In Massachusetts, we’re about to celebrate a group of white men with guns – insurrectionists who stood against the big government of their day.

April 19 will mark the 250th anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord. As we commemorate the embattled farmers who set us on the road to independence, ironies abound.

I live in Massachusetts, the home of supersized government. We have high taxes, absurd regulations, draconian gun laws and sanctuary cities. There isn’t a single Republican in statewide office. Hadassah, the ladies’ Zionist service organization, has a bigger presence in Tehran than the Republican Party has in our state legislature.

We send hard-core leftists such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren and squad member Rep. Ayanna Presley to Washington. It has been 41 years since a Republican carried Massachusetts in a presidential election. We have gone from the Cradle of Liberty to the Sandbox of Socialism.

It’s not just Massachusetts. In the November elections, 48% of voters opted for the welfare state on steroids, even though its champion rarely expressed a coherent thought.

In 2021, the average American family paid $17,902 in federal, state and local taxes. The Colonists revolted against a 3-pence-a-pound tax on tea.

Conservatives are the real heirs to the Spirit of ’76. The left has more in common with the French and Russian revolutions – the guillotine and the gulag – than the American Revolution, which gave us the Declaration of Independence, acknowledging God-given rights, and the U.S. Constitution, with its balance of powers based on a distrust of government.

Although the left seeks to rule in the name of the people, it believes the people are pitiful fools who can’t be trusted to come in out of the rain unless the government leads them by the hand. Reaction to such elitist arrogance includes polling, which shows that only 27% of voters have a positive view of the Democratic Party.

Ronald Reagan said: “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected and handed on for them to do the same.”

Like the Minutemen of 1775 and the GIs of 1944, we are engaged in a monumental struggle that will determine humanity’s fate.

A little more than four months after voters rejected the divine right of politicians and bureaucrats, the Democrats have doubled down on woke.

As if Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz weren’t enough, the Democratic Party has a new de facto leadership team: Sen. Bernard Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the mummified Marxist who honeymooned in the Soviet Union and the Bolshevik Barbie whose district looks like Gaza City after urban renewal by the Israel Defense Forces.

The Minutemen weren’t spoiling for a fight. They didn’t want to go up against the best professional army in the world. They believed in the rights of Englishmen, including free speech, freedom of religion and trial by a jury of their peers. Eventually, they began thinking of themselves not as Englishmen but as Americans.

They were descendants of the Pilgrims and Puritans who believed in a simple, unvarnished form of Christianity. They saw a government 3,000 miles away – a king and his Parliament – taking from them while giving little in return. They came to see the Redcoats as an army of occupation.

If they felt that way about the 18th-century British Crown, imagine how those yeomen farmers who fired the shot heard around the world would feel about the government we have today.

Could they even begin to comprehend a government under which children are indoctrinated in public schools, churches are investigated for domestic terrorism, there are subsidies for everything under the sun (including universities that allow mob rule on campus), and their sons and daughters are involved in endless foreign wars, children are mutilated in the name of an insane gender ideology, gun ownership is constantly under attack, judges believe they are anointed, we have a multigenerational dependent class, and our cities look like gypsy encampments where savages who commit the most heinous offenses are treated like those with overdue library books?

For the commonwealth of Massachusetts and the Democratic Party, which controls it, to celebrate Lexington and Concord is obscene. The Minutemen fought for liberty and the right to be left alone, not an ever-expanding bureaucracy and something called social justice.

This column was first published at the Washington Times.