Let’s close out the day with a note of hope, shall we? And hope is badly needed these days, particularly if you’re a conservative. Watching the news play out before our eyes, it’s easy to sometimes feel as if American society has lost its collective mind and conservative values are frequently targeted, sometimes in a physically violent fashion. Our own government has been censoring the speech of conservatives and weaponizing the justice system against those with insufficiently woke ideas. And liberal activists are constantly on the attack, either through the legislative process or out in the streets, issuing a series of demands, each one crazier than the last.

But over at Townhall, Scott Morefield is calling on American conservatives to not give up the ship. He argues that people have prevailed during worse times than this and there is always reason for hope. One example he offers is the recent and increasingly strident pushback against the transgender agenda that has been sweeping the country. Morefield views it as a fight against gender ideology and believes that the tide has already begun to turn. It’s not just conservatives taking to the field either. Feminists and liberals who actually believe in what the original civil rights movement was about are standing up in public and on social media, refusing to be silenced. And they should be welcomed into the trenches with the rest of us.

The best recent example of this potential is the ongoing pushback against gender ideology. Instead of bending and giving in to their insanity, conservatives and many old-school liberals and even ardent feminists like author J.K. Rowling are doubling down and refusing to budge, particularly on the most pernicious aspects like women’s sports, biological males in female prisons, and child mutilations. It’s inspiring, really. Despite leftists’ best efforts at portraying the transgender movement as the civil rights issue of our time, a majority of the population – nearly all of which are sympathetic to the ACTUAL civil rights movement – aren’t buying it. Even as they continue to push the envelope, polls consistently show they are outkicking their coverage.

The pushback on social media, particularly Twitter, is even starker. From Libs of TikTok to Matt Walsh to Rowling and countless others, people are just not afraid to openly say the emperor indeed has no clothes. And it hasn’t gone unnoticed.

I agree with Scott, though much of recent history has indeed been depressing. Everything about traditional liberalism has either been pushed past the breaking point and into the territory of insanity or been completely redefined into something unrecognizable. The admirable goal of eliminating the last vestiges of racism in America and creating the colorblind society that MLK dreamed of has been mutated on the left. The 21st-century definition of “racism” is anyone who says or does anything that a liberal disagrees with. So many things have been redefined as being “racist” that the word racism has lost almost all meaning.

The idea of equality of opportunity has been tossed on the trash heap of history on the left. Rather than promoting equal pay for equal work, “equality” in that sense now stands for reparations and basic income guarantees for preferred political classes, regardless of your situation. The communal desire for safer environments in our homes and workplaces has been abducted by climate change alarmists and morphed into a war on things that work.

But as Scott points out, perhaps none of these trends approaches the bizarre social contagion surrounding transgender identity politics. Basic science that has been understood for all of recorded history is being sent up in flames and replaced with unscientific balderdash. The worst aspects of this battle of course involve the genital or chemical mutilation of children, the corruption of women’s and girls’ sports, and dangerous demands to redefine basic rights of privacy for actual men and women.

And yet this is a battle that can and will be won. More and more people are pushing back against this madness and they come from both sides of the aisle. This isn’t a conflict that will have to be won in the courts, though it is already coming to that. We simply need more people who will not be cowed by the demands of a very loud but tiny minority of people who insist on silencing or canceling you if you don’t perform as instructed. We need more people who will publicly stand up and simply say, “No!” We will not abide or accept your madness as some new form of reality. And we will not vote for politicians of either party who attempt to codify this madness through legislation. The vast majority of Americans know how insane all of this is. Sadly, too many of them are too frightened by the mob to raise their voices.

Consenting adults should be able to do with their own bodies as they wish if they honestly think that they can be something other than the gender they arrive in the world as, determined either by God or nature, depending on their own beliefs. But you will not force this on the rest of us. You will not permanently destroy the bodies of healthy children. You will not rob talented and aspiring young girls and women of their rightful, competitive opportunities. We are the majority in this and we will stop you.