“The most powerful way to change the world is to secretly commit little acts of compassion. You must behave as if your every act, even the smallest, impacted a thousand people for a hundred generations. Because it does.”

To sustain this new system, Thornton told me, nonprofit news organizations need diversified funding from membership, sponsorship, events, and philanthropy, which will need to support local media in perpetuity, the way they do the arts.

No one, except perhaps the authors of Project 2025, could have predicted that the so-called guardrails of democracy were made of papier-mâché, that this country could so quickly be teetering on the precipice of autocracy.