"Well, f*ck."

It happened again. This time, it was even more deserved.

Give it up for the corporate press, the so-called experts on cable news, Iowa pollsters, Never Trumpers, and the Obama Extended Universe, they had us going there for a second.

With enough spit shine, a few hundred million dollars, and utter disdain for close to eighty million people, they almost pulled off successfully bluffing an electorate into believing someone all but historically unpopular was not just suddenly popular, but inevitable.

Joy incarnate. Our fourth term. The 2010s never ended!

Then that ‘confidence game’ came out in the wash.

When you lose the House, Senate, Electoral College, and the popular vote in one night — like you’ve been reverse Max Verstappen’d on one of those weekends where he barnstorms to fastest in practice, pole position, a victory, and the fastest lap — the lessons are as bountiful as the haul from a freshly looted Target over that “fiery but mostly peaceful” summer, or as robust as the pharma-industrial profits from gender-bending kids with Democrat approval.

But what matters here most, in the here and now, is the “fuck you,” and the “well, fuck.” Will the grotesque love child of neoconservatism, the far-left, and every industrial complex imaginable be able to take this shellacking, and learn the lesson?

Are they capable of self-reflection? Of shame?

When you escalate from “deplorables,” to Literally Hitler & The Garbage Nazis We Want To Smack In The Ass, how can one even come back from that?

The dirty K-street dollars and the insider trading bucks may help blot the tears, but this reality check should still carry some semblance of stopping power that lives long in the memory. In many ways, this is far more profound a lesson than the initial shock of 2016.

Manufactured in Machiavellian fashion by the Obama camp, they foolishly went back to the 2010s playbook, and back for the same weaponized brand of culture war guilt, the commoditization of identity, and the perceived ownership of young — and in particular minority — voting blocs.

In response to that insult, to deeply misplaced priorities in the face of government-made obsolescence, inappropriate encroachments into the classrooms and female locker rooms of the nation, the crushing weight of inflation, a breakdown of social order in the streets, and the flooding of the Southern border, every significant voter demographic bucked the Democrats like the warm-up act at a discount rodeo.

Young men turned out like they hadn’t in decades.

Hispanics voted massively for Trump.

Democrats lost points with Black Americans and even young women.

Gen X realigned, after witnessing the world they had mistakenly handed to their children.

It turns out those podcasts for tens of millions of people made a difference, that attempting to kill the 45th President of the United States on the campaign trail, twice, tends to have a rally around the flag effect, that calling the best vice presidential candidate in a generation, the most normal-sounding guy imaginable, “weird,” only works on a vanishingly narrow audience of miserable bohemians.

Who knew, right?

The Democrats knew. Their allies knew. The media knew. They had a lemon to sell, and boy, they put their backs into it.

That it didn’t work shouldn’t be surprising. From here forward, it should only be surprising if anyone falls for it again.

We’ve course-corrected into the truth and consequences era; it’s coming for the Liberal vanities of the last decade, it’s coming for an everyday life made needlessly nasty, brutish, and short.

For the last politicians standing, who have yet to accept their reckoning, best to to get those affairs in order.

Lie all you like. Attempt to protect Liberal-industrial kayfabe all you like. The populist rabble have had enough, they’ve caught on to the very nature of shadows on the wall; they now see that there are no lines, no immovable objects, no grotesque caricatures of once-sensible, moderate policies, that cannot be toppled like a 2020-2022 statue.

Learn the lesson — make it easier on yourself, Justin — or don’t. Defeat is coming all the same.

Hell of a night. Hell of a country. Enjoy some of the schadenfreude, then let’s get back to work.