In this year’s presidential election, one party’s nominee took part in a primary, had the party’s voters decide whom they wanted, secured the nomination, and proceeded to get over 74 million votes in a decisive democratic victory.

The other party had no primary. Eventually, they decided their de facto presidential nominee was too feeble-minded, so they couped him and installed a new nominee with no primary. And she lost. Bigly.

But this is not what made Donald Trump the champion of liberalism in this race. The Democrats’ electoral process, or lack thereof, needs to be pointed out time and again. The party forever claiming that Donald Trump is a threat to democracy couldn’t be bothered to practice it.

But no, on top of this, Biden-Harris Democrats and their allies weaponized the legal system against Trump, attempted to throw him off state ballots, attempted to imprison him, forced third-party challengers off ballots, restricted free speech, and threatened to continue attacking and regulating free speech should they win.

These are the acts of authoritarians. This is tinpot dictator stuff not typically associated with modern American politics.

And the Democratic Party was comfortable with all of it as it was happening and would have grown even more comfortable with it had they continued to occupy the White House.

This sentiment is party-wide. I would argue with Democratic friends about the lawfare used against Trump. Most Democrats thought every charge against Trump was justified. They would not question it even a little. They had rationalized it. When I would insist that what so many Democrats now consider “misinformation” or “hate speech” was still protected speech, these people would reject this notion. Often vehemently.

The 2024 Democratic presidential ticket openly rejected the First Amendment. So what would anyone expect the average Democratic voter to think?

When the hosts of ABC’s The View were melting down on the day after the election, co-host Sara Haines said, “if we could regulate social media”—“we” meaning Democrats—that Trump’s victory might have been avoided.

No one on that panel batted an eye.

This kind of rampant illiberalism has devoured Democrats’ brains.

Reason’s Billy Binion commented on X about Haines’s remark: “I say this as someone who is not a Republican: If the only way you can win is by using the power of the state to silence people who disagree with you, then you do not deserve to win.”

Exactly. Thankfully, Democrats didn’t win.

Not just because they deserved not to win. But because they needed to lose.

We have reached that point. This is beyond mere disagreement, which should always be respected.

If you can’t explain to a fellow American why free speech is sacrosanct, where do you go from there? If an American citizen no longer sees any harm in the government going after their political opponents, what do you do with that?

You don’t do anything. All reason has left the room.

So you squash them like a bug.

There were people who value basic liberalism who didn’t vote for Trump for president in this election. Many old-school liberals and progressives supported the Green Party’s Jill Stein. Many classical liberals and libertarians voted for the Libertarian Party’s Chase Oliver. Millions did vote for Trump, obviously.

But the one party for which liberalism was not part of the platform in 2024 was the Democrats. The increasingly illiberal left, impervious to reason or their own former principles, just had to be defeated, preferably soundly, and was.

Trump is no liberal. But he is now the leader of the only major American political party that still champions and defends, however imperfectly, the most elementary precepts of what generations have long understood as basic constitutional liberties, inherited by all Americans and protected by their Constitution.

This can never be tossed away. I don’t care how much blind rage Democrats have for Donald Trump.

With Trump’s newer allies and fellow travelers like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Vivek Ramaswamy, Elon Musk, respected media advocates like Tucker Carlson and Joe Rogan—all of whom expressed a deep need to protect the freedoms I’ve listed here—we have the possibility of a brighter future. Far more than if the next president was going to be Kamala Harris.

Thank God she didn’t win. For liberalism.

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