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Another Democrat Reaches Enlightenment


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2021 Dec 9, 2:03pm   41,224 views  261 comments

by Patrick   ➕follow (60)   💰tip   ignore  

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-turn-liel-leibovitz?source=patrick.net


The Turn

When I saw the left give up everything I believe in, I changed politically. You can, too.

For many years—most of my politically cognizant life, in fact—I felt secure in my politics. Truth and justice, I believed, leaned leftward. If you were some version of a decent human being, you cared about those less fortunate than you, which meant that you supported a whole host of measures designed to even the playing field a little. Sometimes, these measures had unintended consequences (see under: Stalin, Josef), but that wasn’t reason enough to despair of the long march to equality. Besides, there was hardly an alternative: On the other end of the political transom lurked despicable creeps, right-wing orcs who either cared for nothing but their own petty financial interests or, worse, pined for benighted isms that preached prejudice and hate. We were on the right side of history. We were the people. We were the ones giving peace a chance. And, no matter the present, we were always the future.

This belief carried me through high school, and a brief stint in a socialist youth movement. It accelerated me in college, sending me anywhere from joint marches with Palestinians to a two-week hunger strike in Jerusalem trying (and failing) to lower tuition for underprivileged students. It pulled me to New York, to Columbia University, to more left-wing politics and activism and raging against Republicans whose agenda, especially in the 2000s, seemed like nothing more than greed and war.

And it wasn’t just an ideology, some abstract set of convictions that were accessible only through cracking open dusty old books. It was the animating spirit of life itself: The dinner parties I attended on the Upper West Side required dismissive comments on President Bush just as much as they did a bit of wine to make the evening bright, and there was no faster or surer way to signal to a new acquaintance that you were a kindred spirit than praising the latest Times editorial. It wasn’t performative, exactly. At least, it felt real enough, the reverent rites of a good group of people protecting itself against the bad guys.

I embraced my people, and my people embraced me. They gave me everything I had always imagined I wanted: a Ph.D. from an Ivy League university; a professorship at NYU, complete with a roomy office overlooking Washington Square Park; book deals; columns in smart little publications; invitations to the sort of soirees where you could find yourself seated next to Salman Rushdie or Susan Sontag or any number of the men and women you grew up reading and admiring. The list goes on. Life was good. I was grateful.

And then came The Turn. If you’ve lived through it yourself, you know that The Turn doesn’t happen overnight, that it isn’t easily distilled into one dramatic breakdown moment, that it happens hazily and over time—first a twitch, then a few more, stretching into a gnawing discomfort and then, eventually, a sense of panic.

You may be among the increasing numbers of people going through The Turn right now. Having lived through the turmoil of the last half decade—through the years of MAGA and antifa and rampant identity politics and, most dramatically, the global turmoil caused by COVID-19—more and more of us feel absolutely and irreparably politically homeless. Instinctively, we looked to the Democratic Party, the only home we and our parents and their parents before them had ever known or seriously considered. But what we saw there—and in the newspapers we used to read, and in the schools whose admission letters once made us so proud—was terrifying. However we tried to explain what was happening on “the left,” it was hard to convince ourselves that it was right, or that it was something we still truly believed in. That is what The Turn is about.

You might be living through The Turn if you ever found yourself feeling like free speech should stay free even if it offended some group or individual but now can’t admit it at dinner with friends because you are afraid of being thought a bigot. You are living through The Turn if you have questions about public health policies—including the effects of lockdowns and school closures on the poor and most vulnerable in our society—but can’t ask them out loud because you know you’ll be labeled an anti-vaxxer. You are living through The Turn if you think that burning down towns and looting stores isn’t the best way to promote social justice, but feel you can’t say so because you know you’ll be called a white supremacist. You are living through The Turn if you seethed watching a terrorist organization attack the world’s only Jewish state, but seethed silently because your colleagues were all on Twitter and Facebook sharing celebrity memes about ending Israeli apartheid while having little interest in American kids dying on the streets because of failed policies. If you’ve felt yourself unable to speak your mind, if you have a queasy feeling that your friends might disown you if you shared your most intimately held concerns, if you are feeling a bit breathless and a bit hopeless and entirely unsure what on earth is going on, I am sorry to inform you that The Turn is upon you.

The Turn hit me just a beat before it did you, so I know just how awful it feels. It’s been years now, but I still remember the time a dear friend and mentor took me to lunch and warned me, sternly and without any of the warmth you’d extend to someone you truly loved, to watch what I said about Israel. I still remember how confusing and painful it felt to know that my beliefs—beliefs, mind you, that, until very recently, were so obvious and banal and widely held on the left that they were hardly considered beliefs at all—now labeled me an outcast. The Turn brings with it the sort of pain most of us don’t feel as adults; you’d have to go all the way back to junior high, maybe, to recall a stabbing sensation quite as deep and confounding as watching your friends all turn on you and decide that you’re not worthy of their affection any more. It’s the kind of primal rejection that is devastating precisely because it forces you to rethink everything, not only your convictions about the world but also your idea of yourself, your values, and your priorities. We all want to be embraced. We all want the men and women we consider most swell to approve of us and confirm that we, too, are good and great. We all want the love and the laurels; The Turn takes both away.

But, having been there before, I have one important thing to tell you: If the left is going to make it “right wing” to simply be decent, then it’s OK to be right.

Why? Because, after 225 long and fruitful years of this terminology, “right” and “left” are now empty categories, meaning little more than “the blue team” and “the green team” in your summer camp’s color war. You don’t get to be “against the rich” if the richest people in the country fund your party in order to preserve their government-sponsored monopolies. You are not “a supporter of free speech” if you oppose free speech for people who disagree with you. You are not “for the people” if you pit most of them against each other based on the color of their skin, or force them out of their jobs because of personal choices related to their bodies. You are not “serious about economic inequality” when you happily order from Amazon without caring much for the devastating impact your purchases have on the small businesses that increasingly are either subjugated by Jeff Bezos’ behemoth or crushed by it altogether. You are not “for science” if you refuse to consider hypotheses that don’t conform to your political convictions and then try to ban critical thought and inquiry from the internet. You are not an “anti-racist” if you label—and sort!—people by race. You are not “against conformism” when you scare people out of voicing dissenting opinions.

When “the left” becomes the party of wealthy elites and state security agencies who preach racial division, state censorship, contempt for ordinary citizens and for the U.S. Constitution, and telling people what to do and think at every turn, then that’s the side you are on, if you are “on the left”—those are the policies and beliefs you stand for and have to defend. It doesn’t matter what good people “on the left” believed and did 60 or 70 years ago. Those people are dead now, mostly. They don’t define “the left” anymore than Abraham Lincoln defines the modern-day Republican Party or Jimi Hendrix defines Nickelback.

So look at the list of things supported by the left and ask yourself: Is that me? If the answer is yes, great. You’ve found a home. If the answer is no, don’t let yourself be defined by an empty word. Get out. And once you’re out, don’t let anyone else define you, either. Not being a left-wing racist or police state fan doesn’t make you a white supremacist or a Trump worshipper, either. Only small children, machines, and religious fanatics think in binaries.

Which isn’t to diminish the anger, hurt, and confusion you’re feeling just now. But it’s worth understanding that your story has a happy ending. The freedom you feel on the other side is so real it’s physical, like emerging from a long stretch underwater and taking that first deep breath in the cool afternoon air. None of it makes the lost friends or the lost career opportunities any less painful; but there’s no more potent source of renewable energy than liberty, and your capacity to reinvent—yourself, your group, your life—is greater than you realize.

So welcome to the right side, friend, and join us in laughing at all the idiotic name-calling that is applied, with increasing hysteria, to try and stop more and more normal Americans from joining our ranks. Fascists? Conspiracy theorists? Anti-science racist TERFs? Whatever. We have a better word to describe ourselves: free.


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109   FortwayeAsFuckJoeBiden   2023 Feb 3, 10:01am  

mell says


FortwayeAsFuckJoeBiden says


man both parties are full of shit and corruption. its why im independent.

You can be independent all you want, when it comes to vote and 2 parties are the choice given and you throw away your vote instead of voting for the lesser evil, you inflict more pain onto your family and society. Everybody knows that whole DC is corrupt, it always has been, comes with the territory. But there is a clear difference between the two parties. And it's huge, despite the corruption.



i don’t see much party difference, both do same shit, because both are representative of american culture. they all protect their sacred corporate interests.
110   Patrick   2023 Feb 5, 8:48pm  

https://sashastone.substack.com/p/how-the-legacy-media-lost-my-trust#details


How is it that I, a once-former blue-check Democrat and loyal Hillary Clinton/Joe Biden supporter began watching Tucker Carlson in the first place?

How is it I can withstand the hysteria that arises from my friends and family should I dare mention Carlson’s name in their presence? Well, it all started with the truth.

Mark Twain said a lie travels halfway around the world before the truth is putting its boots on. But he also said if you tell the truth you never have to remember anything. I have found that I care about the truth. I care enough to seek it out, no matter where it takes me.

I first found Tucker Carlson in the Summer of 2020. I had just learned the unbearable truth that journalists in the mainstream had gone completely silent on the protests erupting on the streets in nearly every city. I understood why they would avoid the looting and the destruction in mostly Black cities. But why were they ignoring the bizarre nightly rituals in Portland and Washington by mostly white kids, a kind of strange bacchanalia of social justice warriors coming of age and feeling their newfound rapture?

Why were they ignoring what was actually happening? Why was it such a brave act for Michael Tracey to cover the destruction of mostly minority-owned businesses? Why were there suddenly so many journalists being fired, canceled, and sent into exile on Substack? What was going on and where could the truth be found?

Well, I found it on the Right. I did this out of desperation because of what had happened to the Left. The first thing I found was Tucker Carlson not flinching even a little to report on what was actually happening on the streets. My side would call that racist, to even report on it, to notice it, to care about it. If you were worried about the curfews, the broken glass, the theft you did not care about the plight of Black men at the hands of police and you did not care about systemic racism. You were a bad person, a RACIST.
111   Patrick   2023 Feb 5, 8:53pm  

In the above post, she talks about the Columbia Journalism Review finally admitting that the Russiagate hoax was indeed a complete fabrication, and the Russians had nothing to do with Trump winning in 2016:

https://www.cjr.org/special_report/trumped-up-press-versus-president-part-1.php
112   richwicks   2023 Feb 6, 1:25am  

Patrick says


In the above post, she talks about the Columbia Journalism Review finally admitting that the Russiagate hoax was indeed a complete fabrication, and the Russians had nothing to do with Trump winning in 2016:

https://www.cjr.org/special_report/trumped-up-press-versus-president-part-1.php


It's just a naked attempt to regain credbility.

Our establishment media always does this to pretend they were fooled, instead of being dishonest. When their lies are pointed out, they will point out that article. NY Times did this with Judith Miller more than 15 years ago, although nobody read the "apology" of their "error". These people are systematic propagandists. There's no fixing of them.

We all learned about "yellow journalism" - well, it never went away, it just was moved to serve the state.
113   casandra   2023 Feb 6, 9:51am  

Even minded citizens who think rationally are becoming a minority as the powers have invested in creating a class of people who want free money from the government and allowing felons and homeless and immigrants to vote. By the time more people wake up they will realize too late that they are out voted at every level.

I'm beginning to see this scenario play out in places where my liberal friends are noticing problems in their neighborhoods and thinking conservatively, but alas its really too late for them there. My advice is "JUST MOVE!"

Your leaders have fooled you for your vote and you have been betrayed!
114   Patrick   2023 Feb 6, 9:58am  

richwicks says

Our establishment media always does this to pretend they were fooled, instead of being dishonest.




115   HeadSet   2023 Feb 6, 11:22am  

casandra says

I'm beginning to see this scenario play out in places where my liberal friends are noticing problems in their neighborhoods and thinking conservatively, but alas its really too late for them there. My advice is "JUST MOVE!"

No, don't tell them to move! They will just move to an unspoiled conservative area and bring their woke politics with them. Tell them to stay put and fix it.
116   HeadSet   2023 Feb 6, 11:24am  

casandra says

allowing felons and homeless and immigrants to vote. By the time more people wake up they will realize too late that they are out voted at every level.

The homeless and migrants are just space holders. They need not even vote, it is just the afterhours manufactured ballots will be said to have come from them.
117   Patrick   2023 Feb 15, 8:25pm  

https://sashastone.substack.com/p/did-i-just-leave-a-cult#details


Most of the cults back then always collapsed under the weight of their own utopian ideals, sex and financial scandals would rise out of the ash heap of failure.

Whatever was left swirled down the drain in the wake of Watergate, the end of Vietnam, and the failure of the Carter presidency, not to mention the more terrifying events like the Manson murders. It was not cool to be a hippie anymore. But their kids, kids like me, would grow up lost too - worse than lost. Depressed, full of anxiety, and in need of a fix.

We sought out therapy to talk about our bad childhoods. We gathered to watch Oprah every day at 3. We wanted to fix ourselves and thought we could. It was self-help books and anti-depressants. It was yoga, aerobics, meditation, juice cleanses, fasting, and gurus.

First, we focused inward, then we focused outward. Then it was climate change, women’s rights, racial injustice, cloth diapers, hybrid cars, cruelty-free cosmetics, feeding the hungry, and eventually, we had kids and then we sought about fixing them. They had to be perfect too because otherwise all of the work we did on ourselves was for naught. ...

Imperfect children were diagnosed with this disorder or that, even as toddlers, then we would drug them into perfection. We gave our children nowhere to escape. So they escaped online.

Eventually, though, all points led to Barack Obama. A perfect president for a perfect utopia of perfect people raising perfect kids. We were good puritans, utopians who had fixed ourselves, and our kids, and now we had a president to fix our country.

That feeling most of us had when Obama won was like a religious awakening, filling up a hole that had been left empty for decades.

Finally, what we had been searching for, working toward, and desperately craving had arrived: a collective sense of purpose embodied in the first Black president. The idea of the “first” was the high we were chasing, and would keep chasing to find ultimate purity.

But sooner or later you run out of the ones that already exist so then you have to start inventing new ones, finding new ways to define people as marginalized. Who is not accepted by Hollywood? Who is never noticed in public? Who is shamed or ridiculed or bullied? Those people needed rescuing and we were going to rescue them.

Everyone else, which was mostly everyone, was to be named as the oppressors. The more successful, the more oppressive.

Meanwhile, many of our kids began creating and inventing their own religion online, a jacked-up version of ours based solely on identity, purity, and a binary measure of people who are good and people who are bad. They didn’t realize it but they were building a utopian cult that would grow up, join the workforce, and completely overtake the Left. We saw the beginnings of it at Evergreen College in 2018. ...

Though it took me a while to really understand what had happened to the Left, I knew eventually it would drive me away. I was with them as a loyal Democrat who really was a true believer in the Party and even the social justice movement for a time. But then it got weird. Really really weird.

I spent a few years trying to fight with them, pushing back against the many cancellations, trying to convince my friends and family that something was very wrong with the Left but none of them would listen to me. They were in a kind of “mass formation” fugue state and all they could do was try to pull me back into the fold. Even now they show up with their fingers pointed, accusing me of being a heretic, a blasphemer, a witch.

They whisper about me behind my back, they gossip and worry and fret about what happened to me, why I went so wrong. They seem to think that nothing is quite as bad on the Left as Trump. So they keep asking me, “are you a Trump supporter now?” And “Are you voting for Trump?” If I answer yes, then they have their confession and they can feel satisfied that they were right to throw me away like human garbage. But I don’t answer because I don’t know.

What I do know is that it was a lie that we were the resistance. We were always the empire. It was a lie that Trump was a fascist. We’re closer to fascism now than we’ve ever been as a country with the Democrats in power. And it was always a lie that Trump World was a cult.

What kind of cult leader takes credit for the vaccine and then can’t get his supporters to take it? Wouldn’t they have complied like everyone on the Left? Did Jim Jones allow anyone to not drink that flavoraid laced with cyanide?

The cult of the Left is ruled by fanatics, zealots, and true believers. While there really are people who suffer from gender dysphoria - and trans people do exist, in my view - they aren’t part of the cult of the Left so much as they have become sacred symbols of it. ...

The women are bad enough - trading their journey of empowerment for endless self-punishment over their whiteness. So now their children are being used as sacred symbols for their path toward salvation. They might not be sacred themselves but they are “holy mothers” of the sacred which gives them some status.

Cults separate children from parents. Cults separate mothers from their biological impulse to protect their children. Watching Democrats wear pins to the State of the Union that said “abortion” was yet another sign that the cult seeks to destroy the bond between mother and child. ...

But that’s nothing compared to the “Good White Men” of the Left. They have had to erase themselves in real time, as though they alone can roll back thousands of years of men being in charge. ...

Their only outlet is to take to Twitter and unleash all of their pent-up frustration at their own muted masculinity. They can call Marjorie Taylor Greene “white trash” and feel perfectly justified in it. They know no one will call them a sexist. They can openly mock Justice Clarence Thomas knowing they will not be called a racist.

It must feel so good to beat their chest and cosplay being the men they once were, instead of the melted goo that they are now.

This is why Joe Biden must flank himself with Black women and why Hollywood hides behind Black actors in their films, their advertising, and their award shows. Biden and the Democrats believe they really have changed things by re-ordering the social hierarchy.

If you don’t think it’s a cult, just today, the Hollywood Reporter published a letter from celebrities demanding the already OH SO WOKE COULDN’T POSSIBLY BE MORE WOKE New York Times change their coverage of transgender issues...

That they believe they can control what people think if they bully the New York Times into compliance, or they silence dissent is, well, the stuff of cults. ...

Years from now when all of these young people come to us to ask, Where were you? Why didn’t you protect us? What are we going to say? That we were too afraid? Many of them are going to have major health problems for life and probably not be able to bear children or breastfeed them and we’re supposed to sit idly by and say nothing?

What it is we’ve been searching for on the Left is simply a way to replace the religion we lost long ago. I know that now. That is something I am going to have to find a way to reconcile in my own mind and heart. ...

We should never have to live in a country where we are afraid to express ourselves, to have conversations about complex topics, and above all, have the courage to stand up and protect kids. I can’t think of any higher purpose than that.
118   Patrick   2023 Feb 19, 3:43pm  

https://etana.substack.com/p/jennifer-seys-journey-to-medical


Jennifer Sey's Journey to Medical Freedom and Free Speech
Jennifer Sey, former Brand President of Levi's, discusses her journey from the corporate world to the world of medical freedom advocacy.
119   Patrick   2023 Mar 9, 4:02pm  

https://naomiwolf.substack.com/p/dear-conservatives-i-am-sorry


Dear Conservatives, I Apologize
My "Team" was Taken in By Full-Spectrum Propaganda

There is no way to avoid this moment. The formal letter of apology. From me. To Conservatives and to those who “put America first” everywhere.

It’s tempting to sweep this confrontation with my own gullibility under the rug — to “move on” without every acknowledging that I was duped, and that as a result I made mistakes in judgement, and that these mistakes, multiplied by the tens of thousands and millions on the part of people just like me, hurt millions of other people like you all, in existential ways. ...

The proximate cause of this letter of apology is the airing, two nights ago, of excepts from tens of thousands of hours of security camera footage from the United States Capitol taken on Jan 6, 2021. The footage was released by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) to Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson [https://www.axios.com/2023/03/08/mccarthy-defends-jan-6-footage-tucker-carlson-fox-news].

While “fact-checkers” state that it is “misinformation” to claim that Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi was in charge of Capitol Police on that day [https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/07/27/fact-check-nancy-pelosi-isnt-in-charge-capitol-police/8082088002/], the fact is that the USCP is under the oversight of Congress, according to — the United States Capitol Police: [https://www.uscp.gov/the-department/oversight]. ...

There is no way to unsee Officer Brian Sicknick, claimed by some Democrats in leadership and by most of the legacy media to have been killed by rioters at the Capitol that day, alive in at least one section of the newly released video. The USCP medical examiner states that this Officer died of “natural causes,” but also that he died “in the line of duty.” Whatever the truth of this confusing conclusion, and with all respect for and condolences to Officer Sicknick’s family, the circumstances of his death do matter to the public, as without his death having been caused by the events of Jan 6, the breach of the capitol, serious though it was, cannot be described as a “deadly insurrection.” [https://www.uscp.gov/media-center/press-releases/medical-examiner-finds-uscp-officer-brian-sicknick-died-natural-causes] Sadly, though the contrary was what was reported, Officer Sicknick died two days after Jan 6, from suffering two strokes. https://lawandcrime.com/u-s-capitol-siege/capitol-police-officer-brian-sicknick-died-of-natural-causes-after-suffering-two-strokes-day-after-jan-6-report/ ...

And remember, by law that footage belongs to us — it is a public record, and all public records literally belong to the American people. “In a democracy, records belong to the people,” explains the National Archives. [https://www.archives.gov/publications/general-info-leaflets/1-about-archives.html] ...

I was oddly unsurprised to see the “Q-Anon Shaman” being ushered through the hallways by Capitol Police; he was ready for the cameras in full makeup, horned fur hat, his tattooed chest bare (on a freezing day), and adorned in other highly cinematic regalia. I don’t know what Mr Chansley thought he was doing there that day, but so many subsequent legacy media images of the event put him so dramatically front and center — and the barbaric nature of his appearance was so illustrative of exactly the message that Democrats in leadership wished to send about the event — that I am not surprised to see that his path to the center of events was not blocked but was apparently facilitated by Capitol Police.


She's not quite there though. My response as a comment on that Substack post:


I'm glad you're trying, but you're still spinning things for the benefit of people who deeply hate half of the country. You talk about "the violence of Jan 6" but fail to mention the only real violence that occurred: the murder of unarmed veteran Ashley Babbitt by a Capitol Police Officer. Nor do you mention that all of the people let into the Capitol that day (and they were deliberately let in) were unarmed. Please correct those omissions and you'll have more credibility.
120   Patrick   2023 Mar 25, 11:11pm  

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/protest-porn


A few days after the November 2016 elections, I sat down to write out my feelings, which consisted mainly of fear and loathing. The president-elect, I intoned, was a dangerous lunatic, one likely to recall the ghosts of Fuehrers past. His election meant the death of America, of democracy itself, and maybe even scores of Americans. “Assume the worst is imminent,” I advised. Celebrities I’d admired my entire life praised the piece on Twitter. NPR came calling. Seven years later, my cri de coeur remains one of Tablet’s most widely read articles.

As a piece of writing, it was moving, forceful, and … entirely wrong.

You can find much to dislike about Trump—his policies, his personality, and an assortment of other failings—and, over the next four years, I did just that, often and with gusto. But my piece remains an embarrassment, more hysterical ululation than an attempt at the kind of useful or correct analysis that readers deserve. Reading it today, I realize that, for a brief moment there, I lost my goddamned mind. ...
121   Patrick   2023 Mar 25, 11:17pm  

https://sashastone.substack.com/p/democrats-have-nothing-left-but-trump#details


Why did every conversation, every late-night joke, almost every Tweet, every “good liberal’s” Facebook feed, every speech, every essay, and every headline for four straight years from 2016 to 2020 center on Trump?

Because the truth is, it was never really about Trump. It was about us. What we were before Trump, what we did while Trump was in office, and what we’re doing now. Sooner or later, the clock is going to run out on this madness. Democrats can’t live with or without Trump.

I always knew that sooner or later the mass hysteria was going to evaporate because it always does. Although I left the Democratic Party before the election, I still voted for Biden. Even as I did so, I knew that there was something wrong with the Left, and that it was much more dangerous for that power to capture our government than Trump could ever be.

It wasn’t something I could face just yet, and certainly not something I could say out loud but I thought it. My gut told me I wasn’t wrong. As more of us come out of the haze that was the last seven years of complete and total insanity, we will try to make sense of what we just lived through.
122   Patrick   2023 Apr 8, 11:33pm  

https://sashastone.substack.com/p/bidens-america-a-society-that-has#details


I believed the lie that Trump brought the chaos and that if Biden won, things would calm down. But now we know it wasn’t Trump at all. It was them.

It has to be one long emergency because if it isn’t, and the ball finally stops spinning, then they have to face themselves, and they will have to hang their heads in shame for what they’ve done.

That’s why Trump is a necessary component of their definition of themselves. Without that imminent threat, they can’t keep pushing their ideology on the rest of us to “fix” this broken country. They can say don’t look at us as long as he's a threat. Look at him.

Trump supporters might have chanted “lock her up” at rallies, and that alone was meant to be fascism. Now, the Biden administration actually does it, locking up protesters for years by now, many of them thrown into solitary confinement and languishing in jail with no charges brought. They do this with impunity because no one in the mainstream legacy media gives a damn. Throw them away like human garbage. ...

His win shattered every myth about the Left’s power, including the idea that we were so awesome everyone wants to be us, right? Wrong. A slap in the face on that large of a scale meant that suddenly the dominant society that drove much of this country had their notions of reality shattered. There was no preparing for it. ...

The Democrats and the Left want to see Trump go to jail, even if it’s a weak case. They want what they’ve been promised and are perfectly happy to corrupt the justice system to give them the relief they so desire.
123   Patrick   2023 Apr 20, 1:35pm  

https://sashastone.substack.com/p/no-elon-musk-did-not-ruin-twitter#details


The Democrats seem to only want power now. They’ve sacrificed everything they used to value, from objecting to dark money and Citizens United, to aligning themselves with the Deep State, defending the FBI and the CIA. They’re certainly not the Democratic Party I grew up supporting. ...

The Left colonized the internet first, and especially the social media empires. Twitter was co-opted by Barack Obama’s campaign back in 2008 as a revolutionary way to mobilize young people. From then on, the Democrats, or left-leaning, college-educated eggheads, dominated Twitter.

Trump was the first major threat to that power as Trump used Twitter in a way no other Republican or even any politician had. He used it to go over the heads of the media and get his message to the people directly. The more he tweeted, the bigger his follower count grew.

Trump was the existential crisis to the Left not because of anything he did but because of what he said. That he was overtly offensive at a time of extreme word policing was his superpower, and the thing about him that sent much of the Left cascading into waves of hysteria for the four years he was in power.

But that was always what Trump represented. He was the guy who shocked people with what he said because it was brutally honest. That was true in the 80s and true on his show. Anyone who was a fan of The Apprentice often took what Trump said with a grain of salt. But the eggheads on Twitter, the intellectuals, weren’t watching The Apprentice so they took what he said literally.
124   Patrick   2023 Apr 23, 8:53pm  

https://palexander.substack.com/p/did-the-fraud-pandemic-give-us-one


‘A greater share of young adults say they believe in a higher power or God.

About one-third of 18-to-25-year-olds say they believe—more than doubt—the existence of a higher power, up from about one-quarter in 2021, according to a recent survey of young adults. The findings, based on December polling, are part of an annual report on the state of religion and youth from the Springtide Research Institute, a nonpartisan nonprofit.

Young adults, theologians and church leaders attribute the increase in part to the need for people to believe in something beyond themselves after three years of loss.’


I think @AmericanKulack predicted this at one point.
125   richwicks   2023 Apr 23, 9:03pm  

Patrick says

https://palexander.substack.com/p/did-the-fraud-pandemic-give-us-one



‘A greater share of young adults say they believe in a higher power or God.

About one-third of 18-to-25-year-olds say they believe—more than doubt—the existence of a higher power, up from about one-quarter in 2021, according to a recent survey of young adults. The findings, based on December polling, are part of an annual report on the state of religion and youth from the Springtide Research Institute, a nonpartisan nonprofit.

Young adults, theologians and church leaders attribute the increase in part to the need for people to believe in something beyond themselves after three years of loss.’


I think AmericanKulack predicted this at one point.


I predicted this, although I cannot prove it. During times of strife, people tend to become more religious. I think though that organized religion has failed, and is as corrupt as any other institution. I think the result will be individual development of religious belief.

The so-called powers that be have been using centralized institutions to misinform and control the population, which results in the population no longer trusted centralized institutions. Who can say they trust anything in the "mainstream news", or believes any institution in government? Got any faith in any intelligence agencies? How about our judicial system? The last one to fall will be any faith in the military, because so many people were a part of that.

This will lead to the breakup of our society. With no commonality, you don't have a society.
127   HeadSet   2023 May 13, 9:08pm  

He is correct. How one reacted to the Covid fraud shows who would have betrayed neighbors to the Gestapo, NKVD, and Stasi.
129   AmericanKulak   2023 May 14, 10:32am  

Patrick says

I think AmericanKulack predicted this at one point.

It is and I did, because materialism alone is unfulfilling.

It doesn't necessarily mean religious belief, it can also be in Astrology and Crystal Crap, which is skyrocketing among antidepressant taking childless women.
131   Patrick   2023 Jul 29, 12:33pm  

https://slaynews.com/news/oscar-winning-hollywood-mogul-admits-made-mistake-voting-biden/


Oscar-Winning Hollywood Mogul Admits He ‘Made a Mistake’ Voting for Biden

Hollywood movie mogul Oliver Stone has expressed his deep regret in voting for Democrat President Joe Biden, admitting that he “made a mistake.”

The Oscar-winning film director, producer, and screenwriter made the admission while criticizing the Biden administration’s policies.
134   Patrick   2023 Aug 2, 1:03pm  

https://themindcollection.com/st-george-in-retirement-syndrome/

Many who fight injustice come to define themselves by their fight against injustice, so that as they defeat the injustice, they must invent new injustices to fight against simply to retain a sense of purpose in life. (Looking at you, progressives.)
137   Patrick   2023 Sep 6, 7:19pm  

https://vigilantfox.substack.com/p/megyn-kelly-publicly-says-she-regrets?r=6gdz


Megyn Kelly Publicly Says She REGRETS Taking the COVID Vaccine, Suspects It Caused New Medical Issue

Megyn Kelly joins Dan Bongino, becoming one of the few high-profile personalities to express vaccine regret publicly.

“I regret getting the vaccine even though I’m a 52-year-old woman because I don’t think I needed it. I think I would have been fine. I had got COVID many times, and it was well past when the vaccine was doing what it was supposed to be doing.

And then, for the first time, I tested positive for an autoimmune issue at my annual physical. And I went to the best rheumatologist in New York, and I asked her, do you think this could have to do with the fact that I got the damn booster and then got COVID within three weeks? And she said yes. Yes. I wasn’t the only one she’d seen that with.”

So, Megyn Kelly has a new autoimmune issue, and she suspects it is highly likely that the vaccine caused it.

Kelly also revealed last year that her sister died suddenly and unexpectedly.

“I got to tell you that something really sad happened in my family over the weekend,” announced Kelly on October 24, 2022. “My sister died. She was 58. Her name was Suzanne Crossley. And she died suddenly on Friday of a heart attack.”


138   Patrick   2023 Sep 6, 8:16pm  

https://4columns.substack.com/p/quit-being-a-democrat-and-try-to


I knew that rural areas like most of West Virginia had been decimated by the loss of manufacturing jobs, the decline of the coal industry, and the resulting dissolution of families. I was aware that these communities were plagued by suicides and opioid-related deaths. I knew that Wal-Mart had crushed the small businesses that once occupied storefronts in many of the towns I drove through. But it took me a while to grasp the love for Trump.

When I returned home, however, I started to notice how nasty Democrats were when the subject of Trump and his supporters came up. I watched as Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, John Oliver, and countless other left-wing celebrities casually trashed people from places like West Virginia. It became clear to me that most liberals viewed Trump supporters as subhuman, long before January 6, 2021. And I realized I had done the same thing for many years, making jokes about rednecks and so forth. I kept thinking to myself, is hating Trump supporters really any different than racism itself?

The Women’s March irked me. Women were pre-emptively claiming in the most performative and emotional way that THEY WERE ALREADY VICTIMS of Donald Trump the day after he had taken office. I found this “women-first” approach alienating and realized it was just another way that leftist women demand a kind of cultural female supremacy that values their lives over men’s, over babies in the womb, and over boys who might be interested in STEM if they didn’t hate modern American schools. ...

After decades of believing all of these absurd, incoherent left-wing aphorisms, it finally occurred to me: BEING A LEFTIST IS PRETTY MUCH CHOOSING TO BE MISERABLE. ...

When I look back at how I gradually abandoned the left, I can think of a few particular moments that drove me away:

Being subjected to diversity training shortly after 9/11.

Hearing how racist America STILL was after the election of Barack Obama.

Observing for years how any opposition to Obama was presented as evidence of racism.

Seeing Title IX used to deny due process to men on college campuses.

Watching Obama try to force every public school in America to change their bathroom policies for a tiny minority.

Reading Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind.

Driving through West Virginia in January 2017.

Listening to Colin Kaepernick and LeBron James complain about how racist America is for years.

Watching the Democrats try to destroy Brett Kavanaugh based on the flimsiest, most absurd, most conveniently difficult-to-refute accusations one could imagine.

The cumulative effect of these events made me conclude that the Democratic Party, the modern left, people who vote for Democrats, liberals, leftists, whatever you want to call them, are largely animated by rejecting truth and distorting reality. They are determined to see a good guy and a bad guy in every situation, with nothing in between. And I realized the only path forward for me and likely America was to restore the simple wisdom of putting God, then family, then country above all else. Without these foundational values, misery is almost assured.
139   Patrick   2023 Sep 8, 1:06pm  

https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/mandate-freedom-friday-september?r=6gdz


Let’s begin with a local-interest story that nicely frames the main action, a shocking story about the radical red-pilling of a sold-out woke democrat party official. The events were accurately summarized by yesterday’s New York Post headline, “Anti-cop Minnesota Democratic party official left bloodied in violent carjacking — now calls for tougher crime laws.”

Oh, the irony.

Meet Shivanthi Sathanandan, the Second Vice Chairwoman for the Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party, who once swore to “dismantle” Minneapolis’ Police Department. Here is the Chairwoman, both before and after she crashed into reality going about 90 m.p.h.:




Chairwoman Shivanthi’s June, 2020 Facebook post will give you an idea of her previous point of view. She didn’t just want to “dismantle” the police department. She wanted to dismantle the police department in ALL CAPS, with clapping between each word:




The date of Shivanthi’s post, June 5th, 2020, was a few days after George Floyd died on May 25th, 2020. Along with others, over the next three years Chairwoman Shivanthi would help defenestrate the Minneapolis police department.

Minneapolis, as you may recall, was ground zero for the George Floyd disaster. It’s been over three years since George Floyd’s accidental death. A New York Times article published this June reported on Minneapolis’s Third Precinct police station, which was looted and burned down during the mostly-peaceful protests over felonious Floyd’s death. The Third Precinct was never rebuilt. Today, it remains a silent monument to mob rule, an abandoned, boarded-up shell, decorated with graffiti and framed with barbed wire fence.




As of this June, the Minneapolis Police Department had only 585 officers, down from 912 in 2019. As police ranks have thinned out by almost half, violent crime has soared, shocking only liberals (and people who live in Portland, but I repeat myself).

Gang violence, once only a speck of a blip on Minneapolis’ radar, in under three years has become such a rampant and destructive problem that federal prosecutors charged 45 people with being gang members in a pair of racketeering indictments in May this year — a historic first in the city.

But back to Chairwoman Shivanthi. On Tuesday, she endured what sounds like a very painful ordeal. She got violently carjacked by a gang of four masked hoodlums. In her own driveway. At home. In broad daylight. With her kids right beside her (a 4-year-old daughter and 7-year-old son).

On Wednesday, the Chairwoman uploaded a distraught, emotional post to her Facebook page. Here’s how she described what happened:

“Yesterday my children and I were violently car jacked in the driveway of our home in Minneapolis. Four very young men, all carrying guns, beat me violently down to the ground in front of our kids. The young men held our neighbors up at gunpoint when they ran over and tried to help me. All in broad daylight. Look at my face in the picture. This is the face of a mother who just had the s* beaten out of her. A mother whose only thought was ‘let me run far enough so that my kids have a chance to get away.'”

She was beaten pretty badly. Shivanthi said she had a broken leg, deep lacerations on her head, and cuts and bruises all over her body. They stole her car and abandoned it after a joyride.

In other words, the barbaric thugs didn’t even do it for the money. They just did it for fun.

Shivanthi is understandably upset. And the attacks seems to caused a kind of mental sea-change in her overall thinking about the value of local law enforcement. Here’s how the second half of her post continued:

I have rage. These men knew what they were doing. I have NO DOUBT they have done this before. Yet they are still on OUR STREETS. Killing mothers. Giving babies psychological trauma that a lifetime of therapy cannot erase. With no hesitation and no remorse.

I'm now part of the statistics. I wasn't silent when I fought these men to save my life and my babies, and I won't be silent now. We need to get illegal guns off of our streets, catch these young people who are running wild creating chaos across our city and HOLD THEM IN CUSTODY AND PROSECUTE THEM. PERIOD.

Look at my face. REMEMBER ME when you are thinking about supporting letting juveniles and young people out of custody to roam our streets instead of HOLDING THEM ACCOUNTABLE FOR THEIR ACTIONS.

And so we arrive at the crux. Yes, by all means, let us hold them accountable. Hold them in custody and prosecute them. But, Shivanthi … who will do the holding and the prosecuting? Here’s a hint:




The police will hold them accountable and prosecute them The police.

Say it with me.

Shivanthi told local news she was “not ready” to be interviewed about her terrifying, world-shattering experience. It’s too bad that it took something like this to educate the Farmer-Labor Democrat about the value of a local police department.

We pray the lesson will stick and will not have been in vain.
141   Patrick   2023 Sep 8, 3:42pm  

A lot of people at https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/mandate-freedom-friday-september/comments are pointing out that something about this has to be fake:




She didn't smear the blood? She was taking a selfie with a broken leg?
143   Patrick   2023 Sep 17, 11:06am  

https://patriots.win/p/17r9RsDENL/i-redpilled-6-people-with-1-conv/


Three coworkers and two clients heard me talking to a client. I used to just shrug but I decided to speak my mind in this case.

Client asked me what I think of President Trump's mug shot.

I said 'he'll get more votes now.'

It took the guy awhile to realize I am on Trump's side. He said something like he doesn't know why people would vote for Trump. I said people are tired of being told what they can do.

And so he said that I don't look like a Trump supporter

I asked him what a Trump supporter looks like.

He said they have horns. I said that Trump supporters are against the endless wars. He said really? I said Trump was the first President in decades to not send us to wars.

I said Trump has done the most for the working class. And he asked what. I said Trump had record low unemployment numbers and record low inflation numbers and was trying to get manufacturing jobs back and better trade deals. And again I talked about how the working class is tired of sending their kids to die in endless wars.

And I talked about the democrats going along with Bush's war cause they all got rich off of it.

He tried to talk about Trump supporters overturning the election. He tried about 3-4 times to stay on that but I kept refuting it.

He first tried to say that Trump supporters were trying to get the election overturned. I said that is not what they were trying to do. I said they were asking questions that no one was answering. This really seemed to stick with him because he dropped it quick and went on to:

Trump supporters had an insurrection against the capitol and killed people while doing it. (Notice how he had to change his claim and make it a bigger claim then when he started). I said that nobody died. I said the capitol police officer died of a heart attack the next day and the New York Times corrected the story but they buried it in the back in small print that nobody reads. He was surprised at this and he said "I'll give you that cause I don't know much about that."

And he said Trump supporters broke into the capital. I said he isn't seeing all the video footage. I said they were let in -- the gates were opened for them. And I said he is only seeing what the news is showing him.

And then he said that Trump didn't believe in Democracy.

I said we aren't a Democracy. He said we are.

I said Greece was a Democracy. We are a Republic.

And he dropped that.

I asked him where he gets his news. He said the New York Times.

I said they aren't a valid news source.

haha.

I can't believe I said that. I mean, it is true, but I'm not used to saying that a major newspaper that has "authority" has actually no authority at all.

He asked if I get my news from Fox News.

I said Fox News is not a valid news source either - that is mainstream media and they are paid by the very top who have all the money and power that want us always in a war because they get rich off of war. I said a Senator doesn't start out with any money and they get into office and suddenly they have millions of dollars. Where do they get that. I said we don't pay them millions to be a Senator. I said they are getting paid by the very rich to keep us in wars.

And he did agree that there is a power structure there.

So then he said he won't bug me more about it and he was on his way out.

And I made sure to wish him a very good day because I want him to know that us Trump supporters are very nice people.

And I also said that everyone gets to decide for themselves and how hard it is also to get accurate information to be able to decide.
146   AD   2023 Sep 23, 3:16pm  

Patrick says

Dallas mayor announces he's becoming Republican because "Democratic policies have exacerbated crime and homelessness”


I'm no more than 10% surprised as he has always been about low taxes, pro business and support the police

He campaigned on trying to make Dallas a very competitive city to attract new businesses
147   Patrick   2023 Sep 23, 3:26pm  

TBH I don't remember ever hearing about him before.

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