You want policy dictated on paranoia and fear? Last week, while Republicans were making a case for the Fifth and Second Amendments, Democrats were accusing their fellow Americans of selling weapons to ISIS. As far as I could tell, not one politician at the congressional sit-in acknowledged that the GOP was offering a good-faith argument. Instead, Democrats — and I mean every one of them — accused the GOP of being bought by the omnipotent National Rifle Association. While gun violence has precipitously dropped over most of our lifetimes — nearly twice as many people die on bikes every year than they do by “assault weapons;” gun homicides are at a 50-year low, etc. — Democrats would have you believe America is living “The Purge.”

This goes on every day. Conservatives want to take away your right to vote. They want to ban birth control. Ban mammograms. Control your bodies. Social conservatives are the reason an Islamic terrorist slaughters 49 gay Americans. The ones who claim they care about religious freedom — people who have served and hired gay Americans for years but don’t want to participate in a same-sex wedding — are accused of trying to institute a new Jim Crow. Democrats regularly liken social conservatives to the Klan because they want sex-specific bathrooms for their kids.

If Joe Biden doesn’t like Paul Ryan’s budget — a budget that would have increased spending to its highest levels ever, incidentally — he warns an African-American audience that Republicans are “going to put y’all back in chains.” Why wouldn’t he? There is no blowback for demagoguery. For decades now, if a conservative mentions entitlement it means they want to push an elderly woman off a cliff. If Obamacare is replaced, thousands of Americans will die in the streets. If we don’t sign onto the Democrats’ economic agenda, we’ll plunge into another depression. If we don’t pass a car bailout, we won’t have cars anymore. If we shut down the non-essential parts of the federal government for a few days to haggle over a budget, we are putting American lives at risk.