How fitting that Scott Brown’s U.S. Senate victory in Massachusetts came on Jan. 19, 2010 — almost exactly a year to the day after Barack Obama’s inauguration as president.

Recall the scene just 12 months ago. In Washington, the wave of Obama-worship was cresting, as quasi-religious fervor gripped crowds of the new president’s adoring supporters. Obama was a self-appointed Messiah — the man who had accepted his party’s nomination standing before the pillars of a Greek temple. Newsweek’s Evan Thomas breathlessly summed up the national frenzy when he described the Great Man as “sort of God.”

On Tuesday, we got incontrovertible evidence that the country has finally awakened from its yearlong, modern-day tent revival. Massachusetts citizens spoke for many across America: This man is not the messiah, he doesn’t walk on water, and he was selling snake oil all along.

Brown’s upset win is a vivid reminder of the dangers a political party faces in a democracy when it governs too arrogantly. Obama and the Democrats’ inebriation at their 2008 victory was perhaps understandable. But they overreached egregiously when they took their victory — based, in actuality, on Obama’s personal charisma, on Bush-fatigue and on anxiety over the economic downturn — as a mandate to impose a left-wing model of governance based on exploding debt, stifling regulation and a cradle-to-grave entitlement mentality.

In fact, America hasn’t moved to the left. On Tuesday, we saw this vividly in Massachusetts, where registered Republicans make up only 15 percent of the population. The Bay State hasn’t elected a Republican senator since 1972. Last year, Obama coasted to victory there by 26 points.

The common wisdom is that Brown’s win was all about health care — a resounding rejection of Democrats’ plan for an effective government takeover of one-sixth of our economy. It’s true that Brown made his campaign a referendum on health care and promised to be the 41st vote that could stop the dreadful bills before Congress. But he also took aim at two other mainstays of Obama’s agenda.

The first was terrorism. Brown, a lieutenant colonel with the Massachusetts National Guard, called for tough interrogation of suspected terrorists, including waterboarding when necessary.

And he deplored Obama’s plan to treat suspected terrorists like ordinary criminals. “As an attorney,” he told voters, “I believe that our Constitution and laws exist to protect this nation. They do not grant rights and privileges to enemies in wartime. In dealing with terrorists, our tax dollars should pay for weapons to stop them, not lawyers to defend them.”

Brown’s national security message resonated even more with Massachusetts voters than did his position on health care reform, according to the campaign’s internal polls.

Brown also took a strong stand against Democrats’ call for higher taxes. He hammered home the connection between low taxes and the robust economy needed for job creation, and vowed — once in Washington — to work for across-the-board tax cuts.

Brown’s victory reflected voters’ disenchantment, not only with Obama’s policies but also with the way that the president and the Democratic Congress have actually governed. Throughout his campaign, the Bay State’s new senator gave voice to Americans who feel betrayed by the arrogant, secretive way that health care reform has been carried out.

Obama and his Democratic allies didn’t end political cronyism, as they had promised. Instead, they orchestrated outrageous deals like the “Cornhusker kickback,” which exempted Sen. Ben Nelson’s Nebraska from anticipated new Medicaid costs, and the “Louisiana Purchase,” which snagged Sen. Mary Landrieu’s vote with a similar $300 million deal. Instead of governing transparently, Democrats conducted their horse-trading behind closed doors, in the worst Chicago-style, backroom tradition.

In the end, Brown’s victory signals America’s rejection of a governing elite that aims to impose its worldview on the rest of us unenlightened folks, whether we like it or not. His win is the latest manifestation of a grass-roots rebellion that first erupted with last summer’s Tea Party protests.

Democrats pooh-poohed this populist uprising, dismissing its participants as right-wing cranks. But Brown became a potent symbol of the movement. He drove his 2005 GMC truck across Massachusetts to take its message to voters, putting nearly 200,000 miles on the odometer in the process.

Scott Brown’s triumph gives Americans a second chance — an opportunity to start over on health care and to repair the damage done by metastasizing government and soaring deficits. His victory reminds us that a little-known guy in a pickup truck, who connects with average people, can still beat the odds in the United States of America.

African-Americans targeted for harassment. Swastikas scrawled on churches and religious books burned. Homes defaced and people hounded from their jobs because of their political beliefs.

Has the Ku Klux Klan returned? Are neo-Nazis or fundamentalist right-wing hate groups on the rise?

Guess again. This is the work of a sizable number of activists who have decided that any bullying, brown-shirt tactic is fair game in their battle to impose gay marriage on America.

One skirmish in that battle played out last week. In Perry vs. Schwarzenegger, four gay plaintiffs have sued to overturn Proposition 8 — the 2008 amendment that California voters added to their state’s constitution to ensure that marriage remains the union of one man and one woman. Plaintiffs claim the amendment violates the U.S. Constitution and seek judicially imposed same-sex marriage in all 50 states.

On Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected federal District Judge Vaughn Walker’s decision to broadcast proceedings on YouTube. Defendants argued that such a broadcast would increase witnesses’ vulnerability to intimidation and harassment.

What do they fear?

Take, for instance, the bullying tactics on display during the campaign for Proposition 8. Supporters who put signs in their yards risked a brick through their living-room windows, spray paint on their garages and vandalized cars. One woman reported finding her staircase covered in urine. In another case, two women parked an SUV in front of a Prop 8 supporter’s home, with an arrow and the words “Bigots live here” scrawled on the window.

Blacks were singled out for persecution, since they favored Prop 8 in large numbers. Time magazine cited eyewitness reports that racial epithets were used at anti-Prop 8 protests.

Activists also targeted religious institutions, reserving special venom for Mormons. After Prop 8’s passage, at least 17 Mormon houses of worship were defaced, and a suspicious white powder was mailed to two others. At one temple, the Book of Mormon was torched on the doorstep.

Gay-marriage activists made skillful use of public data to harass citizens who donated to the “Yes on 8″ campaign. One website, “eightmaps.com,” displayed a map that enabled activists to pinpoint the identity, employer, donation size and location of certain Prop 8 supporters. Another site, sponsored by a group called Californians Against Hate, revealed some Prop 8 donors’ addresses and telephone numbers. The San Francisco Chronicle and Los Angeles Times also posted search engines that facilitated targeting of this kind.

Not surprisingly, many Prop 8 supporters were bombarded with harassing calls and e-mails. Some lost their jobs, including Scott Eckern, artistic director of the California Musical Theatre in Sacramento, and Richard Raddon, president of the Los Angeles Film Festival. Both resigned after their private donations were publicized and activists threatened to boycott their organizations. Dozens of businesses — including hotels, insurance agencies, accounting firms and dentist offices — were similarly targeted because of their owners’ or employees’ private donations.

Even ordinary folks had reason to fear. After Prop 8 passed, gay activists mobbed El Coyote, a restaurant in Los Angeles, calling for a boycott because the owner’s daughter, Margorie Christoffersen, had donated $100 in support of the measure. Shouting “shame on you,” they hurled vulgarities at diners. Though Christofferson apologized, “boisterous street protests erupted” after she refused to renounce her stance, according to the Wall Street Journal. Christoffersen took a leave of absence.

Maggie Gallagher, president of the National Organization for Marriage, summed up the situation this way. “The same-sex marriage movement,” she wrote, has revealed itself as “a political tsunami which will brook no dissent and openly seeks to punish Americans who disagree with its new dogmas.”

Events in California reveal a troubling double standard on the part of gay activists. While they demand tolerance from others, many appear to view tolerance as a one-way street.

The mainstream media have also betrayed a double standard. If gay-marriage supporters were being harassed and hounded from their jobs, the press would rightly raise an outcry. Instead, the Los Angeles Times applauded a virulent anti-Mormon TV ad and editorialized that “equal rights” campaigns often require years of “in-your-face radicalism.”

In California, we have a wake-up call about the high stakes in the same-sex-marriage debate. Activists’ bullying tactics signal an authoritarian mindset — the ends justify the means — that threaten to shape events in our schools, our workplaces and our houses of worship if same-sex marriage is imposed.

In this age of political correctness, a college student’s best friend is FIRE — the Philadelphia-based Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. Since 1999, FIRE has safeguarded the civil rights of students across the ideological spectrum — winning victories at 121 colleges and universities, bringing an end to 81 unconstitutional or repressive policies, and benefiting 2.7 million students.

Now, FIRE is riding to the rescue of students at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, where a heavy-handed attempt at thought control is underway.

The Race, Culture, Class and Gender Task Group of the U’s College of Education and Human Development has recommended that race, class and gender politics become the “over-arching framework” of all teacher education courses. Under the group’s proposed plan, future teachers would be required to pass an ideological litmus test — denouncing “white privilege,” “hegemonic masculinity” and “heteronormativity,” and proving their determination to “fight” for “social justice.”

In connection with this initiative, the College of Education intends to redesign its admissions process. It plans to use “predictive criteria” to weed out applicants whose beliefs are judged to render them incapable of developing acceptable levels of “cultural competence.” A university document calls for warning this year’s applicants about the possible changes.

Last month, FIRE fired off a legal warning shot to university President Robert Bruininks. “If the Race, Culture, Class, and Gender Task Group achieves its stated goals,” its letter declared, “the result will be political and ideological screening of applicants, remedial re-education for those with the ‘wrong’ views and values, and withholding of degrees from those upon whom the university’s political reeducation efforts proved ineffective.”

FIRE’s letter warns that the U’s proposed actions are an unconstitutional invasion of students’ First Amendment right to freedom of conscience and a “severe affront to liberty.” The letter quotes the Supreme Court’s ringing declaration in West Virginia Board of Education vs. Barnette:

“If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”

This is especially true at our universities, which the court has declared to be “peculiarly the ‘marketplace of ideas,’” FIRE added.

The debacle at the U of M illustrates the gulf that separates higher-education officials and ordinary citizens on the subject of freedom of speech and thought. University leaders seem clueless about these rights’ crucial importance, while average folks grasp intuitively that thought control is wrong.

Thanks to most citizens’ common sense, “often all it takes to end repression of this sort is to expose it to the sunlight,” says FIRE spokesman Adam Kissel.

Kissel cites recent events at the University of Delaware as a case in point. Several years ago, the Residence Life staff there launched a crusade to reform the beliefs and behaviors of all 7,000 students in college dormitories. Instead of invoking “cultural competence” to justify its actions — as the U of M has — Delaware declared that students must become world citizens, committed to “justice” and “sustainability.”

As a result, students were subjected to “Diversity Facilitation Training” and were hectored about consumerism, affirmative action, and world distribution of wealth. Nonminority students were chastised about “white privilege” at mandatory floor meetings. Expected “competencies” included such gems as this: “Each student will recognize the benefits of dismantling systems of oppression.” As one student put it, “I’m being told it’s wrong to be a middle-class white male.”

After FIRE alerted the public to the program’s unconstitutionality, University of Delaware authorities promptly shut the effort down. But continued attempts to revive it suggest that vigilance is imperative, says Kissel.

FIRE’s letter warns that the U’s proposed actions are an unconstitutional invasion of students’ First Amendment right to freedom of conscience and a “severe affront to liberty.” The letter quotes the Supreme Court’s ringing declaration in West Virginia Board of Education vs. Barnette:

“If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”

This is especially true at our universities, which the court has declared to be “peculiarly the ‘marketplace of ideas,’” FIRE added.

The debacle at the U of M illustrates the gulf that separates higher-education officials and ordinary citizens on the subject of freedom of speech and thought. University leaders seem clueless about these rights’ crucial importance, while average folks grasp intuitively that thought control is wrong.

Thanks to most citizens’ common sense, “often all it takes to end repression of this sort is to expose it to the sunlight,” says FIRE spokesman Adam Kissel.

Kissel cites recent events at the University of Delaware as a case in point. Several years ago, the Residence Life staff there launched a crusade to reform the beliefs and behaviors of all 7,000 students in college dormitories. Instead of invoking “cultural competence” to justify its actions — as the U of M has — Delaware declared that students must become world citizens, committed to “justice” and “sustainability.”

As a result, students were subjected to “Diversity Facilitation Training” and were hectored about consumerism, affirmative action, and world distribution of wealth. Nonminority students were chastised about “white privilege” at mandatory floor meetings. Expected “competencies” included such gems as this: “Each student will recognize the benefits of dismantling systems of oppression.” As one student put it, “I’m being told it’s wrong to be a middle-class white male.”

After FIRE alerted the public to the program’s unconstitutionality, University of Delaware authorities promptly shut the effort down. But continued attempts to revive it suggest that vigilance is imperative, says Kissel.

At the U of M, spokesman Dan Wolter told Fox News that the College of Education’s policymaking is still “a dynamic process.” But he added that the college hopes to be ready to admit prospective students into its redesigned program by fall of 2011.

What’s behind campus authorities’ apparent compulsion to dictate what students think and how they live? At both the U of M and Delaware, says Kissel, they “seem to think that sacrificing individual rights and freedom of conscience is a small price to pay for achieving their grand visions of social justice.”

“These programs are so dangerous because they teach the next generation that the authorities get to decide what each person’s values and beliefs must be,” he adds. “That is exactly the opposite of a free society, and the opposite of seeing a university as a true marketplace of ideas.”

A smear machine fueled by huge sums of cash has fixed its sights on a new Public Enemy No. 1. Her name is U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann.

Minnesota voters won’t be heading to the polls until November 2010, almost a year from now, but this machine is already pouring megabucks into a TV ad campaign attacking Bachmann. In the ad, an actress portraying the congresswoman greets voters with oil oozing from her hands. A frightened baby wails, and constituents glare with disgust at the sticky handprints she leaves on their backs. The message? Bachmann is a shill for Big Oil.

Attack ads such as this are just one weapon in the multifront assault that Bachmann will face in coming months. For insight into what’s on the horizon, we can look to Colorado. There, a cabal of Democratic activists, led by high-tech mogul Tim Gill, has masterminded a potent new political strategy that’s “redefining liberal politics,” according to Time magazine.

It’s no surprise that Bachmann finds herself in the left’s cross hairs. She is everything its zealots most despise: a woman who flaunts feminist orthodoxy and dares to advocate limited government, free markets and traditional marriage.

The Colorado model is fueled by unprecedented piles of money, contributed by a clubby group of multimillionaires. It uses left-wing nonprofit organizations, rather than traditional Democratic Party channels, to get its message to voters. Its scorched-earth tactics range from smear ads that twist the facts to trumped-up charges of ethical violations.

Using this strategy, left-wing activists have transformed Colorado from Red to deep Blue since 2004. Democrats have announced plans to export their model to other states, and Rob Stein of the George Soros-funded Democracy Alliance has put Minnesota at the top of the list.

What might this mean for Bachmann? Former Colorado congresswoman Marilyn Musgrave, a Republican whose politics resemble Bachmann’s, knows only too well. In 2008, the attack machine defeated her after three brutal attempts.

The buzz among Washington insiders is that Bachmann will be “the next Musgrave.” Guy Short, Musgrave’s former chief of staff, expects Democrats to pump millions of dollars into Minnesota to try to take Bachmann down in 2010. Her adversaries, he says, will work to drive up her unfavorable ratings to the point where voters finally growl, “Anybody but Bachmann.”

Short already sees striking parallels between the anti-Musgrave and anti-Bachmann campaigns. In Colorado, Democrats revved up their attacks on Musgrave a year before the 2008 election. One particularly scurrilous ad, which Time magazine called the “most shameless” of the 2004 elections, captures their flavor. The ad depicted Musgrave sneaking onto a battlefield to pick the pocket of a solder caught up in a fire fight. It falsely alleged that Musgrave was “cheap” on soldiers’ benefits when she has, in fact, been one of the military’s strongest supporters.

Musgrave’s opponents also attempted to impugn her integrity with bogus ethical charges. In 2005, a left-wing outfit called Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), another Soros-funded enterprise, alleged that she had misused taxpayer funds in her office arrangement, though Musgrave had previously cleared the arrangement with the relevant House committees, according to Short.

“CREW is a left-wing attack machine masquerading as a public interest watchdog,” says Short. “It purports to be bipartisan, but its real goal is to defeat Republicans.”

CREW’s allegations against Musgrave were not only unsubstantiated but never even investigated, says Short. But the media picked them up, with devastating effect. “CREW listed Musgrave as one of the ‘13 most corrupt’ members of Congress, though she never violated either the letter or the spirit of the law,” he said.

Bachmann is enduring similar harassment. Last month, she put a press release about a health care “House call” on her congressional website. After the event took place, CREW charged that she had violated House ethics rules, and the media, which routinely characterize CREW as a neutral watchdog group, picked up the story. A spokesman for the House Administration Committee confirmed that Bachmann had conformed to House rules. Nevertheless, her reputation had been impugned.

If the left brings the Colorado model to Minnesota, Bachmann’s constituents in places such as St. Cloud might like to know that attacks against her are being fueled by fat cat donors from places such as New York City.

Yet in 2010, the Colorado model may lose some of its steam as issues trump big bucks. In Virginia and New Jersey, voters recently elected Republican governors and rejected Democrats, whom they perceived as more negative, according to pollsters. Next time around, Democrats may run into their own buzz saw.