It’s hard for me to improve on a new column at Crisis by my old friend Austin Ruse, a Catholic author and pro-life activist at the United Nations, “It Is Not About Trump, It’s About Us.” I’ll share with you the highlights, but after that I’ve something crucial to add. Here are a few choice quotes from Ruse’s piece:

It’s not just about getting rid of Trump. It’s really about getting us, smelly conservatives and Christians, patriots who love this country. By taking out Trump, they are taking out everybody associated with him, including those who voted for him and put him into office. And it burns their keisters that we voted for Trump not once but twice. Trump received more votes from us than any incumbent president in history. And we may be poised to vote for him again, unless they can bloody him up. …

Barack Obama said we were bitter people clinging to our Bibles and our guns. Hillary Clinton said we were irredeemable deplorables. …

Jussie Smollett told cops he was beaten by white “MAGA Republicans” in the dark of night on a cold and windy street in Chicago. The mainstream media all believe and run with these lies because they hate us.

Consider what they did to the pro-life kid from Covington, Kentucky, who stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in his MAGA hat and was verbally assaulted by a lunatic gang of “Black Hebrew Israelites” and then by a Native American “elder.” He was publicly crucified for months because they hate us. …

The FBI raided the home of a pro-life Catholic because he defended his son from a crazed abortion supporter at an abortion clinic. The FBI raided his house with more than 20 men in tactical gear after the local prosecutors declined to move forward.

Consider that pro-life pregnancy help centers are being burned down, and the Democrat Attorney General Merrick Garland said it is hard to find the perpetrators because their crimes were, get this, committed in the dark. How many hundreds of Christian churches have been burned or otherwise defaced? And the corporate media ignores it.

They hate us. …

Look at what has happened to the 1,000 people indicted and prosecuted for protesting the rigged election at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Most of them walked into the Capitol building, looked around, took pictures, and left. They jailed grandmothers for this! These mostly innocent people have languished in a Democrat jail for months, and some have gotten years-long prison sentences. One of them committed suicide.

They do this because they hate us.

By all means, go read Ruse’s column, which offers much more evidence than I thought it right to excerpt. It’s a sobering wake-up call about the stakes of the upcoming election, which the Democrats aren’t even bothering to steal. They’re trying to cancel it, the way Latin American dictators used to, by locking up the opposition.

I’ve explained before why the left hates us with a new and fiery ferocity. We rejected their messiah.

White liberals greeted Barack Obama like a shiny new substitute Christ. He was Hope made flesh to dwell among us. He incarnated Change. His very existence, bland and banal as he was, won him a Nobel Prize just for showing up. Like the first strongman elected after the British abandoned some colony, he was meant to be President for Life, seated on a throne surrounded by peacock feathers.

Only one thing stood in the way: Our creaky old Constitution, written hundreds of years ago by white men who are now dead. Some of whom were slaveowners—as were nearly all African and Arab heads of state at the time, but never mind that.

With Obama we had been changed, changed utterly. The spilling of his sweat transformed America, washed away its Mark of Cain—the exceptionalism that Barack Obama hated. Obama made us at last into just a regular country akin to Belgium, to be run from the top down in secret committee meetings by managerial elites, as happens in the European Union. The sweaty, bigoted, Bible-thumping masses didn’t need to be consulted. They would learn in time to obey.

But in November 2016, we didn’t obey. We stabbed our elites in the back. As I’ve explained before:

During Obama’s two administrations, his appointees completely politicized the FBI, the Department of Justice, and the Internal Revenue Service. They took the vast, sweeping powers which Republicans had foolishly granted our intelligence agencies, and weaponized them politically…

And the Democrats reacted as Hitler had after another November “betrayal” a century before. They descended into paranoia, hatred, and fantasies of revenge. Whole groups of citizens now became domestic “enemies” or stooges of foreign powers (“Russian collusion”).

And so on, through the purge trials of “insurrectionists” of January 6, 2020. And the new purges and hijacked elections to come.

Austin Ruse has shown how Trump is merely the stand-in for the millions of Americans whom the radical left wishes dead.

I’ve given you an insight into why: Because we betrayed their messianic plan for transforming America into a permanent government by enlightened elites. Accordingly, we will be treated like the traitors whom the Nazis scapegoated in Germany for its defeat in World War I: as subhumans and internal enemies.

But there’s one more piece of the puzzle. It isn’t just the left that hates Trump and all his voters. It’s also the establishment right, the people who’d rather see the Democrats drive our country over a cliff than accept their loss of control over the Republican party, and its machine for sucking in money and distributing cushy jobs. Like the nebbish in the movie Office Space who’s willing to “burn this building down,” these people will cling to their “red Swingline stapler” and snazzy GOP letterhead with cold, dead fingers.

Think I’m exaggerating? Both the liberal Democrat academic Jonathan Turley and left-wing civil libertarian Alan Dershowitz have condemned the indictment of Donald Trump—and his lawyers, and his advisors—as an attack on the First Amendment itself. Nobody charged Kamala Harris for goading the George Floyd riots and bailing out its arsonists because of that same Amendment.

But the “principled conservatives” who hate Donald Trump and his voters more than they love America are signing on with this lawless prosecution of the political opposition by the party in power. William Barr, who impersonated a Republican Attorney General for many months, is praising the indictment in print. Mike Pence is apparently cooperating with prosecutors. The old GOP machine that gave us the Iraq War and the Wall Street bailout, and now risks World War III with Russia, is cranking back into gear.

Its fuel is attachment to power and scorn of the unwashed masses. But a key ingredient is hate. Why else would George W. Bush compare the January 6 protestors to the 9/11 hijackers whom he failed to protect Americans against? Is there a more despicable bunch of people than the mass murderers who attacked the World Trade Center? That’s the class of people where Dubya places Trump voters for taking selfies at the Capitol.

Rick Wilson, political strategist at the no-longer-pedophile-run Lincoln Project, said the quiet part out loud on Twitter:

We’re coming after you, @realDonaldTrump. We’re going to break you, humiliate you, defeat you at the ballot box, shatter your movement. You’ll spend your sorry last years weeping in a lonely prison cell, your hideous legacy a warning to future generations, your shame eternal.

Wilson doesn’t want Trump in that cell alone. He wants all Trump’s supporters, every populist conservative, to live in fear that they’ll share the fates of the January 6 defendants, of Jake Gardner, of Ashli Babbitt, of Kyle Rittenhouse, and all the other uppity proles who dared to disobey their supposed betters. As George W. Bush told us, such Americans are terrorists. No wonder the FBI treats pro-lifers and PTA moms as domestic extremists. They apparently heard it from their old boss, William Barr.

Conservatives, know thy enemy.