Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone

The Democrats, the media, and the blue-checks on Twitter have no idea how many people have been red-pilled over the past three years. No one who watches Joe and Mika or Rachel Maddow or reads the New York Times will ever be red-pilled. They simply believe that is the only reality. How could it not be if every high-status person in America is going along with it? If your friends and family go along with it, if your social media feed confirms it every day with links. If it’s in the media, it must be true, right? How do you not trust it if it’s on NBC News or the Washington Post?Waking up to the media’s near-total collapse during the Trump years is a big part of being red-pilled. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. The only way to escape the media’s hold on the narrative is to cut it out completely, at least until you can see that there is another reality, and very often, the actual truth.If they hadn’t already given up on the “establishment” watching them crush Bernie Sanders like a bug in 2016, 2020 would do it. The response to COVID was a big one. Dividing the country the way it did into the compliant and the non-compliant. What it did to businesses, to the minds of children, to everyone who was locked down and locked in - unable to attend funerals, weddings, and death beds. But the raid on Mar-a-Lago very likely has red-pilled Americans even more, especially when you put it together with the authoritarianism during COVID, the suppression of speech, the silencing of dissent, and the dehumanization we all live with every day. To watch our Department of Justice raid a former president’s home months before the midterms, where the Democrats were expected to do very badly, looks suspect to anyone. If they were trying to create distrust in our institutions, they succeeded. Most Americans have seen, maybe for the first time, that our government has become too powerful, too punitive, and too authoritarian in crushing dissenting voices and outsiders who challenge that authority. We call that being red-pilled.More worrisome is the ongoing mass hysteria that started on Twitter, spread into our institutions of power, and now has spread to our government. To have such a complicit and compliant media is even more terrifying. What wouldn’t they go along with by now? Gulags? We all thought “cancel culture” would be confined to social media but clearly it has become the modus operandi for our establishment government. It’s hard not see this as yet another extension of the insanity and hysteria over Trump. As the Wall Street Journal’s Kimberly Strassel writes:Trump derangement syndrome has a curious way of scrambling coherent thought. Witness the Democratic-media complex’s blind insistence the Justice Department raid on Donald Trump’s home is just and necessary—rather than a dangerous move for their party and the republic.In descending on Mar-a-Lago, the department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation shifted the U.S. into the category of countries whose ruling parties use government power to investigate political rivals. No attorney general has ever signed off on a raid on a former president’s home, in what could be the groundwork for criminal charges.The Mar-a-Lago raid on its own would have one thing. But it comes right after Merrick Garland announced the “largest investigation in American history” against a former president. That came on the heels of prime-time hearings that aired on every news network except Fox, led by Liz Cheney, where they compared January 6th to the end of slavery and the Jim Crow South. This, after Kamala Harris, compared January 6th to Pearl Harbor and 9/11. A red-pilled America is probably starting to think the reaction to Trump, rather than Trump himself, might be the even bigger threat. They were already losing voters by the millions. Hispanic voters, Asian voters, even Black voters were being red-pilled and drifting rightward. That meant there was likely a red wave in the November midterms. Biden’s catastrophic poll numbers meant Democrats could lose and lose big. That was unacceptable. It shouldn’t be too surprising that they used that moment to hold their primetime extravaganza of Janaury 6th. If they can’t win over voters with better candidates or policies, they will scare the living daylights out of them. Donald Trump hadn’t even announced he was running for office, but the failure of Biden and the Democrats alone was enough to launch an all-out war on Trump, his henchmen, and his supporters.Instead of bringing more voters in, the administrative state has now red-pilled even more Americans. That’s certainly true of Hispanic voters, as a recent Spectator article outlines: It’s likely that many of these voters agree with Rep. Mayra Flores (R-Texas) who responded to the Mar-a-Lago search thus: “The FBI raid on the residence of the former POTUS is unprecedented. We do not live in a third world country.” This point will certainly resonate with many first and second generation Hispanic immig

In 2020, an unprecedented alliance of the richest and most powerful entities in the country came together to rig an election. Now I’m not saying they did anything illegal. Or that there was widespread fraud. But really, does that matter? By now, after they spent four years trying to remove Trump from power, impeached him twice, and now Merrick Garland has launched the “largest investigation in American history,” all to boost the Democrats chances in the midterms and try to knock Trump out to keep him from running in 2024, you gotta wonder. What are they so afraid of?The election was rigged because they were afraid Trump would win in 2020. Indeed, a one-term president with a strong economy is unbeatable. To bring him down they would have to take control of the media narrative, deliberately crash the economy, and discredit everything Trump ever did to manage the COVID pandemic. All that because they couldn’t beat him with just Joe Biden. I know it was more than that. I know they were pressuring the media to “fix” their obsession with Hillary’s emails in 2016. They were pressuring Mark Zuckerberg to “help” them win this time, since he “helped” Trump win last time. Facebook offered the same “help” to the Clinton campaign, but she turned him down.They were worried about a scandal erupting as the “October surprise.” You know, like the Access Hollywood tape in 2016? It’s okay when they do it. Trump tried to do it with the Hunter Biden story, and you’ll never believe what happened next.“Hey ya, Mr. Dorsey? Yes, this is a shadowy figure who works for the apparatus, and we think you need to bury that Hunter Biden story. Why? Well, it looks bad for Joe. Also, it’s Russian disinformation. Also, if you post it, you will be complicit in spreading Russian disinformation. Also, you will be helping a racist/fascist win the presidency. We good?”All of the other major Silicon Valley dude-bros complied. What did they have to lose? Nothing. They know which side butters their bread.What we saw in 2020 was the richest and most powerful people essentially subverting American Democracy.In their efforts to remove one president they didn’t like and install another, we lived through probably the most corrupt election in American history by a group of people who really do believe they have the right to manipulate an election. With enough money and lawyers you can do anything. Normally, you’d have reporters at the Washington Post and the New York Times doing detailed reports of how corrupt our government had become. They’re not above the American people. They’re not above American Democracy. But that isn’t what you see. Even now, you still see them taking one side. The Twitter blue-check side. Who are they, you might ask? You know who the ULTRA MAGA is thanks to Joe Biden’s decision to dehumanize half the country. Now meet the ULTRA ELITE. The ULTRA ELITE is the blue-check army on Twitter of the most revered, famous, wealthy, and powerful high-status people in the country - Stephen King, Bette Midler, Patricia Arquette, Taylor Swift, Beyonce, Obama, Michael Beschloss, John Dean, Howard Dean, and then, of course, the Never Trumpers like Rick Wilson and Steve Schmidt - they called themselves “The Resistance.” But really, they were the ULTRA ELITE.They’re the Obama coalition. They’re Netflix and HBO Max. They’re Nike and Microsoft. They’re the Grammys and the Oscars. They’re Audible and Home Depot. They sit atop the food chain, making the most money. Almost every major corporation in America, almost every university, research lab, opera house, art museum are all in alignment with the ULTRA ELITE.They listen to NPR, they read the New York Times. They think the Washington Post is still a legit newspaper and they are all in agreement that Trump incited a “violent insurrection” on January 6th and that his supporters were a “white supremacist” army about to overthrow the mighty United States of America. Imagine our country is that vulnerable it was threatened by an unarmed mob of protesters.But the ULTRA ELITE lives in fear. They hide in their bunker and want the bad people to disappear. They send out scouts to see if they’re gone. If they see one ULTRA MAGA you know, walking around without a mask or wearing a red cap - that means it’s not over yet. They just want their utopia back. Their perfect little world before Trump wrecked it. The truth still matters though it is in limited supply. Watching the entire media take a side on the January 6th show trial is frightening. There isn’t even a question of due process or presumption of innocence. They’ve been convicted in the court of public opinion, and that’s all that matters. Over the past six years, we’ve just become numb to living in a country that disappears perceived wrongdoers. Cancel culture replaced the presumption of innocence and due process with trial-by-mob. Why wouldn’t that hysteria swallow up the government too? Joe Biden has been targeting Trump voters ever since, smearing them as

What has become obvious to anyone paying attention is that we are living through a kind of revolution. It is not a physical one. As my friend Abe Greenwald wrote in Commentary Magazine, it “is not being fought within the physical limits of a battlefield. It is instead happening all around us and directly to us. It is redefining our culture, our media, and giving new shape to our public and private institutions. It is remaking the nation before our eyes.” In other words, this is a revolution of culture. A revolution of ideas.—Bari Weiss, The New Founders America NeedsEveryone has their own version of how the Left was lost. This is mine. I tell my story as someone who was very much a devoted Hillary supporter in 2016 and an early Biden supporter. I tell this story as someone who got online in 1994 with one foot in the real world, and one foot in the virtual one. I also tell this story as someone who is no longer a Democrat. Any slim chance there might have been for me to support the Democratic Party has been eliminated by the undemocratic partisan show trials of January 6th, an authoritarian power grab based on the lie that Trump brought the Proud Boys to DC to launch a violent insurrection against the US government. Trump would not have urged Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz to debate the election in the Senate if he wanted to overthrow the government. All the violent riot did was interrupt the case he was trying to make and hand absolute power to his enemies. He might be a lot of things but dumb is not one of them. Yes, the Democrats have used January 6th as a Reichstag Fire to grow their power, punish citizens and present a litmus test to anyone who dares to question the results of the 2020 election. After the American people watched the Democrats and the media completely memory hole what happened in the Summer of 2020, most are looking at these hearings and the reactions to January 6th overall, as an existential crisis the political aristocracy has time and money to care about. Biden’s AmericaBy the Summer of 2020, I could see that there was something very wrong with the Left. Because I still wanted Biden to win, I was worried they were abandoning three basic fundamentals this country relies on:Freedom of Speech - cancel culture was ragingLaw and Order - “Defund the police” was trendingPatriotism - attacking Federal buildings, and historical statues, saying America was “systemically racist.”Not only did no one listen to anything I had to say, but they were angry at me for saying it. Neera Tanden wrote me personally and asked me to stop criticizing the Democrats until after the election because defeating Donald Trump was the main priority. But I was beginning to worry more about this new version of the Left taking power than I was even Trump. If the things we were seeing at newspapers and across all institutions - silencing dissent, firing people right and left and this suddenly strident doctrine that was being forced down everyone’s throat got into government? Then our country would start to look a lot more like an authoritarian utopia of the 1984 kind.Turns out, we have become that authoritarian utopia, at least online. We trusted the Big Tech oligarchs with our data, our friendships, our preferences, our financials. Now they’re turning on those who are non-compliant and tossing them out of what looks a lot like the “Inner Party” in 1984. The Left was never the “resistance.” They were always the empire. You can’t be that rich, that power, and control almost every area of American culture from Hollywood to book publishing to media to science and big tech and not be the empire. Trump’s side was the “resistance” and still is. It feels eerily like 1984 now that the internet is ruled by a partisan cabal doing the bidding of the government. Even the Two Minutes of Hate feels like every day on Twitter or the January 6th show trials. That’s because George Orwell recognized the hypocrisy of a movement supposedly based on equality that was still totally unequal. It’s kind of like how the Left has those lawn signs that say “This House has no Hate” but of course, they are filled with hate of those they have deemed the “bad” people. Moral superiority against those with less power than you have is not a good look for the Left. They justify it because they have re-ordered the power hierarchy in this country, which puts the most marginalized people at the top and the least marginalized at the bottom. If you are white, to them, you are powerful therefore you must be dropped to the bottom of the new hierarchy. Likewise, if you are Black and extremely wealthy, you are still marginalized and at the top of the hierarchy. They are hard-liners when it comes to skin color but fluid with gender. The first time I heard that the Left no longer believed class to be an issue was pointed out by Conservative analyst Victor Davis Hansen who wrote:During the 1980s cultural war, the left’s mantra was “race, class and gender.” Occasionally we sti

If there is one thing I learned watching the Johnny Depp and Amber Heard trial it’s this: you can’t just hear one side of the story. Because of social media, apparently, convictions in the Court of Opinion have now replaced due process and the presumption of innocence. Had Depp never sued Heard, we would never have known Heard was the abuser. The January 6th hearings look a lot more like the show trials in the Soviet Union under Stalin. Witnesses would only be called if they backed up the accusations made against various prisoners of course. They would be found guilty, of course, because dissent was not allowed, nor was a fair defense.The point of show trials was to intimidate anyone who might consider thinking for themselves or seeing Stalin in a negative light. In our country now, journalists are expected to go along with whatever the state tells them is true. If they step out of line they will be viciously bullied on Twitter, forced to apologize or, in some cases, fired.The same team that tried to impeach Trump after January 6th are back in the Season Finale, this time to drive the DOJ towards criminal charges against Trump. It’s like holding a hearing to find out whether Johnny Depp was guilty or not but only presenting Amber Heard’s side. Those of us who watched the whole trial know the evidence presented destroyed Heard’s case. Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony is somewhat reminiscent of Amber Heard’s. It is sincere but overly dramatic. She’s pretty, with a husky voice, and definitely someone most people would want to believe. But of course, her story is starting to fall apart. You might wonder why would she risk her career to lie under oath? Why would Heard have done it? In Heard’s case, she believed she was going to win the trial because in the wake of the Me Too era, there was no such thing as a defense against an accusation of abuse or rape. For Hutchins, she essentially had no career left. Trump would not hire her after he left office. Her resume wasn’t going to get her much work. Ah, but to be a star witness for the Left she’ll get the Liz Cheney treatment. She’ll get a golden ticket into the land of the special people, the ruling class, MSNBC. She might even make the cover of TIME.She’s a hero now. She can go on Rachel Maddow’s show. She will be praised to the high heavens by people like Rob Reiner and Stephen Colbert. Hey, even Barbra Streisand is out there singing her praises. This, as opposed to starting out her political career as Mark Meadows’ aide. She would be tainted forever. Now, she’s a star.The media and the public, however, need for it to be true, just as they needed Amber Heard’s story to be true because they serve a much larger narrative. But some of us need more than that. We need the truth. The January 6th committee has never been about the truth. For four years, the Left, the Never Trump Republicans, and the mainstream media have been actively attempting to undo the results of the 2016 election that put Trump in power for four years. It wasn’t just his slim victory, it was the kinds of people who supported him. They pretended it was about “white racist trash” but really? Wasn’t it just about their refusal to adopt the ideology of Obama’s America? A fast-moving social justice movement that was changing almost everything?Never before in the history of this country has a president been under attack by so many forces at once from Day One, with not just the largest protests in American history, but protests abroad. A “resistance” that aligned social media, the richest people in the world, corporate America, Hollywood, Big Tech, the Democrats, and the Never Trumpers all to discredit, destroy and remove a sitting president. Why isn’t anyone talking about it?At the time, those of us in the “resistance” believed we were stopping the fascist takeover of America by a guy who looked a lot like Hitler. We were afraid. The fear was so overwhelming that two major mass hysteria events gripped the country for the four years Trump was in power. For a country that valued decency above all else, careful language adopted and mandated to prove that decency, a guy like Trump who says whatever he wants to say, was as dangerous as the Devil riding into Salem in 1692.By the time the 2020 election rolled around, the “resistance” formed a “cabal” that used every resource in its massive war chest to bring down Trump and install Biden -manipulating the news narrative, burying the Hunter Biden story, blaming every COVID death on Trump, even wanting the economy to crash because that is the one surefire way to bring down a one-term President. The protests and riots of 2020 were in reaction to Trump - the worse they got, the worse it made him look, or so they believed. I had been the most strident and loyal Hillary supporter, a well-known blue-check on Twitter. I was also one of the first Biden supporters early in 2019. Here is a picture of me at an early fundraiser on May 8th, 2019:I was heavily involved in polit

Since 2020, after the protests and the riots erupted on the streets of major cities, causing over one billion dollars in damages, implied threats have become the norm on the Left. Windows are boarded up in anticipation of more. During the Derek Chauvin trial, the crowd outside, including some politicians, openly threatened violent riots should he be found not guilty. Random beatings go unnoticed on the streets because they only play on Right-wing channels. Like my friends on the Left, I mourn the overturning of Roe v. Wade because I think it will drive a deeper wedge between the two Americas. To the Left, a fundamental right has been taken away. To the Right, a fundamental right has been granted.I keep hoping for some kind of unity. But now, the ongoing hatred by each side against the other is likely to only get much worse. The division is going to take the shape of red states and blue states, or as future generations will know them, abortion states and illegal abortion states.There was a moment between the unprecedented leak of the Dobbs decision and the final decision. Some justices might have been persuaded not to overturn a 50-year precedent. Some had suggested the leak was intentional for that reason. You’d think, given that, there might be some civility on offer for the Trump appointees. You know, the whole “you attract more flies with honey than vinegar” approach. But if you thought that, you’d be wrong. The Left, the Democrats, and the media did the opposite. They never let up. They seemed okay with using high-pressure tactics on justices who have been taking all manner of incoming for several years now. They stalked and harassed the SCOTUS justices in their homes. A group called Jane’s Revenge torched pro-life centers and vandalized property, sending the message “if abortions aren’t safe then you aren’t either.” And a would-be assassin showed up at the home of Justice Kavanaugh and threatened his life before calling 911 and turning himself in.Was there blanket media coverage by any outlets other than Fox? Of course not. What were they focused on? The January 6th show trial. Did the protesters stop marching outside their homes? No. The idea was that the justices deserve everything they had coming. For several years now, Justices Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, Barrett, and Thomas have been casually, routinely bullied in the press, harassed, and all but crucified by the Left on a daily basis. Because of their hatred of Trump, they have normalized dehumanization against his supporters, and his appointees. Whatever they think of Trump, however angry they feel about Mitch McConnell blocking Merrick Garland’s appointment but going along with Trump’s, treating Supreme Court Justices this way undermines their claim to care about “Democracy Itself.” Chuck Schumer had all but threatened violence against Kavanaugh and Gorsuch way back in 2020, though he downplayed it:Justice Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing alone was unlike anything we’ve ever seen. We don’t have a press that would ever cover it that way, not amid the Me Too movement, but banging on the door of the Supreme Court, disrupting the confirmation hearing, screaming at Senators in hallways - was the exact kind of invasive activism that is endangering not just the Left itself, but the country at the hands of the Left. Kavanaugh was convicted without due process in the court of public opinion, smeared as a rapist. His family had to absorb all of it. Everyone Kavanaugh knew throughout his whole life now looked at him that way. The idea was to make him as weak of a Justice as possible, the Clarence Thomas treatment, so that the public would sour on the Court over time. There was never one moment where the Left backed off of any of it. When Amy Coney Barrett was being confirmed, she was labeled a racist (even though she has adopted Black children — even that was condemned), the media said she belonged to a religious cult and was called Lydia from the Handmaid’s Tale.Clarence Thomas has been hated by the Left since his confirmation, but only recently has it intensified, as Twitter blue-checks and the media suggest he should be impeached because of his wife’s thought-crimes on the election. They dress it up like “news” but it’s more of the same - mass hysteria, Trump obsession, the bottom dropping out. The treatment of Krysten Sinema in particular has been disturbing. Activists find her in airports, follow her into bathrooms, and even disrupted a wedding. The bullying and harassment on Twitter help to dehumanize her to the point where they don’t see a problem with stalking her in real life. All because she won’t agree to go along with the party-line. They don’t seem to realize that the way it works in America is that we elect people. We don’t throw massive fits to intimidate them to go along with what we want. The new Left doesn’t see it that way. They believe fits of hysteria and dehumanization are the right course of action. It just makes them less reliable as leade

The January 6th riot was ugly and violent. It was one of the worst things to happen in this country after one of its most difficult years. Protests are the voices of the unheard. The MAGA supporters who gathered in DC that day were exercising their First Amendment right to protest at their Capitol. At the same time, agitators near the Capitol were whipped up into a frenzy, believing they had a patriotic duty to stop the election of Joe Biden.The footage was proof at last of what the Democrats had been warning the country about - the “white supremacist” terrorist uprising had finally come to pass. It would also turn out to be the most important piece of political propaganda in over 50 years that would hand absolute power to those who sought to remove Trump the minute he was elected. It was not, however, an attempted coup or an “insurrection.” For one thing, Trump was the sitting President on January 6th. If anything, they were trying to prevent the peaceful transfer of power. In their own minds, they were trying to stop a coup, not launch one. Whatever fantasies drove people like Ashli Babbit to become desperate enough that they would sacrifice their own lives is only used to further stoke the flames of hatred and division by our government. That the media, the blue-checks on Twitter, and the political opposition have declared it an “insurrection” without due process is yet another sign that we no longer have a working media. But we already knew that. Most Americans know something bad happened on January 6th. Many believe Trump was responsible. But everyone knows these hearings are for: to stop Trump’s movement from overtaking the GOP, getting into Congress, and perhaps recapturing the presidency in 2024. The thing that scares them the most is that Trump might win. The Democrats have made such a mess of things and turned this country into a dystopian nightmare that Trump is the preferred option, even after the January 6th hearings began. One of the reasons Donald Trump remains popular is that he’s not afraid to mock the powerful. He’s called the media the “enemy of the people.” He destroyed the presidential prospects of Bush’s golden child, Jeb! He wrecked Hillary Clinton’s chances of being the first female president and knocked down the carefully constructed utopia Obama built. Trump is Public Enemy Number One.After months of extremely violent riots alongside the Black Lives Matter protests, where the politicians who won in 2020 addressed their complaints and completely re-ordered American society, the January 6th rioters probably thought they would be considered and treated the same way. Hundreds of prisoners have been dumped GITMO style into solitary confinement in the DC jail, many without charges brought against them, enduring all manner of torments to get them to name Trump as their instigator. Where are the reporters writing about this? Where is the ACLU or civil rights attorneys fighting for their rights as American citizens? As with all things in the post-2020 world, they dare not say a word lest they too be accused of being racist apologists and domestic terrorist sympathizers. Also, they see them as they always have seen them - human garbage as best, terrorists at worst. The January 6th Select Committee hearings are dressed up to look like Watergate - Authoritative, serious, definitive. But they are not a good faith effort to uncover the truth about that day. Rather, they are about naming Trump and his movement as anti-American, which justifies their ongoing marginalization of the non-compliant. That makes them much more like the McCarthy hearings at the point where the Senator had gone too far.Since Trump shocked the country with a surprise win, the idea that a “racist” could win after Obama’s two terms was an existential threat that sent this country reeling. Mass hysteria bloomed in the wake of 2016, and after 2020, there were ongoing witch hunts to root out racists on Twitter, in higher education, in science labs, in fiction, in movies. It was bound to make its way into government, and now, because these committee hearings are making them not about the riot on January 6th but the presumed ideology behind the riot — “white rage” — we have another witch hunt on our hands that looks a lot like 1954. Joseph McCarthy was not wrong about the Communist threat. All of these decades later, it’s clear there were spies in our government, and screenwriters were trying to inject that ideology into our culture. Eisenhower shut it down because McCarthy had become paranoid that anyone and everyone might be a communist, including military members. Ike recognized that it was making the post-WWII American weaker, not stronger. That is why he helped destroy McCarthy’s credibility and end what we now call McCarthyism.It is hard to police the minds and hearts of Americans in a supposedly free society. Here we are, decades later, and that Communist threat is alive and well and has all but consumed the Democratic Par

PROFANITY WARNING — cursing all through some of the videos.When Johnny Depp won his defamation case against Amber Heard it marked the first time a #metoo casualty had fought back and won. Unless you watched the trial, all of the trial, you would not know just how badly Amber Heard fared on the stand, how weak her case was, the many contradictions in her story and that here we have a true defamation case that could be proven with evidence.What was telling, however, was the reaction by the media elite. From the New York Times to Slate to the New Yorker to Rolling Stone, to The Guardian it was one condemnation after another by people whose primary news source is their own feedback loop. They have proved beyond any doubt just how much the #metoo movement was driven not by activists, not even by victims, but by them. There was only one social media platform that showed the groundswell of public support for Johnny Depp and that was TikTok. Anyone who uses the app saw the surge of support for Depp as he became a meme then a trend and at some point a full blown movement around a single hashtag - #justiceforjohnnydepp. 80% of Depp’s most ardent supporters were women, united across political, economic, cultural and racial lines in support of Depp’s innocence. Many of them were victims of Domestic Violence themselves who could easily recognize a woman who was grossly exaggerating, lying and portraying herself as someone that contradicts her own recordings of her relationship with Depp. Meanwhile, the high-minded columnists flopped around like fish, with no clue as to why so many in the general public supported Depp. Now women will never come forward, they collectively squawked. Now, no woman will ever be believed again, they howled. The #metoo movement is over, they bemoaned. It isn’t so much that women will never be believed again as it is about the activist media on the left losing all credibility with the general public, if they had any left to begin with. The #metoo movement, like almost everything else, was a media narrative created by and driven by the same columnists who are now clinging to that power. It first began in the wake of the Access Hollywood tape that caught Trump talking about everything he could do to women as a famous person. Even before Trump won, the New York Times collected a series of women’s stories. Mine was among them. Because the Access Hollywood tape was an October surprise, it wasn’t exactly shocking that the New York Times would have put out this piece in October. The two areas that would bloom into full-blown mass hysteria events in this country during the Trump presidency circled around sexual assault/harassment/abuse, and racism. These were the two main fears about Trump. Even if they started out as much-needed reckonings, they evolved over time into witch hunts, fear, and paranoia that continues to this day.But the pendulum is beginning to swing because it always does. Mass hysteria is inevitably punctured when a case comes along that is so preposterous it brings the whole thing down. In Salem it was the Governor’s wife being accused of witchcraft. During the McCarthy era, it was the “Have you no decency” moment. In Salem, they tried to cover up their embarrassing year where 20 people lost their lives amid a mass hysteria event that might have had the hashtag #believechildren. If not for a Quaker named Thomas Maul no one would even know about it. Due process isn’t perfect but it’s still the best we have. When Al Franken was pushed out of Congress by the likes of Chuck Schumer, Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren he begged for due process and did not get it. For me and many others, that was a major red-pill moment. I could no longer belong to a political party that would go along with something like that. Due process doesn’t always work, of course, particularly during times of mass hysteria where there is public pressure on juries to reach specific verdicts. For decades Black men were falsely accused of rape. It took the Civil Rights movement to shake people out of it. It has taken decades to undo the damage, and much of it remains undone. Due process meant that all white, all-male juries often decided cases based on the pitchfork mobs assembled outside. They were too afraid, or too racist themselves, to return a proper verdict. It was a time that could have had the hashtag #believeallwhitewomen. That is the subject of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird:Johnny Depp is no Black man during the Jim Crow era. To even suggest that would be immoral. But there is a similarity in how Mayella and Amber Heard testified. Both were melodramatic in a way that conflicted with who they were and how they behaved in real life. Heard has actual taped conversations of herself that never once talk about any rape with a bottle, any broken glass, any of the wild accusations she has hurled at Depp. How it StartedWay back in 2016, Depp’s friend Doug Stanhope wrote an op-ed for The Wrap essen

[Update: Since writing this, Elon Musk has actually bought Twitter!]The American dream says that the best and the brightest can rise as fast and as far as their talent and perseverance will allow. The Democrats say - that isn’t true; only white men have that advantage because this is a sexist, racist country built on and supported by patriarchal white supremacy. Regardless of that disconnect, Elon Musk made his fortune the American way and is now the richest man in the world.Musk’s “great man” image is undercut somewhat, I think, by his willingness to use chimps to develop Neuralink. But with Tesla and SpaceX, he has built a fortune any person on the Left should be proud of. Now, they see him as the enemy. Musk has committed the mortal sin of being ideologically non-compliant. That translates into “he says whatever he wants to say.”Twitter was, at first, the great status leveler. Anyone could grow a following. But with the invention of the “blue checks” and Twitter’s strange way of deciding who should get one, they ended up forcing a hierarchy that was just one of the things that ruined Twitter.For Musk, though, it all started with the Babylon Bee. He was a fan of the Conservative-leaning humor site already since he’d no doubt noticed, as anyone would notice, that the Left’s strident policing of thought had led to a stifling of humor. The Babylon Bee had no rules. They mocked anyone for any reason, not shying away from taboo or off-limit targets. The list of what is verboten on the left or even blasphemous grows longer by the day. Musk noticed the Bee was not afraid to go there and for that, they earned his admiration. When they made a joke about Rachel Levine, however, that got them suspended from Twitter until they deleted that tweet. But they refused.I personally didn’t think the joke was funny. I felt bad for Rachel Levine. It must be a difficult position to be in. But I also don’t think Twitter should be in the business of declaring a joke “hate speech” or “hateful conduct.” That comes a little too close to the kind of retribution for parody and humor fundamentalist religions have. You know, like death threats for a joke.Musk had already been swarmed for his views on transgender ideology, specifically the use of pronouns. Already he realized that declaring your pronouns was being demanded of him and everyone else. There was simply no way to not comply without being punished. But clearly, he is not someone who feels it necessary to follow those kinds of rules. He’s a Gen-Xer, like me, and we came of age questioning authority. It isn’t that I won’t use pronouns anyone asks me to but I don’t feel like I need to declare my own just to protect myself from the thought police. Now, activists routinely refer to Musk as “transphobic.” Even before trying to buy Twitter, Musk interviewed with the Babylon Bee and talked about the rise of censorship and the “woke mind virus”:Musk: I think the onion has done some extremely funny stuff over time. It just seems to be in recent years and when infected by the “woke mind virus,” so that just makes everything less funny. It's worldwide viruses, a world without humor. BB: Why do you think wokeness is so destructive? Musk: It is a prevalent mind virus and arguably one of the biggest threats to human civilization, I mean, generally, I think we should be aiming for like a positive society and that it should be okay to be humorous. Wokeness basically wants to make comedy illegal. Which is not cool at all. Wokeness is divisive, exclusionary and hateful, it basically gives mean people a shield to be to be mean and cruel armored in false virtue.BB: The left is almost this religion now, where they're so serious and they believe what they believe with such intensity that for us to make fun of them, you know, for them it's like you're making fun of God or salvation. They're almost the new religious right in our view.If you’re putting it all together you’ll see two colliding ideologies using Twitter as their battleground. Musk buying Twitter would be a big win not just for free speech advocates, but for free-thinking advocates. Musk presents the biggest and most powerful oppositional force next to Trump that is rising up to challenge the vice grip on Twitter and, thus, all American culture. His tweets make news. If Saturday Night Live makes a dumb joke about him he can clap back with a Tweet that people pay attention to. When you have Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton urging Big Tech to become more censorious they aren’t trying to counter “misinformation,” they are really trying to silence voices like Musk’s that have “gone rogue” and do not parrot the party line. We can see the two Americas dividing, speciating, becoming two separate countries between the moneyed class and the working class, just as Orwell foretold in 1984. If you think it’s going to stop you have another think coming. So why would there be such a strong objection to Elon Musk buying Twitter not just by the sharehold

Will Smith slapping Chris Rock on live television was probably the most truthful ten minutes anyone in Hollywood or watching at home had seen in five years. It was ugly. It was violent. It was disturbing. It was unforgettable. And it was the truth. A real thing happened that couldn’t be scripted. There is a reason this uncensored clip of Will Smith slapping Chris Rock has over 90 million views when the Oscar telecast only had 16 million. It’s because it was the truth at a time when the “Left” did almost everything they could to obscure it. The Academy was trying so hard to boost its ratings and satisfy the Wokerati who watched every move they made, every joke told, and every fashion choice. Ever since 2020, people in positions of power have been terrified of losing that power, and the best way to do that is to make Twitter mad with some kind of transgression or to violate an accepted social norm.The Oscar ceremony was produced by a Black man, Will Packer. Two of the hosts were Black women, Regina Hall and Wanda Sykes. The Best Picture contenders were intersectional and inclusive - two films directed by women (The Power of the Dog and CODA), one film directed by a Black man (King Richard), and one from Japan by an Asian director (Drive My Car). The first film with a predominantly deaf cast took the lead and ultimately won Best Picture. Who could ask for anything more?No writer in 2022 could conceive of anything this dramatic, and if they could, they would not be allowed to write it because it would be too offensive. Only white characters are allowed to be written as bad. Black characters, or any marginalized groups, must always be portrayed as perfect. Yet, there was an event millions witnessed with their own eyes. There was no way to gaslight us over it, no way to memory-hole it. It was, simply, the truth. It seemed clear that Will Smith believed he was in the right when he marched on stage and hit Chris Rock. He believed he was still in the right when he sat down and shouted, “keep my wife’s name out of your f*cking mouth.” He thought the crowd would applaud him. They didn’t. They fell silent. I did what everyone else was doing - I looked around at the people next to me and said, “was that real?” A woman sitting behind me said, “I have children watching at home.”No one really knew what to do after that. You could feel the tension in the room that was filled with well-meaning, mostly white liberals who were in shock at what just happened. But thanks to Chris Rock pulling it together and announcing the next award, the show could go on. His face said it all. He quickly regrouped, having had a lifetime of dealing with bullies and having to hide his pain lest he is bullied even more, and gave out the prize for Documentary Feature to Questlove’s The Summer of Soul, or When the Revolution Could not be Televised.” Like everyone else there, I was in shock, but I didn’t know it. I was just waiting for the endless ceremony to finally end. Everything that came after “the slap” was a blur.You might not know it if you are part of the industry, but if you macro out, you will see their social justice voting choices everywhere. People in the future will look back on these awards and see nothing but “woked out” Oscar winners. Jessica Chastain won for playing Tammy Faye, who was sympathetic to AIDS patients (LGBTQIA), Jane Campion won for Best Director (a woman and an LGBTQIA-themed film), and Best Picture to the first film with a predominantly deaf cast. Best Supporting Actress was the first Afro-Latina, openly queer Ariana DeBose. Supporting Actor was Troy Kotsur (the first deaf male actor to win). CODA’s director won Adapted Screenplay, with the only white male to win a major award, Kenneth Branagh winning Original Screenplay for the film that should have won Best Picture, Belfast. And last but not least, the Best Actor winner was Will Smith, only the fifth Black actor to win in the category. As they did their “good puritan” parade of deserved winners and waited for their pats on the back to show that real change had occurred, reality crashed through their glass bubble - leaving a mess that would need cleaning up. Hollywood and the Oscars have built a house of cards that denies reality at every turn to sell a preferred version of it. By the time the Oscars were over, we all just hurried out of the theater as fast as we could. I am never invited to the Governors Awards afterwards so I just found the garage. The valet asked me, “how was the show?” “Well,” I said and he bowed his head, “yeah I heard about Will Smith.” He did not look sympathetic, though. He looked annoyed. Many people would take Smith’s side after that night. He was probably one of them. I drank some bourbon when I got home and went to sleep. It wouldn’t be until the next day that my friend called me that I realized just how shaken up I was by the event. You don’t see that kind of thing at the Oscars. When my friend asked me about it I could not help but bur

This Sunday, the beleaguered Oscars will hold their 94th Academy Awards ceremony. I will be attending, as I have for the last several years. I get my one ticket that is usually on the highest tier. I put on a fancy dress. I drive myself to the ceremony, park in the garage, and take the escalator to the Dolby Theater, which is located in the same mall as the Mann’s Chinese, where I used to visit as a kid to look at the footprints and handprints of all of the stars.I love going to the Oscars, even if the only people I have to talk to are the wait staff and bartenders. Each floor has two full bars outside each of the tiers of the theater. You are allowed to go in and out of the theater as long as you do it during the commercial breaks. One of the most thrilling things about attending the live show is listening to the waves of applause that ripple through the room when an award is announced, or a film clip is shown. It looks very different on TV than it does live. I am usually way way up in the nosebleeds so I can’t see much of what is going on unless I look at the flat screens provided for us. I can go out and have a drink and watch the show on the TV monitor. Then you can see it better. But it is still fun to go. I feel really lucky to be invited every year as a member of the press.How did I ever get here?I have been blogging about the Oscars for 22 years. It never occurred to me in all of that time that the Oscars could go extinct. Now I think there is a good chance they probably will. Sooner rather than later. The Oscars, like the Democratic Party, have created a fantasy world for themselves, an insulated, isolated utopia. It plays out in everything they do. They believe they solved the problem of racism that erupted in 2020 with Biden’s directive, and by forcing everyone who wasn’t a willing participant, across the country and in every institution to go along with their “antiracism” policies. They are now trying to make sure this ideology is taught in schools because it isn’t some obscure scripture studied in law school. It is the entire world view of the Left, and that includes the Oscars.I used to be a true believer. Back when Critical Theory in race and gender was being taught at my daughter’s high school, I was spending my days on my website advocating for people of color and women to be nominated and to win. I was like every social justice scold you see on Twitter now. I believed I was doing the right thing. I believed that there was no purpose to the Oscars if they couldn’t change their history of awarding all white men all of the time. My perspective would start to shift in the last few years as I watched the accusations of racism and the push for equity to be ultimately detrimental to the goal of what the Oscars are supposed to be about. It isn’t that I still don’t feel that the awards should be open to everyone, not just white men, it’s that I can’t go along with using the awards as a way to pat ourselves on the back and fake-pretend we’ve changed anything. Have we? Or is it all a show? Film critics and Oscar voters seem to be okay pretending they are awarding on merit. But it doesn’t seem that way to anyone not inside their utopian bubble. They want to be rewarded for having made change - with their museum, with their casting choices, with the films they award, with how they staff their awards shows. They give the impression that things have changed. But they haven’t really. The Academy, and most institutions in this country, remain mostly white. The Academy is still 80% white, above the nation’s white majority, which is in the high 60s at the moment.Watch any film or television ad produced by Hollywood and you would imagine that we live in a country that has an equal share of people of color and white people. But we don’t. Whites are still the majority. But on the Left, they feel bad about this and thus, they must prove their worth every time they take the stage, every time they put out a movie, every time they give out an award, every time they make a film. The majority in this country, no matter their skin color, has about had enough. They’ve had enough of Hollywood lecturing them. They’ve had enough of their ideology and their strange new religion being foisted upon them and they are slowly pulling away from both the Democrats and the Oscars.Although everything was already starting to be about race before 2016, it wasn’t until Trump won that things would start to radically change on the Left, on the Right - everywhere. There are many reasons for the drop in ratings - the rise of superhero movies, the rise of great television and flat screens, but it also can’t be a coincidence that they really started to dip after November 2016. Trump’s win upended almost everything on the Left, especially the film industry and the Oscars. They became overtly political, taking the side against not just Trump but half the country that voted for Trump. Almost immediately, the mass hysteria began, starting with

A long while back, during the Obama presidency, when my daughter was in elementary school, we were taking a walk with another mother and her daughter. We saw a baby bird that had fallen out of its nest. I urged the other mother to take the bird, as I had cats who would eat it. She was going to take it to the wildlife refuge but instead decided to raise it on her own, thinking it would be a good experience for her daughter.She named the bird after me, Sasha, because I had encouraged her to rescue it from the sidewalk. She kept the bird in a cage, gave it food and water and it grew to full size. At that point, I once again stupidly urged her to give the bird a better life, to not force it to spend its entire existence in a cage. I have never liked looking at birds in cages. There is something so cruel about that. But this was bad advice. The day she decided to set the bird free, she gathered her whole family around, and with a video camera rolling, she set the bird free. Within minutes, a hawk swooped down and killed the bird. This was, to me, a hard lesson on the natural world. But it was also a lesson in my own arrogance and stupidity to think this was all some Disney version of baby birds and freedom of flight. That is not what the natural world is about. It’s life or death. It’s kill or be killed. This isn’t about happiness. That’s a luxury reserved for humans. I often stare into the eyes of animals, both the ones I look after and those in the wild. I look at them looking at me too, knowing I am the most dangerous of all living things. They have all evolved to be afraid of us, and they should be afraid. To me, Joe Biden’s attitude towards Afghanistan, Russia, and China is on par with the thinking that the bird was going to live a free and have happy life, without paying attention to the point of view of the hawk. The hawk is hungry. The hawk has highly attuned skills to capture prey. The prey it seeks has survival instincts of its own that it has evolved over time. But that caged bird had none of it. It was a poor, helpless thing that didn’t know from hawks. It had no protection, no awareness, only vulnerability. Everything that happened since Trump took office happened in a bubble of entitlement, arrogance, and ignorance. Everything we did while Trump was in power, from impeachment to Russiagate, to the Me Too protests, the protests against the “Muslim ban,” and the largest protest in American history, during a global pandemic without a vaccine, the George Floyd protests in 2020 all the way up to January 6th - all of that was being watched by Putin and by Xi Jinping, not to mention other leaders in other countries. It turned out the whole world was watching. We just had no clue or any awareness of that.On his Substack, James Strock wrote way back in February of 2021:The Whole World Is WatchingOur global competitors and adversaries—most notably the Chinese Communist regime—are alert to signs of American decline.How will they interpret the events of 1/6?We cannot know. Nonetheless, the failure of officials entrusted with power to react instinctively, to put themselves on the line against fellow citizens invading the Capitol, might incline some toward unwarranted conclusions about the United States as a whole.This isn’t to get Trump off the hook for the things he said to antagonize the Left or the ways he misled or even outright lied to the public, but there is no doubt that not for one day, not for one hour, not for one minute did the ruling class, the establishment, the media, or the Democrats treat him as the President of the United States. Worse, it was almost a crime to support him, during COVID or at any other time for the four years he was in power. He was not praised for a single thing he did. The media profited off cherry-picking the worst things they could find and then tossing it out for Twitter, MSNBC and CNN to chew on for days. Everything that was encouraged on the Left, from doubting the results of the election, to protesting violently for a cause that was important enough, was condemned when the Right did it. It wasn’t enough that they had spent hundreds of millions to put Biden in power without his having to even campaign with a mandate to win, and bad enough that the election had been won even before Election Day through absentee ballots and early voting, but to then be called “domestic terrorists” and “white supremacists” and racists just for supporting Trump, or protesting mask mandates or vaccines - the message was clear: if you aren’t on board with us, we’re going to treat you like human garbage at best, enemies of the state at worst. When they talk about Democracy and freedom and liberty and human rights, they forget how they have treated half of this country this past year. All of this was going on as though there was no Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping. It was as if America is the whole world and there are no other outside threats we face. The protests of 2020 inspired the Biden adminis

“Neil and Joni, if your side wins—and Spotify bends the knee to your demands—it will mark peak woke and the beginning of your end. In defeat, Joe will just go elsewhere and everyone with a genuinely liberal bone in their body will follow. Most importantly, our present “Eat Me Last” public posture—from which you benefit mightily—will crumble. Enough people will see clearly the threat you pose to open-inquiry and they will gird their loins, say “enough!” and start pushing back at scale.It’s ironic that two aging hippies are waging a Tet-offensive of sorts against Joe Rogan. Walter Cronkite’s change of mind on the war was the tipping point that changed the American mind and turned it against the Vietnam War. The attack on Rogan just might mark the beginning of the end of the progressive war on free inquiry.” —A Planned ManNone of this is about the coronavirus. It’s not about protecting people. It’s about an entire ecosystem that has developed in our society, devoted to bringing down people who step out of line. You don’t even need government censorship anymore, because Democrat super PACs and social media and the 24/7 news cycle are so much more efficient. Today’s smear merchants work a lot faster than ol’ Joey McCarthy ever did.Rogan will withstand it regardless. He’s got more money than he could spend in 10 lifetimes, and millions of fans who will follow him anywhere. He’ll be fine. No, this message is for the rest of us:You see what we’re doing to this guy? You want it to happen to you next? No? Then shut your mouth.- Jim TreacherThe Tipping PointIn every mass hysteria event throughout human history, there comes a tipping point. It’s the moment you can no longer take accusations seriously and the whole thing comes crashing down. In Salem, it was when the Governor’s wife was accused of being a witch. During the McCarthy hearings, when members of the military were being accused, it led to this moment:And now, it’s likely Joe Rogan as a target, along with the working-class uprisings of the Canadian truckers, public opinion is starting to change. This is the moment when everyone notices. When they took the initial accusation against Joe Rogan of spreading “disinformation” and pivoted to accusations of racism that gave them away and everyone saw. That the Blue Checks and the media fell for it was yet more proof of what an insular feedback loop it has become, and just how disconnected they have become from average Americans. Joe Rogan and the Body SnatchersThey look like us. They kind of act like us. But they are not here to live among us. They are here to turn us into them. They want us to think like they think. Like what they like. Believe what they believe. They have taken over Hollywood. They have swallowed up science. They have infiltrated education. They are not here to negotiate. You have only one option: comply or else. It is the Evergreen College generation that now sees its mission to remove undesirables the way they tried to remove Bret Weinstein from Evergreen for having the audacity to suggest it is against the fundamental American right of free speech to absent a group from a shared space. You are not allowed to say such things if you are a white male. It is verboten. We’ve now seen so many examples of this it has almost become the new normal. It is for people who are plugged into the news cycle and social media but a good majority of Americans didn’t quite realize the force we put into power when we elected Joe Biden. But now they do. The Rogan episode has woken up a sleeping tiger. Some will watch this Evergreen documentary series on Youtube made by Benjamin Boyce who was a student at Evergreen at the time and documented all of it, and feel that rising sense of purpose, as so many of my friends on the Left do. This is their newfound religion as a “good ally.” They know they are either racist or antiracist. The dirty little secret is that studies have shown white liberals change their language when they talk to Black people and Conservatives don’t. Do white liberals see themselves as caretakers of Black people and/or people of color? Do they see themselves as superior and therefore feel the need to always make amends? Has that sense of guilt has been carried over from the Boomer generation of the 1960s counterculture when the Civil Rights movement exploded much the same way the Woke revolution exploded in 2020? Must it now be visited upon the minds and hearts of children - they must be taught how to be racist so that they can then be antiracist to make sure the cycle continues. Is that really the plan? It didn’t end well for Evergreen in terms of ongoing success, which should give you a good idea of where all of this is going. Enrollment dropped significantly. Maybe it helped move the needle in terms of marginalized students finding their voice and power, but when it spiraled into witch hunts that is when the bottom fell out. From the WSJ:It turns out that students aren’t clamoring for the privileg

On his daily podcast, Ben Shapiro notes that many were outraged that ABC had suspended Whoopi Goldberg from The View for two weeks following comments she made about race and the Holocaust. But Shapiro notes that it isn’t good enough to suspend her, per the Left’s and The View’s OWN standards. He cites the Ilya Shapiro case wherein Georgetown Law is now trying to decide whether Ilya Shapiro should be fired for an offensive tweet. The students at Georgetown are holding a protest and demanding he is fired. If Georgetown fires Shapiro, if the collective hive on the Left goes along with this, then they must, by their own standards of intent vs. impact, fire Whoopi Goldberg. Says Ben Shapiro:Okay, so here's the thing. They didn't just suspend Roseanne Barr, for making a racist statement about Valerie Jarrett. They fired Roseanne Barr and took the top rated sitcom off the air. So here's the deal. If you guys are going to play this game, where if somebody is openly identified as anywhere close to a conservative and they say something that is a bad thing, little trademark symbol, if somebody does a bad thing, and they're completely removed from their job, then you don't get to suspend Whoopi Goldberg, you have to fire her. These are the standards and you set them and you don't get to play by two sets of standards.One of the most inexplicable untruths we’ve been forced to swallow over the past few years is the idea that intent doesn’t matter. When someone, or a group of people, feel hurt or offended it’s called impact. You caused them to be offended and thus, you are guilty.Impact matters. Intent does not. You are still required to apologize and take responsibility for causing harm. As in:But you can see how that would be a problem for the modern-day Left. They need villains. If Dustin Hoffman got handsy with a woman on a set 40 years ago, even if that was just what people did back then (it was), intent can’t matter. Punishment must be enacted because the story being told NOW causes harm to people who hear it. Intent can’t matter when deciding whether the Roosevelt statue should stay outside the National History Museum in New York. Intent doesn’t matter if an old Hollywood movie has outdated stereotypes. These images still cause harm and must contain a warning or else be removed entirely. The image of Thomas Jefferson causes harm because he once owned slaves, regardless of how things were back then. If a professor says something that people find offensive, he or she could lose their job. We don’t even argue about it much anymore. We just kind of go along with it. The Left is in power and they don’t really believe in forgiveness. They believe in punishing people for impact, like Donald McNeil at the New York Times. The only acceptable response to Ilya Shapiro’s tweets about a “lesser black woman” is that he meant it because he is a racist. They would never consider the other possibility - that he did not choose his words wisely and was swarmed and persecuted as a result. He has apologized, of course, but that doesn’t matter.This is covered quite well by Bari Weiss on her substack:Led by a Slate journalist, the Twitter mob did what Twitter mobs do and stoked the intended result: In an email to the school the dean called Shapiro’s tweets “appalling” and “at odds with everything we stand for at Georgetown Law.”Then Shapiro, who had already deleted the tweet, sent an apology addressed to the Dean William Treanor and the entire Georgetown community: “I sincerely and deeply apologize for some poorly drafted tweets I posted late Wednesday night,” he wrote. If you’ve ever been the center of a Twitter swarm you know that the last thing they care about is intent. They look at the words and decide what they mean. If enough people agree about the intent that becomes the “take” and the only acceptable one. I once defended Ansel Elgort whose girlfriend was 19 when he was 21. She had taken to Twitter to complain about how Elgort had treated her when they were together and after they broke up. Twitter reacted and within minutes Elgort was being called a pedophile rapist. When I said “sorry but a relationship with a 19-year-old is not pedophilia.” It was — and considering how many of these I have gone through by now — really bad. I never backed down, though. I never apologized. Instead, I wrote about it here. That was in 2020. Almost three years ago. It is not getting better. It is getting worse.They DEMAND that Ilya Shapiro be considered a racist. They DEMAND that the rioters on January 6th be insurrectionists. They demand that Joe Rogan is killing people with disinformation. And so they must DEMAND Whoopi Goldberg is an anti-semite. To quote Jonathan Pie once again — this is what YOU wanted. But intent does matter. It has to. If you are deciding who is “good” and who is “bad” and you are making it impossible for someone to have any kind of defense, then you are going along with what can only be described as a totalitarian movement.

There is no doubt, at least to my mind, that we’re living through some kind of a mass hysteria event. Writing on his site, John Kass says:A weak president who is out of control, one who wildly denounces those who disagree with him as sinners against the state, blaming them for the failures of his extreme legislative agenda that can not generate enough votes in the Senate is not a hopeful business. It is a frightening thing. It is something out of bad paranoid fiction, or post-war Eastern Europe. But it is not fiction or history. It seeps from the babbling old man in the White House.Most Americans aren’t worried about looking for racists on every block. They don’t think America is consumed by racial hate. They think America is a nice country. They like living here. They’re worried about other matters. They wonder why Biden and the Democrats won’t address their concerns.The people are worried about inflation, not racist witches. After those wild spending and money-printing sprees from Washington, inflation is now higher than it has been in 40 years. It is eating a hole in their bank accounts, college funds and retirement savings. The people see the rising price of gas and wonder how long they’ll be able to afford meat.They’re worried about confusion over vaccine mandates and vax passes and their kids being locked out of school in the lockdown blue states, of babies ordered to wear masks.What they’re not worried about are the screams of the witch hunters, or whether to play some old-timey Democratic political game like “race cards.” They have lives.Anyone can be seen as a Domestic Terrorist by Biden and Merrick Garland. Parents who protest school boards, anyone who might not want to take the vaccine. Anyone who objects to the practice of teaching “antiracism” to children, or even people who might object to gender theory being taught to their kids. If you misgender someone you can be banned for hate speech on Twitter. Is that now going to be the law of the land? Do the citizens have any right to dissent or object? Worse, the Biden administration doesn’t seem to understand that the whole world is watching. They’re watching him confused and angry, demanding his citizens comply with his orders. So insular and disconnected from reality are Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, not to mention the journalist class in the mainstream and the Blue Checks on Twitter, that they’re actually trying to sell the pitch that a bunch of rag-tag rioters, who were unarmed, had the power to bring down the mighty United States - to threaten our Democracy and to present any sort of challenge whatsoever to the most powerful military in the world. Imagine what Vladimir Putin makes of that. Or Xi Jingping. Or the Taliban leaders. Either they’re laughing at us or they’re kicking themselves for not realizing just how vulnerable the United States government actually is. These aren’t leaders. Writing on his Substack, Serve to Lead’s James Strock goes through how past leaders might have navigated January 6th to illustrate just how weak American leadership has become. From George Washington:Would Washington have toyed with a mob from the White House—and not acted to forestall violence? This was the president who put down the Whiskey Rebellion.Would Washington have fled the throngs marauding the Capitol halls? Would he have slipped onto an underground tram, repaired to an office building a quarter-of-a-mile away, barricaded himself in a bathroom in a colleague’s office, and tweeted that he was traumatized?Would he have failed to recognize an oligarchy brazenly striking at the foundation of the Bill of Rights? Washington’s generation knew oligarchy and feared and fought it. Recall that the British East India Company owned the product that was thrown overboard in the Boston Tea Party.And Teddy Roosevelt:Were he a member of Congress, would he have allowed a police officer, perhaps one not equipped in riot gear, to shield him from danger?On Monday, October 14, 1912, Roosevelt took a bullet to the chest, fired at point-blank range. The aging former president then spoke, without a microphone, for well over an hour, before accepting medical care.Would any of the strongest leaders of this country project such an image of weakness to the rest of the world just to score political points? You think your average person on the Left looks foolish walking into a supermarket in a hazmat suit, imagine what the rest of the world thought of Nancy Pelosi’s Green Zone occupation of DC after Janaury 6th. We look like freaked out, hysteria-driven lunatics who can’t handle someone using the wrong pronoun or words that make us feel unsafe, let alone a riot that was not even as bad as the riots that followed the protests for months in the Summer of 2020. Whole businesses were burned to the ground. Dozens were killed. It was the closest thing to an actual revolution we’ve seen since the founding of the United States yet this one riot, in a futile, an

What’s so funny about Peace, Love, and Understanding?We’ll leave 2021 with no stronger grasp on collective truth than we had in 2020. One kind of dystopian nightmare is exchanged with another. I wish Biden had tried to unite this country. But he didn’t. I wish the Left had not gone so utterly insane. But they did. I wish I hadn’t seen just how corrupt our media class in this country is. But I did. I wish I didn’t wake up from the comfort of the delusion that I was fighting on the right side, but I did.I have come out of 2021 as clear-eyed as I have ever been. There is nothing good about that. The more you see, the more you know, the worse it is. Indeed, ignorance is bliss. I would be lying if I said I didn’t go through many very dark nights this past year. For most of my friends that would translate as: fear of Trump supporters destroying “Democracy Itself.” But for me it was the feeling of being completely and utterly alone. Physically alone. Emotionally alone. I had four animals around me at all times, hovering nearby for comfort and warmth. But I had no one to share quarantine with in 2020 or 2021. I only had the the terrible, abusive internet which I kept returning to again and again for friendship, warmth and kindness. What I would get back, though, was either more abuse, indifference, and cruelty. That can distort how you see the world and how you see yourself in it. I have contemplated more than once if I was anywhere near close to ending it. I never would because I have a daughter, for one thing. Also, I would worry about my four animals. Who would take care of them? Then I would remind myself that this is what it feels like to live in an extremely polarized, algorithm-driven reality and that none of it was real. Then, I would take a walk outside, see the smiling faces of my neighbors, and feel my feet on the ground and I would remember what was real. A good friend of mine dropped dead of a heart attack at 57, reminding me just how suddenly it can all be over. And that time spent on Twitter is time wasted. As hard as it is to quit, my goal in 2022, among others, is to spend much less time there. I do want to say a big thank you to you readers of this Substack. Having you here, subscribing - whether or not you read my newsletter — has made me feel less alone. Less alienated. Some of you I know and some I don’t know. But just knowing you are here means the world to me. What’s So Funny About Truth, Justice and the American WayThe one thing I wish for more than anything is to have a country back where we are allowed to express ourselves freely and openly without fear. As Sam Harris wrote two summers ago:“We appear to be driving ourselves crazy. Actually, crazy. As in, incapable of coming into contact with reality, unable to distinguish fact from fiction—and then becoming totally destabilized by our own powers of imagination, and confirmation bias, and then lashing out at one other on that basis.This isn’t just politics and human suffering on display. It’s philosophy. It’s ideas about truth—about what it means to say that something is “true.” What we’re witnessing in our streets and online and in the impossible conversations we’re attempting to have in our private lives is a breakdown in epistemology. How does anyone figure out what’s going on in the world? What is real? If we can’t agree about what is real, or likely to be real, we will never agree about how we should live together. And the problem is, we’re stuck with one other.” I had to think really hard about exactly what I wanted back in 2022. Then it finally hit me. We need Superman. More specifically, we need to be guided once again by his principles: Truth, Justice, and the American Way. TruthThe alternative narratives are messing with our perception of reality. We watch every day as the narrative is distorted on the Left and the Right. It’s hard to know what is true and what isn’t. While many will blame Trump for this, he’s been gone for a year off of social media and it’s as bad as it’s ever been. The news media is less trustworthy than they ever have been. Objectivity is very nearly gone. We just seem to be stuck in this place of endless Civil War.For me, it was when the New York Times and Twitter worked together in a struggle session over the Tom Cotton op-ed I saw for the first time how we on the Left distort the truth to serve the narrative. How long did the Kyle Rittenhouse narrative rage out of control? Did the media ever walk back their accusations that he was a “racist white supremacist who used an illegal weapon to cross state lines and kill Black Lives Matter protesters?” None of it turned out to be true, none of it. And yet, most on CNN or MSNBC or Twitter had the courage to even ask whether it was true or not. That is just one example of how twisted our perception of reality has been for at least a year, but probably longer. The good news is that there are still plenty of resources to set the record straight if you can pull yoursel

The Democrats are out of touch and out of time.There have been so many opportunities for the Democrats to turn things around since the wake-up call in 2016. To understand why Trump not only won but got that close in the first place is to have the kind of self-awareness that leads to genuine reflection and change. But that isn’t how it went down. As Barton Swaim puts it in the WSJ:Which brings us back to Donald Trump. His nomination in 2016, and even more his election to the presidency, was an anguished outcry against decades of aggressions. It wasn’t wise or sensible, but it was understandable as a frantic attempt to stay the hand of an uncompromising cultural leftism.The leftward-inclining elites who dominate American institutions didn’t interpret it that way. They classified it, as they had classified the tea-party revolt of 2009–10, as an expression of racism and hatred, thus relieving themselves of any responsibility to take it seriously or to discern its meaning. They employed every conceivable tool in an effort to remove Mr. Trump from office. Intellectuals and commentators called him a fascist; top-drawer authors blamed him for coronavirus deaths; officials of the Federal Bureau of Investigation worked with political operatives and for-hire spies to frame him as a Russian asset; the U.S. media accepted and publicized the hoax wholesale; former military and intelligence officials openly called him a traitor; federal security bureaucracies hatched plots to have him impeached; and the entertainment industry used every opportunity to cast him as a villainous madman and a snarling racist idiot.They went all the way to Hitler with Trump. They genuinely believed a fascist had taken power and was about to start shooting people randomly on the street, silencing dissent, banning journalism, forbidding freedom of thought, and putting undocumented immigrants (illegal immigrants - meaning, they came here illegally but we can’t say that because it sounds bigoted) in “concentration camps.”In the end, it would turn out that it was the Left, not the Right, that was exhibiting signs of authoritarianism. Not that you could ever convince them of that. It doesn’t really matter how often they’ve been warned, they are digging their heels in, holding onto what they used to have rather than loosening their grip and understanding that they can’t micromanage an entire country to follow their newfound religion. Now, every day there are more headlines aimed at the Democrats to try to solve the problem:Voters are saying ‘no’ but Biden isn’t listening: Could the message to politicians be any clearer? Any louder?Democrats’ only hope for 2024: jail TrumpA Pollster’s Warning to Democrats: ‘We Have a Problem’Democratic Party’s brand is brokenThe Democrats Need to Dump Harris FastThe Democrats Mayor Pete ProblemDemocrats lost in Virginia, but their win in New Jersey is more worrisomeWhy A ‘Sister Souljah Moment’ Won’t Save BidenAnd today’s latest offering from Benjamin Wallace-Wells:What is the matter with the Democrats? On one level, the answer is simple. Voters with college degrees are increasingly siding with the Party, while those without are moving toward the Republicans, and there are more people in the second category than the first: about two in five voters in the 2020 Presidential election were college graduates. The Party’s prospects in the midterms do not look bright, and everyone involved in Democratic politics is exhorting the Party’s elected officials to do something about it. This has created a slightly comic situation, in which a group of highly credentialled people urgently instruct one another in how to appeal to those who are not.But it’s worse than that. The small but loud minority that controls the Democrats is concentrated on Twitter, where the Blue Check army keeps all of the journalists in line, dolling out their daily “take” or talking points that actively distorts reality people can plainly see with their own eyes and spits it back out on the headlines of like-minded outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post, where it eventually trickles upwards to CNN and MSNBC. How you respond to these headlines will tell you everything about where you sit in the paradigm.The problem for Democrats - they’re losing people. Daily. They aren’t bringing people to them. Who would want to exist in such a guilt-ridden, puritanical, judgmental community without humor or free thought? If you watch any pundit on CNN or MSNBC try to struggle through any news report where they have to give bad news to Democrats you can see their inner panic. They have to offer up a sign that they still believe Trump is an existential threat to Democracy before they can finish a sentence. That, my friends, is a climate of fear. What are they afraid of? Twitter. Believe it or not.The Best of TimesFor a while there, things were really great. A new Camelot. The height was Lin Manuel-Miranda’s glorious Hamilton. It was a celebratory version of

Barney was mostly invisible on Film Twitter. His 3,593 or so loyal followers hung around but he couldn’t break out much farther than that. He was a no-blue-check-nobody. You have to be somebody to get one. It’s a game of status. Who has it and who doesn’t. It was just outside of his reach. Was that fame? Maybe it was. He knew he should leave Twitter. Just walk away from it. The sick game of begging for likes, validation, attention. Wanting to matter but not knowing where to start. No one cared what he thought. NO ONE. At least not on Twitter. He had a modest following for his youtube videos. That had given birth to a modest Patreon where he collected around $700 per month. That wasn’t bad but even he couldn’t live on that. And if he couldn’t live on that he could not move out and find his own place, something he dreamed about in that middle space between sleep and waking when anything seems possible.He also wrote film reviews that were featured on Rotten Tomatoes, and the occasional Oscar predictions on his blog Where The Sun Don’t Shine. His readership averaged roughly 1,200 eyeballs a day. Zero cash there either. Mostly his readers agreed with him. He was just not someone anyone cared about. If they thought of him at all they just saw a rando normie writing things about movies that are probably not that interesting. He knew he needed to lay out the hot takes to get engagement. But the last shred of dignity he still had left kept him from doing that. He would play it straight. People would read or not. Barney knew he wasn’t a somebody. He also knew he probably couldn’t get a job now anyway. He was a white guy and nobody was hiring white guys. At least not straight white guys. Not cis straight white guys. “You were just born in the wrong era,” his mother told him. She wrote something on Instagram - about how she felt sorry for him but it was his turn to step aside, to let someone else eat at the table. She taught him how to be forgiving, she said, and he turned out great, she said. She was trying to get him to put his pronouns on his bio on Twitter: He/Him. But he couldn’t bring himself to state the obvious. He/Him turned out great. Did she really write that? She did. Barney flicked off tweets like lit matches. Some fizzled into a puff of smoke. Some had the power to set something ablaze. His followers liked him best when he was cruel. They liked the little fires and the big blazes. He routinely deleted the tweets that had no engagement. They fizzled out. Puffs of smoke. It wasn’t every day Barney felt powerful. In fact, most days, he struggled just to look at himself. He would deliberately look away when he approached reflected glass or mirrors. He could not stand what he’d become after a year of lockdown. He didn’t like himself before that, even after being raised in the system of the granola crunchers in Los Angeles where the only valued trait was high self-esteem. Leave no he/him chubby gifted kid behind. Windows and mirrors were everywhere, even in places where they shouldn’t be. On closet doors, on walls, in elevators. He practiced the art of not looking. His mother sent him a lot of old photos to remind him of their life together. Single mom and her perfect son. There he was ice skating. Totally alone. Not one friend. She caught him in an expression of surprise. His arms poked out like an upright snow angel, eyes too wide, mouth hanging open, hair that she’d tucked into a wool hat so that no strands were hanging down. He looked like a snowman caught in the headlights. Or was it snow person now. “You have a memory from 2008,” Facebook told him. “You have a memory from 2010” his phone told him. He never knew what horror would surface each time the artificial intelligence decided he should re-engage with his past. Where would all of it go when he died? Would the memory algorithm just keep churning away? Does anyone ever really die online? There was another photo of him taking riding lessons that he’d never wanted. But his classmates were all taking them, the girls were, so his mom wanted him to take them - you know, to look kind of like a normal kid. There he was sitting on a horse, not really smiling, his hair tucked tightly into a riding helmet. His expression was only slightly less miserable than the one on that poor horse. They made him ride that poor horse. No good could come out of that. He had to pretend again. Pretend the horse was into it too, pretend he was having fun, pretend he was normal. He had to look at that photo before quickly deleting it. So much of it was for her, his “woke” white mom. Happy mom, happy son. Her Instagram was a collage of happy and activism. Happy activism. Hapactivism. White wine glass in the sunset happy. Picking up trash on an “Environmental racism” meet-up happy. There was that flushed look white women get when they were high on “purpose.” His mother was all in with the pussy hats and the ongoing efforts to “dismantle the patriarchy” and destroy “systemic racism”

Stanley Kubrick’s sublime The Shining breaks all of the rules. It breaks the rules of adaptation by completely upending the plot and meaning of Stephen King’s original book. The plot of the movie doesn’t really even make sense from a story point of view. King’s book is very much about telekinesis inside people and inside the Overlook Hotel. The hotel wants the boy Danny because his powers are so great. In their way is the mother Wendy, strong and protective, who will keep them from getting the boy. They use recovering alcoholic Jack, a writer, to kill off the mother and bring the boy into the fold. In the movie, Jack simply loses his mind inside the potentially haunted Hotel. Kubrick has simplified it greatly, to focus on the claustrophobia of the snowed-in hotel, and how that might break down a marriage. If The Shining was released today it would be trashed by some 200 self-appointed critics who operate more or less as a hive mind that monitors issues of social justice, as every industry controlled by the left does, as much as it does anything else. But in 2021, there is no such thing as a purely great movie unless it crosses all of the t’s and dots all of the i’s. Amazon Studios has even written it into its DEI guidelines for filmmakers. The left has been consumed by its own righteousness and has become every bit the zealots of the Evangelical Right. The Shining is allowed to mostly exist as a film made before the religion took hold (pre-2014). It would not be made now the same way. Not a chance. First of all, you could probably count on one hand those working today with Kubrick’s talent and ability. But secondly, there is no way it would be told the way Kubrick decided to tell it. Kubrick’s The Shining would be described as misogynistic, no doubt, by many of those who cover film. The irritation with the actress Shelley Duvall by director Stanley Kubrick and star Jack Nicholson is clearly evident and, dare we say, hilariously funny. But it’s funny in that way you might only get if you are a member of Generation-X, that is those of us who really were jaded throughout our young adult lives and preferred subversive art to almost every other kind. We think Taxi Driver is funny. We think Blue Velvet is funny and, yes, we think The Shining is funny. But it’s also brilliant. The reason is, quite simply, that Stanley Kubrick was a great director. He took material that wasn’t his and made it his. Kubrick’s The Shining spoke about the social issues of the time in a quiet whisper, like many of the films of the late 70s did. Feminism, in particular, was taking a hit. If you remember the 80s you’ll remember how no woman wanted to admit she was a feminist. It had a negative connotation, at least to any woman who wanted to attract a man. You heard “I’m not a feminist but…” a lot. It took a while for the word to come back into style. Of course, now it barely exists as a stand-alone movement because it’s been overtaken by trans rights, or non-binary or LGBTQIA+. Feminism? What’s that?Stephen King wrote The Shining in 1977 and is (and was) most definitely married to and influenced by a feminist, his wife Tabitha. So his book isn’t the same kind of commentary that the film version of The Shining is. If you are familiar with King’s work you know what an important person Tabitha is to him. He has called her his “ideal reader” and there is no way she doesn’t get the first pass when he writes a draft. Because of that, even with the awkward sex scenes factored in, his books have always been feminist-friendly. Kubrick, however, was having none of that. The film version exists inside the mind of a man who is driven so insane by his wife and son that he imagines a hotel driving him towards murder. If you had not read the book, that might have been your takeaway. I find the book actually scary and the movie kind of funny. Much of that is due to Nicholson’s hammy but hilarious and magnetic performance as Jack. Nicholson appears to be trolling Shelley Duvall throughout, and though she famously had a traumatic or difficult experience on the set, the result is something weird and unexpected. The more distraught she becomes, the harder he is on her and somehow it becomes funny. This is one of the things about comedy that is hard to explain. If you dissect it and analyze it there is nothing funny about it. But it somehow it is. Even though Shelley Duvall is mousy and bullied by Jack in the movie, she still manages to be the feminist hero in the film that she isn’t really as much in the book. That’s because she is “saved” by the character Scatman Crothers plays in the film (he’s killed in the film, leaving Wendy to be the hero). The acting in The Shining is great, the story is pretty good but what makes it timeless is the directing. If you want to know what great directing is, watch this film. Shots like this one. Kubrick doesn’t have to make this scene funny. It’s supposed to be scary - it’s the scene where Hallorann realizes that Wendy a

Somewhere in Washington, in a parked car. Ike: It’s a dumpster fire.Mike: They’ll bound back.Ike: Didn’t Elon Musk invent some kind of brain enhancement thing? Is it too soon to get that for Biden? Is it only chimps?Mike: What?Ike: Nutrisystem … Nutra grain … Mike: Nuralink! Ike: Is it too late to join human clinical trials?Mike: Don’t be an ass. Everybody gets old. Ike: Most people don’t get that old. Mike: The boomers. They built it all. Now, they’re destroying it all. Everything is coming apart. Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer - how did it all go so wrong?Ike: Seriously, calm down. It’s not that bad. He can bounce back. If he passes those bills the press will be giving him slobbery blow—you know. Mike: Please don’t say it. Ike: He’s putting on the heat with Manchin, the press keeps bullying Sinema - how long can she possibly hold out? Although her fashion sense tells me she doesn’t exactly want to blend in. Got Obama out in Virginia to drag MacAuliffe over the finish line. They have Americans whipped up into unmanageable panic and fear with January 6th. They’ll do as they’re told. Polls will rise because that is the story we’re going to tell. Reality is less of an issue than what we say the reality is. Reality isn’t what you think it is. Reality is just a matter of opinion. If we say everything is going fine, then everything is going fine.Mike: What?Ike: They’ll bounce back. He’s too big to fail. They are too big to fail. The press, the blue checks - they will not let him fail. They put him in power and they don’t want to look like fools. We got this.Mike: It’s more than the polls. There is a disconnect between reality and fantasy. The people who are dictating what the Democrats do are themselves completely out of touch with at least half of the American people. What the Right thinks about the Left is closer to reality than what the Left has decided the Right is. The Democrats only have one option to win elections: To scare voters. Rolling Stone comes out with a January 6 piece just before a big election. But what no one ever says is that there were two separate events that day. One was legal and one wasn’t. They’re treating the whole thing, all of the people who were there to protest lawfully and rightfully into insurrectionists. They weren’t. And yet. If they can keep the people scared they can maintain some power. Once that fear goes away, though, they are sunk. But they need fear and fear is destroying the country. Democrats really think that this is the way forward. It is a way forward. To war. Ike: You’re overthinking it. I’m telling you, the kind of power backing the Democrats right now is insurmountable. We just need to spitball a few ideas to throw out into the public to let them know the Biden administration is on their side. Maybe stop testing baby puppy beagles. Just a thought.Mike: Oh you mean like removing Thomas Jefferson from City Hall? Pronouns Day by the State Department? This was not supposed to be America’s second revolution. You start taking down the statues of confederates, that’s one thing. Teddy Roosevelt - now it’s getting weird. You take down Jefferson, that’s the end of the American experiment. Ike: Okay, so those didn’t work as well. We have to think outside the box here. Ice cream, bike rides, that disastrous Town Hall with Anderson Cooper…not working. So what about, you know, maybe a kind of casual fun thing. Slow jam the news?Mike: BIDEN IS NOT OBAMA! He doesn’t have that kind of charisma. No one wants to see him on TV. The country is falling apart. Ike: Do you want me to give you a “yeah but” or are you past the point of no return.Mike: We just dig around in our pockets and find that one shiny penny that gets us off the hook. Yes it was a global pandemic, yes we were so freaked out we were wearing face shields and lining up outside of Costco but when hundreds of thousands hit the streets it was yeah but they’re wearing masks. Yeah but they’re outside. In May. Of 2020. I know what your “yeah but” is going to be. You’ll say yeah but Thomas Jefferson isn’t being taken down, he’s just being moved. But yes moved after being called an offensive racist! THOMAS JEFFERSON!Ike: Yeah … but …what do you me to say? Mike: I want you to say Biden will start facing reality. He’ll start being the guy who would never go for removing Thomas Jefferson from City Hall. It’s not that hard. It’s the least you’d expect from a president. The very least. Ike: Those who voted on it don’t represent the Democratic Party or Biden. Mike: Yeah but. Yeah but. Yeah BUT!Ike: Why are you generalizing? Okay, so we all know what Thomas Jefferson did with Sally Hemmings and all that, what this whole country did building itself up to be the greatest country in the world, wasn’t exactly pretty. Do you think the elite class who own million-dollar homes are really going to give them back to the indigenous people they claim to care about? Like Gwyneth Paltrow and Laura Dern? No. Are they going to give away all their mone

In 2021, there are only two paths for the left generally and the Democrats specifically to take: totalitarianism or collapse.Some days, like today, when the New York Times’ Kara Swisher parrots the talking points of the progressive left (what does that even mean anymore) while pretending to write about Big Tech, it feels hopeless. The massive wave of support to cancel Dave Chappelle, or have Netflix pull his show The Closer, is overwhelming. And yes, this too shall pass. As long as no one is being thrown into gulags or meth-addicted Nazis aren’t marching into France we’re on the better side of history. But still. This is America. And these are supposedly liberals. Suddenly it’s okay for a mob of mostly white people to condemn, chase and attempt to destroy the life of a black man for jokes. Jokes are harm, they scream. Words are violence, they insist. COMPLY OR ELSE they demand. So few people have the stones to stand up and say ENOUGH. There aren’t adults in the room there are helicopter parents who pander and soothe and over-protect. Or they’re baby boomers who still think pushing back against mass hysteria is selling out. Don’t forget that those who marched against the Black List and McCarthyism were loathe to push back against actual Stalin. Don’t forget what led to the fear of communism. Don’t forget the gulags and the censorship and the propaganda and the forced conformity of thought. The struggle sessions are back but at least they don’t go hand in hand with starvation and torture. Why are we here? Because of three simple words: intent doesn’t matter. Intent doesn’t matter because inside of each person is a corrupt evil that must be exposed. Once exposed, that person is to be hauled out in the court of public opinion. Confess your sins and apologize, even if you did nothing wrong. Deny your sins and be banished from Salem Village, I mean Twitter, I mean your platform. You will be blacklisted in polite society, aka the revenue stream.Of course, there is a market for those expelled from Salem Village, I mean Twitter, I mean the ruling class, I mean polite society. Outsider content can be found on Youtube, podcasts, right here on Substack - desperate sane people looking for voices of courage, looking for people who will say what they can’t spend a lot of money for some relief, for someone to remind them that they are not crazy, that none of this is normal. Dave Chappelle was “transphobic” because he defended “transphobic” JK Rowling in The Closer. But Swisher, and everyone else, can’t humanize Chappelle so they can’t measure nuance in what he’s saying in his show because intent doesn’t matter. He doesn’t pull punches but he also calls his transgender friend Daphne a “she” and speaks of their great friendship. He tells the audience that Daphne took her own life, jumping off of a building after defending Chapelle on Twitter. He makes one final joke that “she couldn’t be a woman because only a man would do some gangsta s**t like that.” The crowd goes completely silent, and then he adds that he told that joke because Daphne would have loved that joke, and, he says, “that’s why she was my friend.”He also said he set up a scholarship fund for Daphne’s daughter. Most people I know in real life don’t understand the sudden lurch in the direction of “there is no biological difference between men and women.” Most people I know don’t believe that and can’t believe the militancy around forcing people to accept that. Chappelle’s show, like it or not, reflects what the majority in this country thinks. You can’t change their minds by forcing policy, as the left is now doing. Trying to destroy Dave Chappelle and Netflix over it only makes that acceptance harder. It is shocking that Ted Sarandos has held the line in standing up for Chappelle, who no doubt brings millions of subscribers to the platform. Shocking to see someone in the plain light of day in the moneyed class say something as truthful yet controversial as “I don’t believe jokes cause real-world harm.”If you talk to anyone on the left they will brush it off. Either they deny “cancel culture” exists at all, or they say you are painting the entire left and the Democratic Party with the same brush as a small but vocal group of activists. Or they say the punishment is not that severe, after all, Joe Rogan and Dave Chappelle, even Louis C.K. can still make money outside of Salem Village, I mean Twitter, mean the ruling class, I mean polite society. Whatever it is that people call “Cancel Culture” exists. It always has. It is also called mass panic or mass hysteria. It afflicts a community of people who are connected to each other enough to feel the same fear at roughly the same time. This study concluded that fear spreads on social media like a game of telephone, growing every time it spreads from one to the next. It also concluded that “unbiased factual news of a story does not seem to halt growing panic.”The study followed 154 participants on social media. The tot

Probably every society goes through revisionist history. Usually this happens gradually, over time, as stories become myths which become legends. Truth or fiction, it doesn’t really matter, does it? Even now, stories are being retold to serve various agendas. The story of the election in 2020 has become a dark and witchy fairy tale on the left and a religious persecution story on the right. Each side clings to the myth that helps them sleep better at night. Yes, there are monsters roaming the countryside but it’s okay because we have MSNBC to protect us. Trump didn’t really lose the election because superhumans do not lose. Trump is an omnipotent force two ways it seems. Devil or Diety. Take your pick. The truth is much less complicated but it is risky to abandon the myths because the myths define us. There probably isn’t a single event that can’t be told a different way, or from a different perspective. I often think about that one Quaker back in Salem who spent a year in jail to make sure the story of mass hysteria and hangings was told. The horrors of Salem are so much bigger and so much more terrifying that the kitschy way Salem is remembered as witch hats and broomsticks is misleading. These are stories of children being forced to condemn their parents as witches. Poor women and their babies dying in prison. A man being crushed to death because he would not confess. Hangings that were applauded by the townspeople in the town square. Fear does strange things to us humans. Collective fear is unmanageable. The Monica Lewinsky myth is being retold because in the post Me Too era even the die-hard Democrats have turned on the withering charmer. He isn’t now an echo of JFK whose romps with women were part of his legend at a time when men were applauded for their James Bond-like sexual allure. I remember being at a party in the 90s and making the joke about the Lewinsky scandal, “when they were handing out b*******s in the Oval Office where was I?” It wasn’t much of a joke. But people did laugh. I suspect every single person at that dinner party now believes Clinton Me Too’d Monica. Or Monica Me Too’d Clinton.We women who lived through these eras remember full well what things were like, and even as far back as the 1970s when it was not uncommon for 12 and 13 year-olds to lose their virginity and brag about it. Molestation was everywhere, hidden from view or barely noticed or addressed. Adulthood was cool, childhood wasn’t. Not until the 1990s. Then those of us who grew up in the careless 70s began to notice that it was all bad, hardly any of it good. No seatbelts, smoking at 10, smoking pot, watching porno, rated-R movies. The parents who protected their kids tended to be Conservatives who still went to Church on Sundays. But kids of the Left? We were raised like weeds. Some of us made it, some didn’t. Then in the 90s we all watched Oprah and went to therapy. Then we figured out that everything was bad. We vowed to raise our kids better. Monica was a kid of the 70s too who grew up in the 90s to think it was cool to chase a married guy with seismic charisma. She famously flashed him her thong to show interest. And back then, wearing a thong was kind of risque. Not like now when everyone wears them. Poor Monica thought he was in love with her and that he would treat her well. She didn’t realize that when she became a problem she’d be tossed in the garbage. And trust me, as someone who knows all too well what it’s like to get in the way of a man who is using you as a side piece, that doesn’t feel good. To her credit, Monica doesn’t entirely blame “Predator Bill” for the affair. But she does tell a big lie in the casting. Beanie Feldstein is no Monica Lewinsky. They want it to look like Bill Clinton cornered a wallflower who isn’t used to male attention, and while that might have been how Monica saw herself, that isn’t how the world saw her then or now. She was vivacious and pinup-like in her beauty. Beanie Feldstein is pretty in a different way. There is no polite way to talk about the differences between the two women - it is a matter of taste and the fact is, Monica was his taste and Beanie Feldstein would have been easier to resist. Although I suspect that if she flashed her thong at Bill he would have still gone for it. It isn’t so much an insult to Beanie Feldstein as it is a distortion by Monica to edge ever so slightly to the person she wants the public to think she was, rather than the bubble-headed girl she actually was.You see, the Me Too movement depends on one simple fact - women are never to be held accountable ever for anything they do regarding sex. It is always the man’s fault because men are predators and women are innocent. Always. To tell this story from the vantage point of now requires Monica be rewritten as Beanie Feldstein because that is the only way to see the power imbalance between the two. If they had cast someone more Monica-like, the show would have been accused of trying to blame t

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