The moment I learned FBI Director James Comey had let Hillary Clinton off from her email scandal a second time, I thought of the following interchange between WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange and interviewer John Pilger published only one day before:

JP: You get complaints from people saying, ‘What is WikiLeaks doing? Are they trying to put Trump in the Whitehouse?’ JA: My answer is that Trump would not be permitted to win. Why do I say that? Because he’s had every establishment off his side; Trump doesn’t have one establishment, maybe with the exception of the Evangelicals, if you can call them an establishment, but banks, intelligence [agencies], arms companies… big foreign money … are all united behind Hillary Clinton, and the media as well, media owners and even journalists themselves.

It’s almost as if this was all planned. Six hundred fifty thousand emails turn up on Anthony Weiner’s laptop. Some “rogue” characters at the NYPD say there’s something there. Comey is forced to reopen the case, creating consternation, and then closes it again in a week, 650K emails having been examined faster than less than half that number were vetted in well over a year.

All this on a day we learned that Hillary Clinton was sharing classified information with her maid! (We also learned, via Assange, that Saudi Arabia and Qatar funded both the Clinton Foundation and ISIS.)

As some guy we used to study in college until PC came along and he was dropped as a requirement from the syllabus wrote long ago, “Something is rotten in the state of… America.” (Well, not America, but you know the story.)

The question is—does this last minute Comey demurral make a difference? What percentage of the American public will change its view less than two days before polls open? My guess is not many, especially since the circumstances are so suspect. The mainstream media will blather on about how this may once again be a game-changer, but at this point the public is largely ignoring them. Few see them as other than propagandists, choosing to report what they wish and distort what they wish.

Meanwhile, the true hero of this election is the mainstream media’s polar opposite, Julian Assange, the man whose life is literally endangered while living under virtual house arrest in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. It is he—and his organization—who truly reports the news undistorted and unbiased through undisputed primary sources. It is he who has revealed to our country and the world how power works.

Originally, I was more than skeptical of Assange and would have agreed with Marco Rubio that paying attention to such a man is dangerous for obvious reasons of privacy and national security, not to mention, as Rubio notes, the shoe could be on the Republican foot in another election. I no longer believe that. What Assange has shown us is that the situation is far worse than any of us imagined, that the power of global elites is so great that political parties are almost irrelevant. These elites endanger our republic and the world to such a degree that transparency is mandatory.

While we should all respect, indeed yearn for, the protection of the freedoms of the individual private citizen, WikiLeaks demonstrates that our leaders, by choosing to take the power they have, should forego their privacy for the public good (except in national security situations, which they seem to treat cavalierly anyway.)

From reading the WikiLeaks, we learn that these leaders have no interest in transparency whatsoever. Rather, they seek to obfuscate for their own objectives, believing in a re-upped version of “the ends justify the means.” But their end is not even Marx’s naive and utopian “withering away of the state.” It’s far more selfish.

As revealed by the Podesta Emails, it’s the Clintons and their foundation that have become the state. L’État, c’est Clintons. We’re back to Louis XIV all over again.

It is Julian Assange who has confirmed this for us. That is why he is so hated by the elites and they insist he is in cahoots with the Russians. Assange denies this and so far no one has caught him in a lie. (It’s obvious any of a million people could have hacked into Clinton’s server.)

Whether he is correct that Trump will not be permitted to win we shall see on Tuesday. But whatever the result, this courageous man who has barely seen sunlight in four years deserves our respect.

He is also correct when he says that Hillary Clinton “has been eaten alive by her ambition.” I would go a bit further. She and her husband are the living embodiment of Lord Acton: “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Our new motto, thanks to Assange, should be: Transparency for leaders. Privacy for their citizens. I know that’s hard to attain. But that should be the message from the revelations of 2016.

Roger L. Simon is an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter, prize-winning novelist and co-founder of PJ Media. His most recent book is I Know Best: How Moral Narcissism Is Destroying Our Republic, If It Hasn’t Already.