WATCH: Ben Domenech calls on Americans to show the totalitarian left 'what free people do'

The Federalist's Ben Domenech took the anchor seat on Fox News' Primetime hour and let loose on the current American crisis.

"What does it mean to be a nation?" He asked. "It's a question have ask ourselves in a moment when so many people seem open to the possibility of a national divorce."

He spoke about a nation having "laws, borders, and values," and gave a lesson in history from a perspective that is seldom heard today. Intoning the struggles of George Washington, and the words of Thomas Paine.

Domenech spoke harshly, too, of Americans who consider themselves "summer soldiers," or "sunshine patriots," who spend their time arguing over economic and foreign policy, and leave "the real wars, the ones that matter for the culture of the nation... they'll leave those to you, the people."

"The crisis we face today," Domenech said, "goes to the heart of what kind of nation we will be."

Domenech cited the entities that are vying for power of the narrative, the economy, the ethos, and the political leverage needed to control the nation.

"As in 1776," he began, "it is a question of who rules. Is it the globalist tech oligarchs? Hollywood executives beholden to China? The race radicals who dominate our universities? A fundamentally anti-American media, the frail, feeble politicians, and the Marxist children of the left?

"Or is it us, the American people, a great people, a free people, who above all care not for money or power, but for the nation we love."

Domenech intoned the story of a Revolutionary War veteran, Levi Preston, who was asked in 1842 why he fought in the war. "Young man," Preston said, "what we meant in going for the Red Coats was this: we always had governed ourselves, and we always meant to. They didn't mean we should."

"The same challenge faces us today," he said, "the forces arrayed against the survival of the United States of America, foreign and domestic, do not believe you have the capacity or the ability or the right to govern yourselves.

"They work every day to scare you into silence, indoctrinate your children, gaslight you with falsehoods, direct your future and stamp our your freedom."

This, he said, "is the totalitarian left that wants a national divorce." He listed the myriad ways that the left is going about destroying culture, from anti-cop rhetoric to transgender ideology.

"They want to destroy our great American experiment," he said bluntly, "a thriving, capitalist, multi-ethnic republic of God-fearing people, for all time."

"But we're on to them, we're not going to let them, and together, we're going to show them what free people do."