More than once in my past commentaries, I have confessed that, had Hillary Clinton won the 2016 presidential election, I would have developed HDS; Hillary Derangement Syndrome.  Before that election, I wrote of dark premonitions, the foreboding that we would lose our basic freedoms, including those enshrined in both the First and Second Amendments.

There were a great many foreshadowings of what would have been to come, but the one that bothers me most, for some reason, is the political assault on the Little Sisters of the Poor.  In the attempt to force Obamacare on the nation, these few and charitable people of faith were targeted for institutional extinction because they would not yield to demands that they be associated, however indirectly, with the murder of unborn babies.

Only the election of President Trump saved them from becoming the Alamo of religious freedoms, but the political Left never, ever, gives up, and now the Little Sisters are once again in court, defending themselves against demands that they violate their religious principles.  It never ends.

There is a larger context to this, and it is Trump Derangement Syndrome.  Of all places, a recent commentary in The New York Times contained a passage that hits the nail on the head.  (Italics are mine.)

The 2020 presidential contest has taken on the attributes, in the words of Michael Anton, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, of a "Flight 93 Election," an election with potentially devastating consequence [sic] for the loser.

If the opposition wins, Anton wrote about the 2016 election — in a view that holds even more true for the 2020 contest — the assault on one's own values and principles will be worse than any "of us have yet imagined in our darkest moments.  Nor is even that the worst. It will be coupled with a level of vindictive persecution against resistance and dissent hitherto unseen in the supposedly liberal West."  Anton was writing from the right, but the same apocalyptic fear of the consequences of defeat applies to the left.

Whichever way the 2020 election goes, the iconic videos of Hillary losers screaming in anguish, and even hysterically threatening suicide, after Trump's election will be multiplied a thousandfold after he wins in 2020.  Antifa is not content to scream, as we have been seeing for the past three years, but resorts to physical violence.  Blood will flow.

I hardly dare mention it, but should the election go against Trump, the suspicions of voter fraud will motivate many thousands of Trump supporters to rebel.  And why would they not?  For years, the Democrats have resisted every effort, no matter how reasonable, no matter how modest, to provide for honest voting procedures.  The motive for preventing that can only be nefarious.

The Democrats fear that they have everything to lose, but in fact, what they have to lose is their power to take our freedom.

What we have to lose is our freedom.

Image: Nathania Johnson via Wikimedia Commons.