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They aren’t even pretending anymore – the left and their pathetic, craven Fredocon Renfields hate us, and they are giddy at the idea that they can shut us up and make us serfs in our own country.

But they can’t do it. And if they weren’t so in love with the thrill of temporary success in banning people from Twitter and lying to our faces on 95% of the channels, they would understand the dangerous and hopeless game they are playing.

See, they want the benefits that come with a free and stable society, but they don’t want to do the inconvenient things that come along as part and parcel of a free and stable society. Things like not using whatever power is at hand to shut up people who say things you don’t like. Like not trying to leverage power to intimidate people into obedience. Like not becoming petty dictators as insanely certain of their own virtue as the Red Guards of the Cultural Revolution.

I saw the results of that mindset in Kosovo. Actions cause reactions, and a smug thug cannot control the reaction his acts unleash. You know, most of the ruins were not the towns and villages of the people the jerks oppressed. They were the jerks’ villages and towns, destroyed after the oppressed folks came back and settled the score.

Acts of oppression against your own people do not provoke fear. They provoke hate. Eliminating the ability to channel dissent within the mainstream causes radicalization.

But this is what our elitists seek to do, and it is utterly incompatible with the American ideal. They want prosperity. They want freedom (at least for themselves). They want peace and stability. And they are doing the very things that make those things impossible.

A prosperous and free society where disputes are resolved peacefully requires open debate and the tolerance of differing opinions. If you don’t reason away your differences instead of silence opponents, persuade instead of intimidate, and operate under a rule of law that applies equally to everyone, then how do you address disputes? By the rule of power.

And the rule of power is great, as long as you’re the one wielding it. But power comes in many shapes and sizes. The left has power because it controls the social media platforms, most of the media and Hollywood and academia, plus a lot of elite authority. They imagine that their monopoly on this kind of power means that they have all the power, but they don’t. There are many kinds of power. Why would they fool themselves into thinking the people they are dumping on would limit themselves to exercising power on the terms of their oppressors?

You can wield a rapier wit in a bar and make that big guy look like a fool with your cutting insults. But he’s not going to try to match your verbal dexterity. He’s going to beat the crap out of you. People under attack by those with power respond with whatever power they have.

The left’s soft tyranny, where your livelihood and ability to participate in society are held hostage to ensure your acquiesce, cannot and will not continue. Those subjected to it – the people I describe in my new book Militant Normals: How Regular Americans Are Rebelling Against the Elite to Reclaim Our Democracy – are not going to just shrug and give up the idea that they have a right to live as they please.

They will use their own power, and in the manner they see fit. They are going to rebel.

In fact, they have already started. The Tea Party was a rebellion. Electing Donald Trump was a rebellion. But our elite – our shabby, undistinguished elite that along the way traded actual accomplishments for mere snobbery – did not learn from them. It could not learn, as it had become so drunk on its skeevy brew of secular cultism and unearned self-regard that it cannot conceive that it might be wrong.

Trump was a warning. Know that what comes next is worse, if you consider Trump terrible. The elite hopes it can stamp out this infernal uppitiness by directing petty oppressions at those who won’t toe the leftist line, but that won’t suppress the resentment the elite has created. There’s no going back to a time when conservatism meant the docile grifting of the donor-flattering, cruise-shilling, MSNBC-friendly hacks at that sorry brochure, the Weekly Standard. Those conservaquislings are the worst. How many articles did they run decrying the goose-stepping fascists in academia, riling us up with tales of liberal thought control perfidy, only to side with the left wholeheartedly when all America became a college campus? Maybe they hope if the left can get rid of the competition – the voices less concerned with DC gravitas than actually pursing an agenda for Normal Americans – they’ll return to the positions they held before we rejected them and their incompetence and greed.

Good luck with that. The left would just destroy them last. Nobody likes a traitor.

That is, if the left won, but the left won’t win. It won’t destroy us. We have power too, starting with political power. It is time to wield it ferociously, but you knew that. You felt their hate for you, and you knew it was time to get in the ring.

Oh, to be sure many Republicans are useless. After Jesse Kelly was shamefully banned, Ben Sasse – hedging with his obligatory “Oh well I never” sigh over Jesse’s refusal to be a passive schmuck – went on to offer a mealy-mouth headshake about deplatforming being bad. But Sasse is a senator. How about he stop tweeting and scribbling stupid books and write some damn laws protecting our rights?

Of course, there’s no doubt some reason that’s not who we are. There always is.

But others can and will take it to the other side. The GOP announced that it was looking into the Twitter CEO’s testimony under oath that it does not discriminate based on politics. After all, perjury’s a crime (especially if you can’t prove collusion). And what a shock – Jesse Kelly is back on Twitter. That’s power too, only this time righteously used.

Cocaine Mitch McConnell, who is as woke as a million suns, gets power. He will ram through judges who will defend the First and Second Amendments. And I would not be surprised if his Senate, with reborn firebrands like Lindsey Graham leading the way, start dealing the pain to those who would keep us in chains. The House can do all the investigating it wants; so can the Senate. If that’s the game, so be it, Dems – you sure you wanna play?

And we own plenty of state legislatures. There’s lots we can do via state law to stop this garbage. All we have to do is do it.

What can we do individually? We can resist. Their power is soft – it only works if we accept it. We can tell the truth about how many sexes there are and how climate change is a scam and all the other truths that the left wants suppressed. We can refuse to be intimidated. We can ignore their garbage media and Tinseltown propaganda. We can elect conservatives who relish conflict instead of whimpering and hiding. We can fight back and win.

The stakes are high, the worst-case scenario is terrifying. But America is worth fighting for.

To keep our freedom, we need to accept the truth, as bitter as it is. The left hates us and wants us silenced. But this is our country. If they want it, they have to take it from us because we are never giving up.