Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone

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.

//


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In this episode, I talk to my friend Andy Schaalman, who has Substack, Fourth Turning Chronicles but whose work can be found mostly on his YouTube page, where all of his great videos are.
We talked for almost three hours, so it’s a real Joe Rogan-type deal. Both of us have been interested in the Fourth Turning for many years. He is a millennial, and I am Gen-X. We get pretty deep into it, so it probably might not be interesting to anyone who isn’t interested in the concept. But if you are, have a listen.
Referenced in our podcast is this episode:
But many of his videos are worth a watch. You can find them here.
Meanwhile, here is some Fourth Turning info referenced in the podcast.
Here are some quotes from The Fourth Turning, a link to the book, and videos.
“At each of these great gates of history, eighty to a hundred years apart, a similar generational drama unfolded. Four archetypes, aligned in the same order—elder Prophet, midlife Nomad, young adult Hero, child Artist—together produced the most enduring legends in our history. Each time the Gray Champion appeared marked the arrival of a moment of “darkness, and adversity, and peril,” the climax of the Fourth Turning of the saeculum.”
“What will America be like as it exits the Fourth Turning?
History offers no guarantees. Obviously, things could go horribly wrong—the possibilities ranging from a nuclear exchange to incurable plagues, from terrorist anarchy to high-tech dictatorship. We should not assume that Providence will always exempt our nation from the irreversible “tragedies that have overtaken so many others: not just temporary hardship, but debasement and total ruin. Since Vietnam, many Americans suppose they know what it means to lose a war.
Losing in the next Fourth Turning, however, could mean something incomparably worse. It could mean a lasting defeat from which our national innocence—and perhaps even our nation—might never recover. As many Americans know from their own ancestral backgrounds, history provides numerous examples of societies that have been wiped off the map, ground into submission, or beaten so badly they revert to barbarism.


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Dear Hillary,
Imagine my shock when I saw you wrote an op-ed in The Atlantic. Before I even read a line, I knew what the point of the article would be because I know you.
You write:
This crisis also reveals a deeper moral rot at the heart of Trump’s MAGA movement. Whatever you think about immigration policy, how can a person of conscience justify the lack of compassion and empathy for the victims in Minnesota, and for the families torn apart or hiding in fear, for the children separated from their parents or afraid to go to school?
That compassion is weak and cruelty is strong has become an article of MAGA faith. Trump and his allies believe that the more inhumane the treatment, the more likely it is to spread fear. That’s the goal of surging heavily armed federal forces into blue states such as Minnesota and Maine—street theater of the most dangerous kind. Other recent presidents, including Joe Biden, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton, managed to deport millions of undocumented immigrants without turning American cities into battlegrounds or making a show of keeping children in cages
I see the game. You know selling open borders is an election killer, so you think selling “empathy,” or compassion, will help bridge the gap and maybe win back independents who don’t want an open border but are troubled by what they see on the “news.”
As with everything else, it’s a manufactured delusion you too must sell, which explains why the Democrats are in this position now, resorting to the first violent attacks on the government since the 1970s, and no, January 6th doesn’t count. These are coordinated, orchestrated, well-funded attacks - not protests as much as flirting with terrorism. And you know that too, don’t you, Hillary? And you’re worried. You should be.
You also know that no president, not Obama or Bush or Clinton, ever had to deal with a cell phone brigade who are screaming, spitting, body slamming ICE agents everywhere they go, stalking them, blocking their paths, building makeshift networks online to find them, harass them, and stop them from doing their jobs. You know this is a first, and you know exactly why.
But that won’t stop you from lying, Hillary. What else is new? You are setting up the argument to slime your way out of this moment, where the Democrats are too crazy to lead and are looking more like the Manson family every day.
I had to laugh, though, at the misappropriation of yet another word, empathy. As if any of you ever had any empathy for anyone other than those who will be voting blue, no matter who. No, you can’t call the other half of the country “racists” for ten years and then pretend to have any empathy.
Just look at Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway on a recent podcast talking about how we’ll have the Nuremberg trials, should all of you crazy people ever get back in power, “and we will,” Galloway says.
This obsession with calling Trump Hitler and a Nazi began in 2016 because you could not stand the sting of humiliation when you lost to Trump. So you and the most powerful people in the world decided it was your right to disenfranchise the millions of Americans who voted for Trump and had every right to representation.
I used to think you were a person of integrity, I did. I supported you. I fought for you. I was proud to be a Democrat. I made this video to humanize you for independents who did not want to vote for you. I thought I could help them see you the way I did. At least, back then.
I was a good Liberal. I repeated the lie that Trump’s win was an existential threat and it required a “hearts and minds” campaign to RESIST everything he tried to do. Oh, the lies, Hillary. The lies. I can barely live with myself; I don’t know how you manage it.
After ten years of those lies, there is not much to show for it. Trump is back in power because all of you failed so spectacularly. The people said yeah, we’ll take the twice impeached, four times indicted, convicted felon. That’s how badly you failed. Because you don’t see them, you don’t see them as people, you don’t care about what they need. In other words, you’re lacking in empathy.
So now you think you finally have Trump on the ropes, and all it took was throwing federal agents under the bus, demonizing them as hateful, Nazi-like thugs, lying about the “rot” at the heart of MAGA.
Here is Tom Homan:
The empire is collapsing. A once-thriving culture has been sucked into a cult. Everything I used to love is gone. Movies, books, great journalism, science, and history. Vanished. Replaced with dogma and fanaticism.
Because all of you walled yourselves off from the rest of the country, you lost touch with reality, which is why it’s so easy for you now to slip into the fantasy world and blame ICE agents for their lack of empathy. Shame on you.
Where is your empathy for the victims of Biden’s border policies? Do you remember the rape van? Yeah, there was a van where an illegal immigrant locked women away in it and raped them for hours.
How about the Venezuelan gang that overtook an apartment building?
Here is one illegal immigrant living on public assistance after multiple rapes, assaults and crimes — and was still out raping women.
Not enough for you, Hillary? How about this story?
And that’s all before we get to the young people who were lured into the Left’s fantasy world and told that if they take drugs and get surgery, they can become the opposite sex.
So you can fool those who read The Atlantic, Hillary. But you can’t fool me. I know you too well. Empathy? Yours is conditional. In fact, empathy was strictly forbidden on the Left lest you empathize with the wrong people. Not the victims of rapes or terrorism by illegal immigrants, not the victims of crime if the criminal is the wrong color, not victims of the crazy gender cult. And you most certainly can’t empathize with Trump or his supporters. If you do, you’ll lose everything.
Some Democrats gave the standard statement condemning violence after Charlie Kirk was murdered, but then we watched everyone on the Left celebrate, some even losing their jobs. No one on your side wrote any op-ed in The Atlantic about empathy. Ezra Klein tried to empathize with Charlie and was viciously attacked for days, with calls for him to be fired.
We watched Jimmy Kimmel play the free speech martyr because his inhumanity in the wake of the murder was so horrific that millions of Americans flooded the station with calls to remove him.
I watched them dig the knife in deeper on X and on TikTok. I watched them mock Erika Kirk. Then I watched Barack Obama and all of the celebrities call Charlie a racist when he wasn’t here to defend himself.
No, empathy vanished on the Left long ago. You were all resentful, you see, because you could not win the election. America broke up with you twice, and you haven’t taken it well. You should see some of the videos on TikTok. The hate is so deep and thick you could cut it with a knife. Empathy. I don’t think so.
It is now your last best resort for emotional blackmail to try to slither out of yet another moment where all of you are defending the wrong people, demonizing law enforcement, and spinning wild fantasies in hopes of tricking beleaguered voters to the polls.
Maybe your op-ed was a way to try to find some middle ground - deportations, but with empathy. Yeah, we tried that. We know how it ended up. So you’ll have to sell open borders like you sell no genders because none of you has the courage to stand up to the psychos, not even to protect women and girls, Hillary. Not even that.
Maybe if you still had empathy, you would not be here now, defending unhinged mobs who think it is their moral right and their duty to go to war on the federal government. Maybe you would understand why Americans voted for Trump a second time. Maybe you all could stop your decade-long campaign of dehumanization against half the country.
But since I know empathy vanished on the Left long ago, I know there is no saving the Left. There is only saving America from all of you.
//


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Part One | Part Two | Part Three
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”― Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Because Donald Trump understands this fundamental rule of The Art of War, he reached a compromise in Minneapolis. It was an easy shift for him because he knows himself and he knows the enemy.
He knows all they wanted was months of warfare and chaos between ICE agents and the citizen army on the ground, who are now becoming an organized militia, some of them even arming themselves, all in hopes of producing viral content for the churn to keep the hearts and minds of their voters activated and mobilized ahead of the midterms.
They wanted him to show up as the dictator, to crack down on protests like the United States had suddenly become Iran. But Trump is too smart for that. He knows once he becomes the version of him they invented, the war is over. He also knows they will ignore the important news of his presidency. The economy is strengthening, crime is declining, and Trump continues to make big moves on the global stage.
By contrast, the left is losing but thinks it’s winning because they don’t know themselves. If they did, they would understand that the clever game they’re playing only takes them so far. Creating chaos throughout 2020 meant they scared Americans into voting Trump out and putting the Obama coalition back in power. But they were the dog that caught the car. They had no idea what to do once Joe Biden took office.
It was worse than that. Biden failed in his first major move as president with the botched exit from Afghanistan that left 13 soldiers dead and sparked two wars, as world leaders laughed in our faces at the man in the White House.
As Biden’s numbers began to fall, and America woke up from the haze of fear from 2020, they wondered why they ever voted out the guy with the strong economy to begin with, and why they were now stuck with a whole new set of rules we were all meant to follow.
In truth? Biden was the face of normalcy for the fanatical cult that has now consumed the Democratic Party. They are the socialist socialites who are both the ruling class and the oppressor/oppressed fundamentalists who have no place for America’s silent majority anymore. When the story of this moment is told by their ever-reliable unreliable narrators, they will cast themselves as the Underground Railroad to free the slaves or the Kindertransport to save Jewish children from the Nazis.
So we have to ask them and make them answer: who is it they’re liberating now? What are they fighting for? Mass migration? Open borders? True, they want to keep the 10-20 million who crossed over under Biden and will vote blue no matter who, but what is the endgame here? Do they even know?
Trump’s greatest blessing and his tragic flaw is that he cannot lose. That’s what makes him a great leader; whether he’s leading a family, a business, or a country, he wants to win. When you’re standing behind him, you get to be a winner too.
Some in his base want him to step on the gas, to crack down on protesters and not back off from Minneapolis, but as with so many hard calls Trump has had to make in his second term, he has to somehow find his way through the storm as a guy who, in the end, trusts only himself because he knows himself.
If he became the dictator now just to please those in his base, he’d be eaten alive by the empire.
They Don’t Understand Themselves
The chaos in Minneapolis was designed for the legacy media. It was resistance theater that played well on the Nightly News and on social media. The objective, as we now know from the Signal chats and the ongoing soldier training for activists, was to push ICE agents into acting out, to capture those viral moments to paint a picture in the minds of social media users—ICE are violent thugs, they will conclude.
If you see enough video of ICE agents pushing women to the ground and detaining children, well, what is a normal person to think? How could the polls not result in the Left’s favor? What you don’t see is everything that led up to it. You don’t see how many times ICE agents are assaulted, obstructed, body slammed, screamed at, spat on, with whistles blaring in their ears, stalked, harassed, and doxxed.
But on the Left, they don’t see that side of the story, just like they didn’t see that side of the story in 2020. The mob terrorizes citizens, and law enforcement and the media call it mostly peaceful protests. I was on the Left. I know that no one was allowed to talk about the violence lest they’d be called a racist. But not being able to say the truth, let alone know the truth, meant we were all walking around in a constant state of confusion.
We all knew that Derek Chauvin did not murder George Floyd, but we had to say he did. We knew Trump wasn’t bragging about sexual assault on the Access Hollywood tape, but we had to say we did. We knew that many of the Me Too cases were either made up or greatly exagerrated but we would be punished if we questioned any of it.
Each side gets its own version of events, but these were never two equal sides. The Left still has most of the media power, says Megyn Kelly:
But they have become too comfortable with confirmation bias and their ability to control the narrative that they no longer even know what is true.
Important words have lost all meaning: Fascist, racist, dictator, resistance, democracy, racist, rapist, pedophile, man, woman, boy, girl, abortion is healthcare, trans women are women. Every time someone blurts out “regime,” or “occupation,” “insurrectionist,” “election denier,” “anti-vaxxer,” or “anti-masker” we are conditioned to snap to attention.
Once the words are gone, and the Newspeak implemented, it’s easy to lie in headlines for the same reasons. An image is even more powerful than words.
Those lies meant we could not know ourselves or the enemy. We were led around by hyperbole and caught up in a dreamscape where nothing is entirely real. That meant comedians, Hollywood, and politicians couldn’t really read the room, but they had to mirror that delusion, lest they get booted out of utopia too.
Recently, Scott Bessent gifted Gavin Newsom with a nickname that will stick. “Sparkle Beach, Ken.” It’s funny because it’s true.
When Newsom then tried to play on Trump’s level with the knee-pads joke, it fell flat because it isn’t true. Trump isn’t that guy.
If they knew themselves, they would understand that they are not the working-class poor who have any business marching around with No Kings posters. If they knew themselves, they would shut up about the Epstein Files because they know it’s way worse on the Democrat side. If they knew themselves, they would not shout “fascist” because they would know that they are, at heart, the real fascists.
If they knew themselves, they would understand why, even now, they are still the crazier side, and no matter the smoke and mirrors, the chaos, the viral videos, the mass hysteria, they can’t do the one thing they would need to do to win this war: offer the people something better.
If they knew themselves, they would understand that the Boy Who Cried Wolf was not just a children’s story. It is a deeply profound statement about people who scream about everything until their screams fall on indifferent ears.
The only reason they’ve gotten this far with their madness is that Trump isn’t a fascist or a dictator, because if he wanted to, he could crush all of these folks like bugs as the Commander in Chief of the most powerful military in the world.
They also don’t seem to realize that a handful of granola crunchers arming themselves is no match for MAGA, either, should it ever come to that. The only reason the Right hasn’t yet taken up arms reminds me of that scene in Grizzly Man where the bears think there might be something wrong with Timothy Treadwell, so they leave him alone, at least for a little while.
But when one bear gets frustrated and hungry enough, we see just how easy it was for the bear to eat Timothy and his girlfriend in the Grizzly Maze.
They don’t know Trump
The Democrats have been fighting a villain they created, but who never existed. I was one of those who sobbed on my couch after 2016, donated to Jill Stein, marched in protest, and felt myself part of the resistance.
I would take to the treadmill at the gym to the Styx song Come Sail Away and I would imagine making a video to rally the troops on the Left. I would think those MAGA “racists” are not prepared for the strength of our battlestation. We have all of this power, and they have none of it. And yet, even as I imagined this, I didn’t realize what I was saying because I didn’t know myself, or my side, and I most certainly didn’t know Trump and MAGA.
What would snap me out of it was seeing what we eventually did with our power. It wasn’t a grassroots uprising. It was one political party becoming more powerful than any other and then using that power to demonize, dehumanize, and marginalize half the country. When we decided we had the right to take over the 2020 election to “save Democracy” that was when I began to pull back.
I was like Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2, who sees the guy she thinks is there to kill her, but instead, he’s the guy who has come to save her.
Because we didn’t know ourselves back in 2016, we had to cover up our failures with lies about Trump. We concocted a false World War II fantasy where we were the “resistance.” Once we started that big lie, we were doomed because there was no way out of it, and there still isn’t.
I would find out in 2020 that all I got from the legacy media was the worst things Trump said, extracted from a much longer speech to paint a picture of someone who did not exist. I had to find that out all on my own, knowing that to do so would cost me everything. Why should just humanizing the other half of the country cost me everything? Because that is what the Left has become.
Here is Chamath Palihapitiya on the Katie Miller podcast:
Recently, Washington Examiner writer Kimberly Ross tried it on X with the following tweet:
But of course, the truth is not something they’re ready for.
There is no way out for them, not because of who Trump is, but because of who they are. They just haven’t figured it out.
In my very wealthy, very white, and very Liberal town, there is a shop with a Buddha fountain outside, with shelves lined with spirituality and self-help. Outside, a red sign of rage.
If you keep walking toward the Buddha fountain, you’ll also see this sign, stabbed into the dirt on the other side.
Their lawn sign isn’t just an admission of how little they know themselves; it is also a manifesto. Just as they demand yet another impeachment of Trump, they also demand that you see the world the way they do, or else. But just remember, love wins.

//


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Dear Mr. Baker,
I am but one in a sea of many Americans viewed as a threat to the established order. I was once a part of that order. I helped build it. It would turn out I couldn’t survive because I couldn’t follow the rules of thought and speech that are mandated by everyone on the Left, especially those at the New York Times.
It’s personal, you see. I used to believe that if all I did was read Page One of the New York Times, I’d be well-informed. Brainwashed is more like it.
It’s easy to spot the bias now where it wasn’t before. For instance, this was the New York Times on January 12th, and one of the strongest activists for the Democrats pretending they’re pushing some sort of objective conclusion on X.
But that’s just another day at the New York Times. I know you didn’t write this piece, Michelle Goldberg did, but it is worth mentioning as an aside that no, the “resistance libs” were not right. They were never right. I was one of them until I wasn’t. It’s been an ugly road out of the Doomsday Cult of the Left, but now, I live free as an exile.
We were never the “resistance.” We were always the empire. We colonized the internet, after all, and, together with Barack Obama, the rise of Silicon Valley, social media, and the iPhone, as society migrated online, we were in control of all of it.
But that’s a story for a different time, Mr. Baker. This letter is much more urgent regarding the matters at hand. Your “analysis” and observation about Trump and protests is so wildly off base, a complete distortion of reality, that I felt compelled to write you this letter.
You wrote:
You write:
President Trump had a ringing message of solidarity on Tuesday for demonstrators in the streets. “KEEP PROTESTING - TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!!” he wrote on social media. He decried “the senseless killing of protesters,” and added that those pulling the triggers “will pay a big price.”
He meant the protesters in Tehran, not Minneapolis. By contrast, the people in the streets of Minnesota, he wrote just 63 minutes earlier, were “anarchists and professional agitators” trying to cover up a fraud scandal. He vowed that “THE DAY OF RECKONING & RETRIBUTION IS COMING!”
The eruption of protests on opposite sides of the planet at this moment in history has brought Mr. Trump’s views of democracy and popular dissent into stark relief. The situations in Iran and Minnesota, of course, are different and complicated, but the president’s rule of thumb seems simple enough: Those who take to the streets supporting a cause he favors are laudable heroes. Those who take to the streets to oppose him are illegitimate radicals.
I read this, and my jaw dropped open, Mr. Baker. Where have you been for the past five years as we watched a split screen of protests in the Summer of 2020 and then on January 6th? Are you actually saying that you at the New York Times and anyone on the Left saw these things as comparable? Democracy and popular dissent in stark relief, boy, I couldn’t have said it better myself.
Tell me this is satire. Tell me you do not live in such an isolated bubble that you can’t possibly see the blatant hypocrisy here?
The treatment of these two events was very different and will be written about in opposite ways in history books forever. One will be seen as heroic and democracy in action, and the other, as dangerous. An insurrection in action.
People like me were pulling our hair out, not because we would justify the riot at the Capitol, but because all of you said nothing about what happened in the Summer of 2020, a year that broke America and broke me.
It wasn’t only your paper that lied that Trump “incited” a mob to storm the Capitol and that it was a threat to “democracy.” That was the narrative pushed by every legacy media outlet, with no kind words for the protesters who were also doing what protesters do - getting angry and having their voices heard by a government and a culture that had demonized them, dehumanized them, and abandoned them. Trump included.
The Democrats put up a Green-Zone-like fence around the Capitol. Ordinary Americans had their doors kicked in as the FBI hauled them off to jail. Anyone who even attended the “mostly peaceful” protest on January 6th was called an “insurrectionist” and “election denier,” and anyone who dared to question the 2020 election or who voted for Trump was inspected under a microscope by you all as some kind of insect or insurgent terrorist.
Vice President Kamala Harris likened it to 9/11 and the attack on Pearl Harbor. These were American citizens, many of whom had been on lockdown, their businesses destroyed after COVID, and had watched the absurd events of 2020 play out.
Masks, no masks, “systemic racism was more urgent than COVID,” then the pivot back to COVID, changing election rules, preventing people from gathering and thus, preventing campaigning, a surge of mail-in voting that won the election all before Election Day, a revolution in the streets that almost no one in the mainstream was even talking about once they got really bad, lest they hurt the Democrats.
Oh, I know the game. I know we’re all supposed to see the Trump supporters as racists, angry that Black and Brown people were in government, a second Confederacy flying their Dixie flags on January 6th, and that the protests over the Summer were about racial inequality and therefore justified. But here’s the thing about democracy. You don’t get to decide. We either all have the same rights or we don’t have a democracy.
There was nothing in your coverage, or the Liz Cheney show trial, that was, in any way, fair to the Americans who protested that day, and even to Donald Trump, who had a right to have their voices heard. No, they didn’t have the right to riot. Ashli Babbitt lost her life over it, and then her memory was dragged through the mud by all of you.
Here is how the Times covered Ashli Babbitt:
And here is how they covered Renee Good:
You see, one is treated like human garbage, and the other is treated like a hero. So just say it. Just admit that this has become a two-tiered society, you are among the ruling class, and the underclass has none of the same rights. You will decide they are “racists” and thus have no real stake in what happens in this country, even when they win the popular vote.
Now that the protests in Minneapolis are violent, as violent as, if not more so than, January 6th, still you say nothing and pretend they are fighting the good fight.
What has changed in ten years? Nothing except the Democrats failing to address the problem, allowing millions to flood over the border, and shaming Americans for caring about it.
It’s a sickness on the Left by now, a reality distortion that spilled out into real-world violence. Just look at what happened at Evergreen College. These students believed they were protesting “racism” at one of the most liberal colleges in America. Why? Because Bret Weinstein did not think it was right that white people should be asked to leave the campus on a “day of absence.”
This kind of strange, new, justified violence by people who don’t live in the same reality as the rest of us has become the new normal on the Left, backed up by all of you. How dare you compare them to the protesters in Iran? Complicated, you say? Oh, it’s way beyond that. Pampered, privileged, bored white women and bratty college kids attacking ICE are, in no way, risking their lives.
Yes, if you attack a police officer or an ICE officer, you are risking your life. Every American knows that if they live in the real world. In Iran, you are risking your life just for standing there and protesting peacefully, or speaking out of turn, or anything they decide is a crime punishable by death, which include adultry, dissent against the government, and blasphemy.
At the New York Times, you want the tragic death of Renee Good to be the symbol for protesters dying at the hands of the regime, but, as usual, it is not the truth. That won’t stop you from perpetuating the mass delusion and injecting it into the veins of your already unhinged readership.
Here is Page One of the New York Times today. Every headline is about Renee Good. That is still the most important news of the day, even as hundreds, maybe thousands of Iranians are slaughtered.
Followed by non-stop negative Trump coverage:
The protests in Minneapolis are not against ICE. They are against democracy. The wrong people won the election, and that means the Left throws a fit. They’ve been throwing fits for ten years, starting in 2015 when they attacked a group of Trump supporters in California, calling them “racists,” because all of you sold them that lie.
The violence continued on through Trump’s inaugural and protests all through his first term. The Summer of 2020 was the biggest by far in modern American history, yet the legacy media, your paper, Mr. Baker, did not capture the truth of what happened.
The baby tyrants who run your newsroom insisted the one op-ed by Tom Cotton, Send in the Troops, was itself violence and that caused the resignation of Bari Weiss and James Bennett, a shamefulprotst moment that should live on in infamy if people tell the truth.
The Left’s protesting now says one thing: Do what we want, or else. That is, Mr. Baker, closer to fascism than Trump will ever be.
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