“The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, and most essential command,” George Orwell wrote in 1984. The line came to mind as I recently returned from a short vacation, only to be met with the Democrats’ latest efforts to conjure “good vibes” around Vice President Kamala Harris, manufacture false realities, and hoodwink the public into endorsing a radical Left agenda that threatens to undermine the principles upon which our nation was founded.

Indeed, perhaps for the first time in American history, what is at stake in November’s election are the very pillars of both our and Western civilization, faith and family, and the values they sustain: honesty, integrity, and respect. For the Left, such principles have long been obstacles to its political agenda — one that hinges on the subjugation of the individual, with the party acting as the final arbiter of truth. The party dictates what is to be believed.

The Left has been in pursuit of this project since at least the 1960s. Today, it’s brandished under the banner of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” though it embodies none of these things. 

The project also has been accelerated since the Democrats stripped President Joe Biden of any political future, after concealing the unfortunate state of his health from the public for nearly four years. “We have a very bold and vibrant president,” Harris said on Good Morning America in February. The nightly news, with images of a bumbling Biden, told a different story.

We are now being told by the same voices that Harris is “matched to the moment.” Her image appears triumphantly, if not with a faintly Mao-esque quality, on the cover of the latest Time magazine, with adoring crowds blurred in the background. 

We are told that she bears no responsibility for the millions of illegal migrants who have crossed our southern border despite having been entrusted with its security. We are told her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), is a valiant military veteran. “I stood one night on the tarmac at Bagram Air Base,” Walz said in 2021. Yet Walz was never deployed. 

The Harris camp has gone so far as to rewrite news headlines within Google search ads to force a reality that does not, and has never, existed.

The brazenness with which the Democratic Party has taken to deceiving the public should, by any reasonable measure, disqualify it from holding power. Yet Harris and the progressive political machinery around her seem to wager that decades of policies designed to sow confusion and erode the fabric of faith and family have yielded a society so befuddled that it will swallow their falsehoods whole, reality be damned.

It is in this regard no accident that the Left has long embraced a gender ideology rooted in the early writings of Judith Butler and Robert Stoller, among other so-called gender theorists, which has today progressed so far as to include the acceptance of biological males in women’s sports and gender-transition healthcare for minors — a position that Walz endorsed with his signing of bill H.F. 146 in April 2023, allowing children in Minnesota to undergo genital surgery without parental consent, and of which the Biden administration has been a lead proponent.

The harm of such measures extends beyond the individual child to the nuclear family. Yet for the Left, this is precisely the point. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels saw the dissolution of the family as essential to the success of communism. For them, as for much of the Left today, the family was the most fundamental unit of privatization, one that reinforced capitalist class structures and perpetuated patriarchal oppression. Once dismantled, wealth could be distributed, women liberated, and functions traditionally borne by the family, such as education, assumed by the state or community. As Hillary Clinton once said, “It takes a village.”

Actually, it doesn’t. And though Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) has faced scrutiny for his delivery on the matter, the Republican vice presidential candidate is right that the United States needs more policies that prioritize parents, making it easier for them to have and raise children in ways that reflect their values rather than those imposed by the powers that be. This includes initiatives such as school choice, which Walz has derided as a “scheme.” It is, after all, far easier to shape young minds when there is no one else offering an alternative view.

This is as true for family as it is for faith. There is little room for church or God when the party seeks a monopoly on the truth. This is why religious freedom is also under assault from the Left. This assault includes ostensible religious tests for public office, such as the one Harris attempted to apply to a federal district court nominee while she served on the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2018, and is visible in the mainstream, too, as seen in the opening and closing ceremonies of the Olympic Games.

This struggle is not unique to the U.S. If anything, the Olympics demonstrated just how widespread it is. Yet it is unique to the U.S. in that this is the first time in its history that such leftist ideals have become so mainstream. Decades of leftist efforts to promote confused and relativist policies around gender, faith, family, and history have left significant portions of American society, indeed, confused — primed to “reject the evidence” of their “eyes and ears” in exchange for the feigned truths of the Left. Such “truths” would likely only become more entrenched should Harris and Walz succeed in November.

As Americans, we have generally shied away from ideological battles. They have, until now, seemed distant and irrelevant, and few imagined that communism or its variants would find footing here. This might be why many struggle to recognize it and why many also fail to see confused policies, such as those around gender, as part of a wider leftist agenda. 

Yet whether we like it or not, the battle has arrived on our shores, and those who care about the institutions and values that have long upheld this nation must now stand up. This is the most essential command.

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Aleksandra Gadzala Tirziu (@awgadzala) is the founder of the geopolitical risk firm Magpie Advisory, a visiting fellow at Independent Women’s Forum, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, and a contributing editor with the New York Sun.