Thank you, America, for making the biggest mistake of your life.

Thank you, America, for electing a man who has known associations with domestic terrorists and dissenting radicals who make their careers out of defacing the United States and promoting its ruin. Thank you, America, for electing a man who is wildly acclaimed by the governments of our country’s worst enemies, by Iran’s death-crazed Ahmadinejad, Venezuela’s drug-lord-promoting Hugo Chavez and Cuba’s torturing-socialist Castro Brothers.

Thank you, America, for electing a man so far from the foundations and roots of our government, so beyond the principles as guaranteed by our Constitution and Bill of Rights, so disrespectful of the glories and honor of the past that his main philosophies take active steps towards the very foundational principles that led to the death of millions during China’s Cultural Revolution and Russia’s Great Purges.

Thank you, America, for failing to do the right thing. You passed over the greatness of a man who stared death in its sallow face for over 2,000 days, in the wake of torture by the enemy as motivated by pure, unadulterated evil, for a man in favor of the promotion of the very same evil. You neglected the fortitude of a man brave enough to better himself in the name of service to his country. You obliterated the necessity of a man with a heart understanding of sacrifice, hard work, and perseverance for a man who defines patriotism by a willingness to remain stoic and submissive as the greedy, controlling claws of government pry hard-earned resources out of dying hands who have nothing but God to cling to, when even He has been taken away and destroyed.

We have been ushered into a time where the selfish, the entitled, the lazy, the weak and the cowardly are idolized and rewarded. Gone are the golden Horatio Alger stories that promoted the motivation to work towards the American dream. Here are the depressing realities of entitlement and selfishness that encourage the passivity to wait for the free checks to be deposited in fat, uncalloused hands.

On our country’s most fateful Christmas in 1776, Gen. George Washington rallied troops into wooden boats under the command cry of “Victory or Death.” Sleet and hail clung to the withering faces of our weakened, sickened militia men, whose thoughts were undoubtedly with the parents, wives and children they had left behind many Christmases before. Violent winds stung at their raw, bleeding faces, as ice floes impeded their course and rapped against the sides of the boats like the bones in the caskets of fellow brothers buried along the paths forged from our country’s young soil during the course of the war for freedom. General Ewing feared the danger of crossing the Delaware under such daunting conditions. General Washington persevered.

It is this perseverance that has carried America throughout its great history to the victory of freedom. It is this perseverance that fed the starving bodies at Valley Forge and that drove brother to fight brother in the name of equality and emancipation. It is this perseverance that pioneered industry, built the Transcontinental Railroad, found gold, brought heat to the world and invented penicillin. It is this perseverance that hung on the last breathes of the young soldiers dying on the beaches of Normandy and that wrote loyal letters to the unfaithful girls back home too poisoned by marijuana and free love to write back. It is this perseverance that dug hundreds of mangled bodies out of concrete rubble piles in New York City.

It is this perseverance that has been lost in the name of ill-conceived populism, fueled not by inspiration, but by the morose delectation of watching severed heads fall swiftly from the Guillotine.

It is this perseverance that has been exterminated from the mob, but in the wake of America’s grave mistake, it is our conservative minority that must adhere with what passion we have left to the perseverance as taught to us by the true heroes of our history.

It is a time for us to more fervently cement our commitments to the foundational principles of this great country, based on the Constitution’s blessings of liberty. It is a time for us to become even more aware of the honor and dignity the masses have failed to internalize and we must fight to preserve. It is a time for us to create our own revolution of the traditions that have never failed us until now, when they have been so blatantly ignored by the freedom-hating masses who seek to destroy the rights to self defense, to the free practice of religion, to the rightful ownership of property and, most seriously, to the autonomous control of oneself.

Let us work without shame to proudly ensure the restoration of unity within our party.

Let us restore the commitment to fight for what is right and to define right and wrong in the hopes of combating the toxic relativism that has quenched the thirst of those too weak to stand up for true morality.

Elizabeth Moore is a senior in Jonathan Edwards College.