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January 6th was terrifying for many Americans. After all, they saw it on television. But what did they really see? Did they know what actually unfolded that day? Did they even ask?

Trump is the Jan. 6 President, proclaims the New York Times’ Editorial Board.

And the text:

What I learned, living through these events as a former Democrat, is that the New York Times Editorial Board is lying through its teeth. Or maybe they aren’t lying. Maybe they really do believe it. They exist inside the Doomsday Cult of the Left, after all, along with all of those high-minded “journalists” at the New Yorker and the Atlantic.

But to make the bold proclamation that any protest, or even riot, against oppressive forces, whether you believe them to be oppressive or not, is un-American proves they don’t know this country or its history very well.

There were two sides to this story. If I’d never left the Left, I would have believed their version of the event. I would have been just as horrified. I would have thought it was an attack on democracy.

But protests are the voices of the unheard and a healthy sign of any democracy, and for a grassroots movement, and millions of Americans who had been disenfranchised by the four years Trump was in power? This was the best way for them to be heard. The only way for them to be heard.

They just didn’t know they were walking into an ambush by forces far greater than them, and more powerful than any political party in American history and what they wanted to do was use that protest - a moment of desperation for desperate Americans abandoned by the government, the culture and most institutions - and demonize them further by calling them extremists, terrorists, Nazis, insurrectionists.

January 6th was played on a loop by the Democrats and their propaganda machine, once known as the legacy media. And why wouldn’t it be? It was everything they needed at just the right time. See, there’s a Confederate flag. See, there’s a hangman’s rope. See, there’s some guy in horns howling inside the Capitol.

Zip ties, hanging Mike Pence, Trump watching the mob, and hoping they wouldn’t stop. It all painted a picture in our minds of an angry president amidst a violent coup. In our age of algorithm-driven mass hysteria, we’re no different from the Puritans in Salem who believed in “spectral evidence,” what you can’t see but can only imagine. January 6th finally provided them with the proof they needed of their campaign against MAGA.

It’s just that none of it was true. Why would Trump have wanted a riot? He’d gone to great effort to convince Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz to debate the election in the Senate.

All the riot did was hand absolute power to the Democrats, Reichstag Fire style. Not only did the media sell that lie, but you’d be severely punished if you asked any questions, especially about the 2020 election.

Yes, we lived through that and more. Just because the Democrats have memory-holed everything they’ve done in the last ten years to cling to power doesn’t mean it didn’t happen or that we shouldn’t talk about it. There was nothing wrong with talking about an election that was anything but free and fair.

I naively went into it as a major Biden advocate, believing he could win the old-fashioned way. I didn’t know they’d hide him and Kamala Harris in the basement and let the legacy media do all of the heavy lifting. I didn’t know they’d planned it—everything that happened throughout 2020 to ensure Trump was taken out of power, like they were meddling in some third-world country’s elections.

It’s all written down in TIME Magazine. They planned on saving an election that was not theirs to save. Who gave them that right? The American people decide, and if one political party believes itself to be above the people, then that is an insurrection, not against the government but against all of us and a fair process we depend on.

They justified everything they did by the lies they told themselves about who Trump really was and how dangerous he was supposed to be. They rigged the election by manipulating the media, changing any law that got in their way, using COVID as an excuse to push ballot harvesting, funded by a $400 million cash infusion, and all the while pretending they were “saving democracy.”

By all accounts, I should have been cheering them on. Yes, get Trump! Anything and everything should be allowed as long as we were saving the country from Hitler! I believed that at first. Why wouldn’t I? I was straight out of Central Casting as a Resistance Lib. This was the back of my car in 2012.

This is who I was.

Before that, I was just a lowly Oscar blogger spending my time writing about superficial things, but suddenly, in 2015, everything changed. I was in a panic about the Greenhouse Effect and the sea level rise. I threw myself into politics to help the Democrats win.

Overnight, I became someone who mattered online, with a growing following, adoration, and kindness from strangers. The warm embrace of the elite Left felt intoxicating: invitations to exclusive parties, friendships with high-status blue-checks on Twitter like Steve Schmidt, Rick Wilson, and Oprah, so much love and support online - after all, I was helping to save democracy and the planet! I was even invited to an early fundraiser for Joe Biden in May of 2019. It was necessary. I was important. I mattered.

You can imagine, then, how surreal it would have been for anyone who knew me that way to see me starting to question the official narratives. For me, it began with what I believed was mass hysteria that had overtaken my side.

Just as the Southerners had whipped themselves up into a frenzy, believing that if the slaves were freed, there would be chaos and violence, so too did we believe that if Trump won, that was the end of everything. But, looking back, all it really was was a populist revolt against a ruling class that just decided what America would be now. Class no longer mattered, only skin color and gender identity did.

Little by little, I began to pull away as things got weird. The more I tried to speak out, the worse it got for me. They went after me hard on social media for years. But none of that would have driven me away from the Democrats.

As with so many others, 2020 was the turning point for me. I suddenly could see the strings, and I wondered who was pulling them. Trotting out experts to say “systemic racism” was more important than a global pandemic, and trotting them out again to discourage Trump from sending in the National Guard. And again, to say the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation. How stupid did they think we were?

We lurched from COVID to racism back to COVID to lockdowns, and all the while, as I would come to realize, the aim was only to GET TRUMP. Imagine completely taking over an election to take out a one-term president with a strong economy. Why?

I asked the same question then as I wonder today. Why did it have to be an existential crisis? Why drive half the country to the brink of insanity? Why cosplay Trump as Hitler and pretend this was World War II? Couldn’t they win the old-fashioned way with better candidates and better policies?

Russiagate, spying on his campaign, two impeachments, four indictments, convicting him of a felony, taking his mug shot, two assassination attempts, trying to throw him off the ballots, and needing the Supreme Court to shut it down, and the American people still chose Trump. Shouldn’t that have been the wakeup call? Shouldn’t that have been the moment their stupid, futile, destructive war ended?

No. It wasn’t about politics for the Left. It was deeper than that. It was as deep as preserving the South before, during, and after the Civil War.

January 6th allowed them a way out of what they’d become, not what MAGA had become. They were the violent ones and had been going all the way back to 2015, when a mob descended upon Trump supporters.

They rioted at Trump’s inaugural.

They believed themselves justified in attacking Trump supporters because they were convinced they were “fascists.” But their words meant nothing because they distorted them beyond comprehension. What does it mean to call someone Hitler, a fascist, a dictator, a rapist, a pedophile, a racist, a white supremacist? These words mean nothing now.

And then came 2020, the point of no return.

For me, it was the recognition that my side didn’t care about democracy or the truth. They only cared about defeating an imaginary enemy they invented but never existed. And were prepared to bring this country to its knees to achieve that goal.

When I saw this video of Sue’s 100-year-old mattress store, I posted it on social media, and the response was, “How can you care more about property than people”? By then, they had already called me a racist many times, and they were pushing me out of utopia and farther and farther away. Was I a racist because I cared about Sue and the older man who defended her with a fire extinguisher?

Trump’s speech at Mt. Rushmore was the first time I’d heard anyone in public life talk about what we could all see but almost no one would say out loud.

The media called it dark and divisive because, of course, they did. Are you getting it yet? This only goes one way. That was for me yet another layer of the onion being pulled back to reveal what the legacy media had become. They were not reporting the news. They were telling us what to think, and they still are.

After