If you’re not ready to go to war, you’re not paying attention. The war is already on. It is escalating with or without your participation. Although it’s not a shooting war, more Americans are being caught in the crossfire as the stakes continue to rise.

Dissenting voices are systematically purged. All the while, cultural titans like the New York Times actively recruit incorrigible racists into their ranks—an act that some “conservative” commentators naïvely have defended. Censorship, however, is just one facet in the spectrum of war the Left is waging.

In the Wall Street Journal, Andy Ngo reports:

Along the trolley tracks behind the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office, a biohazard cleanup crew works under police protection. It finds used needles and buckets of human waste simmering in nearly 100-degree heat. The smell of urine and feces fills the block. For more than five weeks, as many as 200 people had occupied the site to demand ICE’s immediate abolition. They’re gone now, but a community is left reeling. Thirty-eight days of government-sanctioned anarchy will do that.

Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler, a Democrat who doubles as police commissioner, prohibited Portland Police from providing additional resources to federal officers begging for assistance.

“I do not want the @PortlandPolice to be engaged or sucked into a conflict, particularly from a federal agency that I believe is on the wrong track,” Wheeler tweeted. “If [ICE is] looking for a bailout from this mayor, they are looking in the wrong place.”

“Every American flag was defaced,” writes Ngo. “Anarchist and communist flags were unsoiled.”

It wasn’t just federal authorities that Wheeler imperiled. Brianna Hakes, a food cart operator, was confronted by masked thugs who “threatened to hurt her and burn down the cart,” but police did nothing. One 52-year-old local artist photographing the scene had his camera slammed into his face by protesters. Charles Williams, a 62-year-old man, was threatened with an allegedly “AIDS-infected needle” by protestors. Lisa Leonard, a 53-year-old disabled woman, told reporters that “occupiers hit her on her head, disabled her electric wheelchair, and lifted her in the air when she complained about loud drumming.” Police made no arrests.

Nor did police respond when protestors yelled racial slurs at ICE agents. One black agent was called the N-word, a “blood traitor,” and an Uncle Tom. Nor did police respond when ICE agents were followed home. One agent “was trailed in a car and confronted when he went to pick up his daughter from summer camp,” reports Ngo. “Later people showed up at his house.” Another agent “had his name and photo plastered on flyers outside his home accusing him of being part of the ‘Gestapo.’”

The time has come for those on the right to dig in to the culture war against the Left. There can be no compromise with an enemy whose triumph comes at the cost of the legitimate institutions that represent the sovereignty of the people of this nation. There can be no compromise with the Left about who may rightly rule. Compromise is victory for the Left. Compromise, for the Left, is reculant pour mieux sauter—drawing back to take a better leap.

Still, a candid consideration of the litany of the Left might do the trick for the unconvinced.

A Litany of Leftist Lawlessness

In March 2016, three men in Georgia threatened a homeowner with a gun over a Trump campaign sign in his front yard. In May 2016, a Trump supporter in California needed a half-dozen stitches after a mob of illegal aliens and their supporters bashed open his head. In October 2016, a GOP office was evacuated in North Carolina after a bomb threat was received. In the month President Trump defeated Hillary Clinton, a Georgia man was murdered after joking he had voted for Trump. Again that November, a man in Massachusetts was punched in the back of the head, knocked unconscious, suffered a fractured eye socket and broken nose, because he had a discussion with friends about Trump that six thugs overheard.

The following month, Justin Barkley, a former New York state employee, murdered a 52-year-old UPS driver who he confused with the president in a fit of unhinged rage. “I shot and killed Donald Trump purposely, intentionally, and very proudly,” he said.

Also that December, a man was stabbed in the throat in Washington for openly supporting the president, and a 69-year-old woman was nearly beaten to death with a chair for the same. In February 2017, a gay Trump supporter was beaten unconscious in Texas after pulling out a lighter with Trump’s picture on it in public. Again in February, a man in Ohio was sent to the hospital after being jumped in a parking lot by anti-Trump thugs. In March 2017, a man in Florida was punched in the face at a red light for having a Trump sticker on his car, sending him to the hospital for five stitches.

On July 4, 2018, a man watching fireworks in his driveway was punched by a random passerby for having a Trump flag in his yard. The next day, a teenager was attacked at a restaurant for wearing a ‘Make America Great Again’ hat. At a demonstration on July 27, a pro-Trump U.S. Marine was beaten by protestors shouting, “Fuck Trump.” Elsewhere, 20 Trump supporters were reportedly “beaten or struck by objects thrown by the [anti-Trump] protesters” who numbered in the “hundreds.”

None of this violence, however, has encouraged the Left to police its own. Rather, the Left calls for more violence, with encouragement and support from Democratic Party leadership.

Senator Tim Kaine (D-Va.) has called for leftists to “fight in the streets” against Trump, and by extension, all who support the president. Kaine’s son, Linwood, was arrested for participating in a black bloc riot—the sort Antifa is known for instigating. Democratic National Committee deputy chair Keith Ellison has signaled his support for the violent leftist paramilitary group behind vicious physical attacks against Trump supporters.

“If you see anybody from that cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station,” said Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), “you get out and you create a crowd. You push back on them, and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.” Waters’ call for violence resulted in leftists harassing Secretary Elaine Chao and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Understand, the political leadership of the Left isn’t instigating a war, they are calling for the escalation of a war that is already underway.

U.S. Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) was shot and nearly killed last year by a leftist. White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders was kicked out of a restaurant for her role in the administration. Melania Trump has faced repeated threats of rape and the abduction of her children. Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi found herself confronted by an angry mob. Trump’s first nominee for labor secretary, Andrew Puzder, received an envelope filled of white powder and “a paper doll with a noose around its neck” addressed to his wife. U.S. Rep. Brian Mast (R-Fla.) has faced calls for the murder of his children.

White House advisor Stephen Miller and former advisor Steve Bannon have been accosted in public. Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen recently found herself running from protestors affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). The same DSA, mind you, that just scored a victory in New York’s 14th congressional district with their candidate, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. This is the DSA’s fifth candidate to win a primary election this year.

In July, Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) faced death threats from a man who promised to chop up his family with an ax. That threat came one year after Paul suffered six broken ribs and a pleural effusion in an attack on his front lawn.

Out of Cheeks to Turn

Conceivably, there are conservative commentators who will eschew a call to arms. Ben Shapiro, for example, has parroted Nikki Haley’s stop “owning the libs” virtue signaling. Which is weird, since Shapiro famously told the “libs” to “all go to hell, you pathetic, lying, stupid jackasses.” But most of us, unlike Shapiro, cannot afford “spending well into six figures” for security details to keep us safe.

Similarly, neoconservative columnist Bret Stephens warns: “We are approaching a day when blood on the newsroom floor will be blood on the president’s hands.”

It would shock Stephens (maybe) to know that plenty of blood has already been spilled—by the Left. Not that he would care if he did know it. He figures he’s secured his own safety.

Sanctimonious professional conservatives would ask us to hold our arms behind our back, turn the other cheek, then the other, and let the Left break our jaws while they’re at it. This is the “principled” course of action in the culture war. Yet many of these same conservatives applauded President George W. Bush’s binary logic going into the Iraq War: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” Suddenly, they claim, things aren’t so cut and dry. Perhaps the only wars these conservatives are opposed to are the ones in which they would have to enlist—much easier to send off another man’s son to fight than to pick up your own sword.

Suffice to say, they are wrong on all counts. “For, unlike our so-called conservative commentators,” writes Thaddeus G. McCotter, “we are not ‘above the fray.’ We are in the fray—and it’s where we’re needed.”

Common Cause with New Allies

Trump has offered us the opportunity of a lifetime by winning over independents, Democrats, and Republicans alike. Long divided along the folds of party lines, but increasingly unified now by a common cause, these Americans can agree that America comes first, that citizens should be at the center of American politics, and that there is a right way to live. The Trump Era is one of cultivating the necessary national consciousness to fight and win.

But in order to fight, let alone win, the first step is understanding that the war is already on. The next step is understanding that we are first and foremost fighting to overthrow something that is already upon us, not necessarily to conserve something of which we have some nostalgic memory. Our way of life, our traditions, all of the things we want to conserve. But to do that, we must overthrow the Left’s hegemony.

Everything that the Left touches turns to ash, and if winning is the objective, then Americans should become intolerant of leftists like Mayor Wheeler. Americans should militate against leftists like Democratic Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf’s, who, like Wheeler, aids and abets criminals, if they intend to conserve anything at all worth conserving. The mayors of the top-10 most murderous cities in America are Democrats. Likewise, in 14 of the top 15 most dangerous cities in America, the mayors are Democrats, and this pattern will continue across the nation—unless Americans act.

The culture war is on, and it will go on with or without you.

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