I think you're close. If MIL had just stepped in and said "OK, folks. Let's explain what's going on and what we're going to do about it" then the public would have rejected the message en mass and the ideological war would've been lost. What needed to happen was to gauge the public perception carefully with a campaign with the overall goal of 94-96% "wakey uppy" effect. One of the most crucial aspects of this is a free press. Without free press, there is no accountability.
Gearing the public up using social media to question everything the MSM spouts out is key. Having to go through that "darkness" as a society was necessary to wake folks up. While the DS fights that fight on the front of public opinion, the good guys line up everything to legally take down the DS, one step at a time. They can't even stop it because they lost the election of 2016. If WH can prevent election theft in 2016, they could've prevented it in 2020.
This isn't about devolution. This is about how a quiet and benevolent stratocracy of patriots took the people of the world through the most difficult truths of our reality with the help of everyone that valued freedom and truth over power and corruption. The phase we're in is the part where the masses are starting to scratch their heads in unison, and starting to wake up slowly, but surely.