Welcome to the latest installment of the American Theater of the Absurd, where the lead actress is a former county clerk from Colorado and the script was written by a toddler with a grievance fetish. Tina Peters, the erstwhile Mesa County official who transitioned from mundane record-keeping to becoming the High Priestess of the 'Stop the Steal' cult, is currently serving a nine-year sentence for the high crime of being remarkably bad at covert operations. But because nine years in a cage isn’t quite cinematic enough for the MAGA hagiography, we now have the 'assault'—a claim so thin it makes the Colorado air seem dense. Peters alleges she was attacked in prison, but like every other narrative spawned from this particular brand of delusional populism, the surveillance footage appears to have a nagging disagreement with her version of reality.

Let’s be clear: the Left is currently masturbating to the image of Peters in a jumpsuit, convinced that her imprisonment is a victory for 'Our Democracy™.' It isn’t. It’s just a bureaucratic system finally getting fed up with one of its own cogs trying to jam the gears with sand and religious fervor. The Right, meanwhile, has elevated this woman—whose primary contribution to history was letting an unauthorized man play with voting machine software—to the status of a political prisoner. They speak of her as if she’s Nelson Mandela, provided Mandela had spent his time obsessed with Dominion voting spreadsheets and looking for ghosts in the hardware. It is a pathetic, symmetrical dance of stupidity where everyone involved thinks they are participating in a grand historical epic, when they are actually just fighting over the scraps of a dying administrative state.

The alleged assault is the perfect microcosm of the Peters era. She claims physical violation; the video shows... well, it shows the mundane, grinding friction of the American carceral system. It raises 'questions,' which is the media's polite way of saying the footage likely shows a woman experiencing the sudden, jarring realization that she is no longer a local celebrity with a gavel, but just another number in the system she claimed to represent. The drama is performative. It is the reflexive gasp of someone who has spent the last four years feeding on the adrenaline of being a 'warrior' and cannot handle the silence of a four-by-eight-foot cell. She needs the assault to be real because if she isn’t a victim, she’s just a felon who threw her life away for a man who wouldn't recognize her if she was standing on his golf ball.

Speaking of that man, Donald Trump has dutifully weighed in, calling for her release with the same mechanical regularity he uses to order a Diet Coke. To him, Peters is a disposable battery—a source of energy to be drained and then discarded. He doesn't care about the legal merits of her case or the physical safety of her person; he cares that her name can be used as a blunt instrument to beat the drums of 'persecution.' It’s a cynical symbiosis. She gives him a narrative of a 'stolen' life to match his 'stolen' election, and in return, he gives her the fleeting hope of a pardon that will probably never come, or at least won't come until he's found a way to monetize her release as a pay-per-view event.

This is the end state of a society that has replaced policy with personality and truth with 'vibes.' We are watching the slow-motion collapse of institutional trust, and the frontline isn't a battlefield—it’s a Mesa County server room and a prison hallway. Peters is the logical conclusion of a world where everyone is the protagonist of their own poorly written thriller. She isn't a hero, and she isn't a monster; she is a symptom of a deep, intellectual rot that has convinced half the country that laws are just suggestions for the 'un-enlightened' and the other half that a single conviction will somehow save the republic from its own incompetence.

In the end, the video doesn't really matter. The facts of the 'assault' are irrelevant to the people who have already decided she is a saint or a demon. We are trapped in a loop of manufactured outrage, watching a middle-aged woman play out a martyrdom fantasy while the actual world burns around us. It is boring, it is predictable, and it is exactly what a country this stupid deserves. Nine years is a long time to think about a software update, but in the current climate, it’s just enough time for the rest of us to find a new, equally mediocre martyr to scream about. Stay tuned for the next episode of 'Who Wants to be a Political Prisoner?'; the ratings are high, but the IQ of the audience is plummeting into the abyss.