Key takeaways

1. The effort to stop Trump has involved a coordinated campaign by federal bureaucracies, legacy media, and aligned institutions (collectively "the Regime") that began with promoting him as an unelectable candidate in 2016 and evolved into increasingly desperate attempts to prevent his return to power.
2. The Regime's tactics evolved from traditional opposition (negative coverage, opposition research) to unprecedented measures including attempting to overturn election results, weaponizing law enforcement, supporting ballot disqualification efforts, and tolerating political violence.
3. Media manipulation has been central to the campaign, with legacy outlets consistently distorting facts, suppressing unfavorable stories like the Hunter Biden laptop, and abandoning journalistic principles when those principles conflict with anti-Trump objectives.
4. The Regime's commitment to democratic principles is selective, condemning "election denial" while attempting to remove Trump from ballots, defending "norms" while proposing radical institutional changes, and championing "democracy" while supporting undemocratic methods to achieve its goals.
5. Recent events, including Biden's replacement with Harris and increasingly extreme rhetoric comparing Trump to Hitler, suggest the Regime will likely respond to a 2024 Trump victory by abandoning any pretense of accepting democratic outcomes — the very behavior they've spent years condemning.

It is difficult to comprehend a massive, multiyear effort to create an all-encompassing, largely fictional political narrative. It is more difficult when analyzed one bit at a time, dose by dose, over a period of years.

Presto! With the wave of the media’s collective hand, Kamala was never the border czar. And anyone who made reference to that fact would be discredited, usually via more 'fact-checking.'

This piece will be straightforward. I’m going to document some — but certainly not all — of the panicked, dishonest, and, in some cases, probably unconstitutional behavior and acts committed by the people most desperately motivated to keep Donald Trump away from the levers of power.

I refer to these individuals and organizations using a shorthand of “the Regime.” I define this term to mean the combination of the entrenched federal bureaucratic power structure, its legacy media allies, institutions with significant Regime-friendly control (most nonprofits and foundations, college DEI apparatus, many entertainers with prominent platforms and Regime-aligned interests, etc.), and the leadership of the DNC.

Naturally, there’s some overlap among these groups. But the Regime has elements of what Mike Benz calls “the Blob” and what Trump and others call “the Deep State.”

There is no possible way for me to cover every aspect of the effort to keep Trump out of office. Entire books could be written about each facet individually, much less collectively. But that isn’t my goal. Rather, I want to provide a reminder of the big picture by listing the mere “highlights.” And they are staggering.

A brief look back at all that has happened, seen in one place, conclusively demonstrates how dangerous this effort has been — and will continue to be.

Burning Bernie

We begin in 2015, when Trump officially announced that he would run for president. Regime members initially treated this decision as a godsend. They did everything they could to help Trump overtake “viable” candidates who might have a chance to defeat Hillary Clinton.

Thus, between snickers about Trump’s prospects, legacy media outlets were happy to provide as much free coverage as possible for Trump, to the tune of $5 billion.

Helping Trump win the nomination would serve two important purposes for the Regime: One, it would propel Regime dream candidate Hillary Clinton to the White House. Two, it would weaken the GOP. A weaker GOP would decrease the chances that a “serious” non-Regime outsider, perhaps with Tea Party roots, could rise in the future to challenge the Regime.

But there was still the small matter of Bernie Sanders.

Sanders polled very well and won some crucial early primaries, including New Hampshire. He also lost the Iowa Caucus by the smallest-ever margin, greatly exceeding pre-primary expectations. Ultimately, Hillary Clinton could not secure the nomination without the help of unpledged delegates or “superdelegates.”

Unlike delegates secured through primaries, which provided an insufficient margin to give Clinton the nomination, she carried superdelegates 571 to Sanders’ 45.

Subsequent revelations would also show that the Clinton campaign made a secret deal with the DNC to assume financial control of the organization — not after securing the nomination, as is the usual practice, but some 15 months before. It did so by assuming the debt of the 2012 Obama campaign, a step that allowed the Clinton campaign to control the finances of the party during the entirety of the 2016 primary season.

Joke's on Clinton

Nonetheless, Clinton ultimately won the nomination. The conventional wisdom among Democratic leaders and legacy media was that someone like Trump simply couldn’t win a national election. This overconfidence perhaps led to Clinton blunders like the “basket of deplorables” line and the decision not to target key swing states. The New York Times projected Clinton to have an overwhelming likelihood of winning. Instead, Trump defeated her.

This wasn’t part of the plan.

Trump’s victory was even more of a direct affront to the Regime because Trump had campaigned on the idea that the aforementioned “Deep State” of permanent bureaucratic power needed to be dismantled. Or, if you prefer, “drained.” Trump’s victory was a loss as devastating — and unexpected — as anything the Regime had yet experienced.

The Regime would do everything in its power to prevent it from happening again.

Election deniers

First, prior to Trump’s inauguration, the Regime blatantly and overtly attempted to overturn the results of the election. Not through offhanded comments about voting irregularities or lawsuits challenging results. Rather, the Regime did so with something far more brazen: a direct appeal to pressure electors into changing their votes, thus denying Trump the White House.

Legacy media treated this effort not as treasonous but as legitimate, perhaps even noble. The effort failed.

The next, broader effort was to undermine the legitimacy of Trump’s victory. Hillary Clinton repeatedly called Trump an "illegitimate” president, and media and Democrats spawned a comprehensive narrative that Trump had only prevailed due to “collusion” with Russia and Vladimir Putin.

Within minutes of Trump’s inauguration, legacy media began touting the prospect of a Trump impeachment. Regime-friendly media worked with Democrats to amplify the “Russia collusion” narrative, initially focusing less on presenting evidence and more on implying that, if “collusion” could be proven, it would be an offense unquestionably worthy of spawning Trump’s impeachment and removal from office.

Putting aside the question of whether “collusion,” as described by Trump critics, was even a crime, there was the more pressing matter of whether the conduct occurred at all. The principal source of many of the allegations was the “Steele dossier.”

Blue Steele

The Steele dossier was a controversial political opposition research document compiled in 2016 by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, initially funded by the conservative Washington Free Beacon during the Republican primaries. The DNC and Hillary Clinton’s campaign funded further research to complete the dossier.

The dossier contained various allegations about Donald Trump and his campaign's supposed connections to Russia during the 2016 presidential election. While it played a significant role in launching FBI investigations into possible Russian interference, subsequent investigations found its major claims to be unsubstantiated or inaccurate. Although the dossier’s claims were never corroborated, Regime-friendly media reported that they were.

Igor Danchenko, a primary source for the dossier, was later charged with lying to the FBI about his sources. Although he was ultimately acquitted, revelations stemming from his and other trials related to the Steele dossier revealed that federal agencies used unsubstantiated claims from the dossier as the basis for warrantless surveillance of Trump associates.

Prior to these revelations, Regime-friendly media touted the dossier as obvious and conclusive evidence that Trump had committed impeachable offenses — or perhaps even outright “treason.” Even after the credibility of the Steele dossier totally collapsed, media maintained a posture that Trump had obviously colluded and that such collusion was grounds for removal from office.

'Collusion' collapse

The larger questions around the 2016 election led to special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into possible Russian interference and potential coordination with the Trump campaign. The Mueller investigation was not based primarily on the Steele dossier, though it did review the dossier's claims as part of its broader investigation.

Mueller's team examined many other sources of evidence and leads, including intelligence gathered by U.S. agencies, witness interviews, and electronic communications. Ultimately, Mueller’s final report could not find evidence of a conspiracy or collusion.

Fact-chuckers

While the Russia collusion story was the dominant anti-Trump media narrative for years, it was just one example of a much larger pattern of media distortion that would become increasingly apparent. At best, media always presented facts in the light most unfavorable to Trump. At worst — and they were often at their worst — media presented outright distortions as fact.

The chief example of such a distortion was the “very fine people” lie in the wake of the Charlottesville protests in 2017, in which media consistently reported that Trump called white supremacists “very fine people.” In fact, he said the opposite, explicitly condemning white supremacists when he said, “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally.” Instead, his reference was to “very fine people on both sides” of the issue of whether to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee.

The transcript was clear — there was even video — but the media relentlessly reported that Trump had backed white supremacists. Joe Biden subsequently cited Charlottesville as a central reason for entering the 2020 presidential race, almost certainly another lie, but at least one that is within the realm of normal political myth-building.

Regime politicians, part of a closed circuit with legacy media, repeated the “very fine people” lie over and over. They still do, in fact, as Kamala Harris continues to rely on this debunked narrative. This distortion has persisted for years. Even Snopes, which is generally left-leaning, ruled that the “very fine people” claim was untrue.

Of course, Snopes waited until 2024 to do so and included a number of disclaimers, but I suppose it’s (slightly) better than nothing.

'Bleach Blanket Bingo'

However, the media don’t just distort the big things. The media have a reflexive impulse to make Trump look as bad as possible on all matters, from trivial to pivotal. They lied about him feeding fish. They lied about him telling people to drink bleach. They lied about him calling soldiers “suckers and losers.” And on and on.

The pattern of media and institutional bias became even more evident during two major crises of the Trump presidency that would test the Regime's consistency and reveal its true priorities. In 2020, two major forces — the pandemic and the death of George Floyd — dramatically impacted the country. These are also broad topics beyond the scope of this piece, but I want to focus solely on what those cultural forces revealed about the Regime.

Fauci fascism

First, the hypocrisy. At the outset of the pandemic, Democrats like Kamala Harris initially said they wouldn’t trust any “Trump” vaccine created before the election. As we all know, Democrats (and the occasional Republican) shifted quickly into enforcing authoritarian COVID rules. The severity of the rules and the related hypocrisy were particularly egregious in “blue” states like California.

What was initial vaccine skepticism changed quickly to totalitarian behavior. Regime politicians ruthlessly enforced lockdown and masking mandates, sometimes with tragically hilarious results. Businesses and students suffered most, and we may never fully recover from the pandemic learning loss. Those who adopted the previous anti-vax skepticism initially touted by some Democrats were routinely fired from their jobs now that Democrats were in charge and mandating vaccine compliance.

Regime-friendly media dutifully repeated COVID talking points around “two weeks to stop the spread,” six-foot social distancing, masking, and the imperative — even civic duty — involved in getting vaccinated.

As we later learned, once Biden was in office, the federal government also pressured social media companies to remove “misinformation” about the virus and other topics, including the origin of COVID, vaccine skepticism, and so on. Much of this “misinformation” later turned out to be possible or even probable, while some of the “trust the science” talking points turned out to be based on nothing.

And the feds didn’t merely limit their pressure to social media companies. Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a DOJ memo in 2021 making parents and protesters around school policies related to COVID and other matters a new point of emphasis for law enforcement. Garland would later walk back (or “clarify”) the intent behind the memo — but not rescind it.

The memo followed the National School Boards Association’s two top officials sending a letter to the Biden administration referring to objections to critical race theory and COVID measures as a form of “domestic terrorism.” The NSBA later repudiated the letter, but the controversy created serious backlash within the organization.

Stoking racial unrest

While the Regime's COVID response revealed its willingness to enforce strict control over everyday citizens, its reaction to the death of George Floyd would expose an even more telling double standard. Floyd’s death led to massive, destructive protests across the country at the height of COVID lockdowns. Consistently, Regime leaders and allies, when pressed for whether lockdown rules should apply to those wishing to protest the killing, gave elusive or obtuse answers. They suddenly seemed more concerned about “social justice” than what they had been telling us for months was an unprecedented public health crisis, sometimes even suggesting that systemic racism was the bigger threat to public health.

Naturally, this particular flavor of hypocrisy stemmed from the fact that racial unrest is beneficial to Regime politicians. It allows them to leverage division for political gain and exploit the narrative that the United States is an inherently racist country. In fact, it quickly became a standard Biden talking point that “white supremacy” was the top domestic threat facing our nation.

Ultimately, the protests caused billions in damage. Despite this level of chaos, relatively few perpetrators suffered any kind of criminal consequences. Again, Regime prosecutors in these areas (mostly blue cities) were not motivated to send allies and quasi-allies to jail. On the other hand, despite the incident not meeting the legal definition of “murder” and questionable presentation of evidence, Officer Derek Chauvin was convicted of two counts of murder related to Floyd’s death. The Regime’s wishes demanded such an outcome.

Laptop lapdogs

The Regime's control over information flow would face its ultimate test in 2020 when, as the election approached, news leaked about the possibility that Hunter Biden, son of Democratic nominee Joe Biden, was involved in corrupt business dealings in Ukraine. These dealings may also implicate his father, with the possibility that the Bidens traded influence in exchange for financial compensation.

A laptop with information that could support these assertions or that, at a minimum, would be embarrassing to the Bidens fell into the possession of the New York Post. The Post then ran an exclusive story on the laptop.

Regime-friendly media immediately conspired to suppress the story, with support from high-profile progressive and “NeverTrump” voices. This suppression included social media companies, which prevented the proliferation of the story throughout their networks. Simultaneously, a group of 51 “national security experts” signed a letter asserting that the laptop was “disinformation,” likely of Russian origin (stop me if you’ve heard this one before).

This set the stage for Biden himself to cite these “experts” during a debate with Trump, dismissing the laptop story as bogus. Again, Regime-friendly media mechanically repeated these claims as factual and repeatedly used the phrase “without evidence” to describe any claim made by Trump.

Misinformation, please

In addition, the suppression of the laptop story is part of the larger pattern of the Biden administration exerting influence to suppress disfavored views, with its allies dutifully denouncing these disfavored views as “disinformation” or “misinformation,” as described earlier.

This effort began in earnest during COVID, when many pandemic-related ideas that were eventually proven to be true, or at least to be plausible, were suppressed, with speakers often punished with severe social or career consequences. Regime-friendly media mocked those who proffered these ideas, including high-profile voices such as Adam Carolla and Joe Rogan. This mockery later proved to be based on incorrect information (or, if you prefer, lies).

The 2020 election itself resulted in a Biden victory. Trump made numerous ill-advised comments about the election outcome, but the core of what he was saying was at least a question worth asking: If these people would lie and lie and lie to try to stop me, do you really think they wouldn’t cheat on Election Day? This also followed numerous changes to voting rules, ostensibly enacted due to COVID but many of which remain in place today, e.g., earlier voting, liberalized mail-in rules, etc.

Inventing 'insurrection'

This all culminated in a rally turned riot on January 6. The riot, while unquestionably a dark moment, was far less destructive — or deadly — than the Floyd riots. Yet the media present January 6 as if it were an “insurrection,” a word that Democrat politicians hammered home at every opportunity in an attempt to lay the groundwork for disqualifying Trump should he run again.

In fact, Democrats attempted a second impeachment of Trump after he left office. Based again on somewhat vague charges, it failed, as did the first.

As Biden assumed office, fact-checkers also suddenly became less relentless. They argued that Biden simply doesn’t lie as much as Trump, of course. In particular, the Washington Post announced that it would no longer maintain a database on Biden as it did on Trump, although it will continue to “fact-check” Biden.

Biden their time

The Biden years themselves didn’t go so well, although you would have a hard time seeing that if your only source of information was legacy media. Inflation runs rampant, the border is a disaster as millions pour into the country, including tens of thousands of convicted violent criminals, crime is up, and gender ideology and Marxist principles increasingly inform public policy and the guiding principles of major institutions.

Legacy media obscures many of these failures, just as it pushes social positions the Regime likes. “Trans rights,” in particular, receive glowing, one-sided coverage, despite the fact that the issue fundamentally involves surgically removing healthy organs in permanent, often sterilizing procedures, sometimes performed on minors. Any pushback is met with claims of bigotry as a tactic for stifling dissent. Thankfully, backlash grows once people see the impact of such ideology on women’s sports.

The economy is also clearly not going well for everyday Americans, but we’re fed pro-administration news that is quietly revised once the initial (positive) news cycle is well behind us. Crime also clearly seems worse, as permissive DAs in many blue areas refuse to prosecute “low-level” crimes, “smash and grab” incidents occur frequently, and violence seems more present than in recent years. As with jobs data, though, there has been manipulation of statistics to present an untrue narrative — one that is pushed by uncritical media.

The accumulation of policy failures and messaging contradictions finally came to a head in the 2024 campaign. One of the major selling points for Trump at the outset was that his opponent seemed to be declining cognitively. Robert Hur is the former U.S. Attorney who was appointed as special counsel to investigate President Biden's handling of classified documents found at his private office and residence. Administration flacks inside and outside the media relentlessly attacked Hur for his report that suggested memory lapses he noted while interviewing Biden made it unwise to prosecute him.

This report and Hur’s testimony on the topic added significant fuel to the observations about Biden’s decline. However, again, pro-Regime media made an all-out effort to say that this wasn’t true and that Biden was as sharp as ever. They even attacked Hur directly. Once again, we were told not to trust our own lying eyes. At the same time, legacy media began to shift the narrative to, “Actually, it’s Trump who is in decline,” using their tried-and-true “trust [our] experts” tactic.

Then, a horrific debate performance made it so obvious that it was true that Democrats had no choice but to jettison Biden, something Vivek Ramaswamy predicted would happen a year earlier.

Installing Kamala

Now, Kamala Harris, who had never received a single primary vote, would simply be installed as the new nominee. Media commentators again circled the proverbial wagons, now flipping their “should Biden dump the unpopular Harris?” narrative from just a few months earlier to “Harris is actually a good candidate.” What a miraculous revelation!

They also worked overtime to mitigate her role in the immigration disaster. While formerly touted as Biden’s “border czar,” when the Regime intended that unofficial title to bolster Harris’ perceived importance, it became an albatross once she was the nominee in the wake of disastrous, country-altering illegal immigration.

Presto! With the wave of the media’s collective hand, Kamala was never the border czar. And anyone who made reference to that fact would be discredited, usually via more “fact-checking.”

Initially, it worked, as Harris received a popularity surge and massive fundraising boost.

Assassination by 'popping noises'

Notably, however, the candidate switch also came on the heels of an assassination attempt against Trump that came within millimeters of ending his life. Media reports on the event in real time were extremely hesitant to use the word “assassination” or initially confirm that Trump was “shot,” instead using phrases like “popping noises that sounded like gunfire.”

The attempt happened amid a number of security lapses and obvious oversights by Secret Service agents, eventually leading to the director’s resignation after Republicans and Democrats alike took her to task for the incompetence (I’m being kind) that led to the opening to shoot at Trump. Unsurprisingly, relatively few details about the shooter and his possible motives have emerged, and the resulting coverage is far more muted than one would expect for a near-miss attempt at presidential assassination.

A second attempt to kill Trump

Another assassination attempt, this time thwarted pre-emptively, occurred not long after. The attempts on Trump’s life came after years of Democrats comparing Trump to Hitler, which followed years of a “punch a Nazi” ethos that essentially argued that violence against political enemies is not only justified but a moral imperative. Even prior to the Trump incidents, we had seen the natural results of unyielding demonization of Republicans.

Despite some lip service about “toning down” rhetoric, much of which implicitly blamed Trump for the attempts on his own life, that hasn’t stopped Harris’ closing argument from being plainly “Trump is Hitler.” With two weeks to go and poll numbers weakening, the Democratic Party simply abandoned even the pretense of “civility.” Winning is all that matters.

More precisely, holding power and keeping it from a disruptor are all that matters. This is the same mentality that caused Democrats to lob absurd, unsubstantiated accusations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, for example. The end always justifies the means.

And the Regime and Regime-friendly media lies have continued. They lied about Trump saying there would be “a bloodbath” (as in violence) if he were to lose, when he was obviously referring to an economic “bloodbath” related to China and the auto industry. They lied about Trump embracing Project 2025, which he has actively disavowed, even saying he hadn’t even read it. They lied about him wanting a national abortion ban, which, again, he has flatly said he opposes.

Just a few days ago, they lied about him calling for Liz Cheney to be executed by firing squad, when he was quite clearly making a point about how her calculus for sending soldiers to war would be different if she had to go herself. And I’m omitting a dozen other examples just from the past year alone.

Playing favorites

This problem isn’t limited to lying about Trump. The media also lied about JD Vance’s comments about mass shootings being a “fact of life.” When Kamala Harris refused to do unscripted interviews for several weeks after being anointed the new nominee, the media shifted into “it’s good not to do interviews” mode, until the campaign realized it was hurting her. They will minimize the importance of bad job numbers just a few years after treating much better numbers under Trump as disappointing news. The media regularly act as almost blatant surrogates for the Harris campaign, spinning and even obscuring her positions to make her look as good as possible.

This should come as no surprise, of course. One of the hallmarks of the Regime is the interplay (some might say “incestuousness”) between Democratic administrations and major news positions at many legacy media outlets. George Stephanopoulos is the ABC News chief anchor after being the White House communications director under Bill Clinton. Jen Psaki went directly from Biden White House press secretary to hosting a show on MSNBC.

While there are certainly Republicans who also transition to news roles, they are usually presented as either token conservative contributors or appear on Fox News Channel, which is perceived as inherently right of center. Democrats are still free to present “objective truth.”

We saw a potent example of this phenomenon in the debate between Trump and Harris. There, ABC’s David Muir and Linsey Davis vowed to fact-check both candidates. In reality, they failed to fact-check Harris on a number of obvious falsehoods, including the lack of active-duty American soldiers in combat zones, another attempt to tie Trump to Project 2025, extreme abortion laws in some parts of the country, and, as mentioned before, the “very fine people” lie.

Perhaps worse, the moderators did “fact-check” Trump on some statements that turned out to be true. For example, Muir advanced the narrative that crime is down, only for those FBI revisions to show up quietly just days later.

Rule of lawfare

Beyond media manipulation and narrative control, the Regime deployed perhaps its most potent weapon: the selective use of legal authority. This was a tried-and-true tactic that certainly predated Trump but that was regularly deployed against him once he became a threat.

They tried to remove Trump from the ballot. They changed statute of limitation rules so that they could go after him. They tried to bankrupt him.

In fact, Letitia James, the New York attorney general who brought the civil case designed to financially cripple Trump, ran on a platform of “us[ing] every area of the law to investigate President Trump and his business transactions.” Give me the man, and I’ll give you the case against him, so to speak.

One case was a highly irregular and likely unconstitutional prosecution in New York. It resulted in “34 felony convictions” on unprecedented, novel charges. While these will almost certainly be overturned on appeal, the “convictions” immediately allowed Regime voices to call Trump a “convicted felon” over and over — an odd but telling strategy for a group that normally attempts to “destigmatize” “justice-involved” individuals. But I digress.

Can't stop, won't stop

OK, so what is the point of all of this?

The Regime can tolerate a Republican president, perhaps only begrudgingly if the Republican isn’t a neocon. But what it can’t tolerate is a loud-mouthed, brash, somewhat chaotic disruptive force.

That is Trump. As I said, Trump isn’t part of the plan. And the Regime and its media allies will never stop lying and deceiving in order to exaggerate Trump’s flaws (which absolutely do exist!) or even to create new ones from whole cloth.

But that isn’t even what bothers me the most. No, what bothers me as an American is that they will do all of this at the same time as they preach to us. They will anoint a nominee who has received no primary votes, or they will try to pressure electors into changing their allegiance, all while preening about being the ones who are on the side of “democracy.” They will call for adding several new Supreme Court justices and abolishing the filibuster just as they claim to be for maintaining “norms.” They will say that Trump is a threat to freedom while calling for new and stronger limits on “misinformation.”

I want to pause there. Most of all — most of all — they lament free speech.

Thank God for Elon Musk.

Musk matters

It was Musk’s purchase of Twitter (now X) that may have been the most important anti-Regime moment aside from Trump’s election in 2016. Robbed of a critical tool to manipulate public information and suppress “bad” ideas, the Regime immediately launched attacks on Musk — but failed.

Yet in just the past few months, we’ve seen and heard numerous high-profile Democrats talk about the dangers of free speech, with John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, and Tim Walz each saying, incorrectly, that the First Amendment doesn’t protect “misinformation” and/or “hate speech.” Kamala Harris herself has a terrible record on free speech.

And all of this comes at a time when leaders around the world, even “Western” leaders, are cracking down on free speech and punishing “harmful” speech. The Regime seems to peer across oceans and borders with an envious gaze, eager to implement similar measures here. And, in some limited circumstances, it already has.

All of what I’ve recounted above, coupled with the impulse toward suppression of speech and censorship of ideas, leads to strange treatment of common-sense questions such as “quickly adding 20,000 people to a town with a population of 40,000 is odd, isn’t it?”

Put aside the political, cultural, and racial implications. Just on its face, isn’t it worthy of discussion that the government facilitated the settling of tens of thousands of non-English-speaking people in one place and granted them provisional citizenship?

Exploring the motivations behind that move, as well as questioning the policymakers who made it possible, seems like something that a functional, independent media would want to pursue. But now ask yourself the following:

1. When did you first hear about that story?
2. Once you knew about it, how was it covered?

For me, it was only a couple of months ago, and the prevailing tenor of the coverage was to attack the people who dared to notice it.

This quickly morphed into the usual attacks on Trump for being outrageous, while the underlying story is diminished or denied, probably up to the point when legacy media feel it’s now “safe” to report the truth.

If Trump wins

And this brings us to the present moment, on the eve of an election that could see Trump return to power.

I believe Trump will win. Forget polls, most of which are non-decisive and perhaps inaccurate to boot. There are too many signs at the margins that point toward a Trump victory.

Democratic senators in tight elections embracing a limited connection to Trump policies. A few major newspapers refusing to endorse Harris (and the accompanying pro-Regime journalist resignations). Jeff Bezos, in particular, wisely conceding that the Washington Post and other legacy media have work to do to earn back the public trust. Mark Zuckerberg admitting and expressing remorse for Facebook’s role in acceding to White House demands to remove content.

More than anything else, those indicators suggest to me that Trump will prevail.

In the end, all of the above is actually a warning— a warning about how the Regime will react to such an outcome.

I feel confident that many of the same voices that have spent years lecturing us about “election denialism” and “threats to democracy” will quickly pivot to denying Trump’s victory or using undemocratic means to subvert or overturn the election in the event that Trump wins.

They will rationalize and justify their hypocrisy. For evidence of this, we need look no farther than the 2016 “Hamilton elector” scheme, the attempt to disqualify Trump from the ballot, and a variety of legal actions designed to imprison or bankrupt Trump.

The same media outlets that amplified baseless claims and myriad distortions will now tout new theories and platform “experts” who will explain why Trump isn’t even eligible to be president. The same institutions that coordinated to suppress stories unfavorable to their preferred candidate will do it again, to the extent that they still can in a post-X world. And the same politicians who routinely compare Trump to Hitler while preaching about “dangerous rhetoric” will once again make a not-so-subtle plea to the most unstable elements of our society that "Trump must be eliminated."

When the Regime warns about threats to democracy, it is really warning about threats to its power. The Regime's commitment to democratic principles — free speech in particular — extends precisely as far as those principles serve its interests. And if Trump wins, we will see just how quickly the Regime's supposed devotion to accepting election results evaporates. The only question is whether enough Americans will finally recognize this breathtaking hypocrisy for what it is.

I hope I’m wrong about the reaction. I really do.

But those are the stakes.

Vote accordingly.