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With just a week left before Election Day it’s obvious there’s been a major vibe shift in American politics, and the vibe shift is this: People aren’t afraid of publicly and unapologetically supporting Donald Trump any more. There are no “shy Trump voters” like there were in 2016 and 2020. The Trump voter has been liberated.

Just look at the Trump rally this weekend at Madison Square Garden. When was the last time a Republican presidential candidate packed out the Madison Square Garden? It’s never happened. 

And it doesn’t matter what our corrupt corporate media and degenerate cultural elite say. No one cares any more. They can rage and moan all day long about how Trump is a fascist, a second Hitler, a would-be dictator, and how all his supporters are a bunch of Nazis. It no longer has an effect.

Every media outlet ran headlines after the Madison Square Garden rally calling Tony Hinchcliffe’s Puerto Rico joke racist, tsk-tsking the supposed “vitriol” and “misogynistic remarks” of Tucker Carlson and other speakers. The New York Times said the “inflammatory rally” was a “closing carnival of grievances, misogyny, and racism,” and that Trump’s rhetoric “has grown darker and more menacing.”

Oh really? As dark as menacing as calling your opponent Hitler and his supporters Nazis? As dark and menacing as repeatedly insisting that your opponent represents a danger to American democracy and that his victory will usher in a military dictatorship?

The truth is, normal people no longer take this kind of fear-mongering seriously. The mere fact that Hinchcliffe felt comfortable doing a comedy set at a Trump rally, or that a popular comedian like Andrew Schulz had Trump on his podcast, tells you that these people know there’s no real social or professional cost to engaging with or even embracing Trump.

Why is this happening? One reason is that the media and the Democrats have overplayed their hand. They have lied so brazenly, been so dishonest and so obviously corrupt and self-dealing that regular people aren’t afraid anymore of being called the worst things possible by them. The people who hate Trump are the worst people in the country, and they think they can tell us who we can and can’t support? I don’t think so. The entire rotten edifice of public discourse gatekeeping in America is coming down, and it’s about time.

Attempts to shame Trump and his supporters, which might have worked at one point, are now falling flat. The Kamala Harris campaign reacted in a desperate, pathetic way to the Puerto Rico joke, posting a stilted, awkward rejoinder on X, as if Hinchcliffe’s joke was a policy statement from Trump himself. No one in America was actually offended by the joke, and the collective corporate media freakout about it was nothing but manufactured outrage. Americans have finally caught on to what these media outlets are doing, and they’re tuning it out — or just mercilessly mocking them.

To be sure, corporate media are still trying, in a feeble way, to gaslight us into thinking it’s “weird” to support Trump, or that Trump is somehow offensive, but the game is up. No one is buying it. In some cases, outlets are having to backtrack in real time. For example, on Sunday night San Francisco 49ers defensive end Nick Bosa, one of the most popular players in the NFL, crashed teammate Brock Purdy’s postgame interview in his MAGA hat. Didn’t say a word, just pointed to the hat.

NBC initially cut that part out of its post-game coverage, sharing an edited version to its 1.3 million followers on X Sunday night. But when complaints came flooding in, NBC deleted the edited version and posted the full clip on Monday morning. 

Meanwhile, the Harris campaign keeps trotting out celebrity endorsements like they’re going to move the needle. They’re not. Are we supposed to care that Leonardo DiCaprio, a 50-year-old creep who still dates women in their 20s, endorsed Harris? Or that Beyoncé, who almost certainly knows what was happening at all those Diddy parties, supports Harris?

No one cares. In fact, a lot of people are repulsed by these celebrity endorsements. And do you know why? Because our elites have burned their credibility to the ground. The people who think you’re a Nazi if you support Trump are also the people who lied to you about everything for years. They lied about Covid, lied about the border and the economy and inflation, lied about the insanity of the transgender movement and critical race theory and pornography in school libraries. All they do is lie. And if you notice their lies, they call you a bigot.

Perhaps worst of all, they lied for three years about President Joe Biden’s obvious and worsening cognitive decline. They only booted him from the ticket when it became impossible to lie about it anymore with a straight face, once we could all see for ourselves during the June presidential debate that Biden’s brain has turned to mush.

But they didn’t just swap Biden out for Harris. They refuse to acknowledge that Biden is not just unfit to run for president but to be the president. They still insist he’s fine! This isn’t a lie like the Russia collusion hoax, which was a little hard to follow at times and only worked because people are busy and have other things going on. This is the most obvious, bald-faced, outrageous lie imaginable. Everyone in America knows Biden has dementia, but the only people who won’t admit it are Democrats and the corporate press.

Same with the border fiasco. No one thinks the border is really secure, and no one thinks Democrats care about it or have any intention to fix it. We’ve all seen the horrifying news stories about illegal immigrants committing heinous crimes, murdering and raping American citizens, or entire foreign gangs taking over apartment complexes. Everyone knows this is happening because of Biden-Harris border policies, yet Harris continues to act like it’s not her fault. The only thing Harris could do to convince people she cares about the border would be to say, “I’m sorry, we were wrong about the border and we need to shut it down.” But she’ll never say that, just like she can’t say what, if anything, she would do differently than Biden. She just doesn’t have it in her.

When Trump first came on the scene in 2015, a lot of people didn’t know what to make of him. He was a famous entertainer and businessman, but he didn’t fit into the American political discourse, mostly because he was blunt and told the truth about what he really thought—something few career politicians dared to do. We were told it wasn’t respectable to support him, that he was boorish and offensive, that he was mean and dangerous, and so a lot of people hid their support for him, which made his victory something of a surprise.

But in the years since, everything has changed. The way the media and Democrats reacted to Trump’s 2016 victory, the impeachments and the Russia collusion hoax, the lies and corruption that came with Covid, the appalling failures and gaslighting of the Biden-Harris administration — all of it has destroyed their credibility and along with it whatever social stigma might have been attached to supporting Trump. 

Who knows what will happen next week, but one thing is certain no matter who wins: Americans are done being shamed for their political views by a bunch of self-appointed superiors. In a very real sense, after this election, we’re never going back.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.