You’ve heard the expression: A conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged by reality.

But we need to be careful here. We need to not stoop to the level of our political enemies. Because what happened last week to Shivanthi Sathanandan is no joke, no laughing matter.

Sathanandan is the second vice chairwoman of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party — which is the state’s version of the Democrat Party, and which controls four of Minnesota’s eight U.S. House seats, both of its U.S. Senate seats, the Minnesota House of Representatives and Senate, and all other statewide offices, including the governorship — and she was, in her own words, “violently car jacked in the driveway of [her] home in Minneapolis.”

As she wrote in a lengthy Facebook post accompanied by a bloody-faced picture of her: “Four very young men, all carrying guns, beat me violently down to the ground in front of our kids. The young men held our neighbors up at gunpoint when they ran over and tried to help me. All in broad daylight.”

She continued: “Look at my face in the picture. This is the face of a mother who just had the sh$t beaten out of her. A mother whose only thought was, ‘let me run far enough and fight hard enough so that my kids have a chance to get away.’ This is the face of a mother who just listened to her four year old daughter screaming non-stop, her 7 year old son wailing for someone to come help because bad guys are murdering his Mama in the back yard, her neighbors screaming in outrage… all while being beaten with guns and kicks and fists. I have a broken leg, deep lacerations on my head, bruising and cuts all over my body. And I have rage.”

Sathanandan’s rage, though, is misplaced. Yes, she should be furious at her attackers, and she is. “These men knew what they were doing. I have NO DOUBT they have done this before. Yet they are still on OUR STREETS. Killing mothers. Giving babies psychological trauma that a lifetime of therapy cannot erase. With no hesitation and no remorse.”

True enough. But some of that anger should be directed inward, for Sathanandan is a cop defunder — or at least she was until last Tuesday. Indeed, at the height of the George Floyd riots in June 2020, which began next door in South Minneapolis, she took to Facebook to lash out at her local law enforcement.

“We are going to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department,” she wrote then. “Say it with me. DISMANTLE. The. Minneapolis. Police. Department. As allies, what can we do right now? LISTEN and LEARN from our Black siblings. And then AMPLIFY this message right now, in this moment. MPD has systematically failed the Black Community, they have failed ALL OF US. It’s time to build a new infrastructure that works for ALL communities. If you are still disagreeing with that BASIC FACT, I’m not sure what to say to you.”

But the New York Post editorial board writes, “It ain’t the cops: It’s the soft-on-crime lefties like Sathanandan who let crooks run wild.”

We’re not sure what Sathanandan has learned since that time from her “Black siblings,” who are not only the most likely perpetrators of violent crime such as this but also its most likely victims. Strangely — or perhaps not so strangely at all, given the wokeness that infects our mainstream media — we have no description of the young men who savagely beat Sathanandan last Tuesday, other than that they were too young to know how to put her car into gear and drive away, although they eventually figured it out.

“We need to get illegal guns off of our streets,” Sathanandan’s Facebook screed continued, “catch these young people who are running wild creating chaos across our city and HOLD THEM IN CUSTODY AND PROSECUTE THEM. PERIOD.”

Here, we appreciate the subtle but important distinction she makes between the typical leftist’s blanket call for getting “guns off of our streets” in favor of her focus on the illegal guns.

We sincerely hope that Shivanthi Sathanandan recovers fully from this assault, but more than that, we hope that she and her children recover from the emotional trauma that these young thugs inflicted upon them. And for support, we might suggest she call Pennsylvania Congresswoman Mary Gay Scanlon.

Scanlon, as we wrote in December 2021, is a fellow Democrat who was also carjacked at gunpoint — in her case by “two Black males, aged approximately 20-30” at Franklin D. Roosevelt Park in South Philly, where she’d just concluded a meeting.

Scanlon, luckily, was unharmed that day. But Sathanandan wasn’t so lucky. Nor are the countless faceless and nameless everyday victims of violence due to the soft-on-crime policies of Democrat lawmakers all across our country.