One of the cruelest goals of political correctness is to deny regular Americans the right to protect themselves from terrorism, from loss of jobs, and from exposure to disease, and to spit on their innate desire for safety in their communities.  Barack Obama's not so veiled accusations against the American people over the last eight years exemplify this cruelty.  Those of us worried about the all too frequent and continuous terrorism coming from young Muslim men were labeled Islamophobic.  Those opposed to Obama's open-border policy resulting in loss of jobs, disease, crime, and assaults in our towns, as well as the bankrupting of smaller communities due to taxation burdens, were called xenophobic.  Obama too easily hurled the charge of racism against police and millions of Americans.  It was bullying.

He tried making everyday citizens feel guilty for wanting the most basic protections.  He put in place rules that ignored the safety wishes of Americans and made the continuation of these dangerous situations probable.  All attempts at defending Americans were labeled by Obama negatively as "profiling."  He acted as a left-wing McCarthyist-in-chief.  He was a "profiler" – a profiler of us.

Worse, Obama and others exploited the goodwill of the American people wishing to be tolerant.  When sermonizing that we Americans must be "open to others' faiths," which we generally are, he implied that our response to and concerns about the terrorism launched against our cities and citizens by young Muslim men is rooted in "a fear of the other" and proves that we are closed-minded.  This is false.  He turned our desire for safety into a vice.  He turned our goodwill into abdication.  Too often, he co-opted the term "civil rights" as a means of controlling us, making us defenseless – to make us accept the unacceptable.

Obama's appeals to religious freedom were one-sided, forcing nuns and other Christians to be involved with abortion programs abhorrent to their Christian faith.  He stood silently by for eight years, ignoring the deliberate and well publicized murder, rape, exile, and genocide of millions of Christians at the hands of brutal Islamic groups.  He was numb to their suffering.  For Obama and other politically correct czars, tolerance and religious freedom is a one-way-street, something we give to sharia Islam but that need not be requited to us.  And when we ask for a two-way street and tolerance for our ways, we are accused of a "phobia."  This demonstrates the absolute intolerance of political correctness.

What we see from all this is that political correctness has become the tool of the left for allowing prejudice against conservatives, non-trendy Americans, patriots, and believing Christians…because they somehow "deserve it."  Political correctness makes all of us secondary to the political goals of the leftocracy – for example, removing from Israel its holy places, Jerusalem, and its cities in Judea and Samaria, punishing its citizens, if that's what's needed to grant political Islam what it desires and demands.  Political correctness treats us as second-class, a mere utility in service to the needs the left considers more important.  It is liberal-sanctified bullying.

For some, it's simply permission to hate conservatives.  It has also become a mechanism allowing "preferred" groups to get away with disturbances, or violence, or special arrangements that would not otherwise be allowed anywhere.  Those pointing to these discrepancies, the tolerating of things normally found intolerable, are immediately silenced by politically correct charges of racism, misogyny, or Islamophobia.  Political correctness leads therefore to a two-tiered justice system.  We must learn to ignore its charges as completely political and power-motivated.  There is no morality underlying political correctness.

It will not stop with the end of the Obama era.  But we have a far better chance now to fight back, especially with President Trump, whose first appeal to all of us was his rejection and bold defiance of political correctness.  Mr. Trump already comes across as someone whose concern is not about politics, nor about his image with the media and professional left-wing protestors, but about defending the people and reclaiming for them their right to be protected…and cherished.  For Trump, we are people to uplifted, not dismissed simply because we don't cover ourselves in some fashionable "oppressed" or "ism" mantle.

Those good people during the Obama years who were chased from their jobs, or whose businesses were  shut down because they acted according to their God-given Christian conscience, should immediately be offered a job, or legal assistance, by someone in the patriotic or conservative or religious community.  We certainly have enough businesses in our orbit to help our faith soldiers on the frontlines.

Most important and easiest to do is to speak: speak forthrightly and boldly.  Political correctness is based on squelching our freedom of speech.  We answer this threat by speaking what we believe.  If everyone will do it, leftists can no longer focus on the few and thereby isolate them.  Political correctness is the tool of tyrants – left-wing, liberal tyrants.  Rebellion against tyrants is service to God.

Rabbi Aryeh Spero is author of Push Back: Reclaiming our Judeo-Christian Spirit, president of Caucus for America, and author of Why Israel Matters to You.