By Sasha Stone
Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning
March 17, 2023
"If totalitarianism did not exploit [archetypes], which are deep inside us all and rooted deep in all religions, it could never attract so many people, especially during the early phases of its existence. Once the dream of paradise starts to turn into reality, however, here and there people begin to crop up who stand in its way, and so the rulers of paradise must build a little gulag on the side of Eden. In the course of time this gulag grows ever bigger and more perfect, while the adjoining paradise gets even smaller and poorer."
― Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Utopias by their nature have only two options if they're to survive. They must lean into totalitarianism or collapse. We're now at the moment when the Democrats, with complete control of the legacy media, nearly all major institutions of power - including those run by the government - are slowly adopting totalitarian practices to shut out speech they don't like.
What they want is more power to preserve their utopian vision for a new America. But there are powerful dissidents in this country who continue to stand in their way, like Tucker Carlson, Elon Musk, Matt Taibbi, and Michael Shellenberger. What are the utopians to do?
Well, for starters, they'd like to find a good reason to shut down Carlson and destroy Fox News. That will keep their utopia alive for a little longer, stave off collapse, and allow them to eradicate even more dissent. Dissent is dangerous. Dissent is a threat to Democracy.
In just two short weeks we've seen Senator Chuck Schumer bark at Fox News and Rupert Murdoch demanding they silence and censor their top-rated cable news host. We've seen a panel of Democratic members of Congress beclown themselves in one of the most embarrassing spectacles in the history of the party.
The Congressional hearing on the Twitter Files made it abundantly clear that Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger weren't the targets. Elon Musk was the target. They couldn't give the Twitter Files any oxygen lest they help Musk succeed in his ongoing pursuit to help free the truth from their desire to keep it locked away.
Carlson is the one who has them really nervous. Surely there must be a way they can shut him up permanently. Schumer is ready with threats and hysteria to do just that, and he has a willing army of true believers who back him up every step of the way.
What were they so afraid of anyway? Why not show us what was in those tapes? Because it embarrassed the Democrats and their obedient press who, for years now, have defamed and smeared Jacob Chansley as the face of the "White supremacist armed insurrection" to overthrow the US government and install the second Confederacy.
That was a lie.
Almost everything they said happened at the Capitol that day didn't happen the way they said it did. We've never gotten the full story. We got their narrative, the one that was useful to them, the one they believe would stop Trump and MAGA or at least give them permission to wage war against their own citizens.
The footage, according to Carlson, is mostly uneventful. But showing Chansley walking calmly through the hallways with two police officers by his side paints a very different picture than the one they've been selling.
I already knew that their version of Chansley, like their version of Trump, was wrong. I knew because I had listened to an interview with him from prison last year. I knew if I said anything I would be in real trouble so I filed away in the place I keep things I know will matter one day.
Chansley is a vegan, the kind of guy you'd see at Burning Man because it was the cool place to be. Like most Trump supporters, he hovers on the fringes of our society, at the opposite end of the spectrum of the do-gooders and eggheads that dominate our culture now.
If you know anything about Q'anon - I mean the real Q'anon and not the media version, you know they're mostly yoga-oriented granola crunchers who, like so many of us on the Left from the old days, grew up not trusting the government. I felt bad for Chansley because he, like so many of them, had no advocates in government, in civil rights law, or in the press.
But rather than look into it, or demand answers from the powerful, the media did what they always do - they covered for the Democrats.