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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. /// 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