You may be a card-carrying Democrat who checks all the right boxes, but if you think porn doesn’t belong in school libraries, none of that matters. You may fully support gay marriage, but don’t you dare wonder out loud if kids on experimental “gender” drugs may grow to regret altering their own bodies. You may serve refugees, but you’d better watch yourself if you think the mass of humanity crossing the southern border may be just a bit problematic.

Welcome to Gaslighting 101. You see, some on the Left are hard at work manufacturing their own villains.

The strategy goes something like this: Take over America’s institutions and weaponize them against the very values that helped establish them in the first place. When people complain, brand them as the extremists to shame them into silence.

[It’s almost directly out of Alinsky. Adam Baldwin talks about this a lot in our Amiable Skeptics series. — Ed]