationalist dog whistles in Warsaw.” Peter Beinart in the The Atlantic deemed the speech “racial and religious paranoia.”

Meanwhile, leftist leader Linda Sarsour called on her fellow American Muslims to abjure assimilation and wage “jihad” against the president of the United States. The left’s response was to patiently explain to us evil, Islamophobic right-wingers that this was clearly a non-violent call to speak truth to power. Which is false. Sarsour is an anti-Semitic supporter of the oppressive monstrosity known as Sharia law. And in the same speech , she pointed to Siraj Wajjah, an unindicted co-conspirator in the first World Trade Center bombing, and called him “my favorite person in the room.” She knew exactly what she was saying when she used the terrorist by-word.

But don’t think the left is getting religious just because it defends terrorist ideology in the name of Allah. No, sir. When Attorney General Jeff Sessions recently made a speech before the conservative religious rights advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom, the headline at ABC News , later backed up by NBC HuffPo and so on, was Jeff Sessions addresses ‘anti-LGBT hate group,’ but DOJ won’t release his remarks. Those quotation marks around “hate group” are to indicate that the ADF was designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a left-wing hate group that uses its hate-group lists to slander conservatives. In fact, the ADF is defending religious people’s rights to opt out of performing tasks that violate their consciences, and Sessions’ speech was in support of that.

So the left thinks Western civilization is racist, “jihad” means spiritual struggle, and freedom of conscience is hateful.

Oh, and by the way, if you hadn’t heard, Donald Trump Junior met with a Russian lawyer in a failed attempt to get dirt on Hillary Clinton.

What Junior did was stupid and I’ll bet there are others in the Trump camp who did stupid stuff — although when it comes to corruption and collusion, they are rank amateurs compared to Obama and Hillary. It is not defending the Trumpers’ actions to say this, however: the entire Russia narrative seems to me a diversion from the real news. A toxic, anti-western, anti-freedom, anti-religious philosophy known as leftism — a philosophy that was very close to ending the American experiment in 2016 — is now being exposed and, one hopes, stalled by a flawed president and his flawed administration.

In this — the central struggle of our age — I’m on the administration’s side.