It’s obviously fine to disagree on some issues, but here are my general thoughts in response to what you wrote:

I’m in no way parroting the regressive left’s talking points, but I’d be curious to hear your argument about why the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Salem Witch Trials or the many other similar “lowlights” in the history of Christianity were positive developments. How are these things different from modern-day Islamic jihad? The main difference, to me, is that in the case of Christianity, these kinds of instances of crazed theocratic zealotry are largely phenomena that occurred before the Enlightenment and the Reformation, whereas in the case of Islam, jihad is a present-day problem, and as I’ve shown, mainstream Muslim beliefs today are completely incompatible with those of most open Western societies.

The difference between me and the historical revisionists and regressive left’s resentniks is that while I have no problem identifying historical mistakes the West or Christendom has made, I also have no problem embracing all the West’s and Christendom’s glorious achievements. When our idiot mayor here in New York City is now seriously considering taking down an iconic Christopher Columbus statue (probably to distract from his financial corruption, his letting the city’s subway system fall into total disrepair or his handicapping law enforcement to the point where we have unruly homeless and panhandlers on every corner), I’m quite comfortable getting on the Trump train and asking, “Where does this kind of assault on our monuments and our culture end?” I believe in teaching the Western Canon, and I believe education has to be, in Matthew Arnold’s oft-quoted phrase, about immersing students in “the best that has been thought and said” in the world rather than coddling them and teaching specific ideas or texts focused upon their particular racial, ethnic, gender, sexual or religious identity. I believe, as I’ve argued many times here, that stressing such identities is destructive of any common culture and leads directly to balkanization and ultimately, to pure race war.

But I don’t see why I need to take the glorious achievements in the name of Christendom — such as our beautiful religious architecture (cathedrals, etc.), the Sistine Chapel, the religious music of Bach or Handel or Dante’s Divine Comedy, etc. — and conflate these with Christendom’s lowlights, as described above, and then characterize the whole thing either as uniformly good or uniformly bad. We’re stronger, not weaker, when we are able to make such distinctions. The West created democracy, tolerance and great art, literature and music and philosophy, but it also engineered the Holocaust. I have no problem acknowledging both. Again, the difference between me and those who hate the U.S. and the West is that acknowledging these historical mistakes, such as the Holocaust or American slavery, doesn’t mean I’m going to start running down this nation and insist on taking down physical or cultural monuments or start making ridiculous statements about how this nation is built on white supremacy or whatever or start calling for reparations and apologies for history. There’s a tendency, in reaction to those in the alt-left, to harden our own attitudes and start saying that everything about America and the West is great and good, but I think that kind of approach just makes us an easier target, so that these nuts can then point to us and say, “See, that’s what I’m talking about.” When we bring nuance to these issues, however, they lose their bearings, and their inflated rhetoric loses its sting. Or, to put this another way, when we attack extremist Islam for its crusade of jihad but needlessly defend our own history of crusades, purges and Holy Wars, we open ourselves up to charges of hypocrisy and Islamophobia in a way we’d never have to if we were able to make an intellectually consistent stand against all such theological overreach.