If there’s one thing that has been learned over the last three and a half years, it’s that Patriots are targets. Some, notably commentators Kurt Schlichter and Dennis Prager, have been warning us for years. Schlichter, in particular, has pulled no punches about the fact: On the Left, hatred of grassroots Americans exists and dealing with it is going to be very necessary.

Anyone who doubts this just needs to trust their own eyes and ears. It has been blatantly obvious in everything from venomous declarations on social media to campaign slander to smears you’d see while watching TV — news or drama, if you can tell the difference. Maybe you’ve even heard it from those around you.

It goes beyond statements. Look at the nearly 400 incidents of violence directed at Trump supporters. These things didn’t happen because someone just woke up and decided to beat up Trump supporters. It came from a long campaign of dehumanization involving a series of big lies. It’s gotten far worse since Trump pulled off a huge upset against Hillary Clinton.

But those who want to claim that somehow Trump made this all worse are simply not seeing what happened previously. Claims of racism have been aimed at Republicans at least since Ronald Reagan won in 1980. It wasn’t just Reagan: George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole, George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney all faced such nonsense charges.

It wasn’t just those running for president, though. Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and scores of other prominent Patriots have been smeared as racists and Nazis. Had Mitt Romney won in 2012, or even if John McCain won in 2008, we would still see the same Resistance emerge, only this time citing the defeat of Barack Obama as proof of racism. The congressional power of Gingrich and DeLay made them targets.

For a long time, Patriots have joked that the way to tell if a leftist is losing an argument is hearing them declare their opponent a “racist!” The jokes have more than a grain of truth to them — as we have seen, the phony claims are often used to distract from failures. Even trying to fix messed up school lunches led to vicious personal attacks.

That said, perhaps we should have been far more serious, especially as the Left broke out more and more comparisons to Hitler and the Nazis. The fact is, we can answer one question Dennis Prager posed in 2018: They seem to really mean it, and they are acting on the belief that Republicans are no different than Nazis.

It’s graduated beyond name-calling to mobs of antifa outside the homes of government officials and journalists. People are attacked in restaurants or even while registering voters. Once upon a time, that was seen as cause to bring in the FBI. These days, though, there is some local coverage — maybe a report from Fox News — but it’s quickly swept under the rug by far too many journalists who seem to think the victims had it coming.

It’s easy for some on the Right to just dismiss the warnings from Prager and Schlichter. But those who have should be asked a very simple question: Is there any evidence that can disprove their observations? Because from where we sit, we have to say they’re right.