Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone
Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone
Where I Was on January 6th, and Where I Wasn't.
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Where I Was on January 6th, and Where I Wasn't.

The government can't stop lying about the American people
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On January 6th, I should have been huddled on my couch and glued to MSNBC. Their hysteria and fear would have validated everything I already believed about those awful extremist racists and incels waving their “white supremacist” MAGA flags, climbing the walls of the Capitol, and fighting with police officers.

But that isn’t where I was on January 6th. I was scratching my head in confusion. A riot? People were trying to break into the Capitol? Why? Most of MAGA were standing before Trump as he spoke to them about the election we’d just lived through. He had convinced Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz to debate the election in the Senate when, all of a sudden, a riot erupted.

That was when I knew something very bad was about to happen. No, not to our government officials. I knew they’d be fine. It was the Trump supporters who would not be. They had no power.

It wouldn’t matter, I knew, that we’d seen unprecedented violence over the Summer and that those protesters weren’t treated like terrorists or insurrectionists. It was different with MAGA who were by then, already named enemies of the state.

Most people I knew on the Left had no clue what Trump supporters were really like. Most of them existed inside the protective bubble of the Left. We’d built our Shining Woketopia on the Hill after Obama rose to power. And we essentially abandoned half the country and never looked back.

We carefully curated our information streams, our language, our movies, our music, our fashion. We “wokeified” it piece by piece until we’d come close to reaching our ideal as a society. And then Trump won in 2016 and our whole world turned upside down.

Trump supporters were, to us, everything we wanted them to be: angry white men who wanted to tie women to beds and keep them pregnant and having babies like pigs in gestational crates. They were crude and uneducated. They were racists and bigots and drove around in gas guzzlers, wrecking the planet. They were incels who hid on 4-Chan, trolls who did nothing but hurt all of the vulnerable groups, especially women.

They paraded so ridiculously around with those racist red hats and those garish flags. We were traumatized just seeing them. If we saw a Trump supporter in our neighborhood or in our public spaces, we would have to alert the manager and have them removed like a dead animal the cat dragged in.

We hated them. We wanted them gone. We didn’t like the idea that the Trump family was getting their grubby fingerprints all over the same White House that once housed the near-perfect Obama family.

But I couldn’t take it anymore and I decided to find out for myself what was true about them and what wasn’t. By the time January 6th rolled around, I knew that they were kind people, good Christians, many of them. The one thing they most definitely were not was violent. They prided themselves on being the patriotic side that would never smash windows or burn buildings or beat up cops.

So it was confusing to me that MAGA was acting like the ANTIFA rioters who went from city to city, burning buildings, smashing windows, and beating up cops. Why were Trump supporters acting that way? It made no sense.

But I also knew that everyone went a little crazy in 2020 and when one side lost their minds protesting it was excused. When the other side did it was war. They decided it was all okay, anything was allowed when it came to punishing them. Just having attended the rally that day made you a target of the FBI.

And yet, we also knew that hundreds of FBI informants were embedded in the operation, a fact even today no one is allowed to talk about. But a riot would never have helped Trump. Something else was guiding those desperate people to storm the Capitol.

On the contrary, January 6th handed the Democrats and the security state everything it wanted. It was like a wish list for an authoritarian crackdown. It erased blame for “defund the police” and the crime that rose in its wake. It silenced any conversations about the violence over the Summer. Now, it was not the Left that harassed and assaulted police officers. It was Trump supporters.

That’s what they want you to believe, anyway.

Tonight, Kamala Harris will give a speech that she believes will win her the election. She is motivated only by one thing: to make history for the fifth time as the first woman of color to win, after having first done it as District Attorney, Attorney General, senator from California, and Vice President. She has just one last door to walk through, and her life’s goal will be complete. What wouldn’t she say to win?

If she loses, you better hide all the bags of Doritos because none of them will be safe.

Tonight, she’ll make a case that will be rooted in deception, fear, and hate. She will gaslight us and pretend it’s not about that. She’ll pretend it’s about a new beginning, a way forward, and turning the page. And all of her supporters will go along with that lie.

The truth? It is the Obama administration that can’t walk away. They can’t let go of power, especially not to Trump. They can’t respect the other half of the country that has wanted change since 2016.

They will say anything, do anything, and destroy anything—even themselves—to win this last battle against Trump. Unfortunately for them, it has all been their great undoing. Had they spent the last ten years trying to make this country better for all of us, they would not be in this mess.

Trump is the chosen representative of millions of Americans, whether they like it or not. He isn’t some cult leader who whipped them into a frenzy and incited them to overthrow the government, although that’s another lie Kamala Harris will tell you tonight.

She will lean heavily on words. Bad words, Trump said. Bad words his supporters said. Bad words gossiped by the generals. Bad words meant to be funny at the MSG rally. Bad words someone said about someone who said something. But that’s all they have. Bad words. What they’re doing to Americans right now, to our liberties, to our unity, to our safety, is far worse than words.

But they need words to control the narrative. They need the narrative to control reality. Words tell people how and what to think. Words are also the thing they fear the most. They use words to punish, destroy, and control all of us. Saying a wrong word or phrase is often what condemns our fate inside utopia. If this election is about anything, it’s about that - the right to free speech.

Today, Steve Bannon was finally released from federal prison. His charge? Not telling the phony January 6th committee what it wanted to know. His argument? They weren’t a real committee. And he was right. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t honest. It wasn’t American. It was as authoritarian as it gets.

Here is a picture of Steve Bannon greeted by his daughter, Captain Maureen Bannon:

Steve Bannon’s press conference today:

I still can’t believe they took Steve Bannon away from the War Room podcast, which is the central hub of the grassroots movement known as MAGA, four months before a pivotal election. As far as I’m concerned, they locked up a journalist. That shows how little they care about our equal rights under the law.

Kamala Harris will lie to you tonight that it’s Trump who wants to “get rid of the Constitution” and violate your rights, but nothing could be farther from the truth. She’ll lie and say he’s a fascist, but it’s her side that has a monopoly on power, not his. She will lie and say he’s a racist, even though he has built an intersectional coalition unheard of on the Republican side.

Kamala Harris was hand-picked to run as the leader of the free world. That’s not democracy. It is a scam. A beautiful illusion that pretends the first woman of color is about to make history. And oh, how the utopians will dance and celebrate! They like their manufactured realities.

Their empire is a Ponzi scheme. It only survives if everyone goes along with the deception. I went along with it for far too long and I hang my head in shame I ever helped them take power. I thought they cared about all of us but they don’t.

We’ll be fine either way. If they somehow drag Kamala Harris over the finish line, they’re stuck with her. She is in no way prepared to do the job. All she will do is slow down the empire’s collapse, but neither she nor anyone else can stop it. Once Trump is out of the way, they’re done.

If Trump wins, nothing will be more glorious for a movement that has been dehumanized, demonized, and disenfranchised by a ruling aristocracy that mistakenly believed this country belonged only to them. Win or lose, Trump walks away a legend and a hero, having restored his legacy, his reputation, and his family’s name.

Thanks to Trump and his refusal to bow down, Americans have tasted freedom. There is no going back. Whether it’s November or four years from now, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. It’s strong enough and bright enough to guide us out of darkness and back toward something that looks a lot more like the America we know.

So how about it, one more dance?

Discussion about this podcast

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