Hillary’s campaign ran on the line of “breaking through the glass ceiling,” an outdated feminist archetype for disenfranchised women who are unable to break through society’s paternalistic ceiling of power to achieve key roles in business, economics and, in this case, politics. While there indeed have been ages where women felt confined to the home and were unable to achieve success in their desired fields, our era is one in which women can choose their desired professions.

We can choose to go to school, and, in fact, for most of my friends we have found that being a woman has only helped us on our career path. Certainly, the bias against women exists and I have received disparaging sexist comments in my lifetime. However, for the most part, these comments had less to do with my gender than they did with my political persuasions. The glass ceiling for me has rarely been about whether or not I was born a woman, but rather that my conservative views were not welcome and deserved to be belittled, mocked or intimidated into extinction.

The real glass ceiling is not that women can’t get ahead but that women (and men) who have conservative views are sometimes left behind. I experienced this most profoundly in college, when I had professors who felt threatened by the fact that I was a conservative, pro-Israel, pro-life Christian woman, as if that line of labels suddenly made me a bigoted, narrow-minded, judgmental person. I would be greeted in the hallway by a particular professor who called me “Holy Girl” and explained to several classmates why he called me that. He continued to mark down my work for no other reason than my respectfully holding a different opinion. This situation progressed until the final meeting with him in his office to go over my exam ended in “Well, the work is just not where it needs to be” and that I should consider being an interior designer, since I was a woman.

I recount this story not because it exemplifies the woes of one conservative but because it is the story of so many conservatives across this country who have taken heat from a bigoted, narrow-minded academic elite who have built an ideological glass ceiling over any ideas that oppose their own.

“Political correctness” is an insidious semantics game in which elitists on the Left set an agenda that claims tolerance, kum-ba-ya and coexistence, but they cannot even accept those who respectfully oppose their views. This has always been the case, but the protests in the past week have illuminated the hypocrisy of Leftist values. The hypocrisy claims that we are “better together,” but they really mean only better together when our minds are controlled by the group-think elitists.

Many media and academic elites have been shocked by the results of a GOP sweep of power last week because they cannot fathom that people might have different ideas than they do. They are shocked that people believe in the free-market system, that people want a safe and sovereign country which protects religious liberty, conscious rights, the right to defend oneself and the rights of the unborn. They remain shocked because with all the biased Facebook curation of news, with the media hold on key stories (reporting the insignificant and underreporting the significant), the American people still believed in traditional values and they still voted for a better future for their children and grandchildren.

Like the story of the Grinch who thought that taking all the presents would effectively “steal” Christmas, the elites thought that they could steal America. But what happened to the Grinch? Even though he stole all the presents, the spirit of Christmas remained in the hearts of all the people of Whoville. The elites who so carefully constructed the glass ceiling of media blackout and politically correct fear-mongering across our schools and universities could not stop the spirit of America in the hearts of her people.

Hopefully this election gives rise to a new era in which the voice of the people, rather than the dictates of the elites, prevail in the public discourse. Hopefully this election gives the people renewed confidence that their own voices may be heard above the politically correct glass ceiling and that this glass ceiling, the real glass ceiling, may be shattered in our lifetimes.