Last week, a conservative website ran another one of those “gotcha” columns highlighting Democrat hypocrisy. The subject was Bernie Sanders and the gotcha part was the fact that the same socialist/Marxist who now champions amnesty for illegal aliens opposed it 2007, along with a guest-worker program.

Such columns are exasperating because they miss the larger point: Democrats may be hypocrites, but hypocrisy is a byproduct of the one and only “principle” that animates their entire agenda: the acquisition and maintenance of power — by any means necessary. Thus, if Sanders surmises the path to power means taking a tough stance on illegal immigration in 2007, and a polar opposite, open-border approach 12 years later, that is not hypocrisy. It is consistency based on that singular principle.

Moreover, those same Democrats can rest assured the mainstream media will have their backs: Republicans “flip flop.” Democrats “evolve.”

Orchestrated evolution, a.k.a. incrementalism, is an integral part of the Democrat agenda. For example, it’s easy to remember a time when the assertion that a man could be a women, or vice versa, simply by declaring it to be so — utterly irrespective of biological or chromosomal reality — was seen as the psychological deficiency or pernicious nonsense it truly is.

Now, gender “fluidity” has become an integral part of public school curriculums across the nation, a judge remains agnostic regarding the chemical castration of a seven-year-old boy, double-mastectomies are performed on healthy 13-year-old girls, and biological males are dominating women’s sports. Moreover, anyone who opposes that agenda is a bigot or “phobic.”

Most Americans see the radicalism driving that agenda. What they don’t see is the Democrats’ larger agenda: If reality itself can be determined solely by self-identification, then two plus two can equal five, and the entirety of totalitarianism illuminated by George Orwell’s 1984 becomes possible.

College campuses are one of the Left’s primary breeding grounds for such ambitions. “The key to understanding what is happening on campuses, and increasingly in society as a whole, is to discard your bourgeois notions of reason and the presumption of good faith,” writes columnist Kurt Schlichter, who adds that evidence and intellectual consistency are irrelevant because leftists “are not engaged in argument. Rather, they simply assert whatever nonsense they believe will increase their own power.”

By any means necessary.

Perhaps nothing illuminated this dynamic better than the two-part impeachment “inquiry” conducted by Democrats, where a “whistleblower” first deemed integral to the entire procedure was jettisoned in favor of a generalized “quid pro quo,” which became collusion, then bribery, all of which was ultimately formalized as obstruction of Congress and abuse of power.

How disingenuous are Democrats? Last Saturday, the House Judiciary Committee released a report that contained an astonishing assertion. “The question is not whether the President’s conduct could have resulted from permissible motives,” it states. “It is whether the President’s real reasons, the ones in his mind at the time, were legitimate.”

Translation: “thoughtcrime” is grounds for impeachment.

So is second-hand “testimony” wholly undermined by the simplest of questions. At the House Intelligence Committee hearing run by Adam Schiff (D-CA), Chris Stewart (R-UT) asked former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch if she had any knowledge about the president accepting bribes or engaging in criminal activity. She said she did not.

At at the second hearing, conducted by the House Judiciary Committee and run by Jerry Nadler (D-NY), Matt Gaetz (R-FL) asked all the witnesses present to raise their hands if they had “personal knowledge of a single material fact in the Schiff report.” Not a single hand was raised.

In a nation with an uncorrupted education system, that would have been the end of the impeachment fiasco. In this one, four academics, three of whom were transparently political, were bought into offer “testimony” — consisting solely of their opinions — as to why Trump should be impeached. And while the media focused on an intemperate remark made by Stanford Law School professor Pam Karlan regarding Trump’s teenage son, Barron, the woman who claimed she had to cross the street to avoid walking past Trump International Hotel said something far more illuminating. She insisted conservatives are spread across the country “perhaps because they don’t even want to be around themselves.”

Again in a better nation, Americans might wonder how someone making such wholly condescending generalizations is allowed to train future lawyers. In this one, Karlan will continue having a hand in turning out social justice warriors masquerading as attorneys of law.

She is also Exhibit A regarding what Democrats consider one of the fundamentals for imposing their totalitarian agenda: credentialism. Perhaps nothing took a bigger beating in the 2016 election than the idea that credentials should be the sole determinant regarding who should occupy the Oval Office. Thus, when a trash-talking businessman/TV host bested a former first lady, senator, and secretary of state, credentialism was repudiated. Americans were no longer interested in abiding “experts” who are anything but, yet still see themselves as “saviors of the planet and as shapers of mankind in their own image,” as Angelo Codevilla, former staff member of the Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence, so eloquently observed.

Since these self-aggrandizing saviors can’t take their fury out directly on the electorate who voted for Trump, Trump himself becomes the target of those whose determination to “fundamentally transform” America remains imperiled unless he — and his “deplorable” supporters — are thoroughly repudiated.

The next step on the road to totalitarianism? Permanent instability. “From now on, impeachment can be used against any first-term president with a record of success,” Victor Davis Hanson warns. “It will be used solely as a political strategy by the opposition party that controls the House to weaken a president’s reelection chances — possibly in the interest of some of the very House, or Senate, members who as presidential candidates will sit in judgment of the accused president.”

Hanson believe Democrats will “live to rue” such a development. That is highly doubtful, considering they are up against a largely spineless GOP that has never demonstrated the same level of determination as their Democrat rivals. Thus, the notion that Republicans would begin calling for impeachment on Inauguration Day, like Democrats and their media apparatchiks did with Trump, is a pipe dream.

Can the march toward totalitarianism be blunted? Winston Churchill once stated, “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing — after they’ve tried everything else.” Transgenderism, which represents the apex of progressive demands for ideological “purity,” suggests we’ve reached that point. Moreover, spending one’s entire life wondering if a single “intemperate” moment can cost one a career, or engender social ostracism — exactly like the system the Chinese Communist government is imposing on its own people next year — is thoroughly exhausting.

Here’s hoping the 2020 election demonstrates how exhausted Americans truly are.