In last week’s column, I provided examples of damage that the left is doing to America and forcefully pleaded with patriotic Americans to fight for their country, including sending a powerful message in next year’s midterm elections.

Some felt this was insufficient. One disgruntled reader commented, “So, you present us with a nauseating litany of the kinds of evil and destruction that our now clearly communist government and every miserable, disgusting and depraved loser who can crawl from under their rock or out of their cesspool feels free to commit. And then you say the answer is to vote. Are you kidding me?”

The man has a point. Confidence in the integrity and security of our elections has never been lower. According to two recent polls, one-third of all Americans and two-thirds of Republicans think that Joe Biden’s so-called victory in last year’s presidential election was attributable to voter fraud. Democrats’ aggressive push for unauthenticated voting processes rife with potential for fraud — mail-in ballots, ballot harvesting, same-day registration, voting without proof of identification and allowing foreign citizens to vote — only deepens the suspicion of millions of Americans that their votes and their voices are being canceled.

That suspicion is exacerbated by the patent condescension of the elitist classes who regularly express their belief that they should be running the country and the lives of everyone in it.

On Monday, Substack author Matt Taibbi published a piece that describes this phenomenon with brutal accuracy. In “Will Twitter Become an Ocean of Suck?,” Taibbi muses about Twitter’s future after former CEO Jack Dorsey’s recent resignation, in light of the increasingly authoritarian forces within the company.

As Taibbi sees it (and he is not alone), Donald Trump’s use of Twitter in his ascent to the presidency was a blow to the power America’s elites had grown accustomed to exercising. “The real problem Trump represented for elite America,” Taibbi explains, “had less to do with his political beliefs than the unapproved manner of his rise,” which no longer included the elites.

Twitter enabled Trump to take his message directly to the American people, bypassing the “political establishment” and “party elites” who had previously fancied themselves the arbiters of political victory.

Those same elites therefore viewed Trump’s Twitter campaign as “a defect in the platform that needed fixing.” Instead, Taibbi argues, “Trump’s election was proof that Twitter was working much as intended. Our political establishment just wasn’t looking for that sort of functionality.”

Our betters are now determined to choke the hoi polloi’s ability to communicate with one another, including stricter limits to the use of social media.

“Like the Internet generally, instead of a machine for speech without ‘barriers,'” Taibbi warns, “Twitter is becoming, precisely, a mechanism for tightened elite control over expression, a thought-policed platitude sanctuary.”

Whether Twitter will be the preferred censorium of America’s elite is one question. But the more important questions are a) how we got to this point and b) what we’re going to do about it.

Put briefly, we got where we are today because ordinary Americans abandoned control of our most important cultural institutions. We packed our kids off to school without paying attention to the qualifications of the teachers, what was in the curriculum and who wrote the schoolbooks. We proudly sent them off to college, confident that that they would receive an education in the best traditions of Western civilization. We supported movie studios, producers and directors, actors and musicians, applauding their talent, assuming that if we bought their products and made them rich, they’d reciprocate with gratitude for their good fortune and appreciation for the freedom that made that fortune possible. We busied ourselves with our families, our volunteer work and our businesses, believing that if we minded the store (literally), those in charge of government, of education and of entertainment would be doing their bit to keep strong the country we love.

We were wrong.

Our eyes have been opened to the infiltration of the America-haters and opponents of liberty. Under our very noses, they have been undermining our values, indoctrinating our children, attacking our liberties, diminishing our voices and weakening our country.

And now they think they’re entitled to do it and to silence us if we object.

What’s taken 50 years to do will not be undone in the midterms or the next presidential election. But we have more power than we realize. If we look at the places and ways we have succeeded just in the past few years, we can see a path forward. So, for those who want more than “VOTE IN 2022!,” here are other things we can — and must — do:

No. 1: Get involved with your children’s school. Remove porn from the library. Expose policies that endanger children’s safety. Oppose curricula that promote racial hatred. Oust teachers and administrators who abuse their power to indoctrinate children. Insist upon academic rigor, fair standards and equal opportunity.

No. 2: Make sure local government — the city council, the mayor’s office — hears from you.

No. 3: Connect local law enforcement with neighborhood organizations, especially in minority neighborhoods.

No. 4: Demand the enforcement of property laws, including laws against theft and trespassing. In the event of so-called protests, make sure there is adequate police presence to prevent rioting, arson, looting or loss of life.

No. 5: Hold elected officials’ feet to the fire. If they break their promises or capitulate to the left, primary them and vote them out.

No. 6: Work to get election integrity measures passed in your state: Require voter identification, end mail-in balloting and prohibit “ballot harvesting,” same-day registration and voting by foreign citizens. Insist upon machine-read paper ballots instead of computers connected to the internet.

No. 7: Bring concerned citizens of all racial and ethnic backgrounds together to work on common goals.

No. 8: Run for office if you can.

No. 9: Register everyone you know to vote.

No. 10: VOTE.

In short, do not assume that “someone else will do it.” We already know where that goes.

We are the majority. It’s time to start acting like it.