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What has become obvious to anyone paying attention is that we are living through a kind of revolution. 

It is not a physical one. As my friend Abe Greenwald wrote in Commentary Magazine, it “is not being fought within the physical limits of a battlefield. It is instead happening all around us and directly to us. It is redefining our culture, our media, and giving new shape to our public and private institutions. It is remaking the nation before our eyes.”  

In other words, this is a revolution of culture. A revolution of ideas.

—Bari Weiss, The New Founders America Needs

Everyone has their own version of how the Left was lost. This is mine.

I tell my story as someone who was very much a devoted Hillary supporter in 2016 and an early Biden supporter. I tell this story as someone who got online in 1994 with one foot in the real world, and one foot in the virtual one. I also tell this story as someone who is no longer a Democrat.

Any slim chance there might have been for me to support the Democratic Party has been eliminated by the undemocratic partisan show trials of January 6th, an authoritarian power grab based on the lie that Trump brought the Proud Boys to DC to launch a violent insurrection against the US government.

Trump would not have urged Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz to debate the election in the Senate if he wanted to overthrow the government. All the violent riot did was interrupt the case he was trying to make and hand absolute power to his enemies. He might be a lot of things but dumb is not one of them.

Yes, the Democrats have used January 6th as a Reichstag Fire to grow their power, punish citizens and present a litmus test to anyone who dares to question the results of the 2020 election.

After the American people watched the Democrats and the media completely memory hole what happened in the Summer of 2020, most are looking at these hearings and the reactions to January 6th overall, as an existential crisis the political aristocracy has time and money to care about.

Biden’s America

By the Summer of 2020, I could see that there was something very wrong with the Left. Because I still wanted Biden to win, I was worried they were abandoning three basic fundamentals this country relies on:

Freedom of Speech - cancel culture was ragingLaw and Order - “Defund the police” was trendingPatriotism - attacking Federal buildings, and historical statues, saying America was “systemically racist.”

Not only did no one listen to anything I had to say, but they were angry at me for saying it. Neera Tanden wrote me personally and asked me to stop criticizing the Democrats until after the election because defeating Donald Trump was the main priority. But I was beginning to worry more about this new version of the Left taking power than I was even Trump.

If the things we were seeing at newspapers and across all institutions - silencing dissent, firing people right and left and this suddenly strident doctrine that was being forced down everyone’s throat got into government? Then our country would start to look a lot more like an authoritarian utopia of the 1984 kind.

Turns out, we have become that authoritarian utopia, at least online. We trusted the Big Tech oligarchs with our data, our friendships, our preferences, our financials. Now they’re turning on those who are non-compliant and tossing them out of what looks a lot like the “Inner Party” in 1984.

The Left was never the “resistance.” They were always the empire. You can’t be that rich, that power, and control almost every area of American culture from Hollywood to book publishing to media to science and big tech and not be the empire. Trump’s side was the “resistance” and still is.

It feels eerily like 1984 now that the int