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Essays on politics and culture from Sasha Stone's Substack. A former Democrat and Leftist who escaped the bubble to get to know the other side of the country and to take a more critical look at the left. Sashastone.substack.com show less
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As we watch the horrific images of Hamas's brutal attack on Israeli citizens, there is no mistaking the face of evil.
This is brutality on a scale most of us here in America have never witnessed - the rapes of women who are dragged through the streets to cheers. Babies murdered in their cribs — beheaded — fathers shot while trying to help their families escape—charred remains of still-smoking corpses in gardens, doorways, and cars.
For the past three years, our government has lied to us about what happened on January 6th. The Vice President stood before us and compared a riot at the Capitol to 9/11 and Pearl Harbor.
Had I never crawled out of my own feedback loop, I’d never have known they were lying because I, too, would have been locked in my home, terrified of either COVID or Trump supporters. I would have been grateful our government brought the hammer down and told millions of Americans that they were no longer welcome in their own country because a small mob of them lost their minds chasing an irrational fantasy that they could stop the certification of the vote and save this country from an oligarchal monopoly that now controls it.
Whatever January 6th was, we know for sure what it wasn’t. It wasn’t 9/11. It wasn’t Pearl Harbor. It wasn’t October 7th in Israel. And the whole world was watching us pretend that it was. We looked like a fragile nation suddenly, one MAGA flag away from our government being overthrown.
Why would they, our president and vice president, not to mention Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, General Mark Milley, and countless talking heads in media, want us to believe that January 6th was like 9/11 in the first place? Why would they think we would believe such an egregious lie?
Because they knew the power of fear, they knew that the first “war on terror” was still-standing architecture, and why not use it to intimidate, harass, monitor, and “investigate” Trump supporters, especially those who put on a red hat and protested in DC on January 6th.
The first “war on terror” boosted Bush’s poll numbers and handed our government unlimited power to police and surveil its citizens. What better way to help stamp out Trump and MAGA than a new “war on terror?”
After sabotaging Trump’s candidacy meant to hand Hillary Clinton the win in 2016, we watched for the first time the administrative state and the monopolies of power attempt to discredit, destroy, and remove a sitting president. Then, we watched them betray our faith and our trust by forming an alliance to ensure Trump lost in 2020.
They would need the media to gaslight the public about everything from masks to COVID to lockdowns to the violence in the Summer of 2020. They would need lawyers to change any law that made it harder to ballot harvest with the $1 billion in dark money they had to play with. As lockdowns suddenly vanished, they would need an army of activists to turn America into a war zone for a few months. Now, it was perfectly okay to party and protest, body to body, fluids flying all over the country and world.
Then they would need doctors to insist protesting was “more important” than COVID because “systemic racism” had afflicted our country since its founding. Then, they would need military professionals to shut down Trump’s attempts at bringing in the military.
The Democrats would hold their convention, look us directly in the eye, and lie about the protests without mentioning the police and what they just endured even once. It seemed to me then that Barack Obama lied, Kamala Harris lied, Hillary Clinton lied, Joe Biden lied. What threatens you, they said, is the radical, racist Trump supporter.
Trump was not a lawyer or a politician. It was easy for lawyers and politicians to trip him up, to “find things” he did wrong. Nearly every one of his alleged “crimes” has been verbal, things he said, flapping his gums, agitating, taunting, and teasing them. He was showing Americans that you could still exercise free speech in a country that had become oppressive in its demands of what all of us could say, think, and do.
So why would they then need to compare January 6th to 9/11 and Pearl Harbor after Joe Biden took power? Because they didn’t just want to remove Trump. They needed to stamp out the grassroots movement known as MAGA, too.
They wanted Americans to understand, in no uncertain terms, that only some people in this country are allowed to protest violently. If you’re on that side you will be funded, supported, defended, and encouraged. If you’re not, you will be called a “fascist,” a “racist,” an “insurrectionist” and a “violent extremist.”
But for Biden, his failures would overshadow his achievements, starting with the catastrophic exit from Afghanistan. 13 American soldiers dead, countless civilians in the region. America stumbled greatly before the eyes of the world. Russia was watching. China was watching. Iran was watching. Hamas was watching.
As Biden’s approval numbers began to crash, he had no choice but to pivot to fear, to sell out his own citizens as would-be terrorists. Draped in blood-red light, Biden warned Americans of their most serious threat — the “extreme MAGA Republicans,” the “ultra-MAGA,” the “Semi-fascists.”
It worked, at least in part, to sway independents leading up to the 2022 midterms, thanks to a last-minute attack on Paul Pelosi by a mentally ill, homeless, illegal immigrant named David DePape that our government could apply to all of MAGA.
They were gearing up to do it again for 2024, with the FBI at the ready, already investigating Trump supporters. What other options do they have with a deeply unpopular president, a Vice President who is even less popular and Trump making them sweat the polls?
But then Hamas attacked Israel, forcing all of us to stare deep into the face of evil. Now, we could see what that looked like. Now, we remember 9/11. Now we remembered the wake-up call. Now, we can easily see that our government has been lying to us about who our enemies are.
The attack on Jews in Israel was telling. It exposed the House the Left built these past 20 years —the identity-first Democrats who shamed Trump for his “Muslim ban” because it was racist, who shamed Trump for his “build the wall” strategy at the border, who shamed Trump for wanting to block China as the pandemic hit. That, too, was racist. And now, they can’t even bring themselves to utterly condemn the attacks by Hamas. That was a world that existed outside the first War on Terror. Don’t fear them, an entire generation was raised to believe because that is racist.
Fear those other people over there with the MAGA flags because they’re all angry white men mad about women and people of color having a voice for the first time.
It’s all splashing back in their faces like toilet water now because it seems we’ve raised an entire generation that has a hard time seeing evil, much less naming it, if they deem the attackers as “oppressed” and the victims as “oppressors,” based on what they’ve all been chattering about online for years now, evil is harder to see.
#freepalestine builds clout. #standwithisrael does not. Kylie Jenner voiced her support for Israel and lost one million Instagram followers, and, like the coward and narcissist she is, she deleted the post.
Standing with Ukraine is easy because they view Putin and Trump as fighting on the same side. Standing with Israel is complicated because of the history of Israel and Gaza, which, for so many of them, is on par with how America “colonized” the tribes already here.
Much of the Left still sees it as a binary - they aren’t white, which makes them good. The Europeans were white, which makes them bad. All points must lead to “white supremacy.”
But now, we all can see where that has led. It has led to the banality of evil, people who can’t see it, or refuse to see it to serve their own interests. That, too, has now woken people up to the reality of the American left.
For his part, Biden He condemned members of the “Squad” for their pro-Palestine stance. He offered unwavering support to Israel. And still offers unwavering support to Ukraine, and right about now, we’re all wondering if this will take us to war. Glenn Beck suggests as much on Megyn Kelly’s show:
The Banality of Evil
There is a hollowing out of the core on the Left, a lack of morality that seems to be taking them to increasingly dark and dangerous places. Abortion is something they pretend doesn’t warrant even sadness or remorse, just celebration.
Somehow the “safe, legal and rare” argument means all young women must become sociopaths without any connection to the baby they created or the children they mothered.
[dilbert firestorm: tiktok video link from @abortioncounselor]
They seem to have found allowable targets, a baby inside them they don’t have to care about, millions of Americans who don’t want to live the way they do, and the ability just to wash away the deaths at the hand of Hamas if it means more likes on TikTok.
Maybe that means Biden might still get away with perpetuating the “big lie” about January 6th. If his poll numbers do not improve, he’ll have no choice but to flip on the red lights and start screaming about “semi-fascists.”
Questions remain
To date, there has never been any full reckoning of exactly what happened on January 6th. None of the people involved in the riot have been charged with any crimes they threatened to do online. They are being punished for them regardless. We are in the era of thought crimes and pre-crimes because a whole generation no longer knows the difference.
The government knew way before January 6th that a violent mob was coming to the Capitol. They knew, but they did nothing. Why?
Here is what Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund, no fan of Donald Trump, wrote in his book Courage Under Fire about January 6th:
Perhaps it’s high time someone in the Capitol Police sued the government and the intelligence agencies for negligence and failure to adequately protect them from what they knew was coming.
What a difference 11 years makes
The last war on terror helped build a massive apparatus to police citizens looking for would-be terrorists or radicalized Americans. There was as much pressure to deliver then as there is now. The difference is that journalists were still chasing the story back then, not yet too afraid to do so.
Take this story in the Guardian from way back in 2011, and now imagine the Guardian writing anything like this about the FBI and January 6th:
Glenn Greenwald says the FBI routinely engaged in the same kind of thing they likely did in both the Whitmer kidnapping plot and January 6th:
[Glenn Greenwald Rumble link] - [dilbert firestomr: was not able to copy the rumble link]
Only one mainstream reporter had the guts to cover the Whitmer FBI entrapment plot in Esquire Magazine. But even he must capitulate in the end, as his career would be over if he didn’t. Because the new Left, not like the old Left, supports and defends the FBI.
And anyway, back in 2011, journalists at the Guardian were likely to be more sympathetic to nonwhite suspects, as opposed to now, where their concept of MAGA is that they’re angry white men looking to kill Black and Brown people.
The January 6th prisoners and those who protested in DC that day have been treated like the enemy for three years now. They don’t have many advocates, that’s for sure. But there is one. MAGA has a friend and ally in the stalwart Julie Kelly, whose Declassified is a must-read.
From 9/11 to January 6th
We did not have social media during 9/11. The news didn’t whip around the world as it does now, with all of us experiencing a tragedy simultaneously. Instead, we picked up the phones and said to our friends and family, “Turn on the television.”
After the towers fell and the dust settled, after the wars, the Orange alerts, the paranoia, the despair, my thoughts turned to 1999 and the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Why, I thought, could we have been so careless in pouring so much of our time, attention, and resources into something so trivial?
We needed a president with his eye on the ball, not one fighting for his presidency over an affair with an intern. I wondered how things could have gone so wrong that our government was that distracted on the eve of a major terrorist attack.
The Democrats, in their seven-year odyssey to bring down Trump, have made the hunt for the Clintons look like child’s play, though it is ultimately about the same thing: a refusal to relinquish power to the opposing party.
We needed our president when the pandemic hit. We needed a government to support him in trying to manage it, not to mention the race riots in the Summer. But we got exactly the opposite. An unprecedented alignment of power worked to sabotage him at every turn, ensuring that he failed at everything he tried to do.
As Lee Smith put it in Tablet:
Our government’s singular obsession with bringing down Trump and a media all too willing to suck the bones off the carcass meant their eyes were off the ball, and now, we see what that has meant, not just with the war in Ukraine but also, the war in the Middle East.
Recently, the Lincoln Project’s Steve Schmidt beclowned himself on the PBD podcast, insisting January 6th was worse than 9/11.
How will they still be able to lie about January 6th now that we’ve all seen the face of evil? We know the difference between what happened at the Capitol and what just happened in Israel. They’re nowhere near the same. Anyone who says they are is a stone-cold liar. Let this now begin the post-delusion era where we can, at long last, be told the truth.
//end
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Kind of a stretch there, don’t you think DF? You forgot the Loch Ness Monster and Jewish Space Lasers, though both easily could have been woven into that stretch fabric..l
No way reading all that BS. The similarities to 911 and pearl is "a day that will live in infamy". It will never be forgotten even into next generations. A day that the dumbest, most gullible, gathered to support the orange turd that doesn't give a fuck about any one of them.
Wow, I'm not sure how Hammas and Jan 6th are related at all, despite the cool YouTube videos of my man Cat Stevens. Maybe paste less of whatever word salad was up there to make a point vs the "cliff notes" of equivalency of 'War and Peace'.
Only one mainstream reporter had the guts to cover the Whitmer FBI entrapment plot in Esquire Magazine. But even he must capitulate in the end, as his career would be over if he didn’t. Because the new Left, not like the old Left, supports and defends the FBI.
And anyway, back in 2011, . .
. .
The right is so wrong on crime. Why? Because they're criminals.
Kind of a stretch there, don’t you think DF? You forgot the Loch Ness Monster and Jewish Space Lasers, though both easily could have been woven into that stretch fabric..l
LOLLING!
if you say so
Quote:
Originally Posted by royamcr
No way reading all that BS. The similarities to 911 and pearl is "a day that will live in infamy". It will never be forgotten even into next generations. A day that the dumbest, most gullible, gathered to support the orange turd that doesn't give a fuck about any one of them.
The number of convicted deplorables, so far, says different. I'd bet none of them even knew what Jan 6 was leading up to it. They were told to show up and all the stupid sheep came running thinking they could actually save their orange turd cult leader.
The Attack by Hamas Shatters The Lies About January 6th
