Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone

Houston, we have a problem.Now that COVID is long gone, and studios are putting out blockbusters again, it almost seems like things are back to “normal.” Yet, movie after movie keeps underperforming, which is a polite way of saying Hollywood movies are bombing at the box office.Why? Well, I don’t have to tell you why. You know why. Everyone knows why except the people tasked with covering Hollywood who are too afraid to say why. You can’t fix a problem you can’t name.In a recent poll, 42% cite movies getting worse as the main reason they no longer pay to see them. Why have they gotten worse? Because Hollywood swapped great storytelling for franchise movies long ago, then they transformed those franchise movies into agenda-delivery devices. Get full access to Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone at sashastone.substack.com/subscribe This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

The first time I realized I was a proud American was the month I spent in Italy in 1997 with a man who would become the father of my child that month, unbeknownst to either of us. The news was earth-shattering to him because we were worlds apart. We fought and then broke up over the best decision I ever made, to keep my child.He complained about America a lot, and I tolerated it, but then I found myself protective and defensive of my country.“Yeah, well, you sure like our Levis and our Marlboros,” I said. “Not to mention our movies.” I had him there. I knew in that moment that I was a patriot. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

Part One: The Timeline is here.Are we living through a culture war or a religious war? Can we even tell the difference by now?The Left demonized the religious for nearly all of my life, yet here we are, a country at the hands of a cult, and the intellectuals can’t get us out of it — No proper boundaries to protect children, no guiding principles beyond categorizing us by skin color or gender identity, a godlessness that has left us awash in narcissism and hollowed out morality.Progressivism is an invasive species. It can’t stop on its own. It has to blow through everything.The #MeToo and Times Up movements collapsed. The funds dried up for Black Lives Matter. The box office in Hollywood is like a ghost town. All they have left now is to invade the minds and hearts of children to indoctrinate them into this bizarre new cult that seemingly came out of nowhere (aka Tumblr, Circa 2012). This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

The Summer of 2020 was both a revolution and a coup, ultimately resulting in an unshakable pact between the Woke and all major corporate and cultural institutions in this country, up to and including the President of the United States.It isn’t a cult of one personality but of many. It’s a tawdry tale of influencers and algorithms, fast-moving technology and helicopter parents, social media, and Critical Theory. But Joe Biden is no cult leader. He’s more like a George Spahn figure, presenting a more acceptable front while the Manson family did as they pleased behind the scenes.\ This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

My Dad called me “happy Sash,” which was ironic because I was never a happy kid. I was a worried kid, just like I’m a worried adult. My dad would say it often, “she’s a Happy Sash.” I think he wanted me to be happy because then maybe he wouldn’t worry. He was a worrier too.There aren’t many pictures of me as a baby, but here’s one. That’s me in the middle. As you can see, not exactly smiling. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

“We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men – not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular” - Edward R. MurrowAny honest person knows that the Federal indictment of Trump is “shockingly weak.” Worse than that, it’s yet another lie pushed on Americans about Trump.Trust me, I know. I used to be one of them. We started lying around 2012, once we realized how powerful Twitter was when it came to manufacturing the narrative we wanted. We rescued Obama’s second term by turning Mitt Romney into something he wasn’t.That was a newfound superpower. We could manufacture the reality we wanted, but the price we would pay over time was to slowly but surely become disconnected from the truth.Lying became like heroin. We needed higher and stronger doses for it to be effective. It couldn’t just be “Dick Cheney is a war criminal” or “W. Bush was the President Select.” It must be Trump is not just an “existential crisis” but an invasion of OUR country. And that meant they would have to go to war. And in the fog of war, anything goes. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff — I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye. - JD SalingerTaylor Swift’s concerts have become cultural phenomenons, religious-like experiences for so many people worldwide, especially little girls. Happy moms post videos of their flushed, excited faces and near-hysteria at the first sight of their idol.It’s girl world, to be sure. But it’s also become, like so many other things in American culture, LGBTQIA world too, like the upcoming Barbie movie is sure to be. There doesn’t seem to be anywhere left that belongs only to girls. From locker rooms to sports to clothes and makeup, girls are vanishing. Recently, Taylor Swift “got political,” and was no doubt backed into a corner by activists demanding she take a loud public side against what they believe are “harmful” laws hurting their community. Which laws? They don’t say, and you aren’t allowed to ask. They’re all bad, they insist. You’re with us, or you’re against us. There is one law growing in prominence not just here but in other countries too, and that’s to put the breaks on “gender-affirming care” for minors. But if you support gay marriage or you want to be a good ally, you have to go along with that too, you have to be part of a movement that is sterilizing children legally, in the United States in 2023. Most people, including Taylor Swift, have no idea just how bad things have gotten. I too was mostly unaware of what “gender-affirming care” actually means. I also didn’t know how bad things had gotten for women in sports. Denying biological reality seems to be something fundamentalist religions do, not educated liberal societies, yet here we are, insisting trans women are women. They can believe that if they want to but it doesn’t make it true. The media does such an expert job of pandering to activists, pretending like it’s a small percentage of athletes. But the truth is that there is widespread suppression of dissent and a climate of fear that keeps so many from speaking out about how this is not just a tiny movement anymore. It’s the core identity and belief of the Democratic Party. They can’t see this as a social contagion because that news never enters their feedback loop. All they hear, over and over again, is “protect trans kids.” Does protecting them include making them infertile? Does it include surgery that creates a false opening that must be dilated several times a day, or it closes up? Does it mean eliminating their sexual function? For life?Standing up to any of it is hard. We all saw what happened to JK Rowling. The activists are out in force, patrolling reading lists, science labs, school libraries, and all media outlets. Just in writing this, I run the risk of losing everything. But so what? I’ll take my talking points from exiled scientists - the new heretics of our time, like evolutionary biologists Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein:As long as we still have a First Amendment, there is no justifiable reason to stay silent on something so urgent. Controlling speech has been the only reason this madness has gone as far as it has. But thankfully, the voices of dissent are getting louder, and there is strength in numbers. When Twitter, under Elon Musk’s ownership, struck a deal with the Daily Wire to stream What is a Woman on the first day of Pride, they got spooked enough to pull the deal unless they removed two scenes they labeled “hate speech.” One of those scenes included a desperate father who had been charged with child abuse for misgendering his own daughter, as he fought to stop her from life-altering medical intervention.Thankfully, Musk stepped in and put the kibosh on Twitter censorship, even tweeting out the film to his followers. By the end of the weekend, it had been viewed close to 200 million times. Because of Matt Walsh standing up and speaking out, and because Elon Musk bought Twitter, more people know about what goes on behind closed doors at gender clinics, at universities, and in the minds of so many well-meaning politicians. How is it we have arrived in 2023 and the people sticking up for truth, science, and reason are the Conservative Christians?Here are some of the film’s best scenes:The activists have pushed the American public too far. While most everyone was accepting of gay rights and gay marriage, they kept moving the line. Now, elementary schools are making Pride somehow part of their curriculum. But Pride isn’t what it used to be. It’s not the many gay parents I got to know while I was raising my daughter. It’s now expanded like a mushroom cloud to include this unforgivable abuse of minor children under the Orwellian term “medical care.” At this point, I know beyond any doubt that there is no fixing the Left. There is only leaving - leave the schools, leave the therapists, leave the online bubbl

I used to be a true blue loyalist. My grandmother, an FDR Democrat, and lifelong social worker, kept a signed picture of Bill Clinton on her kitchen wall until the day she died. My earliest memory kicks it all the way back to 1988 when I wore a Dukakis button to work and was mocked for it. “Who would vote for du-Taxus,” one woman said. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

As I began my drive across this big, beautiful country of ours, I saw real life going on. RVs filled with families hitched to trucks making their way somewhere. Lights turning on at grocery stores. Workers high atop utility poles fixing electrical lines. I drove through cities and pastures, across state lines, and on an interstate conceived and built by President Eisenhower. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

The same network that called Tucker Carlson a “Right-wing extremist” has decided to put Donald Trump back on prime time. As their hypocrisy comes full circle, a pathetic #boycottcnn hashtag bloomed on Twitter. As if.CNN’s ratings were in near-total collapse when Trump threw them a lifeline. By contrast, the Murdochs dumped their best ratings-getter for speaking too many uncomfortable truths.To many on the Left, reality and truth are negotiable. They can fool themselves into believing Carlson was dumped for being a “racist” and “inciting violence.” But Fox News clearly had no idea what they had with Tucker Carlson and now they’ve taken one step closer to their own demise. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

“Fear not the path of Truth for the lack of People walking on it.” ― Robert F. KennedyA new poll by ABC News/Washington Post shows both Trump and DeSantis beating Biden by 6 points.According to this poll, the public does not believe Biden is fit to serve mentally or physically.@Politics_Polls Has the mental sharpness it takes to serve effectively as president: Joe Biden: Yes 32% No 63% Donald Trump: Yes 54% No 43% .Is in good enough physical health to serve effectively as president: Joe Biden: Yes 33% No 62% Donald Trump: Yes 64% No 28%None of this matters much when you have abandoned the truth and depend on a manufactured reality curated by a partisan public relations department disguised as legacy media. And no one is all that worried. They know the fix is in. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

“Free societies...are societies in motion, and with motion comes tension, dissent, friction. Free people strike sparks, and those sparks are the best evidence of freedom's existence.” ― Salman RushdieLast week, Democrats Chuck Schumer and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez locked arms with Conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch to silence Tucker Carlson off Fox News.Yes, the same side that once fought against the Black List and for cultural icons like Lenny Bruce and the Red Hot Chili Peppers was now cheering on defacto censorship by an oligarch. What a change from the old Left. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

[Imaginary Tucker Carlson Monologue for Monday, April 24th, 2023]TUCKER CARLSON: “Good Evening, and welcome to Tucker Carlson Tonight. No doubt you’ve heard of the name Ray Epps. You have heard his name many times on this broadcast in connection with the events of January 6th. You’ve heard me tell you that our government was lying about what happened that day and that they haven’t stopped lying, and that they have an entire media empire helping them lie to you every day.But those compliant patsies are never going to be threatened with legal action, like a defamation case, to shut them up, just like all of the talk about hacked voting machines after 2016 by Jill Stein and many in the media never led to defamation cases like the one Fox just settled with Dominion for $800 million.Oh no. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

“When you're at the end of your rope, tie a knot and hold on.” ― Theodore RooseveltJoe Biden and the Democrats could learn something from what just happened on Twitter, where a populist revolt is currently underway. The blue check scam was powerful - a minority of elites who have granted themselves outsized influence on the media narrative, the Democratic Party and reality itself.Elon Musk played a game of cat and mouse with the blue checks first by taking them away, then giving them back after they launched a dumb hashtag campaign because the “unwashed masses” could now have access to status on Twitter. It was obscene but telling. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

beware those who are quick to censorthey are afraid of what they do not knowbeware those who seek constant crowds forthey are nothing alone - Charles BukowskiAn old friend texted me recently to ask how I was handling the “new Twitter.” I had to think for a minute, and then I realized that in the language of the Left, he meant that Elon Musk had bought the site, and now it’s overrun by hate speech and neo-Nazis. Do I still feel safe using it? “Oh,” I texted back. “I’m not in the bubble of the Left anymore, so it doesn’t bother me. I like it. I am a fan of free speech.” There was a long pause, something I’ve become accustomed to when conversing with someone on the Left. They don’t want to argue. They don’t want to go any further. They just want to slowly back away. The idea that Twitter was now overrun by “hate speech” was just an accepted reality because that is how much power the blue-checks on Twitter have to influence the mainstream media narrative, which trickles down everywhere.But when a viral video circulated with a BBC reporter who could not name even one example of hate speech, that didn’t make news in the mainstream because it contradicted the narrative.The story will make the rounds on the Right, but the mainstream narrative has more power, and if a story contradicts the government’s official narrative, it will never make the news. That’s still true with Musk as the new owner, but it’s a step up from the government using Twitter as a filter to silence dissent. That Twitter users had enough power and status to decide reality is what made Twitter dangerous. This has been true since the beginning, as it slowly became the most powerful propaganda tool the Democrats had. Once Musk took over Twitter and decided the blue checks were granting status to people deemed “special” but not to others, he set about messing with their own self-importance by taking away their privilege of the verification badge, giving users who pay a monthly fee the opportunity to have a blue check instead.What is brilliant about this, and maybe most people don’t get it, is that Musk understood the collective power of the blue-check army and now he’s punctured it, dismantled it, like stealing all of their horses in the middle of the night, leaving them nowhere to go to fight the next battle. But they aren’t used to anyone challenging their power. Musk has been feeling the impact of their collective wrath ever since. HOW DARE YOU! “I’m not paying for that,” they proclaimed. But oh, how delicious it will be to see some of these once-mighty prominent legacy blue-checks naked without that little verification symbol. Supposedly that’s somehow ruined Twitter. What it’s done is democratize it. It might be more chaotic now, maybe even slightly more unpredictable, but that makes it more thrilling, not less. What “ruined” Twitter was the #resistance, transforming the platform into one massive propaganda outlet for The Democrats in an imaginary battle with Donald Trump that began in 2017, when the company tweaked its algorithm to push more engaged tweets to the top of everyone’s feed.Even if they have the choice to see “latest Tweets,” most prefer to see what tweets are driving the narratives in a given day so they can ride the wave of outrage, whatever is trending, whatever person is “it,” who can be dunked on, humiliated or bullied into an apology or chased off the platform entirely.The bullying on Twitter had become a problem, not just for users, but corporations and institutions that were suddenly worried about being hurled into the public arena for shaming. That is Twitter’s curse and power, which is why Musk never needed to sweat competition like Substack Notes. As someone who has been swarmed and bullied more times than I can count, I already feel a little more free using Twitter now. They’re right that it has changed. But Musk didn’t ruin it. He rescued it.Elon’s StumbleElon Musk has made, by my calculations, only one major mistake since he took over Twitter, and that was assuming journalist Matt Taibbi owed him something after the two broke the all-important Twitter Files story. He thought Taibbi should move his Substack over to Twitter to help Twitter profit. But this vindicated the hysterical rantings by people like Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Mehdi Hasan. They accused Taibbi and others of being bought and paid for by “the Richest Man in the World.” Now they had proof that was the intention all along.Taibbi, however, was never working for Musk, and if he has any loyalty, it’s to Substack, where he’s built his substantial following of readers like me who rely on him to tell us the truth. It’s also his main source of income. Musk isn’t paying him. It wasn’t so much what he did to Taibbi that was the mistake. It was more about giving up a powerful Chess piece he had with the alliance of journalists investigating the Twitter files. Despite how the legacy media has been trying to downplay it, it is the story of the year, maybe of the

“In a country that doesn't discriminate between fame and infamy, the latter presents itself as plainly more achievable.” ― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About KevinAudrey/Aiden and Riley GainesIf we had strong leaders in the White House, which we do not, they would have stepped up to a podium somewhere after the mass shooting at Christian Covenant and the attack on champion swimmer, Riley Gaines by trans activists and tried to lower the temperature.Instead, just days after the shooting, the President took the opportunity to blame Republicans, especially those in Tennessee still reeling from a shocking massacre at a Christian school. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

“Weimar Germany conjures up fears of what can happen when there is simply no societal consensus on how to move forward and every minor difference becomes a cause of existential political battles,” ― Eric D. Weitz, Weimar Germany: Promise and TragedyJust two years into the Joe Biden presidency, it has become abundantly clear that the only people actively trying to destroy this country are the Democrats and the cult that has overtaken them.How much worse could it possibly get than a former President of the United States indicted in the city that made him on a case that no one believes in good faith was legitimate? No government that believes in America would ever do such a thing to rip this country apart, especially after COVID, after the Summer of 2020, and after January 6th. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

“Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form.” ― Herman Melville, Moby-DickIn 2016, Donald Trump became the 45th President of the United States. Like all presidents, he was elected to do the best job he could in service of the American people. Our elections are meant to tell our government what we want. But somewhere along the way, we’ve lost touch with what this country was designed to be - a Constitutional Republic.We don’t go through the trouble of elections to have them systematically undermined because the administrative state, and an elite ruling class, don’t like dealing with someone they can’t control. We don’t spend four years throwing everything at our elected leaders to see what sticks. We don’t send our Department of Justice to raid the home of a former president to “find something.” We don’t punish our elected leaders just for the crime of winning.We don’t indict them on ticky-tack procedural matters because the person now in the White House is too weak and too unpopular to win a second term. In this country, it’s supposed to be a fair contest between those who win the primary elections. Putting that heavy of a thumb on the scale is corruption on a level we’ve never seen, at least not in my lifetime. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

Because the truth is, it was never really about Trump. It was about us. What we were before Trump, what we did while Trump was in office, and what we’re doing now. Sooner or later, the clock is going to run out on this madness. Democrats can’t live with or without Trump. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

It’s kind of amazing that there was ever a time in American life when we pledged ourselves one Nation under God, isn’t it? It seems we are no longer that and have become fractured into many different nations, not even just two. But it does seem very clear that a new religion is upon us. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

Utopias by their nature have only two options if they’re to survive. They must lean into totalitarianism or collapse. We’re now at the moment when the Democrats, with complete control of the legacy media, nearly all major institutions of power — including those run by the government — are slowly adopting totalitarian practices to shut out speech they don’t like. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

How is it possible that the highest-grossing, best-reviewed film of the year - by critics and audiences - that was credited with saving the film industry amid near-total collapse would not be winning Best Picture at the Oscars on Sunday, March 12th? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

President Biden is anxious to take his rightful place in history as a real president, not an establishment stooge who kicked around congress for decades, or a guy who has to be told where to stand, what to say, where to go. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

“The modus operandi of every cult is to convince you there's something wrong with you and only they can fix it.” ― Marty RubinI grew up in the era of cults. My siblings and I attended a small elementary school in Topanga Canyon back in the 1970s, when it was still a wilderness of hippies and health food stores - not a safe haven for the 1%.We were heathens, without a doubt, raised like weeds by a former beauty queen who had dropped out of high school at 16 to have my older brother. She met my father at a nightclub called Pandora’s Box in Hollywood. If you look carefully you can see it in the background of Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

This is the podcast version. If you’d like to read the text version, that is here. I usually post them together but this time I didn’t. Which do you prefer? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

“The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.” John Steinbeck, East of EdenA few days ago, the most powerful, high-profile news media in this country were thoroughly humiliated by Jeff Gerth at the Columbia Journalism Review with a four-part series called The Press Versus The President.Fair-minded and stubbornly objective, this awards-worthy piece of investigative journalism, begins the hard work of sifting through the past seven years to try to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

“I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical. Unsuccesful rebellions indeed generally establish the incroachments on the rights of the people which have produced them. An observation of this truth should render honest republican governors so mild in their punishment of rebellions, as not to discourage them too much. It is a medecine necessary for the sound health of government.” ― Thomas Jefferson, Letters of Thomas JeffersonThe Great UprisingI grew up as a child of the 1970s where I watched the rise and fall of the counterculture protest movements that included everything from Kent State to Patti Hearst, the bombing of the Capitol, the Black Panthers, Gloria Steinem, and eventually, the Manson murders would douse the flames and drive the silent majority far, far away from the Left. I also remember Nixon’s landslide win in 1972 and how hopeless that made everyone on the Left feel, like all of it had been for nothing. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

2016 was meant to be the crowning achievement for the Hillary Democrat. Those who stuck by her in her in 2008, during the Benghazi hearings, the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the non-stop criticisms of her during Bill Clinton’s presidency, and the early feminists who followed her leadership out of college and into politics that would eventually make the impossible possible: The first woman President of the United States.I was one of them. The more research I did on the life and career of Hillary Rodham Clinton the more I came to respect and admire her. I made videos, I fought hard on Twitter with Trump supporters and “Bernie bros.” I wrote essay after essay on Medium to boost enthusiasm. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

Do you remember good movies? I mean, really good movies you had to see in the movie theater the second they came out? Movies so good you would sacrifice your grocery money to see? Do you remember lining up for hours on opening day?I do. I didn’t just watch movies, I lived in them. I grew up on top of a mountain in Topanga Canyon, back when it wasn’t a gated community for the 1% but was instead the land of the hippies - the Manson Family and the Rolling Stones. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

Two years ago, I started this Substack to find a path out of the madness that had overtaken the Left. The madness was everywhere. People were getting fired right and left, mostly left, for saying words they weren’t supposed to say. There was a sudden climate of fear that was crippling nearly every institution of power, most especially the one I work in: Hollywood.The fear was that there were racists and rapists everywhere and in everything. Sex and race became two major mass hysteria events in this country after the election of Donald Trump in 2016. To Trump supporters, his win was nothing less than a miracle. A smart strategy involving a few key swing states to bring in a slim Electoral College victory, mainly with the help of Facebook’s micro-targeting. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

“And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” ― George Orwell, 1984Jamie Raskin wants to tell you a story. It’s one that has tumbled around in his brain for years now. It’s also one he hopes to make his name on. Jamie Raskin: hero at long last.All he had to do was stand before the American people and pretend that President Trump planned an “insurrection,” an overthrow of the United States government. How hard could that be? He’d already tried to impeach him twice, along with Democrats and a handful of Never-Trumpers. All of this worked so beautifully in the midterms to scare voters away from MAGA. Let’s keep it going, they think. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

As the new owner of Twitter, Elon Musk is, to quote, Ben Shapiro, moving fast and breaking things. He could see a big problem, as anyone outside the media feedback loop can. Twitter had become not just the propaganda arm of the State, but was being used as a filter to dodge the First Amendment, to police thought and speech.They didn’t do it directly or overtly. They did it alongside enthusiastic “good soldiers” for the State. The users - the blue-checks - and the employees saw themselves as the #resistance. To them, banning Trump was spiking their flag at Iwo Jima. They won, or so they thought. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

Old Journalism Ethics | Rivers“We're under a lot of pressure, you know, and you put us there. Nothing's riding on this except the, uh, first amendment to the Constitution, freedom of the press, and maybe the future of the country.” - Ben Bradlee, All the President’s MenThe break-in at the Democratic National Committee was small-time, ticky-tacky surveillance to get dirt on Nixon’s opponents for his upcoming re-election bid. When the burglars were caught, but for the efforts of the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, Nixon would have served his second term after his landslide win in 1972. But that was back when we had the kind of journalists who were not afraid to hold the powerful to account. How the mighty have fallen. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

When Jack Dorsey invented a chat-like social media platform with character limitations, he probably had no idea it would one day become the most powerful propaganda tool this country, this world, has ever known.The danger was always that any Big Tech platform, let alone three of the biggest, would one day be under the control of one political party. In 2020, the combination of lockdowns and violent protests of the Summer and January 6th led to the mass formation of hundreds of millions of Americans under the thumb of what Mattias Desmet calls technocratic totalitarianism.Why is Twitter so important? To quote the movie Jaws, when Quint tells Brody to toss more chum in the water to attract the shark, Brody says, “Let Hooper take a turn.” Quint says back, “Hooper drives the boat, Chief.”Twitter drives the boat, Chief. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

“A Native American elder once described his own inner struggles in this manner: Inside of me there are two dogs. One of the dogs is mean and evil. The other dog is good. The mean dog fights the good dog all the time. When asked which dog wins, he reflected for a moment and replied, The one I feed the most.” ― George Bernard Shaw28 years ago, I escaped real life for life online.I was desperate, you see, to find an escape. I had made such a mess of things when I found the internet in 1994. It was, for me, a huge relief. So much of what I struggled with in real life vanished online. You could be anyone, but more importantly, you could say anything you wanted to say.This turned out to be a lifesaver for me. I just wanted to write and write and write without my physical self being part of the equation. All people knew about me was the words I chose to type on a screen. It was such a thrill at first. “You’ve got mail!” AOL said. How to put into words what that felt like. Now I figure it must have been good old-fashioned dopamine hitting my brain. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

Trump was nearing the end of a campaign speech for Marco Rubio in Miami, days before the midterms when it started to rain. The MAGA faithful used their Trump signs as makeshift umbrellas. Trump’s mic cut in and out. He could barely read the teleprompter.“Is everybody having a good time?” he shouted to the crowd. The answer came roaring back. They were having the time of their lives, even as thunder cracked in the sky and the rain came down in sheets. Covering Trump’s head was the red MAGA cap. Trump did something he doesn’t often do. He took it off, smiled at the excited crowd, wiped his brow, put the hat back on, and continued his speech.“I’m not leaving,” he said—the crowd roared. Maybe it was the rain, thunder, or something else but I couldn’t help but think I’d never seen anything like this. The music he’d chosen to close out his speeches might not always work, but this time, it not only worked, it was some kind of crazy magic. Is anyone else seeing this, I wondered? I have watched all of Trump’s speeches since 2020 because I want to know what is true about what’s said about him. Most of the time it isn’t true. It’s the usual delusion meant to drive fear and panic. The music served to raise the drama of the moment. His face soaking wet, his voice strong, I just kept thinking, how is it possible anyone who has gone through what he’s gone through still has the energy in him, the fight in him, to stand there, rain be damned. No one there had any idea it was about to come crashing down. They didn’t know that the midterms would bring disappointment. They didn’t know MAGA wouldn’t be delivering that red wave as promised.They didn’t know the GOP, Rupert Murdoch, Ben Shapiro, and other high-profile Conservatives would turn on Trump and MAGA or that Mitch McConnell would close the loop by saying “bad quality” candidates frightened Americans.They knew none of this as the music played, the rain came down, and Trump moved them in ways no other politician ever had, at least not in decades. It was captured in time by the only streaming channel that plays all of Trump’s speeches, Right Side Broadcasting, and maybe a personal cell phone video. One thing I knew for sure while listening to it, the mainstream media would never report on it. They would never tell the story of that moment in Miami when the rain came down, and Trump stayed.Guess Who’s Back?Last night Elon Musk reinstated Trump’s account after two years without Trump’s tweets. As you can imagine, chaos ensued. Powerful people don’t like things taken away from them, and there has never been a more powerful propaganda tool for the establishment Left than Twitter. It belongs to them, they believed, just like they believe America belongs to them. But more than that, they count on Twitter to be the official story of the Biden Administration. A hive mind of Press Secretaries to make sure everyone is on point. They can’t afford dissent. They don’t mind that there are alternative sites like Substack or Rumble. They know the media only validates Twitter. Musk has taken the place of Trump because nature abhors a vacuum. There is a fundamental need for people to tell the whole truth and to hear the whole truth, no matter how inconvenient it is. Musk’s takeover of Twitter has The Machine quaking in its boots. How long before they go after him the way they went after Trump? Probably not long. Matt Taibbi has a great piece on this about witch burnings. Yeonmi Park escaped the fascist regime of North Korea only to come to America and find censorship and suppression of free speech. She is cheering Musk’s action to reinstate Trump:Trump’s Twitter is important for history. He was our president for four years and used Twitter as his main communication outlet for much of that time. That is also our history. It belongs to the people, even if Twitter is a “private” company. The government co-opted it, creating a filter to violate the First Amendment. Now, they have to contend with Trump’s last tweets, which might be tough to help them prove he incited violence on January 6th:Elon Musk is just getting a taste of the Washington machine, the same machine that has been trying to crush Trump and the MAGA movement for six long years. For a minute there it looked like they were going to lose. The scrappy Davids were going to take on the Goliath and win. They were going to win without the big money donors, without the mainstream media but just by hot-footing it door to door, talking to people the establishment government has long since abandoned. The Long ConRegardless of what you think of Trump, there is no good explanation for the ongoing persecution to “find something” to remove him from power, discredit and destroy his presidency because the Administrative State wanted him gone. Trump, or Elon Musk, isn’t as pure and innocent as Jefferson Smith in Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. But this film, more than just about anything ever written, goes right to heart of the matter. R

“Heroes may not be braver than anyone else. They're just braver 5 minutes longer.” ― Ronald ReaganThe 2022 midterms have emerged as a Rorschach test—anger, disappointment, finger-pointing on the Right, and typical self-satisfied smugness on the Left. There are lessons to learn on both sides.Lingering in the back of everyone’s mind is how a president with such low approval ratings, high inflation, discontent among the electorate, high crime, and failures across the board escaped a midterm wipeout.The answer is easy. Biden wasn’t blamed because Biden wasn’t really there. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

Joe Biden had a smile on his face the morning after the midterms. That’s the look of someone who just escaped total disaster. At least for now.The lesson they were all supposed to get with one decisive red wave never arrived. That is bad news for them. Or maybe it’s bad news for all of us who are much more worried about America at the hands of the Democrats.For weeks, they parroted the mantra, again and again, politicians and media pundits, not to mention the blue-check army on Twitter, “Election Deniers,” were coming for your Democracy. We would never have a fair election again. President Obama heralded a new Gestapo who would kill people on the streets, jail journalists, and turn America into an authoritarian state.All I could think was, we’re already halfway there, pal. It isn’t the Republicans we have to fear. They are traditionalists. It’s the Democrats who have amassed such an extraordinary amount of power by now and want to tear the country down to the studs and reimagine it as a woke utopia; even “Election Deniers” sounds like a better plan than keeping them in office. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

[Apologies for the audio - it was raining pretty hard here and the power kept cutting off]“We had to do something [in Bush v. Gore], because countries were laughing at us. France was laughing at us.” ― Antonin Scalia, The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme CourtI grew up in the 1980s thinking my vote didn’t matter. I became an “election denier” because that is what the Democrats have always been. I grew up with cynicism and mild hatred of the government. My childhood was spent living through the last time the Democrats took a major fall, from Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan with Watergate and Carter in between. Democrats felt hopeless until Bill Clinton came along in 1992. He was the first Democrat to serve two full terms since FDR. But by 1999, the cynicism was back because Bill Clinton had been impeached, the party humiliated, and our last best hope hung on the Vice President, Al Gore, the man with no charisma to speak of. I was one of those angry Democrats in 2000 who watched the Supreme Court stop counting ballots that handed the presidency to George W. Bush. We weren’t thinking about the reasons Gore might have lost, like gun control. We blamed the Court, and we blamed Florida. We blamed Ralph Nader. We blamed everyone but ourselves. The Supreme Court was corrupt, we believed. So were all of those operatives in the GOP that rigged the election for Bush. A rigged election would result in two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. If only the Supreme Court hadn’t “selected” Bush. I remember Oliver Stone’s film Nixon, his best, which suggested that Nixon had JFK assassinated so he could one day rise. And rise he did. To Stone, though, that caused the Vietnam war and all the ravages that followed. That is some election-denying. Nixon himself had believed that the 1960 election had been rigged. After all, he and Trump are still the only two people to have won Florida, Iowa, and Ohio and lost the presidency. Nixon chose not to object to any of it. Trump chose to fight. Back then, the Left felt Nixon’s win was so destructive that it ended everything for them: their optimism and their counter-culture revolution. Warren Beatty made the film Shampoo to suggest that they were all involved in silly narcissistic games before Nixon won and the world ended. They all blamed Nixon for Vietnam. But they also resented him for ending the 1960s for good. Coming out of the 2000 election, our main complaint was that Gore gave in too easily and quickly. Many of us thought he should have dug his heels in and fought harder and that we all should have been more insistent in objecting. That’s another word for protests. We didn’t because we were still burned from the landslide loss in 1972, blamed on the the Left’s anti-war protests.Some protests started around that time, like against the World Trade Organization. But it wouldn’t be until the $700 billion bailout that a whole protest movement would rise, Occupy Wall Street on the Left, and eventually, the Tea Party would form on the Right. Something was happening that would only grow as more people got online and were more connected than ever before. By 2016, we were again in a protesting state of mind, and we believed America belonged not to Trump, not to his supporters. But to us. Anyone who pretends like we accepted Trump’s win is lying. There has never been an elected president with that many forces working together to take him out of office. Never. There have never been worldwide protests against the election of a US president. There have never been the kinds of violent protests we had in this country over an elected president. We didn’t hold “not my president” rallies and pay investigators to see if Russians had hacked voting machines. We never had nervous breakdowns, we never had so many marches. Clearly, we all viewed Trump’s win as an invasion of a foreign entity, or a virus, that had to be immediately purged. We did not accept him as the legitimate president. We were ELECTION DENIERS. From The Hill:“According to data from the latest Harvard-Harris poll provided exclusively to The Hill, 68 percent of voters said Democrats have not accepted that Trump won fairly and is a legitimate president.That figure includes 69 percent of Republicans, 69 percent of independents and 65 percent of Democrats.”One of the reasons Kari Lake is such a strong candidate is that she comes from the media and has no problem calling them out on their hypocrisy and their double standard:It was much bigger than a violent riot at the Capitol and lawsuits by Trump and his supporters who insisted there was “widespread fraud.” No, the FBI was involved when the establishment got in on it. The media was on board. And by 2020, they were willing to crash the economy to ensure Trump was brought down.We were now not only of a protesting state of mind, but of a revolutionary state of mind. We called Trump an “existential threat” because waves of mass hysteria consumed us for the four years he was in office. The

“I do this real moron thing, and it's called thinking. And apparently I'm not a very good American because I like to form my own opinions.” ― George CarlinJoe Biden and the Democrats have a big problem. It isn’t just that they stand to lose in the midterm elections and maybe the Presidency in 2024. They stand to lose much more than that. They stand to lose everything.The American people, by now, have had enough. They’re sick of cowards who cannot stand up to the activists who control them. They’re not just sick of them in Washington. They’re sick of them everywhere. They’re sick of being told what they can and can’t say, what they can and can’t think. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

As we head into the midterm elections, our virtual civil war all too often is fought on social media, as each side battles daily to capture the media narrative. Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter felt like a major win for the real “resistance.” He is our Luke Skywalker, one of our last best hopes for freedom against the Empire. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

The look on Joy Behar’s face said it all. Confusion, befuddlement, and an ever so slight hint of anger. She was reacting to a recent poll from the New York Times that showed only 8% of Americans were worried about the “The State of democracy” heading into the midterms.She understood people were worried about putting food on the table, she said, but expecting the Republicans to clean up the mess was crazy. They weren’t going to fix the economy. Her pivot said it all. It was never about the threat to Democracy and always about the fear of the GOP taking back power. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

“Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official, save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. It is patriotic to support him insofar as he efficiently serves the country. It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country. In either event, it is unpatriotic not to tell the truth, whether about the president or anyone else.” ― Theodore RooseveltWhat did Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill all have in common? They could see the threat and had the courage to confront it.Tulsi Gabbard is the one Democrat who could not only recognize the threat of the modern-day Democratic Party but also dares to lead a movement to help take them out of power. And they must be taken out of power until they can get a grip and restore some sanity to the party and the country.You see the “Temporary Republicans” mostly on Twitter anonymously or in comment sections. But don’t be surprised if you see them turn out in November. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

“Everybody can be great...because anybody can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.” ― Martin Luther King Jr.It turns out that the “antiracists” never meant a single word of any of it. They were trying to preserve their status. That Herschel Walker is a Black man raised in the same “systemically racist” country as George Floyd doesn’t cross their minds, or if it did, they would quickly suppress it. It turns out it was never about systemic racism or oppression at all. It was only about ideological compliance. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

Andrew Dominik’s new Netflix movie Blonde has offended just about everyone. Based on the Joyce Carol Oates novel of the same name, it is a fictional account of the life of Marilyn Monroe. Almost immediately, the robot-army of the Left in the media rallied the troops to broadcast a single message about the movie: it is “anti-abortion,” and “misinformation about abortion.” This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

No matter how justified you think it is, prosecuting someone for what lives inside their minds and hearts is a road to ruin. It’s even worse than that. It’s a road to moral panics that lead to systematic dehumanization that wrecks whole societies. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg might have been selling secrets to the Soviets but that didn’t mean everyone in America who ever supported Marxist ideology was a traitor. Fear of what you can’t see leaves it up to your imagination, and when it comes to human beings, that is an unreliable source. Systematic dehumanization meant that newly freed slaves had to be turned into existential threats to an otherwise pristine uoptia in the South. They were thieves, murderers and rapists. In Nazi Germany, Jews were parasites, draft dodgers, and uniquely evil. It’s been decided that Trump supporters, or MAGA, are all angry white men. They are an existential threat because inside their minds and hearts is the unique evil of racism. This has never been questioned. It is a fear that has become a certainty across all institutions, culturally and politically, not just on the Left but on the Establishment Right. That is the kind of rot that must live inside the mind and heart of Hillary Clinton so that she could casually compare working class people to Nazi Germany. She saw them raising their hands to Trump without looking a little more closely to see that wasn’t the Nazi salute but cell phones.Trump supporters have no status. They don’t have a net worth of $120 million, or an Apple-TV show, or a house in Chappaqua, New York. They’ve been beaten, spit on, screamed at, demonized, and called every name imaginable from Nazi to Fascist to Racist, and now to “domestic extremist,” “insurrectionist,” “election deniers.” Even before Trump won, the Left believed their violence against Trump supporters was justified: We can survive political differences. We can’t survive this. What I realized over the past few years as I’ve gotten to know the world of MAGA it’s that we have a choice: assume the worst about people or give them the benefit of the doubt.I would like to say I would give Hillary the benefit of the doubt. After all, I was the person who made this sign and marched along with millions for the Women’s March:But with a teenager possibly run down and smeared as a “Republican extremist,” with Biden’s militant fascist speech, with a death threat on Justice Kavanaugh’s life, all running parallel to a dangerously politicized Department of Justice, I’m much too concerned with the fate of the country to worry about protecting Hillary one more time.White men and women are the new existential threat to the Left. But it is existential, not based on skin color. Black men can be “white supremacists in BlackFace,” like Larry Elder. Non-white women can be “Far Right Latinas” like Mayra Flores. Black women can be viciously attacked and trend for days on Twitter, like Candace Owens, receiving none of the protection she would get from the “antiracists.” Steve Bannon’s secret weapon is that he knows MAGA isn’t driven by “white rage.” He’s been actively engaged in building a coalition of working-class Black and Hispanic voters, or what he calls “inclusive, participatory, nationalist populism” for at least five years. Anyone who dips a toe into MAGA Land quickly sees it’s not about racism at all. It’s driven more by class and yes, by Judeo-Christianity. From a story on Breitbart:“We’ve got to start having access to capital to black and Hispanic entrepreneurs,” Bannon said.During the financial crisis, Bannon said that the Wall Street class were taken care of by the government but that the smaller banks got crushed since many of them loaned money to working-class people who didn’t get rescued by the government.“The elites took care of themselves,” he said.Bannon said that he was putting together a “task force” of black and Hispanic entrepreneurs to help them build their communities.That, he explained, was the way to evolve the Republican party into a working-class party for all Americans.“That’s why the media and that’s why the Democrats are freaked out about that,” he said.Up until recently, Christianity was the beating heart of this country that united most Americans by roughly 80%. I was never raised with any kind of religion because I am a child of the Left. Most Conservatives, though, don’t look to politics for their collective sense of purpose. They look to God. This might explain why all of a sudden a new term has been dropped into the mix to demonize the MAGA movement: White Christian Nationalism:Only recently has the idea of someone being a Christian become a clear and present threat to the newfound religion of the Left. Says a story in Politico by Stella Rouse and Shibley Telhami:Christian nationalism, a belief that the United States was founded as a white, Christian nation and that there is no separation between church and state, is gaining steam on the right.Prominent Republican politicians have mad

Joe Biden told a bedtime story about the border. It was secure, he said. But more importantly, those in charge were now humane, not like the previous administration’s barbaric practices. It was a good story. His supporters believed it. Then he closed the storybook, turned off the lights, and they all went to sleep. When they awoke, Governor Ron DeSantis had sent 50 migrants from Venezuela to Martha’s Vinyard, the home of his former boss, Barack Obama. They were refugees fleeing socialism for a paradise only Capitalism could have built. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

Joe Biden emerged from his speech last week “on the continued battle for the soul of our nation” like a squalling infant birthed from the loins of blue-check Twitter, bathed in the blood-red light of militant fascism. That was just the beginning. I used to be a faithful Democrat but they've lost me. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

“The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerated the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That in its essence is fascism: ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power.” ― Franklin D. RooseveltThe same week Mark Zuckerberg admitted the FBI pressured him to deep-six the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop, Joe Biden called the populists on the Right “semi-fascists.” From the FBI’s raid on Mar-a-Lago, to the use of social media to police the Biden administration’s idea of “misinformation” to the surveillance of political enemies of the state by an all-volunteer army of social media users — “semi-fascism” is all around us. Naturally, this gave many hyperbolic Twitter users a jumping-off point to get those juicy, juicy likes, as they continue to cheerlead Biden in all the wrong direction. So let’s get a few basics out of the way, shall we? The side policing speech are the “semi-fascists.” The side demanding ideological compliance? Also, the “semi-fascists.” The side throwing political prisoners in solitary for upwards of a year with no charges? “Semi-fascists.” The side that dehumanizes and scapegoats whole groups of people and encourages cutting them off from the economic system? “Semi-fascists.”The side with the FBI pressuring Big Tech to suppress negative information about a political candidate? You guessed it. The “Semi-fascists.” The power of the Democratic Party is shrinking and focusing on the most elite in our society. Their attention has narrowed significantly to the point where they are alienating more voters than they are attracting. From the Wall Street Journal’s interview with Ruy Teixeira:We’re living in a country where most institutions are dominated by graduates of colleges and universities that have made it their mission to proselytize on behalf of crazy ideas. That includes the Democratic Party to a vastly greater extent than the GOP, especially the post-Trump GOP.Mr. Teixeira acknowledges that this is a development “The Emerging Democratic Majority” failed to foresee: “We didn’t anticipate the extent to which cultural liberalism might segue into cultural radicalism and the extent to which that view, particularly as driven by younger cohorts, would wind up imprinting itself on the entire infrastructure in and around the Democratic Party—the advocacy groups, the foundations, academia of course, certainly the lower and middle levels of the Democratic Party infrastructure itself.”Voters chose Biden partly because they believed he was a moderate. Instead, he’s become a kind of George Spahn figure who passively allowed the Manson family to overtake Spahn Ranch. No, I’m not comparing the “woke” fanatics to the Manson family, but it is important to understand what we’re dealing with here.Biden’s ongoing dehumanization of Trump supporters is dangerous because of how people on the right, or those who push back against the newfound religious zealotry on the New Left, is reaching dangerous levels not seen since 1930s Germany.This example of the reaction to Ben Shapiro appearing at a podcast event is funny but also downright chilling. They don’t fear Shapiro because he’s an Orthodox Jew. They fear him because of his political views. Can you remember any other time in American history where opinions held contrary to one’s own made people feel “unsafe”? You can just feel that one, can’t you? Like a punch in the gut. You don’t just dismiss something like that. At least The Babylon Bee, still banned from Twitter, mocks the whole concept:You can see why so many still turn to Trump out of desperation because Trump is not scared of them, even with everything they’ve thrown at him. Even facing an inevitable indictment, Trump just mocks them. How does the American system survive someone they can’t control? They’ve never had to deal with a Donald Trump, that’s for sure. Trump is testing the Constitution every day, proving why it is such an important document. The Constitution is the only thing preventing our current government from graduating from “semi-fascists” to full-blown fascists. Or how they used to refer to Stalin’s regime “red fascism.” They use their systems of power to subvert Democracy, violate the Constitution, and weaponize the Department of Justice. As long as the media backs them up and the polls work in their favor, they won’t stop. One of the great things about social media is that supposedly everyone has a voice online. But now, under Biden and in our post-2020 environment, our government is using Big Tech as a filter to violate the First Amendment, using “misinformation” or “disinformation” as a catch-all for speech they don’t like. I posted a Tik Tok video of a high school coach ruminating on the Mar-A-Lago raid. He said he didn’t believe the claims of a rigged election until he saw just how far the Democrats were willing to go to get Trump. His video was honest, heartfelt, and, more tha

“I don't like that man. I must get to know him better.” - Abraham LincolnWe live in a time where there are more people connected than ever before, and there are more people alive than ever before. Every day, each side of this Cold Civil War broadcasts nonstop agitprop against the other side. It’s Orwell’s two minutes of hate, except it’s 24/7. The problem is that these are not two equal sides. 65% of Twitter users are Democrats. The platform increased by 21% after Trump was banned. The media listens to Twitter; the Democrats listen to the media. Together, they have built an insular feedback loop that is increasingly out of touch with most Americans outside of it. Because so many people are connected, we’ve seen a steady stream of uprisings against the government in recent years, not just in the United States but worldwide. Here in America, it began after the crash of 2008 with Occupy Wall Street. Then came the Tea Party. Then came the Capitol breaches in Wisconsin and Michigan. Then came Black Lives Matter. Then came the Democratic Primary protests against Hillary Clinton. Then came the largest protests in American history against a sitting president. Then came the Summer of 2020. Then came January 6th.Only one of these uprisings was treated as a dangerous threat against the government. It wouldn’t be the first time an act of protest against a government handed absolute power to that government. Reichstag fire, burning of the Reichstag (parliament) building in Berlin on the night of February 27, 1933, a key event in the establishment of the Nazi dictatorship and widely believed to have been contrived by the newly formed Nazi government itself to turn public opinion against its opponents and to assume emergency powers.In the wake of January 6th, our government has gone to war against its own citizens, behaving as though they are the ones waging war. They seem to genuinely believe that the Trump movement is the second Confederacy and that they’re trying to overthrow the government to turn it into a White Nationalist empire that brings back slavery. Liz Cheney compared this moment to the Civil War. They might want to dust off their history books and look at what happens when an insulated aristocracy fends off uprisings by the peasants. It doesn’t go so well.They’ve called worried parents “domestic extremists.” They smeared anyone who showed up in DC on that day as “white supremacists.” They built a Green Zone-like fence around the Capitol and kept it there for months as an act of intimidation. Just a decade before, Democratic activists were pounding on the doors of their state Capitol in Wisconsin, shouting, “Whose house? Our house!” Those who control our government, mainstream media, and the big tech companies see those who would voted for or support Trump as a clear and present danger to their power. They seem to believe they at the very top can go to war with the majority, and it’s somehow going to work out well for them. They seem unwilling to do the one thing they would need to do to stop Trump: offer the working class something better. It’s odd to be living through something that has happened so many times before. Three little words keep otherwise reasonable people from all political spectrums from accurately reading this moment: Trump Derangement Syndrome. TDS mainly affects the ruling class. They just can’t believe they swapped a classy, sophisticated Harvard Law graduate like Obama for a guy like Trump who is crass and offensive, has a toilet made out of gold, eats at McDonald’s, and says whatever he wants to say. Trump is the living embodiment of everything the progressive aristocracy hates about America — a rich white man who doesn't follow the rules. What drives TDS is that Trump is mostly indestructible. He has no shame. After non-stop attacks by the media, two impeachments, the Mueller investigation, the Access Hollywood tape - who but Trump could have gotten COVID in his 70s, survived it without a vaccine, then went on to hold five rallies a day in the run-up to the 2020 election? No wonder they see him as an omnipotent force they have to rally the troops to defeat.But that indestructibility makes him the hero of the working class our government has all but abandoned. Trump is their battering ram. He’s what Victor Davis Hanson called necessary “chemotherapy.” It gets the dirty job done because his support hasn’t diminished, even after he’s been kicked off Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube. If anything, he’s become more popular.Why? Because the Left has become crazier. Surely this would have dawned on one of them by now, but it hasn’t. Those who write brilliantly here on Substack to mount some kind of offense against the Neo-Marxist takeover of our government almost always stop at the Trump line. They just won’t cross it, like the baseball players in Field of Dreams. They know if they cross that line their careers are over. They have even written pieces urging desperate Americans not to flee to Trum