Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone

Chuck Todd is terrified for his life. He announced he won’t attend any events with Donald Trump anymore. He doesn’t feel safe. It’s too dangerous. Trump, he insists, will throw everyone else under the bus to protect himself.
That’s awfully convenient, considering the media is largely responsible for the collective mental health crisis in this country regarding Donald Trump. How do I know? I used to exist inside that insulated Doomsday Cult, and most of the people I know in real life still do. I can see what it’s done to them. Ten years of worry, fear, hysteria, and hatred have consumed them.
When I talk to my mother, I know she exists in that world defined by hate, as she spends the last few years of what’s left of her life as part of this “all of society” effort to bring down the enemy of the Democrats, of Barack Obama. That’s all it is. But she has no idea because she takes them at their word, and her perception of reality is limited to the confines of the Doomsday cult.
My mother is like I used to be, a committed soldier to believing everything that was pumped into my nervous system from my social media feed, to the headlines at the New York Times, to the opening monologues on Morning Joe, The Daily Show, and MS-Now. Like her, I trusted them. Like her, I couldn’t believe they would lie about something so serious. It had to be true, all of it.
It’s just that it wasn’t true, and it was easy to figure it out. All it took was watching Trump’s rallies, listening to him talk, getting to know his supporters, seeing things from their point of view, and humanizing them. And yet, even suggesting such a thing, and you watch them flip out.
I’ve always known all it would take is a little bit of courage from the legacy press to help people like my mom, and millions of Americans who believe the lies they pump out every day on behalf of the Democrats. Just a little bit of sanity would go a long way. But instead, they are playing with fire. They are assuming guys like Cole Allen can tell the difference between extreme hyperbole and the truth.
Any column about the Left’s violence begins and ends with Trump, and all that means is they don’t get the message. At best, they “both sides” it, they can’t see what they’ve done to whole generations who actually believe they’re growing up in a dictatorship, a regime that disappears people off the streets, wants to turn every woman into a birthing slave, and is shooting protesters just for exercising their First Amendment rights. Who wouldn’t want to pick up a gun?
At best, the Democrats came out of the potential massacre screaming about gun control, as though they’ve done anything to protect the students or the schools in 20 years, but all that does is change the channel away from common sense and empathy back to where they want it, right on target.
Cole Allen took the press at their word, which is why he couldn’t understand how they could have dinner with a “rapist, traitor, and pedophile.” He has a point. After all, why would they if they really meant everything they’ve been telling us for ten years?
Had he been better at breaching security — if he’d had a better weapon that could fire multiple rounds, there is a good chance members of the press could have been mowed down too, along with the very pregnant Karoline Leavitt, who thankfully just welcomed her baby into this world. It feels like a miracle for anyone paying attention.
The press didn’t seem to get it. None of them even took a pause, except to blame Trump, to say he was nice for a second there, but then turned hostile again at Norah O’Donnell on 60 Minutes.
The media focuses intensely on acts of violence by the Right and has for ten years, while ignoring violence from the Left. They do this without even thinking about it, which is why Americans conclude the Right is more violent. The media told them. So why wouldn’t it be true?
Alex Pretti and Renee Good shouldn’t have been shot, but they were attacking federal officers. They aren’t the violent ones to the media. It’s ICE, the Gestapo. If you aren’t aware that there are two sides to every story in America now, what in the world would you think? You wouldn’t just be terrified. You would be radicalized. You would think violence is the only answer because everything else has failed.
The press, however, should have better discernment. If they could just tell the truth for once, or at least try to correct the record, maybe we wouldn’t be here now, where yet another assassin felt he had no other choice but to do the world a favor by killing Hitler.
It was the job of the media to push back on the hyperbole and hysteria, but instead they became the delivery device, injecting irrational fear and rage into the veins of this country every second of every day - in airports, gyms, gas stations, and in the living rooms of people who still watch the news, like my mom.
Why don’t they think of us? Why doesn’t just once Joy Behar or Whoopi Goldberg say, “Oh, we don’t really mean he’s a fascist. We just say that because we want to win elections, but it isn’t really true.”
They always think of the next round of elections - keep the people afraid, keep them engaged, then we can win. But what has this done to the soul of our nation, and no, they can’t keep blaming Donald Trump because look at where that has gotten us. Semi fascists, ultra MAGA, racists, rapists, Nazis.
Here is Ben Shapiro.
Cole Allen’s entire adult life has been shaped by Trump Derangement Syndrome, due almost entirely to the legacy media’s partnership with the Democratic Party and their efforts to run a “hearts and minds” campaign on the American people since 2016.
They took a side, along with all of our once-shared culture, institutions, corporations, and universities, with no consideration to what that level of sustained hysteria and rage might do to impressionable minds who know no other kind of America, one before the Democrats and the media turned their world into a Doomsday Cult.
I also know that all it would take is a little bit of courage from the media to start calling the Democrats out for what they’ve done to all of us all of these years. Have they ever even thought about what comes next after Trump? There will be nothing left of them. Their entire existence revolves around ridding the world of this evil force, and they wonder why people are picking up guns.
Cole Allen, Tyler Robinson, Luigi Mangeone, and Thomas Matthew Crooks are playing out a mainstream, in-the-light-of-day version of the CIA’s MK Ultra.
They didn’t need a secret lab. They didn’t even need drugs. They just needed the internet, social media algorithms, and our inability to maintain our sanity while doomscrolling. They knew all this long ago. But it was too useful in growing their “resistance.” Shaping public opinion with influencers who mirror the Democrats' messaging, and before long, for many of them, there was and is no way out.
There used to be cultural touchstones that would offer us some kind of relief - like comedy, like movies, like commentary. Instead, we have a monoculture on the Left all pushing the exact same message: we’re helpless, we’re occupied, please someone just do it.
Even now, when we look to them for the truth, we get cherry-picked information stripped of context. Most people only read the headlines now; they don’t even bother to dive into the story or check how true it is. It is just Two Minutes of Hate, Orwell style.
Like this headline at USA Today. It was obviously a joke; even the reporter laughed.
The first paragraph of the story once again does not say it was a joke:
Amid renewed scrutiny of his personal security, President Donald Trump said he has resisted the idea of wearing a bulletproof vest, not for safety reasons, but because of how it might make him look.
Here are the first two comments under the tweet.

Does the distortion of reality even bother the press now? Did they think about that as they entered the Correspondents’ Dinner? Did they realize that their messaging had almost caught up with them?
Cole Allen was an incompetent assassin, as it would turn out. But it should serve as a warning, one that they should not ignore. This is not a “both sides” issue. Only one side is growing political assassins who echo the exact same messaging of the legacy media and the Democrats. They can deny it all they want, but on that night, it almost caught up with them.
Sooner or later, though, they will have to reckon with having lied for so many years, especially if they plan on toasting a glass of champagne, let alone sitting in the same room, with an “existential threat” like Donald Trump. Who knows who else might be out there who takes them at their word?

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As promised, my conversation with my friend Andy Schaalman who has a Substack called Fourth Turning Chronicles but does most of his work on his YouTube channel The Generation Report.
We are catching up on our current Fourth Turning. We touch on the assassination attempt, the war in Iran, Israel, the danger of the Left taking back power and what our future might be. We are at a crisis point and it could go either way.
This is the video from his channel recommended in the podcast:


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I left the Democratic Party in 2020 because I couldn’t take it anymore. I am not sure what triggered my disgust, but all I know is that I could not go along with what the party had become and what I could see playing out every day on social media. I watched everyone I knew, every prominent person of power, justify their dehumanizing rhetoric, all aimed at one man and his supporters.
I recoiled in horror then. It felt like ice in my veins, or worse, dark sludge, something like evil. Why are we doing this, I wondered. Why have we abandoned all of our principles of decency and kindness? What of the lawn signs that say “everyone is welcome”?
I knew it was wrong. I also knew speaking out about it would be the end of my status online, many of my friendships, and eventually, by 2024, all of my income, as my business was destroyed and my reputation collapsed for the sin of voting for and supporting Donald Trump.
Now, we’re at the point on the Left where all the words — the extreme hyperbole—have been used up, and nothing has changed. There was ever only one place left to go, and that was to take up arms and start shooting people.
Cole Allen, who is Trump’s third would-be assassin, like Luigi Mangione and Tyler Robinson, is not a madman, not like the shooter who murdered Melissa Hortman. He wasn’t hearing voices. He wasn’t suffering from PTSD. He made a sober and calculating decision to do what so many have been begging “someone” to do ever since Trump won.
Here are some TikToks.
From Cole Allen’s manifesto:
Allen is a gamer, and he talks about his potential assassination as if he’s walking us through one of the first-person shooter games he might livestream. He sees himself as a vigilante out for justice against the world’s greatest evil.
How does he come to these conclusions about Trump? Oh, I don’t know, maybe ask the legacy media and the Democrats who have been pushing these lies about Trump for ten years. Cole Allen, like so many other would-be assassins, took them at their word. He doesn’t know it’s all just politics.
Allen said, “I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes,” which is not that different from what your average Democrat broadcasts on social media every day.
After ten years of dehumanizing language, they can’t see the reality of who Trump is anymore, much less see his supporters as their fellow Americans. They can only see the delusion - the mirage - the supervillain they invented. If he isn’t even a human anymore, then killing him is as easy as taking out the garbage.
They speak in mantras. They mirror each other. Their hysteria spreads from person to person and ultimately unites them. They are as aligned and of one mind as a cult. They must believe they are still the “resistance” going to war on an insurmountable evil force that can’t be defeated in any ordinary way. It requires something extraordinary, someone, to “just do it.”
When they are confronted with the reality of real-world violence, and they must reckon with who and what they have become, they go on autopilot, make their canned statements about generic political violence, but never atone for anything they’ve done to bring us to this point - all of them are culpable - the Democrats, the Never Trumpers, and the legacy media.
Cole Allen is a victim of the Doomsday Cult and its dehumanizing propaganda machine. He is consumed by the delusion that keeps them locked away and terrified of the monsters outside. But by now, shouldn’t they be asking themselves who the monsters really are? Maybe they should take a good, long look in the mirror.
As Nietzsche once warned:
If I thought I could save the Left, I would start by telling them to stop calling Trump and his supporters Nazis. I would tell them that dehumanizing language almost always leads to violence. It has nowhere else to go.
I would tell them it’s long past time to accept that Donald Trump won in 2016 and in 2024, and they lost. It’s time they reckoned with that too. Their lies, their rage, their manufactured helplessness have taken them nowhere good. Three assassination attempts on Trump and the death of Charlie Kirk should be enough.
I would tell them that we still have to share this country, even with —especially with—people we don’t agree with. I would tell them that they aren’t better than half the country. I would tell them they had no right to claim democracy for themselves. It doesn’t belong to them.
I would tell them that they’ve destroyed themselves trying to destroy Trump. They have wrecked families, relationships, marriages, friendships, communities, culture - and all for what? To cling to the democracy that was never theirs to begin with? I have so much to tell them, if only they would listen.
The violence against Trump supporters began in 2015 and continued throughout his first four years.
Is it really that surprising that nine years later, someone would try to assassinate him?
How was it that we as a nation were not brought to our knees after that? How is it that the Left could simply soldier on, with the same dehumanizing Nazi rhetoric as though none of this had happened?
It should have been the day that changed everything. But somehow, it wasn’t. To them, they always had the fallback of blaming guns. They’re all reading from the same script, and this is their only way out.
To humanize someone is to have the courage to see them as the complicated, flawed, imperfect people they are. To dehumanize them is to convict them of high crimes and misdemeanors in the Court of Public Opinion. We have built a panopticon that decides guilt, and it’s taken us all the way to this moment, where political violence is just more fodder for the churn.
So let’s get this straight once and for all. Trump is someone who is not afraid to say offensive things in a time when an entire movement believes words are violence, but violence is a way to stop the words.
Trump’s efforts to build a ballroom, transform the Kennedy Center, clean up the streets, end wars, protect women in sports, use the tariffs to bring back jobs, and protect children from the cult are all MAGA — Make America Great Again. People say he’s doing it for himself, but maybe he’s doing it because he loves this country. We give him the benefit of the doubt because it’s the right thing to do.
And if you can’t get all the way there, at least get halfway there. Get to the part where he’s the guy from The Apprentice, who built all of those gold buildings in Vegas. To see him for who and what he is will heal the pathology that has consumed the Left. But we know if three assassination attempts won’t do it, nothing will.
A part of me really did think that if Trump won again in 2024, the mass delusion would be punctured at long last. Maybe it would be like that moment in Salem in 1692, when the accusations became so ridiculous that the whole fantasy collapsed. But that never happened.
Instead, everything got worse. The hyperbole got worse. Detainment centers were concentration camps. ICE officers were the Gestapo. Trump wasn’t just a rapist, racist, fascist, dictator, felon, demagogue, criminal, but now, he was also a pedophile and, before long, a war criminal. They had nowhere left to go except to wish for his death, to manifest it, and make posts about it on TikTok.
There is no saving the Left. There is only saving America from them. I can only hope in those dark nights of the soul when I worry about the future - the future for this country, the future for my daughter — that the scrappy coalition known as MAGA can hold the line.

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Eric Swalwell’s gubernatorial campaign was a ticking time bomb, and the Democrats knew it. They’ve denied it, but come on, are we really supposed to believe that a story that was kicking around in 2019 and set to break in Politico did not reach the ears of Nancy Pelosi? The question isn’t whether they knew, but why they did nothing about it and essentially let Swalwell loose upon the world with access to Snapchat and hotel rooms.
Swalwell was one of Pelosi’s protoges, a foot soldier for the party bosses who decided Donald Trump should never lead this country, no matter the election outcome. They convicted him on Inauguration Day, then spent the next four years finding the crime. The biggest and most embarrassing of these was Russiagate, where Swalwell played a starring role.
They knew Trump would not be removed from office, but they decided to wait out the clock, waste his time and ours, with a phony scandal that, to this day, has never been adequately addressed by legacy media or the Democrats. They just moved on to the next thing and the next thing and the next thing, and all the while, there was Swalwell doing everything right.
There he was on Impeachment Number 2, saying all the things, drawing all of the conclusions, pushing all of the hysteria.
For his efforts, Swalwell was beloved by celebrities like Robert De Niro, late-night comics like Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert. For a time, he was like Icarus, soaring as one of the Democrats’ shining stars.
No wonder he thought he should be next in line to lead California now that Gavin Newsom is running for president. All that’s required of him is that he be someone who can take on Trump.
But Icarus flamed out. In the past week, we watched a political hit that has to be among the cleanest and most efficient on record. One minute, he was leading in the polls — the next, he was dropping out and resigning from Congress. Swalwell never had a chance.
Powerful forces that will never be known wanted him out because there was a good chance the “open secret” that dogged him for years would drop, handing California to the Republicans. It would be another nightmare on par with Biden’s debate disaster. There was no way the Democrats were going to let that happen.
Swalwell never saw it coming. He assumed he had risen to the level of being a valued member of the “resistance.” But he clearly doesn’t know the Democrats very well. If they could force the President of the United States out of running for a second term for the good of the party, they could do it to anyone.
What Did the Democrats Know and When Did They Know It
Swalwell had survived the Right’s favorite lurid tale of the Chinese Spy Fang Fang, along with the rumor he’d passed gas during a cable news spot.
But in 2019, a woman tipped off a Politico reporter that Swalwell was engaged in inappropriate sexual activity with young women while in Congress. Icarus took flight and attempted to run for president. But for unknown reasons, he dropped out.
And then, inexplicably, the reporter dropped the story.
Why would they drop the story? Maybe because they lost their appetite for taking down Democrats after the Al Franken debacle, where Franken was pushed out by the most prominent Democrats, like Chuck Schumer, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders, with no chance to defend himself against what were flimsy charges at best.
As Matt Taibbi writes in Racket:
Democrats tripped over each other to denounce Franken, with 32 Senators calling for his resignation on Dec. 6, 2017. Digital stones flew from Minnesotan Amy Klobuchar, ex-presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, and future VP Kamala Harris, among others:
The Franken story would sting by 2019, following a redemption piece by Jane Mayer in The New Yorker. No one wanted to do that again, so maybe they figured they’d let the Swalwell story pass.
The bigger reason was that the Democrats had one objective in 2019, and it wasn’t to take out the guy who was key in Trump’s impeachment and Russiagate, but to take out Trump himself. It was an all-hands-on-deck kind of moment, and no reporter would have wanted to be caught dead helping Trump and hurting the Democrats.
That’s also why they ignored the story in 2024 of Kamala Harris’ husband Dougie who allegedly slapped a woman so hard she spun around. Like so many other stories that could hurt Democrats, including Joe Biden’s cognitive decline, they said nothing, lest they hurt the “resistance.”
It was also 2019 when a group of women came forward to accuse Joe Biden of inappropriate touching. No one seemed all that interested in pushing it to the point where Biden would drop out. He denied it, and everyone gave him a pass.
Even when Biden was accused of sexual assault by Tara Reade, most in the press wouldn’t touch it. But one person did. Megyn Kelly.
Kamala Harris was among those who leaned into the accusations, but that would not stop Biden from choosing her as his VP.
Like the good Democrat I was, I tried to discredit Tara Reade, along with the rest of the accusers. I, too, had been burned by the Al Franken story and was disgusted with how the Democrats behaved, and like most people, I was getting exhausted by the Me Too movement and the lack of due process. In our minds, this was too serious a moment. We had to defeat Trump. Everything else would have to be sidelined.
I always thought that the harassment charges against Biden were less about Me Too and more about pushing the old man out of the race so that a more progressive candidate might take his spot. Reade, for instance, was a devout supporter of Bernie Sanders, and just before she accused him of assault, she and everyone else on the progressive Left were hoping for a miracle.
Is that what happened with the Swalwell story, too? Something about it just doesn’t add up. It was too clean, too well planned, too easy. It makes me wonder who was really pulling the strings. For the second time, he tried to fly too close to the sun and run for higher office, and for the second time, dropped out, but this time, there won’t be any coming back.
As Taibbi writes:
Which brings us to Swalwell. The accusations are extremely serious. Another woman came forward alleging he drugged her, lured her to a hotel, raped her, and choked her to unconsciousness. “I thought I died,” Lonna Drewes said. Taken with two accusations of sex with women “too intoxicated to consent,” the stories sound more like a developing serial murderer than someone merely guilty of being raised on Bob Hope jokes. Still, Swalwell’s political demise reads like a repeat of the Franken tale, only with context issues amplified a hundredfold, and Epstein playing the role of Weinstein.
With Franken, it took weeks for Democrats to denounce him. With Swalwell it happened overnight, and accusers are already being called “survivors,” as in the Democratic Women’s Caucus announcing, “We stand with survivors.” The writer in me dislikes the appropriation of a word that means “remaining alive where others have died,” but it is true these women might prove to be “survivors” of something, but what? At this early stage of inquiry, “survivors” functions as a turbocharged version of “Believe all women,” in which the possibility of disbelief is linguistically eliminated.
But time is the point. Time means another candidate can build a campaign and beat the Republican in California. That’s the hangover from 2024, and it’s why I don’t believe any of this happened organically.
Who ordered the hit?
The story goes something like this: two progressive female influencers caught wind of a whisper network, with rumors swirling about Swalwell’s sexual proclivities.
How this information found its way to them is not yet known. Will anyone ask or investigate? Probably not. Some of it came from their friends, and that was more than enough to start an amateur investigation, one that will probably find its way to a TV movie near you.
Think: Woodward and Bernstein or Kantor and Twohey, the women who broke the Harvey Weinstein story that kicked off Me Too. Now, instead of reporters, we have influencers.
To hear them tell it, they believed their best bet was to take the story to CNN, where their staff could fact-check it and, more importantly, make it legal.
One is Cheyenne Hunt, who calls herself the first Gen-Z woman to run for Congress, though she did not win. Assertive and confident, Hunt has the influencer game down. She also carries with her the certainty of the Gen-Z woman who does not believe in due process and thinks every man is a predator until proven innocent. Just asking a woman for her phone number could be a reportable offense.
To her, Swalwell was a dangerous moderate who was pro-Israel and too sympathetic to and supportive of ICE. These are red lines for the new Democratic Party's progressive wing, especially in a big state like California.
The other is Arielle Fodor, also known as Mrs. Frazzled, who is known for talking baby talk to Trump and his supporters to an irritating degree, but that is why she is popular on TikTok.
Fodor seems to be the type who would Vote Blue No Matter Who and probably would not be motivated to take down Swalwell unless she was encouraged to do so. Her story is nearly identical to Hunt’s:
It’s an awfully strange coincidence that they began mobilizing efforts to break the story in March, and by April, they were out on social media with it. If Swalwell were a valued member of the progressive Left, if they thought he would fight for Medicare for All, defunding the police, abandoning Israel, and transing the kids, would they have pulled this off? I doubt it.
What seems more likely to me is that they were egged on by unseen forces that were doing the hard job of pushing the accusers in the right direction and nudging the story ever closer to the surface, you know, like Deep Throat in All the President’s Men?
The same forces on the progressive Left that wanted Biden out in 2020 could also be in play here. He looks a lot like the kind of candidate the Democrats say they want and need - someone who can attract the working-class white men all over the country.
But for these women and the progressive Left, there is one candidate better suited to fight for what they care about most: Katie Porter. Both influencers have been seen in photos with her, and Porter and Hunt are both affiliated with the same law school.
Porter denies any direct involvement, but then again, why would that even need to be said?
There is no doubt that Cheyenne Hunt and Arielle Fodor look to be the party’s future, not just as influencers or as women, but as people who are willing to go this far to steer the ship in the right direction. Hunt, in particular, seems committed to rooting out all of the sex pests in Congress, and what better way to make a name for herself?
All the Congressman’s D*ck Pics
The Swalwell story unfolded straight out of the writers’ room of a Lifetime movie where all women are victims, and all men are predators. How could anyone, much less a white male politician, much less a Democrat, send Snapchats of his Johnson to a Gen-Z staffer post Me Too?
Maybe he did it because no one would believe anyone could be that stupid. Maybe he did it because Snapchat deletes the photos, and it’s his word against theirs. Maybe he did it because the thrill of it outweighed the risk. Was he a predator? Were these consensual? Me Too demands we do not ask.
Most of the victims tell the same story we heard hundreds, if not thousands, of times in the old days of Me Too. How a hungry young woman looking for employment opportunities is lured into a trap, only to have their friendly conversation devolve into a cheap proposition for sex. The woman is always portrayed as a non-consenting partner, someone who didn’t flirt back in any way, and was just suddenly hit with an offensive image.
That’s always been the biggest problem with the Me Too movement. It is held in the court of public opinion, and those accused have no way to defend themselves. Because both sides - Left and Right - are invested in Swalwell taking a fall, no one really bothers with the specifics. He did it, that’s all.
Why, for instance, did one of the victims claim Swalwell assaulted her in 2019, only to go back and get drunk with him in 2024 and claim the same thing happened again? Is that assault, or is that bad choices? Doesn’t matter, don’t ask.
I’m not defending Eric Swalwell. I feel about him the way Matt Taibbi does when he writes:
I can’t stand Eric Swalwell. A leading torchbearer in Russiagate lore, he’s always carried himself with an air of oozy self-satisfaction unusual even in a politician. I remember wondering if Swalwell was Latin for “Stubble Lizard.”
But the Democrats have managed to do the impossible. They’ve made me almost pity the guy. He thought he was doing everything right. He told all the lies they told him to tell. He helped build the very machine that would later devour him. But something about this hit feels too orchestrated and perhaps sets a dangerous precedent. Even guys like Swalwell deserve the benefit of the doubt, even if he never offered it to Trump.
Swalwell almost committed the perfect crime. He painted himself as an advocate for women, all the while allegedly going through them like a box of See’s Candies. If it’s true that he drugged and raped women, lock him up, lock him up. But if all of this was over consensual flirting, regrettable sex, and mutual Spapchats, then he’s the dumbest man on the planet.
Swalwell is finally learning who the Democrats really are and that life comes at you fast. Unfortunately for him, he wasn’t squeaky clean enough, or well-behaved enough, or smart enough to keep it in his pants. He should never have tried to fly that high, at least not with so much baggage weighing him down.

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—Jacob Siegel, the Information State, excerpts from audiobook, which can be found here.
Totalitarianism came to America slowly at first and then all at once. It began as a utopia, one I helped build. It seemed like a perfect new America and gave all of us godless creatures, who’d been chewed up and spit out by the Boomers’ counterculture revolution, a collective sense of purpose. It was all going so great until it wasn’t.
A Virtual Utopia
I got online 30 years ago. I never planned on living half of my life on the internet. It just turned out that way. I had motive, means, and opportunity to kill off my real-life self and be reborn in the virtual world. Why wouldn’t I escape a life that had become a full-spectrum failure at everything I tried to do? A relationship that blew up when the man I thought loved me went back to his wife, the Graduate Film Program at Columbia I’d targeted as my life’s dream ended in one semester as I chased that loser guy back to LA.
There are things about that moment that are too painful to write about, at least for now, but I will someday. The result was me staring at the wall with nothing achieved and nowhere to go. I had just turned 30.
The internet allowed me to remake myself as someone else. I could be strong. I could be confident. I could be beautiful because who knew what you looked like? I could just use words, and I was good at words. So I dove into a life online full of excitement and wonder, a dreamscape of endless possibilities. There was no Amazon, no eBay, no Google. There was barely a web browser.
I fell in love with an Italian I met online and came back from Italy pregnant. He didn’t want to be a father, but I wanted to be a mother, so I had my baby, and then I built a website so I could stay home with her and support us.
I was the success story for every progressive female: a single mom and a business owner. A daughter of feminism en route to helping launch the Great Feminization and the Great Awokening.
I was in Italy when I sent my first Tweet from my Treo. When Barack Obama signed on, I followed him, and he followed me. Then I became part of his army of clicktivists, shaping the new rules and building our desired narratives. We felt omnipotent.
This was the internet, after all, and you could be anything you wanted to be - an activist for moral good? Check. An outspoken exhibitist? Check. West Wing-like politicos acting like experts in politics? Check. Remaking a new America one social media post at a time? Check. Virtue signaling with images blasted out to followers displaying our goodness? Check.
For all the ways we used the internet, it shouldn’t be that surprising that we built a virtual America - a fantasy utopia - that we forgot wasn’t real. We were riding high with our media stars like Jon Stewart and Rachel Maddow. We were the new, the progressive, the forward thinkers, the early adopters. We colonized the internet in our image.
Utopias only have two paths forward. They either collapse or they must become more totalitarian out of necessity, to quote Milan Kundera in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.
Our utopia was opt-in at first, and who wouldn’t want to be a part of it? For a time, it felt like the best thing ever, all of our problems solved. It was everything, everywhere, all at once. A “whole of society” effort. It was # OscarsSoWhite. It was Critical Race Theory. It was every institution, corporation, legacy media outlet, and movie studio.
But it was also dull. Movies became infused with dogma. The rules became stifling. Sooner or later, people like me were going to shake the tree.
Says Siegel:
Maintaining utopia, let alone defining it, meant that there would eventually be people like me who asked too many questions, who would be hurled before the almighty panopticon — an army of puritanical scolds policing thought and speech — and eventually destroyed and purged as the mob cheered.
The Breakdown
I’d been a good liberal, a loyal and devoted Democrat all of my adult life. I’d never thought about conspiracy theories. I didn’t really challenge the system. I never doubted the intent of our government.
I was all in for Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden. I was so loyal a supporter that I was invited to an early Biden fundraiser in May of 2019. I watched him speak with tears in my eyes. He will save us, I thought.
One year later, however, COVID hit. My daughter had to leave her senior year of college and have her graduation on my balcony. We were sewing our own masks and making our own hand sanitizer. It was a whole-of-society effort to deal with this once-in-a-generation pandemic.
But by the end of May, the George Floyd video whipped around the world, and before long, the whole of society's effort had to shift to racial injustice as millions poured into the streets.
What I saw unfold that year, the lies that were told, the gaslighting, the lurching from one narrative to the other, and all of the obedient robots going along with it, in full mass formation, was too much, even for me. We watched them lie - the experts, the journalists, the celebrities, the Democrats.
I kept trying to scream from the rooftops that we would lose the 2020 election if the violent protests didn’t stop. What I didn’t know, what I would find out by the end of the election, was that it didn’t matter. They would bend the media narrative to pretend there were no violent protests. It all worked cleanly and smoothly. No one was even allowed to question it.
Trump was campaigning hard, doing multiple rallies a day, and it seemed to me he was making headway and changing minds. We know this because he won Florida, Ohio, and Iowa. Only once in history has anyone won those three states and still lost: The 1960 election.
The difference in votes between Kennedy and Nixon proves how close the election was. But it never made sense to me that Biden would win by such a large margin and also lose Ohio, Iowa, and Florida. Unless, of course, they’d built a system that was too big to fail and had collected enough ballots long before Election Day.
The FBI, still working under Trump, had helped the Democrats by suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop via social media. COVID gave Biden the excuse to hide in the basement and not campaign. A “whole of society” effort to purge a once-in-a-generation threat seemed to justify everything they did, as we know from the confession in TIME Magazine. Our elections, it seemed, were too risky to leave up to the people.
This system, this utopia we built, believed itself to be more powerful than our democracy, more powerful than our elections. I couldn’t go along with that, just as I couldn’t go along with everything that came after, as our utopia devolved into a totalitarian dystopia.
The Information State
Sometimes, during those dark nights of the soul, I wonder, did I do the right thing? Did what I thought happened really happen? No one in the mainstream media or culture has ever acknowledged any of it. They don’t want to admit it or talk about it. Their war on Trump simply rages on, and they hope all of us will one day get with the program.
But for me, there is still that untold story, a story I need to be told so that everyone on the Left - my friends and family and all of Hollywood and much of our legacy media understands what happened in the last ten years. Why are we living like this, with one half of the country marching by the millions to protest a president who defeated them not once but twice? Their hatred and shunning of half the country is still justified and accepted. Why?
Now, thanks to Jacob Siegel, we don’t have to wonder. He’s written it all down, the whole ugly tale, in this essential text, The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control. There is nothing they can do about it now. It will set the record straight, at long last.
The Information State starts with Woodrow Wilson’s Great War crackdown on speech, and moves through World War II, Harry Truman and the Cold War, up to 9/11 and the expansion of the surveillance state. But it was the Obama administration that took it much further, beyond mere surveillance. He used information to change hearts and minds and to create a utopian society, not unlike those of the Soviet Union or China.
As Siegel writes:
How the protests and riots over the Summer in 2020, versus those on January 6th, were treated so differently by our government remains one of the clearest examples of the kind of two-tiered society we were living under before Elon Musk bought Twitter and Donald Trump won again.
The BLM riots attacked working-class people, so they didn’t matter, but January 6th attacked the powerful, and that, to them, meant war.
Siegel writes:
“Truth Held Forth and Maintained.”
The scandal of how 20 people were hanged as witches in Salem would have been long forgotten, were it not for a cantankerous Quaker named Thomas Maule, who made the brave choice to expose the scandal in a pamphlet he called Truth Held Forth and Maintained.
In cool and cutting sarcasm, he wrote that God would condemn the witch trial judges. He famously stated, “[F]or it were better that one hundred Witches should live, than that one person be put to death for a Witch, which is not a Witch.”
Maule’s pamphlet was banned, and he was thrown in jail for “blasphemy and slander.” He would eventually get a trial, and the jury, exhausted and demoralized by the events of that winter, ruled in his favor, handing him a landmark win that would be among the cases that inspired the First Amendment.
Jacob Siegel won’t be jailed for blasphemy. Those named in the book will either ignore it outright or attempt to discredit it. As of today, there are no reviews in the New York Times or the Washington Post.
As if out of a chapter in his own book, Renée DiResta objected to how she was portrayed and wrote a letter of complaint to the website Baffler, which then pulled the review. Siegel and DiResta publicly debated whether it counted as censorship. But who needs censorship when you have total societal control? At least among the university-educated ruling class.
DiResta’s bio on Twitter reads:
DiResta and the machine she works for have rigged the game in their favor. No major media outlets will ever call them out. Hollywood won’t write any controversial screenplays about them. Late night comediens will never mock them, and they will always be treated gently, with soft cotton gloves, lest anyone leave a mark.
Into the Unknown
Jacob Siegel’s The Information State does not paint an optimistic vision for the future. It ends with a question mark. Who will control this vast leviathan of data and human behavior, that now includes unstoppable AI? And how will we survive it?
What will these same people who took complete control of society, of thought and speech, do if they take back power? I think we can probably guess. If they’ve never admitted it, never atoned for any of it, then we can expect it will come roaring back, and this time, they won’t bother trying to hide it.
My advice? Log off. Migrate back to the real world. Look at the sky at twilight. Dig your toes into the sand. Build a fire in the woods. Look people in the eye. Attend a poetry reading. Go to a coffee shop. Meet people in the real world and leave the internet and the Information State far behind.
It’s probably too late for me. I’m a lifer. I know that. But I’m also a cautionary tale. This is what happens when you spend 30 years of your life in the virtual world. But if I can find my way out, then anyone can.

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