Regular Americans, the ones who didn’t attend Ivy League or other prestigious universities and who don’t live in DC, New York, or LA, have always known that the elites hate us. Their smug contempt for “flyover country,” the “bitter clingers” and “deplorables,” is what drives a lot of the anger and political divide in our country today.

The elites forget who we are as a nation. No, that’s not quite right. They detest who we are as a nation, and they endeavor to change everything about it.

Every once in a while, one of them self-reflects. Such was the case with David Brooks, one of the token “conservative” columnists for The New York Times, in a recent op-ed titled “What if We’re the Bad Guys Here?” The impetus for Brooks’s article was Donald Trump — specifically the sense that he “seems to get indicted on a weekly basis.”

That leads Brooks to an epiphany: What if Trump connects with the unwashed masses because the elites hate and rig the system against them, and because they view Trump as their defender?

We know; this just in.

Brooks explores how the elites — like him, he says — are part of the minority who go to college and who take up the majority of the nation’s economic reward. “Members of our class,” Brooks admits, “also segregate ourselves into a few booming metro areas.” Trump won more than 2,500 counties to Joe Biden’s 500 or so, but Biden’s account for 71% of the economy.

“The ideal that we’re all in this together was replaced with the reality that the educated class lives in a world up here and everybody else is forced into a world down there,” Brooks writes. “Members of our class are always publicly speaking out for the marginalized, but somehow we always end up building systems that serve ourselves.”

They became gatekeepers by going to university and then requiring college degrees for all sorts of jobs that don’t actually need degrees. The elites thus block lower-income people from advancing because, ironically, they couldn’t afford to advance. Brooks notes that universities also churn out most of the “journalists” who work for mainstream news organizations, and who then try to tell the rest of us what to think (by lying to us, we might add).

Therefore, Brooks acknowledges, “It’s easy to understand why people in less-educated classes would conclude that they are under economic, political, cultural and moral assault.”

Nevertheless, he basically defends himself and his “class.” They are not “vicious and evil,” he insists, but “earnest, kind and public-spirited.” Still, he admits, “We take for granted and benefit from systems that have become oppressive. Elite institutions have become so politically progressive in part because the people in them want to feel good about themselves as they take part in systems that exclude and reject.”

The compassion is short-lived. “I still basically trust the legal system,” Brooks eventually concludes, and Trump is a “monster” who “deserves to go to prison.”

Translation: Never mind everything I just wrote; screw the commoners, but maybe with a mere moment of utterly insufficient self-reflection first.

The problem is that the elites often are vicious and evil. Because of their aforementioned contempt for America and her regular, normal, hard-working people, the elites have destroyed our institutions and culture. They eroded trust in government by lying and controlling, they ruined our schools and colleges by indoctrinating our youth, they turned news reporting into propaganda peddling in service to one party, and they perverted Hollywood by churning out sanctimonious social messaging.

If there’s “systemic” anything, remember who controls the system.

Historian Victor Davis Hanson explains the Left’s “remaking of America” in a fantastic column by that title. “Every aspect of American life and culture is under assault,” he argues, “including the very processes by which we govern ourselves, and the manner in which we live.”

Hanson lists and explains “10 upheavals that the Left has successfully wrought” — free expression, weaponization of justice, attack on the Supreme Court, media-Democrat fusion, destruction of common law, erosion of the military, the sexes, race, debt, and universities. “The result” of this deliberate upheaval and revolutionary activity, Hanson says, “is an America that is unrecognizable from what it was a mere decade ago.”

Who did that? Elites like David Brooks.

On that note, let’s go back to The New York Times for a moment. The Times used pollaganda to spread the message that Republican voters may not be as interested in fighting wokeness as some candidates think. “Instead,” the Times says, “Republican voters are showing a ‘hands off’ libertarian streak in economics, and a clear preference for messages about ‘law and order’ in the nation’s cities and at its borders.”

The Times wants two things here: First, to create a phony divide between the breakdown in law and order and the wokeness that is responsible for it. There wouldn’t be a spiking crime problem if leftists hadn’t decided being “woke” was so necessary. Put another way, there is no contradiction between fighting for Rule of Law and combatting the woke ideology infecting all the parts of American life Hanson identifies.

Second, the Times wants to stop conservatives from using the word “woke” to discredit the Left. The Times even quotes Trump saying “I don’t like the term ‘woke’” because “half the people can’t even define it.”

When the Times resorts to quoting Trump to prove its own point, you know something’s fishy.

It’s important to remember that “woke” is a word the Left came up with a long time ago to describe its own policies. White nationalists (Nazis) and black nationalists alike, fascists of all colors, have used derivatives of it to describe awareness of the “need” for social justice and other leftist social engineering.

“What happened to ‘Woke’ is the same thing that once happened to ‘Liberal,’” argues political analyst Daniel Greenfield. “Conservatives seized on it and used it to sum up everything wrong with leftist extremism. Before long, no one wanted to identify as a liberal because it meant being seen as a lunatic fighting for sex ed for kids, free needles for addicts, political correctness in the office and surrendering to enemies.” That doesn’t mean leftists aren’t increasingly radical, he notes, just that they regularly “rebrand” because they are “chameleons.”

The beauty of America is that, as Sam Adams said during a previous time of shaking off elite tyranny, “It does not take a majority to prevail, but an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men.”