The attempted assassination of President Donald J. Trump is a turning point—not just in the 2024 presidential campaign but in American history. The stakes in this moment have been laid bare, as are the characters and qualities of the men who contend for the presidency.

For the Left, it means their whole apparatus and mechanism of rule, carefully crafted and advanced across a century—from the erection of the administrative state, to the slow overthrow of the Constitution, to the near-eradication of federalism, to the periodic firestorms of their ideological fervors, to the takeovers of nearly every major institution in American life, and beyond—is now entirely at risk. A ruling class that has felt secure for generations abruptly finds itself staring into the abyss, and it grasps that everything it has stood for is on the precipice of extinction. Its security was ephemeral, its permanence an illusion.

For Americans—I do not mean “the Right,” because the contending sides here are not Right and Left, but Americans versus those who would rule Americans, the latter being definitionally un-American—it means the restoration of the simple promise they were given when they first assumed citizenship, whether by birth or choice. That promise goes like this: “that all men are created equal, [and] that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” A regime that never really believed in that promise, which is to say neither in natural rights nor equality, and certainly not the existence of the Creator, has got to go. It has to go—because Americans aren’t going anywhere.

One side decided to pursue change and restoration through persuasion and ballots, and the other side decided to defend its privilege with persecution and bullets. We now know which side is which.

The anti-Americans chose the path of violence—the path of assassination. They chose it, and whatever we learn in the days and months to come, we cannot forget that fact. Nor should we let them escape accountability for it. It isn’t a new thing for them, because they’ve been working their way up the escalation ladder for a long time. They did it in 2012 when a man radicalized by the Left tried to commit mass murder at the Family Research Council. They did it in 2017 when a man radicalized by the Left tried to commit mass murder at a practice where Republicans were preparing for the Congressional Baseball Game. They did it in 2020 when mobs radicalized by the Left terrorized the entire nation with insurrectionary violence. Now, in 2024, we saw it again as a sniper took aim at President Donald J. Trump and missed—but killed one innocent bystander and put two others into critical condition.

Everyone paying attention knows that if the shoe was on the other foot, the media and its handmaidens in politics—or is it the other way around?—would be tripping over themselves to demand that the Right and Republicans denounce this or that, and clean up the extremist rhetoric within its ranks. There won’t be a comparable call for the Left and Democrats to do the same. Not from them.

But from us, the Americans, we do have a demand: take care of your extremism problem.

In the depths of a cruel Civil War, in 1864, Abraham Lincoln took a moment to write a letter to a Quaker minister named Eliza Gurney. Gurney was by conviction a pacifist, and yet her abolitionist principles led her to support the Union. She carried on a correspondence with the president, who reminded her of the one thing that remains true even in the worst of times: “The purposes of the Almighty are perfect, and must prevail, though we erring mortals may fail to accurately perceive them in advance…. Meanwhile we must work earnestly in the best light He gives us.”

We are not, thank God, in a civil war—although there are forces of evil that would plunge us into that nightmare, which all of us must resist with every fiber of our being. But we are in a time of strife, a time of existential stakes, and a time in which every one of us must stand and be counted. When we do, let us pray that we “work earnestly in the best light He gives us.”

And then, like the president who they just tried and failed to kill, let us raise a fist and resolve to fight.