Any time Trump or one of his supporters brings up the 2020 election, insisting he didn’t lose it, we hear the usual chorus of groans: why can’t he get over it? He lost. Move on.

The thing is, I can’t get over it either. 2020 was the year everything changed. My entire world was turned upside down because I could see, for the first time, that I was in a bubble, a feedback loop that had shaped my perception of reality. It’s just that it wasn’t actual reality. It was a curated, hysteria-inducing delusion.

It wasn’t just me. Go on YouTube, and you’ll find hundreds, if not thousands, of people whose lives were fundamentally transformed that year in one way or another. COVID made them quit their job and move into a van. COVID made them decide to divorce. COVID made them learn how to bake sourdough. And a lot of us were red-pilled.

It was as though someone pressed the pause button and all of us froze in place for a time. Like in the movie Weapons where the kids suddenly wake up one day…

Isolated and shut in, we all turned to social media and the internet, which meant more people were connected than ever before at a time when there were more people alive than ever before. We’ve never really fully processed what happened to all of us that year.

It was the year we stopped trusting the science, the schools, Hollywood, the legacy media, and the government. Children were locked down and staring at their screens, with many of the lost boys finding their way into the dark corners of the internet and would emerge years later fumbling their way toward a rifle and a rooftop.

That isn’t all of it, or even half of it. None of us would emerge from that year unscathed. We can’t talk about it as a country or a people because we are still so divided. The big things divide us, like the vaccine, the masks, the lockdowns, and most especially, the 2020 election.

We were stepping into something we did not understand and weren’t prepared for. Things have changed enough now that it will be hard to remember just how bad things got after Trump won in 2016. I remember because I was on the inside. I lived it with the Democrats and what would become a Doomsday Cult.

We called ourselves “the resistance” even though we had all of the power. Trump and MAGA, they were the real resistance, or at least the revolutionaries going up against the most powerful machine in American history, maybe ever.

All I knew was that I had to fight for my side. I woke up every day like a good soldier for the cause and went to battle online, wasting precious time with my daughter, or doing anything else except sitting and staring at a screen and fighting with people I didn’t even know over issues that didn’t matter with arguments that had no end and went nowhere.

Inside the Doomsday Cult, we were awash with mass hysteria because every single day, every time Trump tweeted, the legacy media sent out more waves of hysteria that pulsed through the hive mind and kept reinfecting anyone who scrolled Twitter or Facebook. It was a new emergency every day. We were stuck in an unending state of trauma.

The legacy media desperately wants to forget what happened, how they lied and gaslit the public. The consequences for these moral crimes have been minimal. A slap on the wrist for ignoring Joe Biden’s cognitive decline, but there has never been a reckoning for what they did to all of us, people who trusted them, in 2020.

What Happened to Me

My daughter had to leave her senior year at college to have her graduation on my balcony, but we did it because we were doing our part to help save the country during this once-in-a-generation pandemic.

Mobilizing for the cause meant sewing our own masks, displaying them proudly on Instagram. It meant mixing our own hand sanitizer because it was all out at the drug store. Some people were wearing face shields.

We were living in fear. We were cowed into silence. Half the country fell into Mass Formation Psychosis. We weren’t allowed to attend weddings, churches, or schools, but somehow on Memorial Day, the George Floyd protests became the most important thing in America for months.

Systemic racism, they told us, was more urgent than COVID. Really? Bringing the whole country — the whole world — to its knees was less serious than George Floyd dying at the hands of a police officer in Minneapolis? Yes. That’s what they were telling us, and everyone was mandated to go along with everything that came next.

These were our idols, we were told. It was the new state religion, even if Trump was still the president. This is the ideology we’re allowed to gather for. This is worth tear ing down statues, burning buildings, carving out “autonomous zones” and demanding everyone put a black square on Instagram, capitalize the word Black and raise their fists to Black Lives Matter.

The madness unfolding on the streets meant Democrats could actually lose in November, I believed. So why wasn’t anyone trying to stop them? Why were the Democrats encouraging them? I started wondering what the hell was going on. It felt like unseen hands were manipulating events behind the scenes, and we were all expected to just go along with it.

As I began to speak out and ask questions, I was turned into an enemy. “You’ve changed,” wrote Neera Tanden on Twitter. She was right. I had. By the time Twitter pressured the New York Times to back off their Tom Cotton essay, Send in the Troops, I was done.

Maybe I was naive. I didn’t understand the assignment. I’d seen too many Frank Capra movies. I’d begun to believe politics was like an Aaron Sorkin screenplay. I thought we were the good guys. We are the side with ethics and decency and fairness.

I was like Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2 when Arnold Schwarzenegger shows up, and she thinks he’s a bad guy, but when he says, “Come with me if you want to live, she realizes that everything is backward. The people she thought were the good guys weren’t. The guy she thought was there to kill her was actually there to save her.

By the end of 2020, I was as black-pilled as Jack Nicholson in Chinatown, disillusioned and wide awake. Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.

But what I saw them do - how we were all manipulated, how they rigged the election to be too big to fail - I could see for the first time that my side had too much power. So much power that American democracy was now beside the point.

It didn’t matter how the people voted, because we would decide who was allowed to win and who would become an existential threat to the world we were building, the utopia we were building online.

When I left the party, I knew I couldn’t be fully honest about what I believed happened, though I did say that the election had been rigged. I also couldn’t be honest about what I knew about January 6th, at least not in the beginning. When I saw the riot break out, my first thought was, that’s not MAGA. They don’t do that.

And anyway, even if they did, why couldn’t the Democrats chalk it up to months of lockdowns and highly enraged, radicalized people on the Right just as there were on the Left that Summer. Why couldn’t they? Because it was all still part of the long con, the mass delusion.

These ideas were dangerous to hold for anyone in America but especially someone of the Left, and yet, I could not stop it. The truth began knocking. I ignored it as long as I could, but eventually, the knocking became a banging, and I had no choice but to open the door.

How to Rig An Election

Once you start tugging on the question of why Twitter and Facebook censored the Hunter Biden laptop, you begin to unravel the bigger picture of just how deep the conspiracy went. But you don’t need the whole story. You just need to know this: The FBI and the CIA worked against the sitting president to lie to the public that the laptop was “Russian Disinformation.”

It was just a standard run-of-the-mill October surprise, timed to help ignite a scandal before the election. But it was also information the public had a right to know, as we would find out later. So anyone who shames Trump for calling the election rigged and denying it was legit will have to answer for this.

But if you keep pulling on that string, you’ll find the why of it. They were trying to fix all of the problems they believed caused Hillary Clinton’s loss. This would be payback for the email scandal that hit her campaign, which she called “Russian Disinformation.” That would also turn out to be untrue.

But there were other problems that needed correcting, like lazy voters who assumed Hillary would win because she was so far ahead in the polls and didn’t bother turning out. They would fix this problem using COVID as the pretext to change everything about how people vote and how those votes are collected.

They knew they had Pennsylvania won long before Election Day and it would only be a matter of convincing the public not to get too excited about a “red mirage.” To all of them, that’s the right way to win an election.

Trump won Iowa, Ohio and Florida, not to mention the bellwether counties that have decided our elections.

The only other time anything like this happened was in 1960, when JFK won in a squeaker. Compare that to 2020, and you can see that something was very off about the numbers.

Since the Democrats believed Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook had handed Trump the win in 2016 by using their marketing machine (the Clinton campaign refused their help), it was time for Zuckerberg to undo that damage, which came in the form of a $400 million slush fund used to “fortify” the election but mostly in the heavily blue districts.

Had all of this been shared with the whole country as a way to improve our elections overall, that would have been one thing. But it was all done behind the scenes, in the shadows, far from the reach of anyone who might dissent. It was anything but ethical and anything but fair.

It was all part of a grand scheme to stay one step ahead of Trump. If they already knew he would claim it was rigged, why not just rig it? Who would the people believe? Trump or the “bipartisan cabal” of unelected bureaucrats hiding in the shadows?

The truth is that Trump was pulling ahead because the Left was losing its mind, and Trump picked up on it. He changed his campaign; no matter how many ways they tried to keep him from his rallies, he got the word out anyway. That would explain why he won those key states but lost so much in the popular vote.

Our elections should not be decided months before Election Day. Candidates should have to make their case to the people, not hide in the basement and let the system do the work.

It’s the candidate’s job to inspire the voters to vote for the kind of government they want, and it’s the voters responsibility to be motivated enough to turn out to the polls and cast their vote. But with an easily manipulated hive mind like the Democrats had cultivated for ten years they didn’t need any of it.

The Year That Broke America

I’ve never been able to convince anyone of what I believed happened in 2020. If you were on the Left, chances are, you wouldn’t be able to see it either. You would have trusted the same people I used to trust: CNN, New York Times, MSNBC, your social media feed.

You would have come out of that year thinking Joe Biden won the 2020 election fair and square and that Donald Trump refused to lose, so he led a dangerous assault on the Capitol, putting our democracy under threat.

Yet, after everything they did to Trump that year and for the four years prior, what else could he have done except protest? It was just a little too convenient that there happened to be a riot at the same time, a Reichstag Fire that handed absolute power to Team Blue.

If you were still trapped inside the Doomsday Cult, you’d have been primed and ready to go to war on your fellow Americans because Vice President Kamala Harris would tell you January 6th was like 9/11 and Pearl Harbor. You would have thought Liz Cheney and the Prime Time Show Trial was legit. What an easy mark you’d be.

If you never escaped, as I did, you’d still be trapped inside the Doomsday Cult and never have any idea that none of this is your fault. You were put into a kind of trance in 2020, even before, like the kids in the movie Weapons, frozen in place and used as an army to do the bidding of the Democratic Party.

They made you believe, like they made me believe, that every day really was the end of the world as long as Donald Trump was in power. But it was never true, none of it. All the Democrats ever had to do was offer the people something better.

If everything Molly Ball wrote about the election the “Secret Bi-Partisan Cabal” supposedly saved, how did Trump win again?

In Weapons, the children are put under a spell and aimed at the enemies of the witch. Once the spell is broken, the children wake up and realize the person they should be mad at isn’t the one she made them attack, but instead the witch herself for robbing them of their ability to think for themselves.

And so it goes with the Democrats.

//

I already knew how the press would cover it. They would only go for the low-hanging fruit. What else is new? Trump seemed to want to give them the Trump they expected, but at times I thought he showed genuine humility and treated them with more kindness than they deserved.

He played some of his greatest hits, going at Cryin’ Chuck Schumer, who is now a Palestinian, AOC plus three, and said Rep. Ilhan Omar should “get the hell of our country,” while encouraging Kaitlan Collins to smile more. It was your typical resistance lib’s worst nightmare. I laughed out loud a few times and found it to be not as bad as it could have been, though I cringed a few times. Even Trump seemed to cringe at some of the jokes that had been written for him, he said.

The cure for Trump Derangement Syndrome was always just to watch Trump’s speeches — which spiral around and go all over the place. He calls it “the weave.” But once you see his speeches and listen to what he actually says, you realize that he’s not the same guy they’ve lied about for ten long years.

The legacy media is to blame for the madness of the Left now, how they’ve gone so insane they are fantasizing about Trump’s death and plan to celebrate. They cherry-picked the worst things Trump said and tossed them into the social media churn, and look at what it’s done to millions of people.

Nothing Trump could say, even the worst insults, is as bad as driving half of the country to the brink of madness. I was a victim of it because I trusted them. I also didn’t question how I was getting my news. It was a feedback loop that fed nonstop “Two Minutes of Hate,” per Orwell.

In 2020, the isolation from lockdowns, my daughter leaving the nest, and one of my cats dying meant I was not able to tolerate the firehose of hate coming from my own side, all aimed at one man and his supporters. Ugly hate. Dehumanizing hate. It was too much for me.

I had to find out for myself who Trump really was. Was he all of the things they said? Was he really an existential threat on par with Hitler? No, as it turns out. He was the same guy whose entire reputation was made on saying controversial things. That’s it.

Trump didn’t change. He is still the guy on Celebrity Apprentice, the guy who shocked Oprah’s audience, or spoke plain truths on Phil Donahue, or told Larry King his breath was too bad to sit near.

It was the country that changed, becoming so politically correct, so afraid to offend anyone, that our speech had been carefully curated over time to the point where it was almost a different language.

So yes, anyone who spoke that language would have been sent into mass hysteria fits every time Trump said something you’re not supposed to say. And yet, that is likely how he beat every GOP contender in 2016 and probably how he beat Hillary Clinton. So many people in this country just wanted to hear someone tell it like it is.

I know so many on the Left, in the legacy media and in the establishment want Trump gone so the country can “go back to normal.” But I look around, and I see overly fragile generations who are in real trouble if they can’t handle words. Maybe Trump is exactly what the country needed, if for no other reason than to grow a thicker skin.

Those of us who have been chewed up and spit out by the Left, or treated like human garbage by them, or been shunned from the culture they’ve stolen for themselves will always be grateful for Trump, who always gives the middle finger even while dressed in a tux.

He saved the best for last, trolling them with his Trump 2028 hat.

Even if they don’t realize it now, everyone in that room tonight will spend the rest of their lives telling stories about how they were in the same room with Trump, both when they all almost got shot and later, when it was rescheduled.

It will be the most exciting thing that ever happened to many of them. They will all write books about this time in their lives and at some point, they’ll all realize what extraordinary events they’ve just lived through.

And maybe, just maybe, they’ll look back not in anger but with a bemused smile. Sticks and stones, dear media. Sticks and stones.

Sorry about that! Thanks to a reader for pointing it out. It’s fixed now.

It’s bad enough that Zohran Mamdani has become the leader of the new Democratic Party, having been anointed by none other than its King, Barack Obama. But now, their shining new star, Hasan Piker, is not even bothering to hide behind the words “Democratic Socialist.” He’s gone full-blown Commie.

These pitiful cosplay revolutionaries are not a match for Donald Trump, who can flick them off his jacket like a piece of lint, but he only has a few more years left, and the Democrats are collapsing into an even more fanatical cult. They have no one to blame but themselves.

Mamdani had made big promises to “arrest Benjamin Netanyahu” if he ever came to New York as a “war criminal.” But he had to backtrack on that because he doesn’t have the authority to do so because Trump smacked him down.

He still calls on the Federal Government to make the arrest. To me, he looks like someone who believes he’s the alternative president in our virtual Civil War, like a would-be Jefferson Davis.

So Mamdani had to back off of his claim that he had any such power to arrest Netanyahu.

Mamdani is cleverly riding a wave of influencer culture, knowing he’ll get all the engagement and amplification on social media, from X to Facebook to TikTok. He’s a star on the Left; there is no doubt about it. But he’s also a problem for the Democrats because Mamdani was the Trojan Horse.

Hasan Piker is now riding high on his newfound fame and glory. He proudly displays the front page of the New York Times with the Twin Towers ablaze after 9/11 and has said on streaming that the US “deserved” it, later clarifying that our foreign policy was bad enough that we should be attacked.

Hasan Piker is dangerous because he is so stupid. He’s so stupid, he doesn’t even seem to know the horrific atrocities under Mao. He showed up at a recent Democratic event wearing a Mao costume at the same time as Bill Maher was admitting his vote was in play. The subject of a recent Dumpster Fire by Bridget Phetasy.

Also covered on Sky News:

Piker put his whole speech on YouTube channel, which has almost 2 million subscribers. His base is growing. Last I checked, a few months ago, he only had about 1 million. You can see the chat on his streaming platform on the side and imagine what it must feel like to be worshipped: Go get ‘em, King! They say.

The College Democrats gave him a standing ovation:

In his speech, per the Commie creed, he attacked the Democrats too. They’re in the way, you see, and this movement, says Piker, is unstoppable. He says he’s an outsider leading an insurgency. He calls out Neera Tanden directly.

He also admits, “I’ve worked with a lot of campaigns,” and is now working with the Democratic Socialists to build a brand worldview so they can fundamentally transform the country. Yeah, heard it all before, pal.

He calls Trump a Fascist, peppers his speech with low-hanging fruit like the “Epstein class.” He, a member of the socialist socialites, demonizes “billionaires.” He calls out, per the usual, climate change even though he streams all day long sucking up energy like the good Capitalist he really is.

They screech to “abolish ICE,” but also want Medicare for All. So, who will be paying for all of that? Not him. Not Gen-Z. It will be mounted on the backs of the same people who were desperate enough to vote for Trump not once but twice, the real working class in America. Piker is just too dumb to know that.

Not all of them are buying it, but don’t worry; per the Commie creed, they will be exiled and chased out of politics.

The College Democrats in Kansas released the following statement:

Hasan Piker, like Zohran Mamdani, like all of the Manson family girlies who fawn all over them, were raised in American schools amid Critical Race and Gender Theory, the so-called “real history” they indoctrinated our kids with. Now we are seeing the fruits of their labor.

It’s Joseph McCarthy’s ultimate nightmare finally realized. Maybe it wasn’t true that the military was infested with Commies, but if it came back to today, he’d see evidence of infiltration everywhere, from culture to academia to politics.

No, I don’t want to censor Hasan Piker, but sometimes you have to wonder, once again, where all of this is going and what, if anything, we can do about it without violating the Constitution. Now, the Communist hunters like Richard Nixon aren’t looking so wrong.

I barely learned about the dangers of Stalin when I grew up on the Left. We romanticized Communism and ignored the horrors of mass murder, gulags, and oppression of free speech. Even now, the Left sees 1984 as Donald Trump’s America, not theirs.

I also never learned about the Cultural Revolution in China until I flipped sides. Now, the Left has the double whammy of Oppressed/Oppressor as defined by race and skin color brushing up against Communist countries like China and Islamic Jihad by people who are not white, and thus, they have no defense against any of it.

There was a time, however, when the legacy media would report on the horrors of China’s past, like the BBC:

Even Vox:

Hasan Piker has the good looks and charisma of Che Guevara. Zohran Mamdani might not be as good-looking, but he’s also charismatic. These guys could lead a cult anywhere. Charisma plus fanaticism is a dangerous combo.

The milquetoast Democrats are no match for Piker and Mamdani. They don’t have any real men in the party anymore who can take them on - they’re all too frightened of the voters. They can’t Gavin Newsom their way out of this one. We'd all better hope it’s Kamala Harris and not AOC in 2028.

I’ve said it many times, and it only gets truer by the day: there is no saving the Left. There is only saving America from them. Godspeed, Republicans, Conservatives, and MAGA.

They made this bed. All of them called Trump a fascist for ten years too. They have dropped the seeds into this fertile ground. They should not be that surprised that weeds are cropping up that are too strong and too fast-moving to stop, even if they will kill the garden.

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.
If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat.
If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” Sun Tsu

The Left owns most of the mainstream culture. I know, because I helped build part of it. In 2008, as Obama rose and the iPhone reshaped everything, I was a film blogger writing from the perspective of race and gender. I was “woke” before the term existed, and I took plenty of heat for it.

By Obama’s second term, around 2012, a deliberate “hearts and minds” campaign took hold. Critical Race and Gender Theory spread rapidly on campuses amid what I now see as the Great Feminization of institutions.

I had no idea what all of it would become just a few short years later when Donald Trump — the ultimate alpha male, a white man who said anything he wanted, manspread at every opportunity, laughed in the face of the Left, and launched a war against all things woke — defeated Hillary Clinton, the heir to the Obama empire.

His rise triggered mass hysteria on the Left and a mobilization that continues today. What followed feels like a virtual Civil War. The Left fights to defend its vision of Woketopia, framing itself as the resistance against Nazis and the Confederacy. The Right sees the war as a fight for representation, tradition, and the freedom to think and speak without penalty. The battlefield is social media, the Super Bowl, and the movie theater.

It’s hard to know how any of this would have played out if Trump hadn’t won, but since he did, that kicked up the “resistance” cosplay all over again. To the Left, any time they are invited to a culture war battle, it’s like this scene in Casablanca, where they have to sing louder to drown out the song by the Nazis.

Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl

When the NFL announced Bad Bunny — known for his anti-ICE activism, gender-fluid style, and Spanish-language music — would headline the 2026 halftime show, many on the Right erupted. Turning Point USA even launched counter-programming. The complaints framed him as anti-American and “woke.”

All it did was hand the Left free publicity. The outrage mobilized fans, drove massive pre-event buzz, and turned the performance into a cultural referendum — emboldening and uniting the Left more than a No Kings protest ever could. You are either all the way in, or you’re all the way out.

When the show delivered spectacle and celebration (leaning into marriage and tradition, even if still too vulgar for many viewers), the Left acted as if it were the greatest performance of all time. It gave them an outlet to express virtue and unite in fury against the Right.

If you turn it into a contest, the Left will win — because they have a larger share of voice and they rule with fear. Who would dare criticize Bad Bunny after that?

The Odyssey

The same pattern repeated with Nolan’s The Odyssey. After a meh trailer dropped, buzz around the movie was tepid. That changed the moment news leaked that Lupita Nyong’o would play Helen of Troy and Elliot Page would play a male soldier. The Right took the bait.

The reaction on the Left was swift: their massive cultural machine roared into action. The film was soon discussed on The View and across the internet. If no one had heard about The Odyssey, they certainly did now. Those who probably would never have bought a ticket now knew they had to do their part and support this movie.

My mother (in a wheelchair) and my sister (disabled)--both progressives who hate Trump--made the effort to drive an hour to the theater with me. About 45 minutes in, my mother leaned over and said, “This couldn’t be a worse movie.” Some in the audience applauded at the end, but it was clear this wasn’t a movie for everyone. It felt more like a religious ceremony than entertainment.

After release, many critics and audiences (including some prominent conservatives like Ben Shapiro) praised the film’s ambition and craft. The controversial roles proved minor on screen. The controversy didn’t sink the movie--it boosted it.

With both Bad Bunny and The Odyssey, the Right was reacting before they knew what they should be reacting to. Both Nyong’o and Page have such small parts that they are barely noticeable in the film. Nyongo’s in particular is given almost nothing to do. The whole film is multi-racial, so it’s not that big of a deal that Helen of Troy is a black woman.

Everyone who saw the movie now could see that the Right over-reacted, clutched pearls, and looked like the fragile, triggered side.

The Left took another victory lap, while segments of the Right looked reactive. Had the film been left alone, without the culture-war infusion, it might have succeeded or failed on its own merits. Not everyone loves this movie.

But now, the Right has handed back to the Left a newly emboldened fighting spirit. This will last for months: teary standing ovations at awards shows and career boosts for Lupita Nyong’o and Elliot Page. It probably sweeps the Oscars.

So if wanting the movie to fail was the goal, the Right now has to take the L.

The Strategic Mistake

In both cases, the Right knew the enemy but not itself. Loud preemptive outrage signals weakness and hands the opposition a simple narrative: “They hate trans representation/Spanish/black people.”

It transformed a moment when the film might have succeeded or failed on its own merits, or even a subtle win for the Right, into a decisive victory for the Left. Sun Tzu would not approve.

Learn the lesson.

The Left dominates legacy institutions — Hollywood, awards shows, Big Tech platforms, major sports entertainment — for now. Complaining louder rarely changes that. These battles show the limits of pure opposition, especially when the Left wins so decisively, as they have here.

The smarter path is to apply Sun Tzu’s wisdom: Know yourself. Know the terrain. Stop feeding the machine. Build parallel culture — institutions, artists, platforms, and stories that people actually want to engage with. Create rather than just react. That is how lasting ground is won.

If nothing else, give them enough rope…

The best film I’ve seen this year is the magnificent Project Hail Mary, a movie for everyone because it is the real Hero’s Journey. It’s not trying to instruct or correct you, but rather, to sweep you up in an adventure story with characters you care about.

The virtual Civil War will continue. The question is whether the Right keeps charging into predictable ambushes or starts fighting on its own chosen ground. Make the movies. Write the books. Build.

I put out a podcast over at Hollywood Woketopia if you are interested.

You might like The Odyssey. I did not. My mother is in a wheelchair, and my sister is disabled, and both of them wanted to see this movie, so they went with me, which is very rare. Unfortunately, both were disappointed.

My sister knew The Odyssey well; my mother and I didn’t. It is getting raves from the Left, of course, and many on the Right like it too, like Ben Shapiro and others.

I wrote up some of my thoughts here.

Hollywood Woketopia

The Odyssey is Peak Woke

After the teaser dropped for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, the reactions were deadly to its box-office prospects. For a film that cost upwards of $250 million, the last thing it could be was boring. The chattering class mocked their accents, said it looked “like a slog,” and that could spell catastrophe for Universal…

Listen now

9 days ago · Sasha Stone

I will come out of this very surreal moment in American history and in the story of my own life, understanding the basic truth that our goodness is not determined by a political party. It isn’t the politics that make us better than anyone else. We all have our own ideas of what matters. Instead, it is our willingness to preserve our humanity when tested that really counts.

We can blame the internet and the algorithms for what has happened to all of us in the last 20 years, to our politics, to our culture, to our relationships. But that can only take us so far. At some point, we all have to reckon with who we are and what we’ve become.

I always thought we were the good guys. We didn’t mock, degrade, or dehumanize other people. We were decent and were empathetic. That is, until Donald Trump won in 2016 and all of that changed. What I saw happen to my own side was ugly. It was dark. I wanted nothing to do with it.

It’s been almost two years since Donald Trump was nearly shot and killed on live television. The way the Left dealt with that shooting was shocking. They diminished it. They said it was staged or just shrapnel. They did everything but wake up to the radicalization on their own side.

By then, they’d become consumed by hatred, having tried everything they had in their arsenal to take down Trump, and all of it had failed. How could they pivot back to their humanity?

So when Charlie Kirk was assassinated on video, with the clip going viral to millions of views in seconds, they were primed and ready to once again leave behind their humanity and celebrate one more battle against their named evil, a guy who said things they didn’t like.

It became a thing on TikTok:

They all took to X and competed for who could be the ugliest and the cruelest. The more disgusting they were, the more their hate and dehumanization were rewarded. Social media has messed with our perception of what defines love and hate, with those tiny deceptive hearts we press every time someone scratches that sadistic itch.

The reaction to Charlie’s assassination by the Left was unlike anything I’ve ever seen or anything I thought I would ever see from my former side. It might have been the people of Salem celebrating watching their friends and neighbors hang because they refused to confess. But this was America in 2025, not 1692. How could they not have been shaken out of their decade-long mass hysteria stupor?

My mind goes to Charles Manson and his followers, who showed no mercy, slicing up the bodies of the rich in the Hollywood Hills, a pregnant Sharon Tate among them. To hear the Manson family tell it, they deserved it. They were the establishment. They had been dehumanized, and their lives didn’t matter.

I bring up the Manson murders a lot because that was the last time we saw that same glint, the same wild-eyed happiness and glee at something as gruesome as a murder or someone’s death.

I thought that would have been the end of it, back then. It was enough to end the 1960s, keep Richard Nixon in power, and send our society tumbling toward Ronald Reagan and the 1980s.

But now, that same kind of bizarre, cult-like fury has overtaken the Left once again, and nothing can shake them out of it, not the near assassination of Trump, not the brutal murder of Charlie Kirk. Not the celebrating afterward.

The hate bubbled up inside them so profoundly that even when Barack Obama tried to show some grace in the wake of Charlie’s death, his biggest applause lines came after he decided to repeat the cherry-picked, out-of-context lies pushed by the Left that led to the dehumanization of Charlie Kirk in the first place.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took her cue from President Obama and followed the same pattern. She offered a condemnation of political violence, but then launched into the kind of attack that they believe justifies all of what they’ve been doing for the past ten years.

This is a country built on freedom of speech, and yet, the entire Left doesn’t believe in it, or they think it’s Trump that’s doing it. They control the culture, which is why they couldn’t even offer a word about Charlie’s death, not even at the Emmys or anywhere else.

Jamie Lee Curtis had a moment of sorrow for Charlie when she choked up on a podcast. But the activists descended upon her, and of course, she was forced to “clarify” what she meant.

All it took was losing one election for my side to transform into monsters who believed that as long as their fellow Americans stood in their way, they could justify anything that happened to them, yes, even an assassination.

Even now, I still get twitchy when I see the blind, hot hatred coming from the Left aimed at anyone on the Right. I’ve never gotten used to it. I’ve never been able to overlook it. I certainly couldn’t be a part of it.

I was reminded of that this week after Lindsey Graham’s untimely death. I watched the same pattern play out, the same ugliness, the same mocking TikTok videos demanding those inside utopia disconnect from their humanity.

Even if Trump danced on the graves of his enemies, Rob Reiner and Robert Mueller, that doesn’t mean he spends his days wishing any of them would be murdered or dead. Plenty of people on the Right, even journalists in right-leaning outlets, had no problem condemning Trump for it. Why can’t they do that on the Left?

Why are we now seeing them once again celebrating the death of a politician for the crime of disagreeing with them? They will keep doing this and as long as they do, someone out there will think picking up a gun will make them a hero.

Celebrating the death of evil people should be reserved for mass murderers like Stalin or Hitler. That they believe Lindsey Graham, Donald Trump, or Charlie Kirk are on that level is proof enough that they’ve lost their minds, and it has taken us to a very dangerous place.

Something Wicked This Way Comes

When Charlie was assassinated, it was like the leg of a pier giving way and the whole thing crashing into the water. He held the MAGA movement together by his optimistic and inclusive nature, but once he was gone, a full-blown war broke out.

It all started with the JQ group - the “Jewish Question” white nationalists - who instantly blamed Charlie’s death on Israel. This was then picked up and amplified by Candace Owens, who has now become more popular than she’s ever been by positioning herself as the anti-Charlie Kirk. She is now attempting to steal his legacy, bully and harass his widow, and destroy everything he ever built.

Why? Who knows. Maybe because she’s a total zero and her friendship with Charlie was the best it was ever going to get for her. Maybe she was bitter and resentful about being sidelined by Charlie and TPUSA. Either way, she has now done the Left a solid by changing the conversation around Charlie’s death.

It isn’t the rising fanaticism on the Left or their pathological need to control thought and speech. It isn’t that they’ve become so totalitarian that they fantasize about the deaths of their enemies and celebrate when people die?

No, it was actually Israel!

I didn’t think anything or anyone could ever match the level of insanity of the Left, but Candace Owens has done it. For clicks, views, and money, she sold out her so-called friend.

Charlie has been dehumanized, yet again, this time transformed into nothing more than a stepping stone to success by a woman who can never get enough of it, who needs people to be talking about her, looking at her, thinking about her, doing anything but ignoring her.

She’s stolen Charlie’s legacy and has now written herself into this story so everyone will notice she was once part of Charlie’s world. Not an important part. She was useful, for a time. Maybe she was even his friend, for a time. Now, she has shown her true colors, and it is the most evil thing I’ve seen in the 30 years I’ve been online.

How lonely and empty does a person have to be to steal someone else’s life?

That so many have followed her, that there is such a thing as the “woke Right,” that Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones and others have actually indulged this sick fantasy that anyone but Tyler Robinson could have done this, proves that goodness is not about political parties. It is about our humanity, whether we have it or whether we’ve abandoned it.

Charlie’s Angels

Something real and violent happened on September 10, 2025. The algorithmic, hypnotic churn of the internet, our absurd, pointless Civil War, the obsession on the Right with Israel, none of that could stop what really happened that day.

There isn’t a person who was there or who was closest to Charlie that Candace Owens hasn’t consumed for content and blamed for his death.

But she’s underestimated the strength of Charlie’s widow, his most powerful angel, Erika Kirk. Candace has used her too, laid her out like raw flesh to be consumed by sycophants, but somehow, that has only made Erika stronger, and now, Candace is the one who is about to understand what love really means. And what goodness looks like.

Erika is Charlie’s angel, but lucky for him, he has a lot of them. They’re out there fighting every day to keep his memory alive and the movement he built thriving.

And a sculptor is putting a statue of Charlie Kirk in Times Square, New York. We know how that is going to go. We know because we know the Left.

The way the Left responded to Charlie’s assassination should be something none of us ever forgets. It is something they will all have to reckon with one day, and for many of them, wiping away its shame won’t be easy.

It will be up to those angels of Charlie’s to continue his lifelong devotion to open debate, to talking to those you disagree with, and to preserve our freedom of speech and expression. Above all, let his memory be a reminder of how important it is to hold on to our humanity.

The world has changed since Charlie was shot and killed. It’s darker, and it’s meaner. Holding onto hope is harder than it’s ever been. But Charlie Kirk lives on through his widow, his babies, his true friends, and the tens of thousands of young people keeping TPUSA alive.

We have his legacy because we still have his voice, and thanks to the internet, it is everywhere, and he will never be forgotten.

///

Rumors (or conspiracy theories) swirled that it might be poison, considering he recently met with Zelensky and attempted to bring a sanctions deal to Trump.

There’s also another conspiracy theory blooming:

But it seems more likely it was a sudden heart attack.

I don’t know what killed him. I just woke up to the news and am trying to sift through it before we’re hit with the predictable barrage of dehumanization from the Left and Right.

But there was also grace offered:

When I was still on the Left and watching the Kavanaugh hearing when Lindsey Graham gave his best speech, it shook loose some part of my indoctrinated brain, and I knew he was right about my side. I knew he was right about the hearing. I knew something was very wrong with us. That something has never been fixed.

The way I see it, unless it’s Adolf Hitler or Charles Manson, offering grace is the least we can do. None of us is perfect. We will all say and do things we might regret. The mandated conformity and totalitarianism on the Left remains terrifying to me, as they believe people who do not agree with them deserve to die.

They will throw back how Trump reacted to the deaths of Rob Reiner and Robert Mueller, as though that gives them the green light to spew their hatred in the hours after his death. Everything now is a political weapon, even the deaths of people. I condemned Trump’s reaction and have always seen it as a major weakness in him: his inability to stay silent or show grace. But he doesn’t want his political enemies dead. Many on the Left do, and they prove it every day.

If they are not picking up guns and shooting their enemies, they are punishing those who do not agree with them by unending dehumanization on social media. I wish I hadn’t seen this side of humanity in my lifetime. Nobody is perfect. We have to learn to live with each other.

I expect these same people will dance on my grave. I know that is how they will mourn someone they used to call a friend. I don’t see it as much on the Right. They are not totalitarians. They do not want all the power, all the culture, all the government. And therein lies the difference.

It costs us nothing to offer grace. Maybe it doesn’t feel as good as hate, but without it, we’re done for.

May God rest his soul.

A reader writes:

“I became a fan a couple of years ago, because of your open-mindedness. Subsequently, I’ve recommended you to numerous friends. However, I am so disappointed that your writing has become so divisive. I expected more...

I’ve been a Tucker Carlson fan for many years, and your attacks against him are shortsighted and mean. He’s a truth seeker like you, and I will always respect his courage to push against President Trump because he broke his promise and launched an unnecessary war with Iran. (Which the U.S. is losing.)

I am canceling my subscription, but hope to rejoin if/when your eyes are opened, because of the truth you saw, like they were several years ago.”

I always knew that criticizing Tucker or even Candace or even Megyn or anyone else in the MAGA world would mean I took a hit. I’ve probably lost more over Israel than I lost over posting Tucker’s videos for as long as I did. I never thought I’d be in the middle of this kind of war.

I call my site “Free Thinking” because of the way my mind works. Most of what I write is attacks against the Left, and that’s perfectly fine with this reader, even if it would never be described as “open-minded” by anyone on the Left.

The truth is that this reader disagrees with my disagreeing with blaming Israel for the war in Iran, for Trump’s decision to bomb Iran, etc. Tucker also believes, by the way, that Israel killed Charlie Kirk, as Candace Owens also believes. If you think calling that out is an attack against them, I don’t know what to tell you. There is a right and a wrong here, and they are on the wrong side.

I do not think Tucker is a truth seeker. I think he is forever looking for someone to blame. I think he is living an unfulfilled life, and what drives him is bitterness toward someone or something. What that something becomes changes. But it is always the thing oppressing him somehow - a guy who has everything.

I can’t understand the pathological hatred of Israel. I was never particularly supportive of Zionism or anything like that. You can’t find many pieces I’ve ever posted about the subject. It has somehow become the most important thing to many on the Left and the Right, and it happened all of a sudden.

Faced with this, I had a choice. I could remain silent, knowing what I was seeing was wrong (at least to me), or risk losing subscribers, even income. I guess I would not be in the mess I’m in now if staying silent were something I could do. I’m not good at it, and that gets me into trouble, especially when I’m on the side of an unpopular issue.

I don’t agree that Trump’s bombing of Iran was a betrayal of his supporters because I’ve watched all of Trump’s speeches, and he’s always said he would not allow Iran to gain a nuke and that he would have them in check. If the USA is losing the war, that’s because Trump is trying to appease people like this reader here and Tucker. But going to war halfway doesn’t work.

So if there was a mistake here, it was assuming there wouldn’t have to be a regime change once the war began. Playing nice with monsters who are akin to Nazis isn’t going to cut it.

He didn’t want or promise a forever war with boots on the ground, and as of now, that’s not happening. Should that happen, I would still support Trump, and I would be grateful that the people of Iran have a chance to live free. Tucker is angry because of his own personal paranoia and rage at Israel. So much so that he’s become sympathetic to radical Islam.

I don’t want boots on the ground. I don’t want our soldiers to die in foreign lands. I hope it doesn’t come to that. But I’ll support Trump 100X over before I’ll support people who think Israel killed Charlie Kirk.

Substack is a work in progress. I expect over time I will gain and lose followers for a variety of reasons. To those who have stuck around all of this time, thank you.

Hope you have a nice weekend.

She wanted fame, and now she’s gotten it. She’ll go down as the most humiliated podcaster in the history of podcasts. And not a moment too soon.

Now that the Tyler Robinson Probable Cause hearing is coming to a close, everyone can finally see who is lying and who was always telling the truth.

The long con by Candace Owens is finally over. It’s done. All that’s left are her sycophants who refuse to let go because they were sold such a convincing lie. None of that would matter if it weren’t for what she was lying about. Charlie Kirk and his beloved, grieving widow, Erika.

There aren’t enough words in the English language to describe the level of evil Candace Owens has engaged in for months on end. All it’s meant is that she’s gotten what she so badly craves: to have people talking about her, looking at her, noticing her. Inside, she is a nothing, a total zero.

She was gifted with charisma and good looks, and that has taken her places. Ultimately, though, because there is nothing inside, she has had to steal from others to become more popular, and now she’s trying to steal Charlie Kirk's legacy.

Those who have excused her, defended her, ignored her, covered up for her, or worst of all, gone along with her - like Tucker Carlson and Shawn Ryan - should hang their heads in shame today, but they won’t.

The evidence against Tyler Robinson is overwhelming. They have everything they need to send Tyler Robinson away for life without parole, unless it somehow goes to trial, where they’ll likely seek the death penalty. Right now, his defense team is just trying to keep him alive.

The grief felt by so many over the sudden and shocking death of Charlie Kirk has been immeasurable, but no one has been hurt more than Erika Kirk and her family because Candace Owens needed the story to be about her instead, and it was never about her.

Candace was sidelined by Charlie before his death, and she blames this on Israel and the Jews, and has somehow implicated Erika as being their puppet. But the truth is, she burned bridges on her way to the “top,” if you see being the number one podcaster in the world for a time, the top.

This case should be the end of her career. She's enough of a sociopath to simply do what she’s always done after she makes a mess of things - disappear and reinvent herself as something and someone else. Now that her sycophants treat her like a cult leader and God, however, it will be harder to let go of that role.

No one should forget what Candace Owens and her army of bored, dumb women did to Erika. They called her a sex trafficker. They called her a puppet to Israel. They mocked how she looked, what she wore, and how she hugged. Only a few prominent people stood up for her, including Ben Shapiro, who lays out the case brilliantly here.

And yes, I know that the Jew haters and Israel obsessives will say, of course, he’s Jewish, as Candace has done many times. They’ll say the same about those who aren’t Jewish, like Chicks on the Right, who have been calling out Candace for months now and whose podcast should be much more popular.

And of course, Dana Loesch, who said she reached out to some of those defending Candace in hopes of getting through to them, like Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly.

Erika Kirk has many angels. They’ve taken a major hit for being on the right side, including dips in clicks, views, and subscribers, and have been attacked nonstop on social media and in their comment sections.

It’s called having a spine. It’s called standing up for what is right. It’s not that hard, though it can be lonely. I mean, if even Nick Fuentes can do it, why can’t everyone else?

This is no surprise or secret. Many people have been ringing the bell about Candace Owens for a long time now. Her popularity on YouTube meant others decided she was “successful,” like Joe Rogan, and that she should be treated with respect. She led them right into the gutter.

is just one of her victims and has a must-read series on how Owens tried to ruin her life and the lives of others for no reason except to be an evil witch.

House Inhabit

1 | Candace Owens Undone: Object of Scorn

NOTE: This series blends traditional reporting, cultural analysis, and firsthand reflection to offer coverage that is as fair as it is real. It’s personal, it’s political, and it’s only possible because of your support…

Read more

7 months ago · 438 likes · 108 comments · Jessica Reed Kraus

An X account that goes by the name of Data Republican finally sank Candace for good:

When Candace’s army claimed Candace never said any of it, Data Republican showed up with receipts.

Candace’s predictable response:

MilkBarTV put together this compilation of Candace's remarks about Erika Kirk. We should never forget how many people who claimed to be Charlie’s friends yet said nothing about any of it.

Those who want to see Erika Kirk and Turning Point USA destroyed because they hated Charlie are amplifying Candace Owens. But every so often, an ordinary person out there notices just how crazy it all is and has no problem saying so:

Megyn Kelly has become a focal point for many on X for her refusal to call out or denounce Candace Owens and instead, defend her. Since no one—not Piers Morgan, Mark Halperin, or anyone else who has interviewed her — ever confronted her directly about Candace, one of her guests—Matt Murphy—had to do it.

I was glad to see the topic discussed at all on Megyn’s show, as she’s steadfastly avoided it. It is a big story, one that, in the past, she would have chased and brought to her viewers. The problem is she’s caught in the middle between her new audience of Israel haters and her old audience, who feel betrayed by the change in her tone.

None of this seems to have impacted her viewership or listeners. I suspect if it had, she’d make some adjustments. She has softened a bit on the Israel stuff of late, but when it comes to Candace Owens, she has been MIA.

Megyn Kelly has been kind to me, and I would not have an income if not for her. I have defended her on X for a long time now, and I do not wish to see her “canceled” or for others to stop watching or listening. To me, this is important enough to take a stand, if for nothing else, for decency.

At some point, it has to be about something bigger than traffic, viral videos, and subscriptions. It has to be about doing the right thing, standing on the right side, even if it costs you everything. In the end, that’s all you really have.

I look forward to the day when Candace Owens no longer matters. If only we all could just ignore her. That would be the punishment she deserved. It was never her place to insert herself like this, to create so much chaos and pain for Erika and their family. I have never seen anything this evil in the 30 years I’ve been online. I can only hope the Right can decouple itself from this madness before it’s too late.

I am working on a longer podcast about Charlie. I hope to post over the weekend. Until then…

He blames the political establishment (probably true, to be honest), and he talks about how hard it is as a normal person to be in politics. He’s right. Politics is a dirty business. He should have known what kind of people he was getting involved with.

He isn’t dropping out for any reason like “helping the Democrats take the Senate.” It’s all about how he’s run out of options.

Jenny Racicot had held back in her accusations against Graham Platner when she spoke with the New York Times. She didn’t want to derail his entire political campaign, being that she’s a progressive and all. But something obviously changed.

She decided to come clean with a story in Politico and an interview on Jake Tapper's show.

Her story backs up what others have said about him, but hers includes sexual assault, or what she thinks of as rape. She resisted but ultimately went along with “it” out of fear. He was drunk. She had told him not to come over, but he ignored her and eventually forced himself upon her.

At first, Platner wasn’t sure whether to drop out. But Racicot’s public testimony has forced even the Democratic Socialists to urge him to drop out.

From Zohran Mamdani:

To Bernie Sanders:

The rest of the Centrist Democrats had already urged him to do so:

Racicot doesn’t appear to have any agenda here beyond her own ethics as a progressive woman when it comes to sexual assault or harassment. But the question still hangs in the air. What made her change her mind? Who were the invisible hands behind the scenes, encouraging her to go public in time for Platner to vacate the nomination and allow for someone else to take on Susan Collins?

Remember Cheyenne Hunt? I wrote about her in the story of how Eric Swalwell was taken out from the Left before he won the nomination, and the Republicans dropped their damaging oppo. She’s a Gen-Z progressive who works with a network of other women to expose the sex pests, wherever they may find them.

From the Politico story:

After the publication of the Times report, Racicot connected with Cheyenne Hunt, a progressive Democratic lawyer who founded the nonprofit Reckoning Action, which launched earlier this year to fight misogyny. Hunt, who had endorsed Platner last fall but renounced her support for him after the Times article, previously supported women who came forward with assault allegations against former Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), earlier this year, prompting him to drop out of the California gubernatorial primary and resign from Congress. NBC News previously reported that Hunt was working with multiple women who had past relationships with Platner. Hunt connected POLITICO to Racicot.

“Reckoning Action exists to confront misogyny in American life in all forms and manifestations, including in bad actors being elected to positions of power,” Hunt said. “We became aware of allegations before ever being connected with Jenny, and have been in contact with multiple women with really troubling allegations, and it just became clear that this is someone who’s not fit to hold public office.”

I don’t know if Cheyenne Hunt is really the one driving this behind the scenes or if she is being “guided” by someone much higher on the food chain. Her militant action, alongside her immature level of certainty that she knows who is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, is terrifying and will be a big problem for the Democrats, whether they realize it or not.

Here is what I know as a former Centrist Democrat. They don’t like the rise of the DSA, which is why Neera Tanden was fully on board with dumping Platner and perhaps using that to throw shade at the anti-establishment or DSA candidates:

On the other hand, their vetting allowed Eric Swalwell to hide in the shadows for years. But both Swalwell and Platner represented two potential high-profile and humiliating losses for the Democrats, which is why it’s hard to believe all of this is being spearheaded by a Gen-Z activist like Hunt.

Then again, Gen-Z won’t just go along with the Democrats or “vote blue no matter who,” and that has created chaos within the party. They aren’t used to being transparent or honest. They’re used to saying “shut up and sit down” and have everyone comply.

But perhaps Sean Spicer has it right:

And Tom Cotton:

As of today, Platner is not dropping out until he chooses a replacement:

Does this blunt the DSA’s rise ahead of the midterms? Does it embolden the Centrists to take the party back? Does getting rid of the guy with the Nazi tattoo give them the upper hand to call the Right Nazis again without feeling like hypocrites? Who knows. But one thing is for sure: they’re still undone by Me Too. That tells you all you need to know about where the power lies in the Democratic Party: with women.

These are their rules, by the way. On the Right, they mostly plow through accusations like this. But not on the Left. This is the bed they made for themselves. They’ll have to lie in it. Or lie about it.

The two Americas faced off over Independence Day Weekend, the nation’s 250th birthday. To the Left and the ruling class, it was the worst-case scenario. How could they celebrate the administration they’ve called “fascist” for ten years? And worse, if Trump pulled off a successful Fourth, and the people felt happiness for even one second, what of their ongoing mass delusion?

A gathering storm, lightning cracking in the sky, buckets of rain pouring down, it looked like a weather intervention to prevent the nation’s big celebration with the biggest fireworks display in history. Nothing would have made them happier. But Trump was never going to let that happen.

I had that feeling, the same one I’ve had so many times. Trump decides to push through anyway, as he did in Butler after almost being assassinated on live television.

Or just after the Correspondents’ Dinner, where another shooting almost massacred reporters and the Trump administration. He wanted to go back into the room and give his speech.

That kind of heroism can’t be taught. It is true grit. It comes from being raised to be tough, resilient, and to stand there, allow yourself to be pummeled by every force imaginable, and remain standing. It always reminds me of that scene in Raging Bull when Jake La Motta refuses to be taken down by Sugar Ray.

“You never got me down, Ray.”

Yes, that’s Robert De Niro before he lost his mind to TDS, and when he was still an actor, all of us could admire. He and everyone else in the upper crust of Liberal society believe it’s their right to rob the American people of representative democracy. They might have won, but they underestimated the kind of stuff Trump is made of. “You never got me down, Ray.”

I kept wondering, is he really going to show up that late and give a speech? Are they really going to push through with the fireworks? The crowd drenched? An unpredictable weather pattern swirling overhead? Sure enough, the minute Lee Greenwood took to the stage, we knew what was coming next.

I knew I was watching the stuff of legends as Trump took to the stage to give his speech. It was something beautiful and spectacular to behold. I’ve never seen anything like it, and it was pure Trump. The real Trump, not the fake version sold by the legacy media and the Left every day.

I just kept thinking, there will be another one like him. We’re all so lucky to be living through this moment, and we have to make sure the story is told right.

I know I sound like a sycophant for Trump. I know what people think when they read the kind of adoring words I use to describe him, and how I neglect to write about his flaws, his bad decisions, or his mistakes. I won’t deny it.

To quote the great Teddy Roosevelt, “The poorest way to face life is to face it with a sneer.” That’s all we’ve gotten from the most powerful people in the country for the last ten years: one long sneer.

I knew how the elitists who believe this country belongs only to them would respond. I used to be one of them. I hated Trump right alongside them. I mourned the death of democracy, too. The difference is that, at some point, the hate became too much for me. I couldn’t be part of it. I had to find out what was true and what wasn’t.

I feel like I have to write about what I am seeing, but also to correct the record each and every time, because I know what the legacy media will report and how they’ll want to tell their version of the story in history books. My admiration for Trump has only grown as I’ve watched him deflect the slings and arrows.

Deep down, guys like Robert de Niro and Bruce Springsteen know who they are. They know they have everything and are used to getting their way. They can’t face their own irrelevance. They don’t want to go down in history as losers to their sworn enemy. What does that say about them?

They pretend it’s Trump who is the bully, but who are we kidding? They live in their own bubble. How could they ever know what was real anymore? They’ve become the antagonists, the bullies, the villains. because they’re the side that still has all of the power.

They threaten and intimidate anyone who would dare participate in a Trump-backed celebration of America at 250. Do they think we don’t notice? They’re the bad guys now. They’re the rich kid villain in a John Hughes high school movie.

To many other people, Trump represents the most famous guy in the world who has their back and is their voice. The best way to have prevented his rise was to understand that this is a big country that didn’t want to be ruled by the coastal elites.

And yes, it’s a cosmic joke that the Gray Champion, the hero of our time, is the guy who was on Celebrity Apprentice and hosted beauty pageants. Trump’s rise is about him, but it’s also about them - those at the top whose reaction to Trump has been their downfall. They destroyed themselves trying to destroy him.

Does that mean I think he’s perfect? Of course not. I wish he’d fund the National Parks. But I know a legend when I see one.

If you can’t stand back in awe over something like this, there is nothing left.

Thank you, President Trump, for giving your supporters the thrill of a lifetime and for showing people like me what real courage looks like.

It’s been said that you can spot an American from a mile away. Travelers to Europe are advised to adjust their attire to blend in with locals and avoid looking so … casual. The French think Americans are loud and rude, and Europe has a long tradition of sneering at how classless we all are, even before Trump.

I spent a month in Italy, and it’s a beautiful place. The slow living, the long naps when all the stores shut down for hours during the day, the tiny cars, the laundry drying on the balconies, the fresh food at the Farmer’s Market. I feel lucky that when I came back from Italy, I was pregnant and having my baby is the single greatest thing that has ever happened to me. But I’m also glad she grew up in America.

I used to travel to France to cover the Cannes Film Festival, and again, I admired their way of life, the food especially. But every time I stayed too long, I began to miss my home in America. There is something thrilling about living in a free country that I’ve never felt anywhere else.

It seems to me that if you are born here, you make up your life as it goes along. It is not planned out for you, necessarily, although in some cases, I guess it probably is. In my case, it wasn’t. I knew I could invent myself any way I wanted. And if I didn’t like that version, I could reinvent myself. We’re like our country, a work in progress. It’s always there for the taking, that promise of opportunity.

Donald Trump is all of America’s freedoms wrapped up in one imperfect man. He broke through the thick layer of oppressive thought and speech and showed the world that here, you really can say anything you want - as long as some crazed totalitarian doesn’t try to shoot you.

That’s the country I want to live in. It isn’t that the greatest writing or art has come from a place like America. Plenty of great works have come from places that don’t center freedom as their main objective. But once you’ve tasted it, you can’t give it up.

In his speech last night, Trump said:

The American founding represents the best ideas and traditions in history by the best people, like you. You can be loyal to Karl Marx or you can be loyal to America. You can be a communist or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both. As for those who peddle Marxist lies about our heritage, tell our children that we live on stolen land or that our heroes were oppressors, they’re doing something much worse than slandering our past. They are slandering and attacking our future. Not going to let that happen.

They’re trying to tear down the great American character to destroy the people who declared independence, who crossed the Delaware, who settled the West and conquered the skies. You know who those people are. But we will never let that happen.

In America now, two stories are competing to claim the right to rule the future. Trump is telling the better story, the one America was founded on and the one we’ve all believed, at least up until recently, when a new wave of progressives decided that the better story paints America as a corrupt, rotten, white supremacist empire that has to be torn down to the studs and rebuilt.

They must be terrified about the 2030 Census because they’ve decided to die on the hill of illegal immigration, which is fast becoming their most important issue. That, alongside Democratic Socialism, is a recipe for disaster.

This was Bill Clinton’s bummer message on the Fourth:

I always thought Bill Clinton was a good president, but reading that just now makes me think he wasn’t. All he’s ever been able to do is point the finger at the other side and never offer any real solutions. He’s not the man in the arena. He’s the man on the sidelines.

What I love about Trump and his supporters is how much they love America. They love it so much that they plant flags all over their homes. They admire the Founding Fathers. They call themselves Patriots. We didn’t have that kind of pride on the Left when I was growing up.

And even now, so many see the American flag and the love of country as dangerous, racist, bigoted, fascist. Whoever told those people that is what MAGA is about lied. They’re protective of America’s laws and its border. That is out of love for the country.

The Left has taken almost everything from them. They’ve locked them out of culture, forbidden them from participating in any of their major events, dehumanized, demonized, and disenfranchised them.

But the one thing they couldn’t take was their citizenship. They hit the jackpot just by being born in America. To think it would be so easy for people all over the world to come here illegally and claim that prize or to come here and attempt to remake America into something it was never meant to be devalues the one thing they treasure most of all.

I’ve always been a proud American. I’ve always preferred this country over any other, but only in the last few years have I understood what it means to be a Patriot, to be ready to fight for the country I love. And that is because of the people I’ve gotten to know on the Right.

This country is worth fighting for. I might not agree with all of the policies on the Right, or even Trump himself, all of the time, but I’d rather have the future of this country in the hands of people who love it the way Trump does than people who hate it, the way so many on the Left do, just because their candidates are weak and their policies are toxic.

I wanted to write 250 things I love about America, but it got too long, so this will have to do. Here are just some of the things I love:

I love the interstates as part of the great legacy of Dwight D. Eisenhower.

I love the Pacific Ocean because it stretches along the state.

I love Catalina Island off the California Coast, where I spent many a summer with my best friend.

I love seeing our history in the many cultures that came here, like Chinatown, Little Italy, Mexican food in LA, soul food in the South, Irish bars and pubs in the middle of nowhere. And yes, you can appreciate a nation of immigrants while still policing our borders now.

I love how nice people are in some places, like California, Ohio, and Iowa, where they smile at you on the street.

I love the weather extremes, from the dusty plains to the snowy mountains to hurricanes by the sea.

I love the historic monuments from the Civil War and the Revolutionary War.

I love the town squares that you can still see if you drive through the middle of America. Even though many are abandoned, they still look like hope to me.

I love how each town square has a church, a post office, and a school.

I love the many farmlands that blanket the Midwest.

I love the small mom-and-pop coffee drive-throughs, and even the convenience of a Starbucks in nearly every town.

I love Route 66 and how people still drive it and visit the forgotten places.

I love the absurdity of Las Vegas, how it sprouts up impossibly in the middle of the desert.

I love the American writers who helped shape our country’s sense of itself - Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Flannery O’Connor, Richard Ford, Maya Angelou.

I love the musical traditions that started here: Jazz and the Blues. And became Rock n’ Roll.

I love the Legend of Sleepy Hollow and the town that still remembers it.

I love diners and dive bars.

I love Gone with the Wind and how it’s still the highest-grossing film of all time when adjusted for inflation.

I love The Twilight Zone and find it timeless, as relevant today as it was in the 1950s.

I love the footprints at the (Grauman’s) Chinese Theater in Hollywood.

I love the US military and its devotion to the country.

I love the wildflowers that bloom in California every year.

I love soft-serve ice cream at the DQ.

I love Levi’s.

I love New York pizza.

I love Solvang in California.

I love driving up the Oregon coast.

I love the songs of Bob Dylan.

I love the tap dancing of Fred Astaire.

I love how anyone can be a star on YouTube, no matter where they come from, but YouTube couldn’t have been invented anywhere but America.

I love how I could build a business as a single mom in a one-room guesthouse in Van Nuys, and that business would, five years later, become profitable because I worked hard and had a good idea.

And then, when my career went up in flames in 2024 because I voted for Trump, I could build another career on Substack because that is what America is all about - inventing and reinventing yourself.

I love the innovative spirit that built America in real life and online.

I love reading about the early settlers, the Puritans, and the homesteaders, how much they sacrificed to help make America a home. And I love the history of the Native Americans, too, even if so much of it remains a tragedy now.

I love high-speed internet and Wi-Fi that are available almost everywhere, and if they're not, I have a hotspot.

I love the old American cars that were not just exceptional but beautiful.

I love the tradition of baseball.

I love that people faithfully watch football, even if I don’t.

I love the tradition of sourdough bread all over social media.

I love that the best basketball players in the world are from here.

I love that every state is different from one to the next.

I love Harper’s Ferry, how it’s frozen in time.

I love that we found a way to move on from the trauma of our past with slavery and how we fought a bloody Civil War to end it.

I love that we were the good guys in World War II. We did the right thing in entering the war and helping the Allies win.

I love that you can be anything here. The door is always open. It’s up to you to walk through it.

I love that America is a Christian nation, and you can see that if you drive across it. But it’s also a country that stands for freedom of religion, too.

I love the American comedians: Groucho Marx, George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Steve Martin, and Johnny Carson.

I love that the best films from the 1970s were American movies, like The Godfather, The French Connection, Taxi Driver, and Network.

But I also love more modern masterpieces by American filmmakers, like No Country for Old Men and Sideways.

I love that people play the lottery, thinking one day they will hit the jackpot. They never will, but they can still dream.

I love Thanksgiving and the way we celebrate it in America, which is to say, all together as one big dysfunctional family.

I love the tradition of Halloween and how every October, the pumpkins and costumes come out. I love the way the weather changes.

I love the Declaration of Independence and those who dared to build this wild, untamed, optimistic work in progress.

I love that America is always looking to the future to find a better version of itself and its people. I love that so many Americans still believe in the American Dream.

I love watching the movie Jaws on the 4th of July.

I love that people watch fireworks, even if I never do, because they traumatize my dogs.

I love that we have a holiday just to celebrate the day we became a country, a ragtag group of deplorable revolutionaries who set out to build a brand new country. Oh, the audacity of it.

I love living here and would not want to live anywhere else.

Happy 250th Birthday, my beloved country.

Happy 4th to you, dear readers. Thanks for everything. I hope you are having a wonderful weekend.

It took 65 years for that message to completely reverse itself in the Democratic Party and on the Left. Out is personal achievement. In is victimhood. Out is reaching for the stars. In is ushering in oppressed people from all over the world to ensure a steady supply. Out is the right of American citizens with their vote. In are people who don’t respect that vote.

As Trump gives his speech at Mount Rushmore later this evening, Zohran Mamdani, who is supposedly just the Mayor of New York City, has positioned himself as Trump’s equal, the Mirror President for the other America.

Thirsty as ever, in love with his own image, thinking who the hell he is, he has the audacity to sit in George Washington’s chair to make a speech about a new America he hopes to invent, one without borders, without Capitalism, without billionaires.

His speech paints the American government as oppressive, while demonizing them for policing immigration:

"We see it just as clearly in every American who still believes this country belongs to we, the people. We see America each time neighbors link arms with neighbors without asking how long they've lived here or what papers they have as ICE invades our neighborhoods. We see America each time working people demand more, not just for themselves, but for their fellow Americans."

The irony is that he demonizes the rich, the very people who pad his risks in New York City and help him present a fake-pretend utopian fantasy that only works because of the rich people in the city, because they won’t let it fail. It’s absolution, after all, and there is no price high enough for that.

It took America 250 years to arrive at a place where the country might finally, at long last, “be like Europe.” How many times did I hear that throughout my life? Why can’t we be like Europe?

We were raised to hate our country, to see it as a Capitalist hellhole of the haves and the have-nots, a lesser nation than France or the UK or Italy. No wonder Mamdani thinks he speaks for everyone. But we didn’t have a bloody revolution just to copy England.

Mamdani is like a cult leader who can now exploit whole generations who have been indoctrinated to believe that there is something rotting at the core of America’s heart, a disease of “white supremacy” and a history of exploitation, colonization, slavery, trauma, abuse, and poverty. Their only answer for this is to “be more like Europe.” At best, that is where they land. Really, it’s probably closer to “be more like China.”

They’re already halfway there. Cancel culture has silenced all dissent. The DSA is rising, and the Democrats have kissed Mamdani’s ring.

Not because it is easy…

It’s not easy making it in America. It’s not easy making enough money for a decent home, to raise a family, and to take a vacation once in a while. No one ever said it would be easy, least of all, JFK:

We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we're willing to accept.”

JFK was assassinated before I was born. The Democrats were haunted by him for my entire life, until Barack Obama came along and was the first to erase the ghosts of the past and redefine what it meant to be both a Democrat and a person of the Left. That meant fundamental things would change. One of the biggest changes was going from believing in personal achievement to believing in victimhood.

Obama took the obstruction of his policies personally. It was those racist Republicans. So they set about changing the hearts and minds of the young and teaching them that the only reason they couldn’t succeed was their victim status, and before long, that became the only thing that mattered about them. But for that movement to succeed, it required a sick country, not a healthy one.

The Democrats were split in 2016 between the “white working class” in Bernie’s Democratic Socialism and the identity politics of Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. Now, what we’re seeing is a marriage between the two. Now, it’s not what Vivek Ramaswamy called Woke Capitalism, but rather, Woke Socialism. Isn’t it just another way to sell to Gen-Z?

They are the most privileged generation ever to walk the face of the earth. Capitalism gave them social media, email, a computer in the palm of their hand, DoorDash, Google, Uber, TikTok, YouTube, streaming music, television shows, fast food, fast fashion, Instacart, Airbnb, influencer culture, and movies.

And it’s not enough.

Why can’t they be a Kardashian and have birthday parties with ten thousand balloons? Why can’t they travel to Europe? Why can’t they own a house? Why can’t they live on Manhattan’s Upper West Side? Why is Elon Musk a trillionaire with so many homeless people on the streets? Why are they so miserable, so full of anxiety, so full of hate? How can a life of convenience be so hard?

They want an easy life as they have in Sweden, Italy, or France. They want to Free Palestine. They want their happy ending for all oppressed people all over the world, especially those crossing the border. They were told this was America's problem, so why can’t they change America to fix it?

And if they can’t have it, well…

They were raised to believe it should all be easy. If you have anxiety, take a pill. If movies and books trigger you, they’ll have trigger warnings. Bullies at school will be eradicated. Self-esteem is what matters most. Words are violence. If masculinity is too toxic, we’ll feminize society to make it easier.

Mothers of my generation coddled the American mind. We helicoptered our children. We kept them from every imaginable harm, and we tried to clear a path to success. We taught them that you should only do things if they’re easy, not if they are hard. Because if they are too hard, that might lead to failure, and our kids could never fail.

But we forgot to teach them the value of hard work and failure because we never wanted them to feel any discomfort. If their lives were easy, we felt like we’d accomplished something because they’d be happy. But happiness comes from service, from building something, achieving something, doing something hard.

This country has always been “move fast and break things” but also “move fast and build things.” Invent things, envision things, start a business. I could never have started a business as a single mother in Italy as I did in America in 1999. America is the only country where anyone can build anything. The downside of that is that it’s hard. There is a price to pay for freedom.

Unless you’ve felt freedom, real freedom, in your mind and heart, you’ll never love this country the way I do. I love feeling free and always have. I had to escape the Left and the Democratic Party because I no longer felt free, as they no longer believe in freedom. They believe in forced compliance and conformity.

But freedom also means this:

And this:

They’re just too dumb by now to realize that they live in a free country where they can say and do anything they please without being shot on the spot or thrown in jail. They’re free to call Trump a fascist dictator because he isn’t one. They’re free to protest “No Kings” because Trump isn’t one.

Mamdani wants to fundamentally transform America and turn it into a Communist utopia, and the Democrats are letting him. That is not the way to lead America 250 years in. No, we have to fight for what America is. It is not a failure, not yet. It is worth fighting for.

Younger generations should be taught that they can do anything with their lives, no matter their skin color, and that they can make money right now on YouTube, Substack, and TikTok. They can start a business. They can go to trade school. They can use AI to get them where they need to go because it can make any ordinary person well-skilled and productive. And it’s free. It’s all there for the taking, but it will never be enough for a movement fueled by victimhood.

A Nation built on strength

Obviously, Donald Trump is not perfect. Every day, someone throws out another immoral or unethical thing they believe disqualifies him from leading. Ya, we got that. Your job was to beat him by making a better case to the American people, and you never did.

Trump was called to this moment in history to hold fast and true to America’s founding principles. I’ve never seen a more patriotic American, let alone a president, in my entire life. He’s celebrating every part of it. He’s reviving our history. He’s making us proud of our country.

Trump’s White House YouTube channel has videos like this:

Endless amounts of them, trying to fill the cup back up to halfway full for future generations.

Later tonight, Trump will once again be at Mount Rushmore to give a speech for America at 250. I already know what he will say because I know him, and I know no president in my lifetime has loved this country more. He’ll remind us what America is and what threatens us now.

And seething in the background will be bitter, angry, jealous people who have to root for America’s failure, not because they hate him that much, but because they refuse to relinquish their power back to the people. They could have won the election, but instead, they went to war.

They will have to hold on to that hate for years to come so they can pass it on to their children and make them understand why they could not celebrate a country that, to paraphrase U2, gave them everything they ever wanted … it wasn’t what they wanted.

I live in a town that is full of wealthy white liberals, and almost no one has a flag out front. I put two up by my fence to show my gratitude and my love for this glorious, young, imperfect, beautiful country. I can only hope no one steals it in a rage.

On the other hand, people in my town have a long tradition of putting out chairs for the 4th of July parade a month in advance. The chairs stretch out for miles, and no one ever takes them.

To be an American means self-governance, but it also means being part of that fragile, invisible thread that ties us together, like chairs that line the main highway, all different but somehow the same because we’re all in it together and celebrating the nation’s birthday, not because it is easy — but because it is hard.

This isn’t my love letter to America. That will come tomorrow. But it is my way of saying that no one should lead this country who wants it to be anything other than what it was born to be: free.

///

A reader writes in to tell me:

“You should definitely put some stuff behind the paywall to get more subscribers. 🙂

I appreciate your work, though, and that you keep it free by an honor system sort of😉 thingy.”

I like the little smiley faces.

Yes, I probably should, but business has never been my strong suit. I started this Substack back in 2020 and had just about 400 subscribers. I figured I would use it to say what I wanted to say without putting my other job (a 26-year-old site on the Oscars) in jeopardy.

The truth is that the only reason I ever even got paying subscribers or readers was that Real Clear Politics linked to my site, then Megyn Kelly and Glenn Beck both interviewed me on their shows. I’ve had high-profile people like John Nolte and Matt Taibbi also write stories about me, which helped boost my profile.

I didn’t intend for this site to be my source of income, as I was making a really good living off my Oscars site. On the left, there is what I call the Trump line. As long as you don’t cross it, they’ll tolerate complaints about the Left. I used to say “I am not a Trump supporter but…” and “I’m not a Trump voter but…”

As my voice got out there and my opinions became much more overtly pro-Trump, I knew it was only a matter of time before the Eye of Sauron fell upon me. I also believed in the middle of Biden’s term that things had gotten so dangerous that I had to use whatever platform I had to try to help win the 2024 election.

So that is why I used my official Twitter/X account, [at] awardsdaily, to “come out” and be fully transparent about what I thought and believed. I remember making some loud and angry tweets in defense of the pro-life movement and I think I made some kind of comment on “childless cat ladies,” which then caught the attention of a writer at the Hollywood Reporter who did a story on me (you can google it) and that effectively ended my 26-year career on my website, which I built as a single mother and an early internet pioneer.

I still get a very small bit of advertising from the studios, but nowhere near what I used to make, and my entire staff had to rebuild their own site in an attempt to salvage what was left of their careers. Feeling that cold hand by the Left was unlike anything I’ve ever experienced, and I will never forget it.

I remember going to the Telluride Film Festival not long after that story broke, and being disinvited from the Patrons Brunch (a kind of status symbol for bloggers) and from parties, etc. All of the studios ghosted me when I wrote to them. Jane Fonda’s Women’s Media Center fired me, etc. It was grim.

In the meantime, this Substack started picking up paid subscribers. As of now, I have exactly 10% of my total subscribers that are paid, and people often generously leave tips, which also count. I feel incredibly grateful for all of it, as it is now my main source of income.

I have just finished a series on the road that I put behind the paywall, and I’m about to post the last piece in that series as a perk and a thank-you for the paid subscribers.

I guess I’m old school when it comes to the internet. I got online in 1994 and built a website in 1999. The idea was that if it was good enough, eventually it would make money. And five years later it did. We all held to the idea that information wants to be free, and I’ve tried, in that time, to make sure no ads disrupt the user experience. I kind of like being able to have my stuff out there, rather than locked behind a paywall.

On the other hand, why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free? There is value in paid content, I know that too. I think I’ve come up with a good compromise, and I might start offering more personal stuff that will be paywalled.

Hope that answers it!

If you want to be a paid subscriber or leave a tip, you can do so here.

Can you imagine Thomas Jefferson trying to understand how the case would even have to be argued? That the people who have lawn signs that say “science is real” would need the Supreme Court to snap them back into reality?

I lived this nightmare as someone on the Left who raised my kid in the progressive public schools in Los Angeles. She attended Wonderland Elementary in the Hollywood Hills, Walter Reid Humanities Magnet in Studio City, and Cleveland Humanities Magnet in Reseda, and the gender madness didn’t crop up until high school, right after that fateful year of Obama’s re-election, when Critical Race and Gender Theory began spilling into public schools to indoctrinate our children.

Here are some of the lessons for students:

The message that came out of these courses and began spread throughout culture is that there is nothing special about you if you are white, heterosexual male or female. If anything, you’re the eternal villain in this story.

Becoming “trans” is one of the ways for otherwise un-special kids and teenagers to become elevated, celebrated, love-bombed online, with their mothers basking in the glow of virtue signaling via their children.

It came on the heels of all of us parents attempting to raise perfect children because if we didn’t, we’d look like bad parents — abusive, traumatizing — like the kind of parenting we all suffered through.

When they weren’t perfect, especially boys, they were diagnosed with some disorder and medicated. Most of my daughter’s friends all had some sort of diagnosis. The idea was that the problem was in their brains and that only medication could fix them.

When none of that worked, they invented the crisis of being “born in the wrong body,” an ideology that was flourishing among adolescent girls online, wherein heterosexual males were scary and predatory, so they sank into this fantasy world where anything but that was “safe.”

It all seemed to happen at once, and by the time my daughter came home from school in 9th grade, right around 2012 exactly, talking about “top surgery” and “bottom surgery,” it was too late. My daughter had just one “trans” friend.

By the time my daughter graduated from college, one boy she knew had fully transitioned, two of her roommates were in the process, and all were declared bisexual except one. I don’t think there is any stopping it because it is such a deeply held belief by now.

Thanks to the Supreme Court, states are now free to ban biological boys from competing against biological girls but all that means is that the red states will enact those laws and the blue states won’t. The Democrats have no plans to roll any of it back. If they aren’t true believers, they will pander to the activists.

To them, it’s extreme to be a Republican who protects the biological reality of males and females. But Republicans are the only sane side now and that is why I voted for Trump and will continue to vote for the Right until such time as the Left can get a grip, should they ever.

Brave women on the front lines who have been fighting for the rights of women and girls as Democrats and feminists like Hillary Clinton, Jane Fonda and Gloria Steinem remain silent.

Jennifer Sey appeared on my new favorite podcast, Chicks on the Right:

The Supreme Court also refused to overturn Birthright Citzenship — I never thought they would. But once again, Justice Clarence Thomas had the best argument. Very good coverage by Ben Shapiro:

The two paths forward could not be more stark. The Left wants an open border — in fact, no borders, along with socialist policies to take care for them and the low cost labor they provide, not to mention a steady stream of oppressed people to justify their entire movement, even if it means permanent harm to children.

And the Right wants a secure border, no birthright citizenship and for our government to take care of Americans who are already here and being left behind. They want to protect kids from the harms of “gender affirming care” and especially to protect women in sports and private spaces.

As I’ve been saying for a long time now, there is no saving the Left. There is only saving America from them. The Supreme Court giveth, and the Supreme Court taketh away.

The Left controls all the blue squares on the Monopoly board, and if anyone dares to try to claim one (Paramount Plus, for instance, Elon Musk), they become enemies of the state. And you’ll see the Left cosplay oppression as though they don’t have all of the power. Even as their empire collapses and their power diminishes, they still have enough power to destroy careers, which is why no one will perform at America 250.

A reader writes to tell me this:

Everyone knows that any Democrat who goes against them will be stalked, swarmed, and harassed before getting primaried out.

Isn’t that exactly what happens in Trumpworld too?

See recent election results for Massie et al, and the incessant purge of workers deemed insufficiently obsequious to Dear Leader. If you’re going to call out one party for bad behavior, be honest and call it out when you see it in the other one.

And I’m sorry, when you start equating “impeachment” with the Nuremberg trials, your TDS is showing. That’s beyond hyperbole, but it also implies that the Nuremberg trials were a bad thing. And with that, you’ve lost me. It’s telling that you think bringing Nazis to justice was some sort of overreach. That’s just sick.

This is classic deflection. Yes, Trump will not support you and attempt to primary you out if you are someone, like Thomas Massie, who obstructs his agenda. Massie did worse than that. He pitted himself as at war with Trump. If you go to war on Trump - the guy who has been at war with almost everyone for ten years, chances are you won’t survive that fight.

But that is very different from the Left’s pattern of behavior. Remember how they treated Krysten Sinema just for the crime of dissent? This was four years ago:

You can’t tell me what the Left is like. I used to be on the Left. I called them out for this many times. I tried to wake them up to the fact that this was a form of terrorism, and it’s only gotten worse since then. They don’t do this on the MAGA side. They might bully online, but that is different from a screeching, terrorizing mob.

Even if you want to “both sides” it, then fine. Don’t position yourselves as “good” and the other side as fascist, Nazi, dictator… Take down your lawn signs. Stop with your “saving democracy” talk because none of it means anything.

As for the Nuremberg trials, that is not what I say; that’s what people on the Left say. High-profile people have said it again and again.

They are unhinged and insane, my friend. I don’t know what else to tell you. They think mass deportations and building a ballroom are on par with mass murder and genocide. They don’t even know what genocide means anymore, much less fascism or Nazism.

And finally, the use of the term “Dear Leader” exposes YOUR TDS, not mine. I see that you’ve tried to make it seem like TDS means people who think Trump can do no wrong. The problem is, you guys are so absolutely insane it’s impossible to even get to criticizing Trump.

There are plenty of things I would criticize, starting with the defunding of the National Parks. But every time I do, I think about the mass hysteria on your side, and I think, okay, Trump is still the better option. That is the thing all of you will have to deal with one day, and I hope that day comes soon.

“In our schools, our newsrooms, even our corporate boardrooms, there is a new far-left fascism that demands absolute allegiance. If you do not speak its language, perform its rituals, recite its mantras, and follow its commandments, then you will be censored, banished, blacklisted, persecuted, and punished. It’s not going to happen to us.

Make no mistake: this left-wing cultural revolution is designed to overthrow the American Revolution. In so doing, they would destroy the very civilization that rescued billions from poverty, disease, violence, and hunger, and that lifted humanity to new heights of achievement, discovery, and progress.

Donald J. Trump, July 4th, 2020

It’s been ten years since the purges began, and I still have a hard time believing it actually happened. Did so many of my friends really go along with it? Did institutions, corporations, and all of Hollywood allow themselves to be shamefully cowed by the fanatical mob? Yes.

Not only did it happen, but it’s become the new normal on the establishment Left — in Hollywood, in culture, in government. Everyone is still too afraid to say what they really think. Just appearing at the America 250 or the Kennedy Center will still ruin your career. The only difference now is that the wheel of oppression keeps spinning. Now it’s illegal immigrants. Now it’s “Free Palestine.”

I don’t know why I didn’t see it sooner: this direct line from cancel culture to Communism. I thought it was mass hysteria after Trump’s shocking win in 2016, and that eventually, as with other episodes of mass hysteria in the past, it would burst, and we could all go back to the way things used to be, where we weren’t fighting a virtual Civil War.

But now that three Democratic Socialists won their primaries in New York against one of the party’s shining stars, Dan Goldman, all because of Israel, what we’re seeing is Communism, but merged with Woke tyranny and radical Islam. It is essentially the perfect storm to destroy America.

Now, we can clearly see what ten years of Cancel Culture have done to the Left. It has given them enormous power to force compliance, not just to those of us who dissented, but to members of their own party. In other words, the mob is about to come for them, too.

What do they want? What the millionaires and billionaires have. They want what’s coming to them after years of indoctrination that told them that they are oppressed because of the color of their skin, their gender ideology, or their ethnicity. America, they were told, was founded on White Supremacy and colonization, and they’re owed something for it.

They seem to have no place for the working class that Mamdani is always talking about, not if they’re white. Bernie Sanders might have cared about the “white working class,” but not these folks. Some animals are more equal than others, and with this new fundamentalism, it is meant only to redistribute wealth, not from the rich to the poor, but from the white majority to the marginalized minorities.

It isn’t their fault exactly. They’ve been indoctrinated. None of us noticed this was happening right around Obama’s second term, 2012. Racism, they believed, had infected the majority in America, and it had to be rooted out. They had to be re-educated on “correct” history.

They were not taught the American dream. They were taught the American nightmare. Here is a video from Katharine Birbalsingh:

And now, they’ve finally found their magic man in Zohran Mamdani, who is everything they need wrapped up in one charismatic leader. He’s TikTok-friendly. He goes viral. He is pop-culture literate, and, most importantly, he’s the Wokest of the Woke. He speaks their language. He wants what they want. He goes to the Pride Parade but not the Israel Parade, becoming the first Mayor of the city in 60 years not to attend.

He doesn’t just want to be the Mayor of New York. He wants to be a worldwide inspirational leader, which fits the new Left well since they don’t really want to unite with the other half of America so much as with those other countries that are ideologically aligned, you know, like 1984?

It might seem like one big party, but this is a disaster for the Democrats. Everyone knows that any Democrat who goes against them will be stalked, swarmed, and harassed before getting primaried out. All the Republicans have to be is the more normal side, and they can win.

Some Democrats are now sounding the alarm that Democratic Socialists are overtaking the party and will alienate people, even James Carville:

No Democrat is safe from the mob, not even one of their most progressive politicians, Scott Weiner, in San Francisco, who was just harassed in public for not being sufficiently pro-Palestine. And obviously, for being Jewish.

Dan Goldman was banned from a coffee shop for the same reason just before getting voted out. Mamdani and his acolytes shield their true selves behind a warm smile and a viral video, but there can be no mistaking the language of the Cancel Culture Left.

The Democrats know what this means. Even the Ladies of The View know.

The DSA wins in New York were driven by a small group of mostly white, pampered college kids who are very online. It is the fault of the Democrats for not seeing the accident before it happened. They might have fought harder for Goldman if they had any idea just how bad it would be for them if these candidates actually won.

And it’s bad.

David Sacks from the All in Podcast:

What people went through in Stalin’s Soviet Union or China’s Cultural Revolution is worse than anything any American has ever or will ever suffer, but let’s not kid ourselves.

We’ve already seen what the Left will do, from three assassination attempts on Trump’s life, to the assassination of Charlie Kirk, to their violent riots for the past ten years. Burning Teslas, trying to throw Trump off the ballot, the impeachments, the indictments.

Now, they’re threatening Nuremberg-like trials and another impeachment should they take back power in Congress, and the Right should do everything they can to make sure they don’t.

We know there are no limits on what they will do. We know because history tells us. George Orwell told us. We’ve seen this movie many times before. Utopias have only two paths forward: they collapse, or they become more authoritarian.

These folks don’t even know what words mean anymore, much less the point of 1984. No one ever taught them why Communism or tyrannical mobs are bad, so why wouldn’t they behave this way?

I noticed it for the first time when a small group of fanatics at Evergreen College chased Bret Weinstein off campus, calling him a racist and holding the administrators hostage until they gave them what they wanted.

All of those pampered, spoiled, overeducated-yet-still-uneducated brats made their way into the workforce, boosted by using their identity categories to secure high-profile slots at newspapers and corporations. The threat was implicit: hire us or you’re an “ist” or a “phobe” and we’ll get loud about it.

Only the Republicans have taken a consistent and principled stand against this madness and done so since it began. The Democrats, however, have stuck their head in the sand and denied it even exists.

That’s why they can’t address crime in the major cities, or the rapes by illegal immigrants, and why their wheel of oppression has amounted to the party standing for only three things: Socialism, illegal immigration, and Palestine.

No one seemed to take it seriously on the Left because they never took Cancel Culture seriously. No, we weren’t being slaughtered by the millions or thrown into gulags, but we built this new civilization online and with it, the power to decide who can participate, who is accepted, and who must be hurled into the public square for character assassination and career ruination.

No matter what the consequences were, it was wrong, and no one had the guts to stop it, and now, those chickens have come home to roost, and it’s the Democrats’ problem. They'd better get used to selling Democratic Socialism or else. This is what happened the last time the Centrists went up against the Socialists.

Two years later, Al Franken would be chased out of the Senate by all of the top Democrats caught up in Cancel Culture and unable to stop the mass hysteria that drove it.

And now, we have yet more insurrectionary behavior with Zohran Mamdani and some governors refusing to comply with the Supreme Court’s ruling on sending back Haitian migrants, and many states aligning to protest the Great American State Fair. It looks like we have a Democratic Party that wants to secede from the Union, again.

In the old days of Bernie Sanders’ Democratic Socialism, they understood that taking care of American citizens required secure border programs like Medicare for All. Well, not now. The new kids want it all and believe they’re entitled to it all. Borders? Who needs those? They are oppressed and therefore deserving of our tax dollars to absolve us of our white colonizer guilt.

The big picture here should be frightening for all Americans. Unchecked migration with the oppressor/oppressed mindset, while also demanding the government and the “billionaires” pay for all of them - that is what the Democrats will have to sell to the American public because the Cancel Culture machine that they helped build and did nothing about will demand it.

The Gray Champion Rides Again

The Republicans have a unique opportunity now to change the course of history. They have been given a gift by the Left, whether they choose to take it or not. They are experiencing their own brand of crazy right now. It’s starting to look a lot like Communists to the Left of me, Nazis to the Right, here I am, stuck in the middle with you.

But if the sane Republicans can pull it together, they can bring in reasonable people, like Bill Maher:

At the moment, the Democrats have the bigger headache on their hands. No one who seeks the nomination in 2028 will survive if they don’t have Zohran Mamdani on their side.

But honestly, the Republicans could be here too, depending on how their current war plays out. But if they want to win, they will have to open their doors to more moderate Democrats, perhaps giving up the old dream of outsider populism. They’ll have to decide which they believe is the greater threat.

Here is Larry O’Connor with Mark Halperin on 2-Way.

America, the Beautiful

In 2020, I was hopeless and lost. No one on my side would talk about what all of us could see happening to our party, to our young people, with this unprecedented climate of fear and culture of silence.

But then I heard Donald Trump’s speech at Mount Rushmore on July 4th, and even though I’d been told he was a dangerous fascist and racist, I heard the words that anchor me to my own patriotic pride, words that describe the country I know and love. These were and are subversive words, but necessary. This is the America I believed in.

Ever since then, I’ve trusted Trump because he did not bend, did not break, and never, ever, ever surrendered. I’m sorry he’ll be leaving office in two years. I can’t imagine the fight without him, but he’s carved a path and lit the way. Now, it’s our turn to finish the job.

The race to normal begins right now.

A reader writes in with a problem. The idea is that the ape meme video the White House shared was the smoking gun that proves, at long last, that Trump is a racist and that ended a long-time friendship. She writes:

“Almost losing a long-time friend over this, she is very rabid about racism aimed at black Americans, her son is half African American (I am Lily white and so is she), and we are having a major war over this when I point out other issues that I think are just as bad about the far left. For example, she doesn’t agree that anti-Semitism is just as bad, and I do.

Anyway, she has TDS, badly now, probably thanks to me. She reacts emotionally to most things, and I don’t.

Do you have any articles about the Obamas pictured as apes in your archive that might give me a better perspective? I already admitted it was awful for Trump to do this (too clinical a statement from me for her taste, really set her off).

I tried to explain that negative black American iconography is equal in badness as negative iconography against jews but she hung up on me.”

The first thing I want to say is that there is no saving the Left. Whatever happens to them, it will have to happen without people like you or me trying to get them to return to any place of sanity. It won’t happen. But with this issue specifically, it comes down to two distinct ways of seeing the world between the Left and the Right.

So one good way to engage in this conversation is to bring up the study published in the Washington Post that said that Liberals dumb down their language when addressing black audiences, and Conservatives don’t.

That means that Liberals see themselves as more intelligent or superior to black people and thus have cast themselves as their saviors. This actually explains a lot of what we’ve lived through in the past ten years.

It’s a hard thing to get used to if you come from the Left because any criticism against black people is considered “racist.” Being called a “racist” to the Left is like being called a witch in 1690s Salem. Not only do many of them believe it to their core, but they also know that they can’t even associate with you if you do not share these beliefs.

I was called a racist way before I ever found my way to Trump. I was called a racist for questioning why Derek Chauvin would have committed murder with all of those cameras trained on him. Obviously, he didn’t think he was murdering George Floyd.

I was called a racist for defending the film Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and Green Book against charges of racism. These accusations flew around online and got so bad that my friends began to slowly back away from me, as though I wasn’t the same person they’d known all of these years, but that I was a “racist.” They still believe that.

I voted for Trump for very specific reasons. The first was the lawfare against him, which I found dangerous to our democracy. The second was “gender affirming care” for minor children. But what I know for sure about Trump now is that he isn’t a racist. He tends to treat everyone equally, as most people on the Right do.

As to the meme specifically, yes, it was sloppy and wrong to post it, and wrong not to yank it immediately, but Trump also knows there is nothing he can say or do that will change their minds.

A lot of people on the Right think memes like that are funny. Not because they’re racists, but just because they don’t have the same protective layer as people on the Left do. They aren’t looking around and seeing “racists” everywhere.

Your friend doesn’t care so much about the meme. What she cares about is having you share her perspective, because it means you are in the same tribe. If you don’t believe the media narratives that Trump is a racist and Elon is a Nazi, then you can’t be in the same tribe because you do not believe the same fundamental things.

Of course, it’s racist to compare black people to apes or chimps. That was the dehumanizing propaganda that spread after the Civil War. The same kind of propaganda was spread about Jews in Germany and for the same reasons: it dehumanizes them so that anything can be done to them, and no one will say a thing about it.

Both things can be true: The maker of the meme just thought it would be funny to put it in the cartoon, but it is racist. On the American Left, however, there is never any forgiving something like that. But I always think intent matters, and I don’t believe Trump intended to post that meme.

What I’ve learned over the past ten years is to give people the benefit of the doubt, since I can’t know what is in their minds and hearts. If they come out and say who they are many times over (Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens), then I feel more comfortable passing judgment on them.

In the end, I don’t think it really moved the needle much. People who thought Trump was a racist still think he’s a racist (although by now, that’s nothing compared to other things they’ve called him), and people who don’t still don’t.

I’m sorry about your friend. It has happened to me many times. Overall, we all have to learn how to be more resilient. Charlie Kirk was shot in the neck, and these people think a meme is worse. I don’t know how to fix that.