Show notes
Violence is in the air after Luigi Mangione assassinated CEO Brian Thompson and became a hero of the Left. It’s in the air by politicians who now want protesters to get messy, to get bloody. All for a necessary photo op, they believe will finally, at long last, turn the public against Donald Trump.Mangione, as it turns out, was a useful weapon in this war. Back in December, novelist and co-host of America This Week, Walter Kirn, foresaw the connection and predicted the rise of a young, charismatic populist. Sound familiar?Kirn saw something much bigger. He could see the connection between what Mangioni represented to the Left and the gathering storm that would ultimately find its way toward Zohran Mamdani and the current wave of populist revolutionaries.From the New York Post:The NCRI study traces the cultural shift back to the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, allegedly by Luigi Mangione, in December 2024. What followed, researchers say, was a viral wave of memes that turned Mangione into a folk hero.With Karen Bass and Gavin Newsom in California, and Mamdani in New York vowing to obstruct ICE, we can see a culture already defined by political violence rising to new heights either to get a photo op that depicts Trump as an authoritarian fascist, or to start a stand-off with the military, one that could go down in the history books.But as with all of the pet causes by the Democrats, this one goes against public opinion, just as their support of biological men playing against women in sports goes against it. Most Americans are in favor of deporting illegal immigrants.The question now isn’t whether there will be violence as ICE continues to find and deport as many illegal immigrants as possible, but how bad the violence will be. What is a cause worth fighting and dying for? From Ben Shapiro:What they hope the violence will do is shift public opinion back in their favor. But they’ve never learned the lessons of the past, why Trump won in 2016, and why he just won again. For the “resistance,” there is no third option where they realize they’re the problem and reverse course. Instead, they double down on everything they’ve already been doing for the last ten years, which has only resulted in Trump becoming more powerful. The Power of StoryThe more people believe in a shared story, the stronger the movement. Our story? We’d solved America’s problems—maybe the world’s. Racism, along with every other "ism" and "phobe," was the enemy. Eradicate it, craft a language that welcomes everyone, and we’d be healed.Healed from what? The scars of our 1970s childhoods were shaped by the reckless "Me Generation." We emerged into the self-help era as victims or abusers, our lives battered by addiction and trauma. Entire industries sprang up to mend our wounds.We sought salvation in the self-help aisles of bookstores, therapy sessions, medications, and Oprah’s group chat every day at 3pm. Relationships crumbled—too many men were toxic or narcissistic. We studied attachment theory, embraced cognitive therapy, and chased perfection: the perfect parenting, car, words, diet, causes, schools. Our children became extensions of our quest, expected to embody that same flawless ideal.When they fell short, we fed them into the self-help machine to mold them into better versions of ourselves, even medicating them to make them more perfect - a practice that would lead us all too easily into “gender affirming care,” the greatest medical scandal in recent history. What we really needed was a higher purpose, a unifying movement. That arrived with Barack Obama, whose Hope and Change brought us together. To us, he was perfect, and even more than that, he was a perfect reflection of the America we wished we had. By then, thanks to the rise of the internet, social media, and smartphones, we had control and influence over nearly every aspect of American society. Why not use the new frontier of the internet to remake the America we wanted? Why not build our Shining Woketopia on the Hill? And so it was written, and so it was done. We closed ourselves off from the part of America that didn’t share our beliefs, and over time, we forgot it even existed. Trump’s shocking win marked the moment the dream was punctured and reality flooded in. A revolution by “we the normal.”Trump represented everything we believed was wrong with our country - he epitomized all of the bad things we complained about - racism, misogyny, sexual harassment, sexual assault. It wasn’t just that he offended our god and our King when he challenged Obama’s birthplace. It was that he said whatever he wanted to say, and in our Woketopia, then and now, that is strictly forbidden.Language must be curated, softened, and made more polite — a form of Newspeak for the modern age. But the flip side of that was people who were too fragile to accept the truth—truth in words, truth in politics, truth in comedy, truth in art, truth in science, truth in elections.And if words are violence, if words cause staffers at the New York Times to feel unsafe, if movies like Gone with the Wind need trigger warnings, there would be no surviving Trump and the rise of free speech in a culture that no longer believed in it.But violence turns out to be, for the Left, the answer to the fear inside them they can’t control, like dogs or bears or snakes who lash out when they feel cornered and threatened.A History of ViolenceWhat drove the early violence by the Left was the commonly held belief that Trump was a racist and his border policies were rooted in the Right’s desire to rid this country of Black and Brown people. Thus, when mobs acted out, like they did in 2015 and throughout Trump’s first term, it was justified. Racism was the ultimate sin, like being an accused witch in Salem or a Communist in 1950s America.Prominent Democrats pushed out the idea, which was then echoed and amplified by what Trump would eventually and correctly call “fake news.” The Democrats loved the violence, as it turns out, because they thought that the people would show the rest of America that Trump was bad. They also began to believe that their uprising against Trump was a fusion of both the Civil War and the Civil Rights movements of the 1960s.By the Summer of 2020, they funded and encouraged violence while also downplaying it. Buildings set on fire, businesses destroyed, and an angry mob banging on the fence of the White House were all excused as “mostly peaceful protests.”However, what I was seeing unfolding, which alarmed me enough to start speaking out, was that something was very wrong with the Left. It wasn’t until the Evergreen stories started coming out that I realized we’d built a fanatical army of not just woke scolds but a Red Guard-like generation who did not believe in limits on imposing their will upon the people.Diners were compelled to raise their fists in support of Black Lives Matter. The statues were coming down. Writers, editors, and celebrities were all being canceled and fired. Movies, literature, TV, comedy, architecture, science, even knitting, cooking, and exercise had to be transformed. It was tolerated because of what our culture had become after eight years of Obama and four years of Trump. The powerful, mostly white elites who run everything felt guilty. So they let it go on. I watched Hollywood devour itself. When the film Green Book won Best Picture, the Left exploded. It was a harmless movie about a friendship between a bigot and a gay Black man, and THAT was racist? Yes, because one of the screenwriters was a Trump supporter.The center could not hold. Though Joe Biden was dragged over the finish line in a corrupt election that would finally cause me to leave the Democratic Party, there was no coming back from what the Left had become. It was only a matter of time before the empire collapsed. I tried to warn them. Here is a DM exchange between me and Neera Tanden back in August of 2020:And then I predicted the future:The GOP did, in fact, take all three branches in 2024. But the message was never getting through. They didn’t want to hear it then, and do not want to hear it now, so what other option do they have but to try to persuade by force?Vive La ResistanceI cringe looking back on being a “resistance fighter.” To think we’d convinced ourselves that we were like the French singer in Casablanca who sings loud enough to drown out the Nazis.It’s that self-righteousness we felt, that entitlement, that moral superiority that would ultimately be our undoing, that Trump happened to us, rather than the people who voted for him. The fantasies by the wealthiest and most famous among us to viciously attack Trump, pull him from limb to limb, seemed to know no bounds. Somehow, violence has filled in the empty spaces. It’s what Walter Kirn could see in the reaction to the Mangione assassination: this idea that violence was another way to build clout, even to virtue signal, in a narcissistic utopia. We believed ourselves to be the chosen people. But because the people didn’t want us, didn’t love us, didn’t want our America - our shining Woketopia on the hill - we blamed them. We blamed their votes. We smeared them. That casual dehumanization did lead to violence. And it’s likely to get much worse.The Party of HateI’ve lost so many friends, people I've known for years, ex-boyfriends, and colleagues. It was surreal to watch them pull away, to block, to unfriend, or attack me so relentlessly that I had to block them. They don’t know who I am anymore, and I don’t know who they are anymore.They have become defined by that collective hatred, that poisonous intolerance that has driven so many people like me away from the party. The worse they get, the more violent they become, the less Americans will want them in power. When I start to think about whether there will be a blue wave in 2026, I think about 1972. In 1970, four students were shot at Kent State for protesting the war. It did nothing to change public opinion, but it did put Nixon on a path toward a record landslide victory. It was just one of a series of violent events that scared the public away from the Democrats, with the Manson murders in 1969 being another.Those students believed in a cause worth dying for. History has mostly vindicated them. The Left of today believes they’re fighting Hitler and “concentration camps.” Some believe it is a cause worth dying for. There’s just one tiny problem: it isn’t true. The reason I keep telling my story is that I know so much of what we lived through will disappear down the memory hole. But we should never forget how crazy it all became and how hard it was for all of us to find our way back to a united America. // 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