For the past five years, I have been fighting to defeat critical race theory and DEI.

This is a historic moment. For the past five years, I have been fighting to defeat critical race theory, gender cultism, and DEI. Now, President Trump has taken decisive action and instructed his administration to rip out these malicious ideologies root and branch, not just from the federal government but from all institutions that receive federal funding—universities, schools, corporations. All of it.

It has been a long road. The Left will try to memory-hole the recent past, but we must not forget a simple historical truth: the Left put America through a reign of terror after 2020. I have long hesitated to tell my personal story—I did not want to give my enemies the satisfaction—but now it’s time to lay out the facts. This is some of what the Left’s activists did to me and my family as they sought to intimidate me and shut me up.

When I lived in Seattle, they put up posters around my neighborhood with my home address, telling insane lies about me and instructing activists to show up at my door. Later, they sent letters to a few hundred of my neighbors, claiming I was a Nazi white supremacist. Death threats, references to my family, the whole deal. A few times, we had to pack up the kids and leave town.

One of these activists found one of my children at a park with the babysitter and yelled at him until he started crying. My son came home terrified. I figured out who this person was—a software developer who lived in the neighborhood—got his number, called him, delivered some “persuasive” words, and forced him to apologize to my son over the phone. I made sure he was much more frightened than my son had been.

Leftist activists organized employees within Microsoft to email-bomb my wife’s boss, claiming that she was a white supremacist. Thankfully, he thought it strange for her to be an Asian white supremacist and knew it was all a fabrication. I tracked down the ringleader and, “coincidentally,” he was fired a few months later. He overestimated his position and underestimated mine.

Then there were the calls and texts to our private numbers. Threats to rape my wife and murder my children. At one point, I reached out to the FBI about it, but the perpetrators had used number-cloaking apps and there was nothing law enforcement could do. I thought we had a lead in St. Louis and hired a private investigator to look into it, but the trail went cold. We fortified our home and studied up on the law. I was prepared to kill anyone who crossed the threshold to harm my family.

The institutions got in on it, too: organized campaigns to ruin my reputation, manipulate my Wikipedia page, cancel my speaking engagements, and list me on the websites of the Southern Poverty Law Center and Anti-Defamation League, in an attempt to get me banned from social media. The censorship apparatus put a target on my back, and the federal government egged it on. They all failed.

My experience is hardly unique. Many other conservatives have faced similar circumstances. Yes, our fight has been about CRT, DEI, and other ideological issues—but more than anything, it has been about safeguarding America’s free society from threats, violence, intimidation, and madness. That is why I fight. And, by the grace of God, why we are winning.

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