Tyrants always make you wonder, don’t they, how they get away with it. True, they’re always surrounded by a phalanx of loyal yes-men who, in protecting the tyrant, protect themselves. But they lord it over great masses of ordinary people, totally dominating them. How do they do it?

It’s easy to see how barbed wire and firing squads serve to keep the serfs in line. The people let you rule them because they’re scared to death you’ll kill them.

Fear in its less flagrant forms is a big part of how the Left dominates the nations of the West, once called “the Free World” but now considerably less free. Here, leftids in power use fear to stay in power.

Fear of what, though? After all, they’re not rounding us up and shooting us.

But they don’t have to shoot us. Once a Canadian “human rights” tribunal gets its claws into you, they never have to let go. Not only in Canada, but now in places in America dominated by the Left, your business can be ruined, your reputation shot, and your life turned into an endless hassle by assorted government agencies that seek out particular targets and apply harsh sanctions to piffling “offenses.” Using the wrong pronoun. Declining to take part in a “gay wedding.” Expressing the wrong opinion anywhere on a college campus. Setting up a grass-roots organization to support conservative political candidates. The IRS is watching you. In a school in Camden, New Jersey, police—yes, the police—were called in to deal with a third-grader who called a brownie “a brownie”—racism, you know.

And if the government overlooks you, the trolls on social media won’t.

So the Left in our country has created a subtle climate of fear, from which the veiled threat of violence is not entirely absent. “By any means necessary,” say the thugs of Antifa. People have learned to notice that.

Even more subtle, and numbingly effective, is the way they come after your self-respect. Once you’ve lost that, you’ll find it hard to stand up to anyone.

One of the ways they erode your self-respect is to force you, through fear of what might happen to you if you don’t, to say things you know to be false, and to pretend to believe in, and support, things you know to be both abominable and ridiculous. This is where the “transgender” business comes into its own.

We know—I pray we know—that just because a man says he’s now a woman doesn’t mean he is, in fact, a woman. But a lot of us will say he is, because who needs the tribulation of being publicly vilified and denounced as a “hater,” a “trans-phobe,” or a “Neanderthal”? You can also win that booby prize by asserting Climate Change Denial, defending America and her history, or criticizing Black Lives Matter. If you do, the self-anointed Smartest People in the World will come crashing down on you. What defenseless student can stand up to a professor’s mockery, let alone the threat of being flunked out of the course? So we go along to get along, and our self-respect is sacrificed on the altar of expediency. Self-abasement then becomes habitual, and tyrants feast on it.

Watching these things happen to our country is not a pleasant pastime.

But it ought to be remembered that there are tens of millions of us, and that we have the strength, if only we can find it and steel ourselves to use it, to declare, in no uncertain terms, “Enough, no more!”

I have discussed this and other topics throughout the week on my blog, http://leeduigon.com/ . Stop in today and visit. It only takes a single click to get you there.