Madness, memes, and media malfeasance (must be Tuesday). It’s embarrassing to admit, but just a little earlier this year I thought the election would be boring. Sure, the Democrats were calling Donald Trump a fascist, but they do that every four years, with every Republican, and the cartoonish slander wasn’t hitting like it used to. This was probably because Trump had already been president. Joe Biden was currently president. We knew these men. There was no scary unknown in the race, no matter how badly pundits on both sides wanted to work with that primal storytelling material, and the threat of a scary unknown is what I always assumed drove people insane inside of an election. It was late June, and I was feeling… fine? For Americans, the question was simple: are you better off now than you were four years ago? People would answer differently, but they would answer soberly, and come November we’d all move on.

Long story short, no — and also lol. Lmao, even. That is not what happened.

Today, on the other side of an historic, decisive victory for President Trump, with the Senate under Republican control, and the House teetering on the brink, Democrats are facing a political paradigm shift. And for good reason. The depraved gutter lows of the election, dotted with moments of true horror and psychopathy, followed four years of what came very close to total dissolution of the social contract. But now, as we learn about the world from our rapidly-maturing alternative media landscape, Americans are capable of discussing such things free of traditional media gatekeeping. That freedom has made the power class anxious, and in this anxiety they’ve grown more authoritarian than ever.

For insight into the broader shape of things, the arc of this election is an important place to start. Let’s just briefly recap, shall we?

The Democrats tried to jail the frontrunner opposition candidate mid-campaign, and successfully jailed several of his allies. Then their candidate, who is allegedly, somehow at this moment, running our country, dropped from the race after his first debate revealed what appeared to be a degenerative brain condition the administration, including Biden’s Vice President, hid for over a year. After Biden dropped — again, because our sitting president appears to have dementia — Democratic leadership, in the name of saving democracy, abandoned the primary process, and ran their preferred candidate. Kamala Harris fell out of a coconut tree, and America entered a season of goofy, “joyful” meme-ing. In answer to Trump’s surprise swell of support in Silicon Valley, VCs for Kamala, a rag-tag group of “investors” nobody heard of before this summer, rose up to save the industry from David Sacks and Marc Andreessen (lol). Everyone was so happy. No policies were discussed. Substance, we were told, was too great a risk in an election so important.

Incredibly, our period of bratty joy — “mid July,” let’s call it — immediately followed the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, which happened live on television. Americans were shocked for about a week before they moved on, and had all but forgotten about the attempted assassination until it happened again. Two months later, after an MSNBC-obsessed “save democracy” loony toon was picked up at Mar-a-Lago attempting to stop Hitler (thank you, Rachel Maddow), the press insisted the real problem here was, predictably, Donald Trump. He should not have joked about the Haitians eating cats, they said. What did he expect after embracing such abhorrent memes? To not be assassinated? Iran didn’t like the cat memes either, it seems, as they hired a third hitman to kill the former president, which barely cracked the news. Then, one thing that did crack the news: a comedian at a Trump rally at Madison Square Garden, which the press characterized as a literal Nazi rally, who made a joke about Puerto Rico’s famous trash problem. We were told this was (surprise) racist. For days we talked about this stupid joke.

Online, our discourse rocketed from goofball proposal to goofball story, with something new and stupid to behold almost every day. We pivoted from Venezuela-style price controls to dueling child tax credits and a renewed conversation on the prudence of packing the Supreme Court (less enthusiasm for this one, I’ve noticed, since Trump won the election). Then, in the final moments of the season, as we were all awash in breathtaking fake news from the right-wing Retardosphere surrounding everything from Tim Walz’s invented sex scandal to celebrity endorsements that never happened, and as the state-friendly press dropped its fifth or sixth piece of “smoking gun” evidence that Donald Trump is a Nazi, the man who claimed he shot Bin Laden casually suggested young men who voted for Kamala should simply be his sex slaves (he has since doubled and tripled down). The polls closed. Trump won. It was a soft landslide.

What did we learn?

By October, several of our most influential corporate executives were in regular contact with Trump, discussing trade policy for example, even before he won the election. Largely, this is because Democrats sided with European regulators over technology industry leadership, and outright targeted our industry at home. The failure of common sense here, and the inscrutable, self-loathing subversion of national interest, is now core to the Democratic Party, which has been hijacked by a minority of people who hate themselves, and us. Meanwhile, Donald Trump is a straight-up mercantilist (we love this) who wants to see European bureaucrats cry (I really can’t stress enough how much we love this). A relationship between American industry and the former American president always made sense. But the bridge was Elon Musk, the industry’s most popular CEO, who Democrats — a party that no longer supports free speech — decided they hated following the sale of Twitter, and set out to destroy through the courts.

The lawfare was, of course, evil. But it was also rational. Twitter, now X, really was the gravitational center of 2024’s election. Democrats were right to worry.

As the November dust clears, two things are certain. First, “the mainstream media” is finally well and truly dead. Elon said as much himself on Wednesday, in the middle of his victory lap. We are now living in the oft-foretold chaotic world of media fragmentation. 2024 was the podcast election. Trump did many more of them than Kamala. Trump destroyed Kamala. It’s maybe just that simple. Second, the Democratic Party was punished, across almost every demographic in the country, for their broad application of the self-loathing tendency that drove them to support foreign bureaucrats over American job makers. In aggregate, that tendency, applied everywhere, looks like an American government that values foreigners over Americans, American criminals over American victims, and drug-addicted crazy people screaming on the streets over young American families. If your house is burglarized, good luck finding help. But if you happen to have a cute rescue squirrel with whom you make funny videos? The state is kicking down your door, and killing your pets. We learned about this where? Social media. But social media gives and takes.

In our chaotic new media environment, it was often difficult, even for me — a professional shitposter, and man of taste — to discern the daily facts from fantasy. Yes, throughout every batshit crazy twist and turn of this election, what’s left of the mainstream press chose to accelerate and amplify vitriol, hysteria, and division. But in addition to their garbage opinions they were still reporting facts, and up until the final moments of the election I looked to them for help while I attempted to understand the truth about our world. As the front page of the Times increasingly looked like the photo negative of my feed on X, it became clear someone (maybe everyone?) was lying to me.

Hours before the election, Nate Silver, the most thoughtful and intelligent of all the famous national pollsters, made himself a meme. “Happy Election Day,” he wrote. “At exactly midnight on Tuesday, we ran our simulation model for the final time in this election cycle. Out of 80,000 simulations, Kamala Harris won in 40,012 (50.015%) cases.” The NYT Daily was ambivalent. This could be a blow-out, they said… in either direction. Or a very tight race. Kara Swisher predicted a Kamala landslide. Drudge Report, now Trump-deranged beyond recognition, indicated something similar. All of this was starkly out of alignment with what we were reading from the more popular podcasts, smaller, ascendant news outlets, and massively influential shitposters on X (that’s me, baby). But it was also, crucially, out of alignment with the betting markets. Suddenly, parallel to the contest for president, there was a contest for truth. The presidential election would determine both victors.

Well, it was a Trump blowout.

The former gatekeepers of our knowledge are, again, disgraced, and defeated. Kara Swisher has characteristically demonstrated zero introspection or humility, and is now sharing stories in which she accosts random men at the airport because she’s upset with people (men) who voted for Trump. There is no coming back from this for them. But these are not stupid people. They had to have known, after all of their humiliation following the Covid years, that this was their last chance to build trust. So why violate this trust with what seems, following yet another Trump blowout they refused to entertain, a season of lies?

Separate from the media’s evolution, and the rise of the alternative media ecosystem, there are very real political consequences in play. Why is the New York Times, even now, arguing Trump is a fascist? I think because the mainstream press represents, chiefly, unelected bureaucratic power, then leftwing zealotry. There is probably only one thing in Project 2025 Trump actually believes, and intends to pursue: a dismantling of the bureaucratic state. The average American doesn’t care about this, because the average American doesn’t understand who is running our country. The New York Times does understand, however, because the New York Times represents the people who run our country.

The goal of state-friendly voices in media was to demoralize Trump’s supporters, galvanize their own, and stem a red wave. By Wednesday morning it was clear they failed. We have not seen a message so decisive from the electorate, from every corner of this country, in most of our lives.

Trump not only won the electoral college, but is the first Republican in 20 years to take the popular vote. While presently set to take every swing state, the more important story is probably his success in blue states (New Jersey, for example, gaining 12 points for Trump over 2020, along with staggering improvements in New York, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Virginia). Over in Miami-Dade county, which a Republican presidential candidate hasn’t won since 1988, Trump is up 11 points. Harris lost 9 points among voters 18-29, with young men specifically shifting — piledriving? — to the right. By 30 points. Tuesday evening, the worst reports had all been proven out: there was enormous erosion of Democratic support among black and latino men, along with Jews and Arabs. In Pennsylvania, the Amish came out in droves to punish Democrats for fucking with their raw milk. On X, this was likened to Tolkien’s giant, peaceful Ents, famously isolationist, rising to punish the wizard Saruman.

Out in California, voters supported Prop 36 by a margin of 40 points, reclassifying rampant shoplifting as a felony. Or, in layman’s terms, making crime illegal again. San Francisco’s useless Mayor London Breed was fired. Everyone’s favorite Millionaire Marxist Dean Preston is poised to lose (to a loser fake moderate, but this is still a big deal in a commie district). Oakland’s Mayor Sheng Thao was recalled. Oakland’s DA was recalled. LA’s pro-crime District Attorney, George Gascón, was fired.

But was anyone really voting for the Republican Party? I don’t think so. Many people do like Trump, and think he’s funny, but mainly Americans just seem to really, really hate the Democrats right now. If I had to distill what just happened in the ballot box into one, simple idea, I think it would be this: fuck around and find out.

Democrats dissolved the border and let in somewhere between 10 and 20 million illegal immigrants (how the hell do you not know this number, by the way?). Fuck around and find out. They used our money to give these people (criminals, by definition) free apartments, food, and cell phones while Americans were struggling to pay their rent and buy groceries because of the inflation catalyzed by their economic policies. Then they called us a bunch of evil racists for wanting to send illegals back. Fuck around and find out. States across the country effectively legalized crime. Daniel Penny is now on trial for trying to protect a train car from a violent crazy person the state refused to remove from the streets. Fuck around and find out. America watched a man beat a woman, on stage at the Olympics, and Democrats told us we were the problem for finding this abhorrent. They chemically castrated children, and floated policies that would let school officials hide a child’s “gender struggles,” which of course their schools invented, from their parents. Fuck around and find out.

But mostly: in the name of democracy, Democrats attempted to imprison their democratic rival. They loudly oppose free speech. They openly advocate changing the rules of the courts, and packing them with partisan thugs. Americans were expected to not understand the meaning inherent of a state philosophy so entirely authoritarian. This expectation was a mistake. Donald Trump’s mug shot became the first galvanizing moment of the election. In the end, Americans weren’t nearly so worried about the man Democrats dragged to court as they were the Democratic Party’s wild, historic abuse of power. Fuck around and find out.

Americans, across almost every single demographic, have expressed real concern, on real issues, for years: crime, the border, and the economy. In response, the Democrats tried to run a man with dementia, then pivoted to a woman who literally refused to talk about these issues for the first month of her campaign. I still don’t know what she believes. Nobody ever will. It no longer matters.

This election wasn’t about tax policy. It wasn’t about war, or abortion, or gay rights. It was a referendum on an all-powerful bureaucracy that treated us like cattle, while refusing, from what seemed some bizarre ideological position, to protect us. And the entire story — the real story — played out honestly online, despite all attempts at obfuscation from the press. Yes, to get to the truth we had to navigate a lot of conspiracy theories, AI-generated slop, and chaotic-neutral former military vets demanding brat boy harems. But, on net, the garbage dump was more reliably correct than the New York Times. People will remember where they found the truth, and where the truth was hidden. Now, the Democrats have to reinvent themselves, and they will have to do it in the new media ecosystem. Because the old guard press will never recover from this disgrace, and the bureaucratic state no longer has the power to shut the upstarts down.

Our information fragmentation will continue now, as the parties both evolve. It will become harder, not easier, to discern the truth from fantasy, but we’ll be here to navigate it with you. In any case, none of us have any choice. For Trump, in the realm of politics, and Elon Musk, in the realm of media alike, Tuesday was a total victory. The world is transforming. The future will be beautiful, and it will be hideous, and it will be, every step of the way, deeply dumb and funny.

What a time to be alive.

—SOLANA