We just concluded one of the strangest, and most illuminating, weeks in the history of American politics — a week in which the Democrat Party, through its majority control of the U.S. House of Representatives, exposed itself as not just driven by out-of-the-mainstream anti-American and anti-civilization ideologues but by radicals lacking the political skill to carry a message even with the aid of a slavish mainstream media.

That was the takeaway from the Robert Mueller hearing on Wednesday, in which the Democrats’ anti-Trump cleanup hitter was summoned to Capitol Hill ostensibly to set the stage for the long-fantasized impeachment of the president.

But the Mueller testimony bombed completely, as the Democrats failed to recognize that in examining him in detail about his report on the supposed collusion between President Trump’s campaign and Russian operatives to tamper with the 2016 election, which the Democrats’ candidate could not win, they were going to expose Mueller as a figurehead lacking authority for his own report. When it was over, it was crystal clear that the report named for Robert Mueller was actually spearheaded by left-wing radical attorney and egregiously abusive federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, who had single-handedly put over 100,000 people out of work in investigations of Enron and Arthur Andersen, which resulted in appellate courts throwing out his prosecutorial achievements due to abuse.

The Democrats still aren’t finished with the Trump-Russia meme. They apparently fail to recognize that virtually everything to come as this story goes forward will be unpleasant for them. There is the Department of Justice’s Inspector General report, due out later this summer, which will likely describe the origins of the Trump-Russia meme as being bought and paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign and used as a predicate for colossal civil rights abuses, if not election tampering, by the Obama administration, which weaponized Clinton’s store-bought Steele Dossier to spy on the Trump campaign. And then there is Trump’s soon-to-come declassification of all documents pertaining to those abuses of power, which holds the potential of discrediting the entire Democrat Party with anyone willing to give the evidence a fair hearing.

Of course, today’s Democrats aren’t interested in fair hearings, and they aren’t interested in persuading the persuadable. What they’re interested in is using political and cultural power to force people to accept things no intelligent person should be able to accept.

And the painting of Donald Trump, one of the country’s most patriotic — his detractors would call him jingoistic, if not xenophobic — cultural figures over the past generation, as a Russian intelligence asset is only one of the clearly ridiculous intellectual abuses the Democrats and the Left demand Americans accept.

Never mind that the evidence (Uranium One, anyone?) points to Hillary Clinton as a hell of a lot more susceptible to charges of collusion with foreign powers than Trump is, or that Barack Obama’s cash payments to the Iranians in support of a nakedly one-sided nuclear deal would present a lot better case for unpatriotic White House leadership than anything Trump has done or said. According to the Democrats and their lickspittles in the newspapers and poorly rated cable news shows, it’s Trump who sold out America to win an election.

And if you aren’t persuaded by their screams and invective, it only proves you’re not worth arguing with and must be called names.

This might be the latest dumb thing Democrats demand you believe, and it’s getting the most play in the media right now, but it isn’t even the worst of the abuses of the American intellect they’re pursuing. Any of the following could be considered more damaging to our collective intelligence.

For example, there is the argument that only white people can be racist in America, which carries with it some further baggage. This meme is so pervasive that it now requires white people, and particularly white men, to refrain from holding any opinions on actions, behaviors, or attitudes of People of Color, whether generic or specific.

If you don’t like seeing young men with pants hanging below their derrières and underwear showing, you are clearly a racist. If you think Ilhan Omar is an unmitigated, hateful disaster, you’re racist through and through. If you don’t think politicians seeking to represent the entire country should be breaking bread with Louis Farrakhan, you might as well join the Ku Klux Klan. Similarly, you’re a racist if you believe Al Sharpton should pay his federal taxes, that the city of Baltimore has greatly declined under Democrat leadership, a state of affairs that happens to manifest itself with black people in positions of power (that decline, however, was present when Martin O’Malley, who is white as a sheet, was mayor) or that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Hank Johnson, Mazie Hirono, or Rashida Tlaib are among the lesser examples of American leadership one might produce for inspection.

Only white people can be racist in America, the saying goes, because in order for racism to be operable it must carry with it a social, economic, and political power structure. Anyone who believes this has clearly never been mugged in a sketchy part of town or attempted to navigate the bureaucracy in a city with a minority-led Democrat government. Sure, there are racist white people roaming the fruited plain, but any honest examination will reveal no racial or ethnic group holds a monopoly on bigotry.

While the increasingly warped definition of racism, most recently applied to Trump for telling the truth about Baltimore, might be the most culturally damaging of the Left’s enforced intellectual abuses, the most absurd meme running today has to be the insistence that gender is a social construct.

This definition is built off the idea that gender and sex are not the same thing, a notion that requires a tortured understanding of the two. For those of us driven by evidence and reality in our daily observations and behaviors, this stuff is not very complicated: your gender is governed by what’s between your legs, and if it isn’t, it’s not so much a function of social constructs, but sanity.

It’s a free country, and if a man wants to present himself as a woman, that’s his choice. But those around him, in a free country, also have the freedom to react to that choice in ways of their own choosing. A man attempting to present as a woman but doing it badly enough that the rest of us are not convinced is not being “misgendered” if we don’t feel like treating him as female or use pronouns he would supply for us. Nor is he being abused if we prefer that he not use women’s bathrooms or access taxpayer resources to groom children for the transgender lifestyle at public libraries. And should he demand that employees of salons catering to female clientele perform services of a nature not conventionally offered to male customers — a Brazilian wax treatment on a penis and testicles, for example, which one transgender male in Canada shut down a Merle Norman day spa by filing a complaint with the local Human Rights Commission after being refused by a grossed-out salon employee — the rest of us are, in a free country, at liberty to reject such demands.

The race and gender terror Democrats are imposing on the rest of us carries a common thread that appears in some of their other abuses — namely, an all-out war on standards. You can’t ask People of Color, who we’re meant to believe have fallen behind in this country, to embrace behavior more likely to produce success in America any more than you can ask people to follow the quite obvious and not-so-difficult imperatives of their basic nature. To do that is to be a bigot, according to the Left.

Of course, there is also the insistence that driving an SUV or eating meat means you’re contributing to burning up the planet. Every summer we hear the global warming crowd reiterate their breathless claims that “climate change” is the biggest threat to the planet, and the remedy for the coming apocalypse — which is always 10 or 12 years away, even if 10 or 12 years comes and goes with no discernible signs of that apocalypse — is always self-imposed poverty and loss of liberty.

This despite evidence that Mars is undergoing a warming trend fairly similar to that on Earth, which would certainly point to that giant collection of nuclear explosions in the sky as the primary governing body of global temperature. When the Earth begins cooling amid the sun’s cyclical decline in activity, it will be interesting to hear what the climate change crowd has to say about it.

Actually, no, it won’t. They’ll say exactly what they’ve been saying and merely scream and call names at anyone who notes the cognitive dissonance.

Another trope that ought to have been put to bed by now is the idea that socialism is a workable plan that simply has not been implemented properly. How many times must we hear this amid the horrors of the USSR, China, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Cuba, and Venezuela, among others? Every time it’s the same story: communist dictators are the good guys seeking to liberate the people from the oppression of the exploitative capitalist system, and when the people being liberated scramble for the border at their first opportunity, their plight is minimized or ignored. When the brain-drain reaches critical mass and the new system begins to collapse, America — and particularly evil American corporations, whichever Republican president can be found, or the CIA — is primarily to blame.

Once the system collapses fully, we are presented with the implementers of the socialism system as the scapegoats, notwithstanding the fact today’s scapegoats are yesterday’s superstars. When someone not a monster rises to the top of a socialist government, we are told, we will get to see the real beauty of such a system.

It never quite occurs to our leftist friends that monsters are precisely the people who do rise to the top in socialist governments.

Predictably tiresome is the disingenuous presentation of the Scandinavian countries as the glowing exemplars of the Democrats’ kind of socialists. Interestingly, every one of those countries have turned away from the socialist model in every way they could because they’ve found it doesn’t work, and when you talk to people from those countries you hear from them that they believe themselves to be capitalist countries, albeit with high levels of government services offered to homogeneously middle-class, relatively sparse populations.

Those are inconvenient facts, of course, and in our modern Bizarro World, inconvenient facts about leftist tropes are pushed far to the side.

A meme pushed repeatedly in the schools but echoed in both pop culture and in hard-left politics is that American history is a tale of oppression and hatred, and that the country’s founding is illegitimate for this reason. Like many of the other inanities presented as gospel by today’s Democrats, this has gone so far as to invite the Ocasio-Cortezes of the world to call ICE detention facilities “concentration camps.”

Think about the stupidity of that one for a moment. A concentration camp, historically, is a place where people who have done nothing wrong are forcibly taken and forbidden to leave, usually while being pressed into slave labor and/or physically brutalized as a matter of policy. In the Left’s narrative, this is what ICE is doing; never mind that anyone in an ICE detention facility expressing a willingness to return to one’s home country may do so at any time, that no work is required of the detainees, that anyone physically harming them is subject to job discipline if not prosecution, and that conditions in those facilities are generally nicer than those prevailing in their countries of origin.

This argument is of a piece with the basic critique of this “America the Oppressor” meme: if this was such an oppressive country, why are there so many people trying to immigrate to it? The Left has never offered an answer to that question, because there is no answer. For all the abuses black people suffered at the hands of slaveowners and systematic racists in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, shockingly few have ever taken advantage of the opportunity to return to countries in Africa and the Caribbean, which are governed by folks who look like them. And why? Because life is better here — and the rights of black people in America are better protected than they are in places like Somalia, Zimbabwe, the Ivory Coast, or Haiti.

America is oppressive? Compared to whom? This country deserves at least the deference the Left offers to the socialist countries they hold up as exemplars of progressive ascendancy … until those countries collapse, that is.

Finally, there is the “diversity is our strength” trope.

Two things about that one are certainly true. First, diversity in and of itself is neither a strength nor a weakness. Yes, having people from many different cultures, ethnicities, and skill sets offers the possibility of getting the best of everything. But no, if those differing people cannot come together around a single moral tradition or at least a unified set of behavioral standards, then diversity will not produce the desired results.

A nation that cannot stop female genital mutilation or child sex trafficking, for example, out of a failure of will to enforce its moral code is not a nation rich in diversity. You are not getting the best of everything; you’re getting the worst if honor killings, bacha bazi, or Santeria animal sacrifices become commonplace in your cities and towns. And no, Americans should not be cowed into lowering our standards in order to accept Third World conditions the Industrial Revolution delivered us from.

One thing you won’t see much of with the “diversity is our strength” gang is a lot of intellectual diversity. They like to present diverse appearances in making their case, but introduce dissident ideas and you’ll find out they’re a lot less committed to true diversity than they let on. That’s why black, gay, or Hispanic conservatives are often so much fun at parties; their views simply do not compute with the We Are the World gang.

One thing we should be grateful to Trump for, despite what often looks like a series of unnecessary political risks coming out of his Twitter, is that he’s willing to expend political capital in fighting these stupidities and leading the way for others to do the same. Trump is the single most effective critic of the seven Democrat tropes presented above, but we should all pitch in to discredit them, and those who employ them, in the name of reason and reality. Reclaiming our national discourse from idiots and would-be tyrants is well worth doing.