In the face of far-left radicalism, we must hold the line. "Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about George Orwell’s chilling premonition over the past several weeks, as an ever-growing number of statues, books, movies, television shows, and even food brands have been canceled by the left-wing mob.

Though there is a legitimate debate to be had about Confederate symbols and statues, the mob never intended to stop there. Not even the most heroic of American figures are safe now. Not the father of our nation, George Washington. Not Civil War hero Ulysses S. Grant, who delivered the death stroke to General Lee’s Confederate rebellion. Not Abraham Lincoln, whom Frederick Douglass called a “friend and liberator.” And not Teddy Roosevelt, who in 1905 spoke of the need to “secure to each man, whatever his color, equality of opportunity, equality of treatment before the law.”

As Americans watch this unfold, many might ask: “Am I a bad person for not joining the mob? Have I failed to see the racism and oppression within these long-admired totems of our history? The mob seems so angry, and its anger must be proportionate to its righteousness, right?”

Wrong.

To Americans asking these questions: You are not the problem. The outrage mob is. Its breathless moralizing and anger do not portend reason or good faith, but instead mask deep ignorance and malicious intent.

You see, this isn’t about taking down offensive messages or symbols. These mobs didn’t suddenly stumble upon some forgotten and offensive historical anecdote, or reach their wits’ end after seeing Aunt Jemima on the grocery-store shelf just one too many times. No, this was a deliberate hijacking of a tragedy. The touchy sympathies of “political correctness” were always just a base from which to launch a cultural revolution, a purge of traditional American narratives and icons.

It’s about time we all woke up to it.

Liberals, naively tolerant of the mob, are always the first victims. Eager to appear as progressive allies, they give inch after inch until they’ve completely compromised the values they claim to stand for. Conservatives tried to warn our liberal friends. We tried to tell them that decades of identity politics and increasing flirtation with far-left ideology would end up here. Now, they have been trampled over completely by radical progressives, purged from the New York Times opinion section, from academia, and from Congress.

The good news is that it’s not too late. It’s never too late, not so long as good and decent people remain standing and willing to do something. There are a lot of us who love this great country, believe in the promise of its Founding, and aren’t keen on letting a mob rip it apart. All we have to do is speak out. We must hold the line and demand that our elected leaders stop allowing their cities to burn, that corporate America stop caving to Twitter hordes and becoming complicit in the cultural destruction, and that our educators stop teaching our kids that America is evil.

America is good. In fact, it’s great. The Fourth of July is right around the corner, marking the day in 1776 that our Founders signed their death warrant and became hunted traitors of the Crown so that we could live freer and more prosperous than any other group of people in human history.

The mob wants to erase the American dream. We can’t let that happen.

Dan Crenshaw serves as the U.S. representative for Texas’s second congressional district. @DanCrenshawTX