The past several weeks have been some of the most frustrating times many of us have ever faced. For me, it started with the 2020 election, the details of which I will not go into because my blood pressure can take only so much, and continued with the failed attempts to Stop the Steal.  The frustration undoubtedly reached its peak in the first two weeks of 2021, the year that is supposed to be an improvement over 2020.  So far, I wonder.

We saw the demonstrations at the Capitol turn violent and get blamed on President Trump and his supporters, despite mounds of evidence that Antifa played a huge role in the chaos.  Even arrests by the FBI have not seemed to budge the continued narrative of Orange Man Bad.

As if that weren't enough, the social media website Parler, which was rapidly emerging as the free speech alternative to Pravda-style Twitter, was aggressively targeted and shut down by our Big Tech Overlords, Google, Apple, Amazon, and Twitter itself.  That move alone, which should earn a massive anti-trust lawsuit, should be enough to scare the hell out of anyone who has even minimal control of his faculties.

But it gets worse.  This morning, I read on The Gateway Pundit that a meme-maker (you know, those important political messages like Grumpy Cat and Willy Wonka Wisdom) on Twitter who goes by the name "Ricky Vaughn" has been indicted for "spreading election disinformation" against Hillary Clinton in 2016.  For one thing, who is in charge of the fact-checking here?  Hillary herself?  And for another, much more important thing, what the hell happened to the First Amendment?

The first step in the silencing was Parler being shut down and conservatives being banned from Twitter, Facebook, et al.  This is the next step, and we are going to see a lot more of it.  Anyone who is outspoken in a public way is going to be found, charged, and put on trial.  There are plenty of corrupt Democrat-appointed judges who will happily go along with it.  Brandon Straka, the founder of the #WalkAway movement, was recently arrested on charges regarding the Capitol Mostly Peaceful Protests.  Who will be next?

We've heard a call from big thinker Sandy Cortez for "the media to be reined in" and other liberal voices calling for conservative media outlets Newsmax and OANN to be shut down or censored.  Joe Biden signed an executive order banning the use of the term "China Virus" in referring to COVID-19.  Microsoft and Google are going to be suspending donations to GOP lawmakers who challenged the 2020 election results (Gateway Pundit, 1/26/2021), and now the White House is considering banning conservative media from press conferences.

This is truly Orwellian stuff here, and it's happening right in front of us every single day.  So I'm here to tell you two things.  One, if you had any doubts before, this should clear them up: this is who the Democrats are.  Someone smart once said, "When someone shows you who he truly is, believe him."  This is the Democrats — all of them — showing us who they are.  And I don't mean just the politicians; I mean nearly all of them, because anyone who sees this stuff happening and stays silent is just as guilty as those doing it.

The second thing is, whether anyone wants to believe it, the Democrats have declared war on everyone who doesn't think the way they do.  Make no mistake about it: they are at war with us.  The question is, are we going to fight back, or are we going to roll over?  And before anyone gets their panties in a bunch, I am not talking about violent means.  That's their game, not ours.

A mantra that I have come to strongly embrace since November 4 is "control what you can control."  So we need to start doing exactly that.  We need to start acting instead of always reacting.

We need to get many more conservatives involved in elections, as poll-watchers and other roles.  We need to be in the room.  Period.  If that means register as Democrats (ick!) in order to get into the belly of the beast, then so be it.

We need to find the few people in our lives who are liberals with a shred of sense and engage with them.  We need to stop talking about President Trump, because he clearly triggers them, and start talking about ideas.  There are things we can agree on with these people, so we need to work hard on finding common ground.  We need to show them facts.  We don't need to defeat their way of thinking; we need to persuade them into seeing a few small things differently.

And possibly the most important thing: We need to take the Democrats' Resist tactic from the last four years, turn it up to eleven, and shove it back in their faces.  We need to block every effort they make to do anything...at the national, state, or local level...everything must be an agonizing struggle for them.  It doesn't matter if it's approval of a new dog-catcher in your town or a half-cent tax that benefits starving orphaned nuns.  It has to be a tedious, lamentable drudge for these villains at every turn.

Some may say this is a time for "unity" in our country.  Those saying it are the very ones who were ripping the country apart for the last four years.  I disagree.  We have tried being nice.  We have tried being patient.  We have tried being logical.  Now is the time to turn every last liberal Alinsky tactic right back on them and beat them at their own game.

We have two years until our first chance at retribution: winning back the House.  If we can manage that, then we might have a shot at stemming the tide of liberalism/socialism.  But with the Dems having figured out how to win (cough, steal) elections at will, it's going to be tough.

Until then, we need to do everything we can to slow them down and to try to change some minds.  We have the advantage of facts and logic on our side.  We know that Democrats can't win on the battlefield of ideas, so that's where our daily skirmishes must be.  I believe there are enough reasonable people still out there for the country to still have a shot at surviving.  Do you?

Image: Lars Di Scenza via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.