Last Thursday, liberal columnist Glenn Greenwald resigned from The Intercept, a website he co-founded in 2013. He did so because it refused to publish his latest column until “all sections critical of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden” were removed.

Above all else, this is what the 2020 election is all about.

With the possible exception of the Civil War era, America is as divided as it has ever been — by design. That division has been cultivated by a cadre of billionaire oligarchs intent on precipitating the “fundamental transformation of the United States” into a construct where they maintain absolute power. Nothing has better abetted that effort than the corporatist media they fully control and its now wholly transparent effort to censor information inimical to the interests of that oligarchy.

Fear — be it in the form of dire predictions about a Chinese virus exploited for political repression, or the implied threats of nationwide rioting if their preferred candidate loses the election — has been their most potent weapon of choice.

Equally integral to their efforts is orchestrated distraction. It is not even remotely accidental that memes such as “systemic” racism, critical race theory, “widespread” police brutality, white “privilege,” and black “victimhood” have become media staples regurgitated by academia, professional sports, Hollywood, virtue-signaling corporations, and the Democrat Party — to the point where everything has become politicized.

If Americans are obsessed with race, discussions about class are obscured. Discussions that would involve the massive amount of economic dislocation precipitated by those same oligarchs, whose accommodation of Chinese Communist thugs might be viewed as anything ranging from highly problematic to outright treasonous if such discussions were allowed to take place. Discussions currently dismissed as “xenophobic,” even as the damage inflicted by the Chinese has wreaked havoc so devastating that our entire society has been reordered to accommodate it.

This reordering has eviscerated millions of Americans’ constitutional rights in ways so selective and capricious they become impossible to defend. Thus, we have politicians, not one of whom has missed a single paycheck during the entire crisis, defining what constitutes “nonessential” and “essential” jobs and services — and nonessential and essential protests — wholly unrelated to the “science” those same politicians nonetheless insist is the sole motivator of their behavior.

In addition, the purposely generated fear surrounding the pandemic has precipitated record-setting levels of mail-in voting, with all the attendant possibilities for fraud and delayed results. In short, regardless of who wins the election, the most important purpose of these elitist-driven machinations will have been served:

The delegitimization of the election process itself in the eyes of millions of Americans.

What brought the nation to this point? The 2016 victory of a political neophyte who, despite his transparent character flaws, completely upended the political class’s conventional “wisdom” that was anything but and the seemingly inevitable trajectory of the globalist agenda Hillary Clinton’s victory would have assured.

In turn, Americans witnessed the exposure of an unelected, unaccountable shadow government, wholly in service to oligarch interests to the point of widespread corruption, even in the nation’s foremost law enforcement and intelligence agencies. They witnessed the ongoing revelation that millions of ordinary Americans are considered so “deplorable” they merit no consideration whatsoever, that justice is “selective,” and that “patriotism” and “national security” are anachronistic terms for “citizen of the world” elitists who view them as impediments to their personal wealth and power. They witnessed the reality that many members of the political class, irrespective of whether they have a “D” or an “R” next their names, are virtually indistinguishable from each other when it comes to accommodating the globalists’ desire for open borders and massive amounts of legal and illegal immigration — and the tacit approval of non-assimilation that enables the further erosion of our national ethos and cohesion.

For the progressives who drive all of this, nothing is sacrosanct — not the size of the Supreme Court, the composition of the Senate or its filibuster rules, the Electoral College, or even the Constitution itself, which is derided as the fever dreams of dead, slave-owning white men of privilege whose efforts should literally be obliterated. This will happen one toppled monument after another until a communistic Year Zero is realized — with all its attendant totalitarian permutations, even those wholly at odds with biological and chromosomal reality.

And nothing facilitates this agenda better than our media gatekeepers and their Big Tech collaborators who make Orwell’s Ministry of Truth seem tame by comparison. The most egregious of the bunch is arguably Twitter, which has succeeded in reducing virtually the entire national conversation to outbursts of 280 characters, exponentially more puerile and inflammatory than informing. That such a format defaults to emotion over intellect is no accident. The superficial appeasement generated by this modern-day version of “bread and circuses” has done a masterful job of keeping Americans ill-informed, even as they believe completely otherwise.

As for the rest of the mainstream media and Big Tech, we are rapidly approaching the point where they are becoming so powerful that if they don’t report something, for all intents and purposes it never happened.

Will a majority of Americans willingly choose to live in such a nation? Even if Trump wins, and by some miracle Republicans end up controlling Congress, the national trajectory engendered by the decades-long, endemic malfeasance of our education system cannot be denied. Year after year, we are producing more Americans whose ignorance is now so widespread that nearly two-in-three would not pass a U.S. citizenship test.

That such ignorance serves the progressive globalist agenda is undeniable. That which is largely unknown — or purported as flawed beyond reproach — is hardly worth defending, especially when doing so could get one “canceled” or even called before a Truth and Reconciliation Committee advocated by Robert Reich, a man who actually held a Cabinet-level position in the federal government.

Can the gulags and reeducation camps be far behind? Are younger, social media-addicted Americans, terminally distracted and developmentally stunted, even aware of such realities? Do they understand how quickly even the wokest of the woke can become the most deplorable of deplorables if it serves the “greater good” as it is defined by those who’ve made it clear “by any means necessary” is their sole guiding “principle”?

“It is in the hands of the American People to overcome their media manipulators — or to do their bidding,” columnist Dov Fischer warns. “But if the American People choose wrongly, it may not be in the hands of the American People again in our lifetimes later to rectify the error they could perpetrate — on themselves, on us.”

Quite simply, Donald Trump is the way forward. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris — who will likely replace Biden at the first opportunity — are the way back. Back to a well-documented history, littered with the millions of corpses socialist/Marxist governance has invariably produced.

The difference this time around? A historically unprecedented level of censorship and surveillance provided by their Leftmedia/Big Tech collaborators — and a pre-established template for draconian lockdowns, for any reason deemed necessary.

If Americans are ignorant enough to put people who despise this nation in charge of it, they should expect nothing less.