It’s not enough for us to mock the manufactured hysteria and choreographed outrage our elites demanded of us over the Jan. 6, 2021 election integrity protests, which disgraced and forgotten former president George W. Bush compared to the 9/11 attacks he failed to prevent.

I tried to watch the Babylon Bee’s snarky January 6: The Deadliest Day. I got 10 minutes in, remembered the peaceful Americans still moldering in prison, and instead of snickering along I was tempted to weep. I wondered whether Ashli Babbitt’s family would appreciate the Bee’s effort.

Jan. 6 isn’t a laughing matter. It’s not a question of snowflakes imploding or TV news hosts just lying. What our institutions colluded in doing to even the mostly peaceful protestors of Jan. 6, and are still successfully doing in real time (arrests have escalated since the election) indicates something much larger and darker. And the protests, for all the excesses which a few provocateurs encouraged, were solemn and important. They were the visceral reaction of a still-healthy nation against being dosed with poison. The moment in our history with which these protests should be compared is the Boston Tea Party, and I hope someday to see pardoned Jan, 6 protestors serving in Congress, as some of those Boston patriots served in the Continental Congress. (Derrick Evans is running for a House seat in West Virginia.)

I cannot compare my efforts on behalf of the Jan. 6 protestors to those of heroes such as Julie Kelly, David Clements, and others who devoted themselves full-time to seeking justice. History will honor them, and innocent victims of lawfare such as the great John Eastman, and if our nation endures their names will be hallowed in its chronicles.

But I was one of the first to speak out, against the advice of friends and the instincts of my editors at the Stream. I published on Jan. 8, 2021, “The Republic Has No Clothes.” In it I said:

Half a country has lost faith in its power to enact peaceful change, or defend its rights under law. I was raised to see our ballots as somehow sacred, our share in the sovereignty which God grants the government. We are now learning to view them as Zimbabwean $20 billion notes, which may or may not buy a loaf of bread by the time you get to the bread line.

Hundreds of thousands of citizens whose media lie to them, who fear that their votes were thrown away, or canceled out by fake votes, whose own party has largely abandoned them, peacefully marched in Washington. What were they hoping would happen? Their faces were mostly bright and full of faith. Did they really think Mike Pence, who sold out religious liberty for Christians in Indiana at the first hint of LGBT outrage, would do his constitutional duty? The thought makes me sad. God bless them, they believed America’s press release.

Our efforts to demand an honest election were thwarted at every turn, like a hero in a Sophocles play trying to dodge his own destruction. The Deep State, like the Fates, slams the door and nails shut the window, then sits back and mocks its victims as they scramble. But to us that poignant spectacle of Americans defending their votes should evoke both terror and pity. For our countrymen and our families.

But the time that has passed since 2021 has transubstantiated tragedy into hope, as the blood of the martyrs congeals into seeds for the Church. I don’t think the suffering of peaceful patriots, even those driven to suicide by legal persecution, will go unredeemed even in this world, much less in the next.

As I watched the protest in real time four years ago, I felt what I can only call exhilaration—and events have come to vindicate that feeling. After almost a year of the worst tyranny Americans had ever endured, the citizenry was rising. There was still life in Lady Liberty.

Our citizens had been infected by a virus weaponized by the efforts of our government, and thousands died. The most heart-rending victims were the Korean War veterans and grandmothers locked in nursing homes, which blue state governors callously seeded with COVID patients, conveniently boosting their local death rates, which justified further lockdowns and corrupt mail-in balloting. Denied visits by clergy and even Christian burials, those Americans were disposed of as medical waste, dumped and burned like aborted babies.

Our churches and schools were shuttered, but casinos and Planned Parenthood clinics still did their thriving business. Our pastors from the pope on down to the halls of Christianity Today were demanding we take an untested vaccine developed using the stolen DNA of aborted babies, to prove our “love of neighbor.” (The Vatican issued a coin celebrating the useless and even dangerous vaccination of children.)

Famed epidemiologists, physicians, and researchers were blackballed, fired, ruined, and censored. Thousands of small family businesses were wrecked, as an unprecedented and medically ignorant global lockdown imprisoned most of the planet. Governments of English-speaking democracies such as New Zealand and Australia planned to put the unvaccinated in camps—and our own Centers for Disease Control laid the groundwork for quarantine camps, as the Brownstone Institute has documented.

Billion-dollar corporations sluiced hundreds of millions of dollars into the coffers of the racist Black Lives Matter, which along with the slumming white radicals of Antifa terrorized U.S. cities with riots, while the same leftists who painted murals of felon George Floyd as a substitute Christ sneered at the COVID death of patriotic black entrepreneur Herman Cain. Americans who defended themselves and their neighbors, such as Jake Gardner and Kyle Rittenhouse, were slandered with “hate crime” claims and charged with first-degree murder. Violent leftist protests were exempted from COVID restrictions because “racism is a threat to public health,” whatever that means. Our FBI instigated a fake kidnapping plot against Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, with her collusion, to entrap hapless conservatives outraged by her unconstitutional, illegal imprisonment of her state’s population.

It was all of that, in addition to the obvious corruption of the 2020 presidential vote, that drove courageous Americans to march on the U.S. Capitol. There’s something still alive inside some of our citizens that won’t be hammered into silence or gaslit into submission. That’s why (despite all his flaws) we elected Donald Trump. And it’s why we will not submit to the next elitist power grab, whatever the pretext.

There is genuine reason for hope, grounded in the stubborn Scots-Irish culture that forms America’s backbone, and in our thriving subcultures of serious, traditional Christians. The fact that non-white Americans rallied to Trump in historic numbers suggests that courage is contagious.

I look forward, prayerfully, to seeing the first J6 member of Congress. We cannot rest until the whole GOP is a Jan. 6 party. Welcome to the Resistance. It’s something to sing about.