Listen to Fox News, and you'll hear phrases such as "Trump derangement syndrome" and "liberal heads are exploding" on a daily basis.

Conservative newscasts are peppered with comments like these: "They're delusional!" "The Democrats just can't seem to accept that they lost the 2016 election." "They've gone crazy!"

Crazy like a fox.

Considering that the Left, since it discredited Joe McCarthy and cleverly put to bed the notion that there were communists in our government, has essentially taken over the media, the universities, Hollywood, our public schools, the tech behemoths, and social media, we'd be foolish to underestimate these guys.

Sun Tzu famously wrote that to win a war, you must know yourself and know your enemy. If Constitution-loving conservatives think the enemy is unhinged and self-destructive, we may be tempted to sit back and watch the show, missing the Left's strategy in play. We may still, after all these years, not understand the enemy.

From the beginning of its "long march through the institutions," the Left has been playing the long game. That hasn't changed. Leftists are playing it today.

Why did they take over the media? The universities? Hollywood? To get their hands on the key levers of propaganda. Add to this the leftward tilt of Google, Facebook, and Twitter, and we're looking at a virtual lockdown on the primary sources of information and public influence.

In his classic 1965 study "Propaganda," Jacques Ellul painstakingly lays out methods and effects of various types of propaganda. Ellul perceived that the development of technology and explosion of information made propaganda unavoidable, even in democracies. And he warns us against its pernicious and insidious effects, as it can, and often does, co-opt a person's belief system — even one's ability to grasp reality.

Here's a quote: "Propaganda must be continuous and lasting — continuous in that it must not leave any gaps, but must fill the citizen's whole day and all his days; lasting in that it must function over a very long period of time. Propaganda tends to make the individual live in a separate world; he must not have outside points of reference. He must not be allowed a moment of meditation or reflection in which to see himself vis-à-vis the propagandist, as happens when the propaganda is not continuous. At that moment the individual emerges from the grip of propaganda."

This is why the Democrats absolutely must keep their charades going full force. This is strategy, not lunacy. They are playing the long game. They are constantly feeding their minions the narrative that Trump is an illegitimate and dangerous president, that he's tyrannical, racist, and xenophobic — that he's a crook who lies continually, etc. And they simply can't admit the falsity of this narrative without breaking the spell of their highly effective propaganda any more than the Wizard of Oz could maintain his power and mystique once the curtain concealing him was drawn.

They're no doubt also thinking ahead, readying themselves for their planned takeover of the White House. They need to keep this narrative alive at least till then, giving them cover to rewrite history, as they aim to convince even future generations that our courageous, successful, honest, promise-keeping, hardworking president who won the hearts and votes of so many millions was a disaster. Only then could they claim the right to say, "We told you so."

The Democrats could not afford to admit that after two years of the Mueller probe, which found no wrongdoing on the part of our president: OK, we were wrong. He didn't collude with Russia. He didn't obstruct justice. Now we can get back to the business of running the country.

Instead, they had to cook up another scheme against Trump. This one quickly backfired after Trump released the transcript of his conversation with the Ukrainian president, proving there was no quid-pro-quo. But no matter — the real game is to keep up the anti-Trump rhetoric every minute this man is in office. Even mere talk of impeachment fulfills their purpose: maintaining the propaganda of "orange man bad" with its implied corollary: "Dems good."

Apparently, the contest is no longer between Republicans and Democrats, but between American constitutionalists and Marxists.

This is how communism works. This is "tyranny over the mind of man." We already have the sour taste of it in America today. We are witnesses to the insanity of it — a kind of mass hypnosis fostering mass delusion — as the Democrats keep preaching to their gullible choir.

We tend to shrug off the Left's narrative du jour. But it's not much of an exaggeration to say we're being bombarded by propaganda blaring from the loudspeakers in Red Square — all day, every day.

What can be done?

I suggest that, rather than only responding to each of the Left's baseless attacks on our president, those on our side change the debate by exposing the radical leftists' use of propaganda — by shining a light into the dark recesses of their strategy. This may wake up some of their followers and maybe even begin to free America from the dark power of the Left.

It's surely past time for Toto to pull back that curtain.