A few days ago, a parrot named Eric saved his owner from a fire in the middle of the night. It happened in Canada and the bird has since become famous because it sounded the alarm before the smoke detectors did.

Most journalists in the European and American establishments are like those fire alarm systems, slower and more ineffective than Eric the Parrot. They insisted on a landslide victory for Joe Biden right up to the last minute, even though the only thing that looks anything like a landslide at this point is the defeat of the big corporate editorialists. If anyone thinks this will make them reflect, they don’t understand how contumacious the progressive bias is. For the sake of killing Trump, they were willing to declare that Joe Biden was a charismatic candidate and that Kamala Harris would lead the way in post-election national reconciliation. They were not making predictions, but trying to impose them.

At the 2010 World Cup, Paul the Octopus became famous. He was a cephalopod from the Sea Life Centre in Oberhausen, Germany, credited with extraordinary intelligence from a very young age by his handlers. To test his talent, they used him to predict the results of the World Cup, giving him a choice between several pairs of boxes of food, each one with the flag of a different country in contention. Paul the Octopus, also known as the Psychic Octopus, got all eight pairings right, becoming the first demoscopic star from the family of octopodiformes. After witnessing what happened last week, I’m convinced that the octopus soothsayer, Eric the Parrot, and Phil the Groundhog would have predicted the election results better than all the editorialists, pollsters, and analysts combined.

That the United States is closing the door on socialism—at least partially—remains the greatest contribution to world politics that the most important democracy of our century could have made. For months, and right up to election night, the left was leaning towards revolution, either by trying to make it or by excusing it. At the height of the pandemic, the Axis of Evil embodied by Cuba, Venezuela, and, of course, China, continues to gain allies for its cause through violence. Chile is the latest example, surrendering to the left after many months of enduring the flames of burning churches and stores.

Biden and Harris have played that satanic game: if you want riots, vote for Trump; if you want peace, vote for us. Yet that game can go very wrong, because if anything goes with the American DNA, it is respect for freedom. And nobody likes to be threatened, especially not if the one promoting the coercion is a guy like Joe Biden, who only had the courage to quietly condemn Black Lives Matter violence when the polls—the real ones, the inside ones—predicted that street chaos could take a toll on his campaign.

Although the American political battlefield is still wide open, the fundamental aspect of what happened last week was the discrediting of the big media outlets. It’s not just that their crazy election predictions weren’t right. It’s that the four years they’ve spent pontificating about the present era, as though speaking on behalf of all Americans, have just collapsed like a house of cards.

Immigrants have backed Trump, BLM’s street noise has nothing to do with the sentiment of the majority of the American people, the president’s pro-life attitude has not been discredited, and the middle class is far more concerned with the economy, work, and freedom than Ms. Harris’ personal obsessions with gender identity, her publicized and put-on-display Indian heritage, and the sexual diversity of the Pacific Ocean’s Marianna Trench amoebas.

The Democrats and their allies in the media led us to believe that Trump was backed by a band of freaks, little more than unscrupulous bounty hunters, conspiratorial leaders, and drunken cowboys who organize riots every night in the cantinas. Now we can see that, no, Trump represents at least half of the country, and especially the working class, the humble and simple people, the small business owners, the families that sustain the salaries and vices of the establishment and the various public administration bureaucracies with their daily work and their taxes. Without them, without their money and their work, neither the Hollywood millionaires of the caviar left nor the government officials would have been able to back a candidacy as crazy and inconsistent as Biden’s. They would have been too busy trying to make a living by their own means to entrust the U.S. economy to the extreme left of someone like Kamala Harris.

Moreover, the fact that none of the candidates won a landslide victory invites a certain amount of contention, regardless of who finally wins. That a country is politically divided is not a drama, but the health and economic crisis that is hitting everyone makes it necessary to close wounds as soon as possible and to seek a national reconciliation that, although difficult, is not impossible—if the left renounces once and for all intimidation through street violence. Perhaps we ought to look towards a celebrated definition from the Spanish satirist Jardiel Poncela: “Love is a man and a woman who agree on one point and disagree on everything else.” After all, it’s not a matter of giving in ideologically, but of seeking unity and points of union. It’s the people alone—and not the politicians—who can get the United States out of the chasm into which the Chinese virus has plunged the entire West. And we all need it.

Itxu Díaz is a Spanish journalist, political satirist and author. He is a contributor to The Daily Beast, The Daily Caller, National Review, The American Conservative, The American Spectator and Diario Las Américas in the United States, and a columnist for several Spanish magazines and newspapers. He was also an advisor to the Ministry for Education, Culture and Sports in Spain. Follow him on Twitter at @itxudiaz or visit his website www.itxudiaz.com.