In order to fully comprehend the dynamic on stage at Saturday evening’s Democratic president debate, understand that every one of the aspirants on stage is wholly dependent upon an activist class that has spent most of the past year eradicating thoughtcrime and historical monuments in the summer, and then concocting moral crises to destroy academic institutions in the fall.

If your political prospects rested upon not antagonizing this roiling mass of poorly educated but deeply fanatical cohorts of middle-class radical youths, what else can you do when posed a direct question like Dickerson’s challenge to call something by its right name? You can’t say the obvious thing that everyone knows: speaking the truth is what gets elites dethroned these days. Instead, you profess allegiance to the lie. You do exactly what the country saw these candidates do onstage Saturday: you dodge, duck, dip, dive and dodge.

No wonder we are witnessing a total collapse of Americans’ trust in the elites at a time when the elites’ beliefs are so consistently and glaringly at odds with reality, when they fail to learn from experience, and when those beliefs have resulted in a very real body count.

The Democrats cannot say we are at war with radical Islam for two reasons. First, because the ones who don’t know it will never know it, and second, because the ones who do know it are afraid of the ones who don’t.