[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 shareholders of Twitter, not just by the blue-checks and their mainstream media family, but likely reaching up to the highest levels of power?

He’s right. It comes down to the need to control the narrative.

What is the narrative? Whatever they decide it is, whatever the Biden administration says it is. Whatever Jen Psaki repeats that it is, and whatever the blue-check army mandates it is. Everything that contradicts it is called “misinformation” or “disinformation.”

I didn’t realize that there was such a concerted effort to control the narrative until I watched Twitter throw a fit when Tom Cotton posted an op-ed about the protests over the summer of 2020. He was responding not just to a poll that said most Americans supported military intervention, but he was also representing half of the country’s views, the half that voted for Trump.

To Twitter, though, this meant a loss in an election year, and that meant editors and writers would have to be fired; the op-ed gave an exhausting, pathetic intro to “apologize” for publishing it. Eventually, the whole bizarre incident would lead to Bari Weiss’ infamous resignation letter and the rise of alternative platforms and voices for those desperate to escape the controlled narrative.

When Weiss left the Times, she made sure to mention how oppressive Twitter had become in shaping the news and policing its journalists:

Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor. As the ethics and mores of that platform have become those of the paper, the paper itself has increasingly become a kind of performance space. Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions. I was always taught that journalists were charged with writing the first rough draft of history. Now, history itself is one more ephemeral thing molded to fit the needs of a predetermined narrative.

Whether it’s Google or Wikipedia, the New York Times or the American Medical Association, the CDC, PBS, NPR or NBC News - they are all part of the same organism that lives in fear of and relies upon Twitter. For its part, the Times has finally decided to urge its reporters to stay off of the platform.

How it Started

Twitter wasn’t always an authoritarian force in American life. In the beginning, it was a fun platform that operated like one big chat room. Obama used it to grow his coalition starting in 2008 as an early adopter and influencer. He was credited with being a leader with his finger on the pulse of the fast-moving modern age.

Trump followed suit, gaining 88 million followers before Twitter permanently banned him from the platform. The Right would say Trump used it to counter the media narrative that lied to the people about him and Conservatives overall. The left would say he used it to spread “disinformation” and to incite violence in the wake of January 6th. The truth is that Trump’s presence on Twitter was a big enough counter to the ecosystem to make a difference. Now Musk has arisen as the next apex predator the site will want to remove. Eventually.

For Musk, it is less about money or power than deciding who gets control over the narrative. And thus, who gets to control what is true.

Like most corporations in America, Twitter didn’t become fully authoritarian until 2020. When the “Cabal” was formed to remove Trump, who was a one-term president with a strong economy, thus nearly impossible to bring down, they amassed an unusual amount of power to create a foolproof action plan that would ensure Trump lost way before Election Day. Nothing would be left up to chance. This would involve not just changing laws, hiring operatives to collect ballots but it would also involve manipulating the news narrative to be the story they wanted, NEEDED, to be true.

That is why Americans felt like they were being gaslit all throughout 2020 - because they were. The Democrats did not mention the police once during their convention because the police, we were told, were all racists killing Black people every day. The protests weren’t angry or violent. No one was dying. Nothing bad was happening. They were all peaceful. Finally, the riot on January 6th was treated like something on the level of Pearl Harbor or 9/11. Americans, having lived through the Summer of 2020, could see the blatant hypocrisy in a government that encouraged one kind of violence but discouraged another.

After Biden took power, January 6th created another convenient crisis for the “cabal.” Now they would work together to police all of what they considered inciting violence, domestic terrorism, or “misinformation.” Between that and the ongoing COVID pandemic, it was clear well into 2021, and especially now, the “cabal” was never giving up their power. Suddenly, in a country that once felt free, everyone is afraid of saying the wrong thing, offending someone, making a mistake that will get them called out or fired or worse.

With Twitter, they have a powerful weapon to silence dissent, boss around journalists to keep them in line and make or break someone who might need Twitter as a platform to attract readers or make a living. But really, this Twitter fight is about holding onto the power to control the media narrative.

Silencing dissent is not just bad for this country or for young people who count on adults to protect them, it’s also bad for the Democrats. They just have no clue how unpopular they have become because they are forcing compliance across the board.

Regardless of how you feel about the issue of transgender rights, there is no doubt that the demands for compliance on the Left are becoming more militant in their efforts to silence dissent. Just questioning it can get you banned off of Twitter if enough people report it.

Batya Ungar-Sargon takes on the issue of the Twitter account Libs of TikTok which was recently doxxed in the Washington Post (owned by the second richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos) as a class divide, which it is. She writes:

Putting aside the shoddy ethics of doxxing a private citizen for curating already public content, the Washington Post story rather disingenuously whitewashed the actual content of the videos that @libsoftiktok posts. For example, instead of stating what was in a video featuring a woman explaining how she teaches toddlers to touch their private parts, the article only notes that @libsoftiktok called the woman in it a “predator” and that the video went on to be featured on Fox News.

There’s a tell in that obfuscation: The Washington Post probably doesn’t want to defend the “sexy summer camp” counselor teaching toddlers to masturbate, a view that few trans people would defend, so instead it resorts to calling anyone who opposes such education anti-gay. The article characterizes @libsoftiktok as “a steady stream of TikTok videos and social media posts, primarily from LGBTQ+ people, often including incendiary framing designed to generate outrage.” Instead of telling you what’s in the videos, it tells you what @libsoftiktok says about them.

And continues:

A tiny elite that benefits politically and economically from portraying its opponents as bigots is using every tool at its disposal – social media, liberal legacy media, and executive action – to obfuscate the vast distance between their views and the vast majority of middle- and working-class Americans with normal views. Like the view that strangers shouldn’t teach toddlers how to masturbate.

“Environmental Social Governance”

Corporate authority in this country has now found a way to bypass the Constitution regarding access and use of their platforms. The divide between elite and working-class America is evident every time I turn on the television and compare the kinds of ads they show on the barely watched SAG awards versus the ads they show on the much more popular Fox News. But corporations care more about their image than anything in 2022, especially those who see themselves as among the “chosen” people, the utopians, the Barack Obamaians.

Twitter and other corporations are following various mandates to satisfy what we used to call in the 1980s “quotas.” But they are also pushing a new dystopian corporate ideology called ESG.

ESG means that investors can pull funds or choose to advertise only with companies they believe are acceptable or compliant. For instance, the Babylon Bee’s joke is defined as “hate speech,” meaning that, theoretically, advertisers would not want to invest in or advertise with Twitter. And that gives Twitter the right and justification to suspend the account.

Since the Democrats and the mainstream media have control of Twitter, and thus, the narrative, they don’t really care that Big Tech has become an authoritarian force in American life. What they want is their utopia back, the one they believe Trump and his supporters destroyed. They don’t realize it is never coming back. Not the way it was.

For his part, Musk is smart enough and brave enough to stare down this massive alliance of power and authoritarianism. He knows that buying Twitter means there is a new Sheriff in town, a winner in our Capitalist system knocking out other Capitalists, or modern-day “Robber Barons” in our new Gilded Age.

Says David Sacks from the All In podcast:

If you were to zoom out 30,000-foot view, the big struggle of our time politically and culturally is populist versus elitist. Elon is one of the rare billionaires who is sort of anti-elitist, he pokes fun at their pieties all the time. This is why they call him a troll. He wants to restore free speech. Somehow the elites are now on the site of censorship. They believe that in order to protect democracy, they need more censorship. What they really mean is to protect their control over democracy. They need censorship. Why? Because they're greatly outnumbered, there are more populists than elitists. So the more democratic this country becomes the more they are going to lose power and be kicked out, that is why they are so fiercely resisting the restoration of Twitter as a free speech platform. It means the end of their power.

In the end, the forces that control this country, Wall Street and Big Tech, will never allow Elon Musk to buy Twitter. But in trying to purchase it, Musk is challenging that power like sunlight blasting into a moldy dark shed. Even if he’ll never get away with it I’m glad he’s trying.

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 burst into tears. And as I did this I could hear Twitter scolding me for being a white woman centering myself. Shock is shock, though. You can’t police it out of your nervous system.

It doesn’t really matter how hard people try to make things true that isn’t true. Sooner or later, truth bubbles to the surface. The idea that “words are harm” and that no joke can offend a marginalized group is one of the many bizarre Orwellian delusions we are all forced to accept now.

So many people tried to make this about “white privilege” and “anti-black.” The Guardian’s Tayo Bero says that the Academy has seen worse and her example of this is John Wayne being restrained from approaching the stage while Sasheen Littefeather accepted Marlon Brando’s award:

It’s also not just about what Smith did; it’s where he did it and who was watching. Anyone who has been following these shows can see that Smith is being held up to much stricter standards than white men who have behaved just as badly or even worse in those settings. In 1973, John Wayne had to be restrained by six security guards when he tried to rush the stage and attack the Native American actor and activist Sacheen Littlefeather. Littlefeather was on stage to accept the best actor award on behalf of Marlon Brando, who was boycotting the awards in protest at Hollywood’s depictions of Native Americans.

She has no way of knowing what John Wayne planned to do had he gotten to the stage. She assumed she knew for sure he would attack her, but no one knew what he planned to do. That they restrained John Wayne, a prominent WHITE actor, doesn’t occur to Bero. Imagine if security had tried to restrain Will Smith. She has an audience and a platform, and she must give them what they want, which is a way to make white people feel bad for being justifiably horrified at this act of violence.

The new cult-like movement that has infected the ruling class in this country is about denying what is real, what you know, what you can see with your own eyes and replacing it with dogma. As a white person, you aren’t really allowed to criticize or dissent. They believe that your “whiteness” is the source of all of society’s problems, that you are born with it, and that you can do nothing else but shut up in the face of something so unequivocal as what Will Smith did to Chris Rock:

Watching my white liberal friends shrink back and say nothing because they do not believe it is their “place” is disgusting to me. It is an illustration of why people don’t stand up to bullies. It took Jim Carrey to say what needed to be said.

After that, more people found the courage to speak out and thus helped the Academy get closer to some kind of action against Smith. But Smith resigned before they could do anything.

I am not someone to stand in the moral judgment of others. I see an entire movement now to forgive Will Smith, and honestly, I am supportive of that, as long as it applies across the board. This is not a community that is supportive of forgiveness. It is a community that accuses, condemns, and destroys. When it stops being that way, I will be happy to be more forgiving of Will Smith’s remorse and apology.

The truth is that having the freedom to say what you feel, or tell a joke, even if it’s an offensive one, probably makes us less violent as a species.

As Ben Shapiro puts it:

The social compact by which verbiage and violence remain strictly separated is a delicate one. For most of human history, words were treated as punishable by physical response — dueling was commonplace in societies for centuries, familial retaliation for insult was regular, and wars were even fought over verbal slights. But over time, civilized people traded away the privilege of personal use of force in favor of rules; truly offensive words could sometimes meet with social disapproval or even ostracization, but certainly not violence.

Now we seem to be reversing the trend. The entire theory of “microaggressions” suggests that if you are offended, it is because someone has “aggressed” against you — and aggression requires response. To deny someone’s preferred pronouns is now an act of “erasure” amounting to violence, since the person so slighted might feel damaged in their sense of worth or authenticity. Once we reconnect the severed link between words and violence, civilization will begin to break down.

Will Smith went into the Dolby on March 27th, thinking it was the night of his life. His family was with him, including his wife Jada, whose battle with alopecia had motivated her, as with all things Will and Jada, to live it out loud and proud by shaving her head. She would not wear a wig. She would not hide what she was struggling with because that isn’t how Will and Jada live. Whatever it is that causes them the pain, they wish it away with empowerment. Jada brags about her grandmother introducing her to “self-pleasuring” at 9 and why that was so great. Will brags about how okay he is with Jada’s many lovers.

In that sort of mindset, how does anyone have a clear sense of right and wrong if nothing is ever wrong because everything is always right? Their self-help claptrap sounded good for a long time. In one night, though, it all came tumbling down like a house of cards. All of it.

Will and Jada live, love, laugh out loud. They distort every painful thing into an easily forgiven non-mistake. It is much easier to wade into dangerous waters without realizing it when you have no moral line.

Every boundary was crossed openly and on television or video. They seemed compelled to just leave nothing private because THEY had all of the answers, THEY were the enlightened ones, THEY have it all figured out. So when a joke is made about Jada - the all-knowing, all-seeing wise love goddess - that is like disrespecting Lord Jesus himself. And that is why Will Smith probably believed the crowd would be with him. His wife seemed to be, and she is all-knowing and all-seeing.

Back on Planet Earth, though, Chris Rock had no way of knowing whether she had alopecia or not - assuming he follows every utterance at the “Red Table” is wishful thinking. I had no idea she struggled with the condition until after I had made a joke on Twitter about her bald head. I thought it was a fashion choice because she looks great bald, and not everyone does.

His joke about Jada looking like Demi Moore in GI Jane was funny to those old enough to remember that movie. Back then, Moore was a lot like the Smiths are today -she believed in challenging perceptions, living out loud, and bragging constantly about her own empowerment, especially as she shaved her own head and beefed up her body to win the praise of her peers.

In truth, she was mocked for it because she appeared a narcissist of the highest order, like so many icons of the 80s and 90s. This was way before our culture was re-ordered into oppressed and oppressors, where your status depends on where you land in that paradigm. Back in the 90s, in the last gasp of individualism, personal success and icon status were everything.

Now you see some of the relics of that era trying to cling to their status, like poor Madonna. Tom Cruise, ever the nice guy, has to still be the King of Scientology while also clinging to his status as an action hero.

Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith were born out of that era but as Black celebrities, they did not expire the way the white ones did. They held onto their status.

Empowerment is out, marginalization is in, and in a country with mostly white, mostly “straight” people, how do they become marginalized? How can they be victims if they just spent decades becoming empowered and living their best lives? That is why there are many new categories of gender, sexuality, and everything else - even size acceptance. Anyone can be in an oppressed or marginalized group if they fit into these or one of the many other categories.

That is how you get to words being harm, where an offensive joke about a perceived or self-proclaimed marginalized group is WORSE than a slap across the face on live television.

Laughing relieves tension. Laughter brings us together. Laughter is a way to connect even if we don’t speak the same language. We understand what laughing means. That is why it is so important to preserve the freedom to be FUNNY, even if it means you might offend some people.

It occurred to me after March 27th that much of an entire generation might not understand what comedy is for. They might not understand what jokes are supposed to do. If you dissect them bit by bit you can find so much wrong with them. But the whole point of a joke is not to do that. It’s to startle you into laughter so you can release some of the built-up pressure inside.

It’s true that not everyone finds the same things funny, but it should not be the job of comedians, or comedy shows, to make sure their humor is for everyone. Late-night comedy, so-called, with Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, and John Oliver isn’t funny. Not in the slightest bit. It is a magic mirror for the Left, which only finds making fun of Trump supporters and Republicans funny. But that isn’t funny. Funny would be making fun of the self-important, self-serious, sanctimonious, uptight Left. They hardly ever do it because they are too afraid.

That we don’t have humor in our lives that is allowed to be free is very likely why it seems like we slip further into collective madness every day. This is why Ricky Gervais’ Golden Globe video has more views than any Oscar ceremony at any time in their history:

Ricky Gervais is the only comedian who should ever host the Oscars. They need someone unafraid of them and the morality police of Twitter. It is the only way to get back any sort of sanity and freedom.

If you are wondering why Trump won in 2016 and why he continues to resonate, draw crowds, and is currently being polled to beat Biden- this is why. By 2016, the Left had already turned America into a country where speech, language and every other thing was heavily monitored. That is why Trump was such a force to be reckoned with. He not only challenged the rules, he spit in the face of them. There is power in that, but there is even more power right now than there ever has been because we have become disconnected from the truth on the Left. It has simply been nonstop gaslighting by the media to force people to believe what they want to be true.

The Democrats are trapped under the thumb of Twitter. Many of them are simply resigning rather than face an election season where they’re about get steamrolled. The majority in this country can’t stand what’s happening to it at the hands of the Left. Even if, when you bring this up, they will start melting down over “Democracy Itself” and January 6th. As usual, they are digging in the wrong place and can’t see what’s about to happen to them.

It begins and ends with how a culture polices humor. Imagine any cult. Think about what kinds of jokes would be allowed. Now think about Putin or Xi, or Stalin or Hitler, and imagine what kinds of jokes would be allowed under their reign. Now you see why it has become so dangerous for our country to find ourselves here, a country that went through a bloody revolution for the right to tell offensive jokes.

Words are harm; words are violence; silence is violence. Criticizing the government, questioning the vaccine or masks, and refusing to use the right pronouns are all the ways the left is sabotaging itself by thinking this country is ready to become Tumblr circa 2013.

No society can survive if jokes are so bad that they inspire one man to walk up to another man and slap him across the face. We have to get back to a place where we can survive an offensive or insulting joke. We have to allow parents to talk openly about what worries them in their children’s classrooms. We have to be able to debate things without fear of being destroyed or fired.

We have to fight back against big tech oligigarchs policing the citizenry, no matter what it takes. We have to find a way back to truth - and the best way to do that is to let comedians, writers, artists and journalists out of their cages. And let freedom ring.

Otherwise, this country will fall into a kind of Orwellian nightmare that will destroy it. We might be living through the end of the era of great movies and the Oscars. We might be seeing the end of great books. All of them will bear the mark of their time - showing a creative class that was so afraid of criticism that they stopped telling good stories, and people stopped watching them.

When the Hays Code was implemented in the 1930s, it cleaned up Hollywood movies for two decades. The films made back then were covered with a veneer of phoniness. Anyone watching them today will think, why are they all acting and talking like that? Why do they never show toilets or pregnant women? It was the last time we lived through an era like this one.

And just like those movies are easily recognizable for their time, so too will everything produced now and for the foreseeable future be easy to recognize as the “woke” era. It took twenty years for Hollywood to break away from the Hays code and tell more naturalistic stories. I imagine we’re about halfway there now.

Until then, comedians and writers will have to find subversive ways of getting their messages out, as Stanley Kubrick did in Lolita or Hitchcock did in Psycho.

I would like to think the slap at the Oscars was a “hinge moment.” But I think it’s more likely it’s just the beginning of what will be a very dark time in our history.

Like all of us on Oscar night, however, we don’t have much choice but to make it through another day. There is always hot coffee and a sunrise. We’re alive, and that’s all that matters in the end.

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 the frontrunner the year of the 2016 election, La La Land.

Because no one could do anything about Trump being the President, and because they could not hurt anyone on the Right with their moral outrage, their disgust, their constant dehumanizing and shaming, they began to eat their own. La La Land was accused of being racist, not just because it was a film that was about to win Best Picture, but because the film features a white man in it who loves Jazz.

I could feel the awkward silence every time the film’s name was mentioned. When they called it for La La Land at the end, I had already left the building because I too was caught up in the frenzy that a racist film was about to win Best Picture. I didn’t find out until a phone call from a friend that Moonlight, the film about a black gay man finding love and acceptance, had won instead. Everyone assumed Trump caused it because no one could take a movie like La La Land seriously when the whole world had so dramatically changed.

The following year, another controversy hit the film Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. In it, Sam Rockwell (who won the Oscar) plays a cop who has a history of police brutality. The film didn’t properly address it, according to critics and journalists. They believed it redeemed Rockwell. Even though the movie kept winning awards the outrage kept simmering. This time I argued against the smear. That was the first time I was called out and swarmed on Twitter. Despite my having advocated for years and years for Black filmmakers on my site, now I was being called a racist, in so many words, for defending Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.

Though it won the Golden Globe, the SAG ensemble award, and the BAFTA, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri would lose Best Picture to The Shape of Water. It must have been such a surreal experience to the film’s director, Martin McDonagh, to be suddenly branded a racist and a police brutality apologist. This was, for me, a major turning point. I could see that a mass hysteria event was unfolding but I could do nothing to stop it.

By far the worse event, though, was the next year when the film Green Book was up for the Oscar. It was so well-liked by everyone who saw it that it immediately won the Audience Award in Toronto. It won the Golden Globe. Then, when it won the Producers Guild it looked like it might win Best Picture and that is when all hell broke loose. It’s a film about a working-class New Yorker who drives a Jazz musician across the country during Jim Crow. Mahershala Ali played the musician who was also gay.

Not only was the film viciously and repeatedly attacked, but the filmmakers involved had their pasts upended and exposed. Director Peter Farrelly was accused of being a sex offender for once flashing someone on the set as a joke. The Screenwriter Nick Vallelonga who wrote the story about his own father was apparently a Trump supporter and had tweeted something criticizing Muslim immigrants. He was banned from the ceremony and never showed his face again during the race.

I went on a massive counteroffensive to defend Green Book, even getting interviewed in the Wall Street Journal.

Green Book was such a warm-hearted crowd-pleaser that the attacks against it backfired and it did end up winning Best Picture. Green Book’s win, however, would push the Oscars past the point of no return.

The “Green Book effect” would ultimately lead the Academy to turn inward, to manufacture a reality they wanted to be true because that was their only option. They had to bow to the activists pressuring them to make change.

The following year, despite films like Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, The Irishman and 1917 being nominated for Best Picture, they would opt to give their top prize to the first film from a different country, Parasite from South Korea, to win Best Picture and Best Director.

Sam Mendes’ 1917 had won the Golden Globe, the Directors Guild, the Producers Guild, and the British Film and Television Academy’s prize but lost the oscar to Parasite. Had 1917 won instead, however, all of the top prizes would have gone to white people - all of the actors and the filmmakers. That was early in 2020. A few weeks after the Oscars that year, COVID would hit. By the Summer, the country would explode with the George Floyd protests.

That the Academy walked away from the 2020 Oscars with rapturous headlines at their having awarded the first “International Feature” Best Picture meant that they had finally won the approval of the loud chorus that demanded them to stop being #oscarssowhite.

After the Summer of 2020, however, there was no further resistance from the industry. Big changes were implemented. The British Film and Television Academy (BAFTA) brought in a jury to select the nominees for the acting and directing category. Voters were ordered to choose half women and half men in Best Director. They kept the policy in place year which meant that not a single BAFTA nominee for Best Actress was also an Oscar nominee.

The Academy already had an inclusion mandate in place to take hold in 2024, so there was nothing more they had to do officially, but they did decide to display their history at their museum to almost completely erase everything about the Oscars, the film industry and Hollywood. They had not only erased their Jewish mogul origin story, but they had almost completely eliminated the Oscars that everyone knows. But of course, no one could say anything. They were too afraid.

As I walked around it I saw one person frantically pacing the rooms of the beautifully designed luxury museum saying into his cell phone, “none of it is here, not a single studio, no Warner Brothers, no Paramount.” And he was right.

After Green Book won in 2018, there has not been a film by a white man to win Best Picture. And there won’t be this year. Voters seem to understand this. I came to the Oscars at a time when great directors made great movies. But now, from the Sundance Film Festival onward, the priority of inclusivity has completely overwhelmed the whole point of awarding films in the first place. Whatever is happening now in Hollywood isn’t about finding the best of anything or anyone. It is simply another arm of the Democratic Party’s new religion.

I imagine if Joseph McCarthy came back today and saw just how influential the political movement of the Left is having on everything from education, to science, to history, and yes, to the Oscars he’d think the Communists finally won.

This year, we’re down to two movies for the top prize. Both are directed by women - Jane Campion for Power of the Dog and Sian Heder for CODA. Both are competing to be the first film by a streaming platform, not a studio, to win Best Picture. Netflix (Power) vs. Apple (CODA). Neither film made money at the box office, with CODA bought for $25 million at the Sundance Film Festival, earning just $1 million at the box office.

CODA is a heartwarming story about a hearing child with deaf parents and is acted by a predominantly deaf cast. Normally, the idea of awarding Apple or even Netflix their top prize, to give up entirely on that hard line between theatrical and streaming, the Academy voters would go a different way. But Apple made them an offer they could not refuse. A chance to make history by awarding the first film with a deaf cast as Best Picture. The cast was recently seen at the White House, as the guest of Joe and Jill who love the movie so much. Even though you have to be an Apple subscriber to watch it and it only made $1 million at the box office, this win will tell you everything you need to know about the Academy in 2022.

CODA earned just three Oscar nominations, the lowest of all ten nominees. If it wins on Sunday it will be the first film since the 1930s to do so with just Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Supporting Actor. In any other time in most of their history, this would be unheard of. But in 2022, no one can stop them from making history and looking like the good guys one more time.

Teenagers aren’t going to pay to see Oscar movies any time soon. They did go to see Spider-Man: No Way Home which is fast on its way to becoming the highest grossing film of all time. The Oscar voters aren’t going to vote for a movie like that. When you do the math, it’s hard to see any future for the Oscars.

Now that the Oscars, like the Democrats, have decided that skin color, gender, and equity matter more than merit there is no point in having a competition. Maybe it’s time to simply hand out certificates of achievement to those they believe deserve it most. Pretending like people are winning, though, is something the public can see through and something only the most privileged utopians find appealing.

None of the movies nominated this year are bad. Some of them are very good. It’s just that it’s an isolated world, a magic mirror, a Shangri-la that touches almost no one else outside of its atmosphere.

Sunday will be Oscar’s 94th year. They’ve had a good run. Most of us would be lucky to live that long.

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 Watching

Our 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 administration to take power as though he’d just won the second Civil War against the Confederate Army. He went along with the idea that America was “systemically racist” and corrupt to its core. He has gone along with the condemnation of members of the military over vaccine mandates or “white rage.”

He has gone along with the idea that we should divide children in public schools into two groups of oppressors and oppressed, to teach them that their whiteness from birth means they have “opportunity” but if they aren’t born with “whiteness” they don’t. He has gone along with equity replacing meritocracy. He has gone along with every new rule the progressive Left puts in place that Americans must follow or be condemned by their peers or fired from their employment. He went along when they dragged the statue of Thomas Jefferson out of City Hall in New York. Biden has gone along with all of it. That is, at least partly, why his poll numbers are dropping. The America he and the fundamentalist Left are threatening is not the America the majority wants.

The blatant hypocrisy on display by the Biden administration goes unnoticed by the high-minded media that controls the mainstream narrative, but it has not gone unnoticed by Putin or Xi.

The Biden-led withdrawal from Afghanistan was so horrific that it leaves a catastrophic humanitarian crisis in its wake. With bodies falling off airplanes and mothers handing their babies over the fence at the airport, that probably seemed like the worst of it. But it was only the beginning. Now we hear of young women locked in their homes, forbidden from going to school. We hear of babies dying when they are born because their mothers are starving. There is no way out of what we have done. But Americans once again act as though we’re the only country in the world that matters, that everyone will understand our explanations as to why this was necessary. But that is not what happened.

Putin noticed that now there was little chance Biden could justify heading into another war. The exit made Biden look weak. His poll numbers began to plummet. Even if the media barely noticed, and the blue checks on Twitter were pretending it wasn’t happening, Putin noticed.

The media has been so focused on Trump that they didn’t even notice when our country - the once mighty United States of America, was mocked by Putin for jailing political prisoners who, according to Putin, came to our Capitol “with a list of political demands.” Putin made the point that we were in no position to criticize him for what he does to journalists and dissenters when we are doing the same thing here. Even if we weren’t, what has happened to the January 6th protesters and rioters is not America most of us have grown up with. Putin noticed. How could he not when all we’ve ever done is take the moral highground against him.

Here is Putin nailing the Biden administration on jailing political prisoners:

Then, if that weren’t bad enough, the other world power that is about to test Biden’s weakness, China, called Biden out for Black Lives Matter and the racism Biden was announcing defined America. Now, not only had Putin exposed our hypocrisy but so did Xi Jinping. The only people who either didn’t see it or refused to call it out was our own media that kept being Biden’s magic mirror, telling him he was the greatest of them all. The Left existed in their own little bubble as though there simply were no other countries in the world that might be watching or listening.

Both of these moments illustrate two major US enemies pushing back, criticizing, and showing a kind of dominance we would not have seen under Trump. Whatever their relationship was, Putin saw Trump more as an equal than he does Biden, whom he clearly sees as no threat whatsoever. Trump also blustered loudly, always saying things like “we’ll hit them with everything we have,” and “it will be a response like the world has never seen.”

Here in the US, the press mocked Trump for that one minute, then called him a dangerous madman the next. But whatever that was, it was a stronger response to these two dictators in Russia and China than the Biden administration was ever prepared for.

In fact, as Ukrainian Konstantin Kisin says so brilliantly, we were not paying attention. We were focused on our own fantasy utopia and we had no idea what was waiting back in the real world. To Kisin, we must exert our power, or else these countries will start to do things we’re not going to approve of. They have no reason not to. They have no one to fear. It is like what happened in blue cities with the “defund the police” policies that led to massive spikes in crime.

That’s because on the Left, and in the Biden administration, they are still living the glory days of the Obama renaissance. In this world what matters is lifting up marginalized groups, renewable energy, a country that doesn’t see our enemies abroad but sees them instead as friends. The only people worth fighting, to Biden, are Trump supporters. Even now, forces are rising up on Twitter to try to get Tucker Carlson banned off Fox, or have Fox removed entirely from the airwaves. Don’t think they won’t use the threat of war to do that. They will. They’ve already tried to say Carlson is pro-invasion, which he never was.

This clip, which was dated February 17, already has 2 million views. This must be what they are referring to:

Obviously, this shows how unprepared Carlson and others on the Right were where Putin was concerned. He wasn’t the only one. Plenty of columnists whom I also read didn’t believe an attack was imminent. But does that make Carlson an enemy of the state? You might not like what he says in this video. I don’t much like it. But Carlson’s job is to be contrary to the status quo. That’s why he is popular. The answer to speech you don’t like is more speech, not less. That is not only what I believe, but it is the American way. Not the Russian way, not the China way. The American way.

What the Democrats want, what Joe Biden wants, what the high-status voices on Twitter like David Simon, Rob Reiner, Joy Behar, and Bette Midler want is to have things back the way they were before Trump won. They want the moral high ground back. They want the run of the place back. They want the garbage out of their pristine utopia. It was so much better when they had no idea just how many people in this country couldn’t stand them, and didn’t want to live by their rules.

We can’t go back. We can’t ever go back. Trump’s win was a pivotal moment in history when the populists rose to power, a movement that had its roots going all the way back to the year 2000 with World Trade Organization protests. They continued on with Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party. That movement, with or without Trump, not only continues but has its eye on the House, the Senate, and the presidency. Again. There is no going back. There is only going forward through whatever the next phase will be.

If I were the Biden administration I would reach out to the populist Right. I would find a way to listen to them the way he is supposed to listen to all Americans. I would stop calling them terrorists. I would take down the political theater fencing around the Capitol. I would find out what they were worried about. The border, energy prices, freedom of speech, our schools, and I would find a way to meet in the middle. He will never do that. Think about David Simon or Rob Reiner’s reaction to that. To them, the populists could be carted off to camps and they would not blink.

But Biden is not them. He is, or at least once was, more compassionate and open-minded than they are. He is also the President of this entire country, not just the side that is acceptable to the Blue Checks.

America is in a very precarious place right now, not just because of the threats coming from Russia and China, but because of our own fractured condition. If we don't believe in this country if it is always being criticized and attacked by the people who govern it if there is a distinct oligarchal class that rules over a majority of discontents that doesn’t bode well for the future. You can’t have a powerful minority rule over a powerless majority and expect things to go well. They never have. Sooner or later the barbarians will be at the gates.

What they want on the Left and in the Biden administration is to be good - to be inclusive and diverse. They want a country where everyone gets a seat at the table and no one is marginalized or offended ever. At some point, though, their desire to be good was replaced by a desire for everyone else to go along with them, or else they weren’t good, they were bad.

The Left, right now, feels threatened that all of the progress they’ve made with women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, and rights for the Black community is about to be ripped out of their grasp by the marauding Right. They believe Democracy Itself is at stake. But really, the silent, afraid majority just wants to be able to have a reasonable conversation about the country the Left is demanding America become. It is their country too and no one ever asked them if they agreed with the new rules.

That is why Trump is such an existential threat to them even now, even after he’s been booted off of social media and is no longer president. He isn’t silent. He isn’t open to discussion. He has come to knock it all down. That has left them feeling scared and under siege.

Their problem was they believed Trump was their worst nightmare. They thought electing Biden was like opening the door of the cage and letting the bird fly to its freedom. But they forgot what was waiting for them in the trees.

“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 Man

None 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 Treacher

The Tipping Point

In 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 Snatchers

They 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 privilege of paying for an education in such a hostile environment. Evergreen accepts 97% of applications, but enrollment dropped to 2,854 full-time students last fall, compared to 3,810 the semester of the protests. Enrollment increased over the same period at other Washington universities.

The accusations against Rogan started out as “disinformation.” But considering how many times the government and media have had to backtrack on all of their strident conclusions about COVID, disinformation, it seems, is in the eye of the beholder. As Jon Stewart illuminates here, it’s a matter of changing opinion and shifting sands:

Bill Maher took it even further to point out how our government is guilty of spreading “disinformation”:

Because the "disinformation” campaign fell flat, they pivoted to … wait for it … racism. because, of course they did.

A Twitter user named Wokal Distance was also curious about how it pivoted from “disinformation” to “racism” and landed on a well-funded superpac.

But Rogan was the wrong guy. They picked someone who is popular but mostly, popular with the blue-collar, center left. Democrats have alienated Hispanic voters, Asian voters and now, Black voters. They’ve alienated parents and suburban moms. They only seem able to alienate people, not attract them. Their plan appears to be: accusations of racism and fear of Trump because Trump is a racist and that will get us votes. They don’t want voters. They want the right kind of voters for their utopia.

It goes without saying that this isn’t about excusing language that is that offensive. It is, however, about context and intent. This is not a sustainable way forward for the country. We have to practice tolerance, kindness, and forgiveness. That no longer defines the Left.

The best piece on Joe Rogan is by Kat Rosenfeld writing for the New Statesman:

Here is the heart of the campaign to push Rogan off Spotify. It’s not about stopping misinformation, and it’s not about reducing his influence; indeed, Spotify could renege and cancel Rogan tomorrow, costing themselves $100 million without costing him a single listener. What people really want is the symbolic satisfaction of kicking him out of the clubhouse. They had a nice place here, with good music and classy people, and here’s Joe Rogan, wearing the wrong clothes, rubbing shoulders with the wrong folks, flouting the etiquette of this rarefied space and generally stinking up the joint.

It’s less about politics than about class, less about disagreement than disgust, and less about what Rogan actually says than how popular he is for saying it. It’s realising that people love him, no matter how much we beg them not to. In the giant fertile chasm between liberal and conservative media, in a vacuum of trust in authority, Joe Rogan has taken root: irreverent, curious, immune to in-group pressure and utterly uncontrollable. 

Will the real cult please stand up?

Democrats are comfortable calling Trump’s MAGA movement a cult. They have certainty about this but they do not have any proof beyond their own narratives around January 6th. While it’s true his supporters turned up in DC to fight for his refusal to accept the results of the election, they also didn’t blindly follow his lead when it came to taking the vaccine he takes credit for.

True that the MAGA Republicans demand that (what they call the) RINOS adopt the America First platform or face punishment, that isn’t that different from the Bernie Left demanding the same of the Centrists.

Cults are different, though. They silence dissent, demand ideological compliance and most importantly, cultivate utopias away from the rest of the population. It’s much easier to make the case that the Left has become a cult-like.

It isn’t hard to find evidence of this anywhere on the internet because it’s everywhere. They remind me of the “born again” Christians in the 1970s high on their newfound salvation.

This bombshell piece over at the Wall Street Journal by Paul Rossi and Andrew Guttman, “Inside the Woke Indoctrination Machine” illustrates just how baked into the school system the religious ferver is on the Left and how many schools now are training teachers to basically be like Evergreen. They write:

In “Feeding Yourself When You Are Fed Up: Connecting Resilience and DEI Work,” we learned techniques, such as “calling out,” that faculty and students can use to shut down conversations immediately by interrupting speakers and letting them know that their words and actions are unacceptable and won’t be tolerated. Several workshops focused on the practice of “restorative justice,” used to re-educate students who fall afoul of speech codes. The final step to ensure belonging is to push out families or faculty who question DEI work. “Sometimes you gotta say, maybe this is not the right school for you. . . . I’ve said that a lot this year,” said Victor Shin, an assistant head of school and co-chairman of the People of Color Conference, in “From Pawns to Controlling the Board: Seeing BIPOC Students as Power Players in Student Programming.”

They didn’t ask parents if they agreed with any of it. They are forcing this belief system onto all institutions of power in this country, including science and education. If I fought against religion in classrooms for most of my life, I am still going to fight against religion in classrooms, even if people on the Left believe it is the better way forward. They don’t get to decide that on their own. And they don’t get to throw fits if people disagree. This should be something we all debate out in the open.

The first thing all cults do is separate the children from the parents. Charles Manson did this. Scientology does this. Jim Jones’ utopian cult did this. They do it to free up the women for reproduction and to indoctrinate the children. It would not be such a big deal if it wasn’t so extreme all of a sudden, and if it hadn’t spread to our government. They are essentially giving parents and reasonable Democrats no choice but to abandon the party because it has so clearly become cult-like in its demands for compliance.

Asra Q. Nomani’s chilling piece “Why Antiracism Should Be Resisted” lays it out pretty well. Here is just part of it:

Bigotry, meanwhile, is back on the curriculum, thanks partly to a “Black Lives Matter at School” campaign, which last week recommended the book Not My Idea: A Book about Whiteness to children as young as six in Evanston/Skokie School District 65, outside Chicago. “Whiteness is a bad deal”, the book argues; it amounts to signing a “contract” with the devil, who is illustrated with an indelicate pointy tail. Meanwhile, in an English lesson in Fairfax County, Virginia, students played a game of “Privilege Bingo”; even “Military Kid” has been shamed as having “privilege”.

And:

The beauty of Martin Luther King Jr’s America was that everyone’s humanity, worth and potential was appreciated, not undermined. Fighting racism used to mean rejecting the notion of a hierarchy of human value. But today the morally twisted teachings of “anti-racism” preach that a new hierarchy of human value, with whiteness at the bottom, is acceptable — and even evolved and “progressive”. Education activists seem intent on pushing the race-shaming, bigotry and segregation of “anti-racism”.

The bigger problem, other than destroying the minds and hearts of children is, as with all cults, they raise people who can’t survive outside the cult. Once they remake their utopia to suit their ideology, suddenly everything will look like oppression to them. If they travel to Europe, for instance, or any country that doesn’t follow the strident doctrine of the Left how will they survive that? They’ll be like the Amish family in Peter Weir’s Witness, with no clue how the modern world works.

People on the Left now believe this country should accommodate them. But as they become increasingly sensitive and fragile that becomes impossible.

So what can we do if so many people are afraid to speak out? Well, people will start gravitating to those voices that aren’t afraid.

The first thing Tucker Carlson did upon hearing Rogan was being targeted as a thought criminal was to air the very clips by the very people that got Rogan almost fired. For him, it was a show of power, and an example of someone who isn’t afraid even a little bit of what they thinks.

There is a reason his ratings are skyrocketing right now. Carlson, like Ben Shapiro, is also drawing more eyeballs from the younger generation on the left, probably the men mostly, who have been told they are useless. Why wouldn’t they watch Carlson? Why wouldn’t they be drawn to people who bravely stand up to the rising hysteria? Biden certainly won’t. The Never Trumpers won’t. Blue Check Twitter won’t.

Dreaming the Biosphere

A healthy society has a balance of liberalism (magical thinking) and conservatism (pragmatic thinking). When one side has too much power it can lead to collapse, whereby the other side takes control.

Because humans by nature want to be free to express themselves, to dissent and to make their own choices, any utopia has two options -to loosen their grip or to tighten it. The next step when threatened, as the Left is now, is authoritarianism.

From the book Dreaming of the Biosphere, a letter by a disgruntled ex-hippie from the 1970s written to Modern Utopia magazine:

It is a benefit of magical thinking to strike forth and build utopias. This is very much an American thing, an American Revolution thing, a Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin thing. It has led to wonderful achievements, just at look at everything the Boomers inspired in the 1970s in movies, art, music and investigative journalism.

But unfortunately, right now, we are watching the collapse of all of it. This is not necessarily a bad thing. The time has come for the Boomers to step aside and allow for new leadership to redefine where the magical thinking Left will take this country next. That can’t happen unless it does collapse, and collapse it will. We are at the tipping point now, the Fourth Turning. It’s all coming apart.

A great example of this playing out was Biosphere 2 in the early 90s. It was a collaboration of a billionaire Boomer and a cadre of magical thinkers who ran The Theater of Infinite Possibilities before they inhabited a carefully constructed second atmosphere for two years. They had high hopes of a scientific breakthrough that would allow humans to build these biospheres on other planets. Their problem was that they prioritized purity and ideology over science.

Hundreds of millions of dollars were wasted, they almost suffocated to death without oxygen, they almost starved, they formed tribal alliances and turned on each other. Eventually, none other than Stephen K. Bannon was brought in to clean out the ideology and introduce practical business management. Yes, the same Steve Bannon who would lead the Tea Party populist uprising that would put Donald Trump in power was once the reasonable fixer that kept Biosphere 2 from failure.

It was conservative pragmatism brought in when the magical thinking liberalism could not sustain itself.

Biosphere 2 is now a research facility that tourists visit every year. Some of them know about the crazy people that helped found it. But most don’t. In fact, that book, Dreaming of the Biosphere, is really the only documented research of everything that went down. It’s easy to tell it was written before 2016, when everything changed, because it offers such an objective, critical view of the Left. If it was written today you bet they would have cast Bannon as the villain.

And that is why I know we have not built our leadership on the Left for the long haul. We have sacrificed truth for idealized propaganda. We have sacrificed objectivity for the preferred narrative. Now, as more and more Americans plot their escape, no one in the Democratic Party seems even half-aware of what is actually going on.

Had they loosened their grip a little bit in Biosphere 2, looked at the bigger picture of what they might achieve, they might not have been ejected from the project, which was completely overtaken by new management and turned into a research center. It is an interesting thing to visit but it is not what it was built to be. Even still, some good did come out of it because there was a healthy mix of liberalism and conservatism at play.

Now with Joe Rogan still facing daily attacks from Democrats online, which has to be among the most stupidest things a political party has ever done, the trucker convey is yet another example of just how out of touch the ruling class elites that run our government and Canada’s are. Matt Taibbi writes:

What’s happening in Canada and other countries seems less about specific demands than about the general principle of being listened to. Leaders like Trudeau could likely make this thing go away if they’d make even a slight gesture toward the idea that legitimate differences of opinion exist on questions like mandates, vaccine passports, surveillance tracking, lockdowns, the vaccination of children, and other matters. You don’t have to agree with people, just find a way to look at them without betraying your profound regret they were ever born. The longer this convoy phenomenon goes on, the clearer it becomes that none of the leaders involved knows how to do this. They’re not choosing to govern without listening. They just don’t know any other way.

We’re watching the collapse of the Left in real-time. This country will need fixers by the end of it, just like Biosphere 2 did. But when all is said and done, some good will come out of it.

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. And the Left has become a totalitarian movement. They decide what is true and you have no right to dissent or refuse or deny that truth or you will be punished by the institutions of power that they control, which is all of them.

As we speak, Biden’s press secretary, Jen Psaki, has joined defacto government officials Harry and Meghan in pressuring Spotify to dump Joe Rogan.

As Ben Shapiro says:

The Federal government is now actually pressuring companies to violate free speech principles. That is a First Amendment violation. And this is super dangerous, which is why again, they should lose their job. Let's hold them to their standard, Whoopi should lose her job. She was purveying misinformation. This means she should lose her job. If they're going to do it, they made this bed, now they have to lie in this bed. You made it, you lie in it, or we go weapons down. And we tried to reestablish some sense of classical liberalism in the country by agreement. Otherwise, it will be all out warfare here.

I personally thought Whoopi Goldberg’s statements on race and the Holocaust to be a great way to talk about something that is getting lost over time. And yes, of course, it was about race. It was about wiping out the Jewish people who have always been considered a race for hundreds of years. If you are born with Jewish blood you are Jewish. I am half-Jewish. I wasn’t raised as a Jew. My mother was not religious and not Jewish. Still, I am considered a Jew and I have felt what it is like to grow up Jewish. It is something people know about you that is a defining characteristic whether you are practicing or not. It’s your nose. It’s your eyes. It’s, sometimes, your bra size (ahem). Most importantly, Hitler believed Jews had to be wiped out for the superior Aryan race to prevail.

You can watch a dehumanization event playing out in real-time right now. Trump supporters have been dehumanized to the point where they could be carted off to camps and Blue Check Twitter would cheer. Jen Psaki would make some comment about how they were too dangerous to have around and that would be that. But a Trump supporter can get out of it, even a white male one, by throwing themselves at the mercy of the Left. They care more about ideological compliance than they do, say, skin color. But Jewish people could not have done that. Even if they’d become Nazis they would be still sent off to concentration camps because of their Jewish blood. That is about race and it’s about genocide.

Likewise, Joe Rogan’s questions about Ivermectin or the vaccine’s side effects are absolutely worth discussing loudly and with transparency. Just because they believe in compliance on the Left doesn’t mean everyone does.

Dumping Joe Rogan from Spotify does not shut up Joe Rogan. It does not shut up “disinformation.” It is what they called a “show trial” in the Soviet Union. Both Stalin and Mao were fond of punishments in public. The higher profile the target the better. It is an act of intimidation and a show of power. That our government would wade into that debate is terrifying. It’s another in the long slow slide we’ve been watching over the past few years as the consolidated power in this country continues to align with the government against the people.

Intent does matter because it has to.

If you are driving down the road and you accidentally hit and kill a family of four that is not necessarily your fault, even if you are responsible for their deaths. But compare that to driving down the road and aiming your car at a family of four. One is obviously worse than the other.

Any politician who fights against this madness will be very popular in 2022 and 2024. The Democrats and Joe Biden should be taking a firm stand for the people, for free speech, and yes, for INTENT. We need leaders who can lead us out of this mess, not ones who keep driving us back into it.

At the moment, Spotify is holding firm and not firing Rogan. Ilya Shapiro is still only suspended from Georgetown. And Whoopi Goldberg is only suspended from The View. I guess we’ll have to wait and see how it all plays out.

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, and frankly sad, effort to decertify the election count might have looked scary as portrayed on MSNBC but close up it was nothing this country hasn’t seen many times before.

Like in 2011 in Wisconsin and Michigan when protesters breached the Capitol to protest a vote on labor.

Like the actual bombing of the Capitol by the weatherman in the 1970s.

The difference was for four years the media had sold Trump and his supporters as domestic terrorists, White Supremacists and Nazi Brown Shirts. Your average Trump supporter holding a Trump flag and an American flag is an image Americans were already conditioned to fear. Had they never gone into the Capitol at all it still would have been to many the most frightening thing they’d seen in their lifetimes.

This is not to diminish what happened on January 6th. No doubt it was terrifying for those who lived through it, but it is how they connected it to what they believe is a “white supremacist” uprising that ties into a greater wave of hysteria and fear. Fold in the idea that only Trump supporters are anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers and you have a full blown dehumanization campaign aimed at one group of people.

Witches, Witches Everywhere.

In the book Pendulum: How Generations of the Past Shape Our Present and Predict Our Future, which is a loose interpretation of Neil Howe’s The Fourth Turning, Howe’s 80-year generational theory is divided into four 20 year-cycles, from a “me” cycle (individualism) to the “we” cycle (collectivism).

The authors Michael Drew and Roy Williams warned of what they call the “witch hunt phase.” As the “we” cycle winds down, the purges begin. Even though the book was written in 2011 or thereabouts, they tag the year 2023 as the height of our “witch hunt phase,” writing:

Senator Joseph McCarthy was an American promoter of this witch-hunt attitude at America’s most recent “We” Zenith of 1943 (see the “House Un-American Activities Committee,” 1937–1953); Adolf Hitler was the German promoter (see the Holocaust, 1933–1945); and Joseph Stalin was the Soviet promoter (see the Great Purge, 1936–1938). Our hope is that we might collectively choose to skip this development as we approach the “We” Zenith of 2023. If enough of us are aware of this trend toward judgmental self-righteousness, perhaps we can resist demonizing those who disagree with us and avoid the societal polarization that results from it. A truly great society is one in which being unpopular can be safe.

It has arrived right on schedule.

Back in 1692, the Puritans had come to America to flee religious oppression in England and were now building a “shining city on the hill.”

The Puritans were already locked into fear paralysis by forces beyond their control. Native Americans fought hard to keep their territory, murdered Puritans, kidnapped their children, killed their livestock. An epidemic of smallpox hit the community hard and it was a brutal winter in 1692. It is not all that surprising given those conditions and frankly, given ours, that they would collectively snap.

Into a utopia comes a major threat that triggers hysteria.

In Salem, it was adolescent girls thrashing around on the floor - the reason? They were possessed by witches. The girls accused any random person. Once accused, they were brought before the Oyer and Terminer and usually found guilty because there were no lawyers, there was no evidence and the only education on offer was the Bible. Once convicted they could confess as a witch and live, or deny being a witch and be hanged in the town square with people they’ve known all their lives cheering on their deaths.

20 people had been hanged before the bubble of hysteria burst. When the Governor’s wife was accused that was a bridge too far and the whole thing came crashing down like a house of cards.

Sooner or later, all episodes of mass hysteria do evaporate and history takes care of the rest. This depends on the society as a whole getting a grip. When you see half the country as your enemy, that is very nearly impossible.

We might be closing in on that moment but we are not there yet.

Have you No Decency, Sir?

The 1950s had all the markings of a manufactured utopia. Coming out of one of the most horrific eras in the history of mankind, World War II, American life in the 1950s had the facade of the same kind of “normalcy” as the American Left is living through today, only back then it was Conservative.

It was the epitome of Americana - though it always must be noted that this was not true for many of the underserved. President Eisenhower, among the many great things he did, would end segregation in public schools and in the military.

Back in the 1950s, like now, there was a happy alliance between the administrative state and Hollywood, or American culture. Many on the left were secretly Communist sympathizers, like many screenwriters and actors. They would be found out and Blacklisted after being brought before the HUAC and asked to “name names.” That was their version of a confession and it is seen as just as much of a dishonest move now. But it was the Republicans who were the main opponents as they tried to preserve what they believed was the American way of life. You can imagine how clearly defined that was in the 1950s.

They believed their very way of life was threatened by Communism - freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of religion, the right to rise in the free market system, to own property. And indeed, Stalin and other Communist dictators beat, tortured and starved millions of their own people to force compliance. There was no dissent allowed. Most lefties in America were blissfully unaware of just bad it was in Stalin’s Russia. The propaganda machine made sure only the positive news got out, just like in modern day China now.

The fear was that there were Communists everywhere injecting messages, spying on Americans, pretending to BE Americans. When actual Communists were uncovered, like the Rosenbergs, that kicked the hysteria into overdrive, making McCarthy a hero to the American public. He was so well liked that Eisenhower chose not to speak out against him when he was running for President in 1952.

When McCarthy started targeting members of the military, it was too much for even a stalwart Republican like Ike. He set about a negative PR campaign against McCarthy and was largely responsible for not just his downfall but the end of the mass hysteria episode against Communists, though the Cold War would rage on until the 1980s.

Racists, Transphobes, Misogynists everywhere.

Two things of significance happened in 2008. Barack Obama became the first Black President and the government bailed out big banks to the tune of $700 billion.

That year, two major revolutionary forces were born: Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party. In 2014, another revolutionary force would become a gathering storm, Black Lives Matter.

Occupy and the Tea Party began when social media was in its infancy. Obama was the first president to use Twitter to build his coalition online. It was seen as a smart way to campaign. Trump would do the same thing in the leadup to his run, around the same time - 2012. It was seen as the end of Humanity itself such that eventually Trump would be banned from the platform.

Back in 2008, the Left of this country had already been well on our way towards building our utopian America, our own version of the Shining City on the Hill. We were the beautiful people, the celebrities, the Silicon Valley whiz kids, the filmmakers. We were on the right side of the environment, women’s rights, LGBTQ rights. We were progressive, idealistic, fitness gurus, empowered women, who had spent the previous decade going to therapy and starting an anti-depressant regiment. We watched Oprah every day at 3pm. We vowed to do better, to be better, to offend no one. We were the “everybody gets a certificate” generation.

Our “goodness” was in how responsible we were. We recycled. We cared about the oceans. We worried about bullies and school shooters. And yes, we HATED the Right. They were the worst this country had to offer. They were “bad” and we were “good” and the Obamas were the leaders of all of it.

But we were also afraid of everything, even then. Our children were analyzed, scrutinized to see if they were sociopaths, psychopaths, bullies or geniuses. We drugged them, praised them, hoped for perfection but also wanted all of them to have an equal shot at success. They became teenagers afflicted with one disorder or another, which they wore like badges of honor, or identification. We did too. All of us on the left. We were both victimized by society’s structure and empowered to disrupt it.

Generation Z has now come of age knowing that they have to put people in categories by skin color, sex, gender and ideology. They know they have to announce who and what people are right off the bat and they somehow also know that the one thing you can’t be is a “white cis gendered male.” They also are smart enough to know that what you think or what you say might get you in trouble so they self-censor.

To challenge anything Obama did or said was considered, in itself, racism. This was especially true about the Tea Party and marginally true about Occupy Wall Street. People on the Left believe that Obama’s win threatened the White Supremacist empire that is America and his very presence led to a White Supremacist uprising called the Tea Party, which would eventually birth the Freedom Caucus, Sarah Palin and Donald Trump, to say nothing of its ring leader, Steven K. Bannon.

Racism would become fascism, which would become “white supremacy” which would become Domestic Terrorism.

I never questioned that it was based on racism. I believed this 100%. That is why I, along with many parents around 2013, began to spread the ideas of Critical Theory without even realizing it. We believed our beloved President was not being accepted by the White Majority. We began to see racism everywhere too. We also saw injustice everywhere. So did our children who came of age online, half of them social justice warriors that now patrol social media like the Children Spies in 1984.

The idea that we are all secretly racists or transphobes or misogynists or homophobes or rapists or we’re just one old Tweet or old photo or slip of the tongue away from being exposed and outed is driving us all collectively insane.

It was one thing when “Cancel Culture” was just a meme on Black Twitter. It was something driven by a community that had a collective voice online for the first time in American history. Eventually, though, it became obvious that Twitter was being used as an arena for public shaming and the mobilization of online mobs to destroy people’s lives. The fear of being targeted is so strong that most in power do whatever they can to avoid it.

Twitter’s mob rule now translates to on the ground protests, riots and mobs. How quickly did Kenosha burn before any of the facts about the Jacob Blake case came out? Due process was out the window because almost everyone was caught up in the wave of panic and hysteria. We should take a lesson from how fast that traveled from social media to the near destruction of one town. It does not bode well for the future. Somehow no one seems to have put all of these things together - the uprisings from 2008, social media, the Summer of protest in 2020 and January 6th.

“Cancel Culture” isn’t dangerous because of Twitter. It’s dangerous because corporations and now our government enact their own justice because of it. If the currency in an oligarchy is maintaining the image of “goodness” they will happily throw anyone under the bus to preserve theirs.

We don’t even need a dictatorship to police citizens in a Capitalist country. We just need the systems of Capitalism to adopt the ideology. And so they have. Vivek Ramaswamy has written a book called “Woke Inc” about this very thing. The average American citizen doesn’t have a chance.

There is not a corporation now, not a university, not a movie studio, or a book publishing house or a mainstream news outlet or a science lab that is not fully on board with the doctrine, who won’t side with the mob to purge their companies of undesirables, to preserve their power and their image.

All of the inane ways the big corporations are going “woke” embarasses them only they don’t realize it. They are pleasing a small minority of loud zealots who police them and will report them for their thought crimes but they are alienating the majority who most definitely is not in favor of this fundamentalism. The same is true of schools and now of our government.

The divide between the oligarchy and the working class is widening, and now with Joe Biden calling anyone who supports Trump, or resists their imposed doctrine, potentially a “domestic terrorist” or “white supremacist” what kinds of protections do our average citizens have? What lawyer would risk representing them? The more corporations comply with Biden’s doctrine, and the fear and hysteria that goes along with it, the more dangerous our country becomes for people with no power and no status.

A recent column in the Spectactor by Joel Kotkin warns:

The new autocracy rises from a relentless economic concentration which has engendered a new and fabulously wealthy elite. Five years ago, around four hundred billionaires owned as much as half of the world’s assets. Today, only one hundred billionaires own that share, and Oxfam reduces that number to a mere twenty-six. In avowedly socialist China, the top one percent of the population holds about one-third of the country’s wealth, up from 20 percent two decades ago. Since 1978, China’s Gini coefficient, which measures inequality of wealth distribution, has tripled.

And:

The time could be shorter than we think. The tech oligarchs are creating something similar to what Aldous Huxley called in Brave New World Revisited a “scientific caste system.” There is “no good reason,” Huxley wrote in 1958, that “a thoroughly scientific dictatorship should ever be overthrown.” It will condition its subjects from the womb so that they “grow up to love their servitude” and “never dream of revolution.” It will maintain a strict social order and provide enough diversion through drugs, sex and videos to keep their artificially narrowed minds occupied and sated.

The fusion of government with large oligopolistic companies, and the technologically-enhanced collection of private information, allow the new autocracies to monitor our lives in ways that Mao, Stalin or Hitler would have envied. A rising tide of money and administrative power defines the rising autocracy. If we as citizens, whatever our political orientation, are not vigilant, our democracy will become an increasingly hollow vessel”

Imagine a future when aritficial intelligence is tasked with policing our thoughts, our speech, our shopping habits, who we date, what we say online, what websites we visit. They can be as indifferent as Stalin’s army. They can simply erase or disappear anyone.

In its own way, Wall-E is about fighting back against authoritarian power disguised as “taking care” of its citizenry via artificial intelligence. There they lay, pudgy and compliant, zoned out on media, while their food is delivered to them. It is a wonderful metaphor for our potential future. With a government willing to sacrifice our image of strength abroad to satisfy panic and hysteria, and willing to use all tools at their disposal to stifle dissent, this future is not that unimaginable.

Here’s hoping a smart little robot like Eve shows up to help save us from ourselves.

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 Way

The 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.

Truth

The 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 yourself out of the media bubble and find it. My year would have been utterly lost without the genius that is Matt Taibbi. Notice how in this video he says he would never simply accuse someone of being a “white supremacist” without piles of documents to prove it? Where did that kind of ethics in journalism go? Well, we know where it went. It got fired from most of the publications in this country.

The New York Times’ biggest blunder of 2020 was losing Bari Weiss, who is a pioneer now in leading the way for new media voices. Weiss’ podcast and her Substack have been absolutely essential. I always immediately listen and I always immediately read anything that sails through my inbox from her.

It is Weiss who encourages her readers to be open-minded and brave. It is Weiss who understands that unless we all start speaking out we will continue to live in a country afraid of the truth. That is what is happening now.

There are so many brave voices online and all of them have been attacked at one time or another and have built platforms outside the mainstream. While it’s a benefit to people like me, we still lose much by having people like Matt Taibbi’s work not make the mainstream. At least Real Clear Politics will often link out to both Weiss and Taibbi, which ensures more people will find their way there.

Here are some other voices on Substack I have read and appreciated this past year — you should read all of them:

Freddie DeBoerBlocked and Reported’s Katie Herzog and Jessie SingalWalter KirnWesley YangMichael SchellenbergerAndrew SullivanKatherine BrodskyJames StrockNancy RommelmanAntonio Garcia MartinezJeff EinsteinGlenn GreenwaldDarryl CooperJeff Maurer Abigail ShrierThe Liberal PatriotGlenn LouryPodcastsHonestly Pod (Bari Weiss) The Quillette PodcastMegyn KellyBen ShapiroWalk-ins Welcome with Bridget PhaetesyAll-In Podcast with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg The Fifth Column Podcast with Kmele Foster, Matt Welch & Michael MoynihanUnspeakable Podcast with Meghan Daum

One of my favorite new discoveries is Sharyl Attkisson whose motto is:

She has gone through all of the media “mistakes” in the Trump era, and all of the media “mistakes” in the Biden era. She is an old-fashioned reporter who believes in objectivity and ethics. I know, right? What a shock. Her podcast has been a must-listen for me this past year as I know she will always get the story.

Justice

We have been subjected to trial by mob for at least five years now. When Trump was elected and the entire established order of this country, aka the ruling empire, believed itself to be the “resistance” everything went out the window. The press was blamed for putting Trump in power so they did nothing but subvert the truth to attack him on a daily basis. On Twitter, the presumption of innocence went out the window completely. Almost every case became partisan fodder, with justice being rendered by mob and no one really having the stones to stand up to any of it.

While Superman’s definition of justice might have meant taking the law into your own hands when institutions of power fail, I mean it here as restoring faith in institutions. Everyone deserves not only a fair trial but a path to redemption when “canceled” by the mob, for starters.

But worse than all of that is how Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and other elected officials have inserted themselves into ongoing cases without any verdict being rendered. This was true when Biden falsely labeled Kyle Rittenhouse a radicalized Trump supporter who was opening fire on protesters because he was a “white supremacist,” true when Biden expressed anger at the Rittenhouse verdict after a fair trial, true any time Biden has commented on a partisan side. That is not the President’s job.

Laying it out in painful detail is Jonathan Turley for The Hill, who warns Biden to change course heading into 2022 and he’s right. Says Turley:

A president plays a critical role in reinforcing our system of justice. He not only represents our constitutional process of representative democracy, but he is given specific power to correct injustices through pardons and commutations. When passions turn to rage, a president can bring a needed voice for fairness and patience in allowing our system to function without prejudice or prejudgment. Conversely, if the president rushes to judgment, he becomes an enabler of mob justice.

Every jury member in this country is potentially under threat from the mob and they know it. In our modern-day surveillance state where everyone is a “children spy” to make anyone famous for anything they do - where video clips are often taken out of context and misunderstood that is all the more reason to fortify our justice system and try to diminish the power of the mob.

It is immoral the way people can be accused of something online based on a tweet or something from their past and have no due process or any way to defend themselves. It isn’t easy standing up to it, but stand up to it we must.

The American Way

In the new economy of the internet and social media, no one is safe. You are expendable. It is considered a privilege to have access to a major platform like Twitter, Youtube, or Facebook, not to mention publishing houses, movie studios, even fast food joints, universities, libraries, the corporate offices of Coke or Nike. You have only one choice: SHUT UP AND COMPLY. If you can do that, you will thrive. If you dissent, your job is on the chopping block.

Does that sound like the American Way to you? It doesn’t to me. Even saying it out loud, “The American Way” feels like it’s verboten, doesn’t it? Why? Because calling anything American carries with it a source of shame, at least on the Left now. I saw a couple with a baby on Youtube offering up a recipe for vegan pumpkin pie say, “We no longer celebrate Thanksgiving because it’s representative of genocide.”

It should surprise no one that this year DC Comics decided to change Superman’s motto from “Truth, Justice and the American Way” to “Truth, Justice and a Better Tomorrow.” Though never part of the original series, The “American way” was added in the early 1940s as part of the WWII war effort, and changed to “freedom” in the 1960s. It sticks with me probably because it was revived in the 1978 Superman with Christopher Reeve.

But apparently, in the years since, The American Way just isn’t on-brand anymore. As CBS News points out:

Still, DC's decision to have the head of the company officially announce Superman's motto appears to be a pointed statement that the Man of Steel is a hero for everyone, part of a wider effort across the company to broaden its representation. Most recently, on Oct. 11, DC announced that Jon Kent — Superman's son, who also wears the iconic "S" shield as a superhero — would come out as bisexual.

Why wouldn’t people see America as the most inclusive country in the world because it is. No other country has so much inclusion, so much diversity and is such a cultural and religious melting pot as this one. We get to decide what this country is. It’s more than a little heartbreaking that in 2021 there is so much hatred towards America and the idea of America. She deserves so much better than that.

While the modern Left wants to tear down America and build a new utopia they forget that it already is a utopia. It is built on the idea that everyone in this country has the right to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. Just because these ideals weren’t upheld in America’s founding, that doesn’t mean they don’t exist or that we shouldn’t remember them or fight for them. America is the only country in the world that has Freedom of Speech written into its Constitution. At its best, we hold to those values, even when we disagree with what is being said.

America stands for the Land of Opportunity. People flee failing governments and oppressive regimes knowing that if they stake their claim somewhere in America they can build a business from the ground up. If their kids work hard they can become doctors, teachers, celebrities, tech moguls, and scientists, even millionaires here. No class system or caste system will hold them back, not if you stick to the founding principles of this country.

There is nothing funny about Truth, Justice, and the American Way, just as there is nothing wrong with Peace, Love, and Understanding. We need more of both everywhere and in everything.

I will close 2021 with this quote from a wonderful speech by Abigail Shrier - another Public Enemy Number One on the left - to the students at Princeton that she ends this way:

You will, each of you, have the chance to matter. You will find yourselves at hospitals or in banks or in courtrooms and at newspapers where you will see things happen that you know to be wrong—where you find that the standard line is actually a lie. You may have found yourself there already. If you’re fortunate enough, you may even find yourself one day with children of your own, knowing you are their best defense in this world. And you’ll feel the nub of your will, pressing you to do something—say something. And when that happens, don’t sit there like a sock puppet.

I’m 43, which I realize makes me very old to many of you. But not so long from now, you’ll wake up and be 43 yourselves. And when I look back on my life thus far, it occurs to me that the decisions of which I am most proud—the ones that strike like an unexpected kiss—are not the times when I obeyed the algorithm. They’re the times when I defied it and felt, for a moment, the magic and power of being alive. When I felt, even for an instant, the exquisite joy of not being anyone’s subject. When I had the unmistakable sense that I’ve existed for a purpose, that I stood the chance of leaving the world better than I found it. You don’t get any of that through lock-step career achievement and you certainly don’t get that by being the Left’s star pupil.

You feel that frisson when you choose a person to commit yourself to knowing full well that any marriage may fail; when you bring children into a world where there are no guarantees of their safety or success. When you summon the courage to fashion a life, something that will remain after you are gone. When you speak the truth publicly—with care and lucidity.  And when you say to the world: you cannot buy me with flattery. Purchase my colleagues or classmates at bulk rate. I am not for sale.

Happy Happy Happy New Year dear readers. Thank you for reading. Thank you for subscribing. Thank you for being there. All the best for 2022.

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 Trump

A Pollster’s Warning to Democrats: ‘We Have a Problem’

Democratic Party’s brand is broken

The Democrats Need to Dump Harris Fast

The Democrats Mayor Pete Problem

Democrats lost in Virginia, but their win in New Jersey is more worrisome

Why A ‘Sister Souljah Moment’ Won’t Save Biden

And 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 Times

For 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 America where everyone had a shot at the dream because the founding documents are just that strong.

Hamilton represented the best of the Obama era where he rose to power and proved that yes, Black men in this country could be elected. Twice. In fact, Obama was instrumental in helping to inspire and promote Hamilton. This video was from 2009, when Obama had just been elected.

It should have been a sign that when Hamilton finally did open on Broadway the tickets were so prohibitively expensive no one in the working class could afford to go. It was, just as so much of what the Left does now, aimed at the privileged class.

By 2016, as Obama was leaving, Hamilton came back to the White House to perform again with its cast:

Cut to 2021:

Lin Manuel-Miranda’s In the Heights was deemed problematic because of “colorism.” They have just removed Thomas Jefferson out of City Hall in New York after 187 years.

It writes its own campaign ad.

Remarkably, shockingly, the Left is morphing into everything Trump said they’d be, up to and including removing the Jefferson statue.

The white liberals of the upper crust still use Obama, or black culture, or “antiracism” or “people of color” to give them a sense of purpose. You see this every day on social media. They “virtue signal” nonstop, along with self-flagellating, to prove they are worthy of their one true god.

As Darvio Morro puts it in Newsweek:

We're living in a golden age of awareness about white supremacy. You can't turn on your TV without hearing the phrase applied to the news, whether it's the explanation for Glenn Youngkin's victory in Virginia or Kyle Rittenhouse's actions in Kenosha. But more often than not, white progressives' newfound obsession with opposing white supremacy isn't helping. It's coming at Black people's expense.

Reverend Jerry McAfee of New Salem Church in Minneapolis has described white supremacy as a situation where white people are defining your reality and then forcing you to live under that definition. And sadly, that's what we're seeing now over and over: White folks on the Left defining a reality for us that doesn't comport with how we as Black people see things, then demanding we identify with it.

The reason is that this cultural-religious movement on the Left is not about race. It’s actually about class. Ideological compliance is still necessary. If you give them that you get to stay. If you do not, you have to go, no matter your skin color.

A New Religion

If the new ideology of the Left was and remains a religion, with a leader like Obama at the head of it, then it makes sense that when Trump won it would have sent the Left into a state of existential and spiritual panic. If they thought Trump was a racist, and everyone who voted for him was a racist, then this country must be racist and we need to ferret out racism from everywhere and everyone and everything. Every white person is potentially guilty of racism just by the color of their skin. We must teach our white children to understand this but we’ll it as “white privilege.” There is no escape from it. If you are white, you are an oppressor destined to succeed. If you are not white, or Asian as we now find out from a recent column on Loudoun County by Matt Taibbi, you are oppressed and destined to fail.

And it’s true that the Me Too movement was a reaction to Trump’s win, since Trump was accused by so many women and still won the presidency. They could not cancel Trump. They couldn’t shut him up. He stands as the most powerful person in the country, maybe the world, who spits in the face of the power elite on the Left, and his supporters not only love him for that, they excuse his faults and would follow him anywhere.

Because many of Trump’s supporters will follow him anywhere, the folks on the Left decided that meant they were in a cult. But cults force ideological compliance and punish dissent. That sounds a lot more like the left to me. There is also this idea that they are the protected people, the chosen people. How else to explain how the media went totally dark on COVID for the months and months when protesters poured into the streets by the hundreds of thousands. They were wearing the sacred cloth masks, that’s true, and their cause was bigger than COVID. Okay, but then when the protests ended, COVID became so serious it has completely wrecked the American economy and is leading to the collapse of the Democratic Party. Surely saving the country and the economy would be important too.

The truth is that somewhere between Trump, who was not cautious enough, and Biden who is too cautious is the right response to COVID. The one thing it never should have become is partisan. The red state/blue state divide is hurting this country. More people died in the red states but their economies are faring much better. Life seems almost normal in states like Florida and Texas, whereas in California, New York, Portland, and Seattle it feels closer to a dystopian nightmare of fear and rising crime and unemployment. What message does that send about Democrats in power?

Moreover, this idea that only they are allowed to protest, as violently as they want, and the media will cover for them, the politicians will encourage them, and the government and major institutions will overhaul all of their power structures to address the claims of systemic racism.

Unfortunately, for the Democratic Party at least, they’re about to find out just how many people they’ve now alienated and how bad it’s going to be in 2022 and 2024. I imagine the most religious among them, the mostly white women for whom “antiracism” is their newfound passion, will likely believe that the racists won.

The Worst of Times

Biden’s numbers didn’t really start to drop until August, after the disastrous exit from Afghanistan, where it’s not getting better, it’s getting worse:

Afghanistan Health Care on the Brink of Collapse [AP]UN: Afghanistan’s economy is collapsing `before our eyes’ [AP]More than 60,000 Interpreters, Visa Applicants Remain in Afghanistan [WSJ]On the front line as Afghan children battle malnutrition and measles [BBC]An Economic Catastrophe in Afghanistan [NYT]

The Independents bailed. The Blue Checks and the loyal Democrats hung on. Then inflation spiked, gas prices soared, then Biden backtracked on his promise not to mandate vaccines on a Federal level. Then Delta, then homicide rates spiked in cities, then smash and grab robberies, then the sudden and inexplicable lurch leftward by the Democrats such that you had General Milley mewling about “white rage” in Congress, and the Democrats with a handful of Never Trumpers could not stop talking about January 6th.

Bad as it was, it was not the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War. It is ludicrous to any American who watched the riots and the wreckage over the Summer, many minority-owned businesses without insurance burned to the ground, to say that. The Democrats said nothing about the attacks on police officers, nor showed any concern whatsoever for them until January 6th, then acted like they gave a damn.

Then came the disaster in Virginia where Democrats took their first big loss. The press said it was “dog whistles” and “White Supremacy.” Big mistake. It showed all of America yet again just how out of touch they actually are.

No one with a platform could dare venture down the road of what might have really gone wrong in Virginia. If “wokeness” is the religion and racism the ultimate evil no one would touch that topic, even if some of it was driven by parents desperate to get their impressionable children out of the hands of the lunatics on the Left.

The obsession with race and racism has led to purity tests where each person is expected to give their opinion that will show exactly where they stand on the issue. You have to completely support “critical race theory” or say it’s just teaching people about slavery or else you are a racist. This is deemed a “right-wing” issue but plenty of parents from all different backgrounds and skin colors on the Left are also opposed to the teaching of whatever it is that is going on in schools now. It isn’t CRT. It is a method of purging presumed racism from every white person in a way that resembles Scientology or Nxivm more than it does activism.

But it isn’t only that. There is all of a sudden a rise in transgender children that teachers and administrators are demanding parents accept, never question, and just happily go along with. This is a recent change in the Left’s ideology but it leaves no room for debate, for questions, for objections.

Biden’s numbers might climb back. Things might get better for the Democrats. The news coming out of San Francisco, that the Mayor was ready to finally confront the crime that has mostly destroyed the city is a good sign. But make no mistake, if you have shut down debate in a country that still allows for free speech, the dissenting voices are going to get more popular and louder, which explains why Tucker Carlson is the number one cable news host and Ben Shapiro is routinely at the top of the iTunes podcast chart.

Freedom of Speech, Law and Order, Patriotism

Last year, when the cities were exploding and we were heading into the 2020 election, I warned anyone who would listen that the Democrats were ceding three key American anchors to Trump:

* Freedom of speech

* Law and Order

* Patriotism

When I saw Trump’s speech at Mount Rushmore it was the first time any politician anywhere in our country, or any prominent person anywhere, said out loud what the majority of Americans were feeling but could not say. Here is what Trump said in August of 2020:

1776 represented the culmination of thousands of years of Western civilization and the triumph of not only spirit, but of wisdom, philosophy, and reason. And yet, as we meet here tonight, there is a growing danger that threatens every blessing our ancestors fought so hard for, struggled, they bled to secure. Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children. Angry mobs are trying to tear down statues of our founders, deface our most sacred memorials, and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities. Many of these people have no idea why they’re doing this, but some know what they are doing. They think the American people are weak and soft and submissive, but no, the American people are strong and proud and they will not allow our country and all of its values, history, and culture to be taken from them.

One of their political weapons is cancel culture, driving people from their jobs, shaming dissenters, and demanding total submission from anyone who disagrees. This is the very definition of totalitarianism, and it is completely alien to our culture and to our values and it has absolutely no place in the United States of America.

This attack on our liberty, our magnificent liberty must be stopped and it will be stopped very quickly. We will expose this dangerous movement, protect our nation’s children from this radical assault, and preserve our beloved American way of life. In our schools, our newsrooms, even our corporate boardrooms, there is a new far-left fascism that demands absolute allegiance. If you do not speak its language, perform its rituals, recite its mantras, and follow its commandments, then you will be censored, banished, blacklisted, persecuted, and punished. It’s not going to happen to us.

Make no mistake. This left-wing cultural revolution is designed to overthrow the American Revolution. In so doing they would destroy the very civilization that rescued billions from poverty, disease, violence, and hunger, and that lifted humanity to new heights of achievement, discovery, and progress. To make this possible, they are determined to tear down every statue, symbol, and memory of our national heritage.

Not on my watch.

Whatever you think about Trump, whatever you think about that speech, I can promise you that Americans are going to run into the arms of the Right if they are the only side fighting against whatever you want to call this new religion on the Left.

The future of the Democrats will depend on just how willing they are to confront this new religion that they are now foisting on America. I don’t see any signs that they are ready to do that. I see plenty of signs that Americans are getting more and more exhausted by them.

Maybe if they can stop being so afraid of COVID they can try to bring America back - but it’s hard to imagine they ever will. Inflation is not going away. The madness of “woke” is not going away. I don’t see a path forward for the Democrats and I haven’t for at least a year.

They’re losing young people. They’re losing Hispanic voters. They’re losing the suburbs. Right now, there isn’t any good reason to side with the Democrats. The only thing they are selling to Americans is fear - fear of voting rights, fear of January 6th, fear of COVID.

It plays on Twitter. In the rest of the country, not so much.

There are so many thousands of people out there that the Democrats, the Never Trumpers and the Left overall are just deciding don’t matter. That is not how you win elections. That’s how you lose them.

Let’s Go Brandon

A healthy movement, a healthy country can laugh at itself. But now, comedy can only really live on the Right, or at least not on the Left because they will not allow it in the mainstream. They are controlling everything they can and at the top of that list has to be humor.

Samantha Bee, Stephen Colbert, John Oliver, Jimmy Kimmel have become like preachers. Their comedy sounds like what you might hear on skit night at the Scientology headquarters. It’s not humor. If any political movement was more in need of lampooning it has to be the sanctimonious, holier than thou, zealots on the Left.

The Right did not use to be funny because they too had to stick to the party line, leaving all the great comedy to come from the left. Those days are gone.

Let’s Go Brandon is funny because it makes fun of a gaslighting media that desperately needs to be made fun of. It’s funny because it symbolizes how the press has been covering Joe Biden since 2020. The reaction to it makes it even more funny because it seems to really annoy the Left that it not only exists but keeps going viral.

It feels good to laugh, though, doesn’t it? We need laughter. Great humor is about dissent, which is about saying what can’t be said. Without dissent, without humor, without the truth, there is no saving the Left.

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” and heal the planet before it explodes in a fiery ball of carbon. Goodbye planet. Poof. Puff of smoke. She was like your textbook “libs of TikTok” who fell to her knees and screamed at the sky when Hillary lost. She laid on the couch for a year and drank a bottle of wine every night. Then came the Women’s March, the Muslim March, Kavanaugh, the hashtag resistance. And before long, her face changed. She was flushed with glassy-eyed purpose.

But she was also picking apart everything he did. Like she woke up and he was all wrong. Her perfect son is not so perfect anymore. She also worried he had a dark side. Like he was an “incel.” She thought if he put his pronouns in his bio people wouldn’t think that about him. Everything he did seemed to set her off. Most of the time they ignored each other. Barney had no escape, not since COVID locked them in together for a year. She did march in the Summer for BLM. But that didn’t count. When you have a higher purpose you can’t worry about pandemics. That was what she said.

His mother seemed to be happy if you saw it from the outside. But if you knew her you would see how fearful she was all of the time, how she could not stop staring at her phone, how her fingers flew across the keyboard when she was getting in a fight with someone online. Hours she would spend tap tap tapping. Then they’d have dinner and she’d recount the fight. She had long since stopped talking to Trump supporters but there were still “problematic” people on Facebook who would say something offensive. Hours would disappear and she’d still be staring at her phone or computer, tap tap tapping away.

But she would not show that. Instead, she would snap a picture of their plates then post it on Instagram to show just how healthy it was, what a good mom she was, how normal their lives were. NORMAL normal. Just like everyone else.

Barney never allowed her to take pictures of him now. Enough of that. He couldn’t look at himself even in a photo. Even in a selfie. When he did accidentally see himself, like a memory eruption, it scared him. His hair was still too long. His eyes looked sad and droopy. They were blue, once upon a time. Now, against the dark half-moons that shadowed them, they looked colorless.

He knew he was two people. Himself, the quiet loner whose mom loved him anyway. A supercomputer nerd who has been online his entire life. He resisted the cliche of being a porn addict and chose instead to buy vintage nudie mags off Ebay. The kind with pubic hair. Even if he did use Pornhub he would never describe himself that way online. He couldn’t be that guy, even if he was that guy.

Online, he was someone else. A different voice came out, one that was in constant reactive mode to what he saw scroll down his feed. He was outspoken and brave, even angry. One tweet would set him off on a long, threaded rant that no one would read. A few hours later, with maybe one “heart” he would delete it.

He was starting to like who he was on Twitter more than he liked his real life self, even if he knew it was an intoxicating cocktail of dopamine, hijacking the amygdala and fight or flight that was keeping him engaged. He was smart enough to know that if you are getting content for free you ARE the content. He knew that but he could not stop. His 20 or so followers who engaged with him made him feel something. He knew he just needed the one day, the one viral tweet, to become a somebody. Then he could try for the blue check.

It was an ordinary day when Barney became Twitter-famous. It all had to do with “that b***h.” Everyone knew who “that b***h” was. She was always piping up to defend bad people. She was fearless in the worst way. She couldn’t shut up. Just shut up. But instead, on a day after the shooting in some town at a massage parlor was being labeled a hate crime, he called her a racist. Not in so many words. He insinuated she had written anonymously about a Chinese film director’s movie doing better because now all of Hollywood would be sympathizing with Asians.

All he wrote was, “I think I know who said that.” Everyone on Twitter knew that he was referring to “that b***h.” Because she was the only person with balls big enough to say something like that. She denied it, of course, but she was losing hundreds of followers. It was fun watching her flip out. It felt good somewhere Barney couldn’t even pinpoint. PING!

She was like, “I can’t believe no one on Film Twitter, people I’ve known for years, wouldn’t stand up for me. I can’t believe everyone is so silent. You know I would never have said that.” They were all laughing at her desperation. Barney knew it. He also knew on Twitter it didn’t matter if something was true or not. The ritual had to play out anyway. Each person cast in their roles and everyone showcased their morality when they took a side. If they liked her tweet that revealed their own ideology. No one wanted to risk that. Liking his tweet was rewarded. CRUELTY is good on Twitter. It is the heat and the combustion that drives the engine, baby.

Then his follower count started to balloon as more and more of the blue checks RT’d his revelation about who the baddie was today. She had so many haters and they were crawling out of the darker corners of Twitter to send him screenshots of things she’d said over the 14 years she’d been on there. Would that be Barney’s fate? Would he really give so much of his life over to a stupid website that took so much and gave so little back? Except today it was giving something back. He was gaining lots of followers.

At some point during the day she went on offense. Because of course she did. She was never one to back down. She tweeted, “In the old days it used to be you’re fat, ugly and old. Come on, losers, you can do better than this.” She was putting on a strong front but it was obviously hurting her, being called a racist and a white supremacist. Barney didn’t exactly say that but others did. By the end of the day five people had contacted the movie studios that advertised on her site and told them what she said.

“It wasn’t me,” she tweeted. “I think My American Life is a great movie and worthy of winning Best Picture so why would I say otherwise?” Then she became defiant, “go ahead and take away my advertisers. Go ahead and destroy my business. Do you think that will shut me up? Think again. Keep sending me those tweets. I’m going to make you famous for them.”

She was such a dumb woman. Didn’t she know when it was time to shut up? There was no coming back from this. The tweets just kept coming and coming. By the end of the day Barney had 1,315 likes and 5,670 RTs. His follower count went from 3,593 to 5,400.

Imagine thousands of people at once engaging with a little button shaped like a heart, formerly a symbol of love, now branded as part of a hive mind agreeing on something in a day. Pressing the symbol of love on the cruelest tweets was how Twitter was winning the game. You give love for hate. You love what you hate. You erase love for hate. And all the while you signal to other people that you agree with them. With their fake love-hate .

Barney wanted to make movies. That was his dream. For now, though, he put these little montages he made on Youtube. They were sort of popular. He was trying hard to build his platform. “Your WHAT?” His father had said, with that twinge of judgment Barney hated. His father lived in Texas with his real wife and family. An affair with his mom produced Barney but he calls every once in a while out of duty. He knows nothing about the online world. He has no idea what Twitter is.

“MY PLATFORM” Barney had to say back, weakly. How could he explain what a platform was to his boomer dad? His conservative boomer dad. His boomer dad who had voted for Trump - a fact he had to most definitely keep hidden. A stain on his otherwise mostly pristine invisibleness on Twitter. All someone had to tweet was “your father voted for Trump.” Maybe he could escape it. Maybe not.

“My platform,” he would patiently explain, “is about how many people I am connected with, who know who I am, who will engage with my content.””Engage with my content,” his father said, not even hiding his disdain. ”Okay Boomer,” Barney snapped back.

“Getting likes on youtube is not going to make you much money, Barney. I always told you to get a real job but you never listened. Your generation just wants a free ride. You complain about capitalism completely unaware that your entire life is ruled by things built by capitalism. Your phone, your laptop, your social media, you—-”

He did spend one summer with his dad and that family. They all ate at the dinner table, no cell phones allowed. The kids - a pair of blondes, a boy, and a girl, had chores they had to complete before they could spend time with their friends. They were church-going folks whose idea of a wild time was scoring a six-pack of Budweiser and drinking it by the creek before stumbling home beer drunk, which wasn’t drunk at all.

They were nice enough to him but every time he opened his mouth it was like they exchanged a glance of unspoken agreement where Barney was confirming their suspicions about him. He slept in the guest room and unfortunately heard his dad and his wife having sex in the middle of the night. Heavy breathing, grunting, and then it all went silent. Barney spent the whole time subtweeting about them to the amusement of his twenty or so followers back before Trump won and everything got too serious to do that.

No matter what else he did in life, no matter how big he got on Twitter, he was always going to measure his success by what his MAGA DAD thought. Like it mattered. He could make one anonymous phone call and send the DOJ after his dad. He was at that Stop the Steal protest on January 6th. Maybe he should let his dad know that he holds that kind of power over him. Is that a bad thing to be, he wondered, or would that make him a good citizen, helping to protect the country from terrorists.

Everything was tightening up and closing in. There was going to be a group that got to stay and a group that had to go. Barney couldn’t save his dad. They were living in two different countries now, more or less. Besides, Barney had enough to worry about.

He had about 20 DMs. One from a Slate reporter who wanted to do a story on him and how he found out Alexandria Anderson had been the person who wrote the anonymous comment about My American Life. He also saw he had a DM from Alexandria herself. She had unblocked him to send it. “Why are you doing this to me,” it asked. “What did I ever do to you?”

Barney stared at her words. He thought about any answer that would make sense to any person. He floated above himself then. He could see what he was. Staring into his phone, angry and frozen like his mother, a glow lit up his face. So this was it. This was all of it.

The next DM came from Alexandria and it had a screenshot of someone else that said, “haha, Twitter thinks that b***h wrote this but I did. More fun to watch her squirm.”

Barney was supposed to do something about that. He was supposed to fix the problem. But how could he delete a tweet that had so many likes? Heart heart heart heart. Love hate love.

No, he would not delete the tweet. He would answer the Slate reporter’s DM. He would do the interview. He would ride it until the wheels fall off. Maybe then he could get verified. A real blue check next to his name on Twitter. All he had to do was just finish the day. That’s what everyone on Twitter did. They just finished the day. Let the truth sort itself out later.

Barney wanted to take a walk. He could hear his mom furiously typing in the other room. It was getting dark. No dinner yet. Was there still a world outside? He didn’t know. He walked to the door, put his hand on the knob, and stood there, his heart racing, his cheeks flushed, his head swimming. No, he thought. Not just yet. And he went back to his room and picked up his phone.