The election has a lot of people scratching their heads asking themselves “What happened?” Maybe I can shed some light on the subject from a conservative point of view. For the past few decades, the rise of political correctness, radical third wave feminism and the political powers that be have done a pretty good job of silencing dissent through unbridled ad hominem slurs and baseless accusations predicated upon regressive identity politics. Consequently, conservatives were shunted to the side and forced to rethink their political strategies. What it gave birth to was a new kind of conservatism. A kind of conservatism that applauds and holds men like Milo Yiannopoulos, a gay catholic Jew, in high esteem.

So what is so different about conservatives today as opposed to a decade ago? The difference is IDEAS. By being forcibly shoved out of power and constantly shouted down as sexist, racist, homophobic, xenophobic, islamophobic, transphobic, fatphobic or any other kind of phobia in the book, conservatives were forced to regroup and hone their arguments. Slowly but surely, they began to rise en-masse and start demanding concrete evidence of their thought crimes from the accusers.

This inevitably sparked outrage and caused the left to create more demeaning and exceedingly sexist pejoratives designed to shut down open dialogues. The very fact that I’m a white, cis-gendered, straight, male, Christian, conservative veteran means that my opinions are often disregarded by elitist liberals, regardless of how good my argumentation is. Such tactics are designed to demonize and delegitimize anyone who would dare question their perceived moral superiority. The best term I’ve heard to describe this phenomena is “Secular Sharia Law.”

So, after all the years of having one-sided ideological viewpoints forcibly shoved down their throats, people grew sick of it. When Trump threw his hat into the presidential race, people were obviously trepidatious and skeptical. However, when he opened his mouth, he began to say things that Americans were already thinking and feeling. The mainstream media is corrupt, we need to bring jobs back to America, we need to secure our borders, Islamic terrorism is a problem and so on and so forth.

When Americans began rallying around Trump is when things got really ugly. The left began to realize that their ad hominem attacks did nothing to dissuade Trump or his supports, so they began to instigate violence. I point to the Chicago riots that shut down Trump’s rally as a prime example. These types of actions did nothing to endear voters who were on the fence about who to vote for. If anything, it probably made them vote against Hillary.

The left failed to engage conservatives in the open marketplace of ideas and instead decided that they weren’t worth the energy or time to openly debate. I mean, who seriously tries to classify a cartoon frog as a hate symbol and expect to be taken seriously?