So, we won. The mushroom cloud from that “political bombshell” has finally dissipated, and the landscape is… well, it’s something else. The progressive left is in shambles, their media empires are crumbling, and their little black-clad army of “anti-fascists” are finally getting the official treatment they so richly deserved. It’s everything we ever wanted, right? Pop the champagne, pass out the cigars, and let’s get back to… what was it we were fighting for again? Liberty? Freedom? Oh, right. That.
It’s been a glorious spectacle, I’ll admit. Watching smug, overpaid news anchors get frog-marched out of their studios was a special kind of schadenfreude I haven’t felt since I busted Ryan Samsel trying to pretend to be Thomas Ballard. (IYKYK) Seeing university professors—the ones who’ve been poisoning the minds of our children with Marxist gobbledygook for decades—suddenly discover the joys of unemployment has been, to put it mildly, deeply satisfying.
But now, in the quiet afterglow of our victory, a nagging thought creeps in. It’s the kind of thought you have when you’re nursing a particularly nasty hangover, and you’re trying to piece together the events of the previous night. You know you had a good time, but you can’t shake the feeling that you might have done something you’ll regret.
We didn’t change any laws to get here. The Patriot Act, RICO statutes, all the tools the federal government needed to crush these domestic terrorists—they’ve been on the books for ages. The Constitution gave us the framework for a government that could protect us. No, the change wasn’t legal, it was cultural. We, the people who supposedly champion liberty, started cheering for the state to use its awesome power to annihilate our political enemies.
And that’s the real danger. The problem isn’t the Constitution; it’s that we’ve cultivated a political culture that sees the state not as a necessary evil to be constrained, but as a weapon to be wielded. Today, we’re cheering as that weapon is aimed at the black-masked thugs of Antifa. But what happens when the political winds shift, as they always do, and the other side is back in power? The weapons will still be there, but now there’s a cultural precedent—a bipartisan agreement, even—that it’s perfectly acceptable to use them on your political opponents.
What happens when a future administration decides that parents protesting a school board are an “extremist network”? Or that a group of citizens defending their Second Amendment rights are “potential terrorists”? The legal mechanisms will be in place. But now, thanks to us, so will the cultural justification.
We used to mock the left for their “cancel culture.” Now we’re the ones demanding people be fired for their political opinions. The principle was never “it’s okay when our side does it.” The principle was supposed to be that in a free society, we don’t use economic or state power to crush dissent. We counter bad ideas with better ideas. We win arguments; we don’t de-platform and de-person our opponents.
We’ve become the very thing we claimed to despise. We’ve embraced the tactics of the left, and in doing so, we’ve validated them. We’ve made it clear that the only thing that matters is power.
This is how you get partisan political regimes and, eventually, fascism. It doesn’t start with rewriting the Constitution. It starts with a culture that craves a strongman, a culture that begs the government to “do something” about the people they don’t like.
So, congratulations. We won a battle. But our victory is hollow because we embraced the rotten culture of our enemies to do it. Legislating our way out of this mess won’t work because the law was never the problem. The sickness is in our culture. It’s time to take a page out of Charlie Kirk’s playbook and go on offense. How we win the culture war is the real fight, and we’ll lay out the battle plan in Part IV.
