I’m not usually one to say I told you so, but it’s been two long years of being called a fool, a Pollyanna, a Q-tard, or even a Boomer in online forums for predicting what just happened. So just once: I TOLD YOU SO. Not you personally, just people.

Ah, that’s better. So now that we’ve finally reached this turning point, let’s review how we got here before talking about what comes next.

The Clinton campaign had a problem with Russia, namely too many corrupt connections to Russia/Ukraine. Their own polling told them that was a major weak spot with their own voters when it was pointed out to them. At the same time, Trump was boasting about his good relationship with Putin, as a way to argue that his lack of political experience didn’t mean he didn’t have foreign policy experience, since he had dealt with foreign leaders for business reasons. So they decided to accuse Trump of being too close to Putin.

It was a pretty smart tactic. If you think someone might accuse you of something, accuse him of it first. That way if he does accuse you in turn, it looks like tit-for-tat, and you could end up with a stalemate. So they started the “Putin puppet” narrative.

But once that narrative was in the air, people started using Mah Russia as a boogeyman for everything. When the DNC’s emails showed up at Wikileaks, the DNC’s IT consultant (a Russian-founded company, by the way) blamed it on Russian hackers. Online trolls invented the “pee tape” dossier and passed it to a desperate NeverTrumper who passed it to media and eventually it found its way through several hands (including John McCain’s) to end up printed by Buzzfeed. And when a pair of traitors at the FBI decided to make up an “insurance policy” just in case Trump won, they and their friend in British intelligence and some other friends at another Russian company called Fusion GPS came up with the Russian collusion theory and a fake dossier to support it.

But then Trump won. The establishment didn’t think that was even possible, because they gaslit themselves too well with their own push-polling and their refusal to believe the raw results they were getting in the battleground states. They assumed they would have at least four years of a Clinton presidency in which to cover their tracks. Suddenly they were desperate, so the insurance policy had to be used, and a campaign meme had to be turned into a criminal investigation.

Here’s the thing: they all knew. All the congressmen and media talking heads who pushed so hard on this knew it was bullshit. The Hollywood celebrities probably knew too, though I shouldn’t underestimate their stupidity. I know they knew because I knew, and they certainly have better sources than I do. They knew all along everything I wrote above, and they pushed ahead with it anyway because OrangeManBad. They just counted on Mueller to find something, because they projected on Trump and figured he probably did the kind of things they would do, so there would be a smoking gun about something. And if there wasn’t on him, there would be on one of his kids, and they could use that as leverage to get rid of him.

Unfortunately for them, businessmen have to play by the rules more carefully than politicians do, because they don’t have the same power to cover up their crimes. So he actually was clean, and Mueller really couldn’t find anything after two years of trying. They’ve invested two years of political capital into a fraud. They haven’t even gotten serious about finding good candidates or assembling a decent platform for 2020 yet, because they invested all their hope in Mueller doing the job for them. Now here we are.

So what comes next? Well, first of all, the media will claim it’s not over. They’ll say some flowery legalese in the report means there are still avenues for investigation, or claim some other investigation is the really important one. THEY WILL BE LYING, just as they’ve been lying about Mah Russia for nearly three years. You’ll be able to tell because their lips will be moving. They shouldn’t double-down, but they will, because they never had a Plan B. All they can do is keep pushing Plan A until it goes off a cliff.

Another thing they’ll do is try to rewrite history, claiming they didn’t just spend two years praying for Mueller to save them, holding #ProtectMueller protests every time the media said he might get fired, and saying we all must trust Mueller and the FBI. Fortunately, all their embarrassing “Mueller Time” memes are saved and ready to roll back out to remind them.

Aside from that, now we get to see if there’s a second act to all this. When Mueller interviewed people like Manafort and Podesta, did he carefully avoid any lines of inquiry that would bring up their Clinton dealings? Or did he pass that along to the DoJ, which has been pursuing it separately? I don’t have a solid read on that yet, but it would explain some nagging questions if that’s what’s been going on.