KURT SCHLICHTER: Liberals Look in the Mirror and Scream.

And here’s a pro tip for the fussy boys of Twitter: You already libel us as “Nazis” and “fascists” – which is weird because we aren’t socialists, national or otherwise – so it’s not like you doing it with even higher-pitched shrieks than usual is going to make it more compelling or get us to care. Nor is it a particularly persuasive flex to somehow assert that a bunch of proposals which a dozen years of my columns oppose are actually proposals that I really support, and that I could not possibly be mocking the pinkos, and that I somehow inadvertently let slip out some sort of inner Mussolini and only tacky blue checks are clever enough to detect the hidden truth. Again, we have the continuing liberal dilemma: Are they dumb, or do they merely think that the people listening to them are dumb?

But I did mix in some plausible initiatives among the outrageous ones. The lines about increasing our carbon footprint and deporting all illegal aliens – yeah, those are good ideas.

In the end, holding up the mirror to these saps had exactly the effect that I sought to achieve – these dorks are so easy to play. Utterly without even the self-awareness to hide their Stalinist aspirations, they demonstrated that they were fine with those authoritarian tactics, just not with those particular objectives. The thread’s modest proposals included banning Marxism, control of social media, and punishing dissenters. Their response was that I should be banned, that social media should toss me off, that I should lose my job, and that I should be reported to the cops. A bunch of freedom advocates reported me to Twitter, so I got a flurry of those “German law” notices. Basically, their view is that suppressing rights is not inherently bad. It’s only bad if done to them. When done to us, it’s a moral imperative.

Not surprisingly, the party whose organizing method is “the moral equivalent of war” happily views American politics as the continuation of warfare by other means, to flip von Clausewitz’s axiom on its head.