7:24:24
Sasha Stone:
Walter Kirn made this great point: if this were happening in another country, we'd know exactly what is going on.
Our eyes would be open. We like to tell other countries what’s wrong with them while remaining blind to our own nation’s corruption and demise. We want its rewards and fake accolades, not its truth.
Derek Johnson calls the current state of the US, “a government in exile.” Sasha Stone calls it “pirates of democracy.” Celia Farber calls it “Woke witchcraft.” What is the true nature of this power we are all under? This spell? And how are you going to break it? Like Farber, I can’t take the Beyonce Freedom video, now the score for the Kamala Harris campaign, either. It feels demonic/creepy. But I’ve always been awake to Beyonce and her poisonous “feminism” while all my colleagues and the world worshipped her. It was only bell hooks who years ago had the guts to declare Beyonce a “terrorist”—I watched her say it—but she’s much worse than that.
A lot of people are under spells. Literal spells, mind control spells, mRNA spells, marriage spells, career spells, fame spells, celebrity spells, friend spells, pharma spells, money spells, fear spells. The spell of lies, which requires more lying from us to keep this dark dance going. As Solarah writes: “Abuse is deeply spiritual, and when we neglect to see this, we can’t heal the fullness of the damage. As in all things, it has its genesis in the ‘above,’ and its materialization in the ‘below.” Talk therapy, another weapon of the Godless deep state, cannot help. Because it is part of the problem. It indoctrinates, programming people into new mental prisons, speech distortions (what Celia Farber refers to as “non-language language”), and toxic dynamics. It does not heal, free, or empower. It is not love-centered. Pharmaoccultism is a mind control system that has completely disfigured, brainwashed, and drugged our entire society. Making it openly demonic. Openly narcissistic. Openly engineered. I have also come to believe from the writing and research I have done in my new book, that one of the main drives of psychotherapy/psychology is to turn people against their loved ones by turning their sovereignty over to the state and to institutions. That doesn’t mean I think no one should be critical of their families or their upbringing, but the obsession with childhood and parental blame feels heavily engineered to me, and has not led, as we know, to people being better parents themselves, just crazier, more infantile, and more brainwashed ones. I’ve argued for a long time that most people are what I call “vicarious parents”—they are correcting and recreating their own childhood by being parents. They are the children not the parents. That’s why they feed their children to the machine of ideology.
Spells (trauma/brainwashing) work precisely because they operate on the spiritual plane, wounding us to the core, stripping us of the internal strength to heal and fight because we’re not connected to the Divine, only to corrupt outside sources/influences. We are not spiritually connected to truth and that is why we are not faithful to it.
People in this country have been systematically programmed that it’s okay to fail people, manipulate people, use people, and lie to people—all you have to do is gaslight them into thinking it never happened. It’s worth reading Nietzsche on the promise, if you haven’t already. Though Nietzsche always conflates (this to me often feels like an intentional conflation) societal obligations/norms with the moral imperative, as if the disavowal of social contracts isn’t a norm in itself. It certainly is the norm now. As in the abnormal and obscene are now normal. But that’s what happens when you don’t believe in God, I guess. What IS your reason for not being evil then, if it’s not the social contract and it’s not God (the Divine)? What keeps evil from morphing into normal? What drives you to keep your promise? To make a promise? Is it simply to break it? To get away with breaking it? Why does one make a promise in the first place if it isn’t because you want to be faithful to it? Faithful to yourself.
Can you trust yourself?
You will know what you’re watching/seeing now if you’ve been paying attention. Truth never lies. But it it does hit most people late. Too late. And lying to oneself is a different kind of pain/disorder/prison/disaster. People do it their whole lives.
The other night I rewatched the 90s movie, The Paper, with Michael Keaton and Marisa Tomei. In it, there is this magical, funny line, delivered (tellingly—look into his “conspiratorial” Hollywood whistleblowing) by Randy Quaid:
"When did you get so paranoid?" (Michael Keaton)
"When they started plotting against me." (Randy Quaid)
It gave me great joy to hear this line in 2024.
I laughed out loud.
The future makes the past true.
It reminds me of Stanley Kubrick, who once stated that paranoia is “knowing what is going on.”
The Conspiracist Manifesto (Semiotexte) put it similarly in 2023: “This world is the work of great paranoiacs.”
Or Tucker Carlson stating that “Secrecy is the hallmark of lying…If you’re hiding something, you’re lying.”
The same goes for the secrecy and evasion that takes place in romantic relationships.
There is a reason I have spent the past four years rewatching (mourning) many films I grew up with, revisiting the past. Reframing my entire relationship to cinema, to culture. Does it still matter to me? Can it still matter to me, after everything we have learned? This has been the big question. I watch movies now, at arm’s length, as though it were someone I fully loved and trusted all my life (not to say I wasn’t always deeply critical of film, media, and culture in all of my work), but who broke my heart. And now I reminisce over the familiar and comforting past, sometimes fondly, yet knowing full well the love will never be the same.
What was true then, what is true now? What was true that we didn’t know was true?
A friend and I frequently used to joke: “If this were the 1990s, we’d be screwed.” Meaning, it is a good time to be awake. A good time to be alive. Even though the stability of the world that existed in the 1990s is gone, and with it, many structures that once made my and other people’s life make some kind of sense. And also, let’s be honest, that felt good. Felt better than it feels today, where nothing is sound, nothing makes sense. The only thing that remains is truth in a world of lies. In the 1990s, there was more coherence, at least interpersonally. At least in pockets. If this were the 1990s, lies and liars would go to their graves with their lives and legacies in tact. And we would still be 34 years away from anything ever changing. From any of us knowing the depth of the lies and the truth that is finally coming. And I might not have lived to see the day.
But lying to oneself and others is different now. It won’t work. It won’t last. The protective structures are all gone. Falling away. The truth is finally coming out. Fake relationships and fake comforts and fake nations and fake lives are coming to an end. Everyone will have to reckon with the world and with themselves. And with their choices.
What will you hold onto in its place?
The truth is: Truth is for people who can face it. History is for people who pay attention. Pain has a slow, fiery release. Love is the only authority, everything else is a distraction and a crutch. Gifts and messages arrive in the future, sometimes years later, as Agamben once told me in graduate school. Which is to say: Truth takes time, gets lost en route, but it always comes. I know that’s hard to believe because I have a hard time believing it myself sometimes, especially after experiencing great injustices and losses repeatedly in my own life. And it’s true that we know it—truth—all along. Even if we cannot face it, or be true to it or to those who spark and awaken the truth within us. We know it when we see it. We feel it when we’re around it. We can’t lie about THAT. But our deep attachment to lies/lying betrays the beauty and the promise of the path of truth and the great courage and heart it requires to follow it. To stand in it, no matter what. A Christian ex once told me: “No one gets away with anything in the end, Masha. No one. Rest assured.” Let that give you pause. And some relief.
