← Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone
Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone
Stop Gaslighting Us Over the 2020 Election
00:33:53
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- [00:01]
Sasha Stone
Hi, this is free thinking through the fourth turning. I'm sasha stone. Stop gaslighting us over the 2020 election. Why? They really don't want to talk about it. Anytime Trump or one of his supporters brings up the 2020 election insisting he didn't lose it, we hear the usual chorus of groans. Why can't he get over it? He lost. Move on. The thing is, I can't get over it either. 2020 was the year everything changed. My entire world was turned upside down because I could see for the first time that I was in a bubble, a feedback loop that had shaped my perception of reality. It's just that it wasn't actual reality. It was a curated, hysteria inducing delusion. It wasn't just me. Go on YouTube and you'll find hundreds, if not thousands of people whose lives were fundamentally transformed that year in one way or another. Covid made them quit their job and move into a van. Covid made them decide to divorce. Covid made them learn how to bake sourdough. And a lot of us were red pilled. It was as though someone pressed the pause button and all of us froze in place for a time, like in the movie Weapons, where the kids suddenly wake up one day.
- [01:44]
Unidentified Caller or Guest
Mr. Graff, I can understand your passion and I don't mind having these conversations with you because God forbid, if it was my child, I'd be dem demanding. Edgers tube. Those kids walked out of those homes. No one pulled them out. No one forced them. What do you see that I don't?
- [02:22]
Sasha Stone
Isolated and shut in. We all turned to social media and the Internet, which meant more people were connected than ever before at a time when there were more people alive than ever before. We've never really fully processed what happened to all of us that year. It was the year we stopped trusting the science, the schools, Hollywood, the legacy media and the government. Children were locked down and staring at their screens with many of the Lost Boys finding their way into dark corners of the Internet and would emerge years later, fumbling their way toward a rifle and a rooftop. That isn't all of it, or even half of it. None of us would emerge from that year unscathed. We can't talk about it as a country or a people because we're still so divided. The big things divide us, like the vaccine, the masks, the lockdowns, and most especially the 2020 election. We were stepping into something we did not understand and weren't prepared for. Things have changed enough now that it will be hard to remember just how bad things got after Trump won in 2016. I remember because I was on the inside. I lived it with the Democrats and what would become a doomsday cult. We called ourselves the Resistance, even though we had all the power. Trump and Maga, they were the real resistance, or at least the revolutionaries, going up against the most powerful machine in American history, maybe ever. All I knew was that I had to fight for my side. I woke up every day like a good soldier for the cause and went to battle online, wasting precious time with my daughter or doing anything else except sitting and staring at a screen and fighting with people I didn't even know over issues that didn't matter, with arguments that had no end and went nowhere. Inside the doomsday cult, we were awash with mass hysteria, because every single day, every time Trump tweeted, the legacy media sent out more waves of hysteria that pulsed through the hive mind and kept reinfecting anyone who scrolled Twitter or Facebook. It was a new emergency every day. We were stuck in an unending state of trauma. The legacy media desperately wants us to forget what happened, how they lied and gaslit the public. The consequences for these moral crimes have been minimal. A slap on the wrist for ignoring Joe Biden's cognitive decline. But there has never been a reckoning for what they did to all of us, people who trusted them. In 2020, What happened to me? My daughter had to leave her senior year at college to have her graduation on my balcony in Burbank. But we did it because we were doing our part to help save the country during this once in a generation pandemic. Mobilizing for the cause meant sewing our own masks, displaying them proudly on Instagram. It meant mixing our own hand sanitizer because it was all out at the drugstore. Some people were wearing face shields. For podcast listeners, a montage of photos from 2020, a sign that I wrote, not supporting Joe Biden is the height of white privilege. A mask discarded on the ground. Warning signs for social distancing. My daughter's graduation picture. Me in a mask. We were living in fear. We were cowed into silence. Half the country fell into mass formation psychosis. We weren't allowed to attend weddings, churches, or schools. But somehow, on Memorial Day, the George Floyd protests became the most important thing in America for months. Systemic racism, they told us, was more urgent than Covid. Really, bringing the whole country, the whole world, to its knees was less serious than George Floyd dying at the hands of a police officer in Minneapolis? Yes, that's what they were telling us. And everyone was mandated to Go along with everything that came next. For podcast listeners, a headline from CNN. Over 1,000 health professionals sign a letter saying, don't shut down protests, using coronavirus concerns as an excuse. These were our idols. We were told it was the new state religion. Even if Trump was still the president, this is the ideology we're allowed to gather for. This is worth tearing down statues, burning buildings, carving out autonomous zones, and demanding everyone put a black square on Instagram, capitalize the word black and raise their fists to Black Lives Matter. For podcast listeners, a chalk drawing on a sidewalk. Blm. The madness unfolding on the streets meant Democrats could actually lose in November, I believed. So why wasn't anyone trying to stop them? Why were the Democrats encouraging them? I started to wonder what the hell was going on. It felt like unseen hands were manipulating events behind the scenes, and we were all expected to just go along with it. As I began to speak out and ask questions, I was turned into an enemy. You've changed, wrote Neera Tanden on Twitter. And she was right. I had. And by the time Twitter pressured the New York Times to back off their Tom Cotton essay, send in the troops, I was done. Maybe I was naive. I didn't understand the assignment. I'd seen too many Frank Capra movies. I'd begun to believe politics was like an Aaron Sorkin screenplay. I thought we were the good guys. We were the side with ethics and decency and fairness. I was like Linda HAMILTON In Terminator 2 when Arnold Schwarzenegger shows up and she thinks he's a bad guy. But when he says, come with me if you want to live, she realizes that everything is backward. The people she thought were the good guys weren't. The guy she thought was there to kill her was actually there to save her. By the end of 2020, I was as black pilled as Jack Nicholson in Chinatown, disillusioned and wide awake.
- [09:11]
Unidentified Caller or Guest
Wanna do your partner a big favor? Take him home.
- [09:20]
Paul Gigault
Take him home.
- [09:22]
Sasha Stone
Just get him the hell out of here.
- [09:27]
Unidentified Caller or Guest
Go home, Jake. I'm doing you a favor. Come on, Jake.
- [09:38]
Sasha Stone
Forget it, Jake.
- [09:39]
Unidentified Caller or Guest
It's Chinatown.
- [09:43]
Sasha Stone
What I saw them do, how we were all manipulated. How they rigged the election to be too big to fail. I could see for the first time that my side had too much power. So much power that American democracy was now beside the point. It didn't matter how the people voted, because we would decide who was allowed to win and who would become an existential threat to the world. We were building, the utopia we were building online. When I left the party, I knew I couldn't be fully honest about what I believed happened, though I did say that the election had been rigged. I also couldn't be honest about what I knew about January 6, at least not in the beginning. When I saw the riot break out, my first thought was, that's not maga. They don't do that. And anyway, even if they did, why couldn't the Democrats chalk it up to months of lockdowns and highly enraged, radicalized people on the right, just as there were on the left that summer? Why couldn't they? Because it was all still part of the long con, the mass delusion. These ideas were dangerous to hold for anyone in America, but especially someone of the left. And yet I could not stop it. The truth began knocking. I ignored it as long as I could, but eventually the knocking became a banging and I had no choice but to open the door. How to Rig an Election Once you start tugging on the question of why Twitter and Facebook censored the Hunter Biden laptop, you begin to unravel the bigger picture of just how deep the conspiracy went. You don't need the whole story. You just need to know this. The FBI and the CIA worked against the sitting president to lie to the public that the laptop was Russian disinformation. From the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal.
- [11:51]
Unidentified Narrator or Analyst
This is Potomac Watch.
- [11:54]
Paul Gigault
Remember the story of the 51 former US spies who rode to the rescue of Hunter and Joe Biden in October of 2020? Well, new information has emerged that their open letter was ginned up at the request of the Biden presidential campaign. You won't read about that story in most of the media, but we're here to tell you what we're learning, thanks to investigations by the new House Republican majority and of course, what it means. Welcome. I'm Paul Gigault with the Wall Street Journal Opinion pages, and I'm here with my esteemed colleagues Bill McGurn and Kim Strassel. Welcome to you both. Fascinating news last week when the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees released partial transcript of testimony from a deposition with Michael Morell. Morell, a former acting CIA director. This is part of the investigation by the House into the weaponizing of the government for political ends. And it concerns the episode late in the last presidential campaign, October 2020, after the new York Post broke the news about a Hunter Biden laptop that it had discovered in a computer repair shop, provided, I guess, with the mediation of Rudy Giuliani, a Republican. But all that was reported at the time. The laptop was full of emails that were personally Embarrassing to Hunter, but that really wasn't the story. A lot more potent politically was the news that a lot of the emails and other things concerned the Biden family business, especially one effort to do business with influential Chinese businessmen. That's where Michael Morrell now enters the story. So, Kim, take it from there. What have we learned about Michael Morell?
- [13:37]
Kim Strassel
So just to set the scene on this, too, so that people really remember how important this was, the Post dropped their story on October 14, 2020. Five days later, 51 former intelligence officials put out this public statement saying that this laptop bore all the, quote, classic earmarks of a Russian information operation, end quote. And the press ran with that the Politico headline that said Hunter Biden's story is Russian disinfo. Dozens of former int officials say, end quote, it had 51 who were on it. A number of them were former Democratic intelligence officials. But people made a lot of hay out of the fact that there were some former Trump officials who'd signed on, too. So they claimed this was a bipartisan letter. If you looked closely, there was actually they were all kind of never Trumpers who were involved. But the press ran with this, and they used it to stamp down the story. The social media latched on to it and as part of their justification to suppress the Hunter Biden story. Now we have this deposed transcript with Morell in front of the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees. And he says that three days after the Post story broke, he got a call from Anthony Blinken, who was at that time a senior aide to the Biden campaign who is now Secretary of State, saying, what'd you think of this story? And the way the letters put it is that while he apparently called mostly is just gathering Morell's reaction to it. Morel acknow that prior to Blinken's call, he didn't have any intent to write this statement. After Blinken's call, he got all the rest of the intelligence officials together and put it out there. The Biden campaign, it was just a
- [15:26]
Sasha Stone
standard run of the mill October surprise, time to help ignite a scandal before the election. But it was also information the public had a right to know, as we would find out later. So anyone who shames Trump for calling the election rigged and denying it was legit will have to answer for this. Here are some videos with Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi.
- [15:50]
Matt Taibbi
Well, I think the basic fact pattern is itself pretty alarming. I mean, we know that the FBI took the Hunter Biden laptop from a computer repair store in December 2019. We know that they spent the year 2020 issuing very strong warnings to Twitter, Facebook and the mainstream news media that a potential hack and leak was coming. In October, the head of Site Integrity, who later became the head of safety and trust at Twitter, testified under oath that the FBI had warned him that that hack and leak would involve Hunter Biden. We knew that Rudy Giuliani was being surveilled, listened to, his phone calls were tapped, his emails were being monitored by the FBI in 2020 when he gave the laptop to the New York Post. And we know that the FBI had to know that the laptop itself was legitimate, both because they had the computer sale signature by Hunter when he dropped the computer off. And they were able to tell that the laptop indeed had belonged to Hunter Biden because it was something that was easily verifiable by going through the data. So what you have here is an effort to basically mentally prepare or prime the Twitter executives and other executives that if they were to see a big story like a Hunter Biden laptop leak, it was likely the result of a hack and leak operation that led directly to Twitter's decision to censor it. And I think most importantly, to discredit the laptop in the minds of voters. I myself did not believe that the laptop was legitimate and did not take it seriously because of the circumstances, because we had all been so mentally prepared to think of it as part of a Russian hack and leak operation.
- [17:43]
Interviewer or Moderator
I want to ask you both about the Aspen Digital Hack and Dump Working Group, which involved an 11 day scenario in October 2020 that began with the imaginary release of falsified records. That's what they claim related to Hunter Biden's controversial employment by the Ukrainian energy company Burisma. This was if they knew, because they did know. So I would like your comments, Mr. Schellenberg. These were the files that you did extensive reporting on about how concerning this is and how this is truly the definition of the weaponization against free speech and suppressing accurate reporting.
- [18:21]
Michael Shellenberger
Yeah. So there's actually two things, and one of them we just discovered recently, which is that there was a Stanford Cyber Policy Institute report which said that, which was in menacing terms telling journalists that they should abandon the Pentagon principle. Again, this is the Pentagon Papers principle. This is the idea that if Daniel Ellsberg brings you materials he's taken from the Pentagon about how the war in Vietnam is going, the New York Times and Washington Post published those, that was considered one of the greatest moments of American journalism. Here you have Stanford Cyber Policy center saying we should abandon that principle, you should instead make the issue about, frankly, the theories about where it might have come from. Then you had the Aspen workshop, which was attended, by the way, by New York Times, cnn, Washington Post, Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, many other journalists, where they basically, you read it. It's like a kind of programming of the journalists that they should not follow this long standing journalistic principle of taking materials from a hack and leak or any other situation and take them seriously. So, I mean, you read this and it feels like a kind of brainwashing exercise that Aspen Institute and Stanford were running against American journalists and the social media companies.
- [19:39]
Interviewer or Moderator
Mr. Taibee, comments?
- [19:41]
Unidentified Legal Expert or Commentator
Yes, I think, you know, there are a couple of moments in the Twitter files that really speak to a kind of larger problem. In the first Twitter files, we saw an exchange between Representative Rohana and Vijayagad where he's trying to explain the basics of speech law in America. And she's completely, she seems completely unaware of what, for instance, New York Times v. Sullivan is. There are other cases like Bartnicky Vopper, which legalize the publication of stolen material. That's very important for any journalist to know. I think most of these people are tech executives and they don't know what the law is around speech and around reporting. And in this case and in 2016, you are dealing with true material. There is no basis to restrict the publication of true material, no matter who the source is and how you get it. And journalists have always understood that. And this has never been an issue or a controversial issue until very recently.
- [20:46]
Michael Shellenberger
And by the way, just one quick thing I'll add. That's the exact same strategy of the mal information, misleading. In other words, they were saying, even if the material you think is true, it could lead people to have conclusions that we don't want them to have. And therefore you should change your journalism because of that.
- [21:06]
Matt Taibbi
So this is.
- [21:07]
Michael Shellenberger
We're so far down the slippery slope, you know, you've crashed at that point. I mean, it's a disturbing trend in journalism, in social media, and in the relationship from the intelligence community to these organizations.
- [21:23]
Sasha Stone
But if you keep pulling on that string, you'll find the why of it. They were trying to fix all the problems they believed caused Hillary Clinton's loss. This would be payback for the email scandal that hit her campaign, which she called Russian disinformation. That would also turn out to be untrue. But there were other problems that needed correcting, like lazy voters who assumed Hillary would win because she was so far ahead in the polls and didn't bother turning out, they would fix this problem, using Covid as the pretext to change everything about how people vote and how those votes are collected. They knew they had Pennsylvania won long before Election Day, and it would only be a matter of convincing the public not to get too excited about a red mirage to all of them. That's the right way to win an election. Trump won Iowa, Ohio, and Florida, not to mention the bellwether counties that have decided our elections. Here is a tiktoker.
- [22:24]
Unidentified Narrator or Analyst
Here's all you need to know about the 2020 election. It cuts right to the noise. It gets right to the heart of the matter and tells you everything you need to know about what happened. From 1980 to 2016, 19 counties in the US correctly predicted the presidential winner. The same 19 counties every single year for 10 elections in a row, 190 over those 10 elections. They were correct. In 2020, one of those 19 counties predicted the winner, Joe Biden. One of those counties went for Joe Biden in 2024. Eighteen of the 19 counties went to Donald Trump. So you've got to ask yourself that is. It's not even an outlier, it's almost an improbability.
- [23:18]
Sasha Stone
The only other time anything like this happened was in 1960, when JFK won in a squeaker. Compare that to 2020 and you can see that something was very off about the numbers for podcast listeners. JFK winning the popular vote by 34,220,000 and Nixon winning by 34,108,000. JFK winning 303 electoral votes to Nixon's 2019. Joe Biden won 81,000,283 to Trump's 74,000,223, with Joe Biden 306 and Trump 232 electoral votes. Since the Democrats believed Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook had handed Trump the win in 2016 by using their marketing machine, the Clinton campaign refused their help. It was time for Zuckerberg to undo that damage, which came in the form of a $400 million slush fund used to fortify the election, but mostly in the heavily blue districts. Had all of this been shared with the whole country as a way to improve our elections overall, that would be one thing. But it was all done behind the scenes, in the shadows, far from the reach of anyone who might dissent. It was anything but ethical and anything but fair. It was all part of a grand scheme to stay one step ahead of Trump. If they already knew he would claim it was rigged, why not just rig it? Who would the people Believe Trump or the bipartisan cabal of unelected bureaucrats hiding in the shadows. For podcast listeners, Molly Ball's article the Secret History of the Shadow Campaign that saved the 2020 election. The truth is that Trump was pulling ahead because the left was losing its mind, and Trump picked up on it. He changed his campaign, and no matter how many ways they tried to keep him from his rallies, he got the word out anyway. That would explain why he won those key states but lost so much in the popular vote. Our election should not be decided months before Election Day. Candidates should have to make their case to the people, not hide in the basement and let the system do the work. It's the candidate's job to inspire the voters to vote for the kind of government they want, and it's the voters responsibility to be motivated enough to turn out to the polls and cast their vote. But with an easily manipulated hive mind like the Democrats had cultivated for 10 years, they didn't need any of it. The Year that Broke America I've never been able to convince anyone of what I believed happened in 2020. If you were on the left, chances are you wouldn't be able to see it either. You would have trusted the same people I used to trust. Cnn, the New York Times, msnbc, your social media feed. You would have come out of that year thinking Joe Biden won the 2020 election fair and square and that Donald Trump refused to lose, so he led a dangerous assault on the Capitol, putting our democracy under threat. Yet after everything they did to Trump that year and for the four years prior, what else could he have done except protest? It was just a little too convenient that there happened to be a riot at the same time, a Reichstag fire that handed absolute power to Team Blue. If you were still trapped inside the doomsday culture, you'd have been primed and ready to go to war on your fellow Americans. Because Vice President Kamala Harris would tell you January 6th was like 911 and Pearl Harbor. You would have thought Liz Cheney and the primetime show trial was legit. What an easy mark you'd be if you never escaped as I did. You'd still be trapped inside the doomsday culture and never have any idea that none of this is your fault. You were put into a kind of trance in 2020, even before, like the kids in the movie, Weapons frozen in place and used as an army to do the bidding of the Democratic Party. They made you believe, like they made me believe, that every day really was the end of the world. As long as Donald Trump was in power. But it was never true. None of it. All the Democrats ever had to do was offer the people something better. If everything Molly Ball wrote about the election the secret bipartisan cabal supposedly saved, how did Trump win again? In weapons, the children are put under a spell and aimed at the enemies of the witch. Once the spell is broken, the children wake up and realize the person they should be mad at isn't the one she made them attack, but instead the witch herself for robbing them of their ability to think for themselves. And so it goes with the Democrats. Thank you for listening to my podcast, sashastone.com this one took a little longer than usual. My apologies for that. Last week I was on the Scott Jennings radio show. You can find that somewhere online, I believe. And if you like my work, please consider leaving a tip or becoming a paid subscriber. It really helps to keep the site going since I don't put much of anything behind the paywall. And I really appreciate your generosity. It means the world to me. Thank you so much. And remember to thine own self be true.
- [30:12]
Unidentified Musical Performer or Poet
People are now places I go make me feel tied and I can see how people look down there on the inside hands wrap the story ends. People I see weary of me Showing my good side like you see how people look down I'm on the outside here where the story ends My h where the story ends it's that little souvenir of a terrible year Christmas feel so I never seen a sand it looks at you and all I love before let's add a little souvenir on the terrible year which makes me wonder why it's the memories of your shine that make me turn red Surprise surprise surprise. Lazy and now places that go make me feel sad I can see how people look down I'm on the outside here's where the story ends oh, here's where the story ends it's that little souvenir of a terrible year which makes my eyes feel sore and whoever would have thought you must have brought for all I loved you for of the devil in me Sad but down the shed I know where I belong but the only thing I ever really wanted to say what's wrong, what's wrong, what's wrong? Let's add a little souvenir of a California which makes me smile inside Sad I cynically, cynically say well in that way Surprise surprise surprise surprise.