Mark Levin
If you’ve been around here a while, you know Mark Levin holds a special place in my heart. Okay, maybe it’s not so much special as it’s the dungeon where I keep my favorite toys to abuse. If you’re on Twitter, you might’ve seen he was pimping some podcast where he explains why Trump totally can’t be charged with violations of the Espionage Act, the Presidential Records Act, and obstruction. (I’ve linked the podcast, which you can listen to if you don’t value your sanity or your ears…)
And if you’ve been around here a while, you know there’s gonna be another punch. Give yourself a treat of your own choosing if you guessed Levin–who insists Trump cannot be charged for these crimes because if the president does it, it’s totes legal–argued Obama could be charged with violations of the Espionage Act for his part in the Hillary email scandal.
You’re as shocked as I was, aren’t you? Aren’t you? Please say you are…
Now, sadly, Levin’s masterful takedown of Obama is mostly lost, but I did at least manage to find the article which linked to his broadcast on the Internet Wayback Machine.
None of us are shocked that for some weird reason Levin’s position has changed on Presidents and whether or not they can be charged with espionage, depending on which party said POTUS belongs to. It’s as if he’s some kind of partisan hack or something.
Also note the right is STILL complaining about Hillary’s server all these years later, but they’d really like the rest of us to drop this whole Trump and the Espionage Act business after ten whole days. And if they don’t get their way, they’re threatening violence.
Here’s Ted Cruz…
And then there’s…
Sasha Stone
In case you’re wondering, she has a podcast and blog about Hollywood. What does that have to do with politics, particularly the raid on MAL?
No one who watches Joe and Mika or Rachel Maddow or reads the New York Times will ever be red-pilled. They simply believe that is the only reality. How could it not be if every high-status person in America is going along with it? If your friends and family go along with it, if your social media feed confirms it every day with links. If it’s in the media, it must be true, right? How do you not trust it if it’s on NBC News or the Washington Post?
Waking up to the media’s near-total collapse during the Trump years is a big part of being red-pilled. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. The only way to escape the media’s hold on the narrative is to cut it out completely, at least until you can see that there is another reality, and very often, the actual truth.
The Raid That Red-Pilled America, Aug 16, 2022
For the record, this is the reality of trumpers. This is how they see him:
Or this…
Or this:
Or, maybe you prefer your Trump head photoshopped onto Rocky Balboa’s body.
Now, you’re probably saying, “Lady Snark, those are just metaphors. People don’t really see Trump as Jesus, a revolutionary war patriot, or Rocky.”
Okay, how about this?
If Steven Crowder actually believes that and isn’t just saying it because he knows it plays well with the Trump faithful…
Would people who took the red pill really present Trump in this manner?
If you see this:
…and your immediate reaction is to insist that obviously any violence on that day was done by BLM and Antifa, then, clearly, you don’t have a firm grasp on reality. Because, yeah, surely the insurrectionists would cover themselves head-to-toe in Trump merch to bury their false flag deep in the crowd. Duh!
These folks live in a world where Hillary will be locked up any day now for the email server scandal, most Democrats in Congress will soon be carted off to prison for running a pedophile ring out of the (non-existent) basement of a DC area pizza place, and JFK Jr and Sr will be returning to earth real soon now. Oh, and SCOTUS is a few days away from overturning the election and reinstalling Trump as POTUS. (Unless something happens, and yet again, Mike Lindell doesn’t deliver the shocking evidence at his latest pillow conference on election fraud.)
Yes, trumpers are the shepherds and it’s the rest of us who are the sheeple. All I can say to that is “Baa-aaaa-aaaa-aah! Baa-aaaa-aaaa-aah!”
I really liked the part where Sasha tells us that you have to cut out the blue-pill media completely, until you can see the red-pill reality. This is my shocked face that she’s admitting to choosing to live in her own little BoB.
But the raid on Mar-a-Lago very likely has red-pilled Americans even more, especially when you put it together with the authoritarianism during COVID, the suppression of speech, the silencing of dissent, and the dehumanization we all live with every day.
The Raid That Red-Pilled America, Aug 16, 2022
Yes, she’s silenced that’s why we’re reading her post on the internet! OMG!!!!
Also, what dehumanization?
To watch our Department of Justice raid a former president’s home months before the midterms, where the Democrats were expected to do very badly, looks suspect to anyone. If they were trying to create distrust in our institutions, they succeeded.
Most Americans have seen, maybe for the first time, that our government has become too powerful, too punitive, and too authoritarian in crushing dissenting voices and outsiders who challenge that authority. We call that being red-pilled.
The Raid That Red-Pilled America, Aug 16, 2022
Yeah, how dare the government, you know, investigate wrongdoing against their own laws! This is tyranny! This is what a banana republic does! And it’s just a couple of months before an election where Trump isn’t even on the ballot! OMFG!!!!!
The thing is, if we lived in a banana republic, Trump would be allowed to get away with whatever crimes he wanted to commit, and nobody would say boo. By holding him accountable, we’re actually proving we DON’T live in a banana republic. Actual democracies that hold the law dear hold former leaders accountable.
More worrisome is the ongoing mass hysteria that started on Twitter, spread into our institutions of power, and now has spread to our government. To have such a complicit and compliant media is even more terrifying. What wouldn’t they go along with by now? Gulags?
The Raid That Red-Pilled America, Aug 16, 2022
TBH, I’m kinda shocked Sasha isn’t making the argument that we already have political gulags where the J6 defendants are being held…
We all thought “cancel culture” would be confined to social media but clearly it has become the modus operandi for our establishment government. It’s hard not see this as yet another extension of the insanity and hysteria over Trump.
The Raid That Red-Pilled America, Aug 16, 2022
Just remember, kids… we’re the hysterical ones. They’re the sane ones. Sure, Jan. Sure.
And let’s not talk about how the right cancels anyone who gets the least bit cross-wise with Trump. cough Liz Cheney cough
They were already losing voters by the millions. Hispanic voters, Asian voters, even Black voters were being red-pilled and drifting rightward. That meant there was likely a red wave in the November midterms. Biden’s catastrophic poll numbers meant Democrats could lose and lose big. That was unacceptable.
The Raid That Red-Pilled America, Aug 16, 2022
There does seem to be a shift rightward among some minority groups. What the reason for it is and how lasting it will be remains to be seen.
I’m just gonna leave this right here…
It took me a few seconds to get what I was seeing, hiding in plain sight in that image.
For the record, the county GOP did apologize for this image.
It shouldn’t be too surprising that they used that moment to hold their primetime extravaganza of Janaury 6th. If they can’t win over voters with better candidates or policies, they will scare the living daylights out of them. Donald Trump hadn’t even announced he was running for office, but the failure of Biden and the Democrats alone was enough to launch an all-out war on Trump, his henchmen, and his supporters.
The Raid That Red-Pilled America, Aug 16, 2022
Question: why waste this ammunition against Trump on the midterms, when he isn’t on the ballot?
Heh… the next paragraph:
Whether the newly red-pilled Americans will become GOP voters or whether they will support Trump at all remains an open question. But many of them will be coming out of August 8th with a high distrust for a government that would use the Department of Justice to sabotage its political enemies.
The Raid That Red-Pilled America, Aug 16, 2022
If they’re red-pilled but not voting for your R candidates, what does that suggest…?
The media and our government willfully ignore the carnage left in the wake of Biden’s bad policies, whether it’s Afghanistan which likely caused Putin to invade Ukraine, China to flirt with invading Taiwan, the rising murder rate in cities with “defund the police,” or the two January 6th rioters who have committed suicide, or Ashli Babbitt shot point blank by a member of the Capitol Police – these Americans just don’t matter because they don’t serve the narrative.
What is most frightening about watching the media spin on a story like the unprecedented raid on a former president’s home, or any story on any day, is how they always offload the bad stuff onto Trump and MAGA. Now, they’ve pivoted away from the naked abuse of power displayed by a politicized DOJ and towards the reaction by the GOP against the FBI.
While it’s true that a man showed up at FBI headquarters with a nail gun, it’s not like that’s the only act of political violence we’ve seen lately. They control the media, however, and can drive fear and hysteria however they want.
The Raid That Red-Pilled America, Aug 16, 2022
Well, it’s nice Sasha recognizes the fact that a Trump guy attacked the FBI last week, so maybe the media isn’t driving the narrative toward the GOP and MAGA as it is the GOP and MAGA are becoming more radicalized and violent in their rhetoric? Because that seems to be the case.
For people who claim to not appreciate the weaponization of the FBI and DOJ, folks on the right like Ted Cruz seem oddly comfortable with the idea of weaponizing those
agencies, when they return to power. So it’s not so much they dislike the weaponization; they just want to be sure to be the ones who have the power…
I, for one, don’t trust people who whine about something they then promise they will do to their enemies. But maybe that’s just me…?
She then goes on to say that anyone to the left of her saying things like this are gaslighting:
That’s just pure gaslighting. Why shouldn’t there be a volcanic response? Do they want everyone to lie down and pretend to like it? They can protest as loudly, and as violently as they want over every single thing Trump said or did for the four years he was in power, but the GOP is not allowed to be angry about this?
The Raid That Red-Pilled America, Aug 16, 2022
- First off, the Trump-world response to the raid was immediate and over-the-top condemnation, as we all witnessed last week, before we even knew any facts about the raid.
- Second, Trump-world embraced threats and violence from the outset of his movement. Remember back at his rallies during the 2016 race how he’d talk about what his people should do to protesters? Remember the early conservative thought leaders’ support of Trump because “he fights!” Is it any wonder that now we see flags emblazoned with a machine gun-wielding Trump as Rambo? This all started long before the raid on MAL; this was baked into the Trump cake. The only thing now is it has ramped up to even greater levels than before.
- Third, we’re seeing Rs supporting the idea of going to war against their own government to fight “tyranny.” Not just fringe Rs, either. We’re seeing members of Congress engage in rhetoric which is dangerous; more so than usual.
But it’s the left gaslighting this. I mean… she acknowledges in the next sentence that, okay, yeah, we’re reacting violently, but why shouldn’t we be?
So, basically, she just proved David French’s (and Josh Kraushaar’s) point. Good job, Sasha! You’re making my arguments for me!
This section… whoo boy!
Chasing Trump for six years based on one mass hysteria event after another has destroyed the Democratic Party and possibly our Department of Justice. Just because they can indict Trump on some procedural error doesn’t mean they should.
The Raid That Red-Pilled America, Aug 16, 2022
So… leaving office with over 20 boxes, including some classified documents that should never have left a SCIF is a “procedural error.” Um… tell that to Reality Winner or Eric Snowden…
The problem with mass hysteria is that it often leads to the dehumanization of whole groups of people. While most see it as more of a physical affliction, like coughing fits or laughing disease, it can also work when a threat spreads quickly in a tight-knit community. Think about a snake slithering into a tent. The more who are connected, the faster the hysteria spreads.
That can be helpful in life or death situations, but when it comes to what is mostly an existential threat, like witches or Communists, or even Jews, or newly freed Black Americans after the Civil War, that fear eventually morphs into dehumanization. That often leads to the worst crimes against humanity. Once people are dehumanized, as Trump and his supporters have been, there are no limits to what can be done to them.
The Raid That Red-Pilled America, Aug 16, 2022
It’s RW media and R politicians feeding the narrative that if “They can do this to President Trump; they can do it to YOU!”
Well, yes, if anyone removes classified documents without authorization and then refuses to return them when asked, they could end up at the wrong end of a search warrant. And in a nation of laws, they SHOULD.
She spends the next several paragraphs discussing Hitler and the Holocaust, along with the Salem Witch trials, because “dehumanization.” This is apparently what we’re about to do to trumpers…
Trump’s rise is no coincidence. He is overtly and deliberately offensive. He mocked a disabled reporter. He made fun of John McCain. He called Marco Rubio “Little Marco.” He often seems like a bully. But there is a side to Trump people don’t know and don’t see. The human side of Trump. When you take the time to see that, dehumanization evaporates.
The Raid That Red-Pilled America, Aug 16, 2022
Um… I don’t know whether to uproariously laugh at that paragraph, or feel sad… But guys, okay, he’s an awful bully, but he’s OUR awful bully, so it’s okay.
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is a film about government corruption and the one man who went into the machine thinking he could make a difference. I do not doubt that the intentions of Adam Schiff, Liz Cheney, Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden aren’t good. But in their unending hunt to destroy Trump, they’ve destroyed themselves.
The Raid That Red-Pilled America, Aug 16, 2022
So Trump is playing Jefferson Smith? Yeah, no.
Do we all need to try to see people on the other side as people and not evil enemies? Yes.
Do we also, as a nation, need to hold people accountable who try to overthrow the government, or when they steal classified documents from the White House? It shouldn’t matter which team’s jersey you’re wearing, folks.
Yesterday a judge said a redacted copy of the affidavit which led to the search warrant should be released soon. We should all appreciate knowing the justification for the search and investigation. Of course, whatever the document says, they’ll dismiss it as mere politics; so giving them what they demand is pointless.
As always, this is an open thread, so feel free to discuss whatever you like in the comments below.
Sunday’s noir picture is “Money Madness,” so be sure to watch that on YouTube for free!