Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone
Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone
Biden's America - A Society That Has Given Up on Itself
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Biden's America - A Society That Has Given Up on Itself

Courage and Leadership are in Short Supply
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“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.

But this is no ordinary government. This is a government that has given up the American experiment, opting instead for a bloated Superstate with its own permanent propaganda press, show trials, a vast network of surveillance to police its own citizens, and a society headed for collapse.

I believed the lie that Trump brought the chaos and that if Biden won, things would calm down. But now we know it wasn’t Trump at all. It was them.

It has to be one long emergency because if it isn’t, and the ball finally stops spinning, then they have to face themselves, and they will have to hang their heads in shame for what they’ve done.

That’s why Trump is a necessary component of their definition of themselves. Without that imminent threat, they can’t keep pushing their ideology on the rest of us to “fix” this broken country. They can say don’t look at us as long as he's a threat. Look at him.

Trump supporters might have chanted “lock her up” at rallies, and that alone was meant to be fascism. Now, the Biden administration actually does it, locking up protesters for years by now, many of them thrown into solitary confinement and languishing in jail with no charges brought. They do this with impunity because no one in the mainstream legacy media gives a damn. Throw them away like human garbage.

The Biden administration plans to lock Trump up even on flimsy charges. It will be too late for the legacy media to stop them when that happens. After beating the drum for prison for seven long years, they will have no choice but to go along with it. It will then be left to history, to tell the truth the legacy media won’t:

They rely on Trump the way Big Brother relied on Goldstein in 1984.

The violence we’re seeing on the Left, that we’ve been seeing, that our media has ignored, is being praised and encouraged by most of the Democrats. Do they see it at all? Do they have any idea how it’s escalating and intensifying? One mass shooting already and another stopped before it could be carried out, both by self-identified transgender people right in the middle of an ongoing culture war.

The activists quickly pivoted to guns to distract from the potential story of what actually could be happening to these young people. Guns, as always, the catch-all for their problems. Guns and Republicans. They’re fascists, they say, as they get a little too close and a little too loud. Where is this all going?

At the same time, we have a government silencing the energized protesters on the Right. They’re doing worse than silencing. They’re treating them like terrorists. If any MAGA supporters showed up and did exactly what the Left has been doing in Tennessee, all of them would be thrown in jail.

It seems that the New Left, at the hands of the religious fanatics, has become a kind of death cult, where they’re under constant threat of being murdered by police if they’re Black, or wiped out in a genocide if they’re transgender. All of that fear, all of that rage, and no leader to calm things down, or to make an effort to unite the country, just a bunch of Democrats who are still burned about Trump and 2016.

How it Started

On the Left, we’d been convinced we had the upper hand in 2016, where Trump was concerned because we cast him as a dumb, tacky reality TV star. We didn’t just underestimate him as a speaker and a politician. We turned him into a caricature we could stick in the corner wearing a dunce cap.

Pivoting from Trump the Clown to Trump, the existential threat was, for the Left - aka all of the cultural, political, and institutional power —a shock that meant this was a country they no longer could trust, not the people in it, not its elections, not even its Constitution.

His win shattered every myth about the Left’s power, including the idea that we were so awesome everyone wants to be us, right? Wrong. A slap in the face on that large of a scale meant that suddenly the dominant society that drove much of this country had their notions of reality shattered. There was no preparing for it. Now, we’ve become a society that no longer believes in itself.

There was a moment to find clarity, even unity, perhaps. But that would have required answering why Trump got so popular in the first place —how and why he was preferable to millions in this country.

I didn’t understand it either. It took me a long time and a lot of work doing my own research, watching his rallies, and listening to and getting to know his supporters.

But what really did it for me was driving across the country. I saw so many love letters to Trump. They were on trailers and lawns. They were on bumpers. Pop-up booths selling Trump gear were everywhere.

So I just started taking pictures of what I saw. I was moved by it. It was a country I didn’t know from my apartment in the city and a life spent online.

It’s not really possible to understand the why of Trump unless you know this country state by state. There is so much of it in between the two coasts, yet the Democrats can’t see it because to them, Trump and his supporters are the nation’s greatest threat. Imagine thinking that and then thinking you should be leading such a big melting pot of a country.

Say what you will about Trump, but it’s rare to have a president that can reach so many different kinds of people and most of them working class. By contrast, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have no connection to any of them and somehow they think this is a good plan.

Those who run this country have to believe in it, have to believe in all of it.

If you believe in this country, you don’t prosecute a former president just because the ladies of The View and Joe Scarborough, Rob Reiner, or Jon Stewart demand it. You don’t tell a blatant lie like, “No one is above the law.” Wanna bet? Do they think the American people are that stupid?

A Wrecking Ball

A society that has given up on itself snatches the American Dream away from impressionable young minds who would otherwise see this country as nothing but wide open spaces. The Left seems to believe that this country should be defined by the worst things about it instead of the best.

The movies they make, the stories they write, the constant coddling of their audiences is nauseating. How about we teach our children that America is a free country built on hope and idealism?

Instead, the leaders of the Left can’t imagine all of us getting along anymore. We have to be divided up, told we don’t have a culture or any kind of national pride for our backgrounds if we’re white. Only people of color can celebrate their cultures. White people have to be told to shut up and be good allies. How is this a healthy way to bring the country together? How does this foster achievement, self-confidence, or patriotism?

But if it isn’t enough to destroy children by categorizing them as “oppressor” or “oppressed” and that they are born with this unchangeable fate, they somehow now tell them that while they can never change their skin color, they can easily change their sex. They’ve handed all of this power to babies, to toddlers, to adolescents, as though they’re some kind of magical spirit, a holy birth that may or may not produce a miracle. That’s way too much pressure to put on them.

How sad that this is where the social justice movement has arrived, fretting over what gender their child might be instead of just getting to know them and love them as they are.

They want to be able to teach this nonsense in every elementary school to indoctrinate them with America’s new religion. They now believe they have all of the answers and it’s only a matter of programming the young.

But America doesn’t need fixing. It needs tender, loving care. It needs people who have faith in this experiment, this unruly teenager of a country that can’t quite get it together.

Why is it suddenly so important to condition or indoctrinate kids? Why do they demonize parents, who are trying to protect them with healthy boundaries, as promoters of hate? They do that because the first thing all cults do is separate children from their parents, like Jim Jones or David Koresh, or Charles Manson.

They’ve turned it into something beyond tweens making order out of chaos on Tumblr back in 2013. Now it’s become a Doomsday Cult where an entire generation of young people believes that if they aren’t given puberty blockers or irreversible surgeries to make them into the opposite sex, they will commit suicide.

They use suicide as a threat but also a promise. This is complete insanity, yet it’s somehow become an accepted norm, sanctioned by the Biden Administration.

This debate has us all being forced to choose one extreme or the other. Either we’re all in or all out. If we’re all in, we have to defy everything we know about science and human evolution just to ensure these young people don’t kill themselves. If we’re all out, we have to refuse to use preferred pronouns or accept that there are transgender people out there. Most of us are in the middle.

Says Camille Paglia:

It is in these times that authoritarianism often arises because we need structure. We need other people. We need to feel like we belong. But a society that has given up on itself believes serving oneself is the road to true happiness. Maybe the only road.

And while it is cause for alarm, we also know that if we have faith in ourselves and if we have not given up on our country, we can find our way through this moment because we always have. But if we condemn or deny or erase our history we’ll never know that this too shall pass.

How can we feel our feet on the ground or trust what our world has become if we no longer understand or accept the simple definitions of words like men and women, boy and girl?

We need our male heroes. We need our mothers. We need to tie them to past generations and to our own history. We need masculinity, and if all we do is punish it, diminish it and try to eradicate it, there is nothing else that can take its place.

There is no hope or plan for the future at the hands of today’s Left. They seem to have no problem sterilizing children through “gender affirming care,” which must be the first time in history since the Eugenics era that this has been the case.

While it’s true that they aren’t forcing it upon children, we also know, or used to know, that children can’t consent to anything, especially changes to their bodies they can’t reverse.

We have both a crisis of mental health and generations that can’t survive without their help. Almost every child is diagnosed with something and prescribed something to become a patient for life.

This has led to a generation that believes there has to be something wrong with them just to fit in. They value victimhood, so they have to be eternal victims. Where will that get them in life?

This is both the product of a culture that has become disconnected from real life outside virtual spaces, and a consumer culture that gives everyone exactly what they need, exactly when they need it, from maps to shopping, to porn, to entertainment. Who even needs to go anywhere or see anyone?

Yet we know this is ending badly. We know our kids are in crisis. We know something is very, very wrong here.

From the WSJ poll:

Some 23% of adults under age 30 said in the new survey that patriotism was very important to them personally, compared with 59% of seniors ages 65 or older. Some 31% of younger respondents said that religion was very important to them, compared with 55% among seniors.

Only 23% of adults under age 30 said that having children was very important.

The future will depend on those who build things. Families, businesses, ideas, and communities. Where will these leaders come from if we are in such dire straights?

“Honest and Unmerciful”

Joe Biden has a secret weapon. It’s a magic mirror of sorts, that reassures him with praise every time he gazes into it. The journalists who cover him know that they must always report good news for Biden, lest they be greeted by an army of well-educated, articulate keyboard warriors who will beat them down until they apologize and retract everything they just said.

Remember the days of robust, ethical journalism that we saw in All the President’s Men or in Almost Famous, where a young journalist is warned by an older and wiser journalist, “You have to make your reputation on being honest and unmerciful?”

Those days are gone, brother. The only evidence that still exists that Rolling Stone was once a cutting-edge magazine is Matt Taibbi, who no longer works there and is instead writing here on Substack.

The Democrats and the Left want to see Trump go to jail, even if it’s a weak case. They want what they’ve been promised and are perfectly happy to corrupt the justice system to give them the relief they so desire.

Now think about the times in history when that was true, when angry mobs and dehumanization took the place of due process. What does that make them? What does that make this moment?

This country at the hands of the Democrats, and the Left, has become a society that no longer believes in itself. They’re ready to pack it in and head for the online frontier where they can live in a well-policed virtual bubble that has no connection to their fleshy selves, no memory of what came before, human bodies that can be cut up and pieced back together again as something and someone new.

They can leave behind the rest of us, those who still remember that life is worth living because life exists on the outside, where there are still forests and oceans, first dates, rootbeer floats, small town parades, Sunday matinees, roasted marshmallows by the fire, the sunset over the city.

It’s a beautiful world, and we’re lucky to live in the greatest country ever built. If you don’t believe in it, don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

Happy Easter and Passover.

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Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone
Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone
Essays on politics and culture from Sasha Stone's Substack. A former Democrat and Leftist who escaped the bubble to get to know the other side of the country and to take a more critical look at the left. Sashastone.substack.com