When historians of the future write about our own time, they will surely see January 2019 as a turning point, when the new America was laid bare for all to see.  This past month marked a point of no return.  The forces arrayed against the republic have shown themselves, and their stranglehold on our lives is now impossible to deny.

It was in January of 2019 that the police state that runs our country revealed itself in full.  Roger Stone, a Donald Trump associate whose only crime was acting as though he were free to express his opinion and fight to preserve his liberty, was dragged out of his home in a pre-dawn raid by dozens of heavily-armed federal agents who had surrounded his property using vehicles, watercraft, and helicopters.  As Judge Andrew Napolitano points out, there were more agents sent to arrest Stone than there were sent to find Osama bin Laden.  To be sure, Roger Stone is a much bigger threat to Washington than bin Laden ever was.  Any man who dares to live free is the existential enemy of the Stasi that has taken over the Potomac. This past month, we learned what our government is capable of, and who their targets are: us.

It was also in January of 2019 that the mask slipped once and for all from the true face of the mainstream media.  When a group of high school boys from Kentucky was shown in a short video smiling at a paid provocateur drumming right against one of the boys’ chest, the media ran with the edited footage and launched into a feeding frenzy, mocking and ridiculing the boys and their families as racists and terrorists.  Of course, the MAGA hats that many of the boys sported were what triggered the media firing squad, but the fact that the boys were white and from a poor state were what made the calumny especially delicious for the “journalists” who slathered the boys with every conceivable epithet and slur.  Many pundits called for violence against them.  In doing so, the media called for violence against all of us.  CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the insufferable lapdogs at National Review -- all of them hate all of us with a cold disdain.  It is all out in the open now.  No one in the media is even attempting to pretend otherwise.

The boys were in Washington in the first place to attend the March for Life, a pro-life rally held every year to mark the January, 1973 Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton decisions handed down by the United States Supreme Court.  In January, 2019, New York State held its own commemoration as Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed into law a bill that would allow virtually anyone to take the life of a baby in the womb for any reason at any time, even up to the emergence of a baby from the birth canal.  As Gov. Cuomo signed the legislation at a public ceremony, the audience erupted in cheers.  Later, Gov. Cuomo ordered the new World Trade Center building lit up bright pink in celebration of the signal accomplishment.  The place where terrorists once murdered three thousand innocent people -- the place that until now had been a solemn shrine to lives cut senselessly short -- was in an instant converted into a lurid monument to the institutionalization of mass murder.  Our country now has two hearts, one red and bleeding for the holocaust of the innocents, the other black and twitching with glee over the same.  This past month, we could finally see the monster that half the country has become.

January, 2019 was the month in which the cracks in the republic began to open into fissures.  It was the month when the edifice began to crumble and fall apart.  There can be no more delusion, America.  The forces arrayed against us are glorying in their growing might.  Are we ready for what is coming next?

Jason Morgan is assistant professor at Reitaku University in Japan. He has written for Chronicles, New Oxford Review, Ethika Politika, University Bookman, Human Life Review, Modern Age, and Japan Forward.