Thank YOU so much, Sasha Stone, for your brilliant writing and your courage!
I thank Elon Musk for giving us the concept of the "woke mind virus."
It helps me understand the phenomenon that way, as a mass mental illness. As you described, a mass hysteria driven by narcissists. It's like the worst and weakest things in our U.S. culture suddenly ignited, caught fire, and are burning up Western civilization.
The hope I feel is tentative and intermittent. It is based mostly on the fact that people like you are speaking out about what you see and hear and what you really think.
The perspectives of the woke are so mind-bending. People who express perspectives like the ones you present in your article are called "right wing" now. My Democrat friends say to me, "I hope you're not becoming a Trumpette!" An acquaintance said (not in my presence) that she wanted me to join her Progressive Democratic social circle because it was so unusual to talk to "someone from the other side who is reasonable."
The woke pretend to embrace Critical Theory but they don't apply it to themselves. Philosophies that are embraced by the people in power, the rich, the establishment, are philosophies that support their power. They are belief systems that provide the moral justifications for shifting more and more power and privilege to the people who already have it.
I am what I have always been, a radical, an independent thinker. The Democrats are no longer "left" or "liberal," let alone "radical." The woke constantly reverse the meaning of words to disguise the true nature of what they do. They are the System now, and all they serve is the power of those who have it.
I’ve made similar cross country drives to see my own kids - it’s a stunningly eye-opening experience. The country is NOT LA, NYC, etc. I spent a decade as a resident of Greenwich Village - I understand the blindness. There was once a famous New Yorker cover illustrating the phenomenon. But today, more than ever, I think such a drive is soul-changing. It’s harder to lump people into absurdly condemned categories when they are right in front of you, making you a cup of coffee....
Thanks to brave people like you, who have been willing to look at reality instead of frantically virtue signaling while cringing in fear, I have hope for the first time in several years. You are helping to build a coalition of those who, despite different political views, understand that this madness needs to stop.
A perfect way to start our new year, reading your latest essay. Thanks for the inspiration and hope that we have, indeed, turned the corner toward freedom.
Great work. I love and admire the way you succinctly articulate the heart of the matter. The Shawshank piece seems particularly apropos considering Tim Robbins’ recent observations about the Covid lock downs. There is hope even in Hollywood.
It sounds like a broken record but thanks for your writing and sharing your thoughts. Keep doing what you’re doing. The pendulum will swing back.
Jan 1, 2023·edited Jan 1, 2023Liked by Sasha Stone
"This guy never cared about the climate or the environment. He cared about his image. He wanted the pats on the back from his peers. For the Left, virtue signaling is more important than even reducing your carbon footprint."
That is exactly who they are.
Um... I think Trump was the first to risk everything, not Elon(and I love and appreciate what Elon is doing).
Trump has lost 1/3 of his net worth, several costly investigations, and still possibly his freedom and his UniParty enemies have found NOTHING. Nothing. Do not forget it. Several of his friends' lives have been ruined by Leftist Lawfare. The shit this guy has had to put up with since coming down the elevator couldnt have been handled by many others.
I found you through your comments on Matt Taibbi's Substack, and have really come to appreciate your common sensical perspective, especially as I think we might be about the same age. Decided to start off the new year by subscribing. Looking forward to more of your posts and wishing you all the best.
Another verbal gem that resonates with me. I love your trip photos. Also the music, book and movie excerpts tie in to your ruminating so nicely, giving a creative flair to what you are conveying.
I too have seen glimmers of restoring what has been lost the last few years - the ability to speak freely without fear of punishment. I still can’t, for instance, fully comprehend how the government has incarcerated so many of the J6 protesters, for so long, in such squalid pre trial conditions. This is not the America known for giving reign to free speech, due process, freedom of choice ... and so many other non-restrictive ways to express yourself that are absent in other countries.
Thanks for this well-thought-out piece. The problem is indeed the Left, and its determination that nothing will be satisfactory until it holds all effective power. It's odd that we should be expected to hand power over to those who can't find good in anything, like a woman marring an angry, demanding perfectionist and thinking it will all work out because he'll change. But of course, it won't.
One good thing about 2022 for me has been discovering your red-pilled writings. Keep it up! It matters.
Jan 1, 2023·edited Jan 1, 2023Liked by Sasha Stone
Happy New Year, Sasha! Safe travels back to Babylon! I've been waiting for your next dispatch with great anticipation. Your writing did not disappoint.
"They can’t stand that one bee has strayed from the hive, from the established order of things. They can’t stand someone like Musk humanizing the Right, thinking the Babylon Bee is funny and opening his heart to the exiled. They, we, must renounce Trump and his supporters — agree with their hysteria and false narrative, or we too are the bad people, the extremists."
Truth. However, I, for one, will not renounce Trump – your former fellow lefitsts can call me a bad person, an extremist, a deplorable – as long as they smile when they say it!
"And if they think Trump is threatening, they should get a look at Ron DeSantis. He too has a broad coalition that is not driven by 'White Rage.'"
When Trump leaves this world, the left will undoubtedly celebrate as though it were New Year's Eve all over again, and then they will be faced with their monster being gone, and it won't be replaced so easily. Nominally, yes, it will likely be DeSantis, but he won't be so easily caricatured as he is nowhere near as polarizing as is Trump.
---
"Everywhere I look there are pieces of our American past. The Revolutionary War. The Civil War. World War II. The Vietnam War. There are monuments everywhere. All of that happened to America the place...We’ve had uprisings, riots, and protests throughout our history and we had many in the Trump years."
If that isn't the American way, I'm not sure what is! I might have even supported the uprisings and protests that occurred while Trump was in office had they not turned violent and destructive – truly peaceful protests reveal some legitimacy. Though, the antifa violence predated Trump's election – there was some kind of UN economic gathering in Seattle before the election of 2016 and there was virtually no official governmental response to preserve law and order in the face of antifa running riot.
---
"There was no other way the South was letting go of slavery. It wasn’t just about their wealth and prosperity with slave labor."
I must differ with you on this point, however. Such a conclusion is understandable, but with some additional analysis, it might be different. Some things to consider:
- Not everyone was a slave owner. By and large, only plantation owners also owned slaves, and they were not the majority of the population. Most folks were tradesmen of one kind or another, merchants, and laborers who undoubtedly benefited from a certain amount of business with the plantations, but it likely wasn't enough to drive the entire economy, even locally.
- The south, at that time, wasn't as prosperous as your conclusion suggests – the tariffs on goods manufactured by the south were prohibitive. They were choking off what prosperity there was.
"It was a point of pride for them."
- Most of the non-slave-owning people of the south weren't as pro-slavery as they were anti-occupation by the union army. For that reason, why shouldn't it be a point of pride? Not all slave owners were abusive to their slaves (see our founding fathers, some who were slave owners, themselves), and not all were opposed to their emancipation. My recommendation is to read as much of the late Shelby Foote's writing on The War of Northern Aggression (oka The Civil War) as possible to gain a more rounded understanding of that period of our nation's history.
"That’s why it resonated for centuries later in the South, why Jim Crow laws were put in place, and how they created a criminal class and prevented the upward mobility of the newly freed slaves. They dehumanized them in unforgivable ways."
I submit that it resonated for centuries had more to do with a handful of folks who, embittered by the terms of surrender to the union, sought their revenge in controlling and oppressing those who represented that embarrassing defeat. None of it is to be excused, but there is a faint parallel between the union, in effect, punishing the confederate states for their impertinence, and how Europe and the US punished Germany after the War to End All Wars. In this case, it was dehumanizing those who benefited from a union victory but had little part in effecting it than a nationalist war machine rising from the ashes. Inexcusable and unforgivable, and today, we would recognize these kinds of people as leftists.
"There is no way to justify it in retrospect."
Justifiable or not, what ought to be the objective is to understand why it occurred in the first place. Please remember that Lincoln, himself, was not exactly anti-slavery – he only became so for the purpose of a desired outcome.
"Everything about it was horrific. The heroes were those willing to put it on the line and fight, and die, to end it."
We'll have to agree to disagree, per the above.
"It was also about the future - the expansion of the country and whether slavery would be included."
Indeed. What is clear now only in retrospect, is that the practice of slavery was doomed by the advance of agricultural technology. Eventually, machinery would make the practice of slavery obsolete.
---
"They want to stop the creation of a 1984-Super-State based on Marxist ideology."
"But can this be stopped?"
I want to believe it can, but am less than convinced.
"Would people be willing to die for that? I’m not so sure."
Be sure that I would be – but to paraphrase Patton, I'd rather make the other s.o.b. die for preserving the status quo.
"The war isn’t going to come from the Right. It will come from the Left if the Right ever manages to take power again."
In that case, let's get it on.
---
"I have to believe that Musk’s revolutionary act will inspire others to take those kinds of risks, let the darts and daggers fly, to help us save our future."
I am with you, one hundred percent – but the real battle is with the ones who, like it or not, ultimately own the access to the internet – AWS, The Alphabet Corporation – what they did to Parler, they can do to any entity that poses enough of an existential threat.
---
"That’s what I keep hoping for now. A cleansing, healing rain."
Don't we all? That, and soon.
"I don’t know where all of this ends up but for the first time, as we head into 2023, I have hope...Hope, the thing with feathers that perches on the soul. Hope, like a rainbow. Hope, like a miracle. Hope, like the rain."
I'm going to have to borrow some of yours. Just keep writing.
"...thank you, dear readers, for your kind words of support, your friendship and your generosity."
Thank YOU, Sasha! Your awakening is, by far, the most hopeful development that has occurred, recently.
Jan 1, 2023·edited Jan 1, 2023Liked by Sasha Stone
Sasha, a good article but you are wrong about one thing - the Civil War, which really wasn't a civil war at all, wasn't fought to end slavery, it was fought to defeat the Confederacy and force the seceded states back into the Union they had left. It wasn't until late 1862, when Abe Lincoln was frustrated because of lack of support for the war, that he put out his "Emancipation Proclamation" that slaves in "rebel territory" were free, but did not free slaves in Tennessee, which had come under Union control, or the slaves states that didn't secede - Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri - or for that matter, West Virginia, which had seceded from Virginia but which was still a slave state and in the process of joining the Union. There were many pro-slavery Southerners who were against secession, including Tennessee Congressman Emerson Etheridge, the Congressman from the district I grew up in, who supported Lincoln because he had promised not to "interfere" with the practice of slavery in the seceded states. Although Tennessee had seceded, Etheridge was clerk of the House until he resigned in protest of Lincoln's proclamation (which didn't end slavery at all. Slavery ended with the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment although most states had already abolished it. Etheridge was not alone as a pro-Union Southerner.
I don't read modern Civil War "histories" although I've read numerous from the past so I'm not really familiar with McPherson. I do know that the myth that the Civil War was fought "to end slavery" was perpetrated by Northern historians AFTER the Civil War to justify the war. Fighting "to free the slaves" sounds better than fighting to subdue the South and force the seceded states back into the Union at the point of a bayonet. I well remember a conversation with a National Park ranger at Chalmette Battlefield outside New Orleans. He told me that he was a graduate of the University of North Carolina with a degree in history, and that "history" was written by Northern historians with an ax to grind.
Incidentally, I find it interesting that you posted a shot of a placard in Sullivan County, which is in far northeast Tennessee where there were very few slaves and where Unionist sentiment was strong. There were no battles or conflicts in that area and the region is not typical of the state, of which I am a native. In fact, I'm assuming you followed I-40 so you passed within 20 miles of where I grew up - and you passed right through one of the most famous battlefields of the war at Parkers Crossroads, where Nathan Bedford Forrest charged both ways and escaped from between two large Federal forces. West Tennessee, where I grew up, was the literal region of "brother against brother, father against son" with three Federal cavalry regiments including men who came from slave-owning families (and who all met disaster at the hands of Forrest's men, with many ending up at Andersonville.) There were large farms with slaves and smaller ones without. Ironically, before the war, they got along. It was secession that split them. In fact, the county I'm from voted to remain in the Union.
"Jim Crow" laws were NOT unique to the former Confederacy. In fact, there were laws pertaining to race through the United States, Segregation by law where I grew up was mainly in the form of segregated schools, which ended in the mid-sixties, in my county without incident two years after I graduated and joined the military. Incidentally, blacks weren't happy when school segregation ended.
I don't know about Twitter. I left it when they censored Trump and got back on when Elon Musk took over. I don't think I'm going to remain active on it. Twitter is basically a big waste of time.
Thank YOU so much, Sasha Stone, for your brilliant writing and your courage!
I thank Elon Musk for giving us the concept of the "woke mind virus."
It helps me understand the phenomenon that way, as a mass mental illness. As you described, a mass hysteria driven by narcissists. It's like the worst and weakest things in our U.S. culture suddenly ignited, caught fire, and are burning up Western civilization.
The hope I feel is tentative and intermittent. It is based mostly on the fact that people like you are speaking out about what you see and hear and what you really think.
The perspectives of the woke are so mind-bending. People who express perspectives like the ones you present in your article are called "right wing" now. My Democrat friends say to me, "I hope you're not becoming a Trumpette!" An acquaintance said (not in my presence) that she wanted me to join her Progressive Democratic social circle because it was so unusual to talk to "someone from the other side who is reasonable."
The woke pretend to embrace Critical Theory but they don't apply it to themselves. Philosophies that are embraced by the people in power, the rich, the establishment, are philosophies that support their power. They are belief systems that provide the moral justifications for shifting more and more power and privilege to the people who already have it.
I am what I have always been, a radical, an independent thinker. The Democrats are no longer "left" or "liberal," let alone "radical." The woke constantly reverse the meaning of words to disguise the true nature of what they do. They are the System now, and all they serve is the power of those who have it.
I’ve made similar cross country drives to see my own kids - it’s a stunningly eye-opening experience. The country is NOT LA, NYC, etc. I spent a decade as a resident of Greenwich Village - I understand the blindness. There was once a famous New Yorker cover illustrating the phenomenon. But today, more than ever, I think such a drive is soul-changing. It’s harder to lump people into absurdly condemned categories when they are right in front of you, making you a cup of coffee....
Thanks to brave people like you, who have been willing to look at reality instead of frantically virtue signaling while cringing in fear, I have hope for the first time in several years. You are helping to build a coalition of those who, despite different political views, understand that this madness needs to stop.
Thanks for your hard work, and Happy New Year!
A perfect way to start our new year, reading your latest essay. Thanks for the inspiration and hope that we have, indeed, turned the corner toward freedom.
Sasha -
Great work. I love and admire the way you succinctly articulate the heart of the matter. The Shawshank piece seems particularly apropos considering Tim Robbins’ recent observations about the Covid lock downs. There is hope even in Hollywood.
It sounds like a broken record but thanks for your writing and sharing your thoughts. Keep doing what you’re doing. The pendulum will swing back.
"This guy never cared about the climate or the environment. He cared about his image. He wanted the pats on the back from his peers. For the Left, virtue signaling is more important than even reducing your carbon footprint."
That is exactly who they are.
Um... I think Trump was the first to risk everything, not Elon(and I love and appreciate what Elon is doing).
Trump has lost 1/3 of his net worth, several costly investigations, and still possibly his freedom and his UniParty enemies have found NOTHING. Nothing. Do not forget it. Several of his friends' lives have been ruined by Leftist Lawfare. The shit this guy has had to put up with since coming down the elevator couldnt have been handled by many others.
Eloquent...prescient...full of hope!
Thank you and Happy New Year to you Ms Stone.
I found you through your comments on Matt Taibbi's Substack, and have really come to appreciate your common sensical perspective, especially as I think we might be about the same age. Decided to start off the new year by subscribing. Looking forward to more of your posts and wishing you all the best.
Leftism will collapse within itself, it always does.
As the old fashioned Liberals find themselves being attacked by
the people that they believed were their friends and colleagues
more and more of them will crossover to the libertarian side and find
themselves agreeing with conservatives.
It will take time for this transformation but it will happen.
Half the American public have voted us into a quasi socialist government
when they installed the Liar Biden.
But, the other half of Americans, the good guys will shoot our way back into
Democracy if need be.
And,… There is hope in Sasha Stone too. Happy new year and thank you for your courageous brilliant statements, the latest of which may be your best.
Just excellent. As always. Thank you and Happy Hopeful New Year!
Another verbal gem that resonates with me. I love your trip photos. Also the music, book and movie excerpts tie in to your ruminating so nicely, giving a creative flair to what you are conveying.
I too have seen glimmers of restoring what has been lost the last few years - the ability to speak freely without fear of punishment. I still can’t, for instance, fully comprehend how the government has incarcerated so many of the J6 protesters, for so long, in such squalid pre trial conditions. This is not the America known for giving reign to free speech, due process, freedom of choice ... and so many other non-restrictive ways to express yourself that are absent in other countries.
Thanks for this well-thought-out piece. The problem is indeed the Left, and its determination that nothing will be satisfactory until it holds all effective power. It's odd that we should be expected to hand power over to those who can't find good in anything, like a woman marring an angry, demanding perfectionist and thinking it will all work out because he'll change. But of course, it won't.
One good thing about 2022 for me has been discovering your red-pilled writings. Keep it up! It matters.
Happy New Year, Sasha! Safe travels back to Babylon! I've been waiting for your next dispatch with great anticipation. Your writing did not disappoint.
"They can’t stand that one bee has strayed from the hive, from the established order of things. They can’t stand someone like Musk humanizing the Right, thinking the Babylon Bee is funny and opening his heart to the exiled. They, we, must renounce Trump and his supporters — agree with their hysteria and false narrative, or we too are the bad people, the extremists."
Truth. However, I, for one, will not renounce Trump – your former fellow lefitsts can call me a bad person, an extremist, a deplorable – as long as they smile when they say it!
"And if they think Trump is threatening, they should get a look at Ron DeSantis. He too has a broad coalition that is not driven by 'White Rage.'"
When Trump leaves this world, the left will undoubtedly celebrate as though it were New Year's Eve all over again, and then they will be faced with their monster being gone, and it won't be replaced so easily. Nominally, yes, it will likely be DeSantis, but he won't be so easily caricatured as he is nowhere near as polarizing as is Trump.
---
"Everywhere I look there are pieces of our American past. The Revolutionary War. The Civil War. World War II. The Vietnam War. There are monuments everywhere. All of that happened to America the place...We’ve had uprisings, riots, and protests throughout our history and we had many in the Trump years."
If that isn't the American way, I'm not sure what is! I might have even supported the uprisings and protests that occurred while Trump was in office had they not turned violent and destructive – truly peaceful protests reveal some legitimacy. Though, the antifa violence predated Trump's election – there was some kind of UN economic gathering in Seattle before the election of 2016 and there was virtually no official governmental response to preserve law and order in the face of antifa running riot.
---
"There was no other way the South was letting go of slavery. It wasn’t just about their wealth and prosperity with slave labor."
I must differ with you on this point, however. Such a conclusion is understandable, but with some additional analysis, it might be different. Some things to consider:
- Not everyone was a slave owner. By and large, only plantation owners also owned slaves, and they were not the majority of the population. Most folks were tradesmen of one kind or another, merchants, and laborers who undoubtedly benefited from a certain amount of business with the plantations, but it likely wasn't enough to drive the entire economy, even locally.
- The south, at that time, wasn't as prosperous as your conclusion suggests – the tariffs on goods manufactured by the south were prohibitive. They were choking off what prosperity there was.
"It was a point of pride for them."
- Most of the non-slave-owning people of the south weren't as pro-slavery as they were anti-occupation by the union army. For that reason, why shouldn't it be a point of pride? Not all slave owners were abusive to their slaves (see our founding fathers, some who were slave owners, themselves), and not all were opposed to their emancipation. My recommendation is to read as much of the late Shelby Foote's writing on The War of Northern Aggression (oka The Civil War) as possible to gain a more rounded understanding of that period of our nation's history.
"That’s why it resonated for centuries later in the South, why Jim Crow laws were put in place, and how they created a criminal class and prevented the upward mobility of the newly freed slaves. They dehumanized them in unforgivable ways."
I submit that it resonated for centuries had more to do with a handful of folks who, embittered by the terms of surrender to the union, sought their revenge in controlling and oppressing those who represented that embarrassing defeat. None of it is to be excused, but there is a faint parallel between the union, in effect, punishing the confederate states for their impertinence, and how Europe and the US punished Germany after the War to End All Wars. In this case, it was dehumanizing those who benefited from a union victory but had little part in effecting it than a nationalist war machine rising from the ashes. Inexcusable and unforgivable, and today, we would recognize these kinds of people as leftists.
"There is no way to justify it in retrospect."
Justifiable or not, what ought to be the objective is to understand why it occurred in the first place. Please remember that Lincoln, himself, was not exactly anti-slavery – he only became so for the purpose of a desired outcome.
"Everything about it was horrific. The heroes were those willing to put it on the line and fight, and die, to end it."
We'll have to agree to disagree, per the above.
"It was also about the future - the expansion of the country and whether slavery would be included."
Indeed. What is clear now only in retrospect, is that the practice of slavery was doomed by the advance of agricultural technology. Eventually, machinery would make the practice of slavery obsolete.
---
"They want to stop the creation of a 1984-Super-State based on Marxist ideology."
"But can this be stopped?"
I want to believe it can, but am less than convinced.
"Would people be willing to die for that? I’m not so sure."
Be sure that I would be – but to paraphrase Patton, I'd rather make the other s.o.b. die for preserving the status quo.
"The war isn’t going to come from the Right. It will come from the Left if the Right ever manages to take power again."
In that case, let's get it on.
---
"I have to believe that Musk’s revolutionary act will inspire others to take those kinds of risks, let the darts and daggers fly, to help us save our future."
I am with you, one hundred percent – but the real battle is with the ones who, like it or not, ultimately own the access to the internet – AWS, The Alphabet Corporation – what they did to Parler, they can do to any entity that poses enough of an existential threat.
---
"That’s what I keep hoping for now. A cleansing, healing rain."
Don't we all? That, and soon.
"I don’t know where all of this ends up but for the first time, as we head into 2023, I have hope...Hope, the thing with feathers that perches on the soul. Hope, like a rainbow. Hope, like a miracle. Hope, like the rain."
I'm going to have to borrow some of yours. Just keep writing.
"...thank you, dear readers, for your kind words of support, your friendship and your generosity."
Thank YOU, Sasha! Your awakening is, by far, the most hopeful development that has occurred, recently.
Sasha,
You rock! Here’s looking forward to a better year ahead.
Sasha, a good article but you are wrong about one thing - the Civil War, which really wasn't a civil war at all, wasn't fought to end slavery, it was fought to defeat the Confederacy and force the seceded states back into the Union they had left. It wasn't until late 1862, when Abe Lincoln was frustrated because of lack of support for the war, that he put out his "Emancipation Proclamation" that slaves in "rebel territory" were free, but did not free slaves in Tennessee, which had come under Union control, or the slaves states that didn't secede - Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri - or for that matter, West Virginia, which had seceded from Virginia but which was still a slave state and in the process of joining the Union. There were many pro-slavery Southerners who were against secession, including Tennessee Congressman Emerson Etheridge, the Congressman from the district I grew up in, who supported Lincoln because he had promised not to "interfere" with the practice of slavery in the seceded states. Although Tennessee had seceded, Etheridge was clerk of the House until he resigned in protest of Lincoln's proclamation (which didn't end slavery at all. Slavery ended with the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment although most states had already abolished it. Etheridge was not alone as a pro-Union Southerner.
I don't read modern Civil War "histories" although I've read numerous from the past so I'm not really familiar with McPherson. I do know that the myth that the Civil War was fought "to end slavery" was perpetrated by Northern historians AFTER the Civil War to justify the war. Fighting "to free the slaves" sounds better than fighting to subdue the South and force the seceded states back into the Union at the point of a bayonet. I well remember a conversation with a National Park ranger at Chalmette Battlefield outside New Orleans. He told me that he was a graduate of the University of North Carolina with a degree in history, and that "history" was written by Northern historians with an ax to grind.
Incidentally, I find it interesting that you posted a shot of a placard in Sullivan County, which is in far northeast Tennessee where there were very few slaves and where Unionist sentiment was strong. There were no battles or conflicts in that area and the region is not typical of the state, of which I am a native. In fact, I'm assuming you followed I-40 so you passed within 20 miles of where I grew up - and you passed right through one of the most famous battlefields of the war at Parkers Crossroads, where Nathan Bedford Forrest charged both ways and escaped from between two large Federal forces. West Tennessee, where I grew up, was the literal region of "brother against brother, father against son" with three Federal cavalry regiments including men who came from slave-owning families (and who all met disaster at the hands of Forrest's men, with many ending up at Andersonville.) There were large farms with slaves and smaller ones without. Ironically, before the war, they got along. It was secession that split them. In fact, the county I'm from voted to remain in the Union.
"Jim Crow" laws were NOT unique to the former Confederacy. In fact, there were laws pertaining to race through the United States, Segregation by law where I grew up was mainly in the form of segregated schools, which ended in the mid-sixties, in my county without incident two years after I graduated and joined the military. Incidentally, blacks weren't happy when school segregation ended.
I don't know about Twitter. I left it when they censored Trump and got back on when Elon Musk took over. I don't think I'm going to remain active on it. Twitter is basically a big waste of time.