Let’s not fool ourselves. We conservative Christians are fighting for our lives and our freedom in self-defense against richer, more powerful enemies with vastly more institutional resources than we have. What we do have is scruples, which they don’t. In the short term, that’s our handicap.

Nor are we nearly as hungry as those who hate us. We seek our Utopia in the next life, not this one, so we don’t crave power as they do. If we had our way, only a few truly monstrous evils would be banned by the federal government — such as the killing of unborn babies, the mutilation of children, and unfettered access to pornography on every young kid’s phone. We’d get our national borders back under control. If we really got excited, we might go a little further and take women out of combat. That’s pretty much it.

But mostly we’d let the deluded souls in blue cities and states go along and live their lives — while praying for their repentance. Maybe handing out tracts in their airports.

The Left Craves Power, Like an Addict

We’re confident that our worldview better fits human nature and therefore makes people happy. So we mostly want to level the playing field, confident that our beliefs will win out if the contest is fair. On our side we have classical reason, divine revelation, and the accumulated wisdom people used to call “tradition.”

The left has unfettered disordered appetites, gnawing envy, rage against the Creator, and a long succession of failed philosophies and pseudo-scientific theories, each cobbled together as a Rube Goldberg replacement for Christian civilization. Since that’s all they have to work with, they fight twice as hard, four times as smart, and infinitely more ruthlessly.

They Create a Desert and Call it “Justice”

We need to do better. The hour is late. Today’s left is perfectly happy to blow up every semblance of legal fairness, natural order and social cohesion, the better to bring on a chaos that would drive desperate citizens to sacrifice their freedom — begging for autocratic rule, if that’s the price of some semblance of peace.

We saw in the orchestrated COVID panic just how far the left’s willing to go: Inflicting trillions of dollars of economic damage, causing tens of thousands of deaths in blue state nursing homes where COVID patients got dumped, denying millions of children education … all for the privilege of closing our churches, locking us in our homes, and gaining more power to censor all our media. By the end, we were actually kind of grateful when our masters allowed us to climb out of our hidey holes.

The power was always the point, the only point: the power to say “Shut down,” to decree a “Great Reset,” to draw up the plans to “build back better” on the piles of rubble the left created. Remember that the same leftists who called church services “superspreader events” and sneered at the death of entrepreneur and presidential candidate Herman Cain … were goading angry mobs to rip up our streets and loot our cities protesting the death of drug addict and career criminal George Floyd. “Mostly peaceful” riots didn’t spread COVID, because (remember this laugh line) “racism is a threat to public health.”

Anarchy for Me, Tyranny for Thee

The left won’t control the millions of aliens pouring into our country from cartel-dominated hellholes. But it wants to surveil and censor our every conversation with our friends. And dictate what medical treatments we’re allowed to try. And force us to use “preferred pronouns.” And strip parents of custody of their children if they won’t chemically castrate them.

This mishmash of libertinism and micromanagement isn’t a contradiction or an inconsistency, but part of a detailed plan: To destroy the natural order that free people enjoy, and replace it with the artificial order that tyrants impose on helots. To take wild human beings and domesticate us like veal calves.

This technique, Anarcho-Tyranny, has proven effective over the centuries, which is why the left’s using it. The most recent example of its success was Nazi Germany, which honed Anarcho-Tyranny from an art into a science.

Leave it to post-Christian Americans to turn it into a religion. That’s what Wokeness really is, Calvinism without Christ. Let’s mock it ruthlessly, not even pretend to respect its gibberish claims or those who accept them. These aren’t misguided Christians, but priests of Baal.

People who’ve bought into the left’s ideology today didn’t do so based on reasoned arguments, but because they wanted to be on the side of the winners. The only way to disillusion them is for us to win instead. It’s a sad fact of fallen human nature, but people flock to the powerful in the hope of gaining protection. Becoming weak and remaining so is not a Godly option.

As little as power over our fellow man interests us in itself, it’s our duty to fight ferociously to gain it — if only to keep the abortionists away from the babies and the groomers away from the kids. The men like my uncle Bob who landed on the beach at Normandy weren’t interested in conquest and war. They didn’t start the fight, but God called on them to finish it.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or co-author of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. He is co-author with Jason Jones of “God, Guns, & the Government.”