This is an opinion column.

There is wailing and gnashing of progressive teeth today. How could it happen?

How could a majority of voters – not just by electoral college but by popular vote – choose a guy with the kind of baggage Trump carries?

I’m writing this at 10 a.m. the day after the election and I’ve already seen so many tired takes from elite writers at the nation’s poshest publications that I need a garbage can to barf in.

There is so much outrage, so much disbelief that a majority of voters would overlook the charges and the buffoonery, the dictatorial tendencies, the sexism and racism and bullying and – stop. Just stop.

The outraged are acting as if the world is a normal place, where it’s 1972 and all it takes to change minds and hearts and presidencies is to point out problems. News Alert: It’s not 1972.

Old rules do not apply. The game has changed more radically than college football in the NIL age.

It doesn’t really matter what the New York Times says. It doesn’t matter what the Washington Post finds out, or whether they ran a Kamala Harris endorsement or not. It doesn’t matter what intellectuals write in the New Yorker, or the Atlantic. It doesn’t matter – I hate to say it – what I write here.

The rules have been rewritten. Skillfully and intentionally.

Progressives – the ones who are supposed to be forward-thinking – are stuck on old ideas about politics and information and truth and tradition. And bless them for it. But the ideas and ideals alone will take them only to disappointment.

Think about it.

Every week I turn on YouTube TV and there’s a Fox News channel suggested for me. Every week I click “Don’t show me this again,” because I don’t want to get my news from America’s second most dangerous immigrant. By the next week, inevitably, it’s always back.

Every time I log on to Facebook it seems I’m greeted with a featured meme containing misinformation. Every time I post a column about politics it is suppressed by algorithms.

Twitter – I can’t call it X, as the No. 1 most dangerous immigrant wants – has become trashier than the LSU student section.

I got stuck in an LSU student section in 2003, as Alabama got pummeled 27-3. Progressives, quite frankly, got their asses beat worse than that. Not just at the polls. Not at door-knocking or fundraising or passion.

They got their ass kicked because they keep thinking facts are enough, truth is enough, that old rules apply and old distribution systems still work.

They’ve been out-smarted and out-slimed. It took years, decades, but the systematic effort to discredit once-revered institutions has come home to roost. Thought leaders that served to balance power – academics, scientists, lawyers, journalists, historians, writers, educators – still cannot fathom a world without gatekeepers.

The legitimate press – people who go find stuff out, report only what they can back up and correct their errors when they get it wrong – has been demonized as enemies of the state. Partisan or unethical pretenders are lauded and real news is called fake.

Truth is devalued.

If you think this is about former and future President Donald J. Trump you are sorely mistaken. He didn’t put these events in motion, though he is gifted at using them to his advantage.

But this is much bigger than him.

America stares at real dystopian stuff, far beyond this election. Political strongmen and tech billionaires have changed the game.

So no matter how many elite writers carp about it, no matter how many Democrats mope about knocking on more doors or doing archaic things better – like actually putting candidates on the ballot in places like Alabama – nothing is going to change. Not until the information war is waged.

That war isn’t fought in newspapers or magazines anymore. It’s fought in algorithms and codes, for profit, by billionaires who face no consequences for the errors, for the lies and libels they host on their sites.

No penalty for allowing all who wish to shout fire in our crowded political theater.

Of course that needs to change.

But if you want to change it, you’re going to need some smart government regulation. Or – more likely – help from a billionaire.

John Archibald is a two-time Pulitzer winner.