The win wasn’t a landslide, but it felt like one because of the towering tsunami of garbage the media and the Democrats and their prosecutors threw at Trump. They could not believe that all this lawfare and relentlessly negative publicity would create a backlash. They saw this pattern in the Republican primary – and yet they couldn’t accept the pattern would repeat itself in the general.

They knew that the Biden-Harris approval ratings were abysmal, and that the top issues, like inflation and illegal immigration, were dragging them down. But they loathe Trump so much they could not imagine he could win again – and win much more convincingly than in 2016.

So then the media had to think about the unthinkable: Doesn’t anyone care about our “news” anymore? How could our relentless anti-Trump messaging fail to land? They had to ponder whether podcasters like Joe Rogan were the wave of the future in influencing voters. They had to moan and whine that “misinformation” spread by Elon Musk’s X ruined all their objectives.

Axios.com wailed that “the big media era is over.” The young people aren’t following along. Smart sources said that “reaching people ages 35 and under with any message – or even major event – is almost impossible. Or they’ve seen an eight-second clip with no context, so they have a very different understanding of what happened than someone who saw a mainstream report.”

These “cord-cutters” aren’t imbibing the conventional wisdom. They’re in “fractured communities” on the internet. Point and laugh that these people eternally see themselves as the “mainstream,” no matter how the people vote.

We can say with confidence that the big media don’t have the same grip on public opinion that they have long imagined. When only 31% of respondents told Gallup they have a “great deal” or a “fair amount” of trust in the press, it became clear most Americans are looking elsewhere for information. No wonder Democrat-enabling journalists worry about “misinformation,” which they define as “information that doesn’t agree with our hot takes.”

But when politicians assemble in public, it’s possible they will still feel the pull of the leftist press as the most powerful players, even if the polls don’t match it. Old assumptions die hard in national politics. It would be encouraging for Trump and the Republicans to make sure that conservative journalists, radio hosts and podcasters are provided with lots of access and make the liberal journalists have to listen to conservatives. Because they tend to be incurious and intolerant of opposing views.

Finally, conservatives should enjoy how the liberals said this whole election was about “saving democracy,” and then a majority voted for Trump and GOP control of Congress. Democracy hasn’t died in darkness. The majority of people who cited “democracy” as an issue voted for Trump.

This is because the Left cannot concede that they were the ones trying to suppress the speech of their opponents, and they were the ones that were putting their opponents in jail. They were the ones raiding the home of the opposing former president with guns drawn. So, who ended up looking “authoritarian” in the end?

Democracy means the Left gets to be ridiculed and rejected, and it’s only just begun.

From the minute he bought Twitter in 2022, the leftists who aspire to complete messaging control were furious. They knew their 2020 jig was up, that they couldn’t just suppress damaging stories like the Hunter Biden laptop. Reporters like Cleve Wootson of The Washington Post complained in the White House briefing that “misinformation on Twitter is not just a campaign issue … it’s an America issue.” Post columnists call it a “mind-polluting app.”

Suddenly, “independent” agencies in the Biden administration unleashed their probes: the Justice Department, the Federal Trade Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission. Government was weaponized against Musk.

After the Democrats installed Kamala Harris, Musk became an explicit Trump supporter and super-PAC funder. Now the press warns he’ll have a massive conflict of interest if he’s brought on by President Trump as a “government efficiency czar.” He has many millions of dollars in government contracts.

Musk’s publicity stunt of handing over $1 million a day to Americans who signed his petition in favor of the First and Second Amendments drew all kinds of negative attacks from the press. On Oct. 21, “CBS Mornings” brought on their elections expert David Becker, who lusted openly about sending Musk to jail for five years for bribing voters.

On the last Saturday before the election, NBC News was warning that “at least nine of the 15 winners” of the big checks were either “registered Republicans” or “Republican-leaning.” Is that really a surprise or a scandal, conservatives backing the constitutional amendments?

Then on the night before Election Day, MSNBC star Rachel Maddow went on a wild rant about how the federal government will have to shed all ties to Musk, everywhere. They are an “untenable” reality for national security.

The meltdown intensified as the votes piled up for Trump after the polls closed. CBS host Margaret Brennan railed at 1:30 a.m. that Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner, D-Va., warned, “no single person is more beholden to the Chinese Communist Party. Because of the business interests he has in that country.”

Hunter Biden’s thicket of business interests in China were never interesting to CBS and the Democrats. But now that Musk is helping Trump? Look out!

Warner and the Democrats are upset that the social media atmosphere isn’t censoring conservative “misinformation” enough. It’s not just X but Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. Musk made censorship uncool.

Journalists like Brennan complain about Musk spreading misinformation willy-nilly and then insist, “The facts were in Joe Biden’s favor on the economy. The facts were in Kamala Harris’ favor on the economy.” Liberals have this funny habit of declaring their opinions are facts. Therefore, dissenting opinions are “misinformation.”

Liberals and conservatives alike feel that Elon Musk’s billions have transformed the “information space.” He made it … more spacious. Our media elites want everyone to have a very limited diet under their control. In their strange minds, losing control of the narrative is equated with the loss of democracy.

This is why Musk is their Public Enemy No. 1. This is why conservatives should be emboldened to push the information the leftists want squashed. The election demonstrated that a more liberated marketplace of news and ideas is what made democracy great again.