My admiration for Trump is not diminished by opinions about his personality. Big tech used our information to control the media creating an illusion of truth. As far as they were concerned he could not do anything right. In reality the economy was stable, people were working and there was no war. I enjoyed Sasha Stone's personal journey because it takes great courage to unfollow the the Silicon Valley supergiants.
No, there was PLENTY of war under Trump - he was just the first president in 4 decades not to start a new war. The last one before him, was Jimmy Carter.
The US was bombing Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, and Yemen during that time. Trump attempted to end the conflict in Afghanistan and Syria and the US media went into a frenzy over how horrible that would be.
That is when ABC "news" "mistakenly" aired footage from a gun show in Kentucky that was supposedly depicting of "our friends" the Kurds being slaughtered by the Turkish military.
Our "friends" the Kurds - is the PKK, something the US media never mentions, because the PKK is a communist terrorist organization. The US supports terrorists all the time, when it's convenient.
The video shows how absolutely dishonest our "news" media is. The West doesn't have actual news sources anymore. They lie constantly, and they aren't called out on their lies. Fox lies, CNN lies, the NY Times lies, PBS does, everybody does. People who tell the truth, they are all deplatformed from Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter. You're in an echo chamber if you're on any of those, and you are not allowed to point out official propaganda there.
It's very simple - if you cannot comment on some article, you're reading propaganda. If you are censored on it, or shadowbanned on it, it's propaganda. If the "terms of service" are unequally applied or disingenuously applies, it's propaganda. So, our entire news media is propaganda, and so is Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube. Substack isn't, at least not yet. Time will tell.
Thank you for your clarification Richard. I should have said there were no new wars under Trump. You are very right about the news. I'm still in the trial period with Substack as I find there are few topics I haven't already read elsewhere. Writers are here because they have started to wake up and they could not speak freely on corporate media. I have a subscription to another Substack that I struggle with because it feels like an op-ed of the NYT. The comments section is filled with elaborate words instead of simple ones and longer sentences are used to try to convey multiple ideas. They attempt to make themselves sound like they know more about a subject by using jargon terms and connecting different concepts together. Each tries to out speak the other and reading gets very tedious. There's a lot of "nuance". I'm really glad that literature is free of this.
Basically, they just laugh at the "mainstream" "news" media. Everything we are told from them are just lies, and it should be obvious by now. From weapons of mass destruction, to Qaddafi is about to cause a humanitarian crisis, to Russia hacked our election. It's all BS, all of it.
The pandemic was BS. Really, a pandemic that SUPPOSEDLY killed 0.2% of the population? Do you know what the mortality rate of smallpox was? 30%. 3 out of 10 people that got it, died from it. George Washington was thought to have become sterile because he got it.
That's exactly what I mean, these commentators have been way ahead of the game. Informing us even at their own expense. It's not just financial it's also professional.
The hope of the Internet was to end the propaganda matrix. I'm 51, I've been FULLY aware of the propaganda since I was 30.
I thought the Internet was a complete failure when George W. Bush was able to lie us into Iraq, what I didn't consider, is that I had been on the Internet since 1989. I had a head start of most people. Censorship began in 2010, when the Internet started to have some effect, and now it's full force, but this system was designed to not allow central control and we can (and will) further diversify it.
Companies we help build and create, have betrayed us. Google, Facebook, Twitter, they will be "oh yeah, I remember them" within 20 years, maybe only 10. Remember Yahoo!? The used to be the undisputed KING of the Internet, unless they started taking bribes to skew search results.
You might want to try www.yandex.com - they are Russian. I'm certain they skew results, but not for Americans.
The left, such as it is anymore, seems increasingly infuriated that calling people "far right," "fascist" and even "Nazi" no longer packs a punch. Did none of them read "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" as a kid???
I believe that the hate and pathological anger coming from the left is too entrenched to come crumbling down any time soon. Their, at times, rabid ideology, is so white hot that it might take at least two election cycles for them to normalize their dogma. I really believe that if DeSantis is elected President, his deliberate, calm nature would help lower the temperature.
Mitt Romney was about the calmest Republican possible and the left demonized him when he ran in 2012. Remember they portrayed him as a high school bully, and I recall commercial of him pushing grandma off a cliff in a wheel chair. Look at what they did to Kavanaugh.
He was also an animal abuser (the dog in the crate) and a racist (despite having a black grandchild). Not to mention a murderer (remember those ads?) and corrupt vulture capitalist. There was Senate Majority Leader Reid too who is on record admitting he lied on the Senate floor about Romney ("He didn't win, did he?").
Which is why I find it so... frustrating (?) watching Romney buddy up to the same people who did that to him (and anyone else who publicly opposes them).
If they could assassinate the character of someone as anodyne as Mitt Romney then we had nothing left to lose. "Sooner or later, well or badly, that majority's demand for representation will be filled." Angelo Codevilla, The Ruling Class
Look, Obama was awful, but Mitt Romney was awful. They are just Neocon PUPPETS. Obama took orders, he was the same as Joe Biden - he read off from teleprompters and listened to ear pieces. Same thing Mitt Romney would have done.
You have to stop looking at politicians as being reformers, they aren't. They are complete sell outs. That's what was so great about Trump, at least he wasn't a goddamned politician. Was he perfect? NOOOOOOOOOOOOoooo - but he wasn't useless, and that last time we had a president that wasn't TOTALLY worthless and downright harmful to the nation, was Ronald Reagan.
He would have been a puppet, just like George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden are. NONE of them had any real power, they just took orders and made excuses for what they were told to do.
Joe Biden is a great president, if we're going to have a puppet as a president, it's best if it's the most incompetent, incoherent, senile, corrupt one possible. Nothing will happen to him, PROVIDED he continues to just do his job of reading teleprompters and following directions and since he's basically out of his mind, that is all he can do anyhow.
Agree on Romney. I am definitely not a Romney fan. Just making the point that the left will character assasinate anyone - it doesn’t matter how calm/mild-mannered they are.
The modern left’s ability to turn educated elites into robots is staggering. They have managed to makes these people feel morally superior than other folks, and now have a cult of robots who will abandon logic, decency, humility, etc to keep them in power and get their ego stroked daily in return. It’s a sick business. Never thought I would see it.
The phony left is already eating itself alive. I take solace in the fact that all of the gender-neutral/fluid/alphabet people will not be reproducing. They will wake up in 10-20 years and be forced to reckon with the fact that they are aging and have no progeny and the younger generation is now filled with the offspring of the unwashed masses they loathe. They will be growing old with serious health issues both mental and physical from their ill-advised medical "transitioning" and/or disdain for building a strong family. Everything that seems so important to them now will inevitably be swept away by serious events like war and hunger. They have the luxury at present of obsessing about woke nonsense, but when they find themselves short of ration coupons for food and gas they'll finally get a dose of cold hard reality. We are headed for very hard times that will rival the Great Depression.
The vast majority of the world's people aren't obsessed with woke malarkey - indeed, they (rightly) see the west as losing its bloody mind. They are already transitioning (pardon the use of that word) from the U.S.-dictated unipolar world to a multipolar order that respects national sovereignty and cultural values - you know, actual diversity, not the Hollywood version.
Maybe a good spanking is what America needs, assuming that our insane leaders don't try to stave off the inevitable demise of our global hegemony by starting a nuclear war. If that happens, we're all dead so none of this matters.
"Everything that seems so important to them now will inevitably be swept away by serious events like war and hunger. They have the luxury at present of obsessing about woke nonsense, but when they find themselves short of ration coupons for food and gas they'll finally get a dose of cold hard reality."
ha ha. It is sometimes said that luxury/prosperity contains within it the seeds of its own destruction.
The fruits of a liberal rule-of-law constitutional republic---built on the foundations of the Enlightenment---are taken for granted. "They" think whatever sucks about their lives, imagined or real, is that way because some billionaire stole from them. Zero-sum foolishness. They do believe a utopia of abundance is just-round-the-corner if they can simply upend the current institutions. Maybe I am a pessimist, but I believe the framework (insane leaders notwithstanding) that has fostered peace and prosperity is fragile, and needs protection. That does not mean no evolution in the institutions and sensibilities of the general population.
Thanks for this reply. It's a lot better than most I've read from Hillary supporters. That said and assuming that Bernie couldn't win (I strongly disagree), so what. The argument that we had to support the lesser of two evils has weight only if 1) Trump is indeed the existential threat that Democratic elites call him and 2) the Democratic candidate is much less bad. But your article (correctly in my view) takes issue with both presumptions.
I agree that it was faulty logic and honestly - I'll never be a part of anything like that ever again. It was wrong. I was of the mindset of 2000 when Gore lost by such a smidge. To me it was all about climate change. That was the only thing that mattered to me. But I'll tell you what, I learned a really hard lesson and have eaten a lot of crow. While it's true that Democrats could have salvaged the SCOTUS -- I mean maybe -- that isn't how Democracy is supposed to work. It just isn't. But you could not have told me that in 2016, that's for sure.
Please review Bernie Sander's actual voting record over the last decade. Sander didn't sell out, he's ALWAYS been a sellout.
Sanders DID win the primary in 2016, by the way.
Anyhow, all these "mavericks" rarely are. If you actually go through their voting record you'll see their rhetoric doesn't match their actions. The only good thing about Sanders is his rhetoric against these stupid wars.
Bernie is far from ideal. But in 2016 he called for reducing greatly the Pentagon budget, tariffs on imports, Medicare-for-All, and much higher taxes on the wealthy. Moreover, he made it clear that only strong pressure from the bottom up could possibly make any of these a reality. Bernie was not the lesser of evils, he was an adulterated good - just like all of us.
Look, Sanders is controlled opposition. He's there to give you hope that there can be change, but he will never actually challenge the establishment.
He will make MANY calls to do this and that, many of them reasonable and good things to do or at least investigate doing - but he has no intention of doing it.
He's there to keep the bottom AT the bottom. Stop looking for a savior. The government is just a criminal syndicate, it's a mafia. It's NEVER going to help the public. It hasn't done ANYTHING for the public in 30 years. They bail out banks even when the banks flagrantly break the law, they can't spend any money on Flint Michigan, but $40 billion goes to Ukraine at the drop of a hat, they run child prostitution rings, that's why Epstein was murdered by our government, and Ghislaine Maxwell is SUPPOSEDLY in jail convicted of sex trafficking of MINORS to... nobody.
The government isn't going to reform. It's just a group of criminals. They're parasites.
I can appreciate your hope, but you need to be more cynical.
Why is it, you have no idea what bills are being passed into law? Don't you think our "news" media would cover that? But they never do. That's one example. Aren't you curious as to why small businesses were forced to close down during this "pandemic" but large ones were not? How does that make any sense? They are just criminals. Nothing they do makes sense, because they rule by fraud, and force, only.
If you look at his voting record, you can see he wouldn't have been. I'm not criticizing you for not realizing this, most people are fooled repeatedly. I was fooled for a bit with Obama, O-BOMB-A - he was worse than Bush Jr, and Bush Jr was horrific.
Sanders is full in for supporting Ukraine. Ukraine is OUR fault. Our government overthrew Ukraine, Zelenskyy is a puppet of the United States.
How do we know for CERTAIN the US overthrew it? Remember Victoria Nuland's scandalous tapped phone call when she said "Fuck the EU" - well much was made about her vulgarity, but very little about the content of the conversation. She was talking to Geoffrey Pyatt about who the next "leader" of Ukraine was going to be, at least 2 weeks and 4 days before Ukraine's "revolution".
She picked "Yats" - Arseniy Yatseniuk - who surprise surprise became the next leader when Viktor Yanukovych was ousted.
Ukraine is a money laundering operation of some sort. The war just hides it, and makes an excuse to throw money at them. Sanders voted for that, although he must know what is going on. He can't be that stupid. I know what is going on, and I'm not an insider.
"We were already on the path towards perfecting our new utopia even before Obama rose to power, but once he did, the utopians had a leader and a religious figure. "
To me, this piece remains the best example of that period's peak Obama worship:
"Is Obama an enlightened being? / Spiritual wise ones say: This sure ain't no ordinary politician. You buying it?
Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
June 6, 2008
...
Many spiritually advanced people I know (not coweringly religious, mind you, but deeply spiritual) identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment. These kinds of people actually help us evolve. They are philosophers and peacemakers of a very high order, and they speak not just to reason or emotion, but to the soul."
"Any white person who opposed or even criticized Obama, who had become and remains a god-like figure on the Left, had to be racist."
I don't think he remains the "god-like figure on the Left" at this point. There seems to be a real disillusionment with him in certain quarters of the actual Left (as opposed to mainstream, "I Support The Current Thing" progressives.
He was no different than Richard Nixon. Behind the scenes, he used the power of the Executive branch to spy on and undermine his political enemies. Far from being a “light worker”, he was as Machiavellian and corrupt as a politician could be.
California is filled with wealthy people looking for meaning in their lives. Those with an executive position, beautiful home, cars, country club membership have joined cults in droves. Obama was a cultish kind of leader. He could run the country into the ground and they would still be singing his praises. He never kept any of his promises and amassed a huge fortune.
How many of these wealthy Californians work for corporations like apple and Nike who make millions off Chinese sweatshop labor? Wokism, an invention of the left, is the religion these folks need to feel good about themselves. It’s kind of creepy.
Sasha - you’ll look back on your days as a “commie” & laugh. I am inspired by your podcasts & even listened to your Glenn Beck interview earlier. I discovered you through Chris Paul. You seem more sure of your views within these podcasts than you did with Glen Beck, by the way (not intended as a critique). By the way, you don’t have to rush to put yourself in any boxes (Democrat, Republican, conservative, liberal, moderate, Libertarian, commie, etc.). I grew up Southern Baptist in a conservative evangelical MAGA type family & was oddly interested in politics from about the age of 5 or 6. I wanted to be President someday. That obviously didn’t work out for me. I am gay and I want to say that I had a LOT more pushback from other ignorant fellow gay “friends” about being a then Republican than I ever got from fellow Republicans or conservatives about being gay. Some would get violently angry with me for being a Republican. And look how much worse that whole alphabet mafia has become. An ex of mine is part of the Hollywood, gay film & tv - he’s a writer - even won an Emmy & I think that almost completed his life. We don’t talk often at all as we don’t have really much in common, but when things were so out of control during the summer of 2020 I reached out to him feeling empathetic of the nonsense I was seeing going on in Los Angeles. I said I’m sure you’re sick of all of this. He quickly let me know he thought it was all great and necessary and then went on Twitter to say that the George Floyd protests, etc. were supposed to make white people uncomfortable. It was his attempt at passively aggressively scolding me. Of course it just irked me, but that’s all they’ve got is their faux moral superiority and endless likes of anything with Joe Biden on it and retweeting everything that shouts orange man bad. Nothing original, no thoughts of his own, but he’s certainly disgusted that I have my own thoughts and let’s me know in his typical commie manner. I’m sure you’ve been treated the same way by your old “friends” there in the scene, too. Was hoping you’d somewhat relate. Thanks for your podcasts…keep telling the truth. Not enough people are doing that anymore.
Ben Shapiro ? A fake Trump supporter and a hedger of bets.Lol...Neo Con par excellence! Ugh...Trump had every right to contest the election and call it fraudulent!? Cause it was! Otherwise the report is spot on...
Thanks again. I've just started reading Ryan Dawson's Substack, Why would a Jewish President work with Nazis, Ukraine explained Part 1. My father was a Polish concentration camp prisoner and this article supports some of the very things he said about Ukrainian Nazi guards at the camps.
Well I had specific reasons for supporting Hillary. I didn't think Bernie could win. I still don't. Although my mind did change on the Democrats -- and I regret how I behaved against Bernie supporters. It was wrong. I can't change the past however. And I have apologized to people from back then. I was of the mindset that if you don't side with the establishment choice you're going to lose.
The only reason anybody would support Hillary Clinton is profound ignorance of what she is.
She voted for the "Authorization to Use Force in Iraq" - what we now call the Iraq War that George W. Bush lied us into, as a JUNIOR senator - she was in the minority of her party when she did this.
She was the driving force in promoting the bombing of Libya "to prevent a humanitarian crisis" as Secretary of State. The US did bomb Libya, and left it with operating slavery markets and it's still in civil war.
She wanted to expand the Syrian war.
She's a Neocon.
She regularly accepts bribes from banks. Why do you think she gets $100,000 for a 30 minute speech at a bank? It's a payoff. Books are another conduit. Now it's "art" from Hunter Biden.
My admiration for Trump is not diminished by opinions about his personality. Big tech used our information to control the media creating an illusion of truth. As far as they were concerned he could not do anything right. In reality the economy was stable, people were working and there was no war. I enjoyed Sasha Stone's personal journey because it takes great courage to unfollow the the Silicon Valley supergiants.
No, there was PLENTY of war under Trump - he was just the first president in 4 decades not to start a new war. The last one before him, was Jimmy Carter.
The US was bombing Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, and Yemen during that time. Trump attempted to end the conflict in Afghanistan and Syria and the US media went into a frenzy over how horrible that would be.
https://www.bitchute.com/video/Z1UOQSrRPfE
That is when ABC "news" "mistakenly" aired footage from a gun show in Kentucky that was supposedly depicting of "our friends" the Kurds being slaughtered by the Turkish military.
Our "friends" the Kurds - is the PKK, something the US media never mentions, because the PKK is a communist terrorist organization. The US supports terrorists all the time, when it's convenient.
The video shows how absolutely dishonest our "news" media is. The West doesn't have actual news sources anymore. They lie constantly, and they aren't called out on their lies. Fox lies, CNN lies, the NY Times lies, PBS does, everybody does. People who tell the truth, they are all deplatformed from Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter. You're in an echo chamber if you're on any of those, and you are not allowed to point out official propaganda there.
It's very simple - if you cannot comment on some article, you're reading propaganda. If you are censored on it, or shadowbanned on it, it's propaganda. If the "terms of service" are unequally applied or disingenuously applies, it's propaganda. So, our entire news media is propaganda, and so is Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube. Substack isn't, at least not yet. Time will tell.
Thank you for your clarification Richard. I should have said there were no new wars under Trump. You are very right about the news. I'm still in the trial period with Substack as I find there are few topics I haven't already read elsewhere. Writers are here because they have started to wake up and they could not speak freely on corporate media. I have a subscription to another Substack that I struggle with because it feels like an op-ed of the NYT. The comments section is filled with elaborate words instead of simple ones and longer sentences are used to try to convey multiple ideas. They attempt to make themselves sound like they know more about a subject by using jargon terms and connecting different concepts together. Each tries to out speak the other and reading gets very tedious. There's a lot of "nuance". I'm really glad that literature is free of this.
Here, I'll show you two people I enjoy listening to:
The last American Vagabond:
https://www.bitchute.com/channel/24yVcta8zEjY/
Ryan Dawson (anti-Neocon Report):
https://www.ancreport.com/
https://www.bitchute.com/channel/kCBxN1oEVOa0/
Basically, they just laugh at the "mainstream" "news" media. Everything we are told from them are just lies, and it should be obvious by now. From weapons of mass destruction, to Qaddafi is about to cause a humanitarian crisis, to Russia hacked our election. It's all BS, all of it.
The pandemic was BS. Really, a pandemic that SUPPOSEDLY killed 0.2% of the population? Do you know what the mortality rate of smallpox was? 30%. 3 out of 10 people that got it, died from it. George Washington was thought to have become sterile because he got it.
That's exactly what I mean, these commentators have been way ahead of the game. Informing us even at their own expense. It's not just financial it's also professional.
The hope of the Internet was to end the propaganda matrix. I'm 51, I've been FULLY aware of the propaganda since I was 30.
I thought the Internet was a complete failure when George W. Bush was able to lie us into Iraq, what I didn't consider, is that I had been on the Internet since 1989. I had a head start of most people. Censorship began in 2010, when the Internet started to have some effect, and now it's full force, but this system was designed to not allow central control and we can (and will) further diversify it.
Companies we help build and create, have betrayed us. Google, Facebook, Twitter, they will be "oh yeah, I remember them" within 20 years, maybe only 10. Remember Yahoo!? The used to be the undisputed KING of the Internet, unless they started taking bribes to skew search results.
You might want to try www.yandex.com - they are Russian. I'm certain they skew results, but not for Americans.
I've bookmarked that search engine.
This is one of the best pieces I have read in a long time. It is also why I trust Substack writers for their independent insights.
Brilliant, thoroughly researched, trenchant analysis, well argued, amazing article. Substack beats everything else. Incredible commentary. Thank you so much.
The left, such as it is anymore, seems increasingly infuriated that calling people "far right," "fascist" and even "Nazi" no longer packs a punch. Did none of them read "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" as a kid???
I believe that the hate and pathological anger coming from the left is too entrenched to come crumbling down any time soon. Their, at times, rabid ideology, is so white hot that it might take at least two election cycles for them to normalize their dogma. I really believe that if DeSantis is elected President, his deliberate, calm nature would help lower the temperature.
Mitt Romney was about the calmest Republican possible and the left demonized him when he ran in 2012. Remember they portrayed him as a high school bully, and I recall commercial of him pushing grandma off a cliff in a wheel chair. Look at what they did to Kavanaugh.
He was also an animal abuser (the dog in the crate) and a racist (despite having a black grandchild). Not to mention a murderer (remember those ads?) and corrupt vulture capitalist. There was Senate Majority Leader Reid too who is on record admitting he lied on the Senate floor about Romney ("He didn't win, did he?").
Which is why I find it so... frustrating (?) watching Romney buddy up to the same people who did that to him (and anyone else who publicly opposes them).
If they could assassinate the character of someone as anodyne as Mitt Romney then we had nothing left to lose. "Sooner or later, well or badly, that majority's demand for representation will be filled." Angelo Codevilla, The Ruling Class
Look, Obama was awful, but Mitt Romney was awful. They are just Neocon PUPPETS. Obama took orders, he was the same as Joe Biden - he read off from teleprompters and listened to ear pieces. Same thing Mitt Romney would have done.
You have to stop looking at politicians as being reformers, they aren't. They are complete sell outs. That's what was so great about Trump, at least he wasn't a goddamned politician. Was he perfect? NOOOOOOOOOOOOoooo - but he wasn't useless, and that last time we had a president that wasn't TOTALLY worthless and downright harmful to the nation, was Ronald Reagan.
Indeed. Put not your trust in princes, in men in whom there is no salvation.
Mitt Romney is an establishment shill.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foj_glQCr3w
I believe that was from 2008.
He would have been a puppet, just like George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden are. NONE of them had any real power, they just took orders and made excuses for what they were told to do.
Joe Biden is a great president, if we're going to have a puppet as a president, it's best if it's the most incompetent, incoherent, senile, corrupt one possible. Nothing will happen to him, PROVIDED he continues to just do his job of reading teleprompters and following directions and since he's basically out of his mind, that is all he can do anyhow.
Agree on Romney. I am definitely not a Romney fan. Just making the point that the left will character assasinate anyone - it doesn’t matter how calm/mild-mannered they are.
The modern left’s ability to turn educated elites into robots is staggering. They have managed to makes these people feel morally superior than other folks, and now have a cult of robots who will abandon logic, decency, humility, etc to keep them in power and get their ego stroked daily in return. It’s a sick business. Never thought I would see it.
The phony left is already eating itself alive. I take solace in the fact that all of the gender-neutral/fluid/alphabet people will not be reproducing. They will wake up in 10-20 years and be forced to reckon with the fact that they are aging and have no progeny and the younger generation is now filled with the offspring of the unwashed masses they loathe. They will be growing old with serious health issues both mental and physical from their ill-advised medical "transitioning" and/or disdain for building a strong family. Everything that seems so important to them now will inevitably be swept away by serious events like war and hunger. They have the luxury at present of obsessing about woke nonsense, but when they find themselves short of ration coupons for food and gas they'll finally get a dose of cold hard reality. We are headed for very hard times that will rival the Great Depression.
The vast majority of the world's people aren't obsessed with woke malarkey - indeed, they (rightly) see the west as losing its bloody mind. They are already transitioning (pardon the use of that word) from the U.S.-dictated unipolar world to a multipolar order that respects national sovereignty and cultural values - you know, actual diversity, not the Hollywood version.
Maybe a good spanking is what America needs, assuming that our insane leaders don't try to stave off the inevitable demise of our global hegemony by starting a nuclear war. If that happens, we're all dead so none of this matters.
See you in the promised land. Arrivederci, baby!
"Everything that seems so important to them now will inevitably be swept away by serious events like war and hunger. They have the luxury at present of obsessing about woke nonsense, but when they find themselves short of ration coupons for food and gas they'll finally get a dose of cold hard reality."
ha ha. It is sometimes said that luxury/prosperity contains within it the seeds of its own destruction.
The fruits of a liberal rule-of-law constitutional republic---built on the foundations of the Enlightenment---are taken for granted. "They" think whatever sucks about their lives, imagined or real, is that way because some billionaire stole from them. Zero-sum foolishness. They do believe a utopia of abundance is just-round-the-corner if they can simply upend the current institutions. Maybe I am a pessimist, but I believe the framework (insane leaders notwithstanding) that has fostered peace and prosperity is fragile, and needs protection. That does not mean no evolution in the institutions and sensibilities of the general population.
I see many of these issues differently but your fantastic piece managed to make it's way into my bubble.
Great job overall!
Many of the things you mention are why I'm primarily a libertarian.
Thanks for this reply. It's a lot better than most I've read from Hillary supporters. That said and assuming that Bernie couldn't win (I strongly disagree), so what. The argument that we had to support the lesser of two evils has weight only if 1) Trump is indeed the existential threat that Democratic elites call him and 2) the Democratic candidate is much less bad. But your article (correctly in my view) takes issue with both presumptions.
I agree that it was faulty logic and honestly - I'll never be a part of anything like that ever again. It was wrong. I was of the mindset of 2000 when Gore lost by such a smidge. To me it was all about climate change. That was the only thing that mattered to me. But I'll tell you what, I learned a really hard lesson and have eaten a lot of crow. While it's true that Democrats could have salvaged the SCOTUS -- I mean maybe -- that isn't how Democracy is supposed to work. It just isn't. But you could not have told me that in 2016, that's for sure.
U R awesome!
Please review Bernie Sander's actual voting record over the last decade. Sander didn't sell out, he's ALWAYS been a sellout.
Sanders DID win the primary in 2016, by the way.
Anyhow, all these "mavericks" rarely are. If you actually go through their voting record you'll see their rhetoric doesn't match their actions. The only good thing about Sanders is his rhetoric against these stupid wars.
Bernie is far from ideal. But in 2016 he called for reducing greatly the Pentagon budget, tariffs on imports, Medicare-for-All, and much higher taxes on the wealthy. Moreover, he made it clear that only strong pressure from the bottom up could possibly make any of these a reality. Bernie was not the lesser of evils, he was an adulterated good - just like all of us.
Look, Sanders is controlled opposition. He's there to give you hope that there can be change, but he will never actually challenge the establishment.
He will make MANY calls to do this and that, many of them reasonable and good things to do or at least investigate doing - but he has no intention of doing it.
He's there to keep the bottom AT the bottom. Stop looking for a savior. The government is just a criminal syndicate, it's a mafia. It's NEVER going to help the public. It hasn't done ANYTHING for the public in 30 years. They bail out banks even when the banks flagrantly break the law, they can't spend any money on Flint Michigan, but $40 billion goes to Ukraine at the drop of a hat, they run child prostitution rings, that's why Epstein was murdered by our government, and Ghislaine Maxwell is SUPPOSEDLY in jail convicted of sex trafficking of MINORS to... nobody.
The government isn't going to reform. It's just a group of criminals. They're parasites.
I can appreciate your hope, but you need to be more cynical.
Why is it, you have no idea what bills are being passed into law? Don't you think our "news" media would cover that? But they never do. That's one example. Aren't you curious as to why small businesses were forced to close down during this "pandemic" but large ones were not? How does that make any sense? They are just criminals. Nothing they do makes sense, because they rule by fraud, and force, only.
You may be right. But we'll never know whether Sanders could have been or would have made a legitimate effort to be a transformative President.
If you look at his voting record, you can see he wouldn't have been. I'm not criticizing you for not realizing this, most people are fooled repeatedly. I was fooled for a bit with Obama, O-BOMB-A - he was worse than Bush Jr, and Bush Jr was horrific.
Sanders is full in for supporting Ukraine. Ukraine is OUR fault. Our government overthrew Ukraine, Zelenskyy is a puppet of the United States.
How do we know for CERTAIN the US overthrew it? Remember Victoria Nuland's scandalous tapped phone call when she said "Fuck the EU" - well much was made about her vulgarity, but very little about the content of the conversation. She was talking to Geoffrey Pyatt about who the next "leader" of Ukraine was going to be, at least 2 weeks and 4 days before Ukraine's "revolution".
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26079957
She picked "Yats" - Arseniy Yatseniuk - who surprise surprise became the next leader when Viktor Yanukovych was ousted.
Ukraine is a money laundering operation of some sort. The war just hides it, and makes an excuse to throw money at them. Sanders voted for that, although he must know what is going on. He can't be that stupid. I know what is going on, and I'm not an insider.
"We were already on the path towards perfecting our new utopia even before Obama rose to power, but once he did, the utopians had a leader and a religious figure. "
To me, this piece remains the best example of that period's peak Obama worship:
"Is Obama an enlightened being? / Spiritual wise ones say: This sure ain't no ordinary politician. You buying it?
Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
June 6, 2008
...
Many spiritually advanced people I know (not coweringly religious, mind you, but deeply spiritual) identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment. These kinds of people actually help us evolve. They are philosophers and peacemakers of a very high order, and they speak not just to reason or emotion, but to the soul."
https://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/morford/article/Is-Obama-an-enlightened-being-Spiritual-wise-2544395.php
However, I think this is mistaken:
"Any white person who opposed or even criticized Obama, who had become and remains a god-like figure on the Left, had to be racist."
I don't think he remains the "god-like figure on the Left" at this point. There seems to be a real disillusionment with him in certain quarters of the actual Left (as opposed to mainstream, "I Support The Current Thing" progressives.
He was no different than Richard Nixon. Behind the scenes, he used the power of the Executive branch to spy on and undermine his political enemies. Far from being a “light worker”, he was as Machiavellian and corrupt as a politician could be.
California is filled with wealthy people looking for meaning in their lives. Those with an executive position, beautiful home, cars, country club membership have joined cults in droves. Obama was a cultish kind of leader. He could run the country into the ground and they would still be singing his praises. He never kept any of his promises and amassed a huge fortune.
How many of these wealthy Californians work for corporations like apple and Nike who make millions off Chinese sweatshop labor? Wokism, an invention of the left, is the religion these folks need to feel good about themselves. It’s kind of creepy.
The left was lost from the beginning, since it is based on coercion by the state.
Sasha - you’ll look back on your days as a “commie” & laugh. I am inspired by your podcasts & even listened to your Glenn Beck interview earlier. I discovered you through Chris Paul. You seem more sure of your views within these podcasts than you did with Glen Beck, by the way (not intended as a critique). By the way, you don’t have to rush to put yourself in any boxes (Democrat, Republican, conservative, liberal, moderate, Libertarian, commie, etc.). I grew up Southern Baptist in a conservative evangelical MAGA type family & was oddly interested in politics from about the age of 5 or 6. I wanted to be President someday. That obviously didn’t work out for me. I am gay and I want to say that I had a LOT more pushback from other ignorant fellow gay “friends” about being a then Republican than I ever got from fellow Republicans or conservatives about being gay. Some would get violently angry with me for being a Republican. And look how much worse that whole alphabet mafia has become. An ex of mine is part of the Hollywood, gay film & tv - he’s a writer - even won an Emmy & I think that almost completed his life. We don’t talk often at all as we don’t have really much in common, but when things were so out of control during the summer of 2020 I reached out to him feeling empathetic of the nonsense I was seeing going on in Los Angeles. I said I’m sure you’re sick of all of this. He quickly let me know he thought it was all great and necessary and then went on Twitter to say that the George Floyd protests, etc. were supposed to make white people uncomfortable. It was his attempt at passively aggressively scolding me. Of course it just irked me, but that’s all they’ve got is their faux moral superiority and endless likes of anything with Joe Biden on it and retweeting everything that shouts orange man bad. Nothing original, no thoughts of his own, but he’s certainly disgusted that I have my own thoughts and let’s me know in his typical commie manner. I’m sure you’ve been treated the same way by your old “friends” there in the scene, too. Was hoping you’d somewhat relate. Thanks for your podcasts…keep telling the truth. Not enough people are doing that anymore.
Ben Shapiro ? A fake Trump supporter and a hedger of bets.Lol...Neo Con par excellence! Ugh...Trump had every right to contest the election and call it fraudulent!? Cause it was! Otherwise the report is spot on...
Thanks again. I've just started reading Ryan Dawson's Substack, Why would a Jewish President work with Nazis, Ukraine explained Part 1. My father was a Polish concentration camp prisoner and this article supports some of the very things he said about Ukrainian Nazi guards at the camps.
This is a great substack. But where's the apology for supporting establishment corporatists Hillary and Biden over economic populist Bernie.
Well I had specific reasons for supporting Hillary. I didn't think Bernie could win. I still don't. Although my mind did change on the Democrats -- and I regret how I behaved against Bernie supporters. It was wrong. I can't change the past however. And I have apologized to people from back then. I was of the mindset that if you don't side with the establishment choice you're going to lose.
The only reason anybody would support Hillary Clinton is profound ignorance of what she is.
She voted for the "Authorization to Use Force in Iraq" - what we now call the Iraq War that George W. Bush lied us into, as a JUNIOR senator - she was in the minority of her party when she did this.
She was the driving force in promoting the bombing of Libya "to prevent a humanitarian crisis" as Secretary of State. The US did bomb Libya, and left it with operating slavery markets and it's still in civil war.
She wanted to expand the Syrian war.
She's a Neocon.
She regularly accepts bribes from banks. Why do you think she gets $100,000 for a 30 minute speech at a bank? It's a payoff. Books are another conduit. Now it's "art" from Hunter Biden.
People just aren't cynical enough.