“I didn’t leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left me."—Ronald Reagan, 1962

"What do these people stand for? What is their platform? All I can figure out so far is ‘We hate Trump’ and ‘We love illegal immigrants.’"—openly gay Brandon Straka, founder of the #WalkAway campaign, 2018

Of all the things exposed by the 2016 election — the rank corruption at the highest levels of national law enforcement, the astounding arrogance of judicial branch members who substitute political ideology for law, and the profound devolution of a mainstream media into a de facto Ministry of Truth whose "truth” is the advancement of the progressive agenda — none was more cathartic than the exposure of the “tolerant” American Left as the nation’s foremost promulgators of hate and hysteria.

For decades, these self-appointed doyens of “enlightened” thinking have tasked themselves with fundamentally transforming a fundamentally flawed America into a socialist utopia run by globalist elites answerable to no one but themselves. Globalist elites whose commitment to “social justice” amounted to remaining wholly immune to the damage they inflicted on “deplorable” Americans while enriching themselves.

On Nov. 8, 2016, their self-serving construct was conspicuously rejected.

Ever since, the wisdom of an electorate rejecting that odious status quo — the one former president Barack Obama assured us would be his “third term” with Hillary Clinton in charge — has been completely validated. All one would have to do to realize the level of bankruptcy that attends progressive ideology is substitute Barack Obama’s name for Donald Trump’s. And imagine the Left’s reaction if a comedian stated Obama’s mouth is Putin’s c—k holster, a high school mural depicted Obama’s severed head, a Hollywood celebrity tweeted someone should “rip” Malia or Sasha from Michelle Obama’s arms and put one or the other in a cage full of pedophiles, or a Republican House representative urged conservatives to “push back” and “create a crowd” so that Obama administration officials understood “they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere!”

Just for starters.

Brandon Straka has had enough. “The #WalkAway Campaign is a true grassroots movement,” his campaign’s Facebook page states. “It is a video campaign movement, dedicated to sharing the stories of people who can no longer accept the current ideology of liberalism and what the Democratic Party has become. … Some here have wanted to leave for some time, but have feared the consequences they might suffer from friends or family if they walk away.”

Attorney Alan Dershowitz revealed some of those consequences, explaining that his “friends” on Martha’s Vineyard have shunned him for defending Trump’s constitutional rights. He cites one of them as saying that if he appeared at one of her parties she’d “stab him through the heart.”

MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough defends such puerile close-mindedness. “As my grandmother would say, Alan, when you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas,” Scarborough sniffed. “And so he can’t try to undermine Robert Mueller … and then be shocked that he’s not allowed to go to the finest spots on Martha’s Vineyard.”

Scarborough’s contempt is shared by Washington Post columnist Abby Ohlheiser, who dismisses the #WalkAway campaign as a conservative-orchestrated mirage. “As the Internet fragments, our understanding of what it means to go ‘viral’ has become complicated, and increasingly meaningless. A hashtag claiming to capture a movement among liberals has gone viral, in this case, almost exclusively on the right-wing Internet, as a reinforcement of one of its binding ideas,” she writes. “There’s little actual evidence to suggest that #WalkAway represents a mass conversion of millions — or even thousands — of Democrats to the Trump Train since Straka’s video.”

As columnist David Catron explains, Ohlheiser misses the point, especially with regard to black Americans who have been one of the Democrat Party’s most reliable voting blocs — and thus taken for granted. “A ‘Great Awakening’ isn’t required,” he writes. “All that is needed is about 5 percent more African-Americans to vote Republican and another 5 to 10 percent to simply stay home. … That means, to quote Reagan, ‘We win, they lose.’”

Unfortunately for Democrats, it’s not just black Americans Straka is recruiting. “If you are a person of color, an LGBT person, a woman or an American immigrant, the Democratic Party wants you to know you are a victim,” Straka says in a video he posted May 26. “This is perhaps the Democratic Party’s greatest, and most insidious, lie.”

Lie? Political platform is more like it. Without the continued cultivation of victimization that fuels big-government dependency, Democrats are in serious trouble. Straka notes what their concern has engendered. “The Democratic Party that I once loved has joined forces with the extremist left.”

Don’t take his word for it. DNC Chairman Tom Perez has dubbed socialist Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez “the future of our party” following her defeat of incumbent Joe Crowley in New York’s 14th Congressional District primary.

Ocasio-Cortez makes it clear what that future portends: “free” Medicare for all, the abolishment of ICE, a federal government-imposed jobs guarantee, housing as a “human right,” mobilization against climate change, gun control and higher education “for everyone.” And like many of her fellow Democrats, she supports impeaching Donald Trump.

Moreover, like Bernie Sanders, who owns three homes and earned over a million dollars in 2016, Ocasio-Cortez’s socialist, working class “girl from the Bronx” bona fides are conspicuously lacking. While she was born in the Bronx, her family moved to Yorktown Heights, a wealthy Westchester County suburban town, when she was five — a detail her biography conspicuously omitted until she subsequently “tweaked” it.

Maybe that’s because Westchester is the eighth-richest county in the nation.

“Do as I say, not as I do” hypocrisy and extremism are beginning to take a toll. “For far too long, the left has controlled the narrative in this country in news and media while the ‘silent majority’ on the right have done what they always do — remained silent,” the #WalkAway Facebook page continues. “The left has been allowed for so long to reinforce the narrative that everybody on the right is a bigot, a racist, a homophobe, a misogynist, etc. But the left has become so extreme, it’s now time to fight back.”

Now? Conservatives have been fighting for quite some time. Fighting against Hollywood, academia, the media and the Democrat Party, along with the faction of GOPers who spinelessly acquiesce to the progressive agenda. Fighting against #NeverTrump blowhards like Bill Kristol, George Will, Max Boot, Bret Stephens and others whose “principles” would have abided undiscovered Deep State machinations, a leftist Supreme Court, the continued hollowing out of Heartland America, and the open-borders/amnesty agenda a Clinton presidency would have surely inflicted on the nation. The same “principles” that have them rooting for Democrats to prevail in November.

Straka has other ideas. “This is a movement of patriots of all walks of life — men, women, black, brown, white, straight, LGBTQ, religious, non-believers, who share something very important in common… WE ARE AMERICAN and we will not surrender our country!”

Amen to that.