Have they scared you yet? Me neither. Not for want of trying, though. Project Fear is ramping up, and it’s only going to get worse. The Democrats and the global establishment class do not care how many lives are lost or how much financial damage results. They have only one concern: removing President Trump from power, silencing us, and bending the arc of history back toward the plutocratic governing elite. For them, that is the only moral universe that can exist.

All of us have known this was coming. From the moment on November 8, 2016, when we looked at each other and smiled, we knew the real war had just begun. The people with the most power in our country and across the globe had spent six months before that fateful election campaigning on nothing but fear. They promised economic ruin. They promised imminent nuclear holocaust. They promised that internal unrest would lead to civil war, that foreign policy inexperience would lead to global war, and that global warming skepticism would lead to planetary extinction. They laid all this and more at the feet of American voters, but enough of us had finally grown so furious with decades of ineptitude and betrayal by the federal government that we drew our own red line across America’s timeline and said, “No.” We did not fall for their scaremongering and delusions; we held our ground and finally pushed back.

That is why the election year of 2016 will always mark a turning point in American history, while most other election years will be long forgotten. 2016 was significant not just because President Trump won, but because so many of us looked around and realized just how many of us there actually are. For years we had been minimized and mocked and made to feel very much alone. We held our tongues in class; we held our tongues at work; we endured the ritual hazing from Hollywood movies and primetime television and late night comedy and cable news; we took it and took it and stayed silent like good soldiers while the institutions in our country worked to make us feel small. Then one day we stood up, threw the mother of all uppercuts to their open jaws, and knocked the bullies right on their backs. To this day, I’m not sure who was more surprised: the pummeled looking up from the ground or the pummelers staring at our own fists and enjoying what we’d done. Either way, everything changed that day because conservatism changed. We finally remembered that the fight for liberty in 1776 wasn’t done over wine and cheese. Conserving freedom requires more than passive respect for one’s traditions; it requires active and vigilant participation. And if our best fighters weren’t getting the job done, we’d just have to send a new type of fighter into the ring, or better yet, stop watching the fight from the damn spectator’s gallery, lace up some gloves, and set to work swinging.

Since that time the Democrats and the global establishment class have done everything to pretend that 2016 never happened. The “smart” set sees the Russian boogeyman under every bed, lack of education behind every Trump vote, racism responsible for every Trump victory. So sure are they that they’re on the “right side of history” that they have abandoned any pretense of supporting free speech or alternative points of view. For them, the Bill of Rights was never anything more than a vehicle toward State control of everything, another troubling and outmoded vestige of America’s past that can be discarded and abandoned on the road to America’s socialist future. So, they’ve sent attack after attack against President Trump and all of us. While the CIA and FBI have conspired to oust the president, the social media giants have closed our accounts, censored our words, and silenced our voices. The harm they cause is as real as their inability to grasp the seriousness of their actions, for by depriving us of our pens, they will leave us only our swords.

Over these long years since the 2016 election, though, our tormentors have unintentionally accomplished something else: they’ve steeled our resolve. In those first few months after President Trump was elected, the attempt to take him down was so furious that none of us knew for sure what would happen. Would Democrats successfully subvert the Electoral College? Would Republicans like Paul Ryan and John McCain demand the president’s resignation? Would Jim Comey’s accusations lead to impeachment and removal? How many James Hodgkinsons would the Democrats send our way? How lethal would John Brennan’s threats against President Trump prove to be? Their attacks on the legitimacy of the 2016 election and attempts to overturn it have created an unrelenting siege against all of us who would have gladly gone back to our own lives until the 2020 election. Because they have given us no peace, however, they have made us sharp for what lies ahead.

This is the year that the Democrats weaponize fear like never before. Every one of us knows that. They will do everything they can to torment and torture American voters until they exchange their votes in November for temporary mercy. But no mercy will ever come. This is the lie they’ve told for generations. The lie they’ve used to make Americans submissive while stealing everything from them. The Democrats have always been the hostage takers who collect their ill-gotten gains before promptly shooting all the hostages they’d promised to free. That’s the history of their party. For them, 2016 was inexplicable. Americans had never stood up to them before, and they intend to make sure it cannot happen in 2020. If they must, they will destroy what they cannot possess. We, on the other hand, are no longer asleep, and we know what is coming. For the first time in many decades, a growing number of Americans finally see who the Democrats are and what they are capable of inflicting upon their fellow citizens. There is a fire before us; we must walk through it; but we no longer have to do so alone. With eyes wide open, we will.