Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone
Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone
Can Elon Musk Save the Democrats from Themselves?
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Can Elon Musk Save the Democrats from Themselves?

A Big Win for Free Speech, a Catastrophe for the Blue-Checks
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As we head into the midterm elections, our virtual civil war all too often is fought on social media, as each side battles daily to capture the media narrative. Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter felt like a major win for the real “resistance.” He is our Luke Skywalker, one of our last best hopes for freedom against the Empire.

Today’s battle - how to position the Paul Pelosi assault. The Left and their allies in the Never Trump movement - the Max Boots, the Rick Wilsons, the Steve Schmidts, and the Tim Millers — want this to only be about MAGA. They’re still hoping to shut down one of the few grassroots movements left in America. They don’t have anything to offer to help Americans feel safer, build a nest egg, bring back common sense in our schools, eke out a decent life for their children, map out a future. They don’t have anything to sell but fear.

On the Right, they’re trying to point out that the media ignores acts of violence against Conservatives like Bret Kavanaugh, Lee Zeldin, or Steve Scalise. And where is the lie? We know they ignored those threats. We know they want the public to see working-class Americans as “domestic terrorists.” They’re willing to distort any tragedy to make that case, even involving a severely disturbed man off the streets of San Francisco who has been lost to crime, drugs, and homelessness, much like the city itself.

San Francisco has become a dystopian hellhole, yet the only thing the media wants to talk about is, you guessed it, Trump. That’s their closing pitch to the American people. Forget about everything else and be very afraid of Trump and his supporters.

It was never a winning pitch to begin with.

After Elon Musk bought Twitter, the Democrats, the blue-checks, and the media had every opportunity to get a grip to start confronting some of the hard realities they’ve shoved down the memory hole. But they did the exact opposite because of course they did. They went after Musk with both guns blazing.

Musk made the mistake of tweeting a response to Hillary Clinton’s typically hyperbolic tweet in reaction to the Paul Pelosi assault. Upon realizing it was “fake news,” Musk deleted it. That mistake was all the opening they needed to drive the narrative that Musk was spreading misinformation.

But instead of allowing the tweet to be deleted, many of the blue-checks recreated it and then spread it far and wide to make musk look bad, which is what they’re going to be doing every second of ever day from now on. They will simply substitute Trump for Musk as their new bad guy. It would be funny if it weren’t so sad.

When you see famous people tweet the most extreme reactions, and those reactions get 100K likes, that distorts reality for the media and for the Democrats. It often snowballs into 24 to 48 hours of pure unfiltered hysteria. The Democrats follow this same pattern, which is why they seem so out of touch much of the time.

Poor Rob Reiner. The man has lost his mind with his Twitter addiction. His Tweets are becoming more extreme by the minute. He’s like Lloyd Bridges in Airplane.

Twitter’s alpha voices seem to work from the premise that whatever they decide is true on the platforms the Left dominates — Twitter, Facebook, the Google Empire — becomes the consensus writ large. But it doesn’t. That Pelosi story Musk referred to was already all over Tik Tok, which reaches far more people than Twitter ever will.

The Left’s singular focus on the riot of January 6th, as though it was the only riot Americans lived through that terrible year, looks plain weird to reasonable people.

The media might have memory-holed the Summer of 2020, but the American people haven’t. They remember the violence, the burning cities, the deaths, and the autonomous zones. They remember “defund the police” and the crime wave that followed. They remember lockdowns until the Left decided it was time to protest, then they were allowed to pour into the streets.

Voters are starting to realize by now that they’re only getting a curated version of the day’s news, depending on which side they’re on.

Most people who live in the real world are not on Twitter. They’re baffled by how out of touch the Democrats seem to be. Their worries don’t seem to be what the Democrats are worried about. They get a lot of “let them eat cake” from their elected leaders. They’re shamed for caring about gas prices, the cost of food, and their rent increases. “Shut up,” their rulers say, “and buy an electric car.”

The Democrats can’t solve the problems the Americans face because they can’t even talk about them. No one on the Left really can. They are too afraid of Twitter. Yes, the little bird app functions as the defacto thought police that enforces the Left’s ideology daily. Anyone who steps out of line will be dragged into the public square and humiliated into compliance.

“2+2=5, say it!”

They can’t deal with the spikes in crime because of their ideology of “systemic racism,” and police reform means they blame the police, always. They can’t confront what’s happening in our schools with Critical Race Theory and Gender Ideology because it is strictly forbidden. They can’t confront the energy crisis because of their stance on climate change. They leave many Americans, especially those who don’t use Twitter, twisting in the wind.

They have, without realizing it, orchestrated their own demise.

If Democrats lose both houses of Congress, they will be forced to do some soul-searching. When looking at why it all went so wrong, they should look no further than their reliance upon Twitter.

Twitter is the biggest obstacle for the Democrats; only they haven’t realized it. They pay attention to the media narrative, which often comes straight from Twitter. They say they’re worried about “misinformation,” but they dish it out in ways that have catastrophic effects on the public. The media doesn’t talk about it, so it’s never properly addressed.

How many major news stories were flat-out wrong? Some have led to real-world violence.

When police shot Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin, the city burned to the ground before the truth came out about who he was and why he was there.

Here is a story from Vogue on August 24th:

Protests have broken out in Kenosha, Wisconsin, after local police were caught on video shooting Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old unarmed Black man, in the back at close range on Sunday night while Blake’s three sons were nearby, in his car.

A video shows Blake walking towards the car, closely followed by a white officer with his weapon drawn. Blake is seen opening the car door while an officer pulls at his shirt, then, the sound of several gunshots is heard. Blake was airlifted to a Milwaukee hospital in serious condition, police said, and the Wisconsin Department of Justice is investigating. The officers involved in Blake’s shooting have been placed on administrative leave, although it hasn’t yet been made clear why those officers initially confronted Blake at the scene. Attorney Ben Crump, who initially posted the video, tweeted that Blake was leaving the scene after “breaking up a fight between two women.”

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris expressed their support of Blake before the facts of the case were brought to light.

As it turned out, Blake was armed with a knife. He was not there to break up a fight. Blake’s girlfriend had called 911.

Why did it take so long for the narrative to be corrected in the Blake case? Did it have anything to do with the 2020 election? You are not allowed to even ask. You certainly weren’t back in 2020.

Kyle Rittenhouse, we were told, was a “white supremacist” who “crossed state lines” to “kill Black and Brown people.” None of that was true. The media ran with the chosen narrative for days before it was corrected.

This tweet by Ayanna Presley is still on Twitter, with 300k+ likes:

It makes no difference to the Left if they get something like this wrong. This tweet influenced how the media covered the story. They all ran with it, emboldened with certainty, convicting him in the court of public opinion without due process.

But meanwhile, the clock is ticking, and Americans are getting tired of the Democrats. No group collectively afraid of everything can be trusted to lead this country. Their closing pitch to the American people is to sell fear, more fear, and nothing but fear. That might work for the party’s dwindling base, but it is not a great motivator for people with real problems.

The sad truth is that Twitter and the media, not to mention the Democrats, have always needed Trump more than he needs any of them. He is their Golden Goose. He drives ratings, the one they blame for all of their failings.

Trump challenged the most powerful people in the world, including the Clinton, the Obama, and the Bush families. He insulted and offended all of them and moved like a giant middle finger cutting through a frosted cake. They made sure he paid for that by sabotaging his presidency. Trump was not “allowed” to be President, not really. All of the same powerful forces brought him down we’re about to see those same forces go at Elon Musk.

They will hit him with everything they have until he either becomes compliant or he abandons Twitter completely.

Now, as I watch them, a once mighty party and people, they have become defined by their desperation. They will say anything, they will take the country anywhere, no matter how extreme, to cling to power.

When does it end? In 2020, we were all supposed to look the other way as they amassed extraordinary amounts of power to bring down Trump, whom they considered an existential threat. Two years later, they haven’t let go of it. It’s still one long emergency.

The best thing for the Democrats and the country is not just to be taken out of power but to have that power, culturally and politically, diminished on Twitter.

If all Elon Musk does with Twitter is destroy it, he will have done humanity a favor. Both sides use Twitter to manipulate and win the narrative, but the Left stands to lose more because they always were the standard bearers of objectivity. That’s gone. If they can disconnect from Twitter, they might find their way back to what they once were.

It’s long past time to take the thought-police out of power. Time to bring back free speech, free thought, free expression and dissent. Musk, as the richest non-compilant man in the world, can help bring the power back to the people. And that is surely worth everything.

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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