Show notes
I’ve been hated by the Party of Hate for five years and counting, maybe longer. For a while, I tricked myself into thinking it was people who didn’t really know me. They judged me on my tweets or my opinions. But then, after I came out as a Trump voter, I felt hate even from the people who did know me.I’ve seen sons disown their mothers, wives disown their husbands. I’ve felt the hatred from the people in my town who put up alienating lawn signs that seem to come from a good place until you think about what they’re really saying: agree with us, or we will hate you. When I was a kid, my stepdad forbade us from using the word “hate.” We were not allowed to say it for any reason, not “I hate brusselsprouts,” “I hate doing the dishes,” or most especially, “I hate you.”I felt it bubbling up so many times - what is a better word, I would wonder. There is no better word, I would conclude. Hate is the word we use to describe that all-consuming heat that bubbles up inside us that we can’t control. There are perfect words for things, or as Anton Chigurh said in No Country for Old Men, “you pick the one right tool.”What is love? I knew what that was the first time I saw my baby’s face. What is hate? What all of us felt in November of 2016 when Donald Trump won the election. From that day forward, for the next ten years, we would be defined by and consumed by hate.The hate wrapped itself around us. It comforted us. It made us feel morally superior and less alone in our misery and less helpless in our actions. It justified everything we did, whether it was protesting Trump’s inauguration or forming the #Resistance. It justified even worse, beating up, spitting on, and knocking the red hats off of Trump supporters. The rulers of the Left’s aristocracy, the empire that is now in tatters, said nothing. They seemed to delight in watching all of us good soldiers protest, even smash windows and burn buildings to show how angry we were, because that made them feel less like the failures they are. Blame Trump, blame the voters for the crime of voting them out. Blame anyone but themselves.All of culture was now consumed by the hatred that blotted out the sun and kept us trapped in a long, dark winter of misery and rage. It was our obligation as citizens of utopia to take a side against the half of America that had betrayed Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Hollywood, universities, corporations, institutions, book publishing, libraries, and restaurants all sent the same message to the Red Hats: you are not welcome here.The directive from on high was not to “normalize” what was not “normal.” The people didn’t just vote in Trump to represent them — that would be democracy. This was something else. This was an affront to all the better people —the ones with all the power. Those who called themselves the good side, the moral side, the side written by Aaron Sorkin and directed by Steven Spielberg, the lawn sign people who say JUST BE KIND, were in the grips of an emotion they could not name, let alone control.You do not speak like we do. You do not believe what we believe. You do not accept our version of reality. We don’t want you here. We hate you. Hate was what we were feeling, and yet hate was a word we’d given away. It didn’t mean this overwhelming sensation that made us use our social media to demonize and dehumanize the working class. It meant people who did not go along with our progressive ideology. It started back in the 1990s with the fight for gay marriage. “Love is love” meant you’re with us. “Hate” meant you were against us. Hate was what all of those bad people over there were, the God people, the Conservatives, that’s what defined them, not us.Without the right words to describe what we were feeling, we had to find other words. Nazi, fascist, dictator, bigot, homophobe, racist, rapist, xenophobe, transphobe. And when that wasn’t enough, we had to go after how he looked, his weight, his hair, his hands, his skin, his relationship with his family, the cars he drove, the food he ate.Trump was the only thing we could see because hate was the only thing we could feel. Like this woman on TikTok who embodies so much of what defines the Left today.It wasn’t that Trump didn’t troll or provoke us or give as good as he got. He did. Every one of his tweets drove us deeper into our hatred. How could he say that? That’s not funny. That’s not a joke. That’s offensive. Presidents don’t talk that way. Who would dare talk that way? Don’t laugh. Take it seriously. Don’t normalize him. Maybe for a while, the hatred was an understandable response to someone who offended everything we stood for. But after years of it, even I couldn’t take it anymore. It wasn’t just poison I could feel — a poison that began to make me sick — it was poison in our culture. It touched everything, ruined everything, destroyed a once-mighty movement, and collapsed an empire. That hate we felt, that united us, meant everything had to be sucked into it, like a black hole. Jokes weren’t funny. Movies were dystopian and apocalyptic, and still are. Keep the people afraid. We are oppressed, said the wealthy ruling class. Hate became a useful weapon for the empire. They could police thought and speech to aim their weapon at anyone who disagreed with them, defied their rules, and thought for themselves. Two Minutes of Hate Although they will deny it and wish for it not to be true, what we all built back when Obama won was like 1984. We built an “inside” that kept everyone else on the “outside.” If you wanted to be on the “inside,” you had to follow our strict rules; otherwise, you were out.In 1984, Big Brother uses Two Minutes of Hate to keep the people consumed by an emotion that prevents them from ever thinking for themselves. Who would want to be hated like that?And yet, that described exactly what it was like to watch everyone I knew every single day on social media. It spilled over into real life because the media drove it — from morning news on NPR and the networks, through the day with social media feedback loops, to cable news, and late-night comedy. It was Two Minutes of Hate all day, every day.I didn’t want to be part of it, and I had to know what was true and what wasn’t. In 1984, we know Big Brother is lying about Goldstein, if Goldstein even existed. The version of Trump we thought existed was the same kind of useful illusion. What was the way out of this, I wondered. I’d already felt the wrath of my friends online for asking questions or breaking our strict code of thought and speech. They hated me, too. So I decided to try to reprogram my brain by cutting off all information coming from the media and social media.It wasn’t easy. I filled up my head with only news from the Right. I wanted to know who they really were. I had to know if any of it was true. What I eventually found out was that no, it wasn’t true. Every screeching accusation is a choice to condemn someone on flimsy evidence without giving them the benefit of the doubt. How can we live like this, I thought. We must be able to tolerate one another. But how? The first thing I needed to do was remember what words really meant. NewspeakNewspeak is necessary in 1984 for the same reason it’s necessary on the Left. Like masks, it identifies who is who in a civilization migrating online, where words are sometimes all we have to decide who is who.Our manipulation of words like 'love' and 'hate' meant that they became elastic over time. We used them for our own purposes to drive our agenda. Break the rules of language, no matter how crazy and ridiculous they become, and you are HATE. The worst offender of Newspeak is undoubtedly “Gender Affirming Care.” It’s a word game for them. You can’t oppose it without opposing the “affirmation” of their gender. It is demanded and mandated. Which is how we get videos like this.Children are conditioned to obey these strict rules because waiting on the other side for them is Two Minutes of Hate, or a lifetime of it.Obey our rules, or else it’s all done with rainbows and unicorns and a smile. Now look at how Charlie Kirk approached this difficult subject, with compassion and grace, but also by edging ever so closely to the truth. Is it any wonder they had to silence him by any means necessary? Child-like words are given for extreme procedures that they are in no way ready for. Top surgery is, in reality, a double mastectomy on a pre-teen or teenage girl who can’t consent. Bottom surgery is either chemical or surgical castration, or mutilating your otherwise healthy organs to fake male body parts. The words became ways to define this bizarre new fundamentalism that has overtaken so many young people, and why so many of them are fleeing for freer, saner pastures. Did you know there was a word called Adultism? It means, “behaviors and attitudes based on the assumption that adults are better than young people, and entitled to act upon young people without their agreement. This mistreatment is reinforced by social institutions, laws, customs, and attitudes.” Heterosexism, cisgender — so many words. All it means is that you cannot question any of it and must follow these words to decide the meaning of things, rather than what you know in your mind and heart to be true; it’s 2+2=5.Trump’s biggest crime was that he stripped away gentle language and spoke the plain truth. None of their weapons of war — the Two Minutes of Hate — worked on him. We forgot the lesson from our childhood about the power of words. They are just words. They are not bullets whizzing through the air from rooftops. They are not shooting a CEO on the streets of New York. They are not setting fire to Teslas.I don’t have to look far to see what the Left has become. I only have to scroll social media, and the algorithm gives me what is most popular. Yes, these are just words, but more and more lately, violence is echoing them. And on TikTok:Sticks and StonesCharlie Kirk was silenced because the shooter said he “spread too much hate” and it could “not be negotiated down.” An assassin did the dirty work. The end result was the same. That he wasn’t immediately silenced, that his voice got louder as people mourned him and defended him, brought the hate back with a white hot fury. I’ve been waiting for five years for those I know on the Left to snap out of it, to thaw out, to find their humanity and their tolerance. Yet every day, it just seems to get worse. Because to them, they are becoming hate while combating what they have defined as hate. That’s not everyone on the Left. I know some brave people who still treat me with kindness and decency. Those who lead their party, however, including their influencers, journalists, celebrities, and comedians, are the ones defined by hate that leave no room for any middle ground.Here is Jesse Kelly:Those who aren’t consumed by hate are too afraid to stand up to the party. They can’t even stand up against text messages that fantasize about violence and death against Republicans. Here is Abigail Spanburger in a debate with Winsome Earle-Sears, refusing to back off her support of Jay C. Jones:But I know that violence on the Left in the era of Trump is not new. The issue dates back to 2015 and has been reported on by Tucker Carlson and Liz Wheeler, tracing its origins to Trump’s first term.But the Left controls the media narrative, and even if that’s changing, it isn’t changing fast enough. There aren’t enough Democrats willing to stand up against any of it. Here is Pam Bondi and Benny Johnson on the arrest of a man who threatened Johnson’s life:When I found my way into Trump world, I found exactly the opposite of what I expected: hate. I found tolerance. I found decency. I found kindness. I found love. It was unusual to find people who were not eternally miserable, bearing the weight of the world on their shoulders, like most progressives. Many of them are not driven by politics but rather by a higher power, and that is what prevents them from becoming a people and a movement defined by hate. There is also a lightness in escaping totalitarian oppression that polices every word that comes out of your mouth. It feels good to speak the truth, and it feels good to feel free. The death of Charlie Kirk has shaken moderate Democrats out of their hate stupor because of how so many on the Left reacted to his death.The Democrats didn’t used to be the party of hate. But powerful people don’t like having things taken away from them. In their fury and fanaticism, almost nothing of what they built, supposedly on inclusion and tolerance, remains. All that’s left is the thing they can’t name, the thing they can’t extinguish: that all-consuming hate. I don’t know how we end this madness. I don’t have any hope that the Democrats will emerge from it any time soon. I guess that means we must move on without them to shape an America that, at the very least, understands the meaning of fundamental words like love and hate. // This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe