“The new puritans, then, are best understood as a clergy for a godless age, presiding over a dreamscape of their own making, rewriting our language, history and traditions as they go along. Yet, for all their clout, there are still some among us who steadfastly refuse to praise the elegance of the emperor’s new clothes, who would rather point and laugh at the naked man in our midst. Not for the first time in human history, our way out of this madness will depend upon the heretics.”
— Andrew Doyle
The new puritans
Joe Biden emerged from his speech this month “on the continued battle for the soul of our nation” like a squalling infant birthed from the loins of blue-check Twitter, bathed in the blood-red light of militant fascism.
He was finally their guy. Gone was the empathy guy. Gone was the unity guy. Gone was the moderate guy. Be mean, Joe. Get them, Joe. Get tough, Joe. Tell them their participation in democracy is a threat to … democracy!
Yes, tell them, Joe. Tell the “MAGA Republicans” they’re not welcome in their own country. Tell them their participation is a threat to a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Tell them that democracy means they have to sit down and shut up.
Tell the truck driver who travels coast to coast, working the graveyard shift, to bring freshly cut meat to supermarket shelves. Tell the police officer, the waitress, the bartender, the cable guy, the grocery store clerk, the grandmother, the garage mechanic, the veteran who served in Afghanistan who now has been kicked out of the military for not taking the vaccine, the mother of two who now must home-school her children that they are the violent extremists posing the biggest threat to the country they call home.
Tell them, Joe, that you’ve decided to throw them away like human garbage and that you’re hoping for another Jan. 6 so you can arrest anyone who ever voted for or supported Donald Trump. Tell them that you and you alone ARE America, and any threat to your power is a threat to the State because that’s not fascism at all.
Why did Joe Biden give that speech? Who thought that was a good idea?
Obviously, Joe Biden and his administration know that the “MAGA Republicans” are not a dangerous threat to the country. Otherwise, the Democrats would not have meddled in primary elections, spending upwards of $46 million pushing those very same MAGA candidates towards a win, blocking the more moderate GOP picks.
Desperate & dishonest
Surely the Democrats know what they’re doing, right? I mean, they’re asking for America’s vote to stay in power. Joe Biden wouldn’t lie to the people about something as serious as a threat to the Republic, right?
Wrong. Joe Biden did lie. The speechwriter lied. They would do anything, say anything, and put any community or even the country at risk just to stay in power and hold onto the past, the America under Barack Obama from 2008 to 2016.
In 2020, we saw them sacrifice the truth as they micromanaged the media narrative to deliver the correct headlines when they gaslighted hundreds of millions of us to cover up the truth about just how violent the protests had been over the summer. They undermined then-President Donald Trump on everything from COVID to the economy. They did this with impunity. They did this to stay in power. That is the very definition of corruption at nearly every level of our administrative state.
Maybe they do believe it. After all, the Biden administration gets its news from the same place mainstream media outlets like the New York Times, the Washington Post, MSNBC and others do. They all drink from the same watering hole: Twitter.
Their feedback loop is all they know. They believe it’s the truth, rather than nonstop recycling of confirmation bias and agitprop flooding the zone.
I forced myself to disconnect from the media entirely to escape the bubble. I stopped reading my Twitter feed and started an alternative account that paid attention only to the right.
It took a conscious effort on my part to reprogram my brain to be able to see both sides clearly and fairly. Once I did that, I was horrified by what I saw on the left. The hypocrisy, the inhumanity. Worse than all, I could suddenly see what was true and what wasn’t true and how much the media and politicians lie daily. They tell themselves what they want to be true, not what is true.
At the same time, they were busy silencing dissent everywhere. If you challenge their narrative, you will be attacked on Twitter, fired from your job at any media outlet, or forced to apologize. You aren’t given any other option. They don’t want anyone to tell the truth ever. They want to shut it down.
How did we ever get here? And is there any way out?
There is a line in “Citizen Kane” where the character of Gettys says to Kane, “you’re going to need more than one lesson. And you’re to get more than one lesson.”
And so it goes with the Democrats. Right now, they need to be taught a lesson — to be voted out in such massive numbers, it causes them to rethink the mess they’ve made of this country. They might destroy most of the cultural institutions the Boomers built in the 1960s, but we can’t let them do that to our government.
This is hard for me to say or even think about. It took me a few years to arrive at this point. After President Biden’s speech, however, I don’t see any other way. Substack, YouTube, podcasts, and other outlets offer objective opinions and investigative reporting. Hopefully, more people will begin to gravitate away from mainstream news until they can get a grip and maybe grow a pair.
I used to be a true-blue Democrat. I voted faithfully in every election. I can even remember voting for Michael Dukakis. My faith remained unshaken for most of my adult life.
A supporter betrayed
In 2019, I was among the first Democratic activists online advocating for Joe Biden to be the nominee, while most others were aiming for “big structural change.” But I knew only Biden had a chance of beating a one-term president with a strong economy.
I figured voters might vote for Biden as an easy lateral move. Biden was the safe choice, the establishment guy who wouldn’t rock the boat too much. I wrote this piece in Medium on May 11, 2019.
I attended an early Biden fundraiser. I made videos praising Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. I made a video to show how much I believed in Joe; after all, he had crossed the street to meet my daughter’s fifth-grade class in 2009.
Most of my friends and family remain gobsmacked that my entire perspective could change almost overnight. My mother said, “You became a completely different person.”
I don’t think that I did. I think I just saw, for the first time, what my side looked like from the other side. Now I can see just how much power and influence the left has. We used to be the counterculture, the anti-establishment. But now we have become the system we used to fight against.
I might have been able to stay with the Democrats. My policy ideals haven’t changed. But when they began dehumanizing the Trump supporters, many of whom do not have access to much of our culture, I could no longer stand alongside them. Until that changes, I will never vote blue no matter who.
The 2020 election was even further proof, at least to me, that the Democrats had now become corrupt, that they had way too much power and wealth such that we might never have a free and fair election again. They spent $1 billion, the most expensive election in history, to elect Joe Biden.
They changed voting laws to close the enthusiasm gap they battle with in every election and simply collect votes from voters who weren’t motivated to go to the polls themselves. They took complete control of nearly every major institution just to stop Trump, and even still, they barely won. Trump still won Iowa, Ohio and Florida.
They haven’t stopped. If anything, they’ve just gotten much more authoritarian. With the prime-time Jan. 6 show trial, the raid of Mar-a-Lago, and now the DOJ going after Trump and Steve Bannon, we are truly living through a dystopian nightmare in a near-totalitarian state.
Why Bannon? Because he’s the central hub for MAGA. They’re smart enough to know they can’t win without using the justice system to take out their enemies. Their candidates are flaccid and weak; their policies are toxic. MAGA is their only formidable opposition. This is corruption at a level we’ve never seen in this country, certainly not in my lifetime, including Richard Nixon. At least back then, we had an objective press to hold the powerful to account.
Zealots in charge
They’re not even a political party anymore. They’ve become a religious movement fighting what they consider a religious war, a war of ideology.
The problem is that they are selling something most Americans don’t want. Look at the ads for Hillary and Chelsea Clinton’s new show. It’s impossible to tell the difference between their activism and art.
They sound like missionaries pushing their newfound faith on the unsuspecting public. They have become so disconnected from average Americans that they thought this was a good idea. In years past, there would be vicious op-eds or hilarious mocking bits on “SNL.” But no more. That’s how you know it’s a true religion. No jokes allowed.
Americans are getting sick of all of it. They’re ready for a change. They’re trying to tell the people at the top, but they just aren’t listening. The Democrats might have complete control of the new economy online as America separates between the virtual and real worlds, but our country is still a place too. Just drive across it to see what real America looks like.
We might not be able to purge this madness from our culture. But we most certainly can purge it from our government by voting. If the Democrats refuse to stand up to the “new puritans” brand of injustice, intolerance and ongoing hysteria, they must go.
Excerpted with permission from sashastone.substack.com.
