Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone
Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone
January 6th and How the Press Became the "Enemy of the American People"
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January 6th and How the Press Became the "Enemy of the American People"

In their war on Trump, the press did the bidding of the Democratic Party, lost the story and lost their way.

On January 5th, Trump will give a rally in Iowa. He’ll do what he’s done for seven years as a hunted man - reassure his supporters that there is nothing to fear but fear itself.

Joe Biden, the President of the United States, will also give a speech that day and do what he has been doing since taking office: offer the people nothing but fear itself.

Biden’s message? Be afraid. Be very, very afraid of your fellow citizens. The guy who works at the gas station, the waitress, the bus driver, the construction worker, the teacher, the pilot — all of them, and any of them could be a Trump supporter. Fear them, shun them, and help us remove them from our country. You are with us, or you are against us.

They see their fight against Trump as something along the lines of the Civil War, World War II, and 9/11 all rolled into one. It would be funny if it wasn’t so terrifyingly real.

It’s no wonder his approval ratings are in the toilet and that Trump is polling ahead, even after everything they’ve thrown at him. The Democrats have lost touch with reality and no longer know the country they lead.

None of this would be happening, of course, if we had a legacy media that served any purpose other than to be what Devin Nunes called part of a “state-owned leftist enterprise” that also controls “everything—universities, nonprofits, bureaucracies, and the Beltway corridor.”

Since Trump was elected, the stories in the mainstream press have been nothing but an advent calendar of lies.

Lift a flap, and there’s Russiagate. Lift another flap, and there’s “Jacob Blake was unarmed and there to break up a fight.” Lift another flap, and there’s “Kyle Rittenhouse is a White Supremacist.”

Lift another flap, and it’s “Mostly Peaceful Protests.” Or it’s “Derek Chauvin was a racist who murdered George Floyd because he hates Black people.” Another flap, “The nation’s police are racists.”

Another flap says, “Vaccines stop the spread of COVID,” and another says, “COVID did not come from a lab.” Here are the “experts” trotted out to say protests are more important than COVID. Then, more “experts trotted” out to say bringing in the military to stop the protests (which were mostly peaceful) was fascism. Then, the experts said the Hunter Biden laptop was “Russian disinformation.”

Lift another flap, and it’s the biggest lie of all, “January 6th was an insurrection.”

No, it wasn’t. It was not planned, or ordered, or even desired by Donald Trump or his supporters. It was planned by someone who was not part of Trump’s rally and in fact did nothing to help Trump but only ended any chance he had to debate the election in the Senate.

The Democrats believe that January 6th is their get-out-of-jail-free card, that they can put the country through unending misery, but all they have to do is show that footage on a loop to keep their flock paralyzed by fear, and the votes will flood in.

The legacy press has been lying about January 6th for almost four years and counting. They live in constant fear of being accused of “normalizing” racism or “normalizing a fascist.” They did as they were told with their image, reputation, and maybe even their jobs at stake.

Salem Village in 1692 had no such thing as a free press. If the town leaders did not want something said or published, they would ban it and throw the perpetrator in jail. That’s how they were able to get away with hanging 20 of their townspeople, convicted on “spectral evidence,” witchcraft they couldn’t see but could only imagine.

After each hanging, they’d all meet up in the tavern to celebrate as one more battle against the Devil won.

When a Quaker named Thomas Maule fought them, his case was said to have inspired the First Amendment to the Constitution - Freedom of Speech, along with Freedom of the Press and Freedom of Religion.

Here we are, all of these centuries later, and not much has changed. The elites and their media puppets still celebrate after another battle won against Trump and MAGA. “Freedom of the Press” is a joke if much of the press is controlled by one political party that decides reality.

But here’s the problem for them. I was there. I wasn’t in DC on January 6th, but I was following the Stop the Steal movement via Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast. I know what the plan was and what it wasn’t. I was a Democrat who had voted for Joe Biden.

After the Summer of 2020, like so many other Americans, I had to escape the mainstream media narrative after realizing I’d been lied to over and over again. I had to find out what was true and wasn’t.

I also thought the 2020 election had been rigged by powerful forces in this country that had robbed the American people of their right to a fair election.

If all the money and power is concentrated at the top and they decide to take complete control of our elections, maybe it isn’t illegal, but it is not what our elections are supposed to be about.

But even still, I didn’t think Trump had a case. Then I watched as the media narrative became about “The Big Lie,” and how it was almost a crime to say the election was stolen. Even now, they parrot the term that makes me want to scream, “election denier.”

But it wasn’t a fair election. One of their most powerful weapons was a lying legacy media that gaslighted Americans all through 2020 as we lurched from lockdowns to protests back to lockdowns. The media continued to lie throughout January 6th as though we all hadn’t just lived through the Summer of 2020. They are the ones who opened the door to acceptable political violence. As usual, it only applies to them.

Then I started to think more carefully about the four years Trump was in power. I thought about Russiagate, the first impeachment. I thought about the media, what they’d done to Trump day in and day out for four years, how they cherry-picked things he said, blew them out of proportion, how they threw Trump news into the churn like bait. It was big business for them.

But how is any of that a free press? That’s pure state propaganda. How can they still call themselves journalists? How can they even sleep at night?

I’d watched every Trump rally since the Summer, looking for proof that he and his supporters were what they’d been charged and convicted of in the media — “racists” and “white supremacists.” None of that was true.

Vivek Ramaswamy is one of the few candidates who has directly challenged them on the damage done.

Trump supporters are kind people, decent and patriotic Americans. They are mostly outsiders who like Trump and want to support him. January 6th was going to be one last rally before they closed the door on the 2020 election. Trump had gone to great lengths to convince Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz to debate the election rule changes in the Senate.

Ted Cruz was giving a speech when, from out of nowhere, a riot at the Capitol.

My first thought was that can’t be MAGA. They don’t do that. There was never any plan to breach the Capitol or take any member of Congress by force. None of that was part of Stop the Steal. But you’d never know it, because these are not questions our legacy media will ever ask or even wonder about.

Now, too many Americans believe the “official story,” that Trump sent a violent mob to attack the Capitol because he couldn’t lose an election.

Over time, it would become clear that January 6th was part of an ongoing sting operation coordinated by FBI informants who were paid well by the Bureau to bring home the bacon. The idea was to manifest extremists, to roust them out of the darker corners of America, rile them up, get them angry, and then aim them toward something dangerous, like kidnapping Gretchen Whitmer or storming the Capitol.

Only one reporter in the mainstream even bothered to ask questions about the Whitmer kidnapping.

Chris Heath, writing for Esquire:

It was also perplexing to see how much of the connective tissue that did exist involved people who were acting on behalf of the FBI. Take, for instance, what seemed, at first glance, to be one of the more damning events in the alleged narrative of this conspiracy. It is one thing to be told that, on the night of September 12, 2020, Adam Fox and Barry Croft, who according to the prosecutors were the plot’s de facto ringleaders, conducted a nighttime reconnaissance of Whitmer’s Elk Rapids vacation home, driving around the area after first stopping to inspect the underside of the bridge on Highway 31, where they might plant explosives. But it is perhaps another to piece together that the truck in question, a Chevy Silverado, had five people in it. And that Fox and Croft were in the backseat, Croft in the middle, next to a man who turned out to be an FBI informant. And that the truck was being driven by its owner, Dan Chappel, who had been at the center of everything that had or hadn’t been happening for several months. And that he was also an FBI informant. And that next to him up front was another man, whom Chappel had introduced to the group as an explosives expert. And that this man was not an FBI informant. He was an FBI agent.

This is a lucrative grift for desperate people on the fringe who want to collect a few thou to sell their fellow Americans out to a hungry ruling class eager for proof the FBI was helping to keep the village safe. Note the date, too. September of 2020, locked and loaded to be an October surprise for the election.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to put all of this together. You only have to look for the connection from the FBI’s plot to spy on the Trump campaign and sabotage his candidacy, and when that failed, it was onward to Russiagate and impeachment, and when that failed, it was COVID and the protests over the Summer, and the biggest get of all, January 6th.

“Seditious Conspiracy”

In 1954, Puerto Rican Nationalists shot up the Capitol, injuring several Congressmen. They were convicted of “seditious conspiracy,” yet the maximum time served for that crime? Six years, a fraction of what many of the January 6th protesters got.

The Weather Underground, in this video, claims they were a group advocating for the “violent overthrow of the United States.”

None of them were called “insurrectionists” or thrown away like human garbage by the legacy media.

Even Timothy McVeigh, who blew up the Federal Building, was not charged with “insurrection.”

The media downplayed the revolution happening on the streets in the Summer of 2020. There were not only “autonomous zones” where protesters claimed territory outside the control of the United States government, not only burning of Federal buildings, violent threats, and abuse at police officers, but there were roving bands of teenagers chanting “Decolonize the suburbs” at sleeping residents, demanding diners at restaurants raise their fist to pledge allegiance to Black Lives Matter.

They breached the gate at the White House, sending Trump and his family into the bunker for protection. The protests, per the “well-funded cabal,” were orchestrated to make Trump look like a bad president with chaos on the streets.

By the end of it, all institutions of power in this country would have been overtaken by a group of fundamentalists who now controlled everything, even the presidency of the United States.

There has always been, up until now, power in being an American citizen and respect for our right to push back against a government we believe has become oppressive.

As many of the violent protests this country has experienced since its founding, the word “insurrection” is not often found in the New York Times, referring to American citizens. The American spirit and identity were inspired by insurrection and revolution; thus, it has never been used as what we’re all supposed to fear, especially not on the Left.

This IS What Democracy Looks Like

Let’s settle this once and for all - Trump and his supporters had every right to contest the 2020 election. Trump had every right to fight his legal challenges in court. He had every right to say it was “rigged and stolen.” He had every right to give a speech to his supporters that he won the election and the Democrats stole it from him. You might not like that he did that. You might think that makes him ineligible to run again or to serve but TOO DAMN BAD.

That is not your decision to make. It’s not Biden’s, or Pelosi’s or the FBI’s or some glassy-eyed fanatic in Maine. It is the decision of the people of the United States of America.

If Democrats believe they have the right to shut down government, block airports, burn government buildings, destroy businesses, and storm the Capitol in various states to have their voices heard because “this is what democracy looks like,” then so do Trump supporters.

There are many unanswered questions about what happened on January 6th. We already know the legacy media will never ask those questions. They’ve lost the trust of the American people, and there is no coming back from that.

So, is Trump right when he calls them the enemy of the people? Maybe we should ask it a different way. If they aren’t the enemy, what are they?

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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