The establishment media and the political elites are reeling, and we have every reason to believe they will never recover.

Considering the massive coalition Donald Trump and his movement had to fight against, it may truly be said that the people — the people alone — have spoken more clearly than they have at any time in recent memory.

Against the always shrill, often hysterical opposition of the establishment media and the leaders of both the Democratic and the Republican parties, the American people have made it clear: they’re tired of politics as usual. It is time indeed to drain the swamp.

Trump’s victory shows that the hegemony of the globalists, the internationalists who have held sway in Europe and North America for decades, is decisively weakening. The Brexit vote in the UK and both the Trump candidacy and his victory show that huge numbers of people on both sides of the Atlantic are fed up with lies, hypocrisy, and self-serving corruption. The free world is fed up with the suicidal policies of the political elites, and their bought-and-paid-for mouthpieces among what are supposed to be objective news outlets.

Not that those elites are going quietly into the night. The upset win, they say, is proof of America’s deep-seated “racism” and “xenophobia.” It’s a sign that Americans are misogynistic, unwilling to countenance a female president and all too forgiving of Trump’s tasteless locker room bluster.

This is the line they took throughout the campaign. Few who opposed Trump — either among the Democrats or among the neo-mugwump NeverTrump faction — ever grasped what made him popular in the first place. They still (still!) have no idea what enabled this man, who had never been a politician and had all sorts of negatives regarding his personal behavior, to defeat sixteen Republican challengers, including several movement conservatives, and then to defeat the Clinton machine.

Trump’s success isn’t a sign that America is “racist.” It’s a sign that significant numbers of Americans want the United States to survive as a free nation. Among all those who excoriated Trump for his proposed temporary moratorium on Muslim immigration never addressed why he actually made the suggestion: not because of their lazy charge of “xenophobia,” but because of the real, rational concern that jihad terrorists will enter the United States among peaceful refugees.

The Islamic State has vowed to embed jihadis among the refugees; refugees were among the jihadis who murdered 130 people in Paris in November 2015.

No one who opposed Trump’s proposal ever offered an alternative way to keep jihadis out of the country. (Of course, the problem of those who learn jihad inside the U.S. is also acute, and must be addressed). Some glibly opined that Trump should ban “Islamists,” not Muslims as a whole, yet never suggested a reliable way to distinguish “Islamists” from ordinary Muslims. Indeed, the Islamic State has instructed its operatives to appear secular — to avoid ostentatious displays of Islamic piety that might arouse suspicions of “radicalization.”

Hillary Clinton promised that the refugees would be “vetted,” but in light of her refusal to acknowledge the Islamic doctrinal roots of Islamic jihad terrorism, it was unclear how she proposed to do this. How could U.S. officials vet for an ideology that they don’t admit exists? Tashfeen Malik, the Islamic jihadist who, along with her husband Syed Rizwan Farook, murdered fifteen people at a Christmas party in San Bernardino last December, showed how effective this “vetting” is: she had passed five separate background checks from five different U.S. agencies.

A majority of the American people saw through the same-old, same-old hollowness of Clinton’s proposals, and opted for a real choice, not an echo.

As Donald Trump begins his presidency, we may only hope that he continues his stinging critique of the political and media elites, and that he never surrenders to their inevitable attempts to regain power. They are the ones who have gotten us into this fix. It’s time for new faces with the courage and the will to do what it takes to get us out of it.