After Memegate went viral on Friday, the usual battle in our virtual Civil War raged on. I had this exchange on X and was answered by Conor Friedersdorf:

To Trump’s enemies, this was yet another crisis not to go to waste. It was the perfect way to reel back some of those Nicki Minaj supporters who might be thinking about flipping to Trump. The midterms are coming up, and they’re desperately worried about losing votes of yet another necessary demographic.

That’s all it’s been for ten years now, emotional blackmail to convince us that Trump really is that bad while offering nothing in return. They have addressed nothing. They have fixed nothing. They have offered only a fanatical cult and a rigid ideology of an oppressor/oppressed mindset, and then demanded everyone go along with it, or they’re racists, homophobes, bigots, Nazis.

Here is a TikTocker:

The Democrats and the ruling class that props up their collapsing empire are in a hell of their own making. They never addressed the people's needs after their 2016 loss because that would mean acknowledging their own failures. Instead, they made Trump the enemy and went to war, a war they’re losing.

All they ever had to do was offer the people something better, but they couldn’t even do that because what they want is their utopia back, the one I helped build, and the one I escaped once it became a Doomsday Cult.

Had they left him alone, just allowed his four years to play out like a normal president, as opposed to Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden attempting to frame him as a Russian asset, the Demcorats impeaching him, the legacy media and all of culture taking a side against him and his supporters, maybe he would have been a one-term president and gone back to a life of golfing at Mar-a-Lago.

But instead, they whipped up a World War II fantasy in which they were “brave resistance” fighting an existential crisis that threatened to topple America and the world, with very little evidence to show for it, then or now. That made it oh so easy to blame Trump and not themselves.

I look now at those still trapped inside the Doomsday Cult that I escaped, and I can’t believe the level of delusion. Look at this post by musician Jack White, which is liked by Jimmy Kimmel.

So let me make it perfectly clear for those who might be wondering after the scandal du jour: I don’t regret my vote for Trump and I never will, because even now, the Left is worse. Their reaction is worse. They are never telling the truth, not to us, not to themselves. All they have to sell is hate and fear.

They aren’t getting less crazy and more sane. They are not becoming kinder, more tolerant, and more forgiving. They still have no idea what democracy means - spoiler alert: you can’t always get what you want. They have never learned the lesson in ten years. They still believe that winning their war is forcing all of us to go along with their distorted version of reality.

And add that to these crazy people on TikTok, and you start to see that the reason Trump won is that he’s closer to normal than they are. They just don’t realize that they’re the problem.

Their totalitarian tendencies left over from 2020 never fully died because there was never any accountability in the mainstream. Remember that crowd that swarmed that woman and demanded she raise her fist for Black Lives Matter:

Here are a bunch of crazy women at a Core Power Yoga studio in Minneapolis doing the same thing: go along with us or else.

That same autonomous zone that was erected in 2020:

Well, that’s back too, only this time the police got rid of it much quicker, knowing Tom Homan and Trump won’t stand for it.

Do they really expect us to vote for these psychopaths? Put them back in power? And why, because Trump accidentally shared a meme with a racist image of the Obamas at the end of it?

Sorry, they have to deal with the fanatics who have swallowed up their party first because they are still too erratic and unhinged to lead this country. What are they going to do with all of us? With Trump? Throw us into re-education camps? Gulags? Shoot us outright?

GET TRUMP

The Left’s 10-year campaign to get Trump is like watching Yosemite Sam go after Bugs Bunny. They always think they’re just seconds away from catching him at long last.

They believe deeply in their mission to destroy Trump, just as Yosemite Sam does. It’s just that we see Bugs Bunny a little differently. Whatever else Trump is, he’s not the guy they say he is, and for that, they will always be one step behind, swinging and missing.

I didn’t get that until I found my way out. As someone who got online 30 years ago, I wasn’t ready for the effects of the feedback loop on my brain, and I don’t think most people on the Left even realized they were living inside a reality-distorting machine. I had to watch Trump videos on my own, get to know him and his supporters, and humanize them.

I found that I unexpectedly empathized with Trump. It wasn’t just that I could finally see the real human being, but because I, too, had been demonized and attacked for being a person I knew I wasn’t. All I had to do was walk in the shoes of his supporters to see what monsters they really are on the Left.

The more they attack Trump, the more his supporters rally to protect him, not just because they have been thrown away like human garbage by these people, but also because they look at Trump and they see a flawed hero, someone who doesn’t always get it right, who makes big mistakes, who is anything but perfect. But he’s also someone who fights for them.

Our culture used to understand flawed heroes because they were in so many movies and books.

Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark:

Humphrey Bogart Casablanca.

Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven.

What counts isn’t their past or their goodness or their purity, but their actions. We all treated Obama like a religious figure, and still do, which partly explains the over-reaction by the Left. It’s blasphemy to mock Obama, whereas it's an American pastime to mock Trump.

Today’s Left seems to desire perfection from cradle to grave and is unforgiving of flawed heroes, especially white men. But Trump is a great character of history, a living legend. They just got the story wrong.

Here is Dominic Sandbrook on Triggernometry:

Trump is a hero to so many of us, not because he’s perfect or “good” but because he is a fighter who got the dirty job done and saved the day.

Crimes against humanity

I asked Conor Friedersdorf the same question I would put to any Democrat. Can you name something — one thing — Trump has done that is worse than sterilizing children who can’t consent? Destroying their bodies with medical experiments? Never having the courage to stand up to the cult?

Now that the lawsuits are coming, and prominent groups like the AMA are openly opposing gender transition treatments for minors, the Democrats will pretend they were always against it. But we can’t let them do that.

The Democrats have not just supported it every step of the way; they have actively blocked any action taken to safeguard children. It took the Republicans standing on the right history yet again, as they did during the Civil War, to push this thing through, and it took the election of Donald Trump to finally bring the hammer down.

Only Trump, in his plain-spoken, flawed hero kind of way, had the guts to say it out loud, without fear, and that gave others more courage to fight back. But Trump wasn’t only saying things. He was doing things. And before long, the dominoes began to fall.

What could Trump have done that even comes close to what has happened to kids at the hands of 15 years of Democrat rule? What’s worse? Saying “Quiet, Piggy” to a reporter? Tearing down the East Wing to build a ballroom? The Kennedy Center? An offensive meme?

Their climate of fear and culture of silence made it too dangerous to take a brave stand, which is why it was left to the brave men and women who risked their lives and careers to put a stop to the madness once and for all.

And along with their ever-increasing authoritarianism, we’d be the UK if Elon Musk had not bought Twitter and turned it into X, and if Trump hadn’t won.

Here is Graham Linehan speaking in Congress:

So when people say, “You could have picked a different Republican, but you picked Trump,” I flip it back onto them. Tell me what Trump has done, just one thing, that comes close to this, and be prepared to answer it 20 years from now, because I promise to hang it around your necks like a dead cat for as long as I live.

Here is a TikToker:

On this alone, I would have voted for any Republican. I’d always say, “I am not a Trump supporter but…” Then, they raided Mar-a-Lago, and when they indicted him, when they tried to throw him in jail, that made me a Trump supporter. That made me the Braveheart meme.

There won’t be any Sister Souljah moments in this Democratic Party.

I have been waiting for six years for the Democrats to snap out of it and come back to reality. That day never came. If anything, they’re crazier now than they’ve ever been. Anyone who wants their votes has no choice but to go along with it.

The Democrats can’t snap out of it even if they wanted to. Gavin Newsom can’t sell anything but hate and hysteria. Even Jon Ossoff, a guy I once supported and fought for, must sell the same thing because they have nothing else.

They have given people like me no path back because the only option is going back to the Doomsday Cult that insists I call Trump and the other half of America racists when I know that it isn’t true. A cult that demands I buy into the oppressor/oppressed mandate, and demands I look the other way as they indoctrinate our kids and destroy every great thing this country ever built.

I could have been one of those who hovered reluctantly in the middle and held my nose and voted for Trump. Maybe I could have salvaged some of my reputation such that when I died, they might say good things about me instead of dancing on my grave.

I could have spent my time apologizing, trying to rebuild my liberal cred by denouncing Trump and throwing him under the bus, like Marjorie Taylor Greene. I could have used that to boost myself, every time another wave of mass hysteria pulsed through our society, because see, Trump IS a fascist! And see, Trump is a dictator and a racist! You were right all along!

But that would not be the truth. Trump is only in power because we put him there. We wanted someone tough enough, strong enough, and persistent enough to never back down, never shrink back, never hand power to those who want to put half the country in re-education camps.

The Democrats might still be the ruling class, dominating most institutions, all of our culture, and the legacy media, but the rest of us have Trump, our last best hope to fight for the country we love.

And if some days it feels like trying to keep from falling overboard or getting seasick, most of us knew what we were getting into when we climbed aboard. We got what we voted for.

So no, I don’t regret my vote for Trump. I only regret I didn’t see it sooner. I didn’t see what we were building, the damage we would cause, or where it was headed until it was too late.

//

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe