Today, 2025 begins. In just under three weeks, President-elect Donald Trump will take the oath of office for his second, nonconsecutive term, ushering in what we expect to be a transformative era of politics: one that has technically already begun since last November’s historic election.
However, let’s not kid ourselves; the path to get there was anything but easy. To reach this point, we had to not merely win at the ballot box; we had to shatter lies which entire institutions were not merely determined to propagate, but whose propagation was a literal mission statement. We had to liberate Americans to doubt what the self-appointed experts and authorities told them; to once more find their voices and, just as importantly, their BS detectors. They have, now, but when this year began, that was a tenuous proposition. Which may account for the fact that looking back on the start of this year feels so much like looking at a different nation.
Let’s recall that in January, for example, the world still hadn’t officially realized that President Joe Biden was essentially a zombie. Nor was his loss to then-candidate Trump a sure thing, though the polling certainly ran in Trump’s favor by small but not necessarily conclusive margins. Nevertheless, Democrats doggedly insisted that Biden’s mental state in private was still sharp; that his inability to perform in front of the cameras was either an illusion or (as they said about everything that they didn’t like hearing) disinformation. Probably the nadir of this was when they claimed that actual videos showing Biden’s decline were faked. To many, this kind of denial probably made little sense; why insist that a visibly over-the-hill candidate was as good as he'd ever been? The answer was not something we would learn until many, many months later.
And to be fair, they almost pulled off the deception when it came to Biden’s public appearances. His State of the Union, despite being a shouty, confrontational mess of a speech, was at least coherent. At the time, even some on the Right may have worried that they were about to underestimate Biden as they had in 2012; that perhaps despite the snow on his roof, there was still fire in his furnace. Democrats, meanwhile, breathed a sigh of relief, no doubt convinced that their ability to gaslight Americans remained intact.
We bring this up not merely to litigate the past, but also to make an observation that can only be made in hindsight: Biden’s precarious mental state turned out to be not merely one more lie told by the Democrats, but perhaps the most important one, symbolically. It was the lie that ultimately tested the Left’s hubristic belief that they could rewrite reality by simply rewriting the terms in which it was described. In many ways, Biden’s deterioration was the one uncomfortable fact which forced the Leftist gaslighting apparatus to finally fly too close to the sun at precisely the moment when it could least afford to. As such, Biden’s barely coherent State of the Union was anything but a defeat for the Right; rather, it was the thing that postponed the reckoning with the Left’s lies to a date where it was no longer possible for them to recover from it.
And those lies just got stupider as they went on. In particular, their case against President Trump, which involved untested legal theories, flagrantly unfair decisions by the presiding judge, a jury so biased it might as well have been made of kangaroos, and (somehow) a porn star testifying about her house being haunted by a ghost possum, became a national laughingstock. Trump’s mugshot, meanwhile, reached iconic status, and his ultimate conviction, despite the Left doing everything they could to try to terrify Americans with the prospect of electing a convicted felon, only added to his martyred status. And all the while. Biden floundered and hid from an electorate that was growing less and less patient with his administration’s fixation on cultish woke ideology at the expense of everyday Americans.
Which brings us to 2024’s Summer of Lies, which began when Biden finally revealed that he could no longer function. During a debate. On live television. That he ever got there at all—that he was even allowed to take the stage—is a testament to the Left’s fantastical belief in its ability to rewrite reality to suit its narrative. But they could not rewrite what Americans saw in real time. They could not declare our very eyes agents of “disinformation.” All they could do was forward unconvincing excuse after unconvincing excuse: Biden was sick. Biden was ill-prepared. Wanting him to drop out was racist (yes, they really tried that one). And on, and on, and on. And as they ran, panicked, through one stock lie after another, Americans began to realize, “this is what they’ve been doing for eight years. I’ve heard all these lines before, only now I know they’re nonsense. So if they’re nonsense now, then what else was I hoodwinked about?”
The Democrats never wanted America to ask that question, and yet ask it, they did. In fact, they particularly started to ask it after President Trump escaped death at an assassin’s hands by a literal fraction of an inch. And once more, there were no satisfactory answers. You want to know why? Because all we have to do is cite the phrase “sloped roof,” and anyone who lived through this year will break out in howls of laughter. But more than that, despite being told for years and years that Trump was a scoundrel and a bully with no courage and no actual willingness to fight for the country, Americans saw the truth in real time as, even after taking a bullet, Trump stood, blood streaming down his face, and roared “fight, fight, fight.” And moreover, the “caring” Left, who were supposed to be opposed to violence and supportive of the little guy, showed their true face as they celebrated the death of innocent bystanders like Corey Comperatore and reproached the assassin not for trying to kill a presidential candidate, but for missing. And so, Thomas Matthew Crooks’ bullet ultimately only slaughtered the Leftist machine’s lies.
And yet somehow, still, that wasn’t the end to their humiliation. Because, knowing that a corpse puppet had no chance against a martyr to violence they had aided, abetted, and encouraged, the Left descended into full on insanity. That is to say, their response, after being caught in multiple lies, was to somehow do the same thing and expect different results. Which is why, despite everyone and their brother being able to tell that the Democrats had clung onto Biden so hard precisely because Kamala Harris was waiting in the wings, the Democrats still attempted to rehabilitate Harris into a historic, Obama-esque figure when it became impossible to deny that Biden was no longer fit for purpose.
Which is, frankly, when the Summer of Lies got stupid. Because somehow, the Left convinced themselves that rather than make Kamala Harris look empathetic or dedicated to public service or literally anything that might make an electorate look twice at her, they instead decided to try to persuade Americans that she was cool: “Brat,” as Charli XCX put it. There was just one problem – okay, a lot of problems – with this approach.
Firstly, Kamala Harris is the kind of cringey, corrupt, cackling banshee that grade schoolers could justifiably mistake for a witch. Secondly, running your presidential candidate as a bratty teenage girl is the kind of thing that activates almost everyone’s PTSD from high school. Thirdly, the soy-infused Leftist political operative class are no more capable of looking cool than gazelles are of wrestling Siberian tigers. And fourthly, actual cool people hang out with other cool people, not Joe Biden. Which led to perhaps the most embarrassing expenditure in the history of political campaigning – the fact that the Harris campaign basically paid a raft of celebrities, from Oprah to Beyonce to Taylor Swift – to hang out with them. In essence, the closest Kamala could get to actually looking cool was paying the cool kids to show up to her birthday party.
Needless to say, it didn’t work. Even as President Trump prompted an avalanche of press derision for his performance against Harris in their one and only debate, Harris absolutely failed to do anything to define herself as more than someone who “grew up middle class.” This would become a pattern, as David Plouffe broke out the old Obama strategy of trying to run a candidate on nothing but vibes. The difference, however, was that everyone knew Barack Obama could talk intelligently about his plans if asked, whereas Kamala Harris plainly could not. In fact, she had an incredible habit of exposing her own party’s lies, in particular the one that she was different from Biden.
Which brings us to the last lie that died an embarrassing death in 2024: the idea that Kamala Harris ever had a chance. She didn’t. Her own pollsters say as much now, and it’s clear that the rosy public polling was yet another gaslighting operation designed to try to make Trump voters not show up while juicing Harris’ turnout. Most embarrassing of all had to be the poll conducted by Ann Selzer, which (somehow) showed Harris up 6 in Iowa. But either way, it all collapsed on November 5, when President Trump became President-elect Trump after winning the popular vote for the first time in 20 years.
Now, besides schadenfreude, what’s the point of us rehashing all of this? Simple: Because as we enter 2025, many of our readers may have noticed that neither the Democrats nor the mainstream media seem to be much of a factor in the American public consciousness anymore. In the recent intra-Right debate over the H1B visa program, for example, as our own senior editor Jack Posobiec pointed out, the mainstream media may as well have not existed. This is not because the mainstream media, or the Left, ceased operating. It’s because they told so many easily disproved lies, in such a short time, that to Americans, their proclamations have as much worth as the Nigerian Prince in their spam folder. The Left’s gaslighting has ended with them blind to their own flaws, and deaf to the voice of America, even as America turns away its eyes and ears from them. As we enter the second Trump presidency, and this new uncharted era, let us pray that we on the Right never take those eyes and ears for granted, as they did. Let us hope that we never become too enamored with the sound of our own voices to listen to our fellow Americacns. And let us remember that persuasion, not preaching, is what won us the right to define a new era in American politics. And most of all, let us leave the lies of 2024, and the people who told them, on the ash heap of history.
