← Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone
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- [00:00]
A
Hi, this is Free Thinking through the Fourth Turning. I'm Sacha Stone. An open letter to Paul Krugman on the Demagification of America. Dear Mr. Krugman, you used to be the kind of journalist I thought was telling the truth. I looked up to you as I did so many writers at the New York Times. I was a different person then. That was before everything changed. The year was 2020, a summer of riots and a breakthrough moment when many of us realized for the first time that the Gray lady was not telling us the truth. I've been on the Internet for 30 years. I watched the collapse of traditional media and the rise of opinion based journalism. The kind you do, Paul. Do you mind if I call you Paul? Mr. Krugman sounds so formal. And really, I'd like for you to see me as a human being, someone worthy of your attention and respect. Now that I have confirmation of what I've assumed all along, that people like you, Kara Swisher, Peter Baker and Susan Glasser would like people like me thrown into re education camps or gulags. I feel it's worth the extra effort to get you to see real people again, to the horror of many. You went viral last week for your comments on what all of you will do with Trump supporters and the system that elected him. It was ugly, Paul, as ugly as anything I've seen written by a high minded journalist and certainly closer to what the Nazis believed about the Jews than anything I've seen in my lifetime. Here is what you said.
- [01:39]
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We need much more. We need to. Obviously we need to defang Trump as much as possible and make sure that neither he nor anybody who follows in his footsteps has power after the next two elections. But beyond that, we really need to do a thorough purging of the United States. We need a demogification, and that is, you know, I'm not going over the top by using a word that's very similar to the denazification that we pursued successfully after World War II in Germany. And we did so something. It's not just the MAGA ideology, but the whole structure of hugely unequal power, hugely unequal wealth that made this horrific moment possible. It's not going to be easy, but. And maybe it's not going to be doable. We have to try because this is an absolute. This is a nightmare. This is a nightmare beyond, I think, even the worst fantasies of progressives, beyond the worst fantasies of conservatives who still have a conscience. There still are plenty of those, but they're no longer maga. This has to be turned around. And we should not, above all, whitewash or forget this moment. This is where a lot of forces in America have been leading, and if we don't do something beyond just getting rid of Trump, it's going to happen again. Have a good rest of your weekend.
- [03:17]
A
It can't have been easy watching Trump win a second time and this time the popular vote. Or to admit that you are no longer relevant and that the only value you have is in giving the base of the Democratic Party their daily dose of hate and fear. Why didn't Americans listen to your constant bleeding about the end of the world? That's an important question to ask, Paul. After all, they're your most popular videos. For podcast listeners, videos from Krugman's YouTube Donald Trump isn't sounding like himself. Our darkest hour, the worst and the dumbest. Learning from a mentally ill President Trump can't even surrender right. Living in hell. Your substack, with over 500,000 subscribers is no less alarmist. Podcast listeners headlines Stop your chirping. Trump is bored and wants everyone to leave him alone. Pogroms American style. It looks like your substack is paying you more than you made at the Times, that's for sure. So why not keep pumping it out day after day like a broken record? Fear, hysteria, hatred. More fear, more hatred. What could possibly go wrong? You all seem certain you're about to take back power and put things back where they belong. The only question you seem to have on your lips is not how we can better address the needs of the people, but what you will do with all of those maggots. You don't even pretend there's a whole country or even half of a country that voted all of you out not once but twice. You have no shame in admitting you see yourselves as better than the working class half of America. You fully admit it. You bask in it. You know your power, Paul, and that's maybe the only true thing you know about yourself. So let me set you straight on a few things. You're not the Allied forces after World War II, and Trump is not now, nor has he ever been. Hitler. The closest thing to fascism this country has ever seen is with all of you in power. It became all sticks of wood bound together as one, a fasci with all elements of our society mandating conformity. Or else your side ruled through fear and violence and still does. You violently beat Trump supporters and feel emboldened to do so, just like Hitler's brown shirts. You probably never even knew that in 2015 Trump supporters were beaten and harassed and called Nazis.
- [05:59]
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What started out as the standard chanting and fanfare for Donald Trump,
- [06:05]
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that's okay.
- [06:07]
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Quickly turned heated Wednesday night with nearly 20 protesters shouting, Dump Trump.
- [06:12]
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That's why we have freedom of speech, folks, you know?
- [06:16]
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And I just suddenly, out of nowhere, felt a thud in the front of my head.
- [06:21]
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A local news blogger who's a Trump supporter, a Costa Mesa officer and a horse in the Huntington beach police mounted un. All were assaulted as the Donald Trump rally on Thursday night in Orange county spiraled into a raucous melee in the streets around the fairgrounds. A Costa Mesa patrol car and a Fountain Valley unit were badly damaged by anti Trump protesters. This incredible video posted to YouTube shows a driver spinning donuts inches from the crowd. And law enforcement, no one has been caught for assaulting. Mission Viejo's Cole Bartiromo, the online blogger who needed six stitches, admits that he got into the middle of the chaos to document it. Someone knocked off his Trump hat, hurled slurs at him, and then slugged him.
- [07:12]
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And I started panicking, getting scared, thinking, well, when are they going to stop? Maybe they're going to kill me. These aren't rational people.
- [07:18]
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17 people were arrested by Costa Mesa police for refusing to leave on. All but two were in their teens and their 20s from LA and Orange counties and the Inland Empire. The total number of law enforcement topped 300 here, which will cost the fairgrounds, which is run by the state, tens of thousands of dollars. In Costa Mesa, Michelle Giley, CBS 2 News.
- [07:46]
A
On the left, there is no such thing as free thought and speech, which is why cancel culture collapsed the empire and why Tyler Robinson had to silence Charlie Kirk. So who are the real fascists, Paul, on your side, Thought and speech are heavily policed through our culture. Everyone is tracked, monitored and under constant surveillance lest they like the wrong tweet, follow the wrong person on social media, or read the wrong news or have the wrong opinion. Just because people like you cosplay that ice is the Gestapo, doesn't make it so. It took 80 years for the world to forget about the Holocaust. But no one should ever forget what that looked like. And it wasn't mass deportations or even detaining a five year old or shooting Alex Preddy and Renee Goode.
- [08:35]
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A flight over Dachau concentration camp near Munich. Set up in 1933, it was the first concentration camp on German soil here. For 12 long years, inmates were tormented, tortured and murdered. On April 30, 1945, George Stephens and his team entered the camp. They found a train full of corpses, victims of the death marches, as they were known, concentration camp inmates who, on their odysseys through Germany, had starved or frozen to death or been shot. In a report written later, Stevens noted it was like wandering through Dante's vision of hell.
- [09:28]
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US troops had reached the concentration camp north of Munich the previous day and liberated over 30,000 prisoners. On April 30, 1945, one of the survivors, Edgar Kupfer Kobowitz, wrote in his
- [09:48]
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American soldiers come into the camp to look at us. A group of them were taken to a block. In the washroom lay the corpses of 50 inmates who had died of starvation or exhausted exhaustion. When one of the officers saw the bodies, it brought tears to his eyes. It is strange to think that a man who had been in a battle and seen so many corpses, an officer in the middle of a war, should weep at the sight of our dead. But I know that I know what our dead look like. The sight is so shocking that even the tears of a warrior are understandable.
- [10:34]
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Some of the GIs reacted with uncontrollable rage and shot around 50 of the guards. But most of the culprits were arrested.
- [10:44]
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Birkenau was part of Auschwitz. Birkenau was. All the killing was being done was in Birkenau. They opened the gate, it was still nighttime. And they yelled, leave all your belonging where it is. Don't pick anything up. Women and children to the right, men to the left. And I'm holding onto my sister, my sister Goldie, my little brother Tuli. And we're being just pulled apart, never to see each other again. My sister and my little brother went directly to the gas chambers. When we came to the barrack, the stubborn elderstedt, the man in charge of the barrack walks out. He was a Polish inmate and he says, ha, you Hungarian Jews, you think you're here on vacation? Think again. You see those chimneys? Those ashes that are flying? Those are your mothers, your fathers, your brothers and your sisters. And if you don't behave and do exactly what you told, this is how you're going to wind up. Ashes. I couldn't. Believe me. My sister, my little brother. Ashes. This is the 20th century. How is it possible?
- [12:10]
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Shame on you. Shame on all of you for even suggesting that what we've just lived through is on any level the same as what happened during World War II. Seven to 80 million people were killed, 600,000 in America alone. Even the war in Gaza can't compare. And shame on anyone who suggests it's the same. None of this should have to be said to a man who enjoys high status inside utopia. A well educated elite who lives on the Upper west side and enjoys a decent retirement while he's discarding half of America like human garbage. You tell me who the real Nazis are. You don't have to tell me. I already know. I escaped the suffocating dystopia that you live in. I escaped the world that no longer knows the meaning of important words like fascist, Nazi, dictator, king and pedophile, never mind man or woman. I escaped that world because the truth always mattered to me more than being liked, making money or having status. I can't say the same for you, Paul, or any one of your former colleagues at the Times. We're watching the destruction of legacy media in real time. Just one of the pillars of your now collapsing empire. And Trump won because ordinary Americans can't stand living under the oppressive thumb of the high and mighty like yourself. I didn't see what kind of power we all had until 2020. We'd built a shining woketopia on the Internet that gave us complete control of all institutions of power. Education, culture, corporations, institutions. We thought we could shape the America we always dreamed of. The problem was that there was a whole other America outside our bubble and it took Donald Trump to ignite a populist revolt. The idea that this was about racism and bigotry was a lie. It was never Hitler invading you, were never the resistance. You've been living in a dream world of your own making. You destroyed yourselves trying to destroy Trump. The real story of the last 10 years will never be told by any of you, much less seen or understood. I still see signs of the Maga Aino. I just saw one near the memorial site for the deadly battle of Antietam. From the middle of America on the side of a store, just living out their ordinary days near the ghosts of profound history. This for podcast listeners. A store with an American flag and a Trump. I'm no longer welcome in your world, Paul. Some days that hurts more than others. But when I see what you have become, calling for a purge and a demagification, I know you don't know this country anymore. You've been isolated for too long and you've been participating in a decade long deception. I also know I have the truth on my side. And that makes me the lucky one.
- [15:44]
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Foreign.
- [15:52]
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Thank you for listening to my podcast, sashastone.com. From somewhere in West Virginia. If you like my work, you can always leave a tip. There's a link for it on the main page of sashastone.com. just scroll down or you can become a paid subscriber. I appreciate it very much, all of your generosity and kindness. And remember to thine own self be true. Sam.
- [17:07]
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Say I went to visit friends. But you ain't heard sing for me quite well when they ask you where I been tilting my mouth on the west coast it don't ever rain I'm probably doing fine don't tell them I go crazy I'm still stung out over you. Tell them anything you want to just don't tell them all to don't tell them all. Until I'm online out in Vegas blowing every dollar I ever made. Tell them that I must be into something bad for me cuz I sure lost a lot of. Until I'm my man on the road some old rocking program living like a G. Stone tell them I go crazy still strung out of you. Tell them anything you want to just don't tell them all to don't tell them all. Truth is that I'm asking you to lie we both know that it ain't right you have love me please have some mercy on me. Oh. Tell them anything you want to just don't tell them all to don't tell them all. I still need need you. Yeah that's true yes we love you oh baby that's the truth.