Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Who is the Sanest of Them All?

Delighted to announce that a new award for being sound of mind is being bestowed to its first recipient today!

Aug 29, 2024

Friend-collaborator,

, gave me this canned drink sometime last year. It contains a very weird-tasting liquid which I did not enjoy at all (and then I learnt, soon after taking a few gulps, that it’s made out of bird spittle — liquid immediately falls out of mouth — but someone says it’s good for you).

Mirror, mirror on the wall. Who is the Sanest of them all?

Ever since, however, I’ve been thinking that until I can create an actual trophy1, I need to turn this can, with the word Sanest printed on it, into a prize that will be given periodically by yours truly — founder of Sane Francisco — after discussion with a panel of eminent Saners.

And yes, I will be creating a Hall of Sane, so people, please do share your nominations for future winners! 🏆

On de-programming from mainstream media:

“It's really about understanding where people's perspectives are coming from and trying to figure out how to meet them where they are … and realizing there's probably going to be a lot of anger and hate and misinformation that they're influenced by… They've been lied to, they've been programmed and it takes time to de-program from the mainstream media narratives, it really does. It also just takes time to deprogram from groupthink… and that's kind of the brilliant thing about our base: they've all arrived here because they were alone in their journey of finding the truth. At some point they found it, and they found others who also were on similar journeys and it was very organic… it just kind of grew out of the desire to find people.”

Not succumbing to groupthink, feeling lonely and isolated after openly choosing to question narratives… this resonates so much with me. Or at least it did in 2020 when, at the beginning of Covid Madness, I only had one friend with whom I could discuss the many vectors of insanity that were being presented as “normal” and nonetheless accepted by practically everyone in my midst.

And truly, de-programming from MSM, and understanding that we are constantly being lied to is the key to awakening.

The Democrats make a mockery of the name of their party:

“And I hate bringing this up because I don't want to bash the Democrats but they really do cross sacred lines… the things that make democracy “Democracy”… they've crossed them in ways that I could have never expected they would do. And they do it in a way also that comes across with this sense of entitlement, that they are entitled to sabotage our campaign, they are entitled to put up websites proudly declaring they have a PAC designed to take out third-party candidates ... I could go on and on about the ways that I've been shocked by their behavior but I will say that many of us have had an education in the current state of American politics that we never anticipated having. And that education, I think, is really important for the rest of the American public to understand because the foundations of democracy are so critical… all of the pieces that make us the country that we are, those are not where they ought to be right now and there is definitely a singular group of people dedicated to undermining it.”

It was in 2020, not really paying any serious attention to politics prior to that, that I came to understand how undemocratic the so-called Democrats were. And that was just one of many unappealing facts I learned about them that year.

(A video post to follow on that education soon...)

On being a former Democrat and now supporting Trump:

Dave Smith asks:

“Did you have any reservations about supporting Trump? … I'd imagine if I could speak to 2016 you, you would be like there's no way I'm gonna be supporting Donald Trump in 2024! And obviously, as Bobby alluded to in his speech, there's a lot of issues that there's disagreement on. Obviously, first and foremost, the one that comes to mind is Covid-related stuff… Operation Warp Speed, lockdowns, and things like that… So, do you have any reservations supporting Donald Trump or do you think it's as clear as ‘the Democrats essentially just can't win this election?’”

Nicole Shanahan replies:

“To go back to your earlier point, most of our supporters are former Democrats or they're progressives… And many of them have looked at Trump for years, as have I, as this really dark, heavy kind of “Old New York,”… not the kind of character that matches our base… he has all these women around in tight dresses, and I keep hearing he's terrible for women. It's been, culturally, an awkward fit…. For me it was a perfect storm of things happening around our campaign, just these constant blitzes by the Democratic party to take us out, to ruin our reputation, going after some of our supporters too, which I think is a huge ‘No-no’… and it was drowning us out. We've said this since Day 1, what really makes independence brilliant is this power of representing ideas and mobilizing it across different parties and partnerships. Because we're agile, we can do that. If the Green Party wanted to do that, they could as well… there's huge power in that.”

I am sick and tired of the divisions that are constantly being stoked between every faction of society, and I’m so down with partnerships even with people you might not agree with 100%!

On MAGA:

“Actually the best part of joining forces with Trump has been seeing MAGA which I'm learning so much about. I was completely misinformed about what MAGA is. I don't know if you've taken any deep dives into MAGA-world but I was just under the impression that they were gun-toting radicals who wanted to come to my doorstep and rip my liberal family out of my house, and do horrible things to liberals. And that's how MAGA has been sold to a huge portion of America by the mainstream media. I have to say that what I have learned about MAGA is that they're actually their own party, they're their own grassroots organization that chose Donald Trump. They have so much power in deciding where to point their energy and support. There are really, really smart, thoughtful, intellectual people within MAGA.”

Prior to 2020 I didn’t know a single “right-wing” person because hey, that’s what it’s like in San Francisco if you’re part of the artist-activist, “social justice” circles. It’s not permitted to think positively of anyone who is right-wing, let alone hang out with them. (Today I actually can’t believe, knowing who I am, that I didn’t know a single non-Dem!)

My own personal experience, based on the 5 or 6 MAGA supporters who are currently part of Sane Francisco — remember we all came together looking for support and friendship because we were fighting the insane vaccine mandates — is that they are smart, decent, caring people. And at least three of them, that I’m aware of, are former Democrats.

How MAGA loves MAHA:

“And they gave us the name ‘MAHA’ — Make America Healthy Again. We didn't come up with that … The coming together of these two groups over the last week… watching that happen has been really glorious because that was always the vision of this unity movement, this desire to heal the divide and even though these are just two pockets within a much larger group of the American demographic, they're two very powerful pockets. To find common ground has been one of the most motivating optimistic things I've seen in recent political times.”

“Hear! Hear!” to common ground; that makes me feel optimistic too.

Speaking of MAGA, here’s a Sane Francisco oldie but a goldie #MFSA:

Make Frisco Sane Again

Sane Franciscan

July 15, 2022

Honestly, you don’t have to do much to be considered a very bad person in this here town. For example, if you had the idea to conduct a social experiment which consisted of composing a sentence using only four words and with certain rules:

Read full story

And now I will transcribe some words uttered by Dave Smith, who, as I say in my footnotes below, also stands as a contender for one of The Sanest:

The Democrats have turned issues they used to say they believed in into “far-right” issues:

“Well it's amazing in a way because over the last few years, even an issue like vaccine skepticism, the corporate media has tried to cast this as a ‘far right-wing’ position but for people who are older than five, who have a memory of the ‘before time’, you're like ‘no, this was always something that left-wingers were very concerned with, this is not a right-wing position. Just like believing in free speech is not a right-wing position or believing in corporate corruption or being against corporations colluding with government… none of that is inherently a right-wing position. Being anti-war is not inherently a right-wing position. … I think with you and Bobby it's just very difficult to caricature you guys as far right wingers… Just everything about you guys is clearly not of the right… and it's also obviously part of like this bigger dynamic where you have people like Elon Musk, Tulsi Gabbard now, yourself and Bobby, where all of you guys are all former Democrats but … the Democratic party has become the party of war and censorship and government corruption.. what's really left there for any traditional liberal to support?”

The off-the-charts hypocrisy of the Democrats was one of the things that made me want to “leave the Left,” as so many other Left-leaners also felt compelled to do in 2020. I don’t know where I am today — yep, I still have those “politically homeless blues” — but I do know I want more than ~~two parties~~ the Uniparty to represent us all. I’m in a blue state and now can say for sure that I will be voting for the third party.

Let’s encourage sanity! So tell me, who else would you like to see step up to the podium and give a speech as they accept the trophy for (one of) The Sanest?