In case you hadn’t noticed, we haven’t been witnessing “business as usual” in America for a while now. This has become particularly obvious over the past two years, but it’s been going on for longer than that. The most recent and obvious example of the “new normal” is the persecution of a former president by an out-of-control liberal District Attorney in Manhattan. But the weaponization of law enforcement and the courts runs much deeper, as we saw with the FBI’s obstruction of the law and successful efforts to influence the outcome of the 2020 elections using Big Tech as their vehicle of choice. Other examples abound. At Townhall, our colleague Kurt Schlichter points out that the old norms are out the window and the left has basically declared war and open season on conservatives and Republicans. Old traditions of restraint in the interest of getting work done are a thing of the past. And Kurt argues that the only way to return to any sense of normalcy in politics and public life is to start hitting back even harder than our opponents. I’ll offer some caveats to that concept below, but here’s his opening pitch, describing how liberals are not going to behave reasonably until we “nuke ’em ’til they glow.”

Conservatives whose reaction to the banana republic shenanigans of a leftist DA in a leftist city using a ridiculous perversion of the law to take out an enemy of the leftists is anything less than a desire to deal the pain right back are worse than useless. They are a menace. Their channeling of Kevin Bacon in “Animal House” empowers our enemies to ruin our country – and us. If you love the rule of law, if you want to bring back our precious norms and hold to our precious principles, then it’s time to go Full Truman and nuke ‘em ‘til they glow.

I note that Japan hasn’t gotten uppity since we tossed them a couple of hot rocks. And that’s what we need to do to the left.

Mutually assured destruction works. But the “mutual” part is just as important as the “destruction” part. When you don’t make it mutual, when your sissy rectitude reacts to them wrecking you by whimpering about how hypocritical they are, then it’s only us who get destroyed. And that does not work for me.

The whole column is full of revenge fantasy porn goodness, so it’s worth a read if you missed it yesterday. And the current situation across the country isn’t entirely hopeless. Kurt offers a few examples of people who are already counterpunching to the best of their ability. Kevin McCarthy took hold of the gavel and booted some bad actors out of their precious committee seats. He has a full weaponization committee in gear conducting investigations in every direction. In Florida, Ron DeSantis has fired up the flamethrower and blasted it at more than Disney. There are a few others.

But while some successes may be achieved at the state and local level, things in Washington are different. To borrow from Kurt’s analogy, there is no point in breaking out the flamethrower when the other side controls all of the gasoline. The GOP investigations are a welcome change, but we’re still highly unlikely to get the ball over the finish line in a big way.

Kurt mentions the prosecution of Donald Trump as sufficient motivation to go after Biden Incorporated and bring some charges against the presumably guilty parties, likely starting with the President’s wayward crackhead son. And I couldn’t agree more. But you can drag out all of the evidence in the world, starting with banking records and the contents of the Laptop From Hell and it won’t make any difference if the Justice Department simply uses “prosecutorial discretion” and refuses to move the case forward. We can point to the Twitter Files and set our hair on fire about the FBI, but as long as Biden’s people and their sympathizers are running the show, we have no crowbar to apply to those doors.

Simply building a case isn’t good enough anymore. Even when blatant evidence of wrongdoing is uncovered, nobody hears about who isn’t watching Tucker Carlson because the rest of the MSM either labels it as a conspiracy theory or ignores it entirely. (They’ve gotten really good at that.) We can point out that the system is currently being run like a banana republic, but that doesn’t matter if the banana republic is working out swimmingly for the people calling the shots and controlling the majority of the media.

There simply isn’t a way to start launching any nukes similar to the ones the liberals are employing unless conservatives convincingly take back both the White House and the majorities in both chambers. Then there can be a thorough housecleaning at the top in the Justice Department and elsewhere. Then disastrous laws can be changed and executive orders can be canceled. The problem is, as we saw in 2020, the other side is making it progressively more difficult (pun intended) to win a national election in a fair and square fashion. And just because their dirty tricks have been exposed, don’t assume that they will mend their ways. Why would they if they know there won’t be any consequences?