Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone

There’s almost nothing worse than getting dumped. You’ve done everything right. You had all the money in the world — a billion dollars! You had all the celebrities — Harrison Ford, Beyonce, Taylor Swift, Julia Roberts, George Clooney, Meryl Streep and Barbra Streisand! Who could ask for anything more? Well, it turns out 76 million people.

This wasn’t just a “don’t call me, I’ll call you” or “we can still be friends” or “maybe someday in the future we could…” No, this was a “get lost, lose my number, forget you ever knew me” kind of break-up. The Democrats aren’t handling it well, to put it mildly.

They’re shaving their heads. They’re uninviting family members to Thanksgiving. They’re obsessing over everything Trump is doing and saying, refusing to go quietly. In other words, they’re turning into Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction.

It isn’t enough to blame the “woke” and the crazies for the collapse of the empire. It goes much deeper than that. Yes, they’ve lost their minds, and Americans are fleeing faster than rats off a sinking ship, but the truth is the Democrats orchestrated their own demise. Even those who think they get it, don’t really.

Bill Maher, for instance, is given pats on the back for kind of, sort of getting it but if you listen really close, you’ll hear the tell-tale TDS worming its way in. Trump is crazy, his voters are dumb.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, Democrats, but this isn’t 2004, as Nate Silver has proclaimed. It isn’t 1988 or 2000, either. No, you must go much further to find a period like the one we’re living through now. You have to go back to 1972.

More specifically, the swing between 1968 and 1980, as Ben Shapiro has often discussed in books and on his podcast. His comment was one of the things that drew me to the Right because, finally, someone said something that made sense. He tweeted this in the Summer of 2020, though it would be four more years before 1980 actually arrived.

And 1980 has arrived right on time. That makes me think it’s not about just four more years of Trump. This is the long game. This is probably 12 years of Republican rule.

Navigating a moment like this depends on confronting the truth, not the preferred truth, not the denial, but the real reason why Trump won such a massive victory after the Democrats spent almost ten years trying to destroy him. The answer isn’t to double down on Trump being a “monster” or a “fascist” or a “sociopath.” All that will do is postpone the inevitable, and it will only make Trump more popular.

It was like watching SEAL Team Six spelunk into a dangerous war zone and release the hostages from inside the bunker. Millions of us wandered out. We felt as though a great weight had been lifted. The sun shined once again after one long, dark winter. We were half-celebrating, half in a state of shock. “You mean … we’re finally free?” Yes, said the soldiers. You are free.

And as the author jotted out those words above, she thought to herself, can I actually write that? Will people say I am exploiting the suffering of the Jews during the Holocaust or still being held in Gaza? Will they say I don’t know real suffering, and how dare I write such a thing? Yes, they will say that. But no, it won’t matter anymore.

The truth is that I was always free to write it. I just had to do it outside of the doomsday cult the Left has become. It wasn’t some orb out in the middle of the Mojave. It was every major institution in America. And they most certainly aren’t giving up without a fight. Heed the words of Peter Boghossian:

Trump drove so many mad, from the Never Trumpers to the Woke Left, because they destroyed themselves trying to destroy him. Their biggest problem was that they were never fighting the real Trump. They were fighting one they invented, a supervillain whose mere presence could end democracy itself.

It’s hard to imagine such smart people losing their critical thinking ability. Power will do that to you, though. No one gives it up willingly. But still, you’d think some of them might have had an inkling America was ready for change by now.

It’s like that Milan Kundera quote about Totalitarianism:

That’s what’s happened to America in the past four years. Our SEAL Team Six came just in time to liberate us from the tyranny of the minority.

Did Rick Wilson really go into election night thinking Trump would lose that badly? How could he have been so confident to make this video the day before Election Day?

How could the disconnect from reality be that profound? And when he was thoroughly and completely humiliated, along with all the other Never Trumpers, he blamed the voters. He blamed America.

Meanwhile, a wellness check is needed on Jojo from Jerz, another who was so certain her daily rages on X, which earned her so many likes, represented, in any way, the majority in America:

The country can’t be run by people like Jojo from Jerz. She’s just too crazy. No reality has ever once entered the chat. And there are too many just like her that control the entire Democratic Party.

Even if Trump only serves one term and JD Vance is somehow beaten by a Democrat (I wouldn’t hold my breath), they can always be credited as the liberators who freed all of us, our culture, our economy, our institutions from a cult.

For those living in agony for the last four years, you can come out, come out wherever you are.

A Mental Health Crisis

Just before the election, Mark Halperin predicted a mental health crisis in this country if Donald Trump should win the election.

At first, I thought he was exaggerating, but as I watched the reaction on the Left in the wake of another shocking win, I realized he wasn’t. Isn’t it just possible there is something wrong with the messenger if these folks are shocked yet again by a Donald Trump victory? I was shocked along with them in 2016, but by 2020, I got it.

The more educated people are, the more they rely on NPR, the New York Times, NBC News, CNN, the New Yorker, New York Magazine, and the Hollywood trades—the less likely they are to see things as they really are rather than how they want them to be. And while it’s true reality distortion exists on the Right, it’s nowhere near the same level.

The media is turning the so-called “4B movement” into a bigger story than it actually is because that, too, is a way to sell fear. These young women are the equivalent of an adolescent who is mad at her parents and refuses to eat her vegetables. NO, I WON’T DO IT!

They somehow think this will cause any man in America one second of grief. The last thing they want is to have sex with any of them. Moreover, it’s funny that they would think Conservatives would be mad that they aren’t having sex and getting pregnant because all that means is less abortions.

All of them are using whatever weapon they have to exact revenge on anyone who voted for Trump. They are people who already see themselves as victims. They see Trump and his voters as victimizers. They’re living out some kind of fantasy where they can cosplay oppression. In a weird way, Trump gave them exactly what they needed.

Inside Woketopia, the more marginalized you are, the more elevated you are. Black and trans people are treated like holy icons. Much is made of how to talk to them, how to make sure they feel safe around you because your white skin is so triggering. Each of them uses their marginalized status as a way to impose their will upon the rest of us. It’s blasphemy to criticize or confront them.

And herein lies the problem for the Democrats. They can’t confront the crazy, let alone eradicate it. They are too afraid of the activists and the bullies on social media. They’re afraid their careers will be over, like everyone else inside the doomsday cult.

A Trump win makes them all believe that they have, in one election, lost all of their power. That’s why you see so many Instagram posts about suicide hotlines but only for LGBTQIA or Queer women, or BIPOC. No white woman or man will get any sympathy for daring to use the moment to suggest they are in worse pain.

But the psychosis is real. Watch this mother use her children to draw sympathy from them — yes, from them. Their hysteria and pain feed her need to feel like a victim. This bad thing just happened to HER, so everyone should have to pay, even her own kids.

These kids will one day realize that they have been raised by a virulent narcissist, which is what drives this movement more than anything, and perhaps they will be among those who lead the next liberation should America once again be overtaken by a cult.

The End of Days

The women on the Left have centered their entire movement on the act of aborting a child they helped produce, as though the fetus itself, that got there through no fault of its own, is their oppressor. They worry for their daughter’s inability to get an abortion, as though that’s something every girl should want.

//

For four years now, maybe longer, I’ve been saying like a mantra, “There is no saving the Left. There is only saving the country from them.” And so America has, definitely and decisively.

But scrolling X this morning, I’m reminded of the scene in Michael Mann’s The Insider when 60 Minutes continued to remain in denial after their corruption had been laid bare:

It took 60 Minutes too long to accept what they’d participated in with the Jeffrey Wigand scandal, just as it will take the Left too long to accept what they’ve done to themselves and this country. But time marches on without them.

And as the line goes from Citizen Kane, they’re going to need more than one lesson and they’re going to get more than one lesson.

I say the Left, but it’s really the perception of reality shaped by the legacy press, the New York Times, CBS and NBC News, the Washington Post, along with MSNBC and CNN. They’ve been lying every day to the American people and for that their reputations will pay a high price.

I’ll never forget Christmas of 2020, when my nephew, who had gotten COVID and was now immune, wanted to visit. But he wasn’t vaccinated. Because of that, several members of my family became hysterical. When I shouted at them, “HE ALREADY HAD COVID,” they sent me links to NBC news articles that said it was contagious unless you were vaccinated, which was a lie.

Donald Trump was not running against Kamala Harris so much as he was running against the media industrial complex which now, like so much of our culture, is inseparable from government.

The New York Times headline, “Trump storms back,” is designed to pander to those who are still stuck on January 6th.

They have to sell fear because that is how they feel now that they are forced to share this country with the “basket of deplorables.” They think they still speak for all of us but their ability to do that ended long ago. Now, they speak only for those still trapped in an elitist bubble that only wants Trump to go away.

In Breaking Away, the Cutters have everything against them. Their bike barely works, their shoes are old and tattered, and only one of them can ride. But they still want to compete in the big race against the best and the brightest rich college kids.

Something in us, something in me, feels an eternal ache to see the underdogs win. No one needs to tell us who they are, and we can see if we’re watching the same movie. The Cutters are the team we want to win despite the enormous odds against them. They’re riding in the race of their lives, fueled by a desire to prove they are just as good as the college kids. They’re not just as good, they’re better.

Good writing can be boiled down to one simple principle: be hard on your protagonist because everyone reading or watching will be invested in that protagonist overcoming the obstacles and winning. That is the Hero’s Journey, and it is the story, at least so far, of Donald Trump and his Basket of Deplorables.

And now, as we head into the last day, I find myself on the edge of my seat, just as I was when I first saw Breaking Away. Will they actually win? Can I get that lucky to taste that kind of sweet relief?

Rooting for the underdog can sometimes mean rooting for the loser, too, like in Rocky when an underdog fighter dares to dream big. Even if he doesn’t win the fight, no one comes out of it thinking of Rocky as the loser.

Or, as Google AI explains, “Rocky's personal victory comes from going the distance, making it through all 15 rounds of the fight. Rocky's performance demonstrates that he honors his family and friends and that you can't humiliate someone who doesn't want to be humiliated.”

I can’t think of a paragraph that better describes Trump, MAGA, and the three elections that made the empire sweat and rewrote the rules of how and who can run for the presidency.

Hollywood doesn’t make movies like Breaking Away or Rocky now. They don’t see white men as having any obstacles because they’re born with “white privilege,” and the only people worth focusing on are those people of color who are born into obstacles. These are the rules of equity Kamala Harris has lived by and believes. And the rules that might elect her leader of the free world.

It’s surreal watching the people with all the power sweat their last battle against Trump. They are the team that wants to win so badly they’ve become corrupt, relying on a propaganda press to coddle and protect Harris, as they try to cosplay making history.

But if you’re paying close attention and you’re following the plot, you’ll be able to see who the good guys are in this story and who the bad guys are. The bad guys use Harris as a shield, a symbol of virtue, to hide their own identities. They are mostly white men and women of enormous wealth who desperately need to appear virtuous lest the people rise up and challenge their power.

I’m invested now. I want the right ending. I don’t want to have to sit through the ending that wouldn’t sell a single ticket. Sure, if Harris had gotten there on her own - if she’d fought hard through a tough primary and then ran for the presidency if all of that business with Joe Biden hadn’t been so down and dirty, with everyone lying about what really happened even now, if her husband hadn’t been accused of slapping a woman because of a jealous tantrum - maybe I could celebrate the first woman of color President of the United States.

But the Democrats and the media have been gaslighting us for years now, though it’s never been quite as bad as it’s been this past year heading into their final battle.

It’s all so fake. It reminds me of what happened in the Oscar race when the rich white elites that run Hollywood decided they needed absolution and all were in agreement to start awarding people of color nominations and wins to make it seem as though things had really changed. But they hadn’t. The same people run the show now as always. They are just wearing masks.

The irony is that the real Hollywood movie is on the other side. That’s where the good writing is. There has never been a hero like Trump, especially as we watched him survive their unprecedented attacks on him, from the demoralizing raid of Mar-a-Lago, to the lurid Stormy Daniels trial, to the Fani Willis debacle, to Leticia James and her idiotic charges against him.

And all the while, the media played along, pretending like it was legit in hopes of rewriting the hero as the villain. Ah, but the people aren’t that dumb. They know bad writing when they see it.

I think of Steve Bannon, who helped unite people abandoned and invisible to our culture and government to give them a voice, something to fight for, to work toward, an American dream. He sought to build what he called “inclusive, participatory, nationalist populism,” and now his dream has been realized as the oligarchs bleed Black and Hispanic voters.

These monsters threw Steve Bannon in jail not because of anything he did but because he said stuff they didn’t like. He inspires people they see as human garbage. And I really don’t want to watch the version of this story where all of them are rewarded for what they’ve done to working-class Americans who deserve so much better.

I became a Trump supporter because I believed in this story. I believe in these people. Everyone on the Left is miserable. They’ve hollowed out their culture. They can’t laugh at jokes. They’ve become humorless scolds. Yet, the Trump voters are not. Their happiness, their carefree spirit is infectious. Who wouldn’t want to them to win?

At the same time, the empire is the empire for a reason. They have built a system that is nearly impossible to defeat. This isn’t Breaking Away. It isn’t a matter of being the best bike rider on the track. This is deep corruption by people who have all the power and don’t want to lose it.

For most of my life, our government has been locked in a deep state, an establishment that is impossible to penetrate. People don’t just come from the outside like Trump. They need institutional backing. A whole generation is now growing up with something I never had - a big, bold challenge to that power.

Half the country doesn’t see it. They’re watching a different movie. A boring one. They have bought the lies of the media. They fear an outsider like Trump and his audacity to challenge the results of the 2020 election, with or without the riot. Ah, but that is democracy. What they represent is institutional power that they have decided doesn’t belong to any of us. That is what Trump has challenged. And that is why they seek to destroy him.

It’s breathtaking to watch, at least to me. But then again, I’m a movie kid. I like this story. I want to see the underdog, the hero, prevail.

We should prepare ourselves for a loss that isn’t really a loss, like Rocky, despite the hideous people on the left — the bad guys — who will want to gloat and rub it in.

Yeah, they will have won the same way they won in 2020 by pushing a fourth Obama term on the people, but no intelligent person will ever see it as fair. She has the entire legacy press propping her up, and Trump has them pushing him down and showing the worst of him day in and day out.

What Trump has done, what Steve Bannon has done, and what all of the MAGA deplorables have done is nothing less than a revolution, one the people of this country desperately needed. They’ve built a foundation. They aren’t going away. This is only the beginning.

Why? Because they love this country. They’re patriots. They know this country belongs to them — to us — as much as it does any American citizen. It was disgusting and unacceptable watching how the powerful shut them out of culture, the economy, social media, and politics. Who do they think they are?

So, let’s get this straight one last time. When you are born in America, you have rights given to you by God, not by the state. Those rights cannot be taken from you: free speech, the right to protest anything you want any time you want, and the right to equal protection under the law.

I hope Trump wins in a landslide. They have it coming to them, and America would be so much better off. Hand the government back to the people because whatever they’ve built, it is no longer serving our needs.

But if he doesn’t, he will finally be able to take a well-deserved rest. He most certainly earned it. His place in history is secured. There will never be another like him.

And to all of you I’ve been with for the past four years I’ve been writing on Substack, you have given me so much, taught me so much, and been so kind to me when almost everyone I knew threw me away like human garbage.

It bothers me that Trump supporters continue to be verbally and physically abused just for wearing a red MAGA hat. Because I know you, and they don’t. Like this man who recently beat up a Trump supporter:

So here is me in my MAGA hat. My dark MAGA hat to tell you thank you and godspeed, MAGA. Godspeed. Trump2024.

So let’s have it, one last dance.

The Democrats have been chasing the dragon for so long even they don’t know what they stand for anymore. Shaped by identity politics and social justice, Kamala Harris sure looks the part. But peel back even the surface layer, and there’s nothing - just the failed dreams of a utopia gone wrong.

No one says it better than Kenneth L. Khachigian at the Wall Street Journal:

Ms. Harris was unprepared to enter the rough and tumble of national politics and at the 11th hour relies on being propped up, as she has throughout her career, by patrons—Barack Obama, his operatives and a national media that is predominantly desperate to prevent Mr. Trump from re-entering office. Ms. Harris is a victim of her own success through moving up the political ladder without being fully tested by challenge and conflict.

Joe Biden wasn’t supposed to defy the rules of the Ponzi Scheme. He was supposed to do what every Democrat does. Go along with the mounting deception. But even Joe Biden’s win was a deception in and of itself. We were promised a moderate. What we got instead was a George Spahn, who allowed a cult-like movement to move into the White House.

They hid Joe Biden’s age even then. I know because I stood just five feet away from him at a donor brunch in May of 2019. I was plucked from the internet as an influencer because I’d been such a passionate and devoted Democrat, a good Liberal who voted blue no matter who, ever since George W. Bush narrowly defeated Al Gore.

I loved Joe Biden back in 2019. He was old, I knew, but he could do the job. How else to take out a one-term president with a strong economy but to pull the country back to the last time they felt safe? Pulling the country back meant a return to the Obama era. Only later would I discover what a mistake that would turn out to be.

Trump should have served a second term. He was cheated out of it, as were his supporters and all of America, who would have likely voted for him just based on the economy alone.

The Democrats could have taken the loss and rebuilt a new movement with new blood and a new direction. But the Democrats were never going to let that happen. They had to preserve the empire under Obama, an empire now in collapse. They’ve held on too long and now, there is nothing left.

Joe Biden was already too old by November of 2020. They hid him in the basement so none of us could see how fast he was declining. I could see it because I had seen where he was back in May of 2019. But instead of facing the problem head-on, the Democrats kept hiding Joe, lying to the public with their full-court propaganda press happily playing along.

They elbowed out the brave truth-tellers like Dean Phillps and RFK, Jr., And they handed Joe Biden the primary win, corrupt though it was with their army of eager beaver lawyers meddling in our elections by removing Cornel West, Jill Stein, and anyone else who dared to challenge their authority, from the ballot. They even tried to remove Trump, which forced the Supreme Court to smack them down.

Then, when Joe Biden’s age was finally exposed, and there was nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide, the Democrats instigated a coup. But Joe Biden wasn’t going along with it, shockingly. It took Obama’s yachting pal George Clooney to write an embarrassing op-ed in an attempt to push out old Joe, arguing that they should choose a candidate, speed-dating style.

Well, they didn’t do that, did they, George? They hand-picked Kamala Harris without a single vote, and you went along with it, too, didn’t you? You wiped your chin and did your duty as the Good Liberal you are. Welcome to the pages of history, for better or worse.

I knew the Democrats were in trouble even before the 2020 election. I tried warning them. I said Trump would win if they couldn’t find their way back to sanity. Oh, how naive I was. I didn’t know back then how much power the Left had amassed in the Trump era - an unprecedented alignment that reached from Hollywood across Silicon Valley to the universities and public schools through corporations and the Big Pharma monopolies.

Janet had a choice to make. Would she wear the T-shirt that said, “What’s so funny about peace, love, and understanding?” or would she put on the one that said, “Trump is a scab.” It wasn’t a hard choice. The election was in a week.

Every morning, Janet took her coffee to the window, where she would watch her small California town residents walk their dogs, drive their kids to school, and get in their morning fitness regime. She kept a sharp eye out for those who didn’t clean up after their dogs. There was always that one person.

This morning was no different. A woman still in her bathrobe shuffled down the street with two dogs. One looked like a collie, and the other was a tiny poodle. The bigger dog waded into a deep thicket of shrubs and did his business.

Janet watched the owner start to shuffle off. “Aren’t you going to clean it up?” yelled Janet from her window across the street. Usually, the person she shouts at will apologize profusely and start digging around for a bag. But this woman didn’t do that. She looked at the window and flipped Janet the bird, shouting, “Mind your own f*cking business. I’m walking AROUND!”

Janet watched the woman shuffle down the sidewalk and walk behind the bushes. That was supposed to make Janet feel shame for assuming the worst, but she didn’t. She assumed the worst because people always make bad decisions when they think no one is watching. But Janet was watching.

The woman waded her way through the bushes, sticks and dried leaves clinging to the cotton fleece of her bathrobe. She pulled at the leash of the smaller dog, who refused to follow her. The dog wouldn’t budge. “Fine,” the woman said, propping the leash on a branch. The bigger dog was sniffing through the bushes as the woman angrily ripped off a green plastic bag and scooped up the pet waste.

Then she looked over at the window where Janet was sitting and held the bag: “SEE!? ARE YOU HAPPY?” Then she flipped her off again, gathered up the two leashes, and shuffled back down the street.

Janet thought she didn’t have to get so upset about it. Was there a better way to handle it? Was she just supposed to have waited to see if the woman would pick it up even though she didn’t look like she would? At least Janet could help keep the street clean.

A Good Town Full of Good People

Vista Butte was a town of responsible citizens who do the right thing. People followed the rules, which is why it was so safe. There was no crime, and it was quiet. They had to work to make it quiet.

Like when they built a pickleball court in the middle of town, which drew so many kids to play after school. The court made so much noise that it disrupted the peaceful harmony of the town center, so the city decided to move it to the outskirts of town.

But it upset the school kids because they liked having a place to go after school and release their pent-up energy instead of staring at their screens all day. Did they really believe that or did their parents tell them to say that? Either way, they went door to door to get signatures to save the Pickle Ball court.

It was a waste of time because there was a perfectly good court on the East End. True, they had to pay to park, and kids would need their parents to drive them there, but they could be as loud as they wanted, and it wouldn’t disrupt the serenity of the townspeople. Janet voted against the measure because everybody in Vista Butte has to work together to keep the town quiet and clean.

As Hillary Clinton said, it takes a village.

Today, Janet was going to do some yard work before Halloween. The Santa Anas were coming, a wind storm. That meant fire season, and she needed to clean up the brush in her front yard. Firebugs get it in their heads to set off a blazing wildfire when the warm wind kicks up. Always men. No woman would do something like that.

Janet could drive down to the corner where all the migrants waited to be picked up for a day's work. It would only cost her about 50 bucks for the whole job. One guy could handle it. It wasn’t that much work. That was much cheaper than the town gardeners, who charge you $50 an hour.

Well, what the hell? She figured she might as well get in some exercise. She wasn't getting any younger, and her body wasn't getting any thinner. Yard work was a good way to get the steps in and grow her fitness circle on her Apple Watch.

Janet had five Harris/Walz signs on her lawn. One of them was just an old Biden/Harris poster, which she ripped off the top where Biden was. It was a perfect metaphor for the election: Rip off the old white guy’s name and elevate the woman of color. It didn't matter that there wasn't a primary. When you have to save the country from rising fascism, you do what you must.

But it made Janet happy, making history, even if it wasn’t exactly the democratic process. Old white men don't like getting out of the way to allow marginalized groups to rise—the history of America. The white male patriarchy is keeping all of us down.

It’s long past time for a woman to lead, Janet thought. We need change. We need to turn the page. Harris cares about the middle class. She cares about immigrants. She cares about poor people. She’s not rude or mean or crude or nasty or abusive. She’s not a racist or a sexist or a misogynist or a bigot.

Janet was ready. In fact, she'd already voted, like most women in America. Vista Butte was, Janet knew, 99% liberal. It had to be, what with all of the Harris/Walz signs everywhere.

Harris/Walz - Obviously.Harris/Walz - Save Democracy.Harris/Walz - We’re not going back.Harris/Walz - Vote for freedom.Harris/Walz - Democracy or dictator.

For a minute, she thought, why are we even bothering with an election? Maybe they should just do what they did for the primary: just place Kamala Harris. Trump is the one who is not qualified. He's a criminal; he's a felon.

Besides, Project 2025 will become the law of the land. They’ll throw Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski in prison. Abortion will be banned, and we’ll never have an election again, so why not get ahead of it now? Why are we wasting time convincing people to vote? Why are we pretending that democracy even applies in this situation? It doesn't.

We’re seriously going through all this worrying about the swing states, focusing all of our energy on undecided voters? Why is the fate of the Republic, the fate of the world's future, resting on people who are too stupid to know now who they want to vote for? That's what our elections have come down to, those people who sit in a Frank Luntz focus group. Come on.

Those are the kind of people who sit in the Starbucks line for an hour deciding whether they want the Caramel Ribbon Crunch or the Pumpkin Spice Frappuccino blended. Pick something and move on! Pick something!

It was Halloween. Janet wasn't going to allow herself to get upset, not today. Halloween was her favorite holiday. She remembered the old days when kids dressed up in costumes they made themselves. They weren’t brands disguised as costumes. Everything is advertising now.

On January 6th, I should have been huddled on my couch and glued to MSNBC. Their hysteria and fear would have validated everything I already believed about those awful extremist racists and incels waving their “white supremacist” MAGA flags, climbing the walls of the Capitol, and fighting with police officers.

But that isn’t where I was on January 6th. I was scratching my head in confusion. A riot? People were trying to break into the Capitol? Why? Most of MAGA were standing before Trump as he spoke to them about the election we’d just lived through. He had convinced Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz to debate the election in the Senate when, all of a sudden, a riot erupted.

That was when I knew something very bad was about to happen. No, not to our government officials. I knew they’d be fine. It was the Trump supporters who would not be. They had no power.

It wouldn’t matter, I knew, that we’d seen unprecedented violence over the Summer and that those protesters weren’t treated like terrorists or insurrectionists. It was different with MAGA who were by then, already named enemies of the state.

Most people I knew on the Left had no clue what Trump supporters were really like. Most of them existed inside the protective bubble of the Left. We’d built our Shining Woketopia on the Hill after Obama rose to power. And we essentially abandoned half the country and never looked back.

We carefully curated our information streams, our language, our movies, our music, our fashion. We “wokeified” it piece by piece until we’d come close to reaching our ideal as a society. And then Trump won in 2016 and our whole world turned upside down.

Trump supporters were, to us, everything we wanted them to be: angry white men who wanted to tie women to beds and keep them pregnant and having babies like pigs in gestational crates. They were crude and uneducated. They were racists and bigots and drove around in gas guzzlers, wrecking the planet. They were incels who hid on 4-Chan, trolls who did nothing but hurt all of the vulnerable groups, especially women.

They paraded so ridiculously around with those racist red hats and those garish flags. We were traumatized just seeing them. If we saw a Trump supporter in our neighborhood or in our public spaces, we would have to alert the manager and have them removed like a dead animal the cat dragged in.

"The essence of propaganda consists in winning people over to an idea so sincerely, so vitally, that in the end they succumb to it utterly and can never again escape from it," —Joseph Goebbels

It was on a Sunday that the Nazi army marched into New York City and gathered at Madison Square Garden.

They came in all skin colors, white and Black and Brown, and from all different backgrounds, Asian, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, atheists, young and old, rich and poor, Left and Right, gay and straight as American citizens who desperately wanted to taste freedom again, security again, a government that cared about them again, and to Make America Great Again.

What they don't know is that they're Nazis. Barbra Streisand and Hillary Clinton have said as much, so isn’t it time that they listened?

How dare they gather, Hitler-like, at Madison Square Garden to worship at the altar of the fuhrer himself, Donald Trump. That’s what the New Yorker says, what the New York Times says, and what John Cusack says.

I know what you’re thinking. John who? John Cusack. Remember him? Once a heartthrob of sorts back in the 80s? Yeah, that guy.

We were all so in love with him. Every boyfriend we ever had was John Cusack in one form or another. But that was then. Things have changed now that fascism has arrived in America.

So to protect us from it, Cusack didn’t hold up a boom box, no. This time, he woke up in his penthouse, tossed around in his high thread count sheets, gazed upon the streets of Manhattan, and remembered Donald Trump was holding a historic rally at Madison Square Garden. He fumbled for his phone and spit out his testimony:

Donald Trump is Hitler, and his supporters are Nazis. How do we know that? That’s just what we’re all supposed to believe. So far, Trump has done nothing to warrant such an accusation ah, but we don’t really care about that. We care about the thing we police at all costs: speech. What Trump says IS fascism. Free speech is fascism.

But if you need proof, let’s say that Trump has said he will deport the 10 million migrants who flooded through America’s weakened border under the Biden/Harris administration. This was after the Democrats spent four years declaring Trump’s border policies were RACIST and FASCIST. So when Biden won, why wouldn’t they come?

It’s funny that Americans are thinking about themselves at a time like this. I mean, they should be anti-fascists, putting their own needs aside. The definition of fascism might be all power to the state against the individual, but that’s in ordinary times.

Power to the state against the individual is how you stop fascism now. Because if free people choose the guy who says he’s going to fix the border problem and yes, that might include some deportations — that means we are no longer able to staff our labor force and grow a stronger coalition in the swing states.

So we dumped them into towns like Springfield, Ohio, and expect everyone who lives there to share our existential angst about racism. Forget about your kids in school, your social services, and your safety. All power to the state means you say nothing, you do nothing, you suck it up.

You see, the anti-fascists are the ones who demand you drop all of your friendships if you vote for the fascists. It might sound confusing, but it’s not. All you have to do is conform or else.

You might have heard that “conform or else” is the very definition of fascism, but really, it’s how you get rid of it. You pressure everyone you know to do what we tell you to do, think how we want you to think, speak how we want you to speak or we will DESTROY YOU.

“I came for you, for you, I came for you, but you did not need my urgency. I came for you, for you, I came for you, but your life was one long emergency.” Bruce Springsteen

To be on the Left in America is to live in one long emergency. It’s depressing and exhausting, and it’s time to move on. It is the misery of the upper class, the misery of a disrupted utopia, and the misery of people who have too much power and have become too comfortable with it, so much so that they do not want to let it go.

I can’t really blame Barack Obama. What must it feel like to feel like a god, to have all of American culture worship you, upend what used to be great movies, great books, great rock and roll, and now, in its place, a reflection of you? That would mess with your head. It would be hard to let go. No wonder he keeps showing up. No wonder he demands that the only people allowed to run for president are lesser, duller versions of himself.

Imagine what it must feel like to be George Clooney, Julia Roberts, or Tom Hanks. Yes, you are among the highest-status Americans inside utopia because you have befriended the man who would be King. But none of them have come from such a high place and fallen so hard as Bruce Springsteen, who abandoned the badlands for the mansion on the hill.

Bruce Springsteen was my idol growing up in the 1980s. I wrapped my legs ‘round his velvet rims and strapped my hands cross his engines. I was just a scared and lonely rider who had to know how it feels, who had to know if love was wild, who had to know if love was real.

Me and Bruce, hiding on the backstreets, going down to the river. I wore out the groove on every single album he ever produced and then could only listen to live bootlegs. Now, I can’t listen at all.

What I know about Bruce is what I know about the modern-day Left. He doesn’t know America anymore. He does not even know the kinds of people who needed his music and who made him rich. He joins the list of once and former icons who helped lift up the lost and forgotten Americans, to make them feel included in something important in our culture.

And now they sneer at them. Stephen King, Steven Spielberg, Barbra Streisand, JJ Abrams, Taylor Swift, and Beyonce sit on a pile of money given to them by the same Americans they now call Nazis.

That’s why you see idiots like Jack White or the Foo Fighters throwing a hissy fit that Trump might use their precious music at a rally. Yeah, heaven forbid the truck drivers who deliver their food or the nurses who wash off the vomit and urine after a night of partying should be able to hear their music and forget their troubles for a night.

Years from now, the question will go something like this, “where were you when you first realized the media was lying to you about Trump?”

Me, I was watching Trump speak at Mount Rushmore in 2020 just as the COVID lockdowns had abruptly ended to make way for the largest protests in American history. They said it was about systemic racism, but I knew it wasn’t. It was about Trump and all of the forces at play to remove him from power.

Yes, even the protests.

Trump was the first person of any kind of prominence to call out the madness of “cancel culture,” the burning of cities, the violence the media suppressed, and he vowed to do something about it. I didn’t agree with everything he said, but I realized then and there that he was not who I thought he was.

At least half the country has been trapped in a mass delusion for ten years, maybe longer. What else can explain what has happened to so many of them, how they could be so consumed by hatred that they would go along with any punishment enacted upon Trump, or whomever the next person in line behind him will be. Elon Musk? JD Vance?

We joke that it’s TDS or Trump Derangement Syndrome, but I think that’s being too kind.

The good news is that more and more people are waking up to what has been done to us all in the name of preserving the American utopia built under the Obama administration. Trump had to represent racism because how else could they sell him as an “existential threat” to the country?

Says Adam B. Coleman:

I try to remember when it started, this idea that America was under an urgent threat of rising racism and “white supremacy.” It happened around the time of the Tea Party’s founding, the only grassroots movement I’ve ever seen coming from the Right.

For most of my life, the Republicans were the establishment party. After the 2008 Wall Street crash, the Tea Party began mobilizing and forming a powerful coalition that must have worried many in our establishment government.

Just arguing class or economics or dismantling the bloated administrative state would not have convinced hearts and minds to turn on them. They had to be so toxic Americans would never want to associate with them, help them, support them, or even listen to them.