We know that the fix is in. It has been for quite some time. We are ruled by a one-party state with rival wings competing for control of an unchanging regime — like the Stalinists jostling the Trotskyites for command of the Soviet dictatorship.

American voters are free to choose between Democrats who will immediately dismantle our borders, savage the birth rate, and chemically castrate our children and … Squish Republicans who promise to accomplish these goals more gradually and incrementally. Republicans like Lindsey Graham, Nikki Haley, Chris Christie and Mitch McConnell stand athwart the march of history and cry, “Stop! Wait for me!”

Our Shock Collars

A dog with a cruel owner only learns where the invisible electric fence extends when he tries to go beyond it, and gets a nasty shock. He might turn another direction, and scamper off that way till … ZAP! Eventually, he’s a beaten dog, and timidly paces only within the limits of his enclosure.

We Americans hit that fence in 2016, and the shock our masters imposed escalated relentlessly from that election night right up to the present. Any candidate who didn’t agree to essentially open borders, the liquidation of our history, the aggressive ethnic replacement of our native population, the transfer of wealth from the middle class to billionaires, pointless foreign wars, and a full-on surveillance state … was off limits. We might even get to elect him by some fluke, just once. But our owners wouldn’t let him govern, and they’d make sure he couldn’t win again.

Now we’re told by the Colorado Supreme Court that Trump’s very efforts to push back against such abuse constituted a crime — and make him ineligible for office. That’s a claim straight out of a Kafka novel, or the chronicles of any despotic regime at any point in history — from the Pharaohs’ rule in Egypt through the empire of Rome, through the Muslim tyrannies that persecuted Christians, right up to include 20^th century dictatorships. You are “free” to speak your mind, as long as it doesn’t matter. Touch the third rail and actually challenge those in power, and you will be destroyed.

Tyranny Is the Norm, Decency the Exception

What we don’t realize as blessed but spoiled Americans is that this is the usual course of things in this fallen world of ours. The American exception really was a kind of parenthesis, a break with the ordinary way that regimes treat their citizens. We’ve enjoyed such unlikely privileges for so many generations, we’ve come to believe that liberty and decency just fall from the sky like rain — when in fact a regime like ours is more like a functioning cuckoo clock found ticking away on the Moon.

I fear that we are entering a world much more like the one our Jewish ancestors in faith faced in 1 B.C., in occupied Palestine. We won’t rule ourselves, or even recognize the worldview or values of those who wield power over us. We’ll see our would-be native political leaders either crushed or co-opted, firmly informed of the very narrow limits our masters allow them.

Which Villains in the Bible Will We Emulate?

We’ll see our church leaders act like the Sadducees Jesus wouldn’t even deign to argue with: sold out completely to Caesar, making themselves valuable to him by feeding us sleepy-time platitudes. Some of us will decide if we can’t beat them we’ll join them, and become “progressive Christians” who rewrite the Bible in rainbow letters with the “nasty,” “judgmental” passages either snipped out or explained away. That’s what my own church’s Vatican is doing, and the leaders of one evangelical church after another.

We might turn into Zealots instead, and martyr ourselves in acts of violent futile resistance, confident that our heroism will in turn inspire others. And we would prove mistaken. We’d have sacrificed ourselves for nothing.

We might act like the Pharisees — whom Jesus respected enough to evangelize and dispute. He expected something of them, which he didn’t of Caiaphas or Herod. We might hunker down and look inward, confident that staying firm in our traditions and history will be sufficient to save us. And we will be wrong, as the Pharisees learned when the Romans sacked Jerusalem and scattered the Jews to the four winds like so many leaves.

We Will Shoulder the Cross Willingly or Not

If I’m right, and we’re being plunged into biblical times, we will see that my favorite American virtues of self-reliance, stiff-necked independence and courage no longer make any difference. We’re pushing a boulder up a hill, which when it reaches the top simply rolls right down again — and might just crush us. There is nothing that fully conquered peoples (the Copts under the Arabs, the Armenians under the Turks, the Jews under the Romans) can really do on their own. All they face is suffering and sacrifice, daily shouldering the cross.

We must strive to diminish the evil that hangs over us like a suffocating fog. But light and redemption won’t leap up from us on the ground. It must come blazing from above, like the sun breaking through in a storm.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or co-author of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. He is co-author with Jason Jones of “God, Guns, & the Government.”