Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone
Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone
The Weirdness of Manufactured Joy
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The Weirdness of Manufactured Joy

What can be unburdened by what has been.

Congratulations to all of you who supported the Democrats. You won. You should be very proud of yourselves. You won in your singular support of Joe Biden for the presidency.

You won in how you attacked any primary candidate who might challenge him, you know, the one guy who told the truth about Biden’s cognitive decline? Dean Phillips? What a terrible person he was for saying the Emperor had no clothes.

You did it! You won the primary for Joe Biden. You had an entire press corp - and an army of supporters - to deflect from accusations that there was anything wrong with him. Those are deep fakes, they proclaimed. When any outlet would write a column that Joe Biden should step down or that he was not fit to hold power anymore, off with their heads! You would threaten to cancel your subscription and bully those reporters on Twitter.

But you did it!

And then, when that didn’t work, you did it again.

Behind the scenes, the plan was hatched to get the man in the White House who was in denial about his cognitive decline into a debate with Trump early. They knew Biden would be exposed to the world, and once he did that, he could be pressured to step down.

Only this guy believed the lie that he won fairly and squarely, that the 2020 election hadn’t been won for him by a well-funded, intricate monopoly of wealth and power in America, and that the primary in 2024 wasn’t rigged in his favor by elbowing out any competition and mandating compliance from everyone else.

After the old man refused to go, as he sat protected by his wife Jill and his son, Hunter, Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, and Kamala Harris decided it was time for Joe to get some tough love. Out you must go, old man, democracy be damned! Democracy only applies if it means Democrats win. We have to kill it to save it, don’t you get it?

So they made Joe an offer he could not refuse. But of course, all that George Clooney talk about having a real primary to decide who should be the nominee fell out the window instantly. The Vice President who had dropped out of the 2020 primary that she could not win, whose approval numbers had been worse than Biden’s throughout her term, was selected to be the nominee.

Yes, the person they all believed could not handle the job of Vice President is now going to be The President! You did it!

She was selected and installed without a single vote from the people. If you believed America was an inherently racist and misogynist country, you might do the same thing. You might think there is no other way to make history than to manufacture making history. After all, isn’t that what the Oscar voters do? Then celebrate as another war won against the white supremacist empire?

You see, the problem isn’t Harris. The problem is that no woman or woman of color can win in America. So why not tweak things here and there, just take out the whole campaign thing, and give her a leg up? Push Harris where she deserves to be rather than where she landed.

And now you see it doesn’t even matter. They will trot out Old Joe tonight and pretend to be the heroes who “saved democracy,” who “saved America,” and who believe in all the good things America should stand for. Except, you know, what America actually does stand for.

All the while, they will continue to demonize, dehumanize, and disenfranchise the other half of the country they genuinely believe is the second confederacy, the evil racists, the bad things who must not ever have any representation, not in government, not in culture, not in education, not anywhere.

We don’t want you in our restaurants, at our concerts, buying our clothes, watching our movies, using our apps, working out in our gyms. Stay back in the hollowed-out hinterlands where you belong because you are still voting for him. Taylor Swift belongs to us. Hollywood belongs to us. Stay out.

Oh, sure, throughout the convention, they will be making a play for these voters. Join our team and become emasculated, nice guys! Join our team, and you can go on a double date for an abortion and a vasectomy in our mobile pop-up clinic. Join our team, and you won’t be hated anymore. You won’t be toxic anymore. You will feel joy, and you will love Big Brother!

They believe isolating themselves from the rest of us will preserve their goodness. But it doesn’t. Their collective fear, their ongoing hysteria, and their unbound hatred expose them for who they really are and what they’re going along with.

Every day, a new person is red-pilled. You can’t really hide the truth. Sooner or later, it rises like the water cycle, becomes too heavy to ignore, and down comes the rain. Here is a TikTok user:

I was a fan of Kamala Harris until I watched her all but call Joe Biden a racist. That was when I saw who she really was, especially after she wrote it off as “just a debate.” You can’t know what it feels like to be called a racist until someone calls you that. There is no defense of it either. You can’t say, “I’m not a racist,” even if - especially if — you know in your heart you are not.

By the end of Harris’ first term, the Obama coalition will have reigned in government for 20 years. This has always been the fight to preserve that version of America, not the one Trump offered. To them, Trump is “going back” to the days of the Old South, with a little Hitler thrown in for good measure.

I would have believed that too. I would snuggle up on my couch with a snack plate to watch my people and my party bring home the win. I would sob as I watched us make history. Wow, look at that. The first woman of color to win the nomination. Except that, of course, she didn’t.

But that wouldn’t matter to me. All that would matter would be chasing euphoria, pure joy, joy I hadn’t felt since 2008. That addiction to the rush of being a Good Liberal making the world a better place one manufactured victory at a time.

I, too, would feel good that I was among the good. That whole “cancel culture” thing and weaponizing the DOJ, none of that would matter because if it didn’t bother me by 2024 it never would.

But unfortunately for me, I saw the old man behind the curtain when I took my trip to Oz. There’s no un-seeing that. I know that it’s a lie that the Trump movement is based on race or that it is about preserving “white supremacy.” I know that it is about class. It’s about people who count on the founding principles that this country is, ideally, rooted in opportunity, which is why so many want to come here and build their fortunes here.

Is America perfect? Of course not. Has it always been fair? No. Not even a little bit. But that’s where we should aim. So that anyone from anywhere can make it if they work hard enough and are good enough at what they do. It should not be about condemning that one gift we’re all born with when we’re born in America: that we can be anything regardless of our skin color or gender.

Being handed a win isn’t a win. It’s a Band-Aid. It’s a mask. It’s a virtue signal that everyone pretends to go along with, all the while keeping the same powerful people in power. Nothing changes except appearances.

Now, the powerful will pretend to celebrate JOY in a country they have all but destroyed with their newfound religion, their division, and their unbound hatred. They will pretend success where no such success is evident. They will smile, celebrate, and throw a big party. Aren’t we happy because our dreams are finally coming true?

They are happy because they believe they are the Good People doing Good Things by throwing the other half of the country away like human garbage. They are the good people when they end careers overnight because someone made a joke they deemed offensive. They are the good people who have infused their dogma into every movie, every television show, every ad, and in all of the public schools.

They are good people because they’ve built a system where children have no escape from the tight grip of the cult. Their teachers, their counselors, their therapists, and their government all tell them, yes, you might be born in the wrong body, and yes, you might need to have your breasts or testicles removed to become the ultimate being, the high-status symbol of purity.

And Kamala Harris will be in support of all of it. It’s done. You won. It’s the New Woke Order that will dominate and control the internet now, and all of American society is plugged into it. Everyone else on the outside will have to fend for themselves.

Think of it: a weaponized DOJ now the precedent. Think of it: censoring social media now accepted and normal. Think of it: abuse of children without their consent celebrated.

The one guy they couldn’t cancel is still their biggest threat. Now, they’re close to that one last cancellation. They can taste it. They will put him in jail, their Goldstein from 1984. Then, they will keep putting other people in jail. But they will never feel all the way safe. And so it will go on.

Ron DeSantis or Josh Hawley or Nikki Haley or Tulsi Gabbard or RFK Jr. or JD Vance will be the new Trump. Fear them, shun them, destroy them. UTOPIA.

I have spent the last four years trying to offer some hope for those Americans who are treated like they are no longer welcome in their own country. They’re racists, they are told, because they aren’t fully on board with the program. Racists even when they’re Clarence Thomas. Racists even if they are Vivek Ramaswamy. They are the bad thing if they want a different America, out from under this new cult-like religion that has overtaken the Left.

I know everyone is hoping for a sudden miracle, that Trump can somehow fool the most powerful government in American history and pull off a magic trick like he did in 2016. Hope is a beautiful and dangerous thing. It is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul.

I once heard a story I can’t ever forget. Mice were dropped in water to see how fast they could survive. One group was abandoned, and drowned and the other group was rescued. Then, they threw the rescued mice back in the water to see if they could survive longer. And they could, just by a few seconds. That experiment, as cruel and barbaric as it was, was said to prove that hope does matter. Even if just a little bit.

I always thought the people I admired would stand on the right side of history when faced with dehumanization and mass hysteria, but I was wrong. Most people stand on the side of power, even if they have arranged the Chess pieces to make it seem like they don’t.

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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