As our esteemed former President once intoned, “I feel your pain.” I also feel the same raging pessimism you express. This simply proves that it’s far easier to defend your territory than it is to reclaim it. But any useful plan of action needs to start with our own house cleaning, and an admission that we dropped the ball. Pure and simple. This crisis didn’t just fall on us out of the heavens, where we woke up one morning to discover, “My God! The barbarians are at the gates!” They’ve been gathering for years, at least since the early 60’s. We let ourselves be duped; we’ve been willfully blind.

So before we talk about fighting back, we have to break our decades/long habit of not fighting at all. We have to stop apologizing for what we believe. We have to stop letting the left frame the debate. We have to stop accepting their terminology and spin. We have to stop playing defense. We have to recognize that the political war is a side-show. The real battle is for the culture.

We have to stop using terms like Democrat and liberal, and reintroduce terms like treason, sedition and traitor into the conversation. We have to stop wasting time (Sean Hannity) trying to prove, yet again, that there’s a double standard in the media, and instead attack them for their lies and keep hitting them. Right now, only one person with a national platform is willing to do this: President Trump. He needs people of influence to raise their voices and stand with him, and we need to let the people who directly depend on us for our vote know that anything less is unacceptable. We need more leaders like Martha McSally who refuse to pretend that so-called reporters are anything other than what they are—cheap whores operating a corrupt propaganda enterprise, aimed at destroying our country.

We need to learn the lessons from the left: win the culture war, the political will follow. We need to be willing to get down in the mud with the enemy, because that’s where the battles are being fought... and lost. I love Ben Shapiro, but this is not the time for carefully constructed logical debate. The left is fighting a religious war and if we don’t start meeting them on that battlefield, we’ll end up with convincing arguments why they shouldn’t burn us at the stake, even as they’re lighting the sticks.

I embrace all our intellectuals, Shapiro, Peterson, Praeger, Levin, Beck, so many more—but for my money, the two most significant voices on the right in the past 30 years have been Rush Limbaugh and Milo; both showed how easy it is to laugh at the left, both exposed the absurdity of their thought and both showed us how to frame the argument on our terms. And both have proven that the most effective weapon is ridicule.

We still have lots to learn from them both.