For the umpteenth time I’ll say it.

At one of his last rallies before the 2020 election President Donald Trump said at a Wisconsin appearance, “Republicans don’t play the tough game.”

He was right. Republicans don’t.

Abigail Shrier, writer and author of “IRREVERSIBLE DAMAGE: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughter” wrote this past July:

The last thing America needs right now is more wallpaper over cracks. Time to toss out the “Aw Shucks Conservatism” of navy blazers and boat shoes, the sort that believes matching jammies on Christmas suffices to save a country on the brink. That approach may have excelled when churches and civil society were strong and conservatives needed only to get married, raise a family, and perform the simple heroism of showing up. Today, it’s a loser.

Its mistake is not in any of the hand-written niceties it revels in, which make life orderly, cozy—even lovely. Its mistake is that it treats Leftist ideologues like quirky out-of-town guests arriving for brunch. It assumes we all want the same things and are equally devoted to the perpetuation of bedrock American commitments: free speech, free exercise of faith, equal protection, rule of law.

But the Woke are not zany guests. They are home-invasion robbers. The structure they intend to leave behind will contain but a handful of the cultural artifacts they encountered. Bringing down statues of Abe Lincoln, books by Dr. Seuss and schools named for the country’s founders? That’s just their casing the joint. The large-scale heist hasn’t even started. 

Here’s more blunt commentary from Michael Walsh, the editor of The-Pipeline.org and the author of “The Devil’s Pleasure Palace” and “The Fiery Angel,” both published by Encounter Books. His latest book, “Last Stands,” a cultural study of military history from the Greeks to the Korean War, was recently published.

Back in 2009, in the early days of the first Barack Obama administration, I wrote the single truest sentence about the Democrat Party ever penned. In an essay for National Review entitled “I Still Hate You, Sarah Palin,” composed under the name of my alter-ego, the Hollywood leftist David Kahane, I made this observation: “think of the Democratic Party as what it really is: a criminal organization masquerading as a political party.”

Ah, but I went on: “If you had any sense, you would start using our tactics against us. After all, you have a few lawyers on your side. Sue us. File frivolous ethics complaints against all our elected officials until, like Sarah, they go broke from defending themselves… Let slip your own journalistic dogs of war, assuming you have any… Of course, you won’t. You’re too nice, too enamored of history and tradition to realize that the rules have changed. Not for nothing is one of our mottos, ‘By Any Means Necessary.’”

I followed this sage advice up with a best-selling book, “Rules for Radical Conservatives,” published in 2010, outlining how to defeat the Left: by confronting them at every step, refusing to be bullied by them, and mostly by turning their own weapons of mockery, lawfare and, when necessary, physical resistance, against them.

Needless to say, such counsel was then and continues to be studiously ignored by the Republican establishment, which preferred Paul Ryan’s wonkism then and prefers Joe Biden’s wokism today. It’s not just that the party of Lindsey Graham and Kevin McCarthy likes to lose, it’s that they want to lose. To fight back, or even God forbid win, would be rude.

A society that won’t fight back, that refuses to defend itself, is doomed, its people deserving of scorn and contempt. And yet when has the GOP establishment ever fought back? They hated Trump and did their best to sabotage him at almost every turn. (The rest of the sabotage he accomplished by himself, on the advice of Jared and Ivanka, aka Javanka, aka “the Democrats,” as they were known around the White House.) They wouldn’t kill Obamacare, they wouldn’t build the wall on the southern border, they wouldn’t even try to stop illegal immigration, they wouldn’t join the president in his trade war against China—why would they, since so many of them are in Chinese communist pockets?

Some of them are even out-and-proud sham Republicans, such as Liz Cheney and the soon-to-be-retired Adam Kinzinger in Illinois, whose House district just vanished in redistricting. With a Stalinist ferocity that is almost admirable, Democrats police their own and enforce the party line. Meanwhile, Republicans make mock-shows of outrage and then meekly roll over and play dead when the media barks.

The days of Republican “dirty tricks,” which in the modern era date back to Watergate, are long gone. Merry prankster Roger Stone, a Nixon-era veteran, found himself arrested at predawn gunpoint by the FBI during the “Russian collusion” investigation for alleged witness tampering and lying to congressional investigators about something that never happened.

When Democrats get caught red-handed, on the other hand, they take a page out of Bill Clinton’s Monica Lewinsky playback, grin sheepishly, and deny, deny, deny. Although Clinton was impeached, the Democrats decided that rather than ever come clean, they would double down on recalcitrance, and since then nothing ever happens to them even when they’re guilty as… well, Bill Clinton.

All the while, the Republicans—the Washington Generals to the Democrats’ Harlem Globetrotters—dutifully play their assigned roles as chumps and stooges, voicing fake outrage, then pratfalling on cue while the media yuks it up and the war on real America takes another left turn. They’re the real clowns in the room—but the joke’s on us.