Everything Joe Biden and his team are doing right now depends on the American people despising one another. I don’t mean that Biden & Co. want us to have partisan differences or occasionally get mad at each other online. I mean they are counting on us to burn with vengeful fury toward each other, to seethe in even our private moments with bitter resentment that our fellow Americans are out there somewhere, daring to exist when they are so wrong about everything.

The Left is banking on our mutual loathing because it’s all they’ve got. They have no achievements, no plan, not even a basic understanding of the challenges that face the country and the world. They are a mob of bloated mediocrities whose every governing theory has been proven fatally wrong again and again for decades. All they can do is distract from failure with oppression, hoping as they do that oppression will find grateful welcome among those whom they are not currently characterizing as subhuman undesirables. And so they need us to hate each other.

This was the gamble Biden made with his venomous speech last Thursday, when he announced his intention to conscript business owners and make them bully hesitant workers into being vaccinated against COVID-19. This obscene decree was accompanied by a harangue against “the unvaccinated.”

“We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin,” the President spat at tens of millions of American citizens, as if he were their governess and not their employee. “We’re going to protect vaccinated workers from unvaccinated co-workers.” Never mind that this statement is practically an advertisement against the effectiveness of the vaccine. It is above all an invitation to pure spite.

Biden was relying on a significant portion of the electorate not only to accept his unlawful edict, but to cheer it on gleefully. He desperately needed a win, having presided over a truly shameful retreat from Afghanistan. His callous nonchalance about this catastrophe made clear that he has no intention of making amends or taking accountability. He just wants to make it go away.

When approval ratings started plummeting, as well they should have, Team Biden began to worry that maybe they couldn’t just shrug this one off. Besides which they are staring down the barrel of a supply chain crisis which, if it really gets bad, will become hard for Americans to ignore or forgive. Biden has no solution to that, either—except to hurl trillions of dollars into the midst of the Colosseum, hoping this will keep the peasants happy for a while. But he knows the thrill of handouts is a short-lived one. He needed more.

So he stood up there with his face hanging out and told the unvaccinated that his “patience is wearing thin.” He did not do so apologetically or with any sense of shame. He actually thought it would be good for him. In the midst of his innumerable betrayals and offenses, as the tottering facade of his ludicrous presidency threatened to come crashing down, this is the thing he actually thought would help.

Maybe he’s right. Maybe there are enough people out there thinking “hell yeah, screw those unvaccinated rubes!” to buoy his polls along until the next disaster. Our corporate press would certainly like you to think so: they are broadcasting the death of every COVID-infected anti-vaxxer they can find with rueful satisfaction. Maybe it’ll work. Maybe they’ll so poison our hearts with their own hatred that we become like trained dogs of the regime, snarling and biting at one another on command.

I pray it is not so. If there is one thing needful in this terribly broken society, it is solidarity among the American people themselves—among all of us who are supposed to be brothers and sisters, who declare by our citizenship that we are equal in the sight of God and of any law that may be considered legitimate. Still after all this lying, after all this treachery, after all these dedicated efforts by our ruling class to corrode our souls and our civic friendship, we are one another’s last best hope.