One Last Ride….

=It’s been a long time coming, hasn’t it MAGA? What a ride it’s been for you.

As people like me were arguing with Bernie bros about the 2016 nomination for president and were caught up in our unending phantasmagoria about a “reality TV star” who was rising in the ranks on the Right, you were being verbally and physically attacked already, bullied at rallies, spit on, kicked, called racists, Nazis, fascists, bigots. It would only get worse.

How far you’ve come from the last inaugural when so many protesters burned cars and smashed windows, screaming, “Not my president.”

The beautiful and elegant Melania Trump never graced the cover of any magazine. They mocked her Christmas decorations and called her an uncaring Nazi.

But almost no one got it worse than Ivanka Trump, although all the Trump kids were put through the dehumanizer the Left had become. They were called ugly and inbred. There were jokes about Trump sleeping with his own daughter just because he was proud of her and praised her, as he does all of his kids. This was mainstream on the Left, dehumanization on a grand scale.

As long as that was the version we told ourselves — that they were the rich, hollow, power-hungry elites like the cast of Succession, we could convince ourselves we were the hard-scrabble people lifting up the minority class and making the world a better place one marginalized group at a time. But what of the majority?

It would eventually lead to the government and their media lying about you on January 6th, riding the hysteria to ban the social media app Parler from Amazon’s web server and the then-sitting president of the United States from YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter.

It seemed there was no place for you in America anymore. But what did you do in the face of that kind of social and political oppression? You rose up, and you fought back. You didn’t have to do it by smashing windows or protesting. You did it with true grit, organizing, fundraising, and keeping the MAGA spirit high. You never lost your faith because you knew exactly what you were fighting for and what you were up against.

And most of all, your unbreakable loyalty to Trump kept hope alive that one day there might be fairness in government, in our culture, and in our major institutions that decided it was perfectly fine to treat you like hostile invaders in your own country.

But people like me had no idea that it was happening. What we heard was that Trump’s rallies were violent, that his supporters were beating up Black people, and that his rallies were like Hitler’s. If you scare people enough, they’ll go along with anything.

We were the side that had all of the power. We were the empire. We were never the resistance. That we turned our helplessness and fanaticism into dehumanizing half the country is a shame we should never live down.

I didn’t realize it until 2020. I was so trusting of people like Rachel Maddow. I listened to NPR without even thinking about their political bias. We were the side that told the truth, I believed. We weren’t fooled by Fox News and Breitbart. How could anyone not trust NBC News? How could I ever think that what they told me on CNN might not be the whole story?

I didn’t realize until the Tom Cotton op-ed disaster at the New York Times that my information was being carefully curated. I watched all of my friends and colleagues crucify Bari Weiss on Twitter for allowing the Cotton piece to be published in the New York Times. It was harm, they said. It would get people killed, they said. It terrorized their staff, they said.

Tom Cotton was a United States Senator who merely reported what most Americans already believed. The protests were violent and destructive. A majority of Americans wanted the military to be brought in. Bari Weiss was trying to give the majority a voice in the paper of record.

But as we’d done with almost every news story since the beginning of the Trump era, we stretched the truth like taffy to suit our needs. Trump was Hitler, and this was fascism— we’d all convinced ourselves to believe, and with the help of the military “experts,” they trotted out to agree.

The truth? They needed the protests to be as violent and chaotic as possible. They encouraged them to make Trump look bad.

By 2020, I’d already been the target of so much abuse from the Left. I was called a “white supremacist,” a bigot, a racist, and a transphobe. Many on the Left now just assume it’s true —that I “went to the dark side.”

Not a day goes by that someone from my former side does not lob me with some kind of hateful insult. Just yesterday, I was told by a long-time follower of my film site that I was a “vile person,” and they regretted ever following me for all of those years. “Enjoy MAGA,” he said.

Joe Biden said goodbye. He wanted to mirror Eisenhower, who once warned of the Military Industrial Complex, but Biden saw something equally alarming—the Big Tech oligarchy. He sees Zuckerberg and Bezos attending Trump’s inaugural. He greatly fears the power of Elon Musk. He realizes that his side lost control of it and now, he wants all of us to be afraid.

Well, I’m sorry, Joe. I can’t play that game anymore. It’s time to say goodbye.

Farewell, Joe Biden, farewell, Democrats. Farewell, hysteria. Farewell to mandated preferred pronouns in everyone’s bio. Farewell to being forced to lie about whether or not masks work. Farewell to not being allowed to give people the benefit of the doubt. Farewell to being too afraid to ask questions about an experimental vaccine. Farewell to Critical Race and gender theory in elementary schools.

Farewell to the ruling oligarchy — yes, Joe. You were the frontman for it. You can’t fool me. I was part of it, too. It was like a daisy chain of paper dolls—Hollywood, all major corporate and cultural institutions, Big Pharma, and all of the ads they pumped into the veins of Americans that showcased the American utopia in all of its splendor. Just take this pill, and you, too, can be with us, in the happy place.

Farewell to a government censoring speech via social media. Farewell to the absence of masculinity. Farewell to worrying about every word that comes out of our mouths, what we drive, what we wear on Halloween, what we buy, what we eat, what we watch, what we desire.

Farewell to being made to hate ourselves and everything we know to be true but can’t say out loud. Farewell to being the oppressors or the oppressed defined only by the color of our skin. Farewell to hating our history, hating our country, hating our heroes. Farewell to virtue signaling our goodness. Farewell to always being told that it’s better to keep your head down and say nothing about any of it.

Farewell to never being able to take a joke. Farewell to seeing problematic content in every movie and farewell to the warning labels now affixed to all of them. Farewell to seeing all men as predators and all women as victims.

Farewell to a country ruled by fear because our leaders can’t see it any other way. Farewell to a president who called half the country “ultra fascists,” “ultra MAGA,” and “extreme MAGA Republicans.” Farewell to a government that believes its biggest threat comes from the people of the United States.

Farewell to life inside the doomsday cult, where every single day is the end of the world. Farewell to every word taken literally and seen as another chapter of Mein Kampf. Farewell to repression and sanctimony. Farewell to the long, dark winter. Farewell to lawn signs. Farewell to pretending Kamala Harris wasn’t a terrible candidate installed by the deep state.

Farewell to ever having to worry about speaking the truth. Farewell to the unshakable hopelessness, the unending sadness, the mourning of the long-forgotten Old Left. It’s never coming back. Everything has to be rebuilt. Welcome to the beginning of the rest of your life. At least now, you can have a life.

Bringing it all Back Home

Watching the confirmation hearings was bringing it all back. Adam Schiff was still out of his mind, braying like he’s Cotton Mather in the Oyer in Terminer in Salem, demanding Pam Bondi say Joe Biden “won the election.” Why did it matter so much to him? Are there really that many Americans out there who need to hear those words said out loud?

The nominees’ worth depended on whether or not they would stand up to the tyrant fascist racist rapist dictator that they impeached twice, indicted four times convicted on a bogus felony charge, all of which eventually landed in the fevered dreams of a washed-up surfer hippie from Hawaii who got himself a gun and tried to kill the president to SAVE DEMOCRACY.

And they still lost. They lost the Electoral College and they lost the popular vote. I never get tired of saying that. Talk about owning the libs. What can we do except quote Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire. HA. HA HA HA.

That’s how much America hates them. After all, how hard could it possibly be to beat Hitler?

The problem with utopias is that they can’t last. They either must become more authoritarian and thus, less utopian, or they collapse. By the end of our utopia, anyone we knew could be one of those things.

A bad person. A sexist. A racist. A homophobe. A bigot. A transphobe. Toxic masculinity. White feminism. Everyone was either an abuser or a victim. The weaker we were, the more we were celebrated.

We’d snuffed out all independent thought. We were under constant surveillance by the government, advertisers, AI, algorithms, and each other. We began to wonder what real life even was anymore.

It was like Winston and Julia in 1984 trying to carve out some love and lust from the dystopia under Big Brother’s ever-watchful gaze, with children spies at the ready to tattle—and cancel—those who broke the rules.

So if you say Joe Biden won the 2020 election, like you say 2+2=5, then democracy might have a chance. But if you dare think for yourself and start looking behind closed doors and see things you aren’t supposed to see, well, now you threaten democracy.

When I pushed open the door of the doomsday bunker and escaped, I knew there was no going back. I also knew I couldn’t save anyone, much less the once-great culture I used to love. There is no saving whatever it was we used to call the Left. There is only saving America from what it had become so that all of us at least have a fighting chance.

No, it won’t be perfect. Yes, it might be chaos — entertaining chaos — but chaos all the same. We’ll have to learn how to tolerate each other again, live together somehow, and learn this new way of life suddenly foisted upon us with the internet. Now, we know what it looks like to shut ourselves off from people and ideas we cannot control.

If the Democrats on Blue Sky and in the Senate Confirmation hearings are any indication, nothing much has changed on the inside. They’re still transfixed by the one guy they couldn’t cancel, the one guy they couldn’t destroy.

1984 Part Two

And maybe now we’re about to find out what happens in the sequel. Does Big Brother find a way to regain power by destroying Elon Musk to retake X and make it Twitter again? Do those of us exiled and canceled remain on the outside? Does the New York Times beg Bari Weiss to come back, or The Atlantic to throw themselves at the feet of Walter Kirn, or Rolling Stone magazine, the crap rag it has become, offer Matt Taibbi millions to write for them again?

Can those on the inside who have speciated with a whole new language and belief system learn to live with the unwashed masses again? Can they tolerate offensive speech? Can it all be one big, happy, dysfunctional family?

On the inside, the news that Carrie Underwood and the Village People were playing at the inaugural birthed a fresh new crop of mass hysteria and rage. So I’m guessing Saturday Night Live won’t have Trump back any time soon. The Oscars won’t ask him to attend, and those who still believe they control this country will hold onto their collapsing empire until ashes, ashes, it all falls down.

I don’t know. But it doesn’t matter. Because today we say farewell. And oh, how sweet it is.

//

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” - Shakespeare

Despite the shock and awe of the four indictments against former president Donald Trump, the Democrats are more vulnerable than they’ve been in decades. It isn’t just the Afghanistan exit, the economy, or the cancer growing inside the presidency, it’s also the radical policies the Democrats have embraced since Biden took office in 2021.

They are hemorrhaging working-class voters, especially among groups they believe belong to them, like those in the Black and Hispanic communities. They refuse to face their own failings, and why should they? With no legacy media to hold them to account, they can pretend nothing to see here, move along, move along.

Dear Mr. Brooks,

Your column might be the best thing written in the New York Times in the past seven years. You’ve undoubtedly been subjected to a fair amount of abuse for it. You should probably never have written it if the comments are any indication. But those are people in the bubble. They don’t represent either the majority or the future. They think they do, but they don’t.

Your question, “Are we the bad guys”? The answer is yes. You are the bad guys. You have systematically dehumanized half the country because they dared to want to be represented by someone you don’t like. You have gone along with a warped distortion of who Donald Trump actually is, and you have perpetuated that lie to your own detriment.

Oh, it’s much worse than that, Mr. Brooks. Are you sitting down? This is the moment just before the aristocracy you write so eloquently about comes crashing down around you. You might say you have just spotted the iceberg on the horizon. The water is too still. The ship is moving too fast. It can’t be turned around in time. The ship is made of iron, and it will sink.

Like so many times before, an aristocratic minority can only stave off its ultimate collapse at the hands of the discontented majority for so long. Just look around at the abandoned mansions of the Gilded Age, a world that once was. Or take a trip to France and look at the chateaus in the countryside, or you might even look around in the American South at the plantations and high society before it was all Gone with the Wind.

I’m not necessarily saying the red states are going to drag America back in time - that’s your narrative and the false opinion of the ruling class. This is about a new America waiting to be born once the establishment elite gets out of the way.

You do get points for noticing, Mr. Brooks, even if it is too little, too late. You write:

Are Trump supporters right that the indictments are just a political witch hunt? Of course not. As a card-carrying member of my class, I still basically trust the legal system and the neutral arbiters of justice. Trump is a monster in the way we’ve all been saying for years and deserves to go to prison.

Neutral arbiters of justice? Did you really just write that with a straight face, Mr. Brooks? Do you really believe that? Yet here we have proof enough that you can’t be the good guys if you can’t even see that these investigations and indictments are designed only to stop Trump. Biden has said as much.

No news on Joe Biden’s blatant corruption with his son, potentially protecting oligarchs from sanctions, influence peddling? And a DOJ that pivots to another Trump indictment every time there is bad news for Biden? Neutral? I don’t think so.

Surely you’re not suggesting that, because you believe Trump is a “monster” that he deserves to “go to prison” without any trial? Is that what we call innocent until proven guilty, Mr. Brooks? Or is that what we call trial by mob? Tell me, what books have you read that paint yourselves as the good guys? Trump was never revealed to be the “monster” you promised. In fact, quite the opposite.

He could have, as a fascist, shot protesters on the street in the Summer of 2020 oh wait, Biden did that when the Capitol police shot Ashli Babbitt. He could have jailed protesters, throwing them in solitary without a trial, convicting them in the court of public opinion as “white supremacists,” oh wait, Biden did that too.

Censor social media outlets (oh, oops, Biden too), weaponize the DOJ (oh, darn it, Biden again), edge us closer to Nuclear war (D’OH also Biden), and attempt to jail his political opponents to hold onto power for the foreseeable future (YA, that’s actually Biden). Darnit. Will the real fascist please stand up?

Trump might aspire to be an authoritarian but never had the necessary institutional support. He had just the opposite - every institution was at war with Trump every day of his presidency. I expect you’re educated enough to know that fascists require an alignment of power across all corporate, cultural, and political life — kind of like the Democrats, Mr. Brooks. Are you sure you have the right fascist? Or Tyrant or authoritarian or monster?

For those who now say, “he led an armed insurrection to overthrow the US Government and install a white supremacist army to kill all the Black and Brown people,” or anything related to January 6th, I call b******t. The Trump emergency happened long before 2020, as any honest person knows.

Steve Bannon accurately predicted in 2017 that the Democrats would take the House in 2018 and immediately impeach Trump. It didn’t even matter what it was for. Everything our FBI and the Democrats, along with you Never Trump Republicans, did to reject the duly elected President of the United States was unprecedented and evidence of an elite ruling class that does not want to give up its power to the people.

I could spend a few paragraphs on January 6th, as I bore witness to a fake media narrative blooming out of the events that day, just as I could spend an equal amount of time talking about the violent protests in the Summer of 2020 that the media all but ignored, but instead, let’s stay focused on the task at hand - are you the good guys or are you the bad guys?

I know you are a Never Trumper, who has counted on the ratf*ckers like Rick Wilson and the Lincoln Project, or the high-minded intellectuals at the Bulwark, or the pretentious ramblings of a Joe Scarborough — it feels so good, doesn’t it, to have the affections of high society finally? To be let into the club and on the A-list now? Yeah, I bet it does. To quote Bob Dylan, I used to be among the crowd you’re in with.

I’ve only recently gotten to know the Conservatives such as yourself. I am a lifelong Democrat who voted for every Democrat that ever ran for president starting in the 1980s. I was a prominent Hillary Clinton supporter. I marched, I protested, and I wrote op-eds. I said Me Too. I supported and voted for Joe Biden. And yes, I wrote about race and gender for years on my website. Yeah, I was that guy (girl).

It would take me a while to realize you were all wrong about Trump. First, I had to find out all of these years later that your paper of record was not telling me the truth, which I did in June of 2020 when the New York Times upended itself over the Tom Cotton essay, then threw two of its editors under the bus.

That moment was, for me, like the lantern dropping out of the sky in The Truman Show.

My whole world changed. But it was hard to explain it to my friends and family. I would say things to them like, “I can’t explain it to you because you’re in the bubble.” And they would look at me like I was insane.

All that really meant is that they still trusted the New York Times. They still trusted you, Mr. Brooks. But little by little, people like me are escaping the bubble and discovering a whole wide world of freedom outside of it - freedom of the mind, most especially. Imagine, not having to fret every word that comes out of your mouth. Imagine people seeing each other as people and not as partisans in an imaginary war, not as “white supremacists” or divided by race or gender.

If the Tom Cotton debacle wasn’t bad enough, the Times sunk itself even further into the morass when it demonized and chased out respectable COVID reporter Donald McNeil after some entitled brat tattled on him that he’d used the “n-word” on a field trip. Oh, he must be a RACIST, concluded the gaggle of gossips and pearl-clutching wokesters in the newsroom.

Are you the good guys, or are you the bad guys for allowing lunatics to take over the asylum? For bringing on board uptight thought police to bully your journalists for trying to tell the truth. Most of that is not your fault, but since you stay at the paper and say nothing, you are complicit. You’re building a rat ship, as Al Pacino once opined in Scent of a Woman.

I like to think I would have resigned in protest and in support of James Bennett, Bari Weiss, and Donald McNeil. But I know it’s hard out there for a propaganda pusher, I mean a journalist, so I don’t blame you for keeping your job and staying quiet.

That intense focus on race and racism pushed and adopted by the Times, has had a catastrophic effect on the news business and American culture writ large, but especially so in the Trump era. A revolution of devout woketopians crashing up against Trump, a guy who will say anything he feels like saying, did this to the NY Times:

This is the ticket to ride at the Times now, Mr. Brooks. You are trapped in a hell of your own making by now. Look at the “Reader’s Picks” comments. It is hard to resist a comment that has 7,000 plus upvotes telling you to abandon your humanity and continue the ongoing dehumanization of half the country.

Why can’t they, or you, trust the voters? Why can’t you find better candidates and better policies? Why can’t you allow an outsider to shake things up in a people-run government? Moreover, who gave you permission to claim this country for yourselves and decide for American voters what they should want? That is not how things are supposed to work in this country.

You’ve all been treating Trump like an elusive mob boss who engaged in dirty dealings, drug smuggling, prostitution, bribery, and even murder, which justified taking extraordinary measures against him to put him in prison finally. But the evidence at hand does not bear this out. He’s a rule-breaker by nature, he always has been. He likes to upset people. He likes to antagonize, tease, and sometimes bully, but we can’t even get to Turmp’s real problems because of your tsunami of hyperbole.

The so-called charges against Trump will look ridiculous in time, just like the perjury charge against Bill Clinton does. By now, you all should be sued for wasting our time and money policing a president who had the nerve to win an election and offend the ruling elite. And then had the nerve to protest the most corrupt election in my lifetime. But again, we won’t go into that.

These charges show pencil-pusher detailing that doesn’t amount to anything serious enough to meddle in yet another election, and nothing more serious than what Joe Biden is alleged to have done — no one at your paper would put together the billions being sent to Ukraine with Joe Biden and Hunter Biden’s payoffs, just like you’ll never tell the truth about the FBI’s involvement in January 6th, but sooner or later, someone will.

I know you probably don’t really care what the majority of Republicans think of you. But still, it has to be a bit of a drag that the “paper of record” is now on par with MSNBC in the minds of the public, per this poll:

When I headed over to Trump World and watched his rallies, I did not see a racist or a bigot. I didn’t see a frothing-at-the-mouth Hitler-esque tyrant. And I couldn’t lie about that anymore.

This isn’t about telling you to support Trump or that I will even vote for him. It’s hard to talk about anything else because of YOUR obsession, not ours. He has to dominate the news because it drives traffic on your site and ratings on cable news and because God forbid any of you will actually report on the Biden administration’s obvious failings.

Some people got it long before I ever did, like David Horowitz, a former lefty, who wrote a brilliant book on the 2020 election and January 6th called Final Battle. His introduction goes like this:

“Trump’s final seventeen hours of campaigning had included more than 3,000 miles of flights and motorcades, 367 minutes of rallies, and—in the words of one Wall Street Journal reporter, “five awkward and hilarious stage dances to [the popular song] ‘YMCA.’”A Trump rally was always an entertainment.”

At one point in the evening, the crowd became so ardent—as similar rallies had before—that it began to chant “We love you!” and did so over and over, until Trump responded: “Thank you. Don’t say that. I’ll start to cry and that wouldn’t be good for my image.” It was an uncharacteristically emotional moment, displaying a self-awareness and even self-deprecation, that went generally unacknowledged by Trump’s legion of haters.”

The same rally was referenced by Tucker Carlson, who has now been fired by Fox News to protect the delicate ruling elites from hard truths they studiously avoid. Carlson wrote this before the 2020 election.

And that was really it for me. The journalists, so many people I knew and in the highest reaches of culture and power, had the story completely wrong. They didn’t know Trump at all and had no clue why so many people supported him. All they could do was spin around, wondering how could anyone like and vote for a MONSTER like Trump?

Calling them all racists led to real-world violence, as in this rarely covered event from back in 2015:

But Trump makes them feel seen, in the parlance of the Left. The people most of you through away like human garbage had one guy with balls of steel taking on the entire machine. If you don’t think most people are rooting for Trump to skate these charges, then you aren’t paying attention.

Oh sure, the Beckys and the Karens are waiting for their money shot, but most people can’t help but root for the underdog. Sorry, folks. You’ll have to confront the lies you’ve been selling for years because the people are way ahead of you.

Lastly, you write:

But there’s a larger context here. As the sociologist E. Digby Baltzell wrote decades ago, “History is a graveyard of classes which have preferred caste privileges to leadership.” That is the destiny our class is now flirting with. We can condemn the Trumpian populists until the cows come home, but the real question is: When will we stop behaving in ways that make Trumpism inevitable?

The answer, Mr. Brooks, is never. As with most aristocracies, power must be taken from you. No, not with a violent revolution, but when the American people realize what I finally did — that they can no longer trust the media, and that the media have become the bad guys. When that happens, it’s all over but the shouting.

Part 1 - America at the Hands of a Cult | Part 2 - A Religious War

As yet another indictment of Trump rolls out, they can barely contain their excitement. Is this finally it? Will that long-awaited termination of their tormenter give the ruling class the peace they demand?

They’ve been patiently waiting, spending too much of their precious time hunched over a keyboard, saliva pooling at the edges of their mouths, tongues flicking with the promise of release - will anyone put them out of their misery?

The election of Trump was never allowed in their country. They would have done anything to keep him out of power. They protested violently, they negotiated with electors, they blamed Putin for Russian interference then they set about removing Trump from power from Day One.

“Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts... perhaps the fear of a loss of power.” ― John Steinbeck

I not only believed in the myth of Joe Biden, I helped sell it. My father had just died and it was easy for me to transpose my grief onto Joe as I tried to convince my fellow Hillary supporters that he was the only candidate to beat Trump. Yes, the “old white guy” whose moment had finally arrived. He would save us, we all thought. He was empathetic and kind. He was, I insisted, a good man.

He’d once crossed the street in DC as the then Vice President to talk to my daughter’s 5th-grade class. My daughter stood just inches away from him. Who didn’t love Joe?

Scranton Joe is the good man, the good father, who rode the Amtrak train home from DC every day to be with his family. He’s the forward-thinking progressive who fought for the Black community, for victims of sexual assault, and for gay rights before even Obama did.

He was famously almost too young to serve when elected to the Senate in 1972. Here he is alongside his family, celebrating his birthday just one month before his wife and baby daughter would be killed in a car crash.

How could so much good fortune be cut short by a tragedy that would leave his two boys without a mother? His young son Hunter suffered from a head injury while his other son Beau survived with broken bones.

Joe Biden was sworn in at the hospital as his two young sons looked on with confusion. He pledged to put them first, and abandon his political career if it ever came to that.

But there is another Joe Biden. It’s the one who has shunned his granddaughter he pretends does not exist. At least with the Biden name she could make something of herself. But no, says Joe. She isn’t one of us.

It’s the Joe Biden who would exploit a family tragedy to hold a press conference and photo-op that was good for his image while being sworn in in1972. It’s the Joe Biden who claimed the death of his son Beau kept him from running as Obama’s successor in 2016, when the truth was that Obama didn’t want him to run. He wanted Hillary instead.

"The incredible bond I have with my children is the gift I'm not sure I would have had, had I not been through what I went through [after the fatal crash]. But by focusing on my sons, I found my redemption." - Joe Biden, Yale Commencement Address, 2015

As a Senator in 1972, Joe Biden would bear witness to the downfall of Richard Nixon, just two years away from resignation. He could not know all of those decades ago that he would face something far more serious than being caught on tape offering to pay off a blackmailer.

No, this isn’t obstruction of justice Biden is accused of participating in. It’s out-and-out corruption, the worst kind, being a politician who traded power and influence for profit.

Comparing what Biden is alleged to have done with even the most serious charges against Trump is laughable. The more of Biden’s story that is revealed, the worse the Trump hunters will look.

As always, the legacy media is the only thing standing in the way of a Nixon-like downfall for Joe. They’re in way too deep now. If Biden goes down, so do they. After all, they were responsible for helping put Joe in power in 2020, to absolve themselves of the sins of Trump. Now, they will pay a price for ignoring the Biden scandal.

All the President’s Sons

It’s hard to look at Joe Biden’s life and not think about East of Eden, the Steinbeck novel turned into a movie in 1955, based on the story of Cain and Abel. It’s not the same story, but it’s similar enough.

The golden child, Beau, was meant to carry on the family name and was preparing to run for governor when he died tragically in 2015.

The other son, Hunter, the wayward Cain, or Cal, was nothing but trouble for his father, acting out in obvious ways to get his approval and attention, but never quite getting it, engaging in corruption to enrich the Biden family.

Hunter didn’t just engage in high risk behavior with cocaine and hookers, he did it on camera, uploaded it to porn sites, and left it all on his laptops, which he then abandon at a computer repair shop.

He wasn’t exactly hiding it - if anything, he seemed like he was begging to get caught, to finally experience some of the much-needed consequences that might have changed his life. But they never came then and they won’t be coming now.

But what about Joe? Did he have anything to do with the pay-offs by foreign leaders to buy influence?

If he skimmed off the top and feigned ignorance, it would be one thing. But it’s far more sinister than that. If the allegations against him are true, Biden used the son with the dirty reputation as a go-between, knowing if they ever got caught, Hunter would take the fall. Biden would make sure he didn’t go to jail.

Even as his son was spiraling into drugs and alcohol and his other son was dying of brain cancer, Joe Biden still managed to push forward to cash in on the Biden name and his position in the Obama administration.

In 2013, Hunter Biden started a fund with the Chinese government, with Joe bringing Hunter there to meet with the CEO, the Chinese then greenlighted the fund, and Beau Biden was diagnosed with brain cancer

In 2014, Burisma appointed Hunter Biden to their Board of Directors, paying him $83K monthly, and while he and Devon Archer formed Rosemont Seneca as Joe Biden flew to Ukraine to speak against corruption, a “Kazakhstani oil company and Burisma joined with the Chinese company to announce a transnational financial arrangement.” [dw]

In 2015, Hunter Biden organized a dinner at Cafe Milano where Joe Biden dropped by to meet a high-level Burisma official, Vadym Pozharskyi, Beau Biden’s cancer has returned, and he died in May of 2015.

Also, in 2015, a Burisma source said, “It costs 5 million to pay one Biden and 5 million to pay another Biden.” [dw]

In April of 2019, Hunter Biden dropped off three damaged laptops at a computer repair shop. By October 14, 2020, the New York Post would break the story that was then silenced by Twitter and Facebook and dismissed as “Russian Disinformation.”

In October 2020, Tucker Carlson broke the Tony Bobulinski story, which the legacy media and late-night comedy hosts roundly mock.

In 2021, NPR’s story on Hunter Biden: “Biden writes that his addictions entered a particularly dark phase after Beau died of brain cancer in 2015. It got to the point where in an intervention in early 2019, his father held him in a bear hug, saying, "I don't know what to do."

In 2022, Elon Musk bought Twitter, and the Twitter Files exposed corruption at the FBI, pushing Facebook and Twitter to bury the laptop story and protect Joe Biden in the run-up to the election.

Follow the Money

The legacy press have become zombie-like in their ongoing Trump trance, refusing to chase what has to be the biggest political story of the decade, maybe of the century.

With Nixon, the cover-up was far worse than the crime itself, but in Biden’s case, both the crime and the cover-up are equally bad. Dozens of government officials, experts, activists, and journalists have had Biden’s back and covered for him. Now, as the house of cards they’ve built, the Madoff-like empire of lies finally collapses, all of them will be dragged down with it.

When will the reporters figure this out and start aggressively chasing the story? It’s hard to know. They’ve all been mandated to track the Trump indictments, which seem like child’s play by comparison, and Jack Smith is just a few headlines away from looking like a fool.

Peter Baker of the New York Times tweeted something that indicates he’s at least asking the right questions:

As long as the Justice Department and the propaganda media keep the focus on Trump, they can deflect from high crimes by the Biden family. Yet, this story goes all the way back to the “perfect phone call” that led to the first impeachment. Imagine that. Trump getting impeached for daring to ask about the Bidens’ involvement in Ukraine.

We’re witnessing unprecedented corruption at the top, yet, here we are, with only a slim GOP majority in the House aggressively chasing the scandal and a handful of outsider reporters who give a damn.

Everyone else shrugs and moves on. But that was exactly how Watergate went down too. It wasn’t a story until it was a story.

From The Spectator:

We’re in the middle of corruption bigger than our own democracy. We, the people, are not equipped to manage something that involves an actual hot war. Yet, we deserve to know just how deep Biden’s involvement goes with the Ukraine government.

Since they tied Trump to Russia, and many Americans side with Ukraine the same way they side with Democrats, no wonder the scales of justice have been so lopsided lately. They have conflated Putin and Trump, yet it’s really Biden and Ukraine that deserves closer scrutiny.

Explained here by Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn on America This Week:

I left the Democratic Party in 2020 after I watched them rig the election with dark money and well-educated lawyers who could simply rewrite any law that got in their way, not to mention a permanent propaganda press to do their bidding. I already knew they were corrupt and that they were lying to the public about almost everything, from COVID to lockdowns to voting to the protests in the Summer and January 6th, and that meant all of the experts they dragged out to back them up were lying too.

Health experts say racism is more important than COVID.

Military experts tell Trump not to send in the military during the protests over the Summer.

And yes, from Politico:

It just tugs at your heart, doesn’t it? That they could lie so brazenly, thinking themselves on the right side of history because they were stopping a once-in-a-generation threat to “Democracy”? But at what cost to the rest of us?

How long will they be able to keep the balls spinning? How long can they fool the public? How long will the legacy press turn a blind eye? And worse, how will we ever trust our government, our FBI, our experts ever again?

We used to have journalists in the mainstream who cared more about the public’s trust more than they cared about their own image on social media. What hope do we have now except our faith a few good Republicans with a slim majority in the House to bring forth witnesses who will risk everything just to tell the truth.

This is a supplement to the piece I posted yesterday that needs clarification. It is all too easy to see both Barbie and Oppenheimer as two sides of the same coin - Barbie as the ultimate “woke” movie and Oppenheimer as a movie that attempts to vindicate or sympathize with Communism.

But that would be a mistake. Barbie reflects our society now, a society not unlike what the Communist hunters most feared: ideological capture of our major institutions, our culture, our schools, and our government.

I enjoyed Barbie because laughing at a silly movie was fun, but it is important to put it in context of what we’re living through now.

As Critical Drinker explains:

Barbie is light-hearted and not intended as propaganda, but it makes assumptions about our shared reality that really only has meaning for those on the Left who go along with it. Men are bad, women are good, but gender is not a binary, etc.

Oppenheimer is about the America before the war and the America after the war. Everything changed dramatically in the wake of Hitler, Stalin, and the bombs dropping on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which would eventually take us to the Cold War.

Oppenheimer was never a Communist. The film Oppenheimer is not about Communism. It isn’t even really a Left vs. Right film. There isn’t much politics involved at all. Some might react to the movie without seeing it, falsely believing it’s Communist propaganda — understandably, because of Hollywood’s reputation of late. But that would be unfair and a misread of what Oppenheimer is about.

In the 1930s, amid the Great Depression, Hooverville, and the New Deal, it was a “Great Awokoning” of a kind. Those on the Left who cared about social justice started organizations to help those left behind. FDR’s New Deal, for instance, left behind Black Americans.

In the book about Oppenheimer, he was so well-read, compassionate, and worldly that he understood it was an unequal society, just like Orwell or any decent person who lived back then would. That is what drew him, and Orwell, at one point, to Communism. And both would eventually abandon it once they saw where it led.

Oppenheimer and Orwell were free thinkers. They valued freedom of the mind more than anything, just as I do. That is why Orwell wrote 1984, and it’s why Oppenheimer’s quote about science is such a good one:

Does anyone think today’s Left still believes that? They do not. They don’t believe in freedom of the mind at all. They believe in forced conformity and ideological compliance in art, science, education, and even relationships between people, language, comedy, and everything else they control, which is almost everything.

Oppenheimer’s first girlfriend, Jean Tatlock, was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party. Many of Oppenheimer’s friends were also Communists. They continued to try to recruit him, but he always refused to join — he was a singular thinker and did not want to belong to any group or have any allegiances.

He also, and I want to be clear here, BUILT THE ATOM BOMB THAT ENDED THE WAR. Anyone who wants to dump on Oppenheimer has to understand his place in history, and if you are applying his suspected ties to Communism as being more important than BUILDING THE ATOM BOMB THAT ENDED THE WAR, then you are no different from the screeching fanatics on the Left.

Whether you think he should have built the bomb is beside the point. He helped end World War II, full stop. He was hailed as a hero for doing so. Our government wanted to build what President Ike warned against in his farewell address, the Military Industrial Complex:

Oppenheimer did everything he could to prevent the arms race, which put him at odds with the government and the military.

Oppenheimer was Jewish, which meant he was already an outsider and felt like one his entire life. But playing such an important part in history — with the caveat that they dropped the bomb on Japan and killed hundreds of thousands of people, of course — mattered to him. He believed he was building the bomb for Hitler, not Japan.

The paranoia in our country was understandable. Communist spies were working in our government. There was a united effort to indoctrinate our citizens to their ideology. There was Communist ideology injected into Hollywood screenplays. There was a Communist movement here. Their fear was not unfounded.

Many of those involved in the Communist movement in the 1930s would ultimately abandon it once they saw Stalin’s murder of millions and his extreme totalitarian ideology. Most people on the Left did not know the extent of it because then, like now, only useful information filtered through.

I grew up thinking Communism was “good,” and would only later understand how that ideology had manifested in the former Soviet Union, in China, in North Korea. Has it ever worked out without becoming a dystopian nightmare? No.

That’s why Winston Churchill concluded this about Democracy:

Yet, with the mass hysteria after the Rosenbergs were caught and executed, and the shooting in the Capitol, our government wanted to purge not just actual Communists but anyone who ever knew Communists or read a book that might be thought of as having Communist leanings.

This is why Arthur Miller wrote the play The Crucible to bring back the Salem Witch trials to illustrate another era when mass hysteria caused us all to look at one another suspiciously, and terrible things followed in its wake. And why Rod Serling wrote such profound dissenting viewpoints in so many of the Twilight Zones epsiodes, like the Monsters are Due on Maple Street:

Now, we’re seeing our country overtaken by something similar to Communist ideology AND the persecution of those trying to fight back. It’s a hard pretzel to wrap one’s mind around. It’s easy if you separate the mass hysteria from the ideology.

Now, the hysteria is (and I’m writing a longer piece about this for next time in Part Three of America at the Hands of a Cult) rooted in the idea that it’s the “Communist” ideology that must be preserved and anyone trying to dismantle it is a racist, sexist, bigot, transphobe, etc.

The two sides have completely reversed themselves. The Left is now where the Right was then. But if you stand on the side of freedom, you will always be on the right side, no matter your ideology. America is founded on freedom, and it’s freedom we must always reach for.

What will frustrate me the most about the Left’s reaction to Oppenheimer is that they will see themselves as still on the right side of history because the Republicans were persecuting him and ultimately removed his security clearance. Maybe that means they still see themselves as the good guys still fighting the good fight. But they would be wrong.

Even those who are against “cancel culture” and understand fanaticism and dogma have captured all of our major institutions, from culture to education to science to government, will never be able to take one step further to understand that the source of the hysteria is the person that disrupted the utopia: Donald Trump.

It’s a little like saying witchcraft is real and there are real witches, just not those you accused of witchcraft. To understand the source of the hysteria — Donald Trump is a racist and a rapist — is to understand the purges and persecutions.

This is why I no longer draw that line, why I write so much about Trump and MAGA even at the cost of my own reputation, and why I live my life publicly defying that direct order to divide myself from half the country. I do not buy into it, and that, I think, is our only way out.

Until they can do that and humanize Trump and his supporters, they will never fully grasp the moment we’re living through and will still kick the can down the road for years before it all comes home to roost. And it will. It always does.

All one has to do is look at their behavior, and our behavior, since Trump was elected to understand what they’re doing now, to Trump, to anyone who isn’t fully on board with their “Woketupia” is still mass hysteria. It’s still a mass delusion. It will still be regarded with the same disdain we now regard the witch hunts in the 1950s.

At least in the 1950s, they had the excuse of WWII — Hitler and Stalin. Now, all we have is Trump, MAGA, and the Tea Party as their greatest threat. They believe it’s the “white male patriarchy” and the “white supremacists” trying to remove the “Black and Brown and the LGBTQIA people from power.” And this is because Obama did remake this country into a “woke utopia.”

The film Barbie is a great example of just how accepted this ideology is - that regardless of its dramatic changes over the past few years - they can still point to “The Patriarchy” as the ultimate evil.

We’ve now become almost numb to watching our fellow Americans, millions of them, treated as enemies of the state, not to mention the unprecedented persecution of Trump — Jack Smith’s indictment as the most recent example, but the raid on mar-a-logo, Russiagate, the two impeachments, and a propaganda media that refuses to report the truth, the casual dehumanization we see against them on social media when the Left holds all of the power is a terrifying moment in history to be living through.

It isn’t hard to stand on the right side of history. You just have to recognize what fear and delusion can do to people when they don’t have strong leaders like Eisenhower to guide them through the storm.

I hope that clarifies my intent with the piece.

It’s beginning to look a lot like the 1950s. No two films recall that era more than Barbie and Oppenheimer, both opening this weekend. Despite these films being completely different in every way imaginable, they have captivated the internet as a reach back in time to a forgotten world, just as the sci-fi movies of the 1950s reached forward to a world they could never know.

There is something about the two of them as Romeo and Juliet on the eve of the apocalypse that has inspired the internet to reimagine a whole different movie called Barbenheimer:

Sound of Freedom is sailing toward $100 mil without breaking a sweat. It topped all Hollywood blockbusters, from Disney’s catastrophe, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, to Insidious, to Jennifer Lawrence’s middling sex comedy, No Hard Feelings. Only Tom Cruise’s Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning could top it.

For a film that cost just $14.5 million, Sound of Freedom is rounding the bases and humiliating Hollywood by the minute, as if to say - what, like it’s hard?

They have one job in Hollywood: tell a great story. Why would they expect people to turn out if they can't even do that?

“The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.” ― Thomas Jefferson

November 8th, 2016. That was the day journalism, as we once knew it died. Gone was objectivity. Gone was a search for the truth, no matter where it led. Gone was holding the powerful to account. Gone was the desire to serve the public’s best interest.

It’s been seven years now, and most of us are still in mourning. We can’t forget what journalism used to be. We sit glumly in front of yet another viewing of All the President’s Men, Broadcast News, or The Insider where reporters still cared about the truth, and all we can do is take another drink and cry.

Houston, we have a problem.

Now that COVID is long gone, and studios are putting out blockbusters again, it almost seems like things are back to “normal.” Yet, movie after movie keeps underperforming, which is a polite way of saying Hollywood movies are bombing at the box office.

Why? Well, I don’t have to tell you why. You know why. Everyone knows why except the people tasked with covering Hollywood who are too afraid to say why. You can’t fix a problem you can’t name.

In a recent poll, 42% cite movies getting worse as the main reason they no longer pay to see them. Why have they gotten worse? Because Hollywood swapped great storytelling for franchise movies long ago, then they transformed those franchise movies into agenda-delivery devices.

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

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

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

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

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

It’s like that Milan Kundera quote about Totalitarianism:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Mental Health Crisis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The End of Days

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

//

The first time I realized I was a proud American was the month I spent in Italy in 1997 with a man who would become the father of my child that month, unbeknownst to either of us. The news was earth-shattering to him because we were worlds apart. We fought and then broke up over the best decision I ever made, to keep my child.

He complained about America a lot, and I tolerated it, but then I found myself protective and defensive of my country.

“Yeah, well, you sure like our Levis and our Marlboros,” I said. “Not to mention our movies.” I had him there. I knew in that moment that I was a patriot.

Part One: The Timeline is here.

Are we living through a culture war or a religious war? Can we even tell the difference by now?

The Left demonized the religious for nearly all of my life, yet here we are, a country at the hands of a cult, and the intellectuals can’t get us out of it — No proper boundaries to protect children, no guiding principles beyond categorizing us by skin color or gender identity, a godlessness that has left us awash in narcissism and hollowed out morality.

Progressivism is an invasive species. It can’t stop on its own. It has to blow through everything.

The #MeToo and Times Up movements collapsed. The funds dried up for Black Lives Matter. The box office in Hollywood is like a ghost town. All they have left now is to invade the minds and hearts of children to indoctrinate them into this bizarre new cult that seemingly came out of nowhere (aka Tumblr, Circa 2012).

The Summer of 2020 was both a revolution and a coup, ultimately resulting in an unshakable pact between the Woke and all major corporate and cultural institutions in this country, up to and including the President of the United States.

It isn’t a cult of one personality but of many. It’s a tawdry tale of influencers and algorithms, fast-moving technology and helicopter parents, social media, and Critical Theory. But Joe Biden is no cult leader. He’s more like a George Spahn figure, presenting a more acceptable front while the Manson family did as they pleased behind the scenes.

\

My Dad called me “happy Sash,” which was ironic because I was never a happy kid. I was a worried kid, just like I’m a worried adult. My dad would say it often, “she’s a Happy Sash.” I think he wanted me to be happy because then maybe he wouldn’t worry. He was a worrier too.

There aren’t many pictures of me as a baby, but here’s one. That’s me in the middle. As you can see, not exactly smiling.

“We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men – not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular” - Edward R. Murrow

Any honest person knows that the Federal indictment of Trump is “shockingly weak.” Worse than that, it’s yet another lie pushed on Americans about Trump.

Trust me, I know. I used to be one of them. We started lying around 2012, once we realized how powerful Twitter was when it came to manufacturing the narrative we wanted. We rescued Obama’s second term by turning Mitt Romney into something he wasn’t.

That was a newfound superpower. We could manufacture the reality we wanted, but the price we would pay over time was to slowly but surely become disconnected from the truth.

Lying became like heroin. We needed higher and stronger doses for it to be effective. It couldn’t just be “Dick Cheney is a war criminal” or “W. Bush was the President Select.” It must be Trump is not just an “existential crisis” but an invasion of OUR country. And that meant they would have to go to war. And in the fog of war, anything goes.

What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff — I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye. - JD Salinger

Taylor Swift’s concerts have become cultural phenomenons, religious-like experiences for so many people worldwide, especially little girls. Happy moms post videos of their flushed, excited faces and near-hysteria at the first sight of their idol.

It’s girl world, to be sure. But it’s also become, like so many other things in American culture, LGBTQIA world too, like the upcoming Barbie movie is sure to be. There doesn’t seem to be anywhere left that belongs only to girls. From locker rooms to sports to clothes and makeup, girls are vanishing.

Recently, Taylor Swift “got political,” and was no doubt backed into a corner by activists demanding she take a loud public side against what they believe are “harmful” laws hurting their community. Which laws? They don’t say, and you aren’t allowed to ask. They’re all bad, they insist. You’re with us, or you’re against us.

There is one law growing in prominence not just here but in other countries too, and that’s to put the breaks on “gender-affirming care” for minors. But if you support gay marriage or you want to be a good ally, you have to go along with that too, you have to be part of a movement that is sterilizing children legally, in the United States in 2023.

Most people, including Taylor Swift, have no idea just how bad things have gotten. I too was mostly unaware of what “gender-affirming care” actually means. I also didn’t know how bad things had gotten for women in sports. Denying biological reality seems to be something fundamentalist religions do, not educated liberal societies, yet here we are, insisting trans women are women. They can believe that if they want to but it doesn’t make it true.

The media does such an expert job of pandering to activists, pretending like it’s a small percentage of athletes. But the truth is that there is widespread suppression of dissent and a climate of fear that keeps so many from speaking out about how this is not just a tiny movement anymore. It’s the core identity and belief of the Democratic Party.

They can’t see this as a social contagion because that news never enters their feedback loop. All they hear, over and over again, is “protect trans kids.” Does protecting them include making them infertile? Does it include surgery that creates a false opening that must be dilated several times a day, or it closes up? Does it mean eliminating their sexual function? For life?

Standing up to any of it is hard. We all saw what happened to JK Rowling. The activists are out in force, patrolling reading lists, science labs, school libraries, and all media outlets. Just in writing this, I run the risk of losing everything. But so what?

I’ll take my talking points from exiled scientists - the new heretics of our time, like evolutionary biologists Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein:

As long as we still have a First Amendment, there is no justifiable reason to stay silent on something so urgent. Controlling speech has been the only reason this madness has gone as far as it has. But thankfully, the voices of dissent are getting louder, and there is strength in numbers.

When Twitter, under Elon Musk’s ownership, struck a deal with the Daily Wire to stream What is a Woman on the first day of Pride, they got spooked enough to pull the deal unless they removed two scenes they labeled “hate speech.”

One of those scenes included a desperate father who had been charged with child abuse for misgendering his own daughter, as he fought to stop her from life-altering medical intervention.

Thankfully, Musk stepped in and put the kibosh on Twitter censorship, even tweeting out the film to his followers. By the end of the weekend, it had been viewed close to 200 million times.

Because of Matt Walsh standing up and speaking out, and because Elon Musk bought Twitter, more people know about what goes on behind closed doors at gender clinics, at universities, and in the minds of so many well-meaning politicians.

How is it we have arrived in 2023 and the people sticking up for truth, science, and reason are the Conservative Christians?

Here are some of the film’s best scenes:

The activists have pushed the American public too far. While most everyone was accepting of gay rights and gay marriage, they kept moving the line. Now, elementary schools are making Pride somehow part of their curriculum.

But Pride isn’t what it used to be. It’s not the many gay parents I got to know while I was raising my daughter. It’s now expanded like a mushroom cloud to include this unforgivable abuse of minor children under the Orwellian term “medical care.”

At this point, I know beyond any doubt that there is no fixing the Left. There is only leaving - leave the schools, leave the therapists, leave the online bubbles, vote them out.

Here is Ben Shapiro on the growing backlash:

Too many moms now are finding their march toward progress nothing but feet getting stuck in the mud, unable to move, trapped in a movement that seeks to erase them and minimize their power as mothers.

Some moms found out all too well, and all too late.

“America is Wrong” but Heather was Right

Dooce, aka Heather Armstrong, came up alongside Ree Drummond, the Pioneer Woman as mommy bloggers with great cameras who recorded their daily struggles raising their kids.

But Dooce would never get a cooking show on the Food Network nor sell merch like an air fryer with her personal design on it. But she was a great writer who was funny and brilliant, and there is no doubt she loved her kids. Much to the shock of her longtime readers like me, she killed herself last month after a long battle with depression and a relapse into alcoholism.

Dooce had two daughters. The younger daughter was Marlo (pictured above), the absolute girly girl. Dooce described this aspect of Marlo’s personality often. She loved tea parties, pink dresses, makeup, and princess costumes but had emerged in our post-2020 dystopia as a “non-binary they.”

When I saw this on Dooce’s Instagram, I immediately thought, oh, there she goes again. Surfing the latest trend, so of course, one of her kids would be trans. She’ll get much mileage out of this online with all of those Good Liberal White Women clucking about, using the correct pronouns, and settling into the only activism they have left.

But something wasn’t adding up in my mind. I wasn’t sure why. Something made me think more deeply about Dooce, her kids, and her suicide. Was there a story there?

Then I saw this from NBC news:

Armstrong’s impulse to put her most private feelings on display occasionally forced her readers to reckon with sentiments they might have found troubling. In a lengthy blog post published in August 2022, most notably, she expressed views some deemed transphobic.

The post in which she wrote "Biological gender is scientific" and "we are tossing around these pronouns like goddamn candy" was later removed. But some fans remained disappointed; some said they stopped reading her blog.

And even after her suicide, a tweet by Nicole Rosenleaf Ritter (she/her/hers) says: “After almost 20 years, I stopped reading @dooce after her terrible TERF moment last year, but I always hoped she would come out of that so I could delight in her singular voice again. I hope she has found peace, and I ache for her loved ones.”

No matter what else Dooce was, no matter how “delightful” her voice, women like Rosenleaf Ritter drew the line at her opinion on trans issues, even when trying to save her daughter’s future. That is why there is no saving the Left. Fanaticism has obliterated objective truth and humanity itself.

Heather was, more than anything else, a good mother. She knew both of her daughters well, and had tracked their lives for years on her blog, with loving, hilarious, tender detail. What came flooding back when I unlocked my memories of reading Dooce all of these years — her daughter Marlo was a girly girl!

Does the above photo, Princess in the Garden, look like gender dysphoria in any way, shape or form? Or does that look like an adorable girly girl? If there was a textbook definition of what the Gender Cult thinks defines a girl early on, Marlo would be it.

I don’t go along with the idea that there are such well-defined gender stereotypes. I know this isn’t true from my own experience and watching my daughter grow up. Neither of us fit what they would call upon to decide what gender we were. But never in that time did any of us even consider, for one second, whether we were girls or not.

So what exactly was so offensive as to make so many of Dooce’s readers turn on her? While her post, America is Wrong, has been deleted, it’s still available on the Wayback Machine.

It is a long, rambling, desperately sad depression spiral that was a clear sign she was in trouble mentally, emotionally, and physically. In it, she already confesses to having attempted suicide. But just as she heads for the edge of the cliff, with nothing to lose, she lays it out, all of it, the whole ugly truth of what she and every honest mother knows, otherwise known as “Her Terrible TERF moment.”

She wrote:

For the kids who are still with me — and you’re still with me, right? You can trust me, and I need you to believe that. It will become very clear why. I may be a little scary because no one in your life is allowed to talk to you about gender dysphoria.

Those words are super loud and clarion clear to all of you, aren’t they.

Gender dysphoria. There. I said it again.

Every adult in your life has been told by the government to AFFIRM AFFIRM AFFIRM your gender dysphoria because you are out there co-opting suicidal ideation. You are throwing that phrase around as if you own it, as if you have any f*****g idea what it means.

Yes. I am calling you out, too. All of you. And I will calm down a little bit, maybe, because you need to be able to trust someone who loves you. And I love you more than you will ever comprehend because I am you.

And she continued:

White progressive moms, I am talking to you now. And I have no f*cks to give should any of this hurt your feelings. I feel your pain, too, because when my they/them told me they wanted to change their pronouns I believed they were riding this massive cultural shift in acceptance and inclusion.

But I was wrong. America is f*cking wrong.

During my recovery process I began to realize that I was not asking the right questions about what we think is a radical new way of celebrating diversity.

White progressive moms, are you asking yourselves the right questions? Maybe you should so that I don’t have to do the work for you. But since none of you are doing the work, lean in close and let me give you the answers to the questions you won’t ask.

Gender dysphoria is social contagion.

Should your theys and thems be afraid to read this or disinterested in the manic rambling spiral of some looney white anorexic on the internet, this part is for you and your kids together. Read this part together calling upon the pain of your childhood that in hindsight might have made you realize that your girls are experiencing normal human sadness. They are teenagers. They were once your precious baby girls.

They are experiencing the same sadness you experienced when you were their age.

Your children are perfect. They were born perfect. And you love them just the way they are.

Let me say it again, and you need to repeat this over and over again to your girls. Every single day for the rest of their lives because WHO KNOWS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN WE DIE:

Your children are perfect. They were born perfect. And you love them just the way they are.

This was her Marlo - the textbook “girl” by their own definition of what defines a girl. How does a gender clinician talk their way around this?

Heather posted this photo of her own withering body, to emphasize the damage caused by a lifetime of body dysmorphia.

You’d think, given that, a little bit of sympathy would be on offer for all of her pain. But no. She has broken the sacred trust of the Ordnung and for that, she must pay.

And a Tweet from Fatemeh Khatibloo that says:

So. Heather Armstrong (aka as Dooce) has, in one utterly unhinged post:1) Outed herself as a TERF parent to a non-binary child2) Demeaned neurodiverse adults everywhere3) Co-opted the pain and lives of Black women4) Disappeared Black trans women entirely

This poem on Heather’s Instagram, and the accompanying photo, reveals how hard it was for her and what it would mean to abandon everything she knew about her child.

She might have seen Marlo’s transition as her mental health issues visited upon her youngest, despite the therapy, despite the self-help, despite being a “good liberal” and doing everything right. But that isn’t true. Like so many young girls, Marlo has been taken in by a movement that looks a lot like a cult that gives her the acceptance every adolescent needs.

Does any of this mean her daughter, the gender clinics, the internet or any external forces are responsible for Heather’s suicide? Absolutely not. That was her decision to end her life, just as it was her decision as one of the mommy bloggers to put that life, and the lives of her children, online.

But Heather left her daughter, and countless other girls a precious gift: a trail of breadcrumbs back to the real Marlo. It’s all there. The photos, the smiles, the stories, years and years of history - once a mommy blog, now an archaeological dig, a historical record of what really happened in the life of a young girly girl with curls, dimples, and a lisp.

I can’t know what happened with Marlo, whether she was in the process of taking “T” or not, but Dooce’s desperation in America is Wrong is a warning. And that tells me that she was likely worried this was her daughter’s future, defined only by the drugs she would have to take for the rest of her life.

Heather was not a TERF, which is a hateful slur to punish and control women to shut them up. She was a worried mother like so many worried mothers going up against such insurmountable forces, from Taylor Swift to the President of the United States.

It shouldn’t be surprising that to gain control of our youth, they must first gain control of women by driving a wedge between them and their kids or co-opting them as happy cult members sending their kids into the lion’s den.

But if there is one thing everyone knows to fear in the wild, it’s the Mama Bear. We are ferocious when it comes to protecting our young.

One such Mama Bear is Megyn Kelly, who has taken on the fight too. Her explanation of why she will no longer use pronouns has recently earned almost 1 million views.

It should go without saying that standing up for women and girls doesn’t mean being abusive or cruel to trans people. What they do as adults, how they choose to live, is their business, as long as it doesn’t mean trampling the rights of others to live the way they choose to live, to have fair competition in sports, to feel safe in locker rooms, and to mature fully as biological women, or men, before they decide to alter their bodies permanently.

And don’t force us to go along with your version of reality. Don’t force us to say something that isn’t true or force us to use pronouns because no one should be forced to believe anything. That’s fascism.

Despite Dooce’s declining mental state and her withering physical form, she had enough Mama Bear to risk even her carefully cultivated reputation to go up against her own audience and perhaps lose everything. That, right there, is true grit.

Dooce.com is Heather Armstrong’s legacy. They can call her whatever they want. Her beautiful words will remain.

She wrote:

Dooce wrote:

July 17, 2014 - My Little Mermaid

Marlo is currently obsessed with mermaids and not because of Disney, no. Leta has been watching an Australian show on Netflix called H2O: Just Add Water with Marlo tucked in on the couch beside her. She got several mermaid Barbies for her birthday and has been requesting that I leave her hair down “like a mermaid” before I send her to camp. Before I left for Southeast Asia I bought a passport cover in faux pink crocodile that she calls my mermaid wallet, and when I returned she claimed it as her own. This is one of those adorable yet at times annoying phases (if I let her she would swim in the bathtub “like a mermaid” for hours and hours) that I’m glad I’m documenting so that I can remember it years from now. And remind her that she used to sleep with my passport cover.

Rest in Peace, Heather BArmstrong, AKA Dooce. You were right. America is wrong.

But don’t worry, I got you. They’ve awakened the Mama Bears now, and they better run.

I used to be a true blue loyalist. My grandmother, an FDR Democrat, and lifelong social worker, kept a signed picture of Bill Clinton on her kitchen wall until the day she died. My earliest memory kicks it all the way back to 1988 when I wore a Dukakis button to work and was mocked for it. “Who would vote for du-Taxus,” one woman said.

As I began my drive across this big, beautiful country of ours, I saw real life going on. RVs filled with families hitched to trucks making their way somewhere. Lights turning on at grocery stores. Workers high atop utility poles fixing electrical lines. I drove through cities and pastures, across state lines, and on an interstate conceived and built by President Eisenhower.

The same network that called Tucker Carlson a “Right-wing extremist” has decided to put Donald Trump back on prime time. As their hypocrisy comes full circle, a pathetic #boycottcnn hashtag bloomed on Twitter. As if.

CNN’s ratings were in near-total collapse when Trump threw them a lifeline. By contrast, the Murdochs dumped their best ratings-getter for speaking too many uncomfortable truths.

To many on the Left, reality and truth are negotiable. They can fool themselves into believing Carlson was dumped for being a “racist” and “inciting violence.” But Fox News clearly had no idea what they had with Tucker Carlson and now they’ve taken one step closer to their own demise.

“Fear not the path of Truth for the lack of People walking on it.” ― Robert F. Kennedy

A new poll by ABC News/Washington Post shows both Trump and DeSantis beating Biden by 6 points.

According to this poll, the public does not believe Biden is fit to serve mentally or physically.

@Politics_Polls Has the mental sharpness it takes to serve effectively as president: Joe Biden: Yes 32% No 63% Donald Trump: Yes 54% No 43% .

Is in good enough physical health to serve effectively as president: Joe Biden: Yes 33% No 62% Donald Trump: Yes 64% No 28%

None of this matters much when you have abandoned the truth and depend on a manufactured reality curated by a partisan public relations department disguised as legacy media. And no one is all that worried. They know the fix is in.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Free societies...are societies in motion, and with motion comes tension, dissent, friction. Free people strike sparks, and those sparks are the best evidence of freedom's existence.” ― Salman Rushdie

Last week, Democrats Chuck Schumer and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez locked arms with Conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch to silence Tucker Carlson off Fox News.

Yes, the same side that once fought against the Black List and for cultural icons like Lenny Bruce and the Red Hot Chili Peppers was now cheering on defacto censorship by an oligarch. What a change from the old Left.

[Imaginary Tucker Carlson Monologue for Monday, April 24th, 2023]

TUCKER CARLSON: “Good Evening, and welcome to Tucker Carlson Tonight. No doubt you’ve heard of the name Ray Epps. You have heard his name many times on this broadcast in connection with the events of January 6th. You’ve heard me tell you that our government was lying about what happened that day and that they haven’t stopped lying, and that they have an entire media empire helping them lie to you every day.

But those compliant patsies are never going to be threatened with legal action, like a defamation case, to shut them up, just like all of the talk about hacked voting machines after 2016 by Jill Stein and many in the media never led to defamation cases like the one Fox just settled with Dominion for $800 million.

Oh no.

“When you're at the end of your rope, tie a knot and hold on.” ― Theodore Roosevelt

Joe Biden and the Democrats could learn something from what just happened on Twitter, where a populist revolt is currently underway. The blue check scam was powerful - a minority of elites who have granted themselves outsized influence on the media narrative, the Democratic Party and reality itself.

Elon Musk played a game of cat and mouse with the blue checks first by taking them away, then giving them back after they launched a dumb hashtag campaign because the “unwashed masses” could now have access to status on Twitter. It was obscene but telling.

beware those who are quick to censorthey are afraid of what they do not knowbeware those who seek constant crowds forthey are nothing alone - Charles Bukowski

An old friend texted me recently to ask how I was handling the “new Twitter.” I had to think for a minute, and then I realized that in the language of the Left, he meant that Elon Musk had bought the site, and now it’s overrun by hate speech and neo-Nazis. Do I still feel safe using it?

“Oh,” I texted back. “I’m not in the bubble of the Left anymore, so it doesn’t bother me. I like it. I am a fan of free speech.”

There was a long pause, something I’ve become accustomed to when conversing with someone on the Left. They don’t want to argue. They don’t want to go any further. They just want to slowly back away.

The idea that Twitter was now overrun by “hate speech” was just an accepted reality because that is how much power the blue-checks on Twitter have to influence the mainstream media narrative, which trickles down everywhere.

But when a viral video circulated with a BBC reporter who could not name even one example of hate speech, that didn’t make news in the mainstream because it contradicted the narrative.

The story will make the rounds on the Right, but the mainstream narrative has more power, and if a story contradicts the government’s official narrative, it will never make the news. That’s still true with Musk as the new owner, but it’s a step up from the government using Twitter as a filter to silence dissent.

That Twitter users had enough power and status to decide reality is what made Twitter dangerous. This has been true since the beginning, as it slowly became the most powerful propaganda tool the Democrats had.

Once Musk took over Twitter and decided the blue checks were granting status to people deemed “special” but not to others, he set about messing with their own self-importance by taking away their privilege of the verification badge, giving users who pay a monthly fee the opportunity to have a blue check instead.

What is brilliant about this, and maybe most people don’t get it, is that Musk understood the collective power of the blue-check army and now he’s punctured it, dismantled it, like stealing all of their horses in the middle of the night, leaving them nowhere to go to fight the next battle.

But they aren’t used to anyone challenging their power. Musk has been feeling the impact of their collective wrath ever since. HOW DARE YOU!

“I’m not paying for that,” they proclaimed. But oh, how delicious it will be to see some of these once-mighty prominent legacy blue-checks naked without that little verification symbol.

Supposedly that’s somehow ruined Twitter. What it’s done is democratize it. It might be more chaotic now, maybe even slightly more unpredictable, but that makes it more thrilling, not less.

What “ruined” Twitter was the #resistance, transforming the platform into one massive propaganda outlet for The Democrats in an imaginary battle with Donald Trump that began in 2017, when the company tweaked its algorithm to push more engaged tweets to the top of everyone’s feed.

Even if they have the choice to see “latest Tweets,” most prefer to see what tweets are driving the narratives in a given day so they can ride the wave of outrage, whatever is trending, whatever person is “it,” who can be dunked on, humiliated or bullied into an apology or chased off the platform entirely.

The bullying on Twitter had become a problem, not just for users, but corporations and institutions that were suddenly worried about being hurled into the public arena for shaming. That is Twitter’s curse and power, which is why Musk never needed to sweat competition like Substack Notes.

As someone who has been swarmed and bullied more times than I can count, I already feel a little more free using Twitter now. They’re right that it has changed. But Musk didn’t ruin it. He rescued it.

Elon’s Stumble

Elon Musk has made, by my calculations, only one major mistake since he took over Twitter, and that was assuming journalist Matt Taibbi owed him something after the two broke the all-important Twitter Files story. He thought Taibbi should move his Substack over to Twitter to help Twitter profit.

But this vindicated the hysterical rantings by people like Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Mehdi Hasan. They accused Taibbi and others of being bought and paid for by “the Richest Man in the World.” Now they had proof that was the intention all along.

Taibbi, however, was never working for Musk, and if he has any loyalty, it’s to Substack, where he’s built his substantial following of readers like me who rely on him to tell us the truth. It’s also his main source of income. Musk isn’t paying him.

It wasn’t so much what he did to Taibbi that was the mistake. It was more about giving up a powerful Chess piece he had with the alliance of journalists investigating the Twitter files. Despite how the legacy media has been trying to downplay it, it is the story of the year, maybe of the decade. This was not a fight worthy of Musk and the power he now holds with Twitter.

And frankly, Taibbi didn’t deserve it. He put his reputation on the line, and was interrogated by Democrats in Congress who treated him like a traitor to his own country. He had to sit there as Mehdi Hasan performed some odd “gotcha” theater just so he could send out Tweets, anticipating the pats on the heads from the smug and self-righteous brigade. GET HIM, they collectively hissed. How dare he try to embarrass the Security State! To hold the powerful to account! How dare he do journalism!

Taibbi and Musk were on the same side, and fracturing that relationship, and devaluing the Twitter files, is too big of a win for the blue-checks.

Substack Notes was never going to be a threat to Twitter. No other social media site has the power to humiliate influential, high-status people. It is the designated arena for public shaming, and it’s the only one. Unfortunately for the left, they don’t realize they were largely responsible for making Twitter that powerful. And now it’s backfiring on them.

Musk should have Taibbi back to work on the Twitter Files to keep up the pressure and drive heat from Substack back to Twitter to form a powerful resistance against the dominant groupthink.

Musk is under enormous pressure now, with the legacy media attacking him daily, not to mention our government seeking his destruction. To the Biden administration, he barely exists except as a threat, not with his SpaceX program or Tesla. That does illustrate perfectly what the modern Democrats value, and it’s not success or hard work or innovation.

Regardless, Musk’s power in working with Taibbi and others on the Twitter files, whether they continued or not, was making them sweat. Otherwise, there would not have been such a massive effort to pretend they were meaningless.

What a sad state of affairs when people like David Frum, your classic blue-check, marinate in their own smug satisfaction. Their fame, such as it is, being a big fish in a tiny pond, hopelessly addicted to the hearts and the RTs. Imagine being a guy who did matter once, now having to turn to a flattering reflecting pool to feel a tiny flicker of importance.

Their job was supposed to be to chase the story as Taibbi did. Instead, their jobs became chasing the reporters.

Elon’s Warning

2016 was the first time Mark Zuckerberg put his powerful new toy, Facebook, to the test, and it helped Trump win. But by 2020, Zuckerberg, probably because he wanted to absolve himself of the guilt of 2016, “helped” the Democrats with not just a $400 million cash infusion but also that same technology to “find” the right voters not to suppress their vote but to collect their ballots.

If Zuckerberg has data on almost 300 million Americans, imagine how easy it would be to find those exact voters to pull in wins in key swing states where the “enthusiasm gap” would have led to a second term for Trump. While no one can ever prove this is what they did, Mollie Hemingway’s book on the 2020 election details just how deep Zuckerberg’s involvement went.

Now, factor in the power of AI. Democrats are ready to use influencers already whoring themselves out to big brands to convince a generation raised on brands to imprint on the Democratic Party. It won’t be that hard to use AI to ensure the right news gets to the right people, and the bad news stays out. They don’t even need the blue-check army anymore with AIs shaping the media narrative.

The Democrats seem to only want power now. They’ve sacrificed everything they used to value, from objecting to dark money and Citizens United, to aligning themselves with the Deep State, defending the FBI and the CIA. They’re certainly not the Democratic Party I grew up supporting.

The War of the Words

So much of the reaction to Trump had to do with what the Left had become before 2016. If political correctness was already a problem in the 90s, by 2015 it had become almost a crisis in America. Everyone noticed it.

From 2015:

Even before that, back in 2011, this video talked about the rise of political correctness, tying it to the Frankfurt School and its influence on colleges with Critical Theory. Watching this video is shocking because it could have been made today. What was confined to college campuses has now become our entire country at the hands of the Democrats and their powerful alliance with cultural and corporate America.

The Left colonized the internet first, and especially the social media empires. Twitter was co-opted by Barack Obama’s campaign back in 2008 as a revolutionary way to mobilize young people. From then on, the Democrats, or left-leaning, college-educated eggheads, dominated Twitter.

Trump was the first major threat to that power as Trump used Twitter in a way no other Republican or even any politician had. He used it to go over the heads of the media and get his message to the people directly. The more he tweeted, the bigger his follower count grew.

Trump was the existential crisis to the Left not because of anything he did but because of what he said. That he was overtly offensive at a time of extreme word policing was his superpower, and the thing about him that sent much of the Left cascading into waves of hysteria for the four years he was in power.

But that was always what Trump represented. He was the guy who shocked people with what he said because it was brutally honest. That was true in the 80s and true on his show. Anyone who was a fan of The Apprentice often took what Trump said with a grain of salt. But the eggheads on Twitter, the intellectuals, weren’t watching The Apprentice so they took what he said literally.

Here is a clip from The Apprentice and 1980s Trump.

So much of the battle for Twitter is simply about words. Words control ideology, which ultimately controls the people. Musk’s objection to how Twitter was being managed was that they had the power to decide what words were allowed, what jokes were allowed, and what news stories were allowed, and that, he rightly believed, was not only destroying Twitter but it was destroying our country too and everything we value.

I’ve heard people say that Elon Musk cares what people think of him, as though they’ve cast him as a supervillain with no feelings or compassion. Why wouldn’t he care? Not many people can take that level of incoming and wipe the slate clean the next day.

But we need him. We need more people like him to thrust a bold middle finger at the information monopoly the Left controls. We need more people with courage to carve a path out of this crippling sea of misery we’ve created. We need role models who are resilient and who send the message to the young that words are just words. We can survive them.

Musk is still a superhero for the modern age, smart enough to notice what threatens our civilization, brave enough to speak up about it, and rich enough to buy Twitter for 44 billion.

The tweets by the blue-checks that they seem to think matter are just cyber dust - a layer of data to trap them in time as people who were caught up in their own unearned importance before the whole thing came collapsing down, before Twitter and this country were wrestled free from their grasp.

“In a country that doesn't discriminate between fame and infamy, the latter presents itself as plainly more achievable.” ― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

Audrey/Aiden and Riley Gaines

If we had strong leaders in the White House, which we do not, they would have stepped up to a podium somewhere after the mass shooting at Christian Covenant and the attack on champion swimmer, Riley Gaines by trans activists and tried to lower the temperature.

Instead, just days after the shooting, the President took the opportunity to blame Republicans, especially those in Tennessee still reeling from a shocking massacre at a Christian school.

“Weimar Germany conjures up fears of what can happen when there is simply no societal consensus on how to move forward and every minor difference becomes a cause of existential political battles,” ― Eric D. Weitz, Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy

Just two years into the Joe Biden presidency, it has become abundantly clear that the only people actively trying to destroy this country are the Democrats and the cult that has overtaken them.

How much worse could it possibly get than a former President of the United States indicted in the city that made him on a case that no one believes in good faith was legitimate? No government that believes in America would ever do such a thing to rip this country apart, especially after COVID, after the Summer of 2020, and after January 6th.

“Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form.” ― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

In 2016, Donald Trump became the 45th President of the United States. Like all presidents, he was elected to do the best job he could in service of the American people. Our elections are meant to tell our government what we want. But somewhere along the way, we’ve lost touch with what this country was designed to be - a Constitutional Republic.

We don’t go through the trouble of elections to have them systematically undermined because the administrative state, and an elite ruling class, don’t like dealing with someone they can’t control. We don’t spend four years throwing everything at our elected leaders to see what sticks. We don’t send our Department of Justice to raid the home of a former president to “find something.” We don’t punish our elected leaders just for the crime of winning.

We don’t indict them on ticky-tack procedural matters because the person now in the White House is too weak and too unpopular to win a second term. In this country, it’s supposed to be a fair contest between those who win the primary elections. Putting that heavy of a thumb on the scale is corruption on a level we’ve never seen, at least not in my lifetime.

Because the truth is, it was never really about Trump. It was about us. What we were before Trump, what we did while Trump was in office, and what we’re doing now. Sooner or later, the clock is going to run out on this madness. Democrats can’t live with or without Trump.

It’s kind of amazing that there was ever a time in American life when we pledged ourselves one Nation under God, isn’t it? It seems we are no longer that and have become fractured into many different nations, not even just two. But it does seem very clear that a new religion is upon us.

Utopias by their nature have only two options if they’re to survive. They must lean into totalitarianism or collapse. We’re now at the moment when the Democrats, with complete control of the legacy media, nearly all major institutions of power — including those run by the government — are slowly adopting totalitarian practices to shut out speech they don’t like.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So let’s have it, one last dance.

How is it possible that the highest-grossing, best-reviewed film of the year - by critics and audiences - that was credited with saving the film industry amid near-total collapse would not be winning Best Picture at the Oscars on Sunday, March 12th?

President Biden is anxious to take his rightful place in history as a real president, not an establishment stooge who kicked around congress for decades, or a guy who has to be told where to stand, what to say, where to go.

“The modus operandi of every cult is to convince you there's something wrong with you and only they can fix it.” ― Marty Rubin

I grew up in the era of cults. My siblings and I attended a small elementary school in Topanga Canyon back in the 1970s, when it was still a wilderness of hippies and health food stores - not a safe haven for the 1%.

We were heathens, without a doubt, raised like weeds by a former beauty queen who had dropped out of high school at 16 to have my older brother. She met my father at a nightclub called Pandora’s Box in Hollywood. If you look carefully you can see it in the background of Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

This is the podcast version. If you’d like to read the text version, that is here.

I usually post them together but this time I didn’t. Which do you prefer?

“The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.” John Steinbeck, East of Eden

A few days ago, the most powerful, high-profile news media in this country were thoroughly humiliated by Jeff Gerth at the Columbia Journalism Review with a four-part series called The Press Versus The President.

Fair-minded and stubbornly objective, this awards-worthy piece of investigative journalism, begins the hard work of sifting through the past seven years to try to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

“I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical. Unsuccesful rebellions indeed generally establish the incroachments on the rights of the people which have produced them. An observation of this truth should render honest republican governors so mild in their punishment of rebellions, as not to discourage them too much. It is a medecine necessary for the sound health of government.” ― Thomas Jefferson, Letters of Thomas Jefferson

The Great Uprising

I grew up as a child of the 1970s where I watched the rise and fall of the counterculture protest movements that included everything from Kent State to Patti Hearst, the bombing of the Capitol, the Black Panthers, Gloria Steinem, and eventually, the Manson murders would douse the flames and drive the silent majority far, far away from the Left. I also remember Nixon’s landslide win in 1972 and how hopeless that made everyone on the Left feel, like all of it had been for nothing.

2016 was meant to be the crowning achievement for the Hillary Democrat. Those who stuck by her in her in 2008, during the Benghazi hearings, the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the non-stop criticisms of her during Bill Clinton’s presidency, and the early feminists who followed her leadership out of college and into politics that would eventually make the impossible possible: The first woman President of the United States.

I was one of them. The more research I did on the life and career of Hillary Rodham Clinton the more I came to respect and admire her. I made videos, I fought hard on Twitter with Trump supporters and “Bernie bros.” I wrote essay after essay on Medium to boost enthusiasm.

Do you remember good movies? I mean, really good movies you had to see in the movie theater the second they came out? Movies so good you would sacrifice your grocery money to see? Do you remember lining up for hours on opening day?

I do. I didn’t just watch movies, I lived in them. I grew up on top of a mountain in Topanga Canyon, back when it wasn’t a gated community for the 1% but was instead the land of the hippies - the Manson Family and the Rolling Stones.

Two years ago, I started this Substack to find a path out of the madness that had overtaken the Left. The madness was everywhere. People were getting fired right and left, mostly left, for saying words they weren’t supposed to say. There was a sudden climate of fear that was crippling nearly every institution of power, most especially the one I work in: Hollywood.

The fear was that there were racists and rapists everywhere and in everything. Sex and race became two major mass hysteria events in this country after the election of Donald Trump in 2016. To Trump supporters, his win was nothing less than a miracle. A smart strategy involving a few key swing states to bring in a slim Electoral College victory, mainly with the help of Facebook’s micro-targeting.

“And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” ― George Orwell, 1984

Jamie Raskin wants to tell you a story. It’s one that has tumbled around in his brain for years now. It’s also one he hopes to make his name on. Jamie Raskin: hero at long last.

All he had to do was stand before the American people and pretend that President Trump planned an “insurrection,” an overthrow of the United States government. How hard could that be? He’d already tried to impeach him twice, along with Democrats and a handful of Never-Trumpers. All of this worked so beautifully in the midterms to scare voters away from MAGA. Let’s keep it going, they think.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As the new owner of Twitter, Elon Musk is, to quote, Ben Shapiro, moving fast and breaking things. He could see a big problem, as anyone outside the media feedback loop can. Twitter had become not just the propaganda arm of the State, but was being used as a filter to dodge the First Amendment, to police thought and speech.

They didn’t do it directly or overtly. They did it alongside enthusiastic “good soldiers” for the State. The users - the blue-checks - and the employees saw themselves as the #resistance. To them, banning Trump was spiking their flag at Iwo Jima. They won, or so they thought.

Old Journalism Ethics | Rivers

“We're under a lot of pressure, you know, and you put us there. Nothing's riding on this except the, uh, first amendment to the Constitution, freedom of the press, and maybe the future of the country.” - Ben Bradlee, All the President’s Men

The break-in at the Democratic National Committee was small-time, ticky-tacky surveillance to get dirt on Nixon’s opponents for his upcoming re-election bid. When the burglars were caught, but for the efforts of the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, Nixon would have served his second term after his landslide win in 1972. But that was back when we had the kind of journalists who were not afraid to hold the powerful to account. How the mighty have fallen.

When Jack Dorsey invented a chat-like social media platform with character limitations, he probably had no idea it would one day become the most powerful propaganda tool this country, this world, has ever known.

The danger was always that any Big Tech platform, let alone three of the biggest, would one day be under the control of one political party. In 2020, the combination of lockdowns and violent protests of the Summer and January 6th led to the mass formation of hundreds of millions of Americans under the thumb of what Mattias Desmet calls technocratic totalitarianism.

Why is Twitter so important? To quote the movie Jaws, when Quint tells Brody to toss more chum in the water to attract the shark, Brody says, “Let Hooper take a turn.” Quint says back, “Hooper drives the boat, Chief.”

Twitter drives the boat, Chief.

“A Native American elder once described his own inner struggles in this manner: Inside of me there are two dogs. One of the dogs is mean and evil. The other dog is good. The mean dog fights the good dog all the time. When asked which dog wins, he reflected for a moment and replied, The one I feed the most.” ― George Bernard Shaw

28 years ago, I escaped real life for life online.

I was desperate, you see, to find an escape. I had made such a mess of things when I found the internet in 1994. It was, for me, a huge relief. So much of what I struggled with in real life vanished online. You could be anyone, but more importantly, you could say anything you wanted to say.

This turned out to be a lifesaver for me. I just wanted to write and write and write without my physical self being part of the equation. All people knew about me was the words I chose to type on a screen. It was such a thrill at first. “You’ve got mail!” AOL said. How to put into words what that felt like. Now I figure it must have been good old-fashioned dopamine hitting my brain.