Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone

For a brief moment in time, the Democrats were humiliated in defeat. November of 2024 was the body blow necessary to end the war on Trump. They lost. Trump won, and that was that.They never absorbed that loss, however, except in the way that it made them meaner, angrier, and more willing to blow through norms and abandon what remained of their humanity to chase victory by any means necessary. That would include spending hundreds of millions on Prop 50. It would include celebrating the murder of Charlie Kirk and fantasizing about Trump's imminent death.It would be about sacrificing being “good people doing good things” to “stop fascism.” And somewhere in there, they took a dark turn. I watched it. I wrote about it. I warned about it. I could see it in their attacks on Tesla and their destruction of Elon Musk in an attempt to kill him and his business.I could see them at the No Kings rally, angry and motivated. Their desperation to find a Joe Rogan or compete with the memes on the Right failing at every turn. They looked to me like the monster in The Thing that could imitate but could never be what they thought won Trump the election.Their men are attempting to appear more masculine. Gavin Newsom and JB Pritzker have no problem fomenting insurrection against the government, and the newly elected Mayor of New York just taunted Trump to “turn up the volume.”The women bask in it and pretend they're still feminists when all they wanted all along was to be rescued by men, and here we are again. It's funny. But not so funny.To them, all is justified in the name of “saving democracy.” But that's never been what any of this has been about. They are totalitarians at heart, and they are prepared to sacrifice almost everything - friends, families, marriages, whole industries of culture and education - to attain it absolutely.Utopias only have two potential paths. They become totalitarian, like the Soviet Union, like China, or they collapse. What you sacrifice in chasing utopia is personal freedom, art, journalism, comedy, and common ground with those who disagree with you. A totalitarian system wants it all and is prepared to take it if it isn't given willingly.They were already halfway there before Zohran Mamdani became the new leader of the new Left. Matt Taibbi calls this the end of the Democratic Party, and he's right. Totalitarianism will mean giving up even that. It's all for one and one for all, and those who aren't on board will be left behind.Here is Ben Shapiro:For now, they are holding their not-famous, bland, cookie-cutter centrists —like those who won in Virginia and New Jersey —whose names and faces no one remembers, close enough to not scare people away. They're centrists in name only. The new socialist wave will obliterate them, and if they don't realize that yet, they soon will.This came through my mail, even though I was never put on any list, and I have no idea how it arrived after five years of trying to leave the Democratic Party.Does the Right have anything like that? Are they in any way prepared to go up against people this fired up? No. They aren't. They have Scott Pressler, and they had Charlie Kirk, and everyone else seems to be invested in building their platforms for clicks and views, not for votes. MAGA is on the ropes.The heart of a totalitarian is that all things are necessary to achieve the singular goal of absolute power and dominance for the cause. The cause is usually a Marxist-like government system, but it doesn't have to be. It can be fascist, too. But even that has its roots in socialism because in totalitarianism, there is no power for the individual against the state.Over at the Free Press, Olivia Reingold looked deeper into the DSA:…The Free Press reviewed thousands of pages of internal Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) documents, which show that the organization's leaders view Mamdani as a tool in their agenda to abolish prisons and borders, and ultimately end in what they call the “barbaric order of capitalism.” The DSA, founded in 1982, is a political body dedicated to the doctrine of democratic socialism, which is a variety of socialism that simply specifies how it would like revolution to occur: peacefully, through the subversion of democracy. Mamdani, a dues-paying DSA member since 2017, is the tip of that spear.The Democrat machine cultivated “cancel culture” and used it as a method of societal control. No one would dare say anything that would get them banished from Utopia, except those of us who did and were. That form of policing was straight out of the Cultural Revolution, or Stalin's Komsomol or Hitler's Youth.In our bubble of the Left, we required no military because the system we built made it possible to destroy people with a single accusation. Over time, our hearts and minds had to be captured or suppressed. If you could not go along with it, and I couldn't, you were out.For a society that had migrated to the virtual frontier, that didn't mean you were sent to a gulag or killed, but it did mean you could lose everything and have to rebuild. Not the end of the world, but still, imagine a system like that attaining absolute power because MAGA dropped the ball?That totalitarian practice of punishing thought crimes and dissent spread to government when Joe Biden took power, which is why they censored the internet with impunity and would have continued to do it had the richest man in the world not bought Twitter and freed speech, which allowed for a counter movement to rise and win.Joe Biden and his administration, along with the Democrats, thought nothing of indicting Trump on weak charges, raiding Mar-a-Lago to paint him as a criminal. Their dehumanization and rage for him knew no bounds. They wanted him in jail. They wanted him off the ballot. They wanted him out of their government, their culture, and their country. They wanted him dead. And still do.Jay Jones' texts fantasizing about the death of Republicans and their children are not an exception. It's the rule. They openly talk about “when it happens” to Trump and plan to celebrate that day with playlists and dancing in the street. That is where they were mentally before this November 4th, and their blue wave revived the movement. Now, they are winning.You'd think, given that, they would ease up on the ugliness, the dehumanization, and the hate. Think again. These aren't people who want to share this country or even share the same restaurant as Trump and MAGA. You can't lie about a whole group of people like they have, calling them Nazis and racists and bigots, and not have it end as easily as one election. This is, to them, war.Mamdani's speech proved it. It was masks off, and here comes the revolution, and the enemies are the rich, the Capitalists, and the free thinkers. You think cancel culture was bad? Just you wait until they have control of AI, YouTube, Facebook, and all social media platforms, not to mention all of Hollywood, book publishing, universal preschool, and the universities.And what happens when the money runs out? Even now, Mamdani needs money, and he's asking for it to help pay for his transition team. Get used to it, rich people. You are the ones who will fund this production.The policies matter less than their total control of the country they believe belongs to them. But the one person they can't control is Donald Trump, and that's how he's gotten the better of them again and again. They believe this time, they finally got him. They think the time has come to declare victory. I wouldn't be so sure.When you control the corporate press, the universities, the public schools, the culture, you can create any reality you want. That's a totalitarian paradise, and why they've constructed it that way. A Trump win was never in the plan. It took them a while to find just the right narrative to preserve utopia, which was in a state of collapse.All it took was for Trump to focus on tariffs and not the economy, to celebrate a lavish Halloween ball amid a government shutdown, and most of all for voters to get a taste of Republicans ripping away SNAP benefits and rising healthcare costs. So they shut down the government to manufacture a crisis because, of course, they did. It was Defcon 1.Victor Davis Hanson on Emily Jashinsky's After PartyThat handed the Democrats their oppression cosplay, lining up the shot perfectly. How did the GOP not see this coming? They became arrogant and too comfortable with the idea that the Democratic Party had imploded. The only reason they imploded is that they didn't have the right script. Now, they do.The forces at play to destroy MAGA are everywhere. Do you think totalitarians play around? They do not. Now that Tyler Robinson conveniently assassinated Charlie Kirk, the vultures have flown in, and there is division everywhere.Nick Fuentes, boosted by the New York Times, will become the face of MAGA over the next few years. Excusing him, excusing those who interview him, or apologizing for him is a gift handed to the Left on a silver platter like the Epstein Files. Don't say I didn't warn you.The more people try to censor someone like Fuentes, however, the more energy and popularity he will attain. Anger among the public, especially the young, will find its way out and land somewhere. It will be sucked up by the totalitarians on the Left, or the identity-obsessed faction of the Right.Vivek Ramaswamy:Fuentes is popular, and no amount of scolding will change that. Shutting people up will never be the answer, and it won't work anyway in the age of influencers, clicks, and views. Brett Cooper and others will want a piece of that audience. And so they will placate, they will lean in, and they will excuse.But a Fuentes Right plays like a Reichstag Fire for the totalitarians. MAGA will not survive unless they have some beacons of morality, of true virtue, like Charlie Kirk, guiding them.As Konstantin Kisin points out:There is no saving the totalitarians. They already thought Charlie Kirk was as bad. Even now, none of them felt his assassination in any way. They did not tone anything down. They justified their celebrations and are determined to smear his legacy in death. They would watch and laugh if hundreds of Trump supporters were lined up and shot.Totalitarians want all of you. They want your mind, your heart, your devotion, your loyalty, your past, your present, and your future. They want it all, and they will take it all. And if you aren't on board, out you go. The only hope we have is a sane and common-sense alternative, which we have in Donald Trump. Somehow, in this mess, he comes out as the normal one.If Charlie Kirk were here right now, he'd be on the phone with Trump and urging him to address the economic woes that just lost Republicans a landslide election and ask him to say to the people, “I know you're suffering. I hear you. Here is our action plan to bring down costs and boost the economy. Here is our plan for healthcare. Here is why we won't let anyone starve in the richest country in the world.”But Charlie isn't here. Trump is relying on a team of Yes Men who will not pick up the phone and challenge him, like Charlie would have. But someone must.MAGA must have in place right now a mobilized effort to win in 2026, enlisting all influencers who want to help in the effort to beat back the Totalitarians and their massive alignment of power and their army of fired-up zealots.Otherwise, the totalitarians take America back. They'll raise the drawbridge, and that will be that. They will have whole generations in their universal preschool, shaping those minds however they please. Choose your gender, never think for yourself, do as you are told, utopia.If they take control of AI, that's it for free thought in America. None of them realizes it or even thinks about it. The heart of a totalitarian is not to question but to obey.Gen-Z is facing nothing but a depressing future - no home, AI coming to take the jobs, crippling student debt, and a magic man handing them everything they could ever want for free. Except it's not free. It will cost you everything because it will cost you your freedom.It will sound great at first, like those early enthusiastic speeches in Animal Farm. But if and when the money runs out, if and when there isn't enough for everyone, well, then it becomes the stuff of nightmares.America wasn't built for totalitarianism. It was built to be exactly the opposite. Just visit a socialist country, any one of them, and you'll see why. Charlie might be gone, but thousands of others have risen and attempted to fill his shoes, like Benny Johnson announcing this homeownership program for young people:America is always changing, evolving, and recreating itself. People come here to make their dreams come true. A republic, if you can keep it. Godspeed, MAGA. Godspeed.…// This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

[I meant to get this out before Halloween, but life got in the way — previous Janet stories — Part One | Part Two ]Janet left Two Moons Yoga Studio, where a gaggle of concerned American citizens — the true patriots — held an emergency “No Kings, Cancel Halloween” meeting to save democracy. The attendees were Janet's age. They were her neighbors, but she didn't know most of them. They were all directed to join the NextDoor app to get to know each other better online.Janet used the app frequently. Even though they had a rule about no politics, she would use NextDoor to inform her neighbors if ICE agents had entered the town's perimeter. She would also warn neighbors about the e-bikes speeding through town, endangering animals and pedestrians. She would take pictures of people whose dogs left messes that their owners did not pick up and post them on NextDoor, and she would make sure to let everyone know how many people were responsibly wearing masks at the Farmer's Market.COVID wasn't over, Janet knew. It was still a constant threat, especially to the marginalized, trans people, Black and Brown people, and immigrants. It was her duty to wear a mask at all times, even at the meeting at Two Moons Yoga. Only some people there were wearing masks, but not all. Janet was sure to jot down their names in case she needed to warn people later.The meeting went well. Everyone was on the same page that democracy and their way of life were now under a grave threat. This is not normal, said Barack Obama. Janet agreed. Their action plan was to go door to door and inform their neighbors that Halloween would be canceled due to the government shutdown and the fascist occupation of the country. They had even bigger goals, like canceling Thanksgiving and boycotting Christmas, too. But one step at a time. Halloween was in just a few days, and it was time to send a message to the government that we would not be buying candy or trick-or-treating while Nazis roamed our streets.Everyone had a list of the neighborhood's sections. Janet would go that evening after she watched MSNBC. She didn't want to interrupt her neighbors, who were probably just as glued to their TVs. That was the only way to stay informed now that the country has been overtaken by fascists.Nothing else can be trusted now. The media is terrified of Trump, not even the ladies of The View talk politics anymore. Janet can only watch for five minutes before they move on to shallow interviews and publicity hits. Trump has intimidated everyone, suing networks, disappearing Jimmy Kimmel for a joke, and that has had a chilling effect on free speech. Janet wasn't exactly thrilled about knocking on doors, but she had to do something. She couldn't just stay home and post about HIM on Facebook and NextDoor. Some had suggested giving out bags of groceries to those whose SNAP benefits would run out. Yes, a community effort for the poor and downtrodden. It's just that Vista Butte isn't a town full of poor people. It was expensive to live here. Were there poor people in this town? Then she remembered the maid who comes to clean her house once a month, and everyone has a gardener. Maybe she would approach them with a bag of groceries when she saw them at work. Would it be weird to take a selfie and post it on Instagram to show how important it is to recognize the poor right now?Assuming the maid was poor just because she cleaned houses for a living wasn't racist, was it? Is it offensive to call her a maid? What's the appropriate term? Janet asked ChatGPT. The answer: housekeeper, house cleaner, or domestic worker.” Okay, so domestic workers might be the poor people in Vista Butte, like immigrants. Janet did her best not to offend marginalized people. She didn't know if any such people lived in Vista Butte. The town was, after all, 96% white, affluent, and very liberal. But on the off chance she might encounter one, she wanted them to know she cared about their health, too. That's why she wears a mask outside every day.Janet began walking up her street and could feel the October breeze. This was the best time of year in Vista Butte. It wasn't too hot and it wasn't yet too cold. It was one of those perfect fall days. Every so often, you could smell smoke from a fireplace off in the distance. She didn't want to think about HIM on a day like this. She needed to be living in the moment more. Self-care. Meditation. Daily walks. Breathing exercises.The election was almost one year ago. Janet's hair had finally grown back after she shaved it to protest THE FASCIST in the White House. She thought about keeping it because people were so kind to her when they thought she was battling cancer. She never said she was. They just assumed, and she kind of let them. It felt good to have people be nice to her.Things aren't getting better, Janet knew. They're getting worse. Much worse. He disembowled the East Wing to put up a Nazi building. He defiled the Lincoln bedroom's bathroom and put in a Roman bathhouse. Everything is ugly, tacky gold. He hates America! He had a late-stage Roman Empire ball at Mar-a-Lago, apparently. While millions were about to starve because of the government shutdown. He was having a party for billionaires!Janet tried not to think of it. Instead, she looked around at all of the Vote Yes on Prop 50 signs that were stabbed into the lawns of all of her neighbors. What good people they were. They raised $120 million. Imagine that. Of course, it will pass. We have to save democracy, she thought, by adding more seats in Congress. Janet herself donated around $300. Somewhere in the distance, she could hear buzzing, whirring, what is that sound? She knew before she even saw them that it was those kids on the electric bikes that had been terrorizing the town. E-Bikes. Everyone had complained on Next Door. Even the MAGGAt, who goes by the name RedHat. Even he, or she, or they, no he or she, hated them. They were dangerous. They were loud. It was the only time she and RedHat agreed on anything. He was always the first to chime in on her ICE posts. “Good job, ICE,” he would say. “We need to protect American workers,” and “the media is lying about ICE and scaring people.” But Red Hat was living in a Fox News fantasy world, Janet knew. Their fights got so heated that Janet had to block RedHat and then warn everyone on Next Door not to engage with him. There is no point, she would say. He is too lost and can't be helped. All we can do is block him. But he just made a new account. What will we do with all of these racists who voted for Trump? She thought, We can't live with them. We can't forgive them. Their days are numbered. Already, the Democrats are leading in the polls. It's just a matter of time before we take back the country and save democracy. But what to do with all of those bad people? Janet didn't know. But she hoped someone did. Red Hat was right about the bikes, though. The kids didn't know how to control them. They went too fast down the road. They scared dogs and cats, and they scared Janet. She could hear them off in the distance now. Then, she could see them. There they were, a gang of about six boys speeding right toward her. Janet was still holding her No Kings sign, which she'd brought to the meeting, which said No KKK No FASCIST USA and NO KINGS. She held it up in front of her so the boys could see her clearly in case they weren't paying attention. Could they see her? They had a devilish look on their faces and were speeding right toward her. Were they planning on hitting her? Would they hit a middle-aged woman in a mask carrying a No Kings sign? Yes, Janet knew, they would because they're DUMB KIDS. It was now a game of chicken, and Janet was not playing that game. Just as they got within a few feet of her, she leaped out of the way and stumbled, falling face down onto the concrete. She could hear them screaming with laughter as they sped by. “Chicken!” one of them called out. Janet was furious. She ripped her mask off her face and stood in the middle of the road with her cell phone aimed right at them. “I'm recording you!” She said. The boys screeched to a halt on their bikes and turned around to look at her. They apparently thought this was really funny because they could not stop laughing. “Go ahead, No Kings,” one of them said, and that cracked them all up even more. “I will!” Janet said, “And then I'll call the police! How do you like that?” “We didn't do anything,” another said. A couple of them had their own cell phones out and began recording her. “You tried to kill me!” Janet said. That made the boys burst into yet more uncontrollable giggles as they began mocking her. “Oh, no! She almost died!” ”Death by E-bike!”“You don't even live in this town, do you?” Janet said. “Why don't you go back to where you came from?” “Why don't you?” One of them said. “I live here. Do you?”They didn't answer, but just thought the whole thing was either super funny or a waste of time. And with that, off they went, with their noisy, irritating, dangerous E-Bikes headed for who knows where. Janet searched around for her mask, but the strap was broken. She was too traumatized to bother picking it up. She did take her sign, which was wrinkled and dirty. She looked around to see if any of her neighbors had witnessed the ugly scene. She might need a witness if she called the cops. But why bother? What could they do? She would keep trying to get E-Bikes banned so the neighborhood could be peaceful and orderly again. She was just a block away from her house now. Tears were streaming down her face. Why did those kids have to be so mean? Why are they so aggressive? Boys, that's why. Boys who grow up to be men. Boys who can't be controlled. That's what is wrong with our society, Janet knew. Just look at all of the damage caused by Trump. The Gestapo was disappearing people off the streets and putting them somewhere, ripping children from the arms of their mothers and putting them on trains. Sending grandmothers to concentration camps. All because they're Brown and the racists on the Right want only a WHITE AMERICA.He's sent in the military to occupy our cities. It's not to protect ICE, stop crime, or clean up the streets. It's to implement MARTIAL LAW to put all of us under federal control. It won't be long before we're snatched off to death camps just for making a joke or having a NO KINGS rally. Of course, Fox News will shrug it off. That's how the Holocaust happened. The Good Germans did nothing. Janet finally got home and flopped down on the couch. That was too much activity for someone who never left the house. She closed her eyes to take a quick nap before checking social media. Just as Janet was drifting off, she heard her phone ping. Someone had texted her. She glanced down and saw it was the woman who organized the Cancel Halloween meeting. The message said, “Call me. It's urgent.” Janet's first instinct was not to call her back, to pretend she didn't get the message or that she slept through it. Whatever it was that was urgent, Janet didn't want to know. But she picked up her phone and called anyway.“Kim?”“Hi Janet, thanks for calling. ””Yes, Kim, how are you?” Janet was trying to counter Kim's panic with calm. ”I'm okay, I just—have you looked at Facebook?””No, I just got home. I was about to work out.””You should probably check it now. Did you tell an immigrant and a mixed-race child that they didn't belong in this town and to go back where they came from?”A cold chill ran down Janet's spine. Her palms began to sweat. She could see the scene play out in her mind, the cell phones recording her as she said those exact words. But “go back to where they came from” just meant whatever town they lived in that wasn't Vista Butte.“Well, I didn't say that exactly,” Janet said.”That's what it looks like in that viral video.””There's a viral video? It just happened like 15 minutes ago.””So it did happen,” Kim said.”Well, I mean, they tried to kill me.””You're a white woman, Janet.””And what's that supposed to mean?””One of those kids was mixed race,” Kim said.”They all looked white to me,” Janet said. ”One kid's stepfather is Black, apparently,” Kim said.”Stepfather? So that's not his biological father, Kim. And what is he, like the only Black person in Vista Butte?””Well, I'm just telling you what is happening online right now. You should go look, and I think, given the anger and tension around this, it's best that you do not go door to door or engage with anyone on behalf of our group.”And with that, Kim hung up the phone without even saying goodbye. Janet sat there, stunned. One of those boys was a migrant child? A Brown child? And she told him to go back to where he came from? And a mixed-race child? In a town that's 96% white. Her phone was pinging with Nextdoor notifications. She checked there first. There was a whole thread about her, the so-called “racist” video was now playing on the app. There was Janet screaming at the kids, “Go back to where you came from!” It was filmed from a different perspective, though. It was from someone watching from inside their house. They must have posted the video. Who would do that? She read the comments. “What a terrible person.””That's scary.””It's sad what's happened to her.””I didn't know there were Karens in this town.””Racism is ugly and so is she.””I always knew there was something weird about her. She just seems off.””The kid has a mom who works at the local Wendys and ICE has just taken her. He's worried he's next.””She's MAGA now.””I hate ugly people, don't you?””She lives near me.””I see her walking outside sometimes. Scary.””There is nothing wrong with standing up for your morals and shutting these people out of your life forever.””We should meet later and figure out what to do about her.”Only one person, RedHat, pushed back. “Everything is racist with you people,” he wrote. Great, the MAGA guy. That's how low she sank. She was sick. Her stomach hurt. How could this be happening? Why did she say what she said? They all looked white to her. Were they all white? Now she couldn't even remember their faces. She only saw them laughing.She didn't want to look at Facebook, but she had to know what they were saying about her. There were dozens of posts on her wall calling her the worst names she'd ever heard in her life. There were lengthy posts from people she only knew online explaining why they were walking away and unfriending her. “It's a matter of morality,” they would explain. “Of decency.” “She is toxic,” one said. “She needs help,” said another. “Some people can't be helped,” said her old co-worker from years ago. “Racism is a disease,” said one of the women from the No Kings protest.Racist? Janet was starting to get angry now. She wasn't racist. She did everything she could to not be racist. She was careful never to say the wrong word. She wanted only the best for all of the marginalized groups. She hated white people. She knew they were the colonizers and the oppressors. She thought America was a rotten, corrupt, white supremacist empire that would elect a twice impeached, four times indicted, adjudicated rapist, felon, fascist, dictator! They were the racists, not Janet. Not JANET! Now things were starting to get weird. Should she call Kim back? Should she apologize on Facebook? That's what she did. She apologized. She sat down and wrote, “I am very sorry that I said those words. But I am not a racist. I don't have a racist bone in my body. I'm sorry if I offended anyone.” Then she posted it. Right away, the comments flooded in. “Too late,” one said. “It's always the racists who say they aren't racist,” said another. “You should take responsibility for the harm you caused.”Janet sank into the couch and put her head in her hands. Then she heard a knock on the door. Who could that be? She slowly approached the door and looked through the peephole. It was the women from the meeting. They were standing there, arms crossed.“Open the door, Janet. I know you're in there,” said one of the women. Janet said nothing. They pounded the door again. “You are not welcome at our meetings anymore, and we want you out of our neighborhood.” The other women chimed in, and they began clapping and chanting, “GO BACK TO WHERE YOU CAME FROM! YOU ARE NOT WELCOME HERE! Janet clutched her chest and fell to the floor. What is happening? She couldn't breathe…she couldn't breathe, and then, suddenly, she realized she was now on the couch and awake. She'd been dreaming. It was all a bad dream. She was sweating through her shirt. Her heart was pounding. She picked up her phone and looked at the screen. No notifications. She checked her history, no call from Kim. She looked on NextDoor, and there were no posts about her. She checked Facebook, same thing. And that was when she looked up to Heaven and thanked God. She had never done that before—not ever—but it seemed appropriate now. Thank you, God, she said. She knew there was a reason she'd had that dream. She knew it was a wake-up call to be a better person. Did that mean she should maybe try to make friends with RedHat? Would that be enough to redeem her? No, she knew. That dream was a warning. She had to be very careful from now on. And she would be. She would not break any rules. She would not even try to get the E-Bikes banned. She would be quiet and go along to get along. She picked up the phone and called Kim. “Hello?””Hi Kim, it's Janet. I was just wondering what time we would all be knocking on doors tonight.””Oh, hi, Janet. That would be around 7:30. We can meet down at Kate's Koffee at 7.””Sounds great!” Janet said. “See you then!”She turned on MSNBC, and there was Rachel Maddow looking worried, as usual. What now? Islamophobic attacks on Zohran Mamdani. A woman being manhandled by ICE agents. There were real problems to worry about, Janet realized, much bigger than whether some awful little brats had a damaging video of her. And yet, just as she felt herself relax, she heard her phone ping. She looked at it and said aloud, “Oh no.” TIP JAR// This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

When the hilarious clips of Katie Porter losing her temper went viral, I thought What a great skit that would make on Saturday Night Live. Would they dare? The answer came the following Saturday. Of course not. Why not? Because on the Left, they protect their own. The alignment of culture, media, and the Democrats has been a deadly one for them in all ways. It has caused a mass exodus of people like me fleeing the bubble for more honest and truthful alternative media. It has led to empty theaters across America and a ratings free-fall in cable and network news.Desperate times call for desperate measures, which is why CBS News hired Bari Weiss and why we're just starting to see Hollywood attempt to pull away from the monoculture. But it might be too late. As the lines go in No Country for Old Men, “Well, it's a mess, ain't it, Sheriff?” “Well, if it ain't, it'll do ‘til the mess gets here.”Welcome to No Country for Old Media, where a story as big as Arctic Frost meets deafening silence inside the bubble, where once again, Axios stands alone.Lucky for me, I listen to the Real Clear Politics podcast every day, which is where I first heard about the story. If these guys are alarmed about it, I know it's more than just partisan politics. Carl Cannon, Tom Bevan, and Andrew Walworth are straight shooters. It's a sign of how fast new media is growing that they've now announced they will be joining the Megyn Kelly channel on SiriusXM. Is it worse than Watergate? I think so. But you have to look at the big picture, not just one story. The Democrats' ten-year war to prevent Trump from representing those who voted for him and to deny half the country their right to representation remains one of the biggest scandals in American history. We've never had an administration refuse to step aside because they didn't like the winner and decide for the American people that their votes didn't matter because one side had all of the power. It was never Trump who refused to leave. It was Barack Obama and the America he believed he had forever shaped.Since the Democrats have complete control of the legacy media, they decide what matters. They have manufactured nearly every major crisis where Trump is concerned. So much so that they've inadvertently manifested a Boy Who Cried Wolf scenario for themselves, which is why they're so dangerous now. They are willing to do and say anything to win a war they've already lost. This press conference was ignored by the legacy press, but it's worth listening to. It lays out in shocking detail just how deep the rabbit hole goes.It's No Country for Old Media because they can't cover a story like this, no matter how big it gets. They don't chase the story anymore. Just as Tommy Lee Jones in the movie is always a day late and a dollar short chasing the bad guys and can't save the hero, our old media is too afraid to tell the truth and doesn't get there until much later, if they get there at all. How long did it take them to talk about Joe Biden's cognitive decline? After Nixon thoroughly humiliated the Democrats in 1972, winning every state except Massachusetts, his approval numbers were at an all-time high. Taking down a guy that popular was compelling news for the American people, who watched his approval numbers crash, and then watched him resign over it.A crash like that isn't something you see every day, and it's certainly not the case with Trump. His approvals have been steady because they have been attacking him nonstop. But the legacy media is MIA on all of it. Why? Because they're part of it. It was the massive alignment of power that I finally could see in 2020, which is why I left the Democratic Party. I believed they had too much power and that the election was anything but “free and fair.” I was a Biden voter, but I assumed we would be on a level playing field. We weren't. 2020 was a pivotal year for me and many others. I had been Joe Biden's #1 best gal until the Summer. When the violence began and the legacy media covered it up, it radicalized me, you might say, for the truth. I could see that Trump was gaining ground over that summer, with his five rallies a day and how insane the Left had become. He won Iowa, Ohio, and Florida, which meant that without the way they changed the laws for ballot collecting and counting, he probably would have won. But the election was already over long before election day. That isn't how our elections are supposed to go. Candidates make their case to the people, and the people vote.But the Democrats collected the majority of their ballots before campaigning was even over, which required keeping the public in the dark about many things, like Biden's age — they hid him, as they did Kamala Harris' incompetence. And then, there was the rising fanaticism on the Left and the violence over the Summer. They kept it all hidden from view, just like they're doing now. What I saw was not so much a rigged election as a rigged system. The “Secret bipartisan campaign” in TIME Magazine lays out exactly how widespread this effort was to subvert American democracy. They all believed it was their right to do so. But it never was. They manufactured an illusion to fool the public. It was the legacy media's job to expose those lies. They never did. Not then, not now.Trump might have been unable to lose. His inability to accept the loss might not have been what we want in our leaders. But as a Biden voter who was now horrified and disillusioned with my party and all of American society they controlled, I was grateful Trump took them on. I also knew January 6th was a much too convenient tool to dismiss everything the Democrats did to drag Old Joe over the finish line.Even now, they can't confront their own corruption, or even the plain facts about what Joe Biden did to elbow out competition in 2024, what George Clooney did, what Obama did, and how undemocratic it was to put Kamala Harris in without the voices of the people whose votes should matter more. They don't have to confront it or even talk about it because the legacy media, like Hollywood, like so much of our society, has their backs. It was never about Trump at all. It was about their refusal to step aside and allow America to change. Arctic Frost is an opportunity for them to come clean and admit everything they did to stay in power, and how badly that has hurt them as a party and a movement — how badly it has hurt America — our trust in our institutions and our ability to coexist as a country. Even if the Democrats have destroyed themselves by becoming too corrupt to function, it is how the press became their willing puppets that is the real tragedy here. We don't need more propaganda. We need more truth in our news.Getting there months or years later is not good enough. Things are moving too fast. This country is changing. Technology is changing. It's adapt or die. This is no country for old media. It's time to leave them behind. To quote another line from No Country for Old Men, “You can't stop what's coming. It ain't all waiting on you. That's vanity.” //Tip Jar This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

I imagine right about now, the group chats between Hillary Clinton, Neera Tanden, and Huma Abedin are lit. Democratic Socialism is at the gates. Once upon a time, that was their worst nightmare. Now, it's their inevitable reality. If Andrew Cuomo does somehow pull off a miraculous last-minute one-in-a-million win in New York, he will do so without any help from the establishment Democrats. But even a weak endorsement from Hakeem Jeffries for Zohran Mamdani is enough. They know their goose is cooked. Even if they're not happy about it, they have no choice but to go along with it.We wanted to smash the Patriarchy. They wanted to smash the oligarchy.I am old enough to remember how those of us in the I'm With Her army fought viciously with “Bernie bros” throughout the 2016 primary, calling them racists and misogynists, saying they were “useful idiots” for Trump. We wanted to smash the Patriarchy. They wanted to smash the oligarchy.Most of us Hillarycrats were terrified that Democratic Socialism would pull the party too far to the Left and we'd never win an election again. It was the word “socialism,” and no matter how many times they put “Democratic” in front of it, the song remained the same.Maybe we were the last generation forced to read Animal Farm in high school, but we seemed to remember what so many in the Bernie movement had suddenly forgotten. Not only doesn't Communism sell, but it doesn't work. That message never got through, and socialism, Democratic or otherwise, would be like those dinosaur eggs that magically appeared in Jurassic Park. Socialism, like life, finds a way.Look at the Democrats now. They're all in. Even if they weren't, they know better than to say so out loud. They also know they're out of moves. They've had their shot, and all it meant was Trump beating them again. But I still wonder what's going on in those group chats. Does Hillary know that this potentially means the Republicans will rule for much longer? Or does she, like all of the fanatics on the Left, still believe they are just one election away from taking back the country We'd better hope they aren't. Socialist SocialitesYou've heard of Vivek Ramaswamy's Woke Capitalism. Now, meet Woke Socialism —the hybrid of AOC and Bernie, and their Green New Deal manifesto, merging the two ideologies into one complete organism. Zohran Mamdani is their love child, so perfect for today's Left that he almost seems like he was created in a lab.You see them everywhere, these socialist socialites. Somehow, it's become the ultimate pretty girl cred, like “Free Palestine” and “This baby is not yet human.” They like socialism for the same reason they like fat acceptance. As long as homely and otherwise rejected women are allowed in, that gives the pretty girls the freedom to display their beauty without being hated for it. Here are hot girls for Mamdani:We saw this on display at a recent Vogue Hollywood fashion show, populist enough for Gavin Newsom to attend. An array of all designated marginalized and their allies, the virtue signalers, all in one place. It was one big mix of the new Gilded Age and the high-society Woketopians in their finest. Here were two famous transgender models greeted with euphoric cheers.How to reflect social justice while luxuriating in extreme wealth? Just chant Tax the rich! Tax the rich! Tax the rich! That was all AOC needed to abandon her working-class cred to join the high-status Woketopians at the Met Gala.It's its own kind of evangelical grift. But it is the workaround necessary in the totalitarian America promised if the Democrats return to power. We've seen what it looks like. We already know. Obey the rules, or you're banished forever. AOC's gleaming face in that photo has been replaced by an angry one. Her speech at the Mamdani rally was very much an “us vs. them” anthem, and by them, she means you, the majority in America that voted for Trump. There is no escaping the fact that the party about to embrace socialism is the party of wealth and the ruling class. It's an inconvenient detail they all mostly gloss over. Here is Walter Kirn and Matt Taibbi on America This Week:It is no longer Bernie's dream of smashing the oligarchy — they are the oligarchy. The workaround is to make it no longer about class but about race and gender. Then, there are no limits on wealth. The lawn sign people desperately crave the status that comes with being deemed an oppressed group, the highest status attained inside Woketopia. You can borrow oppression by, say, making illegal immigration your most important cause. You can be out there chattering about racists. Accuse, lest ye be accused. And best of all, wealthy and powerful high-status figures like Michelle Obama or Oprah Winfrey can still be oppressed and maintain their status while helping to fund the revolution. Meanwhile, some working-class white man in Wisconsin, unemployed and strung out on fentanyl, is forever the oppressor because they need a constant supply of them — white men, Christians, Jews, and billionaires. Here is Barstool Sports Dave Portnoy:Mamdani must rely on his identity to make wealthy elites feel the same sense of inner purpose we all felt the first time we heard Barack Obama speak. He made us feel worthy because our support of him, just because of his identity, made the country better. We mattered. We were important. We were changing the world. What else does Mamdani have to sell? Sure, he's charming and charismatic. He has a great social media game. He is offering a vision for the future rather than only Trump hate. But I also wonder, could his pitch have worked if he were a normie white dude selling it? It only barely worked for Bernie.How many will heed this warning?Or this:What Mamdani has, like every other designated marginalized group, is protective status inside Woketopia. No one can ever criticize you once you are deemed oppressed because then you get to call them racists, homophobes, transphobes, more phobes, more ists, and even ignite a mob to chase, condemn, and purge the offender. When I hear Mamdani speak, or any Democrat besides John Fetterman, I hear them always choosing to see the worst, to see all the complaints against policies the majority of Americans care about, like crime and the border, the answer is always that they are bad people for caring about their own lives. They are a racist, an Islamaphobe, or a transphobe. Here is the Great White Hope, Gavin Newsom, doing just that on a podcast: Their inability to see beyond that, or for voters to snap out of it and return to the real world, has put them in their most precarious position since the Civil War.Gone with the Wind If you are wondering how the Left was lost or why they are in a hell of their own making, or why they can't snap out of it, or why they seem like every day is the end of the world, look no further than the South during the last Civil War. They did not want to give up their way of life, or their utopia, either. They were happy, and they did not realize the rest of the country wanted to move on. When the North decided slavery would not expand to the states, the South was willing to fight and die to hold onto what once was instead of evolving into what must now be. The Left is so desperate to hold onto their way of life, they are willing to fight to preserve crime in the cities, to open the border and allow all of the migrants to flow freely into America, and for Medicare for all and universal education to pay for them too.It was a fixed hierarchy in the American South, just as there is a fixed hierarchy among today's Left. Just as the South was a contradiction to America's foundational principles, that all men are created equal, so too are today's Democrats a contradiction to America's promise, that class no longer decides success, certainly not gender or skin color, but hard work, merit, and talent do. Obviously, that hasn't always been true for everyone. But it is the whole point of an America at all. Mamdani insists he wants all New Yorkers to live a dignified life. It sounds great, doesn't it? Once you start digging into exactly what he means by that, you realize he's not just talking about economics. He's also talking about thought and speech.Woke socialism is, for the Left, the best of all possible worlds. As long as the marginalized living in poverty are lifted up and elevated, the wealthy ruling class, the Socialist Socialites, can justify their absurdly comfortable lives in a country that has afforded them more wealth and privilege than most will see in their lifetimes. They're hoping that if they keep the government shut down, if they make Americans suffer, then we will have no choice but to abandon the American experiment and lean in to the same failed policies that have so many fleeing from all over the world just for the chance to live here and be free. As Orwell warned in Animal Farm, it is human nature that ultimately upends utopia. Sooner or later, the powerful take control anyway because all animals might be equal, but some animals are more equal than others. Music:Tip Jar This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

Somehow, I missed this story that appeared in Compact Magazine by Helen Andrews, The Great Feminization.” In it, she writes:Cancel culture is simply what women do whenever there are enough of them in a given organization or field. That is the Great Feminization thesis, which the same author later elaborated upon at book length: Everything you think of as “wokeness” is simply an epiphenomenon of demographic feminization.The explanatory power of this simple thesis was incredible. It really did unlock the secrets of the era we are living in. Wokeness is not a new ideology, an outgrowth of Marxism, or a result of post-Obama disillusionment. It is simply feminine patterns of behavior applied to institutions where women were few in number until recently. How did I not see it before?And:The substance fits, too. Everything you think of as wokeness involves prioritizing the feminine over the masculine: empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition. Other writers who have proposed their own versions of the Great Feminization thesis, such as Noah Carl or Bo Winegard and Cory Clark, who looked at feminization's effects on academia, offer survey data showing sex differences in political values. One survey, for example, found that 71 percent of men said protecting free speech was more important than preserving a cohesive society, and 59 percent of women said the opposite.And this, which would make a great dystopian sci-fi novel:All of these observations matched my observations of wokeness, but soon the happy thrill of discovering a new theory eventually gave way to a sinking feeling. If wokeness really is the result of the Great Feminization, then the eruption of insanity in 2020 was just a small taste of what the future holds. Imagine what will happen as the remaining men age out of these society-shaping professions and the younger, more feminized generations take full control.Yes to all of this. I would also argue that a feminized society has given more power to the LGBTQIA movement because the one identity group not allowed is masculine, heterosexual men. Feminization has meant, to me, a much more boring and dreary culture—agonizing, if you want the truth. Hollywood has never recovered. Her piece explains much of what I've been dancing around in the past five years, and it might explain why hatred toward me, especially by women, is so profound. Why am I not behaving like all the other women by obeying the rules of Woketopia?Cancel culture started on the pages of Tumblr circa 2013 when middle school-aged girls began constructing a totalitarian system of control that punished people for stepping out of line. Here was Liat Kaplan admitting she helped start it all. It also has its roots in the rise of Black Twitter, though largely driven by women. When it was co-opted by the more dominant group - white women - it swallowed society whole, at least on the Left and in the bubble.When you think about it, whole generations of girls have been raised to be empowered, while men have been raised to be exactly the opposite, disempowered. How did we think it would turn out? So much of our common theories about what's happened to us can be laid at the feet of the matriarchy, and the Left's ongoing insistence that the system of oppression upon which their movement is based has not been fundamentally altered. They still need a fresh crop of oppressed people because that is how white women find their sense of purpose, their virtue signals — illegal immigration, Free Palestine, in order to justify their authoritarian control of our culture and its institutions. They still pretend we live in a rape culture where women are victims and men are predators. And yet, we know things have dramatically changed. Their movement cannot account for that change.I raised a daughter in the same progressive schools and culture that bred this madness. Part of why I write this site and have risked so much is to help clear a path for her to live a freer life and say what she actually thinks without losing everything. But I also watched how boys raised alongside her came of age in a society that punished them for who they were, and many of them wander around aimlessly, or they become mass shooters, or they suffer lives of quiet desperation. And yet, none of us ever thought about why this may be, or at least we didn't have adequate solutions. We all know what happened with girls and boys in our schools. I watched it happen. The boys had too much energy, couldn't be controlled, and were constantly singled out as the problem, while the girls thrived. Yet, the only response was to try to change the boys so they fit, rather than change the system to accommodate their needs. I lived all of this because I am, or was, the typical female Liberal. I remember when mostly white women, the Oprah generation, became the most profitable demographic with the most disposable income. We were mostly unmarried, homeowners, business owners, or the ones who went to work while men stayed home with the babies. All corporations aimed their products at us. When Gen-Z became the more desirable demographic, women took it personally, and that explains why they are in such a state now when it comes to Trump and his defeat of Queen Hillary. A society that had empowered women expected a woman to finally be elected president. Women on the Left believe that in a patriarchy, once women pass the childbearing years, they become worthless. After the age of 40 or 50, invisible. But that's never been true. Post-menopausal women do have value because they can become leaders and grandmothers to help guide younger women. I could go into a whole thing here about human evolution, but I'll spare you the extra 500 words. I used my own sexuality as a card to play for decades, and then when it was gone, I was lost in some ways. But I also realized that if you re-order society and “smash the patriarchy,” you never have to absorb that shift. You can pretend there is no reality to any of it. Fat women can be sexy, old women can stay young and desirable. If everyone is equal (Marxism), women never have to face getting old and fading away. Makes sense.It's just a screeching harpie. Relax. The truth is that once you see the feminization thesis, you can't unsee it. It's suddenly everywhere. Now, I will look at personal attacks against me a little differently. It's just a screeching harpie. Relax. The other half of this story that must be told is the rise of Trump in response to it. I've written about that too:There is a reason the man who is an affront to these screeching harpies has taken power and won our Virtual Civil war. He's an unapologetic, heterosexual, masculine man. Barack Obama was not. He was a sensitive, empathetic man who led our country for eight transformative years. If the end result of that was a feminization of society, then Trump is the response to it.I even jokingly made this political ad last year before the election:In all the ways Trump is the Gray Champion of the Fourth Turning, this might be the most profound. The absence of men and masculinity has set society off-kilter. We've all noticed, it's just that no one has articulated it quite as well as Helen Andrews or J. Stone, who wrote the book. Understanding it as a feminization also removes any discussion of race, which is where many get tripped up when discussing wokeness. They see the word “woke” as a dog whistle. And yet, all this time, it had nothing to do with race except in the way that white women, who dominate the Left, need to virtue signal, and the best way to do that is to use minorities.It also tracks that emotional manipulation drives this. Women are more likely to use emotion as a lever of power, which explains why, for ten years, we've seen the rise of mass hysteria. Sure, it's a cliche to call women hysterical, but how else to explain it? Listen to this woman who is straight out of Central Casting for the kinds of women who control the Left and thus, society.So the question then becomes, how do we stop it? How do we change it? I'm not sure it can be fixed. As I've been saying for a while now, there is no saving the Left. There is only saving America from them. We must build anew, build outside of what is in place now. We're halfway there already. But Helen Andrews believes that once we return to a meritocracy, the problem will take care of itself. It's hard to argue with that. What a mess we've made of things by denying those who are good at what they do to rise in this country of all countries. It had to be Trump. There was no one else with the right set of skills to get the dirty job done. //End song:Link to tip jar. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

The Democrats are involved in their own cover-up. They're covering up for a Nazi. How could they! All they've done for ten years is scream about Nazis! Trump was Hitler, I was told and told and told and told, leading a Brown Shirt army, awakening the White Nationalists, and radicalizing them to rise up and kill Black and Brown people. I was told the Democrats were the side fighting Nazis! It's okay to punch one, and they're all Nazis! The Democrats told us! But there is a Nazi in their midst. A genuine bona fide Nazi by their own rules, a Nazi. We don't give Graham Platner the benefit of the doubt. That's not how this works. It's one strike and you're out.We convict him in the court of public opinion because these are your rules, Democrats. This is the bed you made, and I'm afraid you will have to lie in it. Why are they having a hard time with calling Platner a Nazi and pushing him out like they all pushed out Al Franken after he was called a rapist? For the same reason they aren't pushing out Jay Jones for his vicious fantasies about killing the children of Republicans. They don't think they have to, and they are right. They have the legacy media on their side, and to them, only those on the Right can ever be called a Nazi and have it stick. Political violence only matters if someone on the Right does it. Joe Biden told us that. The people we have to fear most are the radical MAGA extremists. Platner will slither on through because that's how the game is played.Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, and Dan Turrentine on 2way.The problem is, they like him. They want him to stay in their party because they need macho, macho, macho men. He's a macho Nazi! He sounds like a real man, not like a Democrat.They'll have to convince the ladies of The View, however, because they are not on board. Somehow, they realize that if they give Platner a pass, it essentially renders all of their accusations against the Right for ten years null and void.These are their rules. They set the no tolerance for Nazis policy. And anyone they deem a Nazi is, in fact, a Nazi. So by their own rules, we must conclude Graham Platner is a Nazi. There is no presumption of innocence allowed. There is no benefit of the doubt. There is certainly no tolerance, redemption, or forgiveness allowed. It's once accused, forever guilty. That is their most powerful weapon against the Right.Everyone is a Nazi who voted for Trump. Elon is a Nazi for waving to the crowd. The media, far and wide, reported that story as an actual fact, and the utopians inside the Doomsday Cult not only believed it but still do. Just ask them. Trump is a Nazi because Trump is Hitler. Ivanka is a Nazi because she is Hitler's daughter. Melania is a Nazi because she wore an outfit one time that the Left decided looked like a Nazi outfit. The utopians inside the Doomsday Cult not only believed it about Melania in 2020, but still do. Then again, is there anything they wouldn't believe? Right now, they are rolling around in agony yet again because Trump is demolishing the East Wing to build a ballroom. It sounds like a great idea, and Trump is a builder —so why not?If Obama were building the ballroom, they would hail it as a profound moment in history where America's “white supremacist” past was finally confronted. They would be more honest about how they really feel about the Founding Fathers, who built this country on the backs of slaves, and the White House is representative of our colonizing, 1692 white male patriarchal past. Obama would be hailed as a hero and celebrated on the pages of the New York Times for tearing down that past and building anew.But since it's Trump, it is a desecration. Because he's a Nazi, racist, fascist, dictator, criminal, felon, rapist, and most recently, pedophile. Everyone has to be a Nazi because, as the ruling class, they are the oppressed side. Their otherwise pristine lives were disrupted when the other half of the country, the less powerful half, decided they wanted to participate in our democracy, but also couldn't stand living under the suffocating totalitarian GOODNESS of the lawn sign people. You've heard of the Good Germans, now meet the Good Liberals.Here is a list of what you can't say, eat, drive, or wear. Everything you ever did in your past is subject to our judgment. We will decide your character and convict you of whatever we damn well please. We will call you racists, and everyone will go along with it. And your life will be destroyed over it. What did you once wear on Halloween that could now come back to haunt you?Once marked by them, your whole life was ruined, now that American society had been sucked into the utopian cult of the Left. You were marked, and that meant you were to be banished, shunned, disappeared as the BAD THING, a NAZI. Which kind of sounds like actual Nazis, doesn't it? The word Nazi is, to them, a casual adjective. The sky is blue, that flower is pink, that person in a red hat is a Nazi. They don't think twice about it and have emboldened themselves to say it all the time. They have also screamed it, chanted it, and even used it to justify violence.Charlie Kirk's assassin believed he was fighting fascism, which is another word for Nazi, because none of these people really know their history. These words are stand-ins for their own helpless hatred and rage against people who don't agree with them on their totalitarian worldview. When the Epstein story failed to take down Trump, the Democrats decided pedophile was now their favorite word. And all Republicans were guilty of it. They scream it, wild-eyed with spittle spraying out of their mouths. They say it on TikTok to any Trump supporter because, you know, Nazi was played out. Can you imagine Nazi being played out? Now it's PEDOPHILE!! This is on billboards, on the No Kings signs. They say it casually and frequently, as they use the only weapons they have in our virtual Civil War, WORDS. Words to them are harm and they are violence, so they fire them at will. Freaky virtue signaling podcast host Jennifer Welch, who has almost single-handedly alienated all heterosexual men from the Left, loves to point her bony finger at her fellow Americans. Accuse lest ye be accused. Here she is calling Stephen Miller and other Trump supporters Nazis. What this whole ugly affair has exposed is that they never meant any of it. It was all politics. They just didn't want to share this country or hand it over to people they deemed beneath them. It was all lies for ten years. They destroyed people based on those lies, and they never thought twice about it. People have actually died and been viciously assaulted. Most of us were victims of a long con. They never believed it. They just wanted to win.Which is why it's funny to hear Democrats like Jaime Harrison pretend they aren't the side that has been throwing their fellow Americans away like human garbage for a decade, all because they couldn't beat Trump.So yes, the Democrats have a Nazi problem, and it's high time that the Republicans gave them a taste of their own medicine by saying so at every opportunity. Who knows, maybe it will make the Good People of the Left think twice the next time they point their finger and scream NAZI! // This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

“If the rule you are following has led you to this, of what use was the rule?””Do you have any idea how crazy you are?””You mean the nature of this conversation?””I mean the nature of you.”So goes an exchange in No Country for Old Men, but it's a conversation the Democrats might have with themselves as they gather for yet another protest after ten years of them. If the rule you are following has led you to this, of what use was the rule?”Protests are meant to be the voices of the unheard. Yet these protests are the voices of those who never shut up. Not for one minute, not for ten years, and all of us have had to endure them like being trapped inside Willy Wonka's chocolate factory with hundreds of thousands of Veruca Salts.What are their No Kings protests anyway? What have they been since 2016? What are they trying to say? Is it like the ex who smashes all the dishes in the kitchen when her husband tries to leave? I won't be ignored, DONALD.What's the point of it? To what end now? Of what use was the rule? The voices of the unheard? More like the side that had everything. All the media, all the institutions, all the culture, and for a time, all of the government. The people had only Trump. They gathered their small donations and, by some miracle, voted him in, because they had a right to be represented, because this is their country too. It was a revolutionary act that mounted some sort of opposition to a movement that had swallowed up much of American society and demanded that we all go along or be left behind.They managed to have the mother of all protests in the Summer of 2020, smashing windows, burning buildings, beating up cops, and throwing massive fits that said WE'RE MAD! But mad at what? Democracy? Sorry, you lost an election?I try to remember being one of them and feeling the same way. But why did we think we had the right to protest an election just because it didn't go our way? And not just protest, but protest all of the time over everything. Because we had all the power and we couldn't stand to compromise with the other half of the country. They had to go, MAGA had to go. We canceled them. They're racists, we said.Elections only counted if the Democrats won. The other side was not allowed to win, try to make a change, or fight for their right to representation. Not in 2016 and not in 2024. So the protests will not end because the people have to be made to suffer for their vote. So fine, the American people said in 2020. Okay, we'll vote him out. Donald Trump is an existential threat, and our country is pure chaos. Desperate times call for desperate measures, so that, you know, like rigging an election, becomes necessary. And fine, we'll vote in Joe Biden, maybe that will calm things down - finally, the protests will end. Cut to: a botched exit from Afghanistan, 13 American soldiers dead, two wars in Russia and the Middle East, one long dark winter, a bad economy, and are we topless at the White House?It was like George Spahn had moved in and ushered in the Manson Family. Things were getting weird, and the culture of silence and climate of fear meant no one would tell them that they were freaking America out. The Democrats became totalitarian while in power, not just censoring speech on social media, not just institutionalized cancel culture, and a transgender contagion that was spiraling out of control, an obsession with race and racism and antiracism, and if that weren't enough, they weaponized the Justice Department and tried to throw Trump both in jail and off the ballot. Suddenly, the Trump chaos wasn't looking so bad. But we still lived through the first president to have his home raided by the FBI, the first mug shot, and then watched him almost getting his head blown off on live television. None of that made even the slightest bit of difference. They were still somehow the victims even though they lost both 2016 and 2024 entirely on their own.Whose fault was it that Joe Biden, behaving like a king, elbowed out any challengers even though he was in serious decline? Whose fault was it that the Democrats and the media said nothing? George Clooney said nothing until he was publicly humiliated after the debate.Whose fault was it that they pushed Kamala Harris as the nominee, thinking it would be easy to defeat Trump, after all, he's a twice-impeached, four-times indicted, convicted felon! Whose fault was it that Kamala Harris was a terrible candidate, and every honest Democrat knew that in 2020. But suddenly everyone just pretended not to remember how she was humiliated and triggered by Tulsi Gabbard, and then dropped out because she was polling so badly?Whose fault was it that the Democrats have given their party over to the lunatics who still insist trans women are women and that they should be able to play in sports against real women? “We just need to change the messaging,” said King Barack. What choice did reasonable people have but to vote the Democrats out and keep them out until such time as they can come back to sanity? They fight against mass deportations and want an open border, while also demanding free healthcare for all. They never see any problem with this. To them, it's a human right that someone else always has to pay for. They are the victims here, and all of America is expected to address their needs OR ELSE. NO KINGS!They're like the attention-starved kindergartner who can't stop crying in the corner, the stalker ex who monitors your every move, and the nagging wife who won't leave you alone, all rolled in one — what about ME? What about my NEEDS? They are the party of the rich, yet pretend to be the voice of the people. As if. That ship sailed long ago. The Bernie Sanders/AOC/Zohran Mamdani brand of socialism is yet more virtue signaling for graduates of Ivy League colleges and wealthy celebrities. As long as you signal Tax the Rich you can chum around with Anna Wintour and Kim Kardashian.It all sounds good, right? Let the poor people have free stuff, and they'll leave us rich folks alone. They're happy to pay a guilt tax as long as they can Instagram by day and sleep at night. Give the poor and the marginalized whatever they need, and join me on my yacht after that climate change fundraiser. I would be more sympathetic if, after ten years, they had something, anything other than more protests. If they could face the truth about how crazy they have become. If they could understand just for one minute that they were only getting one side of the story by a weaponized, biased media machine that seems to delight in keeping them mentally and emotionally unhinged. If any of them had any courage whatsoever to stand up to their own party, but they're too afraid. Even Gavin Newsom is afraid. Who are they trying to convince by now with these protests? Who would be drawn in and want to vote for them? It's mostly aging Baby Boomers and Jen Psaki viewers, naked grandpas on bikes, women with septum piercings calling babies parasites, and single women who shop at Erewon and Lululemon after high-priced pilates on Sunday.Why would you want to showcase all of that madness when most Americans are just trying to get through the work week? Have a beer on the weekend, maybe take a walk at sunset, maybe drive their Tesla that isn't smeared with feces or keyed down the side. And hope that their kid doesn't have to decide which gender to be in preschool or, god forbid, catch a glimpse of a naked appendage while coming upon a protest in the park or just trying to use the girls' bathroom. Why, Democrats, why? The only semi-reasonable one of them is John Fetterman, whom I once believed should never have run after suffering a debilitating stroke. They were doing it for a yes vote, I thought. Boy, did that turn out to be wrong, and now, he's their worst nightmare because he thinks for himself and isn't afraid of them. Now, according to Axios, they're trying to push him out. That's right, the only semi-sane Democrat is now persona non grata with the totalitarians because, of course, he is. They punish dissent. That's why they're in this mess. Protests signal to the public that the Democrats are helpless, that they have no ability to win elections or to compromise or have any kind of rational conversations about anything, much less any plan to lead America anywhere. Their messaging for ten years now is all or nothing. Give us what we want or we'll throw a fit. Listen to how insane they are with these TikTok videos:They shun anyone who votes for Trump. They treat the other half of the country like toxic waste. They have no way to attract new voters. Who would want anything to do with them? Sure, they still have lots of money and enthusiastic psychotic delusional voters, not to mention the legacy media and Hollywood.In their imaginary world, Trump is a king, a dictator, and a fascist when in reality, he's just the guy they could not destroy or defeat. It's never been Trump. America is exhausted. Ten years of the 19th nervous breakdowns the Left has been having over Trump, only to lose to him again in 2024, and probably to JD Vance in 2028 and 2032, is enough. The Democrats are doubling down on the very thing that makes them so repellent to voters. Helplessness and temper tantrums are no way to lead anyone anywhere. // This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

Heroes are in short supply in America at a time when we need them the most. Hollywood can't deliver them anymore, that's for sure. They are too ashamed of themselves and their history to remember how. Heroes seem to be a matter of interpretation, like everything else in our two Americas. But one thing was certain on October 13th: Donald Trump was a hero that day.He was a hero because whatever it is that defines Donald Trump, he was not going to give up on those last remaining hostages. He would bring them home. He found the best people who could get the job done, and with help from leaders all over the world, we watched a miracle.What a difference a president makes. Instead of watching bodies falling off airplanes with 13 soldiers dead in the Afghanistan withdrawal, now we were watching hostages rushing into the waiting arms of their families. We are at war for the narrative of what we all just lived through over the past ten years. It's like that line in the song from Hamilton, “who lives, who dies, who tells your story.” Who will tell it? How will it be written about in history books? If one half of America tells the story of Donald the Terrible and the other tells the story of Donald the Great, who wins? How will it be preserved on Google, YouTube, and AI? Here is what I know for sure. Trump isn't Hitler. He isn't a fascist. He isn't a dictator. Whatever else he is, the Left has been lying about him. They lie in the legacy media. They lie on social media. They lie to themselves. I know because I lied too. I lied because it was socially acceptable, even encouraged. The bigger the lie, the greater the reward.Over the past five years, I learned something about myself I never knew until Trump. I'm someone who cares about the truth, and that became a problem for me if I wanted to stay inside utopia. The more questions I asked, the louder and stronger the attacks against me became. I was to accept the lies or else. It matters how we tell the story of Donald Trump and the political machine that tried and failed to destroy him. That doesn't mean Trump is perfect, or that he doesn't create chaos and push boundaries that can sometimes offend or insult people. However, it does mean telling the truth about him and ensuring his legacy is recorded in history as one of the greatest stories ever told, and the most exciting time any of us will ever live through. Donald The TerribleYou might have had to be like me, someone who has spent 30 years online, to understand how the Left could become so disconnected from reality for so long. They exist inside a perfectly contained bubble that perpetuates confirmation bias through a media/social media feedback loop. Social media, and now AI, are new technologies that we must somehow survive, even though they often deceive us into thinking that what we see and read reflects reality. It doesn't. AI is a reflection of everything that has already been written. We must work hard to influence it, because it will reflect the lies.Our story begins in 2008, with the election of Barack Obama, as well as the dawn of the iPhone, Twitter, and Facebook, not to mention the Wall Street bailout that gave rise to two populist movements and sparked the crisis that led to the Fourth Turning. We had the opportunity to build a New America, a shining Woketopia on the Hill, with new rules of language and behavior — one big soup of humanity that required us all to find our tribal identifiers. Class went out the window, as did the free market and the silent majority. Identity became a means by which we ranked ourselves and others. Obama was our leader, and as wealth and power shifted leftward and society began migrating online, the Democrats amassed an unprecedented amount of power. If you were living like this, you felt like you were at the cutting edge of something brand new. We were not only leading the country but also the world. The problem was not only that we had abandoned much of America without even realizing it, assuming everyone would be on board with our new direction, but also that we did not build our house of bricks. We cultivated victimhood and fragility, which made us ill-equipped to deal with the rise of Donald Trump.He was our ogre rampaging the quiet countryside while we stayed locked behind the castle walls, terrified that he might storm through the gates. Our comedians became our court jesters, and the legacy media delivered only news that was acceptable to the ruling elite. Hollywood reflected our singular hysteria. We had our magic mirror to tell us, always, who is the fairest of them all. Had there not been a big lie that consumed us that Donald the Terrible was an existential threat, maybe we'd have been okay. But when, at long last, Donald the Terrible was pushed out of office and Joe Biden was installed as a placeholder for our King, Barack Obama, the Democrats couldn't deliver. They showed the people that they still didn't care about them, that they would double down on their same toxic policies and force all of us to live under their increasingly strident rules.The border was open. Crime was rampant, thanks to defund the police. Gender ideology was not only a full-blown contagion out of control, but no one was allowed to even talk about it. Somehow, that truth never found its way in. Instead, the lies grew and the delusion took the Democrats all the way to raiding Mar-a-Lago, four separate indictments to put Donald the Terrible in prison. They took his mug shot. They forced him to sit in court so he could not campaign. They slapped him with a nearly $100 million lawsuit for defaming someone who was never defamed. And never, in all of that time, did they once talk about Joe Biden's failing cognitive abilities. Not once did they turn the camera around to look at themselves and see all the ways they were failing us.History must tell that story. It's the only way to understand what came next and what made Trump a hero. Donald the GreatWhen I was a Trump deranged lunatic, I was doing what everyone else did every second of every day. I was scouring the world for proof of Trump's evil nature. So I, too, read Mary Trump's book on her uncle. I expected to find stories that would serve as the necessary smoking gun, justifying how much of our emotional real estate was now devoted to obsessing over him.Instead, I found myself seeing a different side of Trump than I'd been conditioned to believe, even though that clearly was not Mary Trump's intention. She wanted me to see her uncle as uniquely dangerous, but how could I after reading the part where Trump was abandoned as a toddler when his mother was sent to the hospital after the difficult birth of his brother Robert? Donald Trump was just two years old, but he was already a fighter. He had to be. He had to survive without his mom at a time when he needed her the most. That was his first lesson in self-reliance. It was also his first lesson in seeing the brighter side of life. He could have spent all these years blaming his childhood and blaming her. But he never did. Why? Because he always paid tribute to his mother and chose the positive, he made his life better, and that is the power of positive thinking.That wasn't the only lesson in being emotionally tough, but it does explain, at least a little bit, how he was able to keep pushing through attacks that almost no human could survive. He wasn't babied. He wasn't coddled. He was thrown right into the deep end.And that is how you get to the guy who did not falter when they used everything in their considerable arsenal to destroy him. Each time they went at him, whether they knew it or not, they were making him stronger and transforming him into Donald the Great. And perhaps that helps explain how Donald the Great came to exist at all. That is what we all saw on October 13th. We saw that guy, the guy who would not stand down and would never allow his enemies to tarnish his good name. Here is Megyn Kelly:The Democrats still have not learned their lesson. If anything, they've only gotten worse.They may not like that Trump writes stuff like this:But they always overplay their hand. I don't happen to think his TIME cover is so bad. To me, it looks like he's looking to Heaven, and there is a halo around his head. But why should he trust any of them after ten years of attempting to destroy him through imagery? A day before, TIME tweeted this out: Make America Great AgainTrump's secret weapon has always been his loyal supporters, his MAGA base. He had their backs, so they had his. They showed up on January 6th at great cost to their reputations and their incomes. They were tarnished with lies and propaganda, but they stuck by Trump. It was felt most profoundly in Butler when none of his supporters ran after he was shot. As Trump said so eloquently at the convention just days later, they wanted to make sure he was okay.Then, when he says he isn't supposed to be here, they chant back to him, “Yes, you are.”This has never been the story of the Fourth Reich and the Second Confederacy. This has always been a love story, a grassroots movement, a basket of deplorables, standing by the only guy who saw them at all, let alone the guy who would fight for the America they want.That was what I witnessed in 2020 when I began watching Trump rallies. I saw happy people who were celebrating. How can they be celebrating? I remember thinking. Why aren't they miserable like we are? The answer is that, no matter Trump's many flaws, he has the unique gift of saying what no one else had the courage to say. And through him, they have a voice.Here is Scott Adams:And here is a Trump supporter:Every day, Trump is at war with the truth because there are still so many powerful people who want the lie. But they must know by now that this thing is only moving in one direction. We're never going back. Best lay down your weapons, Democrats. It's over. Here is Scott Adams again:The Democrats probably had no idea that in their unending pathology, their TDS, their ten-year temper tantrum that is still ongoing, they would sabotage their own fairy tale, Donald the Terrible, and manifest a better one, Donald the Great.And so we must tell this story over and over again until one day we won't have to because everyone will already know the truth.// This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

I've been hated by the Party of Hate for five years and counting, maybe longer. For a while, I tricked myself into thinking it was people who didn't really know me. They judged me on my tweets or my opinions. But then, after I came out as a Trump voter, I felt hate even from the people who did know me.I've seen sons disown their mothers, wives disown their husbands. I've felt the hatred from the people in my town who put up alienating lawn signs that seem to come from a good place until you think about what they're really saying: agree with us, or we will hate you. When I was a kid, my stepdad forbade us from using the word “hate.” We were not allowed to say it for any reason, not “I hate brusselsprouts,” “I hate doing the dishes,” or most especially, “I hate you.”I felt it bubbling up so many times - what is a better word, I would wonder. There is no better word, I would conclude. Hate is the word we use to describe that all-consuming heat that bubbles up inside us that we can't control. There are perfect words for things, or as Anton Chigurh said in No Country for Old Men, “you pick the one right tool.”What is love? I knew what that was the first time I saw my baby's face. What is hate? What all of us felt in November of 2016 when Donald Trump won the election. From that day forward, for the next ten years, we would be defined by and consumed by hate.The hate wrapped itself around us. It comforted us. It made us feel morally superior and less alone in our misery and less helpless in our actions. It justified everything we did, whether it was protesting Trump's inauguration or forming the #Resistance. It justified even worse, beating up, spitting on, and knocking the red hats off of Trump supporters. The rulers of the Left's aristocracy, the empire that is now in tatters, said nothing. They seemed to delight in watching all of us good soldiers protest, even smash windows and burn buildings to show how angry we were, because that made them feel less like the failures they are. Blame Trump, blame the voters for the crime of voting them out. Blame anyone but themselves.All of culture was now consumed by the hatred that blotted out the sun and kept us trapped in a long, dark winter of misery and rage. It was our obligation as citizens of utopia to take a side against the half of America that had betrayed Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Hollywood, universities, corporations, institutions, book publishing, libraries, and restaurants all sent the same message to the Red Hats: you are not welcome here.The directive from on high was not to “normalize” what was not “normal.” The people didn't just vote in Trump to represent them — that would be democracy. This was something else. This was an affront to all the better people —the ones with all the power. Those who called themselves the good side, the moral side, the side written by Aaron Sorkin and directed by Steven Spielberg, the lawn sign people who say JUST BE KIND, were in the grips of an emotion they could not name, let alone control.You do not speak like we do. You do not believe what we believe. You do not accept our version of reality. We don't want you here. We hate you. Hate was what we were feeling, and yet hate was a word we'd given away. It didn't mean this overwhelming sensation that made us use our social media to demonize and dehumanize the working class. It meant people who did not go along with our progressive ideology. It started back in the 1990s with the fight for gay marriage. “Love is love” meant you're with us. “Hate” meant you were against us. Hate was what all of those bad people over there were, the God people, the Conservatives, that's what defined them, not us.Without the right words to describe what we were feeling, we had to find other words. Nazi, fascist, dictator, bigot, homophobe, racist, rapist, xenophobe, transphobe. And when that wasn't enough, we had to go after how he looked, his weight, his hair, his hands, his skin, his relationship with his family, the cars he drove, the food he ate.Trump was the only thing we could see because hate was the only thing we could feel. Like this woman on TikTok who embodies so much of what defines the Left today.It wasn't that Trump didn't troll or provoke us or give as good as he got. He did. Every one of his tweets drove us deeper into our hatred. How could he say that? That's not funny. That's not a joke. That's offensive. Presidents don't talk that way. Who would dare talk that way? Don't laugh. Take it seriously. Don't normalize him. Maybe for a while, the hatred was an understandable response to someone who offended everything we stood for. But after years of it, even I couldn't take it anymore. It wasn't just poison I could feel — a poison that began to make me sick — it was poison in our culture. It touched everything, ruined everything, destroyed a once-mighty movement, and collapsed an empire. That hate we felt, that united us, meant everything had to be sucked into it, like a black hole. Jokes weren't funny. Movies were dystopian and apocalyptic, and still are. Keep the people afraid. We are oppressed, said the wealthy ruling class. Hate became a useful weapon for the empire. They could police thought and speech to aim their weapon at anyone who disagreed with them, defied their rules, and thought for themselves. Two Minutes of Hate Although they will deny it and wish for it not to be true, what we all built back when Obama won was like 1984. We built an “inside” that kept everyone else on the “outside.” If you wanted to be on the “inside,” you had to follow our strict rules; otherwise, you were out.In 1984, Big Brother uses Two Minutes of Hate to keep the people consumed by an emotion that prevents them from ever thinking for themselves. Who would want to be hated like that?And yet, that described exactly what it was like to watch everyone I knew every single day on social media. It spilled over into real life because the media drove it — from morning news on NPR and the networks, through the day with social media feedback loops, to cable news, and late-night comedy. It was Two Minutes of Hate all day, every day.I didn't want to be part of it, and I had to know what was true and what wasn't. In 1984, we know Big Brother is lying about Goldstein, if Goldstein even existed. The version of Trump we thought existed was the same kind of useful illusion. What was the way out of this, I wondered. I'd already felt the wrath of my friends online for asking questions or breaking our strict code of thought and speech. They hated me, too. So I decided to try to reprogram my brain by cutting off all information coming from the media and social media.It wasn't easy. I filled up my head with only news from the Right. I wanted to know who they really were. I had to know if any of it was true. What I eventually found out was that no, it wasn't true. Every screeching accusation is a choice to condemn someone on flimsy evidence without giving them the benefit of the doubt. How can we live like this, I thought. We must be able to tolerate one another. But how? The first thing I needed to do was remember what words really meant. NewspeakNewspeak is necessary in 1984 for the same reason it's necessary on the Left. Like masks, it identifies who is who in a civilization migrating online, where words are sometimes all we have to decide who is who.Our manipulation of words like 'love' and 'hate' meant that they became elastic over time. We used them for our own purposes to drive our agenda. Break the rules of language, no matter how crazy and ridiculous they become, and you are HATE. The worst offender of Newspeak is undoubtedly “Gender Affirming Care.” It's a word game for them. You can't oppose it without opposing the “affirmation” of their gender. It is demanded and mandated. Which is how we get videos like this.Children are conditioned to obey these strict rules because waiting on the other side for them is Two Minutes of Hate, or a lifetime of it.Obey our rules, or else it's all done with rainbows and unicorns and a smile. Now look at how Charlie Kirk approached this difficult subject, with compassion and grace, but also by edging ever so closely to the truth. Is it any wonder they had to silence him by any means necessary? Child-like words are given for extreme procedures that they are in no way ready for. Top surgery is, in reality, a double mastectomy on a pre-teen or teenage girl who can't consent. Bottom surgery is either chemical or surgical castration, or mutilating your otherwise healthy organs to fake male body parts. The words became ways to define this bizarre new fundamentalism that has overtaken so many young people, and why so many of them are fleeing for freer, saner pastures. Did you know there was a word called Adultism? It means, “behaviors and attitudes based on the assumption that adults are better than young people, and entitled to act upon young people without their agreement. This mistreatment is reinforced by social institutions, laws, customs, and attitudes.” Heterosexism, cisgender — so many words. All it means is that you cannot question any of it and must follow these words to decide the meaning of things, rather than what you know in your mind and heart to be true; it's 2+5=5.Trump's biggest crime was that he stripped away gentle language and spoke the plain truth. None of their weapons of war — the Two Minutes of Hate — worked on him. We forgot the lesson from our childhood about the power of words. They are just words. They are not bullets whizzing through the air from rooftops. They are not shooting a CEO on the streets of New York. They are not setting fire to Teslas.I don't have to look far to see what the Left has become. I only have to scroll social media, and the algorithm gives me what is most popular. Yes, these are just words, but more and more lately, violence is echoing them. And on TikTok:Sticks and StonesCharlie Kirk was silenced because the shooter said he “spread too much hate” and it could “not be negotiated down.” An assassin did the dirty work. The end result was the same. That he wasn't immediately silenced, that his voice got louder as people mourned him and defended him, brought the hate back with a white hot fury. I've been waiting for five years for those I know on the Left to snap out of it, to thaw out, to find their humanity and their tolerance. Yet every day, it just seems to get worse. Because to them, they are becoming hate while combating what they have defined as hate. That's not everyone on the Left. I know some brave people who still treat me with kindness and decency. Those who lead their party, however, including their influencers, journalists, celebrities, and comedians, are the ones defined by hate that leave no room for any middle ground.Here is Jesse Kelly:Those who aren't consumed by hate are too afraid to stand up to the party. They can't even stand up against text messages that fantasize about violence and death against Republicans. Here is Abigail Spanburger in a debate with Winsome Earle-Sears, refusing to back off her support of Jay C. Jones:But I know that violence on the Left in the era of Trump is not new. The issue dates back to 2015 and has been reported on by Tucker Carlson and Liz Wheeler, tracing its origins to Trump's first term.But the Left controls the media narrative, and even if that's changing, it isn't changing fast enough. There aren't enough Democrats willing to stand up against any of it. Here is Pam Bondi and Benny Johnson on the arrest of a man who threatened Johnson's life:When I found my way into Trump world, I found exactly the opposite of what I expected: hate. I found tolerance. I found decency. I found kindness. I found love. It was unusual to find people who were not eternally miserable, bearing the weight of the world on their shoulders, like most progressives. Many of them are not driven by politics but rather by a higher power, and that is what prevents them from becoming a people and a movement defined by hate. There is also a lightness in escaping totalitarian oppression that polices every word that comes out of your mouth. It feels good to speak the truth, and it feels good to feel free. The death of Charlie Kirk has shaken moderate Democrats out of their hate stupor because of how so many on the Left reacted to his death.The Democrats didn't used to be the party of hate. But powerful people don't like having things taken away from them. In their fury and fanaticism, almost nothing of what they built, supposedly on inclusion and tolerance, remains. All that's left is the thing they can't name, the thing they can't extinguish: that all-consuming hate. I don't know how we end this madness. I don't have any hope that the Democrats will emerge from it any time soon. I guess that means we must move on without them to shape an America that, at the very least, understands the meaning of fundamental words like love and hate. // This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

George Floyd was born on October 14th, 1973. Charlie Kirk was born thirty years later, on October 14th, 1993. That is an odd coincidence, a cosmic joke upon us: we have two paths forward for America. How we honor these men in death will decide our country's fate. We all remember what happened on Memorial Day weekend of 2020. We all saw the video. It was horrific to watch a man die while begging to be freed and calling out for his mother. The video showed an unconcerned Derek Chauvin calmly placing his knee on the suspect to subdue him. Then we saw the life drained from George Floyd.Overnight, he was transformed from a career criminal trying to pass a $20 counterfeit bill to score drugs into a martyr for the systemic racism of America's police, and a “racist” America that elected Donald Trump.Millions poured into the streets, breaking lockdowns. Defund the police, they chanted. A photo circulated online of a fake Derek Chauvin with a “Make America White Again” hat. If you worried about the riots, the looting, and the violence, or sympathized with anyone who was brutalized that Summer, like Sue and her 100-year-old mattress store, you too were a “racist.”When I showed the video of Sue, my friends shouted, “How can you care more about property than people?” As buildings burned, as chaos reigned, whatever mass hysteria had taken hold four years earlier, when Donald Trump won, had now reached its pinnacle. It felt like war. But against what? Police brutality, White America, Donald Trump?In reality, it was a way to reclaim not just the White House, but what Mark Halperin calls “cultural hegemony,” where they get to decide what we can and can't say and think. They decide what books and movies are “racist” or phobic of one kind or another. After that Summer, there would be no debate about any of it. That America was “systemically racist” was the default. Anything you said could convict you in the court of public opinion as a “racist.” All it took was one accusation against you.A massive industry of “antiracism” ballooned as wealthy whites poured millions into their desperately sought-after absolution. It was laughable and grotesque, but it set the tone for what American society would become in the future. There was a disease in America that needed to be eradicated — the disease of “whiteness.” This was and still is being taught in public schools and universities. It's so bad that young people see transitioning or becoming non-binary as a way of being accepted. Now you start to see why Charlie Kirk was and is such a problem for them. He challenged those ideas. He challenged the mandated doctrine. He criticized Affirmative Action and DEI, not to mention trans rights and sex outside of marriage, and that abortion is murder. All of that went straight to the heart of the empire.But let's not get it twisted. The reaction to George Floyd's death was to transform America into a fascist-like Woketopia with nearly every major institution on board and handed more power to those at the top, who could destroy anyone for breaking the strict rules.That has meant the Left is free to dehumanize the Right in any way they want, as long as they tag their target with the mortal sin of “racism,” which they have attempted to do to Charlie to distort his message and silence his voice.In those days and weeks after Floyd's death, no one on the Right celebrated. Trump did not do what Barack Obama did: make a public statement of condolences before launching into an attack.Trump never smeared George Floyd in death, though he did condemn the protests. The high-minded media ignored the violence almost completely in 2020, and no one would dare write an investigative piece on the life of George Floyd or look at the case critically. When Bari Weiss and James Bennett were chased out of the New York Times, it was the Left eating its own for daring to challenge the mob. Firing Donald McNeil or David Shor did not happen because they questioned the doctrine. It was because they were accused of being “racists.” That is very different from people being fired for dancing on Charlie Kirk's grave.To pretend, in any way, that the Right has the power to re-order society, to mandate thought and speech, to implement strict doctrine in every institution, corporation, business, and social media platform is to either have amnesia about the last ten years or to willfully lie.That isn't exactly the sentiment of Thomas Chatterton Williams in this Atlantic story, The Other Martyr - MAGA has found its George Floyd. The title is slightly misleading, but since it's behind the paywall, I don't have much to work with. He writes:For many on the left, Floyd's asphyxiation turned a flawed and desperate man into a Christ figure, someone who bore the weight of the world's failings and, in so doing, cleared a path to fix them. In the feverish weeks since Charlie Kirk's assassination, the MAGA right is undergoing its own religious ferment, animated by a new martyr. Just as the left used Floyd's death to justify and hasten all manner of political ends, the right is invoking Kirk's name to advance illiberal aims and silence opponents. In death, Kirk has become a cudgel.Even if Trump has gone so far as to condemn Jimmy Kimmel and threaten to silence speech in Charlie's name, there is no comparing that to how our society was transformed in the wake of Floyd's death.These are not now, nor have they ever been, two equal sides. The Left is feeling a fraction of what all Americans have been forced to endure for ten long years. Jimmy Kimmel was taken off the air for five seconds. The Trump admin wants to know why PBS and NPR were so one-sided for so long and why the public airwaves only support one side. But even asking that question is fascist. That's how much power the Left has.We see them all rising up to sign letters by the thousands, with Jane Fonda daring to pretend to care about free speech on “both sides” to mock our leaders. Yet she and all of the high-status elites in the aristocracy said not one word as cancel culture purged hundreds for thought crimes for years.I lost much of my income in 2024 for mocking “White dudes for Harris,” and Gina Carano was fired from Disney for a tweet. Tucker Carlson was thrown off the air after Chuck Schumer threatened Rupert Murdoch from the Senate floor. Every time, the Left cheered. Now they want to pretend like they care about free speech?The truth is that Charlie threatened them because he did what they could never do. He offered to discuss his views with people he disagreed with. He put the ideas to the test. He spoke with respect and kindness, but his ideas were resonating, and he was changing minds one debate at a time. So of course, they can't afford to see his star keep rising now that their empire is in collapse. That's why all of the big names are now coming out to make a statement about Charlie when he's not here to defend himself. No one did this in the wake of Floyd's death, certainly not at the New York Times. Here is Ta-Nehisi Coates echoing that sentiment:But Mark Halperin, who interviewed Charlie many times and who knew him well, was not holding back in his rebuke of the lie that Charlie “spread hate.”They don't realize that the more they try to lie about Charlie, to bury him in the past as a “racist” who “spread hate,” the more people like Halperin and others will fight to protect his good name. Here is Emily Jashinsky breaking down a NY Times investigation on Charlie Kirk's debating style, like he's an insect in a jar. That is how desperate they are to hold onto the cultural hegemony and to silence Charlie.Here is Megyn Kelly going to great lengths to debunk the viral lies about Charlie.Charlie said provocative things because he wanted to shake college kids out of their indoctrination stupor and have them think critically about what they had been taught to recite by rote. That's what teachers are supposed to do. That is what art, journalism, and comedy used to do. Yet, that is what the Left sacrificed to demand obedience to the doctrine. Which Way Forward, AmericaTwo 19-year-olds. One is Violet Affleck, the victim of every awful lesson pushed upon her by her extremely progressive schools and parents who can't stand up to her. Here she is at the United Nations making a pitch for masks in 2025. Meanwhile, another 19-year-old, Brilyn Hollyhand, is continuing the tradition of Charlie Kirk. He's not cowering. He's not shrinking back. He's fired up because one man led by example. Which way forward, America? Masks? Helplessness? Celebrating victimhood or something else, another way forward, a way out, a way to success. Perhaps Charlie was a threat because he sought to rewrite the future for everyone, regardless of their skin color. Maybe his aim was to try something new because the old way wasn't working. The old way led to George Floyd. They don't even want to take the chance that what Charlie was saying was resonating. They're happy he's not here anymore. They're happy he was silenced. They want a sick and crippled America because then they are necessary. Unfortunately for them, Charlie wasn't like George Floyd. He wasn't famous only in death. He stood for more than just serving as a religious symbol. If you disagreed with him, he welcomed you in. Debate him. Change his mind.He has left his legacy everywhere - YouTube, podcasts, speeches, and interviews. Surely they must realize that every time they lie about Charlie, all it takes is one search to see the truth about who he was.Here is Charlie engaging in a respectful debate about DEI and affirmative action, where people can listen, learn, and form their own opinions. The Right didn't need to invent a religion or make Charlie a martyr for one; they already have that religion and they already have that martyr. Charlie was bringing religion back into the minds and hearts of the young, to give them something, anything other than hating themselves for the color of their skin. And it was his faith that led so many people to see the Left differently in the wake of his death. Be careful what you wish for.That Charlie Kirk and George Floyd were born on the same day offers up two paths forward. One path leads to victimhood with no way out in a “white supremacist patriarchy.” The other path is summed up by Andrew Kolvet, who is busy trying to keep Turning Point alive: Oh, how I wish someone had taught me that lesson thirty years ago when Charlie was born.Choose your hero wisely, America. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

They came out, all of them, like Lady Macbeth, crying, “Out, damn spot,” anything to distance themselves from the words of Tyler Robinson to his lover to justify the killing of Charlie Kirk. What was Charlie's big crime? He believed in the biological reality of men and women and refused to go along with what he thought was a lie. To Tyler Robinson, that meant he was “spreading too much hate,” and it could not be “negotiated down.” He was not having a mental collapse. He was not suicidal. He was a cold-blooded assassin doing the bidding of fanatics whose fury had brought them to this deadly moment. And so Charlie had to die because that's what happens to “fascists.” All of us who have been booted out of utopia for one reason or another know what it feels like to have our characters assassinated by people who think their moral superiority means they have the right to be Judge, Jury, and now, Executioner of those who refuse to comply and conform.One wrong word and you're a “racist,” even trying to stand up for someone being called a racist, like Megyn Kelly or Chris Harrison did, means they'll assassinate your character anyway, with no due process and no presumption of innocence. It was in 2020 that I could not take it anymore, this ugly, unending, bottomless dehumanizing of Trump and his supporters. Maybe it was my over-abundance of empathy, maybe it was that I'd been attacked, my character assassinated. Or maybe it was lockdowns, my dear friend and ex-boyfriend overdosing on heroin from loneliness, and my daughter moving across the country. Whatever it was, I felt the cold hand of evil every time I logged on, and I watched them unleash hell on one man, his family, his staff, and his supporters.Why are they doing this? I demanded of them. They must know what I know that dehumanizing whole groups of people is never the right side of history, no matter what. But once they cast Trump supporters as “racist white people,” “fascists,” and “Nazis,” there were no limits on what they could say or do. But someone had to be lying. Why would millions of people have voted for Trump, including my brother, if he were as bad as the media said he was? And it turns out it wasn't just the media doing the lying. It was the Democrats, too, and all of those good soldiers on social media going along with their lies.I used to be one of them. I went along with the lies, too, because I thought we were fighting to defeat an existential threat. But by the end of it, all I could see was that we'd built an empire of lies, just like Bernie Madoff did, and that our empire would collapse just like his once people started to uncover the truth. It was always going to end up here, because that's how dehumanization campaigns always end. Lynchings in the Deep South, concentration camps in Nazi Germany, and the hangings in Salem. Or the Manson murders in 1969, the bombing of the Capitol in the 1970s. And now, attacks on ICE officers.Here is Mark Halperin covering for Megyn Kelly.The violence has continued because it's barely been reported accurately. They only publicize killings if they fit the already prescribed narrative, like if a “far right” white man opened fire. When it's on their side, they never address ideology. They say nothing when the hive mind indulges in a Trump death fantasy for an entire weekend, or TikTok users begging for someone to “just do it” and become a hero. Or planning their celebrations for the day Trump dies — where else did they think this was going? It wasn't just the assassination of Charlie Kirk; it was the response to the assassination. It was revealing because it showed just how delicious it all was for them. Why else would they have been celebrating and cheering? That's the itch they want to scratch, and they're just glad someone out there got the job done so they didn't have to get their hands dirty.Oh, how good that feels when all you have are fantasies and words and cancel culture and shunning and screaming at, which then became spitting on and kicking and finally, shooting. Violence, that's what all of this was invented for, right? How else do you think you could get people to fight and kill in war? They came out on social media like flesh-eating zombies from a 1950s horror movie. We won't mourn a “racist” or a “fascist,” they insisted. It seemed to track alongside the decency of those whose humanity was still intact, and who knew that we don't shoot people because they disagree with us. The more we all felt for Charlie and his family, the uglier their social media posts became. They could not absorb what just happened to America. So it had to be Charlie's fault, Out Damn Spot:Amanda Seyfried then backed away and gaslighted like they always do, deflecting blame, bringing up other acts of violence to lessen what just happened to America. This was it, the moment people like her and the Democrats, along with their influencers, could have stood up, led by example, and said ENOUGH. Hollywood, the Left, and the Democrats have looked uglier. Try as they might to reclaim their moral superiority, their reaction to Charlie's death said it all. Even if many of them did not go along with it, the fact that they haven't stood up against it makes them culpable for that and everything that's coming next. Charlie did not incite violence. He did not spread “hate.” He stated his opinions while listening to the opinions of others. It is his opinions they don't like because they are strictly verboten inside utopia. You must believe what they believe, speak like they do, or else. They have never figured out the ugly truth, that they are the fascists, as this TikTok user explains so perfectly:Charlie's death was a test, one they failed. They spent all of their decency cred turning Jimmy Kimmel into a martyr for free speech as the news was breaking that the Biden administration forced YouTube to censor and demonitize those who would not use preferred pronouns or dared to doubt the results of the 2020 election. Kimmel cried, so what? Kimmel got high ratings, so what? Nothing could clean them of the stench. Out, damn spot. Another TikTok user:After they destroyed and ripped up their version of Charlie, the high wore off. Hungry for more, they went after his wife, Erika. These tweets receive hundreds of thousands of likes, which is why they often appear at the top of everyone's feed. Each time, you are given a choice: flesh-eating zombie or decency. Now, she was a woman who was acting, who didn't shed a single tear. They dug into her past and found a bikini pic from her days as Ms. Arizona and somehow connected her to Trump. Nothing could clean them of the stench of Charlie's blood, no matter how hard they tried to rewrite the narrative that they were the good guys fighting actual Nazis. They have to reckon with the truth about who Charlie really was and then ask themselves whether these tweets, this decade-long dehumanization, mean they had nothing to do with it, and even now, must continue to pummel Charlie's reputation when he's not even here to defend himself. The legacy media knew ten years ago that violence was rising on the Left in response to Trump, as a direct result of the messages they were sending. They were not telling us the truth. Not then, not now.Some of them want pats on the back for finally noticing and writing stories about what people on the Right have been talking about for years.Matt Walsh imagines what would have happened if all of this had gone the other way. The Democrats need a revival of decencyWhat if Obama or Hillary or any of them had the courage and, yes, the decency, to say enough? ENOUGH. It's time to put our weapons down because a man was just shot in the neck for no other reason except that he didn't agree with the Left. What if they could say that? What if they could have their own revival, a revival of decency?What if that was the message Jimmy Kimmel gave? What if the Democrats made speeches in Congress, and that was the message? What if they apologized to all of us for lying about half the country for ten years? What if they said it was wrong to call other people “Nazis” and “Fascists”? The best they can muster, because even they know how bad this looks, deep down they know, is to “both sides” it, as Hillary does here:Rather than focus on themselves and what they've done, they have had Trump to use as their dumping ground. They are addicted to the daily ritual. That's the only purpose Jimmy Kimmel serves now, and John Oliver, Stephen Colbert, and the legacy media and Hollywood. But you have to ask, when is it enough?Ten years of nothing but blaming Trump, of hating and bullying people who might not agree with their increasingly cult-like doctrine, with no one in the Democratic Party to call them out or tell them to stand down. No one in the media either. If no one ever tells them that it's wrong, why would they stop?They have lost everything. Their numbers are in the toilet because Americans can't stand them anymore. The death of Charlie Kirk and their reaction to it have only made it worse. It has been a clarifying moment for many of us who might have been holding out hope that something this horrific might finally pierce the mass delusion that has taken us to this very dark place. The problem with what we built, our utopia oh so long ago at the dawn of social media, the iPhone, and our god and king, Barack Obama, was explained best by Milan Kundera in his book Laughter and Forgetting:Having an insulated, isolated utopia where the rest of America is locked out allows everyone to play the part they want. E. Jean Carroll gets to pretend she was defamed and walk away with almost a hundred million. Jimmy Kimmel gets to pretend he's a good guy, never meant to smear MAGA, and receives glowing headlines in the wake of it. Kamala Harris gets to pretend she ran a successful campaign, but America was too racist and sexist to vote for her. I used to think this was our biggest problem, this two-tiered society, their castle in the sky. But after Charlie, now, it is so much worse than that. Why can't they see what they've become? Why can't they see where it has taken us? Perhaps it was the immense outpouring of love for Charlie, the overwhelming grief of so many people, and the admiration for the impressive movement he built, which helped change the country and elect a president, that made them feel a little bit jealous. They don't have anyone like that on the Left because they can't do what Charlie did. They can't have conversations with people they see as “Nazis.”Sooner or later, the mass delusion will come to an end. It always does. Those who believe themselves to be better than half the country will have to face the truth about who they are. The only question is how bad it will get before they do. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

If Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez plans to run for president in 2028, she's just made the biggest mistake of her political career. That speech of hers will be written in ink, and it will haunt her for years to come. Why? Because she didn't know the first thing about Charlie Kirk, and everyone who watched her give that speech knows she's either ignorant or lying. We know that on the Left, they do not believe in any kind of presumption of innocence when it comes to words. Words are harm. Words are violence. Most of all, words define who you are. They found some words Charlie Kirk may have said one time, but they strip them of context and refuse to confront the whole human being. But that's what they do, right? That's why so many of us have fled. AOC's attempt at a posthumous cancellation of Kirk made her look ridiculous. I don't know if she realizes it yet, but she will one day. George Floyd's death was the very thing the Left feared showing up in real life. We know what came after. But with Charlie Kirk's assassination by a guy who didn't like his words, it was on an entirely different level.George Floyd, like Melissa Hortman, served as a symbol of the Left's view of a country full of bad people, “racists” and “misogynists.” Who they really were didn't matter. Charlie Kirk was everywhere. We saw him speaking to us on YouTube, on TikTok, on X, on podcasts. He was on Bill Maher. He was on South Park. He was leading a massive movement of young people who were excited about changing the world. The algorithms didn't know he died. Our brains and our hearts somehow had to process someone who was so close and yet no longer with us. I'm writing a longer piece about the Democratic Party and its failure to meet the moment, but in honor of the memorial for Charlie Kirk on Sunday, I thought I would put together a video montage of clips and various voices to give Ms. Ocasio-Cortez a better idea of who Charlie Kirk really was. The truth is that they're all bitter and jealous of what Charlie Kirk was doing. No Democrat ever would or could. They don't debate. They shut you down. They shut you out. They shut you up. I've never talked to a Democrat who ever wanted to listen. They start to glitch out if you try. They'll hang up, or they'll start hurling insults, or they'll walk away. The idea that any of them could do what Charlie did time and time again, offering up respectful but spirited debate, is laughable. He was the voice for so many who could not articulate arguments as well as he could and who had the courage to touch untouchable topics. There is not a single Democrat who can do that. They only know how to tell you what to think.The legacy media and the Left will attempt to write Charlie's story, and they'll write it badly. They'll scare people by warning of rising “Christian Nationalism.” They'll cherry-pick things he's said because why wouldn't they? That's why it's important for those who know him to counter that argument any time they can.Let this be the beginning of making sure they don't lie about him out of a lack of “education” or “ignorance.” I hope you enjoy the video. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

It's funny that they all suddenly care about censorship, free speech, and cancel culture, isn't it? And the chilling effects that had on open expression? Have they looked at Hollywood lately? Ever hear of a culture of silence and a climate of fear that has all but gutted a once-thriving industry? Do they remember why Elon Musk had to buy Twitter?How many people did we watch unpersoned, disappeared, and banished from utopia? How many lives have been ruined just for daring to speak the truth about the differences between biological men and women? Remember All Lives Matter? Remember Blue Lives Matter? Remember the MAGA hat and all of the ways people were assaulted, screamed at, spit on, and shunned just for wearing them?Do the hundreds of names in the database for Cancel Culture register at all? Remember the Harper's Letter and how so many were canceled just for signing it? Now, we're all supposed to feel bad because those who chose to dance on Charlie Kirk's grave are now losing their jobs? Well, my friends, turnabout is fair play. What drama queens. They get fired, and it's the end of the world? They lost their jobs, try losing everything. Your family, your marriage, your friends, your status. The Right doesn't have that kind of power. And besides, no one is banning them from social media for posting things like this:I know I'm supposed to care and play the game of saying that firing people is wrong. Maybe it's wrong, but honestly, I don't care. If we just move on and pretend all of this is on par with using the wrong pronoun or questioning masks or the results of an election, then how can we ever absorb something as serious as someone being shot and having his throat exploded in front of his wife, his kids, and a rally full of students? Here is someone who was there and witnessed it. How can we just move past this with all the usual memes and mocking, sneering posts?Look at these awful women mocking Erika Kirk. If they get fired for this, I have not an ounce left in me that cares even a little bit. Maybe that makes me a hypocrite and a bad person, but I would not want these soulless monsters working for me.I wouldn't want a guy like this working for me either, partly because he is awash in mass hysteria and trapped inside a delusion of his own making, and partly because he seems to think it's necessary to keep killing people he thinks are “fascists”:Cancel culture was always about power. It was wrong when it began after Trump's win in 2016. It existed before that, mostly as a joke on Black Twitter, and in the murky, icky depths of Tumblr circa 2013. But it became frightening and chilling when institutions got involved. And when the government got involved, it was authoritarianism. Julie Kelly has a story on the crackdown after January 6th that should make anyone's head spin about what they did to American citizens, most of whom were practicing their First Amendment rights when they were treated like terrorists. Kamala Harris herself compared that day with 9/11 and Pearl Harbor, as if to justify everything that was about to happen to them (aka internment camps and Gitmo), from the show trials to the absurd charges thrown at many of them, policing their thought and speech, convicting them in the Court of Public Opinion with “spectral” evidence. They were accused and convicted “racists.”I have stood up to cancel culture for the last five years, even longer. I stood up for those wrongly accused, whose lives were ruined over the same things, either imagined crimes of their past, or one wrong word spoken, or a joke made on Twitter, like Gina Carano, who was fired for joking about COVID and pronouns.Why is it always on MAGA to take the high road? Imagine if a prominent left-leaning influencer of Charlie Kirk's stature (they don't have one, but let's say they did) was assassinated at a rally. Millions would pour into the streets all over the world. MAGA can't. Why? Because they'd be once again demonized as dangerous extremists. Their right to protest was eliminated after January 6th.Imagine if, in 2015, the Right had done this to Democrats:Yes, January 6th was bad, but so were the protests when Trump was inaugurated. Yet, it's always one group that is punished and one group that is either ignored or celebrated.Sure, you get the fake Patriot Front out in force in an attempt to continue the lie that Charlie Kirk was a “fascist,” but the Right doesn't riot and rally and protest like the Left. They can't, but also, contrary to popular belief, it's not who they are.For the record, the side that shoots the guy in the neck because they don't like his opinions is the fascist side. Supporting those celebrating his death is to support fascism or extremism. Do I think Stephen King's books should have been removed? No. Do I understand why MAGA would want to use its power to pay them back? Absolutely. When the Left rampaged through the cities all through the Summer of 2020, leaving violence and mayhem in their wake, the media barely covered it. No one was punished for it. In fact, all were rewarded. Anyone who criticized the protests even a little bit was canceled for it. I remember. I was there. When January 6th unfolded, there was violence, just as there had been all Summer. Yet, only one side was demonized for it. All the American people saw for months, years after, was the January 6th footage on a loop. Even now, they bring it up as though the Summer never even happened.After Biden took power, he weaponized the DOJ to go after Trump, indicting him four times after the Democrats impeached him twice. They tried to throw him off the ballot in several states. He defeated them all and won again, impossibly, in November. When Trump's DOJ went after John Bolton, the Left clutched pearls — how could he be using lawfare against his opponents!? When does the Left take any accountability for the bed they made? Ever?In theory, I don't agree with Cancel Culture. But I guess I don't care that much now, not after everything I've seen them do, not just what they did to me, but what they've done to MAGA for the past ten years, or anyone who broke their rules. They had all of the power, and they abused that power. This is their precedent. They've never apologized to those who have been canceled, like me, Graham Linehan, JK Rowling, and Joseph Massey, and hundreds of others, for making a joke or having an opinion. So cry me a river.But sure, if they all step forward and say, “We're so very sorry we canceled all of you. You are now officially uncanceled,” then maybe MAGA should think about feeling bad about it. But until then, they're having to lie in the bed they made — tastes like victory.And besides, on the Left, they fail upwards. If anything, they'll be celebrated for getting fired. Look at Stephen Colbert, who has now won an Emmy and will be getting a standing ovation tonight at the ceremony and a pat on the back for condemning political assassinations. Just not character assassinations. He'd never condemn those. He wouldn't have a career. As they gather at the Emmys tonight to hand each other gold statues none of them really deserve, they will all pretend for one more night that they're the good guys as a heartbroken MAGA gathers at the Kennedy Center to honor Charlie Kirk, something they will see as a desecration. They probably think it will be a Nazi rally. Instead, they might be surprised to find them honoring Charlie the best way they know how, by praying. They won't be able to avoid thinking about Charlie Kirk at the Emmys. They'll pretend to care about Cancel Culture because the worm has finally turned. But his death, that brutal public execution, has embedded itself in our culture, yes, even on the Left. Sooner or later, they will have to confront the truth about who Charlie Kirk really was. Because, even in the afterlife, he still knows how to encourage people to question their core beliefs with amazing grace. // This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

The death of Charlie Kirk and the reaction to it have shaken millions of Americans, at least those who have managed to hold on to their humanity in the past ten years. Even if the prominent Democrats in the party tried to project a uniform message of decency, to condemn the violence and offer condolences to the family, it was increasingly evident that they were no longer in control of their own party. Not even President Barack Obama himself could set the tone for these people, so consumed with hatred are they. Maybe they thought selling fear for ten years and calling Trump and his supporters an existential threat was a good idea because it would motivate their voters to the polls. Instead, they've created a Frankenstein monster that is now roaming the quiet countryside and scaring the crap out of normal Americans.They want all of us in this country to join them, to agree that Charlie Kirk got what he deserved. He supports gun rights, after all. That alone meant they would shed no tears for him, his wife, or his kids. That was the least of it. On TikTok, Blue Sky, and X, they went on and on, plastering the social media apps with negative stories about Kirk to erase any legacy the Right might try to build in his name.And maybe they thought the rest of America would agree that they should close off their hearts and separate themselves from their empathy to serve the greater political cause that has taken the place of just about everything else in their lives. But they miscalculated how normal people view violent death, especially political assassinations.On TikTok, many users were expressing their anger at the Left, and some of them even said this was it; they were no longer a part of the Democratic Party. Here is a video:And Jennifer Sey just registered as a Republican from “unaffiliated.”And Colin Wright redrew his famous chart:This is the last thing the Democrats needed. All they have left is Zohran Mamdani and Gavin Newsom's meme factory of would-be nepo babies of the Lincoln Project. They have no vision, no hope, no policies, no fixes, no solutions - nothing. All they have is this. Their hatred of anyone who doesn't conform and comply. Their approval rating has never been lower. Registrations are down by the millions. They're losing the support of Gen-Z. They have no plan to bring voters in except to draw more militant fanatics, and now, they've once again exposed how lacking in any common decency they have become. Congratulations, Democrats, oops, you did it again.From the New York Post:They're an army of Lord of Flies whose parents coddled them and raised them to believe all of their finger paintings were masterpieces, that their traumas defined them, and were “gentle-parented,” and when that didn't work, were drugged into perfection. They don't seem to understand that no one deserves to die just for having a different opinion.When one person's death means nothing to you and all you do is make a video where you calmly recite the reasons you don't care and why no one else should care? What is left of you?They sound like modern versions of the Stepford Wives who say exactly what they're supposed to say, repeating it almost word for word like robots:There is no one to pull them back from the brink. They collect so many likes that it messes with their heads. Their followers demand more, give us more. They're punished if they dissent, if they disagree, if they do any critical thinking whatsoever. Anyone who uses TikTok and any social media app knows that it's dominated by the Left. We built it, after all, oh so long ago. Even the Democrats themselves are under the control of the fanatics in their party, which is why they all felt emboldened to boo Charlie Kirk's name when they called for a moment of silence. Even if they didn't agree with it, why would they want to show the public just how petty they are?Not that we needed this tragic event to expose that ugly truth. It's been obvious for some time that the Left has been hijacked by the modern equivalent of the Manson Family. Joe Biden was the George Spahn-like figure who presented the mask of normalcy for what was most definitely not normal.All they had to do was the bare minimum, either stay silent or offer condolences and some generic comment on free speech and how political violence is never okay. But they couldn't even do that. Why? Because there is nothing left of them. All they have is this pathological need to control everyone and everything, whether it's destroying the careers of convicted thought criminals or celebrating their assassinations. All they know is they wanted them gone. In all of their lies about Charlie Kirk, their endless posts with hundreds of thousands of likes that prop up their own manufactured goodness as if to say, See, we still have the moral high ground, they came off somehow looking worse than they ever have. Charlie Kirk was a nice guy. They're celebrating his death because they didn't know that. They didn't know that because no one would tell them. Not their own social media feeds, not the legacy media. And when Ezra Klein tried to tell them with a New York Times op-ed, they began attacking him too, because of course they did. The dehumanization is a feature, not a bug. Here is Benny Johnson and Chris Cuomo:The Left so badly wants this to be a “both sides” issue, but it isn't. The Right mourned the death of Congresswoman Melissa Hortman. They did not blanket X or Blue Sky or any other social media site, smearing her. They would not have posted something like this on the Right:But until the people with the real power on the Left condemn them, nothing will change. They can make any false reality they want. They can tell themselves any lies they want. But what we've seen now in how they've responded to something that would shake any normal person out of their partisan stupor could cost them not just for the midterms but for 2028 and beyond.They think they have the narrative well in hand because the media is so supportive of everything they do. But every once in a while, they go too far, and they end up red-pilling Americans who shrink back in horror at who and what they've become and want no part of it.I am not saying “The Left” killed Charlie Kirk. Maybe someone on the Left did. Maybe they didn't. It doesn't really matter because they've shown their true colors in their perilous moment in our history. It's like that scene in The Dead Zone when Martin Sheen picks up the baby to protect himself. There is no unseeing that.They might think the silencing of Charlie Kirk will cripple the MAGA movement and everything he's done to build Turning Point USA and mobilize the young. But because of his death, MAGA will be more energized, not less, more motivated, not less, more determined than ever to save America from this madness. And they must because they are our only hope.Charlie Kirk has left a legacy, whether they realize it or not. It isn't just how psychotic they've become, and how so many of us have fled. But it's all of those young people he inspired who adored him. They will remember the assassination of Charlie Kirk. It will shape their youth the way the killing of Martin Luther King, Jr., RFK, and JFK shaped generations before. They will know that he was killed to silence him, and they will remember how the Left reacted to his death. And they will grow up knowing that it was wrong.Most of all, they will know that he built a movement that would ultimately defeat the most powerful political machine in American history. And if he can do it, so can they./// This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

After a shift at Zepeddie's Pizzeria in Charlotte, North Carolina, Iryna Zarutska boarded the train and quickly made a decision where to sit. Did she think about her safety? Did she fear sitting in front of a Black man with dreadlocks and a face twisted into worried knots? Or did she find a seat far away from him, just on a hunch?The truth is that Iryna had no real choice. If she avoided the seat in front of the Black man, she might look like a racist. She had no reason to fear him, after all, because she was sympathetic to the plight of racism in America and even had the words “Black Lives Matter” and “I can't breathe” scrawled on a chalkboard in her room. She was learning to speak English, and what better way than to get to know the villains and the heroes in America in 2025? She was just 23, having arrived in the US at the age of 20, with a degree in art and restoration from Synergy College in Kyiv. She joined a settlement of other Ukrainian refugees in Charlotte. She knew enough to tuck her hair into her cap, keep her glasses on, and not look like the blonde beauty that has now blanketed all social media. If you look like that, no one will leave you alone. But a little fear would have done Iryna good, as it would do any young woman riding the train at night. Fear is her only protection. The problem is, when it comes to Black men, white women are shamed out of that fear. They don't want to appear like racists or Karens. They won't grab their purse in an elevator or avoid sitting too close to a Black man. They don't want to buy into the stereotype that has white women fearing Black men for centuries.As she boarded the train that night heading home, she could not have known that the man she sat in front of had thirteen previous arrests and was diagnosed with schizophrenia. She wrapped her arms around her body and seemed to display a sense of foreboding. She looked afraid of something or someone, just not of the guy sitting behind her.With her earbuds canceling out all noise, she might not have heard the man take out his knife. Before she knew it, he was stabbing her neck, killing her. Did the other passengers scream? Did anyone try to do anything to alert her to the danger? No. They were too afraid. When her murderer finished, he paced around the train as the passengers huddled in fear, with blood dripping all around him, her blood. She escaped the war in Ukraine only to be murdered by a country also at war, at war with the truth. The truth about crime, about mental health, about Defund the Police, about bad governance.There was a time when this would have been a major news story. Now, after 2020, this story would have to be memory-holed, like every other story where a Black man is the perp. The only stories that go viral now or become major news stories are those that fit the narrative - it's white men, incels, “white supremacists,” and MAGA you have to fear. So, how would Iryna have known to even be afraid or cautious that she might want to find a seat far from everyone on the train? Maybe she wouldn't wear her headphones. Maybe she would look around at everyone, even the guy sitting behind her. But she didn't. Here are Megyn Kelly, Rich Lowry, and Charles C. W. Cooke.Stories like these are reported on local news, but they never capture the attention of the major networks or legacy media, like this story of a woman in Chicago who was beaten to a pulp by a repeat offender. Reporting on white women as victims might devalue their brand. It might generate outrage and an uproar that they are contributing to racism and discrimination. But what about Iryna and other young women just like her? Will we send them out into the world without warning that violence can come at any time, no matter the skin color?And why is everyone okay with the double standard? The silence by the media on deaths or killings that don't involve a white man? How do they get away with lying to their viewers and their readers? Has the New York Times even covered this story? If they do, it will likely be only to call out “MAGA” for turning it into a story about race.“Don't be a Good White Liberal” Those were the words I told my daughter many years ago when she went off to college. “Always protect yourself, no matter who it is. Don't let white guilt prevent you from being cautious.” I had to tell her that. I had to drill it into her head. It would be our secret. She would never have to tell anyone, but she would know. What prompted me to tell her that was the story of Lily Burk from 2009. She was the daughter of a progressive Liberal who helped her mother feed the homeless in Los Angeles. She attended one of the expensive, fancy private schools I could never have afforded for my daughter. One day, Burk wanted to practice driving, so her mother sent her out to run some errands. She happened to see one of the homeless people she fed for charity. She knew him. He knew her. He pressured her to drive him to an ATM and get him some money. Her card didn't work. So he bashed her head against the dashboard and murdered her.That was long before Black Lives Matter, before Defund the Police, before cashless bail. Even then, it wasn't exactly easy to talk about a crime like this, much less warn our daughters as they headed off to college. But that story haunted me. Even now, I can't imagine what it must have been like for her mother to wonder, How could I have let her take my car? How could I have raised her to be so trusting? Why didn't I tell her to be cautious even around homeless Black men? I knew I had to get the message across to my daughter, Don't be a Good White Liberal at the cost of your own safety. You'd think I would have followed my own advice. But white guilt runs deep. That's why in 2023, I fell for a scam. I thought it was a call from my bank. I could tell the caller was Black, so I was as accommodating and trusting as I could be, not wanting to seem like a Karen. He told me that someone had stolen my bank card, and he listed my purchases. Somehow, he had my account information. Then he said, “Did you wire $4,000 to someone?” And in a panic, I said NO! He said he'd stop the payment, but I had to confirm that it was me. That was my mistake. If I hadn't been trying not to be a racist, I might have doubted him or asked him if I could call him back, but I was too worried about his feelings. Once he got my confirmation, he was able to disappear with $5,000 from my bank account, all the money I had. I've never told that story because I am ashamed of how stupid I was, how easily manipulated I was, and that white guilt. It turned out to be a harbinger of things to come. The next year, I was canceled by Hollywood and called a “racist,” which would wipe out my income. Oh, the irony.The story here isn't to fear Black men or that Black men are more dangerous. It's that white guilt often means ignoring the gut instinct for self-protection. The false narrative pushed out by Hollywood, the legacy media, and the Democrats - that only white men are bad or violent will ultimately make all women unsafe, and hiding the truth to fit the narrative will get more women like Iryna killed.Every night I go to sleep, I worry about my daughter. I want Trump to send the National Guard into Cleveland. I want her to be protected while living in such close proximity to a high-crime city. But if she can't be protected and the streets can't be safe, then let her remember to protect herself, to be aware of who and what is around her at all times. I made her watch the video. I don't want her to be another girl on the train, failed by weak leaders and undone by white guilt. Iryna deserved better. She deserved to fulfill her life as an artist. To maybe get married, maybe travel back to Ukraine when the war is over. But most of all, she deserved to be safe, to be left alone, to make it to her stop just so she could get off the train and find her way back home safe and sound.The GoFundMe for Iryna has now raised $112,616. // This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

In anticipation of a Fourth Turning series for paid subscribers, my friend Andy just posted our conversation about the Fourth Turning and various other topics. His youtube is The Generation Report and his Substack is Fourth Turning Chronicles. Hope you enjoy! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

Everything changed for me in early June of 2020, when the Tom Cotton essay appeared in the New York Times and all hell broke loose on Twitter. I was scrolling the app to my detriment, as I always do, and all of a sudden, it was like the night Donald Trump won the election. Big trouble in blue-check city. The New York Times published an op-ed that called for the military to be brought in if the riots could not be controlled. Even typing that sentence, calling them “riots” instead of protests, was a thought crime and could not be said out loud, so you can only imagine how horrifying it was for the reality deniers on Team Fragility to hear Cotton's thesis statement, “This week, rioters have plunged many American cities into anarchy, recalling the widespread violence of the 1960s.”It was dangerous because it was the truth. Like this scene in The Insider, where Jeffrey Wigand's story has to be buried because it might disrupt a corporate merger at CBS News, except this time it might upset the Times staffers and the Twitter hive mind.The point was, Cotton was not only telling the truth — a truth all of us could see with our own eyes — but he was reflecting the majority opinion of Americans. That's why Bari Weiss and James Bennett asked Tom Cotton in the first place to represent the other half of America that the New York Times and everything under the Left's control abandoned. I sat in my apartment, gobsmacked that all of this was playing out. Here we'd spent months on lockdown, making our own hand sanitizers and masks. My daughter was sent home from her senior year of college to have her graduation on my balcony. And all of a sudden, none of that mattered because “systemic racism” mattered more. Yeah, that's what the experts told us.All of these years later, after everything we've seen and learned about that time in our history, we know the Democrats needed it to be bad — bad enough to pressure Americans into voting out a one-term president with a strong economy. It's just that I didn't know that then. All I knew was that no one would talk about it. If you did, your career would be over.The Tom Cotton op-ed would change the course of my life forever because that was the moment I could suddenly see that I wasn't getting the truth. I was getting the negotiated truth, the narrative, what they wanted me to know. I began to wonder, what else wasn't true?It was also the moment everything changed for Bari Weiss, who'd been hired to shake up the media bias at the New York Times. Everyone I knew on Twitter swarmed her, attacked her, and attacked the Times the day the op-ed was published. They were dragging out the history of James Bennett. They were accusing the Times of “putting Black bodies in danger.” The staff felt unsafe, and before long, Bari Weiss became the problem.They kept the piece up but affixed an embarrassing disclaimer at the top, which is still there:After that, Bari Weiss didn't just resign. She took a flamethrower to the Times in a fiery resignation letter that was the shot heard round the world, or at least the internet. She wrote:But the lessons that ought to have followed the election—lessons about the importance of understanding other Americans, the necessity of resisting tribalism, and the centrality of the free exchange of ideas to a democratic society—have not been learned. Instead, a new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn't a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor. As the ethics and mores of that platform have become those of the paper, the paper itself has increasingly become a kind of performance space. Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions. I was always taught that journalists were charged with writing the first rough draft of history. Now, history itself is one more ephemeral thing molded to fit the needs of a predetermined narrative.They thought that was the end of Bari Weiss. They'd chewed her up and spit her out. Boy, were they wrong. It is now one of the greatest success stories ever told, almost on par with Donald Trump defeating the machine and winning again. According to Puck News, Bari Weiss and the Free Press have now been offered a deal upwards of $200 million to sell the site to Paramount/Skydance and put Bari Weiss in charge of guiding CBS News back to some kind of credibility. Even if Weiss doesn't take the deal, it's still a victory lap for her. There will be rumblings that this deal only took effect because of Weiss's overt pro-Israel stance after October 7th. No doubt, she will be hit from both sides over that one. What happened to MeBecause of Weiss, I started a Substack too, five years ago, in July of 2020. By then, I was already a pariah on my side. I could not use Facebook because of the ongoing attacks, which would still exist should I make my return, which I never will. I'd been swarmed and harassed on Twitter/X more times than I could count. On July 11th, I wrote my first Substack post:On the one hand, I am worried that if I start writing what I've been thinking it will be met with harsh reprimands. At the same time, there are not enough people on the left willing to speak up to talk about what is happening for fear of being called out, shamed, and put out of work. I run my own business, but in this climate, the fear is real. A few angry phone calls can put anyone's source of employment in jeopardy. I'm having a hard time keeping my mouth shut, is the only problem. I see a disaster looming and I feel like joining those brave voices that are trying to shift the course of the Titanic which is about to slam into the iceberg.Nobody read it. No one knew it even existed, but it made me feel better that I didn't have to suffer in silence. Keeping it confined here meant I could still earn an income at my other site, AwardsDaily.com, one I'd been running for 26 years and earning a decent income from for almost as long. In ordinary times, my own website would be where I wrote what I thought and felt, but I knew even the most subtle dissent offered up would be the end of everything. I'd made a name for myself on Medium writing from the other side of the aisle, and I couldn't return there either. In both cases, the readership did not want to hear what I had to say.I kept thinking I had to be that person with the machete, clearing away the sticks and weeds, snakes and spiders, so others could safely travel after me, especially my daughter, who deserved to grow up in a free country where she did not have to be afraid to say what she thought and believed, that she could write any book she wanted to write. I couldn't know that the more people read this Substack, the closer I'd dance to the flame. It didn't really take off until Real Clear Politics began linking to my column and Megyn Kelly interviewed me on her show. So did Glenn Beck. Now, somehow, miraculously, people were paying to subscribe and wanted to hear what I had to say.But this world is kept far, far away from the other world, the Doomsday Cult, the bubble of the Left. Most of them had no idea what I was up to because they would never even think to look. To them, all of those bad people on the outside are to be shunned and ignored.At some point, though, considering how many people there were out there gunning for my destruction, I knew I had to come clean and come out and let all of them know what I thought and where I stood. I also wanted to use whatever voice I had to help Trump win, to defeat them. I was too loud and too obnoxious on Twitter. I was careless. I was doing what I have always done in the 30 years I've been online. I didn't change. Everything around me did. I made a joke mocking “White Dudes for Harris,” and that tweet went viral, with people whispering that I was a “white supremacist” and a “racist.” That caught the attention of the Hollywood Reporter, and they thought a story on my political shift would be interesting. They called me a “Maga Darling,” and that was the end of that. That ended any hope of making money on my website. Even though I defended those who were getting canceled many times, I was still taken aback by how it felt to have all those doors slam shut and all those people turn away. It was isolating and, in some ways, terrifying.The crime I committed was crossing the Trump line. Most heterodox voices refuse to cross it. They'll mingle with Trump supporters, but they will hold that one card back, knowing that when the ship rights itself, they might want to play it. So I don't have the same happy ending Bari Weiss does. I can't take a victory lap, at least not yet. She has her whole life ahead of her. I have my whole life mostly behind me. I'm eternally grateful that there are so many readers out there who get something out of what I write. In some ways, this has been the summation of my life online, tapping out words on the screen, hoping that those words land in the hearts and minds of readers. Hoping that I can be heard. I don't know what I would have done with that. I will never stop saying thank you for saving my life.I don't know if Weiss will take the deal. $100 million or even $200 million means she'll be set up for life. She will never have to struggle. It will also mean she is less free. It means they can “cancel” her again, and believe me, they will try. If she is the head of CBS News, everything will be her fault. The bad ratings no one on the Left talks about now will suddenly be the headline in every mainstream media outlet. Every story will be heavily scrutinized in a way it never was before. They manifest failure where no such failure exists, and they'll never give her any credit. She should heed the wise words of Megyn Kelly, who has been there and done that:Either way, if she's sitting on $100 million, maybe it won't matter. Then again, who knows, maybe she can lead a revolution in the legacy media too./// This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

Part One | Part TwoI didn't just leave the Democratic Party. I ran screaming from them. On Friday night, I was reminded once again why.The news hit X that Trump had died. It wasn't true, of course, but for some reason, those who think that the only way to gain back power from Trump is “mess with him” or “troll him” seemed to think this was funny.But as usual, the Left can't meme. It wasn't funny. It was chilling because of how obsessed with Trump they've been and how their hatred has boiled over into madness.It became a frenzy, a wild-eyed bacchanalia on TikTok. They were smiling and cackling at the mere thought of “it finally happening.”After all, the TikTok trend of “when it happens” has been flourishing on the app, along with “somebody just do it,” for quite some time. They're strung-out junkies by now, hunting for that dopamine hit that comes from blurting out what shouldn't be said.Looking at their eyes, their crazy, crazy eyes, always makes me think of the Manson followers who had that same look, especially as they skipped through the courthouse while on trial for having slaughtered innocent people who were enjoying a hot August night in 1969 before the creepy crawlers came.The conclusion at the time was that they'd been brainwashed by Charlie. But how he brainwashed them wasn't that different from how the Left has brainwashed their followers. He surfed the wave of the anti-establishment counterculture, finding easy targets to dehumanize and blame. Are you angry? He seemed to say, take it out on them. They deserve it.The evil was at the top - cops were “pigs,” the rich “deserved” to die, which is why when Susan Atkins, aka Sadie, plunged the knife into the pregnant stomach of Sharon Tate, she only felt relief and a kind of euphoria:The Left of today reminds me so much of my childhood growing up as a hippie kid in Topanga during that time. I was too young to really remember the Manson murders, but I could sense the vibe shift in the wake of them. It was their inability to hold power, how the silent majority rejected them, that transformed the “make love not war” hippies into violent radicals.I also knew that we all believed religion was too oppressive, which is partly what birthed the counterculture movement in the first place. Sex, drugs, and rock n' roll only took us so far, I remember that, too. I was a child of the narcissistic “me” generation, where kids were sidelined as adults chased their bliss and “found themselves.”The rise of feminism also meant women adopted a false sense of security, and serial killers and rapists began sprouting up like mushrooms all through the 1970s. I remember the gas lines and the malaise. I remember the pendulum shift, and how welcome it was when our culture finally became too exhausted of the hippies, especially after the violence, and opted for a different kind of life.Money and success were the fix in the 1980s - mortgages, marriages, kids, jobs. But even that failed to do the trick. We were still broken and empty inside. By the 1990s, just as the self-help revolution and therapy culture arose in the wake of the FCC allowing Pharma to market to consumers, we turned to the brave new world of psychologists and psychiatrists who would “fix” us, heal us from our trauma and abuse.After a while, though, how we were abused, what made us victims, would eventually become our identity. For years, every time I met a man or anyone, I would tell my story of abuse to put it all into context: see me as a victim, feel sorry for me.In 2008, the Wall Street bailout of $700 billion was the crisis that sparked the Fourth Turning, according to Neil Howe, who co-authored the book with the late William H. Strauss. But it was an important year for another reason. It was the rise of Barack Obama, the iPhone, Twitter, and Facebook.While the bailout would awaken the public and eventually birth two populist movements — Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party — the rise of Obama would be the religion we didn't even know we needed. It was a collective sense of purpose where everyone had a seat at the table, but mostly focused on marginalized groups, everyone but the majority.We colonized the internet as Obama built his coalition on Twitter, as civilization began to migrate into virtual spaces. Because we were all connected, we could decide the rules of behavior, of language, of status. We remade a new America online to address our collective trauma and abuse and build a better America, a shining Woketopia on the Hill.As wealth and power shifted Leftward under Obama's rule, much of America's rust belt was abandoned. We didn't realize this as we tinkered with our perfect little world, our insulated bubble. We were so cut off that we almost speciated, with an entirely different language from the rest of America.The ruling elites could find absolution by borrowing oppression. They could elevate the marginalized and use them as a protective layer as the populists began rising up against the government.The Democrats, as the party of the wealthy, didn't have to address their needs or even acknowledge them. Turning the public against them by convicting them as “racists” in the media and in the court of public opinion served the Democrats well. Now, they had an existential crisis because Trump was leading the populists, and they were about to shock the world by winning.Mass PsychosisTrump's win would kick off Trump Derangement Syndrome, otherwise known as mass psychosis. Maybe it wouldn't have afflicted so many and gone on for so long if the people at the top - the Democrats and the ruling class - cared enough to calm things down. But they didn't. Having a public crippled by mass psychosis served their needs.Trump Derangement Syndrome: The Movie begins there. It was never about Trump. He was what Alfred Hitchcock would call “The MacGuffin.” It's the thing people in the movie care about, but the audience knows doesn't matter.As they chased their Macguffin for ten years, they had no idea that the real story unfolding was what happened to all of them. What happened during COVID, during lockdowns? What happened to a group of people who were fed the Russiagate lie, and even now, it has never been corrected or debunked.What happened to people who were told by the New Yorker, the New York Times, and the Washington Post that fascism was coming to America? What happened to the young people who absorbed and internalized the unending and relentless focus on the evils of Trump as the media cherry-picked the worst things he said and dumped them into the churn?And all for what? To turn out voters when the candidates don't drive enthusiasm? They never once thought using fear for that long would ultimately cause a mental health crisis in this country, especially among the young?By 2020, I could no longer endure the daily ritual, the two minutes of hate for one more minute.It felt like poison. I had to know whether it was true or not. Was Trump really all of these things we believed him to be, or was he the guy we all remembered from the 1980s, the guy in Home Alone? Or, in the worst-case scenario, was he the Goldstein-like figure from Orwell's 1984, used only to keep their voters in compliance and full of hate?So I did the hard thing and I decided to find out for myself. I watched Trump's rallies heading into the election, all five a day. I saw his supporters for the first time. They were nothing like as described. They were intersectional, for one thing, all different races, gay people, and even trans people.The one thing they had in common was that they did not belong to the ruling class and were not part of the Doomsday Cult. They were sick of Trump Derangement Syndrome: The Movie. They were exhausted by it. They wanted to move on. So did I.For me, finally seeing that none of it was real, that Trump wasn't who I was led to believe he was, that he was the Macguffin, and his supporters were not mouth-frothing brown shirts fueled by racism. And that meant, for me, there was no going back. It took all the courage I could muster — my Soylent Green is People moment, my To Serve Man is a Cookbook plea to say to them, “It's not about race. It's about class!”But class had been eliminated out of necessity. If America is a systemically racist country, then Barack and Michelle Obama are still oppressed, which gives them status. But some white guy strung out on fentanyl dying on the streets in Wisconsin is still an oppressor and has no status.Are they surprised the revolution happened to them?The Trump They Invented Never ExistedThe story the Left has been telling itself is how Shakespeare once described life in the play Macbeth: A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.Focusing solely on Trump for ten long years has meant they have never made any progress in solving the problems that put Trump in power in the first place.They've only hurt themselves because there is no version of this movie that comes to anything good. Should they take back power, what is their plan for the rest of the country that voted for Trump? Gulags? Mass deportation? Firing squads?Trump Derangement Syndrome has all but collapsed the empire, with Hollywood barely clinging to life, network television hemorrhaging viewers, and a rising counterculture movement they can't keep up with. Their jokes aren't funny. Their movies are unwatchable. Their moral superiority is unbearable.Voters are fleeing like rats off a sinking ship.The Democrats themselves have been recorded now as having no faith in the direction of the country, down to zero for the first time in history.Unfortunately, there is no snapping out of it any time soon. They are trapped in a hell of their own making and have arrived at the abyss. Their Great White Hopes, such as Gavin Newsom and JB Pritzker, seem to think that “fighting back” must also mean reflecting the mass psychosis that has distorted their perception of reality.But a great leader would be the one to help them out of it, offering rationality and critical thinking. A good leader would welcome Trump's help with crime to save mothers from having to worry about their children, but this is not a party that cares about them. This is a party that only cares about the ruling elite, still stuck in the Doomsday cult.It should not be about Donald Trump 10 years laterWhat has destroyed the Democrats and the Left was never Trump. They could have easily beaten him. They just had to be a little less crazy. But they couldn't even do that. The voters had in Trump someone who could see the working class at all, let alone help address their problems. But really, most of us voted for Trump as a way outThe Democrats have become so disconnected from reality that they believe it's acceptable to sterilize children and amputate their body parts, among other horrors.There is no such thing as a sane Democrat. Even those who seem semi-sane, like Rahm Emanuel, will buckle under the question of “gender affirming care.”That made voting for Trump in 2024 one of the easiest things I've ever done. I will spend the rest of my life reminding every single Democrat that they not only went along with it, but they also fought to preserve it. They own this and every terrible thing that will happen in the next ten years as children wake up and become adults and realize what has been done to them.That's just one of the reasons I think Trump is the Gray Champion of this Fourth Turning, the one we're living through now. 8 years ago, Neil Howe was asked this question. He wasn't prepared to answer it because Trump's presidency had not yet been tested.All of these years later, it's hard to see Trump as anything else:And maybe that's why a death fantasy was their last best hope. Maybe deep down, they know this is the end. Trump Derangement Syndrome: The Movie is nothing less than the rise and fall of a once-mighty empire and a disastrous campaign that has all but destroyed the minds of a generation.What the Democrats don't realize or won't accept is that the pendulum wants to swing. So let it. But until they find their way out of mass psychosis, we should do everything we can to keep them as far away from our schools and our government as possible.It brings me no pleasure to watch the empire fall, but I always knew it would. We built an empire of lies. I also knew that sooner or later, the truth would bring the whole thing crashing down.You can't stop what's coming. It ain't all waiting on you. That's vanity. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

As a lifelong Democrat, I always thought the problem of gun violence was easy to solve. Just get rid of the guns. It was one of the most important issues for us as Bill Clinton rallied voters to the polls in 1992. But back then, it wasn't mass shootings that we worried about. It was handguns. Just look at this scene in Aaron Sorkin's The American President, released in 1995, where Michael Douglas has to bury protecting the climate to pass a weapons bill, but by the end, he realizes he doesn't have to sacrifice anything. He can and will get both.Four years later, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold would become famous by shooting up Columbine High School with illegally purchased weapons. That led to the renewal of the now-expired 1994 Assault Weapons Ban originally implemented after Patrick Edward Purdy killed five children at an elementary school in Stockton, California, in 1989. We had a joke back then called “going postal,” referring to the same kind of person who would open fire on post offices or other office buildings. It seemed like men reacted violently to being rejected, either by a job or a woman. School shootings were rare. But Columbine hit differently than any tragedy that came before it.It wasn't just the crime itself; it was the pleasure the shooters took in carrying it out, performing for the security cameras, the casual cruelty, and later, how they became subversive icons. All of these years later, many of our early theories about them turned out to be wrong. They weren't really bullied. For them, it was more about the thrill of killing and gaining fame for it. By 1999, two significant changes had occurred in American society. The 24-hour news cycle, thanks to the O.J. Simpson trial, and the rise of the internet, which could give us our news even faster. However, it did something else as well. It allowed ordinary people to become famous overnight. That's still true. Anyone can get famous for anything. Mass shooters also have their influencers and platforms. But even more importantly, like the Columbine shooters, they are all caught up in the romance of building a mythology behind their planned shootings, their grand statements against society as they carry out their evil acts. They seem to have empathy for other shooters. They want to be like them. They want to be feared and remembered. The more evil the deed, the greater the myth. The endgame always seems to be suicide, go out with a bang. Solving that problem, understanding it, trying to get ahead of it, proved too difficult, so we pivoted to the guns. Always the guns. Just get rid of the guns, and the problem will be solved.Like these TikTokers: I used to believe that. I also demonized people who carried them, and it was an easy excuse to blame the other side. What else is new? At least we want to do something about it, I would say. For this reason, I began studying mass shooters. I thought that if I could identify the one thing they had in common, maybe we could find a way to reach them before they decide to pick up a gun.Every time I brought it up to anyone I knew on the Left, I would always get the same answer: it's the guns. Take away the guns, solve the problem. They didn't want to talk about anything else. If you lived through the Oklahoma City bombing and 9/11, it seemed obvious that if people want to kill, there are other ways. Just look at suicide bombers, or people who drive trucks through crowds, or go on stabbing sprees. No, guns just made it easier, but taking them away is not only impossible, it doesn't solve the problem. In my research, I came across a site called GunViolence.org. They lay out just how rare mass shootings are compared to the rest of the shootings in America. I was shocked when I actually looked at the numbers. Here is their ten-year review:Gun deaths are part of the everyday reality for many working-class families living in high-crime cities, and yet, in the post-George Floyd America, even talking about “Black on Black” crime is strictly verboten. It has to be the guns. On August 27, the same day as the most recent shooting in Minneapolis at a Catholic school, several other people lost their lives to gun violence. Like this:And this:And this - a man shot in his home in Mississippi. Two more:How about this shooting, captured on Facebook Live and viewed by millions in Chicago: The same party that thinks guns are the problem have not only refused Trump's help to bring in the National Guard to clean up crime, but have also attempted to “defund the police,” called all police “racists” all through 2020, and continue to ignore crime in cities like Los Angeles where all of the products have to be locked away and criminals aren't even prosecuted for theft under $1000.There is no question that the Democrat brand lately stands for defending and protecting criminals and crime rather than protecting citizens. They won't talk about how residents in DC are relieved to be able to walk on the streets and feel safe at night. This latest shooter, Robert/Robin Westman, bought his guns legally. Giffords.org gives Minnesota a grade of “B.” Yet, here are their suggestions to improve that grade:None of these improvements would have stopped Westman from shooting his gun through the window while Catholic students were praying on the second day of school. He did it because he knew that they were too trusting and that there would be few barriers in his way. For a guy like Westman, or any of the latest trend of trans and nonbinary perpetrators of violence, wearing a mask of a woman offers an extra layer of protection, but it also reveals someone who doesn't want to be who he is in a society that no longer has any use for men. Not only won't they look into it, but their greatest fear coming out of the event was whether they would offend the transgender community.You see how easy it is to blame the guns? Then, you never have to look at anything else, uncomfortable things, things no one can even talk about.And for those complaining that the Republicans are “politicizing a tragedy,” know this: all the Democrats have done for the last 30 years is politicize tragedies. Never let a crisis go to waste. And the answer is always the guns. Because “it's the guns,” we never had to face what we'd done to contribute to making this country worse. We never had to confront what the feminist movement had done to men. Listen to how these women talk on TikTok. It isn't just that men have fled the Democratic Party. It's that they've been abandoned by them and, worse, they've been demonized.I am not excusing violence, certainly not mass murder, certainly not of children. But how can we not even talk about what has happened to men over the past 20 years that has brought them to the point where so many of them feel like there is no place for them in society, that they are loathed at best, invisible at worst? And if we don't understand them, if we don't see them, if we don't know how to reach them, how can we possibly stop them? Oh, don't worry, we'll just take away the gun. That will solve the problem.We never had to confront what psych meds might have done to potential mass shooters. We weren't even allowed to bring it up lest we offend those afflicted with mental illness. At least now, under Trump, we have RFK, Jr. to take a look, finally, at whether or not these drugs had any impact on mass shootings. After the massacre at Sandy Hook, I realized we lost the gun debate. Adam Lanza's guns were locked up. But he stole them, shot his mother in the face, and went on a rampage, where he would later end his life.I knew that wasn't about the guns. It couldn't be. So what else was going on? How can we prevent this problem from happening again? The guns? Seriously? That's all you got? Yes, that's all they got. Even now. But what I know now is that we have to do the other thing. We have to pivot to protecting children — schools, churches, parks, restaurants. We must ensure our buildings are shooter-proof, just as we make sure they are earthquake-proof. Debating about guns for 30 more years isn't going to do anything. And then, we have to have a serious conversation about the deeper issues at play, not just with the most recent shooting, but with all mass shootings. How is it that they become celebrities? Why do men feel left behind? Why do they think they need something like this to be valued? Why did this shooter and so many others of late feel they had to transition or identify as something other than a man to be seen and valued? What can we do as a society to help them?We live in a take-no-prisoners new world of algorithms and isolation. It will likely disrupt our species in ways we can't even fathom. But one thing I know for sure is that to make the conversation only about guns is to be unprepared for everything that's coming next. // This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

Before the fascists came, America was finally on the right track. As the saying goes, when you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow. That's what happened with our violent but mostly peaceful revolution in the Summer of 2020. When Joe Biden took office, we had complete control over the message and could fire anyone at will if they used the wrong pronoun, doubted the election results, or dared to defy mask mandates or lockdowns. Or even wore a red hat. We erected a high fence around the Capitol. We shunned, destroyed, de-banked, fired, bullied, harassed, and abused anyone who ever supported Trump. The hearts and minds did follow, they had to. We'd laid the groundwork for our revolution decades before. Most Americans were unaware of it. So were most parents until lockdowns. Then, unfortunately, they saw, but by then it was too late. A whole army had come of age and now, had taken to the streets. Conform or else.That's how culture changed, and it changed dramatically, almost overnight — all were in compliance. Movies, fashion, books, the arts, comedy, and yes, museums finally did what they were supposed to do - tell us how to think, what to think, and whose side to be on. America wasn't ready for that back in the 1950s when Communist hunters in government and Hollywood punished those seeking to use culture as a conduit for dogma. It's the Conservatives once again attempting to purge American culture of an infectious mind virus. When Trump gave a speech at Mount Rushmore, it was a warning, like Mein Kampf. America knew where we were headed, but they put him in power anyway four years later. Then again, how do we really know he was elected? Like they say on TikTok, “he wasn't shot, he didn't win, he is on the list.”We know how close the election was. Just as when Hitler won in Germany, Trump's win was close enough to rob him of his mandate to decide America wants change. America doesn't. America is “woke” and likes it that way, and if they don't, too bad.Now, the fascists want the Old America back. They want people to feel proud of their country and be inspired to make the most of themselves, regardless of skin color or class. As if that's even possible in a White Supremacist empire founded by colonizers on stolen land on the backs of oppressed and enslaved people. But we're going to fight them, just like we will fight them, trying to close the border or clean up crime or end the crisis of unhoused persons. Fortunately, we have complete control of the BBC, NBC, CBS, ABC, The New York Times, and the Washington Post. They will project our message - they have to. They know that and have since 2020. And that message will have to be that Trump wants to eradicate all mentions of slavery, pretend it never existed at all. When Jillian Michaels tried to explain to the Good People at CNN that purging the “woke” from the Smithsonian wasn't about erasing slavery, it didn't go so well:But she's a fascist-apologist, which means we must do what we can to exclude her, purge her, and silence her. There is only one point of view allowed in our America. Anyone who tries to criticize us or dismantle what we built over the past 20 years must be destroyed. That is anti-fascism.So that meant she had to go on News Nation to try to further explain what she really meant.It doesn't really matter what Jillian Michaels thinks. What matters is what we tell her to think, and if she doesn't go along with it, she must be punished. We want every child or teenager forced to visit the Smithsonian with their school or their parents to know they should be ashamed of not just the color of their skin (if they are white) but of their country, its history, and its so-called heroes. We want every Black child or teenager who is forced to visit the museum to also know that they are forever and eternal victims; we need them to be. We need an endless supply of oppressed people to continue demonizing the oppressors and preserve our power. Not to mention, raise money from wealthy, guilty white people who need absolution for their sins of wealth and privilege. Otherwise, what's the point?Yes, it's to make everyone feel welcome, but they must know their place as symbols of oppression and never be allowed to rise beyond the menial jobs white people won't take. That keeps them in their lane. It's better than life in the third world. And it helps justify our movement. One exhibit depicts what looks like the Baby Jesus and family caught by border agents while trying to cross over the wall. Art must tell us what to think. This image conveys the migrants as martyrs under an oppressive system. It's a message that we project across all facets of culture under our control. We guide viewers on how to interpret this image and draw a conclusion about America. The message must be that all people who cross the border do so seeking democracy and a decent life. They are good. If you see them as terrorists or rapists or gang members, you are bad. You are a racist. If there is a Sydney Sweeney ad that celebrates “good genes,” well, the Gap will answer it with how we're all supposed to reflect female beauty as every color of the rainbow, because the Sydney Sweeney ad was racist. Here is another exhibit which reflects how we see our protected groups — it's never about achievement. It's only about identity. Identity is achievement. From the White House: I mean, of course, we know that Irish and Italian immigrants were attacked and prevented from voting and working in the US. They were white. But we can't tell that story because it muddies the message. All children need to know is that Benjamin Franklin was a racist. Art should depict any person who is marginalized as saintly and god-like. Here is an example of one of our children who is probably the last generation to know the truth before the fascists came.All school children should learn, as early as possible, about the various identity groups in case they might belong to one — surely they are aware of this even as toddlers. What we used to call a fetish is also now identity:The American History Museum's “LGBTQ+ History” exhibit seeks to “understand evolving and overlapping identities such as lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, transgender, queer, transsexual, transvestite, mahu, homosexual, fluid, invert, urning, third sex, two sex, gender-bender, sapphist, hijra, friend of Dorothy, drag queen/king, and many other experiences.” If this were actual art, there would be an exhibit labeled “The Woke Eye view” and offer some critical thinking of Critical Theory. But that would be blasphemy. Artists have always spoken truth to power, and we have all of the cultural power, so we decide the message. Because identity matters, the transgender fight is on par with Jim Crow in our ideology, so if you remove any of it, it is like you are erasing Black history, too.Illegal immigration is identity. Crime is identity. Theft, carjacking, murder, and rape are identity, unless you're white. Then you drive the news cycle for several weeks as we lament the harms of “white supremacy” on our society.If you try to stop any of it, then you will be screamed at, “F— you! You f—ing fascists! Why are you here? I don't want you in my city!” So said one brave resistance fighter who then, in a fit of pure rage, hurled a footlong sub at the Gestapo then fled the scene. We turned that into art, too. Ordinarily, we might care that the sandwich would make for a pretty good meal for an unhoused person, or that it costs carbon emissions to grow the animal, slaughter it, then drive the meat to Subway, and finally put the sandwich together, probably all labor by people of color or other marginalized groups. We might protest him or cancel him on social media for his carbon footprint. But that would be in ordinary times. These are not ordinary times. Anti-fascism is preventing crime in the cities because policing crime is another form of oppression. Anyone who supports making the streets safer is a fascist. All of the Good White Liberals agree: Fascism is here. Even Bill Maher says so. Sure, he kind of has to because if he doesn't, he might not get invited to the parties anymore. Or his show might be canceled outright. Or maybe he believes it. We get to say what kind of lawfare amounts to fascism. Terry Moran gets to say. Sure, we raided Trump's home and indicted him, took his mug shot. Threw Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro in jail for Contempt of Congress, tried to throw Trump in jail, tried to throw him off the ballot, probably tried to shoot him; we might have de-banked a few and kicked people off social media. Fired them for offensive words, ideas, or headlines. But you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.It all works together. Keep teaching that America is an empire of “white supremacy” and Black and Brown people must turn to crime and drug addiction just to survive it, well, then, we don't want the National Guard in our cities, because what would happen if they cleaned up crime? No crime, no democracy. We need the museum to explain why we need DEI, why we have crime, and why we need to accept crime and homelessness as a part of normal life in a sick and broken country like ours. As long as our country is sick and broken, then our movement is justified. We must eradicate fascism and restore democracy. 2020 was only the beginning. We just need to ensure we have complete control over the young. We want them as early as infancy. We want them in preschool. We want everything they see and everything they learn to be our message. Our America. Was it Orwell who said, “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.” That is our fight now. Who controls the present? We need to protect our message that not all are created equal. Our history must remind us every day that we should feel shame about our past, because how else to justify our survival? // This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

When I was struggling in my 20s, I would receive a $50 check from my dad every week. It would come from Gene Stone's Janitorial Service. He's dead now, and he would never want to be remembered that way. He was a jazz drummer, after all, and that is what he wanted people to know about him. But he also had a janitorial service where he would clean office buildings owned by his friend Dave from high school. Dave made it big in real estate and threw my dad a bone by giving him a reliable route to clean his office buildings. My dad needed the money, so he went every day on his route, cleaning toilets, washing down countertops, and vacuuming the carpets in low-rent buildings deep in the San Fernando Valley.I know the route because he gave it to me when I was a struggling single mom who wanted to raise my baby and not put her in daycare. And for a time, I worked as a janitor so I could bring my baby with me. It was honest work, except for those few individuals who seemed to take pleasure in ruining a bathroom in ways that no one would ever say out loud, much less write about in a Substack post. But I cleaned them, and I did the best job I could to make my pops proud and not embarrass him in front of his friend Dave. Now, we see the Gavin Newsom meme factory being praised by the media and the Left, for making fun of janitors.They think they're just doing what MAGA does, making fun of people. They make fun of Scott Pressler by calling him Nancy Mace. They make fun of Trump's assassination and the bandage. Except, as usual, the pod people have it wrong. Trump doesn't make fun of janitors. He doesn't make fun of gay men. Rick Grenell, the so-called “janitor,” is gay.Not only doesn't Trump make fun of the underclass, but he also took over the Kennedy Center and now the Smithsonian to do what our cultural overlords would never do: open up America's culture to everyone. As it is, both of these government institutions have served the upper-class whites who need absolution for their sins of wealth and privilege, so they virtue signal with social justice to shame all of those bad people over there who do not “believe” in their colonization origin story.I know what it is to be among the sneering class. I know what it is to virtue signal. I know what it feels like to be a “white savior” and how, for years, that was the only way people like me could feel any sort of purpose or worth. Because otherwise, we were just another “white supremacist.”I also know how this ideology benefited those at the top, and how ashamed I once was that my dad was once a janitor. Because, like all of those in Hollywood and everywhere else in American culture, what you want is to be part of the rarified elite, no janitors allowed. As long as you virtue signal, you are seen as “good” and “pure.”Well, not anymore. Newsom's desperate bid to unseat America's alpha male is reminiscent of a jungle fight between two silverback gorillas. My money is on Trump. For ten years, the Left has tried to mock him, humiliate him, defeat him, and all they got for it was a lousy White Dudes for Harris t-shirt and a humiliating loss in November of 2024.Trump has made a fool of every Democrat for ten years, and he'll make a fool of Gavin Newsom, too. Although he might not have to. The way it looks to me is like watching George Bailey and his future wife dance at the edge of the pool, not realizing they're about to fall in. They think the cheering is for the dancing.Newsom's obsession with Trump has reached almost stalker-level. He so badly wants to be Trump that he'll stop at nothing, it seems, and is perfectly happy to abandon the moral high ground to get there. But, as usual, because the Left can't meme, he's doing it wrong. Their imitation of Trump and MAGA is off because they are depicting the version they see, not the version that exists. They don't get it that much of what drove Trump's popularity was empathy. People like me couldn't stand watching their endless obsession, the unending hatred, the nonstop attacks. That's partly why I left the party. And all they're doing now is helping to rally MAGA once again. Newsom is a try-hard pick-me. He is the sleazy villain in a Lifetime movie. He's giving snooty college brat who bullies the nice guy. Don't forget where our hearts landed with the movie Breaking Away.He's the wrong one in a 1980s high school romcom, like James Spader in Pretty in Pink:His meme army, flying high on Adderall and Wellbutrin, probably thinks making fun of the working class is a winning pitch, and maybe it is for the upper class, who have run out of every other option. I mean, it's not like they have anything to offer the people, right?You can't feed your family with memes. They have no plan for the future, no vision, no way of governing the whole country except perhaps to throw half of us into gulags. What do they have left except to imitate what has defeated them? And when you've lost Joe Scarbrough:The party that is already too online is feeding the beast the Left has morphed into, as they have become consumed by their pathological hatred of Trump. So maybe that's right — this is exactly how to win hearts and minds of soulless sociopaths. According to Harry Enten, it's working! They're hoping mockery and bullying by a white guy who tweets in all-caps will work as political viagra to restore morale among their base. Ultimately, what they seem to crave is their own version of Trump. Newsom is so power hungry that he is happy to go along with it. But Trump is a survivor. He was raised to be a killer by a father who would not tolerate weakness. How else could he have survived two impeachments, four indictments, a felony conviction, two assassination attempts, and non-stop attacks from the empire for ten long years? By contrast, Newsom won't survive even one scandal. Listen to him try to defend stealing his friend's wife:Oh, and let's not forget when he ran like a coward from Erin Friday: First, he made headlines for saying allowing biological men to compete against biological women was “deeply unfair,” then he backtracked, because of course he did.Ben Shapiro opened his show with the latest scandal involving Newsom, who, of course, pivoted to Trump when called out:Newsom's tyrannical COVID policies destroyed the minds of children, not to mention small businesses. We watched them all close down. He kept students locked down longer than he should have. And that cost California a $2 billion settlement for students hurt by the lockdowns, and there is no way to recover what they've lost. Besides, Sheriff Chad Bianco is hot on Newsom's heels, highlighting the governor's obvious weakness when it came to leading California through a crisis. Newsom is now in a mad scramble to prevent gas prices from soaring to $8 per gallon. Environmental groups are coming for him, just as the LGBTQIA lobby came for him. He'll cave because he's spineless. His biggest problem is that he can't meme his way out of being a white, heteronormative male in a party that supposedly speaks to the marginalized. Gen Z, Black voters, and women will need to be on board for Newsom to win the primary. If Newsom and Kamala Harris, for instance, or even AOC, go head-to-head, then they will be at war with themselves. Who are we, they will ask, are we the party that can only win with white men? Or are we the party that wants to make history?Either way, in focusing only on the soulless bullies in his party, Newsom will have a hard time selling his own rotten policies to the Rust Belt. He won't be running against Trump. He'll be running against JD Vance. I'd bet the farm on JD. Why? Because he came from nothing, survived an abusive, drug addicted mother, fought to defend our country, and wrote a brilliant book about forgotten America.And the more they boo him, like they did at the Kennedy Center…Or kick him out of restaurants, as they did in Scotland, the more likely people like me will stand up for him and stand behind him.JD's success was earned, Newsom's was not. Just as Newsom hides behind his zillennials who do his meming for him, he will have to rely on the legacy media to transform him from a cipher into a man of substance.But if you're making fun of janitors, you're making fun of my dad and others like him who didn't have a powerful aunt in San Francisco but had to make money the old-fashioned way - they had to earn it. No one who makes fun of janitors should ever be President of the United States.The hardest work Newsom has ever done is slicking back his hair for a photo op. He's survived nothing. He's built nothing. He stands for nothing. And in that way, he's the perfect representative for today's Democratic Party. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

Nobody would discuss how strange everything became on the Left after Trump won the first time. But here's the truth: We went stark raving bonkers, especially the women.There was never anyone to pull us back from the abyss. The legacy media profited from our collective hysteria. The Democrats amplified it to scare voters to the polls. It worked for a while, until it didn't.And most of all, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton seemed to like watching the world burn on their behalf. I never thought that at the time, but looking back on it, I can see how cynical they were, how greedy for power they became. Along with the legacy media, Hollywood, and all institutions and corporations, we were their weapons of war, and they never seemed to care what that would do to us over time.The day my father died, I arrived at the VA hospice five minutes too late. His body was still warm. The day before, I recorded this scene from It's a Wonderful Life. The next day, he was dead.When the hospice nurse handed me his flag and said, “On behalf of the President of the United States, Donald J. Trump…” I burst out laughing. I was laughing at my father's deathbed.It was like a Facebook status update come to life, where I seemed to believe my narrative of who I was and what I stood for had followed me into that room, or that everyone else in that room would find it as ridiculous as I did that Trump was the president. No one else laughed. It wasn't funny. And I seemed delusional.I wish I could say that was my wake-up call, but it wasn't. That was only the beginning. It would get so much worse.When my younger sister, a Bernie supporter, showed up, we were screaming at each other in a hospice with all of the other dying veterans and their families within earshot. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

I sometimes wonder what it must be like at bedtime for the New York Times' Peter Baker and his wife, The New Yorker's Susan Glasser. Do they worry that the Gestapo will kick down their door and haul them off to Alligator Alcatraz for writing negatively about Trump?Do they watch out their window for the bright light of a circling Black Ops helicopter? Do they cling to each other in the dark and whisper like they're Anne Frank's family hiding from the Nazis?For them and millions just like them enjoying their lives at the top of the food chain, every day is the end of democracy, the end of America, the end of the world. They are afflicted with the disease of hyperbole, and they can't seem to find their way out of it.Once you use up threats to democracy, Hitler, fascist, dictator, Nazi, racist, rapist, pedophile - you have nowhere left to go. You've hit the wall. You can't get any more extreme than the most extreme.Because they can no longer distinguish between fantasy and reality, they are too crazy to lead this country, and Americans know it. Nothing they do now can fix the problem because the problem is everything - it's the empire. Americans rightly chose the less crazy side in 2024. They chose the real America, not America online.I got online 30 years ago. I helped build the empire. I fought like a good soldier for the Democrats until I could not stand living inside of what became a Doomsday cult anymore, and in 2020, I left.Since then, I've been sifting through the wreckage of the last ten years, trying to make sense of it. Was this just the unintended consequences of a movement rooted largely online? Is that how we became so disconnected from the truth and reality? Or was there more?As the Russiagate hoax unravels, and hungry reporters like Matt Taibbi excavate just how deep the rabbit hole goes, I have to wonder, was any of it real? Were we just tools of the establishment to prevent a populist uprising? Have they destroyed the collective mental health of millions of Americans just as a power grab?When a real revolution hit the streets in the Summer of 2020, a generation believed they were fighting the system because they were told that Trump was the system. They didn't realize they were the unwitting puppets of a much bigger system. A “hearts and minds” campaign that destroyed their sense of reality, this country's unity, and any hope of coming out of it.What the last ten years are starting to look like to me is that our government orchestrated the same kind of “color revolution” they've used to manipulate the elections in other countries. Only this time they did it here. They had the motive, the means, and the opportunity.Motive - to destroy the man who threatened our king, Barack Obama. Means - they controlled everything from the legacy media to Hollywood to social media. Opportunity — create an ongoing crisis that would require a “whole of society” approach to combat, such as communism or COVID-19.The same people who manufactured protests in other countries likely did the same thing here, at least to some degree. Why wouldn't they? All they had to do was sell Trump as an existential threat who only won because Putin meddled in our elections. And just like that, he's illegitimate.The press wasn't going to challenge them. They'd spend ten years going after Trump. No one in the #resistance would either because they couldn't be seen as “normalizing” a fascist. All institutions, corporations, and celebrities were all in on the war effort.And yet, they failed. Trump beat them at their own game. How did he do that? Because Trump was someone who didn't just build his platform online, as the Democrats have done. He also invested his time in America, the place. He built his house of bricks, and the Democrats did not.A New America OnlineIt all sounded good when Barack Obama built his coalition and his army of devoted followers on Twitter. I was one of them. The first record of an Obama Twitter account was in March of 2007. He signed up for it but hadn't used it and had just 23 followers.By May 5th of 2007, Obama was using Twitter to speak directly to his now 1,475 followers.On November 3, 2007, Obama was building a much bigger coalition, laying out his plans and appearances, and now had 5,000+ followers.Heading into the election, the last capture is on November 1, 2008.I got on Twitter around that time, too, because Obama was the new thing, and so was Twitter. They grew up together and, in doing so, birthed a new America online —a new empire, a new utopia. As of today, Barack Obama is followed by 130 million people, second only to Elon Musk.This might explain, at least in part, why all of us perceived Donald Trump as such an existential threat. Trump used Twitter, and he had been using the app himself since around 2010.Politicians speaking directly to the people, as though all of us could reach out and touch them, is without precedent in American history, at least in the modern age.It might have seemed like all of us were ahead of the game back then. We had complete control of the media narrative. If we wanted to spread the lie that Mitt Romney was a sexist because he said he had binders full of women, we could.But Trump had a platform and a voice equal to that of Obama's. That meant there was only so much we could do to shape the narrative. Trump did it all on his own as his Tweets began to drive the news cycle, especially after he won in 2016. And how could they not?It must have driven Hillary Clinton and the Democrats insane that Trump had access to Twitter and could say whatever he wanted to say, and they could do nothing about it.By the time the 2016 election rolled around, Trump had 13 million followers and Hillary Clinton had just 10 million. The differences between the two campaigns were stark. Hillary's side was all about identity-making history and centering on women and people of color.Trump's was about delivering for the people. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

A few years ago, if Sydney Sweeney had appeared in an American Eagle ad talking about her “good jeans/genes,” the uproar would have been just as deafening as it is today. By the end of the day, American Eagle would have pulled the ads. Sweeney would have been forced to issue a pandering, simpering apology. But none of that happened. Instead, Sweeney was celebrated, American Eagle's stock soared, and most importantly, the Puritanical Woke scolds have never looked more ridiculous. But most Americans aren't buying it. They're rolling their eyes at this level of hysteria and outrage over a silly jeans ad featuring a hot blonde, the kind we used to see all the time for all eternity until right now.Woke ideology has always been artificial and performative. It was never rooted in reality. It was a cosmetic fix for a ruling class that was too rich, too powerful, and too white. They needed symbols of virtue to absolve themselves of their privilege. It came at too high a cost. Their empire is collapsing all around them. You can't fool all of the people all of the time. Sooner or later, we must face reality and the truth.What is the truth? While beauty is in the eye of the beholder, there is still a standard, and there always has been. Take this woman, for instance. On what planet would she not be the beauty standard, and yet here she is pretending otherwise just to virtue signal to the fascists in the cult:What it all looks like to me is good old-fashioned bullying. What has shifted between older Gen-Z, younger Gen-Z, and Gen-Alpha is that they no longer want to look like sexless, genderless militant activists. This has always been acceptable for non-white women. It is only white women who have been shamed and scolded and told to de-center themselves. The best way to do that is to ugly themselves up and to celebrate everything but their beauty and their sex appeal, which was a way to punish them.So, you'd have movies like Barbie, where the hot blonde was front and center, but then standing behind her, like strategic Chess pieces, were the mandated intersectional, representative coalition. They thought it was giving equality, but it inadvertently read like “white supremacy.”Right about now, young women will flock to American Eagle to wear those jeans, signaling exactly the opposite message: they want to look hot, sexy, and desirable, because who wouldn't? Those jeans will make them feel like what it must have felt like to wear a leather jacket after The Wild One was released. American Eagle isn't trying to send a message so much as they are trying to sell jeans. After the Great Awokening, they pandered, like everyone else. Here are some examples of their previous branding:Now compare that to the latest Sydney Sweeney ad: Her ad cuts through the conformist, oppressive, stagnant monoculture like a hot knife slicing through birthday cake. Who wants to be associated with the screeching school marms on the Left now? Not teenagers, that's for sure. Calling everything racist has jumped the shark, as they say. It feels stale and yesterday's news. It doesn't feel modern, hip, and cool. Those protesting it are only making the jeans and Sweeney more popular.The criticisms were that the ad was “Eugenics” and “Nazi propaganda,” just because Sydney Sweeney said her genes determined her hair and eye color. But obviously she wasn't referencing either of those things because she knows what she's famous for.Sweeney is leaning into what has given her notoriety in our culture. She has what one might call a good “rack.” I can relate. That was sort of my entire life, being seen as the girl with a good “rack.” And every woman who has one also knows the “eyes up here” line. But Sweeney does it with a wink. She isn't shaming men for looking or noticing. She's showing them she's okay with it. How do you think we reached 8 billion people on the planet? The male gaze and women's desire to be gazed upon are nothing less than the forces that produced the entire human race.That alone is controversial now. But if the topic were only sexuality, that would be one thing. The really agonizing thing is the part about her being a white woman. That is, to the Woke, a mortal sin because whiteness is the original sin, the evil that lives inside of all of us who are white. This fanaticism has ravaged the confidence and identity of white men and women who seek to alter themselves not to be who and what they are out of shame. They dye their hair pink and blue. They wear septum piercings. They shave their heads. They wear drab clothing and try not even to look pretty. They find a way to be included in the LGBTQIA+ category so that they can be among the protected groups.In the most serious cases, they attempt to transition themselves out of their genders, which can and has sterilized them. The Woke support and celebrate this without even realizing how close that is to Eugenics. One million abortions a year can also be seen as a form of Eugenics, since all that really means is controlling births. This idea that white people should stop having babies or that we need to bring in more people of color to make our country less white is itself a form of Eugenics.True, the Nazis used it in an attempt to curate the master race, but Eugenics was practiced in this country up until the 1950s. Women were sterilized if they were seen as unfit mothers. Those who were not smart or had mental problems were also sterilized to purify the gene pool. There is only one movement that supports the sterilization of young people who can't consent, and it's not the Right.The Racism PanicThe idea that there were racists, racists everywhere, seeped into our culture after the election of Barack Obama. The fundamental differences between Liberals and Republicans on race were evident in a poll by the Washington Post that showed Liberals deliberately dumbing down their speech when speaking to Black and Brown people vs. Conservatives who don't. That meant the Right felt free to criticize Black people where the Left never would, unless it's Clarence Thomas.The panic began around 2012, with Obama's re-election and the rise of the Tea Party and Freedom Caucus. We were all conditioned to believe that these were “white power” groups rising up to attack and remove the first Black president. By then, Critical Race Theory was being taught in public schools, such as my daughter's. This coincided with Gen-Z getting online and finding their way into militant tribes that decided your worth by your identity. Before long, they formed an army of fanatics while most of us were not paying attention.They sold Trump as a “racist” and his supporters as the second “Confederacy,” and all of us believed it. Most people I know on the Left still believe it. You can imagine these two forces converging and what that might do to a society. It was nothing less than mass hysteria for the four years Trump was in power. The good news is that every episode of mass hysteria throughout our history is eventually punctured when the accusations become too ridiculous for the people to tolerate any longer. It was the accusation of witchcraft of the Governor's wife in Salem in 1692. It was “Have you no decency?” in the 1950s amid the Red Scare. I've been waiting for this moment for a long time. It always seemed like we were almost there, but the tyrannical mob would rise up and squeeze out their confess-as-a-witch-to-live apology, and we'd be back in it.So far, I don't see an apology from Sweeney or American Eagle, and I hope I never will. Because if they never apologize, they'll learn the only lesson corporations, institutions, and Hollywood need to learn. Let them get mad. Let them throw a fit. Eventually, they will exhaust themselves and take a nap, just like toddlers. I have the unfortunate curse of being ahead of the curve. It stems from 30 years online, and 25 of those years predicting the outcome of the Oscars. I've conditioned myself to read the signs that tell me where the consensus is headed.I have been warning the Left, the Democrats, and Hollywood for some time that the pendulum wants to swing and that if they don't see this coming, they will be left behind. Most of them didn't listen to me, but instead exiled me from our utopian diorama that denies reality to serve the elite. But the Sydney Sweeney ad and the reaction to it are proof enough that the tyrannical Woketopians have lost much of their power to force everyone into compliance. We're not all the way through the woods yet, but we're getting there. All thanks to a hot blonde and a company that could see the writing on the wall. Maybe now, we have good movies back. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

In their 10-year coup to spy on, discredit, impeach, and unseat the twice-elected President of the United States, Donald Trump, the Democrats have only made him stronger and more resilient.As Chris Matthews explains:By contrast, they've emerged from all of this as wild-eyed Doomsday preppers who have finally gone full Pizzagate, scraping the bottom of the barrel to chase a scandal that was never theirs to begin with, and one they never cared about until right now.Will there ever be any accountability for what they've done in their attempts to override American Democracy, disenfranchise half the country, and preserve their power?Will they ever confront the truth that Americans were so desperate to be rid of them, they were willing to re-elect the twice-impeached, four times indicted, convicted felon? Who would want them in charge? They have no plan, no optimistic vision, and no solutions.They have only one thing: an ongoing mass delusion that Trump is the ultimate evil. It is that delusion that has driven the hysteria that has led to the collapse of their empire. They just haven't figured it out yet. They lurch from one social media fantasy to another, all about Trump. And each time, it takes them deeper into their delusions as they lose all of their power.If sex is involved, whether it's an imaginary trip on the Lolita Express to Epstein Island or paid Russian prostitues defiling him on the bed the Obamas slept in, or his night with Stormy Daniels, his dressing room encounter with E. Jean Caroll, these insane, repressed, puritanical women who define the typical Democrat now can't seem to get enough.Give us more, their clicks and views say. We're bored. We need salacious details, no matter how ludicrous, contradictory, or implausible they may be. We need an injection of something other than the mind-numbing boredom of a monoculture that has become so sanitized and preordained that even Lifetime movies can no longer do the trick. Trump is their dirty little secret, the forbidden fruit, the dance with the Devil.The first version of Trump sold to us was that he was a raging racist because of the Obama birther story and other myths that helped create an existential crisis that required a “hearts and minds” effort to eradicate:That version led to violent attacks against Trump supporters in 2015.The next version was that he wasn't a playboy from the 1980s who could get any woman he wanted; no, he was a “rapist” thanks to the Access Hollywood tape and the multiple women who came forward to tell their stories, none of them believable.That led to the #MeToo movement, where due process and the presumption of innocence were disregarded, as once accused, forever guilty. You weren't accused of something; you were accused of being something. It was inside of you, spectral evidence, just like the witch trials in Salem. Every time someone was canceled in effigy of Trump, just as the hangings in Salem, it was a celebration for another battle won against an ultimate evil.One version of Trump made it all the way into the highest reaches of government. Imagine, a failed attempt to paint Trump as colluding with the Russians to win an election fell short, so they had to spin a yarn that the racist and rapist was also a Russian asset, compromised by kompromat.I believed it! I'd already bought the books on Putin in late 2016, how could it not be true? Rachel Maddow had told me night after night after night, laying it all out in painstaking detail. Here she is in June of 2016 dropping those breadcrumbs. Of course, I believed it because I believed her. I trusted her. I trusted them. They wouldn't lie to me, would they?The Clinton campaign even said so. They proved it with the changes made to the GOP platform to please Putin. That had to be true, right?No, it turns out. It wasn't true—none of it. Not only that, but it involved Barack Obama and his henchmen. If the lie that Trump was a Putin puppet resulted in Hillary's win, great. But what if she lost? Why not push out the lie anyway? Why not hobble Trump at the outset?Why not make him illegitimate just as he once suggested Obama's birth certificate was? Who wouldn't go along with it? We were all conditioned to follow the breadcrumbs and believe whatever they told us about Trump, so why wouldn't we believe this?It turned out to be a convenient pivot. It didn't have to be that Hillary Clinton was a high-risk candidate with more baggage than the Kardashians on a ski trip to Aspen. She was “likable enough,”up against a once-in-a-generation political talent like Trump.It didn't need to be the Clinton campaign's decision to focus on Georgia rather than Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. After all, the New York Times said she couldn't lose.Someone as powerful as Obama, a man we all treated like a god, could not lose to Donald Trump. He couldn't have stood on stage with Katy Perry and Bruce Springsteen and had an election go that badly. None of them could stand it, not in the FBI, not in the legacy media, not any of us.No, it had to be Putin.In reality, it was actually much less complicated. It was a one-in-a-million strategy laid out by Steve Bannon way back in 2012:They had to manufacture the Russiagate story because they couldn't face the ugly truth about what they had become, how they'd abandoned the rest of this country and insulated themselves in their castle in the sky. By the end, they were no different from other upended aristocracies when the people had had enough.This is not a complicated story if you are living in reality. The 2016 election recalled the infamous quote about the lavish ball held in honor of the 290th anniversary of the House of the Romanovs held in the Winter Palace, Saint Petersburg. But it was a moment that would symbolize the empire's ultimate collapse.While Democrats now have to fend off their own Communist uprising, 2016 wasn't one. It was the populists, a genuine grassroots movement that reflected the voice of a country that was sick of an elite ruling class lecturing them about how to speak, how to live, and what to believe in. Sneering at them. Judging them. Shutting them out.And yet, that couldn't be the reason Trump won. It couldn't be the people who made that decision. The people never decide, at least not when it comes to President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. They live by another quote, one from Citizen Kane:“People will think…””What I tell them to think.”The Russiagate lie was pushed through the feedback loop —a self-contained bubble that went from morning news, through the churn of social media, to legacy media headlines, up to cable news and late-night “comedy.”Those who questioned it, such as Matt Taibbi, Walter Kirn, and Aaron Mate, saw their careers evaporate, and their friends turned against them.Even after the entire thing was exposed and condemned in the Columbia Journalism Review, it hasn't made its way into the bubble. Everyone I know on the Left still believes it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

Dear Ms. Maher,You don't know me, and there is no reason why you should. I am mostly a nobody. If people know me at all, they know me as a former Oscar blogger whose public support for Trump destroyed my so-called “career.”But really, I am not all that different from you. Or at least, I didn't use to be. I come from your world, more or less. Not that I was ever a tech-savvy, globtrotting millennial in charge of National Public Radio, but it would not have been unusual for me to take a picture of myself in a mask in November of 2020, wearing a Joe Biden hat.In November of 2020, however, I was already afraid of the Democrats retaking power. Things had gotten weird on the Left, Ms. Maher. Really, really weird and no one would talk about it, least of all NPR or PBS. Then again, they couldn't talk about it because they would be destroyed if they did. Everyone knew that, and everyone just went along with it, especially you.I am a creature of the Internet and a former lifelong Liberal who left the party and the movement in 2020 after things had derailed so badly that I could no longer stand to be associated with them. It was the dehumanization of half the country. It was the corruption within the Democratic Party. It was the dangerous future in store for the nation's young people.It took me a while to finally get kicked out of Woketopia for good, banished to the virtual gulag. I made a joke about “White Dudes for Harris,” suggesting finally “white power” was back in style. But one thing about the Woketopians, they have no sense of humor. None. It's been stripped away and replaced with yet more of the suffocating, repellent monoculture that's been shoved down our throats for these long ten years.They all thought I was serious, that I really meant it, that “white power” was back. Thousands saw the tweet. A close friend of mine would text me to see if I really meant it. I wanted to joke that no self-respecting “white supremacist” would be caught dead praising “White Dudes for Harris,” but I was already in too deep.That caught the attention of a reporter named Rebecca Keegan, who was a devoted NPR listener and a true believer in the causes of the Left. She called me a “MAGA darling” in the Hollywood Reporter. A major studio pulled their ads that day, and everything I built over the last 25 years as a “woman-owned” business went up in flames almost overnight.It's quite a story, Ms. Maher, but it's one people like you wouldn't even want to talk about. To you, it isn't “cancel culture,” it's “consequence culture.” Well, you might call the defunding of NPR and PBS the same thing, it's “consequence culture” as a populist movement decides to finally fight back.How it started…You were just ten years old when I got online, Ms. Maher. The year was 1994. Bill Clinton was still the president. Much like it did last year, my life had fallen apart, and I needed a reset. I found the perfect escape on the Wild, Wild Web, where I would live out the rest of the next 30 years of my life. I had a baby in 1998 and, as a single mother, built a website devoted to the Oscars in 1999.I also helped birth an entire industry, and before long, even The New York Times would have an Oscar blogger. I appeared on NPR a few times as an Oscars expert. I would attend film festivals all over the world and hobnob with the rich and famous at fancy parties.I would be invited to cover the Oscars, attending as a guest for almost ten years. I would make money from movie studios that thought my voice was influential enough to advertise on my site. I could buy a new car. I could support my daughter. I could pay my rent.I would use my website to advocate for a more diverse and inclusive Oscars by promoting women and people of color for the awards. I did this even before Barack Obama won in 2008, which coincided with the rise of Twitter, Facebook, and the iPhone. I wouldn't realize it until much later, but all of that coming together at once would allow us to build a necessary “inside” where we could eventually banish the undesirables to the “outside.”We all caught the wave at the same time. We had come out of the 90s era of therapy and psych meds, and now, we were ready to build our Shining Woketopia on the Hill. As society migrated online, it was all under our control. We would ultimately build an empire that represented nearly all of the power in America - cultural, political, educational, and institutional. But only a select few would be invited in.My daughter attended all of the progressive public schools in Los Angeles. We listened to NPR on the way to and from school. I was a PTA mom, a progressive, active Liberal who cared about the climate and racial inequality. I barely noticed around 2014 when my daughter began feeling depressed from what she was learning in school.As a white student, whose best friend was Black and whose president was Black, she was now being told to stand outside the circle and de-center herself from the students of color. She was taught that she was part of the oppressor class and was among the “colonizers.” This disease was inside of her; it was her “whiteness.”I didn't realize then just how deeply indoctrinated our public schools and universities had become. When she graduated from high school, only one of her friends wanted to transition to become a boy. Her mother, a Conservative, refused to give her puberty blockers and amputate her breasts, though she would finish the job when she turned 18 and is now living as a boy.By the time my daughter graduated from college, two of her roommates were on cross-sex hormones, changing their sex as a couple. A boy she had a crush on had now fully transitioned and is living life as a transgender woman. And no one in the media, not at NPR or PBS, ever warned them. They were indoctrinated now, too. COVID paranoia and lockdowns only served to heighten the growing anxiety and fear about saying or doing the wrong thing. Wokeness arrived first as a low-frequency hum, a reaction to the election of the first Black president. As Republicans began to obstruct his agenda, we called them “racists.” The Tea Party was racist; it had to be. The Freedom Caucus was racist; it had to be. Our president was perfect, and the only reason anyone would object to anything had to be racism.The “social justice warriors” who came of age online on sites like Tumblr ballooned into a massive army of zealots. None of us saw this coming, and by the time we did, it was too late. The protests at Evergreen College were the first indication that something had gone very wrong. Holding a professor hostage because he went against the doctrine? It should not surprise you, Ms. Maher, that NPR and PBS did not cover that either, although it would have made a compelling episode of Frontline. Had they come even remotely close to telling the truth throughout this era, maybe things would be different now.That left it up to independent voices to cover the growing scandal at Evergreen, the transgender contagion, and the obsession with race. That is how evolution left NPR and PBS in the dust. Those looking for truth and common sense had to escape the bubble. I'm guessing you never did, Ms. Maher.The army that took to the streets in 2020 was not peacefully protesting; they were demanding diners raise their fists in support of Black Lives Matter. They were demanding everyone put a Black square on Instagram, or else. My niece threatened to cut off all ties if I didn't. I told her she was in a cult.When I saw the video of Sue's 100-year-old mattress store in Kenosha burning as the city was consumed by a false narrative perpetuated by the media, that Jacob Blake was unarmed and there to break up a fight, I tried to post about it on Facebook. I was shouted down and told I cared more about property than I did about people. You agree with that, don't you, Ms. Maher? When Tom Cotton published an op-ed in the New York Times reflecting what the majority of Americans believed, that if the protests could not be controlled, we must “send in the troops.” Then I watched everyone online lose their minds over the truth - once again, the truth, always the TRUTH.By the end of it, James Bennett and Bari Weiss would be out at the New York Times. They would not be the only ones at the Times or other news outlets. Writers and editors would lose their jobs for posting headlines like “Building Matter Too.” Or because some overly fragile staffer felt unsafe and called them out for something, like racism. Hundreds and hundreds of “cancel culture” purges taught everyone the same lesson: say nothing, or you're next. A glance at your tweets around that time, Ms. Maher, suggests that you were fully on board with all of it, too - a true believer in the cause, probably like everyone else who runs a public radio station across America. So when you say they're “collateral damage,” know this: in a monoculture, everything is the same. If it isn't, you lose your job. That you did not listen to Uri Berliner's brave testimony in the Free Press, but rather demonized him for speaking out, should have been enough to force your resignation by the Board of Directors, but I'm guessing they're all on the same page as you. Your resignation letter might look something like this, posted by Representative Brandon Gill:You remember him, right? He grilled you pretty hard, and you maintained a poker face throughout, gaslighting all of us. It's not “fascism” that canceled Stephen Colbert and defunded public broadcasting. It's democracy. Your side was voted out by the guy you spent ten years trying to destroy. That alone should send the message that whatever you were doing backfired. Maybe you'll learn the lesson. Probably not. I can promise you those community radio stations in Trump states don't have any Trump supporters listening to them. And though I do notice some subtle changes in the coverage at NPR after a few casual searches, I'm afraid it's too little, too late. Those local stations are likely to be as woke and indoctrinated as NPR and PBS have become. They have to be because everything has to be in a monoculture like ours. There is no other option but for all of us to leave it behind. We don't want this indoctrination anymore - not in our schools, not in Hollywood, not in science, not in culture, and not in our news. Our American story has always been that we shook off the class system that decided our station in life at birth, that anyone could rise regardless of their status, where they were born, their skin color, or their gender. Obviously, we haven't always lived up to that ideal, but it is still our story.The Woketopians tell a different story. And it's one you believe in, Ms. Maher. Or at least you pretend to because as long as you pay obeisance to the cult, the activists will leave you alone. As I strolled through the Farmer's Market in my very white, very liberal town this morning, I was awash in hedonistic pleasure. The smell of fresh strawberries, bountiful basil, organic olive oil, a whiff of lavender carried by the wind, freshly ground coffee, and someone playing music in the distance. You would fit right in here, Ms. Maher, in a sunhat with a smile on your face, because this is where you belong, inside utopia. But I also know none of these smiling faces I pass know me. For all of their hybrid cars, the lawn signs, the pleas for “kindness,” the careful, gentle language so as not to offend all come with an implicit threat: obey our rules or we will destroy you. Milan Kundera explains what happened to the Left, as we built our Woketopian empire, in the Book of Laughter and Forgetting:To quote one of the greatest films ever made, one Hollywood will never come close to making again, No Country for Old Men. You can't stop what's coming. You can't stop what's coming. It ain't all waiting on you. That's vanity. Nothing will ever be the same when this is all over. The good news is that the empire's collapse will usher in a renaissance —a big bang of brand-new culture that is alive, fearless, and rooted in truth, not dogma. The best thing you can do is what I did: escape the bubble now and realize those who don't agree with you aren't your enemy. They are your fellow Americans. // This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

It was a story that moved like wildfire and showed no signs of slowing down. The more Hillary Clinton denied it, downplayed it, and attempted to pivot away from it, the more it was just too salacious to leave alone. And so it will go with the Epstein Files. The Epstein Files are giving me flashbacks. I find myself, as a former “vote blue no matter who” Democrat, wanting to say, Are you all insane? Chasing this non-story when Trump's presidency is at an all-time high? Don't you know what this will do? Don't you know how long the Democrats have been waiting for something like this to finally end MAGA and destroy Trump?The Democrats have been given a gift. They didn't have to lift a finger. MAGA did it all on their own. Trump is stuck in an impossible situation. He can release the so-called “files,” which probably amount to a lot of names, perhaps some being blackmailed, but no crimes, no convictions, just an angry mob with pitchforks and a story that will never die.In the post-Me Too America, it is once accused, forever guilty. There is no such thing as due process or the presumption of innocence. Releasing those names with no real crimes attached will ruin their lives. This is class warfare via social media mobs. It's the heads of the wealthy elites they want. They care less about how they get them. On the one hand, no president should talk to the people or his supporters like that. After all, his own son, Don Jr. was out there just as caught up in The Epstein Files as everyone else. But Trump wasn't. He didn't campaign on it and never talked about it at rallies. On the other hand, Trump deserved some credit for his monumental last couple of weeks, not to mention having been shot in the head just one year ago. How many of his supporters actually care about this if he never campaigned on it?The Democrats aren't quite celebrating but I can tell, as a former Democrat, that they know a good thing when they see it, just as the Trump side knew the Hillary Clinton email story was a winner to eat up oxygen, drive the media narrative even if, in the end, it came to nothing more than salacious gossip. “But her Emails” was meant to convey the ironic message that the email story was more important than our impending climate apocalypse. For me, that was the crisis, and thus, everything else had to be put aside.I find myself now looking at “Gender Affirming Care” and feeling like this is the crisis that demands everyone put everything aside for, even if I know it won't play out like that because I remember how nothing could slow down the email story and nothing could help Hillary Clinton win, no amount of fear or threats could change people's minds about their vote.Trump isn't heading into an election, but the Democrats want their power back, and they don't think they should have to do anything for it except attack Trump. And attack they will. MSNBC posting on TikTok from Turning Point:Nothing will slow it down because influencers on the Right are less invested in electing candidates and stopping them, and more invested in being the anti-establishment voices that draw the clicks and views.Now that they sloppily affixed the whole scandal to Israel, they have the “Free Palestine” crowd driving up their traffic and making them money. Why would they stop now? Burn it all down, who cares? They are Watergating themselves.Years ago, when I was a Democrat making this same argument about Bernie Sanders and his challenge to the Clinton presidency, I would say they're ratf*cking themselves. They are doing what the opposition would do to fracture and break up a coalition, thereby guaranteeing Hillary's loss, which is partly how I won $100 by predicting Trump would win.However, I later felt bad about that. That's not Democracy. Let Bernie run, let him build a movement, let the chips fall where they may, and I still believe that. But man, it's hard to watch this go down and not think, Are you seriously going to throw it all away on this? But this isn't the first time these so-called MAGA influencers have been busting up the coalition. From the Tariffs to the bombing of Iran to the One Big Beautiful Bill, it seems not a week goes by that I'm not out there on X sounding like Han Solo in Star Wars begging the Millennium Falcon, “Can you hear me, baby, hold together?”I understand MAGA is not a cult. I learned that when I watched them boo Trump for asking them to take the vaccine. No self-respecting cult leader would allow for that. Do you think Jim Jones would have allowed any one of his members to say, “That's okay - I don't need to drink the Flavor-Aid, I'm good.” I also know that the Epstein story runs deep within the movement and that they all believed Trump would release the files and the truth would come out. But the truth was something they had already decided before it was found in evidence, and now they're left feeling angry and betrayed. To make matters worse, Trump's messaging seems to indicate that something is in that file that would be damaging to him; otherwise, he would not keep saying it's a hoax by the same people who cooked up Russiagate, etc.Michael Wolff is out there talking about seeing photos of Trump with Epstein:Here is Victor Davis Hanson telling Glenn Beck he thinks Epstein was blackmailing influential people with photos just like that, which would then force them to invest in his properties, making him very rich. You don't have to be a genius here to put two and two together.Meanwhile, Alan Dershowitz notes that the Democrats are weaponizing the story, as they would, of course. Turnabout is fair play.A Legacy Press that Became PropagandaI understand why journalists like Megyn Kelly and others don't want to be CNN for Trump 2.0 and thus, will chase the story regardless of their own personal preference for political leadership. I get that. They have to be a trusted voice because once they lose that, they're done. She has never backed off of a story, no matter who it might hurt politically. It should not have been the media's job to pivot away from the email story to help one candidate win the election, but that was the message they took from 2016. They felt overwhelming guilt for helping to elect a “fascist,” and from then on, would never hold a single Democrat to account for anything. That decision would doom the Democrats to an even greater fate, nothing less than the rise and fall of a once-mighty empire.MAGA isn't an empire, but it is the rare grassroots populist movement that, for once, put the working class at the front of the line and, for once, beat the administrative state and the deep pockets of the lobbyists. Winning was practically a miracle. The whole thing seemed to be held together by duct tape, glue, and a lot of hard-working people who wanted to make change and did so by organizing, with their small donations and, yes, with Trump—a once-in-a-generation political talent who could withstand almost anything.Almost anything.So you can understand Trump's frustration now that he's just seen the best two weeks of his or any presidency in my lifetime, and those who are now fueling another “But her emails” story aren't the legacy media at all, but his own base.But if it's a pedophile ring they're waiting to see exposed, they will be disappointed. For one thing, none of the alleged thousands of child victims have come forward in this, the era of Me Too, where they could be famous and rich overnight for doing so?They could be hugely popular on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, telling their story, blowing the case wide open. They would be all over social media by now. But all we really have are women, some of them underage at the time, suing for massive payouts. All this will do ultimately is put power back in the hands of the worst people imaginable, people who don't think children can consent to sex crimes but have no problem talking them into slicing off body parts and sterilizing them.It will be power back to the people who want to open the border and who think booing JD Vance at Disneyland is the right thing to do. The Left used to be the side that didn't care about married men cavorting on an island with barely legal sex workers. How could we, with Bill Clinton ogling Monica Lewinsky while she snapped her thong in front of him? No, we had no choice but to excuse his peccadillos. We wanted to win, hold power, and change the world. That mattered so much more than who Bill Clinton was having sex with this week. But the Right, they've been consistent where infidelity and sex were concerned. They were Me Too before we were Me Too. That's why they defended those who accused Bill Clinton of rape and harassment. They traded all of that for a chance to win with Trump, too. The Epstein case, however, because it looms so large in their collective imaginations, might be what the Democrats hope for: that moment when Trump's whole coalition implodes. It runs so deep with so many of them that it defines everything they are and everything they believe. You might as well ask them to give up religion. Who knows, maybe they'll get lucky and the whole thing will magically appear. Bill Gates, Bill Clinton - all of those rich and powerful elites caught as part of a massive pedophile ring that leaves Pizzagate in the dust. Or not. The thing about conspiracy theories, as everyone knows, is that the more people you have to add to them, the less likely they are to be true. Dr Grande explains how the very thing that made Trump popular might be the very thing that brings him down.No, this is only the beginning, and everyone knows it. The Left knows it most of all, and if you can't see that now, someday you will. Someday, you will be saying, “But the Epstein Files.” This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

Some say Trump won a second term one year ago today when his head was almost blown off on live television. Maybe that's true. Maybe it isn't. Luck was most certainly on his side that bright, beautiful day in Butler, Pennsylvania. I'd been looking forward to the rally because he was returning to a place made almost famous in MAGA lore by Tucker Carlson, who explained Trump's appeal better than anyone else ever had.So when Trump was almost assassinated, the first question I had was Why Butler? Even one year later, it seems odd that it happened there, especially since US intelligence already knew Trump's life was threatened, and outside in Butler, there were many rooftops, and many ways to climb on top of them. It wasn't secure, but then again, MAGA rallies seemed like the last place anyone would get away with shooting Trump. In September, another assassin would give it a shot, a burned-out Gen-X surfer dude who wanted to “save democracy.” But one year after Butler, it's as though the tragedy never happened at all. The Left never fully absorbed it and is awash in assassination porn every day, and the Right, well, let's just say there are many forces at work to break up the grassroots movement otherwise known as MAGA.Here is a look back at the good, the bad, and the ugly of this past year. The GoodOne year after Butler, Trump's presidency has been a smashing success when you look at everything he's accomplished, from the historic bombing of Iran's nuclear facilities to the ceasefire between Israel and Iran, to passing the One Big Beautiful Bill, and several key Supreme Court decisions in his favor. The tariffs seem to have worked out, and the economy is humming. One year after Butler, the Secret Service has been overhauled. They will continue to reform the agency, they say, to prevent something that catastrophic from happening again. One year after Butler, Corey Comperatore is remembered as a hero. He protected his family from gunfire. But to those he left behind, they don't feel like there has been enough closure on the case - how could they have left them unprotected? But on Saturday, the community came together to honor Corey with a motorcycle ride called Corey's Cruise:Corey's Cruise, that's the MAGA spirit. Paying tribute to one of their own.One year after Butler, journalist Selena Zito published the definitive account of that day. A Pennsylvania native, Zito captures Butler and cares enough about the place and its people to tell the story of its history and why it mattered that Trump came to Butler at all. He's the only sitting president ever to do so, she says. Zito has seen Trump in a way no other mainstream journalist ever has, and even tops Tucker Carlson, I think, in explaining Trump and his appeal. Maybe because she knows the time and place of which she writes, or maybe it's something else, an ability to see what other people can't. One year after Butler, it has been promises made and promises kept for people like me. I voted for Trump for two reasons. To protest the unprecedented, authoritarian lawfare by Joe Biden and the Democrats and to put an end to the gender madness that was destroying the minds and bodies of children. It is still hard for me to believe this is going on in America with no guardians on the Left to protect kids. When I see videos like this, I am reminded of why I voted for Trump and why I would vote for him a thousand times over:One year after Butler, the Trump administration is going after John Brennan and James Comey for Russiagate:Matt Taibbi has been on the story for years and goes into it at length on America This Week.The BadOne year after Butler, Elon Musk, who said he became a Trump supporter that day, is now a Trump hater, someone so filled with rage and resentment that he started his own political party just to hurt Trump. And said on Twitter that Trump is in the Epstein Files, which put the whole ugly scandal into motion.The truth? Musk was likely burned after Trump shut him out of the inner circle. The richest man in the world might be among the most fragile, and hell hath no fury like an Elon scorned.Tucker Carlson is parting ways with the Trump administration because of Iran and Israel, now proclaiming Israel is the one behind the Epstein cover-up. He's also saying, in his recent speech for Turning Point, that it's no big deal to kick biological men out of women's sports. Who cares? One year after Butler, fair weather MAGA like Andrew Schultz, Theo Von, and Joe Rogan aren't ride or die Trump supporters anymore. They chose him at the time as the better option, but if Trump doesn't give them exactly what they want — not fund Ukraine, wash their hands of Israel, or reduce the government deficit, whatever it is, they're free agents now ripe for the picking.One year after Butler, a war has broken out between the head of the FBI, Dan Bongino, and Attorney General Pam Bondi over the promised release of the Epstein Files. MAGA wants Bondi to be fired or to step down because of it. She made it seem like there was a client list and they would be naming names. But then abruptly announced that no, there isn't one and case closed.So Trump has had to take to Truth Social to defend her and try to steady the ship, but more and more people are reading this like a cover-up. In other words, MAGA is leading a Watergate-like situation to take down its own leader. into its own leader, doing the Democrats' dirty work without even trying:Both the Left and the Never Trumpers are using the Epstein case in hopes of dividing and conquering MAGA. And from the looks of it, they're winning. It reminds me of that song from U2, So Cruel, “I gave you everything you ever wanted, it wasn't what you wanted.”Even though the Democrats had the files all through Biden's presidency, they are counting on people being stupid enough to believe them when they pretend to care:The UglyOne year after Butler, almost no one cares about the shooter, Thomas Crooks. He is a ghost. If Thomas Crooks had succeeded, would he have been made a hero like Luigi Mangione? Is that what he was seeking, that kind of adulation and respect? He was not only a nobody, a loner, but like so many others, spent his formative years on lockdown, online. Who knows who got to him?One year later, the lesson was not learned because the tragedy was never fully absorbed. All they knew was that they were angry the shooter missed. We have to assume that, yes, Crooks would have been remembered well if he hadn't. Instead, he was shot and killed in the blazing sun on a rooftop at just 20 years old. One year after Butler, comments like this are not just accepted but encouraged. Nothing has changed for the Democrats and the Left; their propaganda press and the so-called “resistance” have not done a single thing differently after their defeat. They didn't absorb what happened on their side, the debate, the cognitive decline, the George Clooney op-ed, and Kamala Harris' terrible campaign. If anything, they've become even more emboldened to amplify their hate against Trump, as if they never saw him shot at all, as if they didn't just suffer the greatest political humiliation in modern American history. But they did. We were there. We saw. All it's meant to them, one year after Butler, is that they have to wish harder for Trump's demise. They have to get louder and meaner. One year after Butler and the Left still have no power except for one Democratic Socialist on the rise, who is leading them even further into fanaticism. The day I called Trump “My President”If I'd never left the Doomsday Bunker and found my way to watching a MAGA rally, I'd have never humanized Trump either. I, too, might have said about both of these attempted assassinations, “Too bad he missed.” But I did escape. I had to leave when the hatred I was engaging in made me feel sick. I knew I had to do something to understand better why we were on one side and they were on the other, and why we felt it was okay to treat half the country like human garbage.At first, the MAGA rallies were like homework. I was looking for the smoking gun. Was Trump really Hitler? Was he a bigot and a racist? No. He was just someone who didn't follow our strict rules of language, which had become so rigid that we didn't even know what basic words meant anymore, like man and woman. Over time, the rallies became, for me, the one bright spot amid a long, miserable, dark winter. They were celebrations with happy people. None of them judged each other. All of them were part of an America that people like me had abandoned long ago. Finding my humanity in 2020 would change the course of my life, something I could never have predicted would hit me in middle age. All I knew was that I had to do what I thought was the right thing, and humanizing my enemies was it. So, of course, I was watching Trump's rally in Butler. I wouldn't miss it. When I saw Trump was shot, I said, “Please, God, not my president.” My president. I didn't vote for him in 2020, so how could he be my president? And besides, he hadn't even won yet.I can't really explain it except to say that by then, I knew the forces that had been marshaled to remove Trump from power by any means necessary, and there were only a few months left before it was too late for them. Would they really go this far? Could they? Would it have been like shooting fish in a barrel to find vulnerable people who might want to make something of their miserable lives by becoming famous for taking out Public Enemy Number One?I guess it's as Rupert Pupkin says in The King of Comedy, “better King for a day than schmuck for a lifetime.”One year after Butler, we'll never know the answer to that. If there ever was any evidence, it's long gone by now. It could just be that lockdowns caused real harm to the minds of the young, especially young men, and no one has bothered to look into it.One year after Butler, I know I made the right choice when I voted for Trump. I'll be forever grateful to him for rescuing this country and its children from the clutches of fanaticism. And you can't watch as many rallies as I have and come away not liking the guy. Those still awash in rage and delusion might find, decades from now, that they missed out on one of the most spectacular moments in American history when this country elected one of its brightest lights. // This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

Violence is in the air after Luigi Mangione assassinated CEO Brian Thompson and became a hero of the Left. It's in the air by politicians who now want protesters to get messy, to get bloody. All for a necessary photo op, they believe will finally, at long last, turn the public against Donald Trump.Mangione, as it turns out, was a useful weapon in this war. Back in December, novelist and co-host of America This Week, Walter Kirn, foresaw the connection and predicted the rise of a young, charismatic populist. Sound familiar?Kirn saw something much bigger. He could see the connection between what Mangioni represented to the Left and the gathering storm that would ultimately find its way toward Zohran Mamdani and the current wave of populist revolutionaries.From the New York Post:The NCRI study traces the cultural shift back to the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, allegedly by Luigi Mangione, in December 2024. What followed, researchers say, was a viral wave of memes that turned Mangione into a folk hero.With Karen Bass and Gavin Newsom in California, and Mamdani in New York vowing to obstruct ICE, we can see a culture already defined by political violence rising to new heights either to get a photo op that depicts Trump as an authoritarian fascist, or to start a stand-off with the military, one that could go down in the history books.But as with all of the pet causes by the Democrats, this one goes against public opinion, just as their support of biological men playing against women in sports goes against it. Most Americans are in favor of deporting illegal immigrants.The question now isn't whether there will be violence as ICE continues to find and deport as many illegal immigrants as possible, but how bad the violence will be. What is a cause worth fighting and dying for? From Ben Shapiro:What they hope the violence will do is shift public opinion back in their favor. But they've never learned the lessons of the past, why Trump won in 2016, and why he just won again. For the “resistance,” there is no third option where they realize they're the problem and reverse course. Instead, they double down on everything they've already been doing for the last ten years, which has only resulted in Trump becoming more powerful. The Power of StoryThe more people believe in a shared story, the stronger the movement. Our story? We'd solved America's problems—maybe the world's. Racism, along with every other "ism" and "phobe," was the enemy. Eradicate it, craft a language that welcomes everyone, and we'd be healed.Healed from what? The scars of our 1970s childhoods were shaped by the reckless "Me Generation." We emerged into the self-help era as victims or abusers, our lives battered by addiction and trauma. Entire industries sprang up to mend our wounds.We sought salvation in the self-help aisles of bookstores, therapy sessions, medications, and Oprah's group chat every day at 3pm. Relationships crumbled—too many men were toxic or narcissistic. We studied attachment theory, embraced cognitive therapy, and chased perfection: the perfect parenting, car, words, diet, causes, schools. Our children became extensions of our quest, expected to embody that same flawless ideal.When they fell short, we fed them into the self-help machine to mold them into better versions of ourselves, even medicating them to make them more perfect - a practice that would lead us all too easily into “gender affirming care,” the greatest medical scandal in recent history. What we really needed was a higher purpose, a unifying movement. That arrived with Barack Obama, whose Hope and Change brought us together. To us, he was perfect, and even more than that, he was a perfect reflection of the America we wished we had. By then, thanks to the rise of the internet, social media, and smartphones, we had control and influence over nearly every aspect of American society. Why not use the new frontier of the internet to remake the America we wanted? Why not build our Shining Woketopia on the Hill? And so it was written, and so it was done. We closed ourselves off from the part of America that didn't share our beliefs, and over time, we forgot it even existed. Trump's shocking win marked the moment the dream was punctured and reality flooded in. A revolution by “we the normal.”Trump represented everything we believed was wrong with our country - he epitomized all of the bad things we complained about - racism, misogyny, sexual harassment, sexual assault. It wasn't just that he offended our god and our King when he challenged Obama's birthplace. It was that he said whatever he wanted to say, and in our Woketopia, then and now, that is strictly forbidden.Language must be curated, softened, and made more polite — a form of Newspeak for the modern age. But the flip side of that was people who were too fragile to accept the truth—truth in words, truth in politics, truth in comedy, truth in art, truth in science, truth in elections.And if words are violence, if words cause staffers at the New York Times to feel unsafe, if movies like Gone with the Wind need trigger warnings, there would be no surviving Trump and the rise of free speech in a culture that no longer believed in it.But violence turns out to be, for the Left, the answer to the fear inside them they can't control, like dogs or bears or snakes who lash out when they feel cornered and threatened.A History of ViolenceWhat drove the early violence by the Left was the commonly held belief that Trump was a racist and his border policies were rooted in the Right's desire to rid this country of Black and Brown people. Thus, when mobs acted out, like they did in 2015 and throughout Trump's first term, it was justified. Racism was the ultimate sin, like being an accused witch in Salem or a Communist in 1950s America.Prominent Democrats pushed out the idea, which was then echoed and amplified by what Trump would eventually and correctly call “fake news.” The Democrats loved the violence, as it turns out, because they thought that the people would show the rest of America that Trump was bad. They also began to believe that their uprising against Trump was a fusion of both the Civil War and the Civil Rights movements of the 1960s.By the Summer of 2020, they funded and encouraged violence while also downplaying it. Buildings set on fire, businesses destroyed, and an angry mob banging on the fence of the White House were all excused as “mostly peaceful protests.”However, what I was seeing unfolding, which alarmed me enough to start speaking out, was that something was very wrong with the Left. It wasn't until the Evergreen stories started coming out that I realized we'd built a fanatical army of not just woke scolds but a Red Guard-like generation who did not believe in limits on imposing their will upon the people.Diners were compelled to raise their fists in support of Black Lives Matter. The statues were coming down. Writers, editors, and celebrities were all being canceled and fired. Movies, literature, TV, comedy, architecture, science, even knitting, cooking, and exercise had to be transformed. It was tolerated because of what our culture had become after eight years of Obama and four years of Trump. The powerful, mostly white elites who run everything felt guilty. So they let it go on. I watched Hollywood devour itself. When the film Green Book won Best Picture, the Left exploded. It was a harmless movie about a friendship between a bigot and a gay Black man, and THAT was racist? Yes, because one of the screenwriters was a Trump supporter.The center could not hold. Though Joe Biden was dragged over the finish line in a corrupt election that would finally cause me to leave the Democratic Party, there was no coming back from what the Left had become. It was only a matter of time before the empire collapsed. I tried to warn them. Here is a DM exchange between me and Neera Tanden back in August of 2020:And then I predicted the future:The GOP did, in fact, take all three branches in 2024. But the message was never getting through. They didn't want to hear it then, and do not want to hear it now, so what other option do they have but to try to persuade by force?Vive La ResistanceI cringe looking back on being a “resistance fighter.” To think we'd convinced ourselves that we were like the French singer in Casablanca who sings loud enough to drown out the Nazis.It's that self-righteousness we felt, that entitlement, that moral superiority that would ultimately be our undoing, that Trump happened to us, rather than the people who voted for him. The fantasies by the wealthiest and most famous among us to viciously attack Trump, pull him from limb to limb, seemed to know no bounds. Somehow, violence has filled in the empty spaces. It's what Walter Kirn could see in the reaction to the Mangione assassination: this idea that violence was another way to build clout, even to virtue signal, in a narcissistic utopia. We believed ourselves to be the chosen people. But because the people didn't want us, didn't love us, didn't want our America - our shining Woketopia on the hill - we blamed them. We blamed their votes. We smeared them. That casual dehumanization did lead to violence. And it's likely to get much worse.The Party of HateI've lost so many friends, people I've known for years, ex-boyfriends, and colleagues. It was surreal to watch them pull away, to block, to unfriend, or attack me so relentlessly that I had to block them. They don't know who I am anymore, and I don't know who they are anymore.They have become defined by that collective hatred, that poisonous intolerance that has driven so many people like me away from the party. The worse they get, the more violent they become, the less Americans will want them in power. When I start to think about whether there will be a blue wave in 2026, I think about 1972. In 1970, four students were shot at Kent State for protesting the war. It did nothing to change public opinion, but it did put Nixon on a path toward a record landslide victory. It was just one of a series of violent events that scared the public away from the Democrats, with the Manson murders in 1969 being another.Those students believed in a cause worth dying for. History has mostly vindicated them. The Left of today believes they're fighting Hitler and “concentration camps.” Some believe it is a cause worth dying for. There's just one tiny problem: it isn't true. The reason I keep telling my story is that I know so much of what we lived through will disappear down the memory hole. But we should never forget how crazy it all became and how hard it was for all of us to find our way back to a united America. // This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

I remember the exact moment when I realized I loved my country. The year was 1997. The place was Italy. The affliction was love. The guy had a Che Guevara poster on his wall. I had no idea who that was. He was talking about Israel and how terrible they were. I had no idea what he meant, so I just nodded along. But then he started trash-talking America.So I said, “Well, you sure like our Marlboros, our Levis, and our movies, don't you?” It could have been a joke, but it somehow wasn't. I wasn't mad exactly, I was defensive. And that's how I knew I loved my country, and why I was an unapologetic American.Like Kevin Kline in A Fish Called Wanda:As we gather together on the Fourth of July to celebrate the nation's birthday, I'm struck by just how polarized we still are. It is as bad as it was during the last Civil War. So, how can we feel as if we are still “One nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all?”They don't feel that way on the Left, and they make sure everyone on the Right knows it. They hiss and shriek and moan and scream at Trump and his supporters as though they are living under an oppressive emperor rather than just having suffered a humiliating defeat in November.If only they called him an emperor. They've gone all the way to Hitler. Once you've reached Hitler, there's nowhere left to go.But maybe that's wrong. Perhaps there is still somewhere else to go, taking what is a virtual Civil War and transforming it into a hot war, or at the very least, a violent uprising. If, say, a few blue states decided to secede from the union, over mass deportations or transgender ideology, what then?Zohran Mamdani has promised, if he's elected, to obstruct ICE, even if it means he gets arrested by the feds.Gavin Newsom has already taunted Trump into arresting him for obstructing ICE. Mayor Karen Bass in Los Angeles and all of the wealthy donors who put her in power are making mass deportations the central issue for the Democrats. Is it a cause worth fighting and dying for?They've taken to social media to proclaim “Alligator Alcatraz,” which is designed as a deterrent to discourage gang members, drug smugglers, and other criminals from risking crossing the border illegally, “Alligator Auschwitz.”This illustrates perfectly how it is that the Left has become the crazier side. What Trump says could be seen as potentially removing American citizens, but it's not clear exactly what he means. If you do not exist in reality, what he says can mean whatever you want it to.They react with the same level of panic as they had with the Access Hollywood tape, Russiagate, E. Jean Carroll, Stormy Daniels, “good people on both sides,” “losers and suckers,” Ivanka Trump, Elon is a Nazi, impeachment, impeachment, indictment, indictment. They are the party that cried wolf.Their helplessness in the face of Trump's wins is then taken out on those they know.Most people on the Right have a story like that. I have lost many friends over the past ten years, and much of it even before I ever decided to vote for or support Trump. It's just that I asked too many questions. I didn't follow the rules.It isn't just the betrayal of voting for Trump, although that's a big part of it; it is the mandated directive from inside their Doomsday Cult. They must purge those who do not align with their views, and even those who know or are friends with Trump supporters are also banished, swarmed, and attacked.So, how can we celebrate as one country if so many of those who rule our culture and dominate so much of our society are this intolerant?A New America OnlineI've lived online for 30 years. I helped build what would become a vast utopia of a new America. Our superpower was creating our own reality and then presenting it to the media, who then transformed it into the status quo.Much of the early internet took shape in the George W. Bush era. Not many people realized the power of social media back then, but Barack Obama did. It's not likely Bush would have even been elected if social media had been around. The Republicans were slow to catch on. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

Zohran Mamdani's primary win marks the end of the Democratic Party as we once knew it. Maybe they realize it, probably they don't, but it makes no difference. The truth is, it was already dead. They spent ten years going to war on Trump while also using him to scare their voters to the polls, with their endless crisis.Without a combative media to keep them in line, they didn't have to offer the people much of anything because they knew they would vote blue no matter who, as long as Trump was on the other side.Mamdani did the unthinkable. He ran as an unapologetic Democratic Socialist. He seemed to arrive almost magically to sell Gen-Z the dream. A showbiz nepo baby and former rapper, he was a whole lotta of charisma waiting for his ticket to ride. Has the Democratic Party found its new leader?There is still a question as to whether Mamdani can indeed pull out a win in the general election. Voters might turn out in droves to stop him. But maybe, just maybe, they won't. Perhaps they'll overlook high crime, “gender affirming care,” and the border crisis to explore what state-run grocery stores might look like.It's not really his policies that brought him to victory so much as his revolutionary spirit - he's like the living embodiment of the Summer of 2020. He wants to tear it all down, too. It's the demographic he appeals to that might herald a real revolution, considering it's the same demographic that backed Obama in 2008—Upper-Middle-Class white college kids.David Friedberg from the All in Podcast:Like Obama, Mamdani is cut from the same cloth. He hung out with them. He went to college with them. He was indoctrinated alongside them. He speaks their language. He knows their world. They'll follow him anywhere.Note the viral songs already hitting TikTok, where young women shake that groove thing as they chant his name.Mamdani tapped into Indoctrination Nation, the Evergreen generation that believes America is a corrupt, “white supremacist” empire crippled by Capitalism - but could you please hand me my iphone so I can make a TikTok?This generation came of age in a convenience culture that gave them everything they wanted when they wanted it - Uber, Netflix, abortion, DoorDash, Tinder, TikTok, iPhones, Google, and ChatGPT. Why can't they have democratic socialism if they want it?Because they don't really know what it means, and they don't care. They are a generation ready for the big moves, no more playing it safe. The Democrats should have listened to David Hogg, who was a harbinger of things to come.The Death RattleAfter Mamdani's win, it was all quiet on the Leftern Front. Bill Clinton was the first to weigh in. It was like cautiously approaching a coiled rattlesnake. Don't make any sudden moves.But the Democrats old enough to know the history must be in a panic. They know why Hillary had to crush the Bernie movement like a bug. They know how bad it got. So bad that Sarah Silverman and Al Franken had to try to calm down BernieMania as the crowd chanted “WAR HAWK” at Hillary.The Party Elders recall the bad old days, when they were undone by the Eugene McCarthy faction of the party because they were perceived as too extreme for the silent majority. They remember the catastrophic loss of George McGovern.They recall Jimmy Carter's malaise and how Uncle Teddy primaried him, ushering in 12 years of Reagan and Bush. They remember the dark days of the milquetoast normies who couldn't inspire crowds - like Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis and John Kerry.Playing it safe worked until it didn't. Now they'll have to play it bold with an army at the ready, the same army they funded and praised all through the Summer of 2020 with the Autonomous Zones, torching businesses, all to sow chaos, to do the bidding of the Democrats just to take Trump out of power.This army had no choice but to absorb what a weaponized, biased press corps told them every day of their lives - when they called Trump a fascist, when they called him Hitler. The hysteria kept mounting, and purging bad people wasn't enough.This army is ready for a different war, a bigger war - a war against Israel, against ICE, against Trump, Capitalism, Free Enterprise, the gender binary, the cost of rent, mortgages, fossil fuels, and now, the Democratic Party.The legacy media have been covering up their violent riots, outbursts, and protests for a long time, so much so that most people on the Left don't even know about it. Even in the Summer of 2020, they didn't turn it into a significant news story. Why? Because it always had to go one way, it always had to be about Trump.The media will never take responsibility for what they've done, how they've lied for so long, and what that did to the minds of the young who spent the last ten years believing a fascist dictator had overtaken America.This army that torched Teslas and set cars on fire in Los Angeles has been hiding in plain sight, but the rest of the country is about to get a much closer look. Just wait until this Summer, because that army now has a real leader in Mamdani.Call Him DaddyAs Operation Midnight Hammer brought the might of the American military down on Iran's nuclear facilities, Trump was carefully, steadily coming in for a landing. As the passengers screamed and howled, imagining the absolute worst, Trump did what he always does - he hit the bullseye.Some were calling for his impeachment. Others regretted their vote and called him a “war criminal.” There was talk of regime change in Iran and a MAGA Civil War. It was pure chaos.But then, the plane touched down, and everyone burst into applause. After a few setbacks, a ceasefire was established. Even the leaders of NATO were impressed. How could you not be?As he racked up win after win after win, Trump was having the best two weeks of either of his presidencies.This week made one thing abundantly clear: Trump won the ten-year insurrection, coup, and war on his presidency, his supporters, and democracy itself. He beat them at the ballot box, he beat their lawfare:He beat them at the schools, stopping indoctrination and the denial of biological reality:In ordinary times, Trump would be hailed as the comeback kid who has erased the lies told about him in his first term and remade himself as one of the most consequential presidents in American history.But that was not going to happen because the so-called “resistance army” believes itself to still be at war with Trump.One of their favorite conduits is Natasha Bertrand at CNN, who was an easy mark to spin the narrative the Democrats needed, that Trump and Operation Midnight Hammer had failed:But the early findings are at odds with President Donald Trump's repeated claims that the strikes “completely and totally obliterated” Iran's nuclear enrichment facilities.Missing in that report was that it was “low confidence,” and should never have been tossed out like bloody chum to draw the sharks.One of the reasons people like me no longer trust them is that we know the game by now, too. We'll find our information elsewhere from people we trust to tell us the truth, people who, unlike the Democrats and their corporate press, are looking out for the public's best interests. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

After the bombs dropped on Iran's nuclear facilities, there were some rumblings on X that the mission felt eerily familiar. Mike Benz said Operation Midnight Hammer is the same mission that plays out in the grand finale of Joseph Kosinski's Top Gun: Maverick.His followers quickly pointed out that they're using fighter jets in Top Gun: Maverick, not the stealth B-2 bomber. The $2 billion plane is called the “ghost of the skies” because it is undetectable on radar.Even if the rough details are the same, the mission is slightly different because in the film, the pilot's skill is everything.Top Gun: Maverick is the American film industry at its finest, just as Operation Midnight Hammer is the American military at its finest. The film gives back more than it takes. It doesn't lecture us. It doesn't try to fix us. It merely entertains us for a couple of hours by reminding us why we need heroes and why we'll always respond to the Hero's Journey.We need heroes because, as the Buddhists say, life is suffering. We need them because every day we wake up alive is a good day. But most of our days are mundane and ordinary. And that might explain why Top Gun: Maverick resonated so deeply three years ago.After COVID and the Great Awokening brought Hollywood to its knees, the film industry desperately needed a Deus ex Machina. When Top Gun: Maverick made upwards of $700 million, it looked like it had finally arrived. It also earned a well-deserved Best Picture nomination and probably should have won, but it's been a while since they picked the actual Best Picture of the Year.Like the first Top Gun, Maverick was criticized as military propaganda. But we do ask our soldiers to fight and die in war as we sit in cafes with matcha lattes, so it's the least we can do to make a movie celebrating them.It turns out that Top Gun: Maverick isn't propaganda for the military. It's propaganda for the human race. It's propaganda for even having hopes or dreams at all. It's propaganda for feeling like a winner when the whole world is against you. We need heroes to take us on that journey. Even if we didn't know we needed them, we only have to watch them on screen to understand why.Tom Cruise in Top Gun is our ordinary world. He's brought back into the extraordinary because he's the only pilot who can fly like that and reach Mach 10.What's so great about Top Gun: Maverick is that while it shows our hero succeeding, it also shows him pushing too far and failing. We're now hooked to see if he can learn his lesson.Like all heroes, Maverick must be blessed with something special that makes him the only person who can save the day.It might sound silly when reduced to the basics, but a tried-and-true formula works. We root for the hero we know. The harder it is on him, the more invested we become.Top Gun: Maverick, to my mind, has very few flaws. But it does have one. They chose the girl to fly the critical mission. I didn't buy it. Maybe we can believe that extraordinary women exist just as extraordinary men do. It's only a movie, after all. But suspension of disbelief only goes so far. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

I once believed that the worst thing that could happen to this country was to have a Conservative Supreme Court. That was supposed to be the end of everything. I would scream those words into the abyss all through 2016 to anyone who didn't want to vote for Hillary Clinton, “THE SUPREME COURT.”I grew up on the Left, after all, and nothing scared us more than Christianity in our schools, in our corporations, institutions, and in our courts. If Trump won, he would appoint Conservative Christians to the highest court in the land, and that would be the end of Roe v. Wade, the end of the feminist movement, and women's rights.Well, it turns out, we didn't need Conservative Christians to do that. The Left did it all on their own, leaving just one right in place, the right to terminate a pregnancy, or, if you prefer, kill our babies. We use soft language like “choice” and “terminate” as though that changes the reality.Now that the Left has been assured that the pace of abortion did not slow down and women can use abortion like reproductive bulimia - have fun now, deal with the problem later - they've moved on to more pressing matters.I don't think abortion should be illegal. But you know what should be? “Gender-affirming care” for minors. That is the most grotesque example of soft language ever invented by my former side. Call it what it is - sterilization. Top surgery is a double mastectomy. Bottom surgery is castration.In all the ways I feared religion and Christianity infiltrating our schools and institutions has now been left in the dust by a dangerous, fanatical, unstoppable cult that has left too many young men and women destroyed and mutilated in its wake.What a fool I was. Now, I am so grateful for Conservative Christians. I'm so grateful to Donald Trump, who put them on the court. I am glad we lost, even if I didn't know that in 2016. Now I do. Now I can see.Because Hillary Clinton lost, we did not get control of the court. And thank God for that. Because if we had, there is no way the bill from Tennessee to ban “gender affirming care” would have been upheld.Like everyone else on my former side, I was convinced Trump's win in 2016 would end everything we held dear, especially the Supreme Court. We'd been fighting with the Right for years to get control of it. We watched Merrick Garland's appointment obstructed, and we fumed.After Trump won, we became an unhinged, hysterical, angry mob of women who felt it was our right to convict Justice Kavanaugh of rape in the court of public opinion.And to demonize and depict Amy Coney Barrett as the Handmaid.But what I know now that I did not know back in 2016 was that when a society excuses and allows for the young to be sterilized, that's when the bottom drops out, whether it's Eugenics or “gender affirming care.” I didn't see the problem. I was comfortable with the soft language of the Left. We were the good people standing up for marginalized groups.It took me years to realize just how insane the Left had become. But it's one thing if it's just about cancel culture, destroying Hollywood, comedy, art, and book publishing. It's a whole other thing if we're allowing irreversible harm to be done to the minds and bodies of children.But thankfully, God invented Conservatives and they rose to do what we could not, just as they did back before the Civil War to end slavery and for the same reason — they believed it was morally wrong. Now, they are back to stop the Democrats from doing something morally wrong. It's the Christian Right yet again that is on the right side of history.I'm not a religious person, though I wish I could be. I imagine there is relief in that connection to something more powerful than yourself, and maybe that is what so many of these young people need, not “gender-affirming care.” This de-transitioner realized she was made in God's image, which helped her find her way out.I always believed religion was dangerous and destructive. But whatever I thought about religion, and whatever the Left thinks about it now, it can't touch what madness has been manifested by the Left. Look at what they've done.Christianity, we all believed, was the source of bigotry against gays and lesbians. We wanted no part of that. I still don't. But today, I am grateful that they have been fighting this fight because I do not think we could have done it without them.Matt Walsh has been relentless. He's not only reported on the horrors of “gender-affirming care” on his show but also appeared in town halls and government, and helped push the fight in Tennessee to ban the practice. He deserves much credit today.It's ironic, isn't it, that it has been left up to many Conservative Christians to state biological reality. Growing up, I was on that side, and they weren't. Now, the Left has pulled so far into madness that the Conservative Christians are the more pragmatic side.They lock arms with independent thinkers who function as the sane middle, like Colin Wright, Andrew Doyle, Gays Against Groomers, Christina Buttons, and Peter Boghossian:The forces that oppose them are powerful, as this statement by the American Psychological Association shows. But the resistance forces are stronger.The Democrats are collectively too stupid to understand that this is not the hill to die on.The Climate of Fear This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

[This is a slightly different kind of podcast, a news summary - and will have its own podcast feed eventually]Every Fourth Turning, at least since the founding of America, has been defined by a great war: the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and World War II. When I began this Substack a few years back, the world war we might be fighting would be Iran, Russia, and China against the United States and its allies, including Israel. It made sense then. Not so much now. That was before Putin invaded Ukraine, before October 7th, before the United States government pursued Trump like he was a war criminal, before his attempted assassination, and his second win. Steve Bannon says we're already fighting World War III.Now, as Trump declares “unconditional surrender, " everyone wonders, is this it? Is this our great war?Iran doesn't appear to have an ally in Russia or China at the moment. Trump just met with his security advisers and will address the nation later this afternoon. It does feel a little like the post 9/11 drumbeat for war, and we're all still wary and fearful that it might turn into “regime change” rather than a negotiated peace. We will know what their plans are soon enough. The neocons like Lindsey Graham are prepared to go all the way.Earlier today, Tammy Bruce spoke to the press from the State Department:She mentions that Trump has made the same warning, that Iran can never have a nuke, over 40 times, going back to 2011. Here is that video:Dealing with Iran has been one of the main conflicts between Trump and Barack Obama, so it's easier to see how it started and how it's going. Trump's administration is not the Bush administration. If the 2008 Wall Street meltdown was the crisis that sparked the Fourth Turning and the mission is, as Steve Bannon says, to dismantle the Deep State that took us to the $700 billion bailout, then a big war in the Middle East would fracture the MAGA coalition. For his part, Benjamin Netanyu has said he believes Iran threatens America too, and indeed, they've been trying to assassinate Trump. If there is a graceful way to end the threat without getting into war, that's the path Trump will want to take.A MAGA Divided Cannot Stand.MAGA is split over whether or not to aid Israel in its fight against Iran. Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, and Marjorie Taylor-Greene are locking arms with Dave Smith and Glenn Greenwald to push back against any involvement. Breitbart reports that members of the Squad have now joined Thomas Massie to limit Trump's power on Iran:From Breitbart:While he remains the sole Republican backing such a legislative effort, several top Democrats from the far-left of the Democratic Party, including “Squad” members Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), and Ilhan Omar (D-MN), have indicated they are signing on to the Massie proposal.Alex Jones is opposed to any help or aid in Israel's war, writing:Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon discussed our involvement, with Bannon urging Trump and MAGA to keep their eye on the ball. He means to go after and dismantle the Deep State:Raheem Kassam sums up the internal conflict well:Ice Raids Paused, Then UnpausedThe Iran conflict is not the only dividing issue in MAGA. There is a split between those who want to support farms and hotels with their large immigrant staff, many of whom are undocumented and have worked for the companies for decades. Versus the opposing side, who insist Trump must not back off even an inch when it comes to mass deportations. Trump listened to them and retreated from his original plan to offer a potential middle ground.Federal Agents Arrest NYC Comptroller & Mayoral Candidate Brad Lander At Immigration CourtAccording to the Left, Lander was arrested for asking to see a warrant. But the truth is, he was arrested for assault, per a Fox report:New York City Comptroller Brad Lander was arrested by Department of Homeland Security(DHS) agents on Tuesday after allegedly assaulting a federal officer. The article quoted a DHS spokesperson,"Our heroic ICE law enforcement officers face a 413% increase in assaults against them—it is wrong that politicians seeking higher office undermine law enforcement safety to get a viral moment, no one is above the law, and if you lay a hand on a law enforcement officer, you will face consequences."Letitia James said:"This is profoundly unacceptable. Arresting Comptroller Lander for the simple act of standing up for immigrants and their civil rights is a shocking abuse of power. No one should face fear and intimidation in a courthouse, and this is a grotesque escalation of tensions. The administration's rampant targeting of New Yorkers only makes our communities less safe."The Democrats had four years of the Biden administration to do something about the border. They didn't. Instead, they encouraged millions to flood in, many of them unvetted. Yet, because the migrants represent an oppressed group, the Democrats can't turn away. They are choosing this as one of their base issues because it feeds their ongoing delusion that they are living under a fascist dictator. No Kings vs. Army's 250th AnniversaryThe coverage of the No Kings protest was amplified to look like a grassroots movement, even though it was well-funded and populated by the same people who had protested in the “Hands Off” event not long before. It reached roughly the same number of participants, around 5 million. This will be their playbook for the next five years.The legacy media muted the coverage of the Army's parade, and if they covered it at all, they covered it as militaristic, fascist-like, and compared it to North Korea.Here is a balanced report by Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, and Dan Turrentine on 2Way:Assassination NationThe Democrats will not let the crisis of the recent shootings of Democratic lawmakers in Minnesota go to waste and are currently calling the shooter the “MAGA assassin.”On the list of targets were 45 Democrats, “including dozens of Minnesota lawmakers and members of Congress such as Rep. Angie Craig, Rep. Ilhan Omar, and Sen. Tina Smith. It also included members of Planned Parenthood, philanthropist MacKenzie Scott, who has donated hundreds of millions of dollars to the organization, and several healthcare centers across the Midwest,” according to Fox9.As usual, the reaction to the shootings, horrific and tragic though they are, is far less than we saw for the assassination of the healthcare CEO Brian Thompson by Luigi Mangione, who has been turned into a martyr and a hero by the Left. Both assassination attempts against President Trump were not treated the same way by the legacy media, and coverage was muted. Again, we turn to 2way to hear balanced coverage.If you think we're living through crazy times, you would be right. Every Fourth Turning feels transformational in good and bad ways. Change is all around us. These are just a few pressure points we are currently hitting as a country.Let me know if you like this format. Until next time.[I hope to turn this into video but I ran out of time to do it today. Next time]. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

In the Fall of 2021, Donald Trump was selling a hardcover book about his presidency called Our Journey Together. It would be self-published because it had to be. No publisher would touch it, no author would write it, and no critic would be caught dead praising it.January 6th was meant to be the end of the Trump story. He was to slink back to Mar-a-Lago, disgraced and a failure. They all said his book was a joke, a Putin-like rewrite of what really happened in his first term. Obviously, it had to be a lie - covering up the crimes, treason, and corruption.But something told me I should get that book anyway and hold onto it. It might matter someday. Maybe, I thought, the Trump story wasn't over quite yet.So I paid the hefty price for the signed copy and waited. When the package arrived, it came in a plain cardboard box. I breathed a sigh of relief because I thought if the UPS guy knew I was buying it, he might accidentally lose some of my packages next time, or who knows what else.I knew I wasn't a Trump supporter because I was still holding on to what I thought were my principles as a lifelong Liberal. I didn't vote for Trump in 2020, and as long as that was still true about me, I was protected from their wrath. I would find out years later just how bad it was to admit you supported Trump, let alone voted for him.Much of what we have experienced over the past ten years will be memory-holed. No one will remember how treacherous it was back then to buy Our Journey Together. Now, I keep it to remind me of what it felt like to be that afraid and how foolish I was to give them that much power over me.That's what Trump has done for the past ten years. He's refused to give the mighty empire power over his story. He's decided to tell it himself, even if he has to self-publish a book. He'll dress up in a tux with Melania and attend Les Miz at the Kennedy Center, even if some of them boo him. He'll celebrate his birthday on the same day as the 250th anniversary of the creation of the United States Army, even if they mobilize their infantile “No Kings” protest.Trump insists his version is the truth, and two narratives go to war every day. But the thing is, Trump's is the better story. It's like the end of the movie Life of Pi, where the lone survivor of a shipwreck has the choice of whether to tell the good story or the bad story. One will destroy you, and one will inspire you. It's used as a metaphor for religion, but it works here, too.Trump's is the better story because he's a better storyteller. For all of Trump's obvious gifts, that one has served him the best. He's mastered it for his entire life, starting all the way back in high school, where he would just stand in front of a crowd and tell stories.For the past ten years, many people have needed to believe in Trump's story, many of them discarded and forgotten by the empire. Over time, more and more people were drawn in as each side played its role. The Left hunted Trump down and cast themselves as the villains. How could they have ever thought that was a winning strategy?That is what I find most inspiring about Trump. That's why so many of his supporters remain loyal to him and fiercely defend him, even when — especially when — he makes mistakes.In 2020, I was in a very dark place. I was caught up in the so-called #resistance. I believed Putin had Kompromat on Trump. I believed it all. I read all of the books. I hung on to every word Rachel Maddow said.But things would change in those four years. It would become dystopian on the Left. I would feel the mob's wrath one too many times just for speaking out and pushing back about things I knew to be true. I also had no other social life except Twitter and Facebook during lockdowns, where the daily ritual of hate aimed at Trump, his staff, his family, and his supporters began to feel like poison.I didn't want to be a part of it. If, for no other reason, I'd been the target of hate for so long, and I empathized with them. Worse, I knew I was wrong to dehumanize a whole group of people, no matter what the excuse was. Dehumanizing them had already led to violence on the streets before, during, and after Trump's first term.I knew enough history to have asked myself the question more than once: What would you do? What would you do in Salem in 1692? What would you do in Germany in the 1930s? What would you do in the Jim Crow South? I'm not comparing them. I'm just saying the mechanism is the same, and the person I wanted to be, and believe I am, is someone who would not go along with it, especially since my life wasn't in danger.Thus began my journey over to Trump's side of things. I wanted to know whether our version of Trump was true. Was he a threat to Democracy? Was he a virulent racist and “white supremacist”? If I watched enough of his rallies, I might find the smoking gun. Maybe I would have enough proof to justify everything we did to try to destroy him. But that never happened.In 2020, he had survived COVID and was out doing five rallies a day, flying in on a helicopter, circling the crowd overhead, then greeting them with a handful of red hats, tossing them to the crowd. And I watched every single one of his rallies. And as time went on, something happened to me. I guess you could say I was like the Grinch.My heart grew because I saw people who had every reason to be miserable, full of hate, and resentful, as the media describes them, but who were none of those things. They were happy. They were joyful. Trump made them laugh. They danced. It was one big party—a glowing oasis of fun amid an endless, dark winter on the Left.I'll never forget hearing Trump at a rally in Miami in the pouring rain. I remember thinking, This is amazing. The press will never cover this. They could never. They could never write about people who loved Trump that much, to stay out there as the rain pounded down.But of course, that was the story. That was the real story. That was the truth. What I saw in Trump and MAGA is what Tucker Carlson saw in this often-played video summarizing the Trump movement just before the 2020 election.Trump speaks a language called Normal American. It's one we on the Left abandoned long ago. After years of curating our language to be pristine, inoffensive, soft, and kind, we became too fragile to speak Normal American.But Trump can talk to anyone, especially normal Americans. That's why he could fly to so many different states, land anywhere - a McDonald's, a pizza joint, or even East Palestine, Ohio, and fit right in.Normal American can sometimes be offensive. Some of us still speak it when we think no one is watching or listening. To the Left, that means we use all of the slurs that prove we are an ist or a phobe. But no, it just means the occasional dirty joke, or talking like we all used to, without fear and at ease.What I love so much about Trump is his persistent, unshakable optimism. He refused to accept the Left's rewrite of him. They could never destroy Trump because they weren't fighting the real guy; they still aren't. Their ridiculous “No Kings” protest on his birthday is a fantasy about someone they invented who doesn't exist in real life.They don't see the Trump we all see—the guy who faced them down for a decade and triumphed. Four years of attacks, framed as a Russian asset, impeached twice, indicted four times, convicted of a felony, called a racist, a rapist, a fascist, a dictator, a criminal, a felon, Hitler and now — a King. A guy who was almost assassinated twice, took a bullet, survived it, then got on stage just days later to give a 90-minute speech. You bet that's the better story.In all of that time, the Democrats never did the one thing they would have to do to defeat Trump: offer the people something better. The reason they don't is that they can't. They want America back the way it was before Trump. But it's never coming back because we, the people, voted for it never to come back.If they think they can somehow force those who speak Normal American to ever listen to them over Trump, they're fooling themselves. They can throw as many tantrums as they want, but that won't fix who they are. That's why they lost the election. It's never been about Trump. It's always been about them.If anything, Trump was the guy who spelunked into our Doomsday Bunker like SEAL Team Six to get us the hell out of there. You can throw all the lawn signs at us you want. We're not going back.What watching Trump for five years has taught me is just how weak so many of those I once saw as heroes really are. They've never looked so small as they do right now, never so petty as all of them cosplaying oppression just because they lost an election and can't face the humiliation. This is a public episode. 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“All you have to do, I tell myself, is keep your mouth shut and look stupid. It shouldn't be that hard.” - Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale.Last month, Margaret Hoover lobbed Hillary Clinton with sickeningly sweet softball questions for a lengthy interview about her new book. What book was it? Who knows, and who cares? Whatever it is, almost nothing in it will be the truth.When asked what advice she would give to the first woman president, Hillary paused — a pregnant pause that seemed to say, “Well, why can't it still be me?” as the audience laughed. Then, she said, “Don't be a Handmaiden for the patriarchy,” like all the women on the Right.But she's wrong. Republican women aren't the Handmaids. On the contrary, they've put the so-called “feminists” to shame. They aren't afraid of the fanatics on the Left who tried to force all of us into compliance. They have spoken out without mincing words about scientific and biological reality.Most importantly, they have been the only women in government willing to stare down the cult that seeks to erase women. Not a single Democrat has that kind of courage, male or female. But it's those who call themselves “feminists” who have been exposed as cowards and frauds. They are the real Handmaids.I didn't use to think so. I thought Hillary Clinton fought for the rights of women and girls. That's how she sold herself, anyway, and liberal women like me bought the lie. I even downloaded an audio copy of The Handmaid's Tale, thinking it would resonate with me as part of the “resistance.”But as the story unfolded, a chill went down my spine. It didn't remind me of the Right. It reminded me of the Left, everything that had happened to us after Trump won the first time, and how quickly mass hysteria consumed us and how obedient we all became in the wake of it.As if to prove my point, I knew I could not tell my friends we were the side living the Handmaid's Tale. As I began to pull away from my fellow comrades on the Left and directly challenge the new rules of the Woke, I thought some women who called themselves leaders would rise up and speak out. They never did.When I realized that the transgender social contagion had captured a generation of young girls and boys, and how so many of them were waking up to what happened to them at the hands of professionals, therapists, clinicians, and experts, I waited for strong female leaders to stand up for them, to protect them. They never did.When the fanatics on the Left rewrote the rules of biological reality, like there is no difference between men and women, that “trans women are women,” whether they're competing in sports, Jeopardy, or Chess. I thought the strong female leaders who fought so hard for Title IX would speak up and fight for women and girls to compete fairly. They never did.Hillary Clinton's silence on these fundamental rights to protect women and children has been deafening. Even though her history will be written by pandering sycophants like I used to be, who will never call her out for her silence and complicity, some of us will never forget.She and the other “feminists” leave quite a legacy. A whole generation of young women raised to sell themselves out, women like Olympic athlete Simone Biles, who exposed herself as a Handmaid on X by attacking Riley Gaines in a deeply personal way, calling her a “sore loser.”But imagine if Biles had to compete against biological men. Would she stand by and say nothing? Would she chant “trans women are women”?The real fight for women's rights, and the rights of children, has exposed the so-called feminists like Hillary Clinton, Jane Fonda, Gloria Steinem, and every female Democrat in Congress as too weak and ineffectual ever to be real leaders.They've turned a blind eye to stories of girls being forced to share a dorm with a man pretending to be a woman whose visible erection gave him away. They said nothing when a sex offender infiltrated the Wi Spa in Los Angeles and exposed himself to little girls and women, with protesters outside chanting Trans Women are Women.The Democrats haven't just gone along with it; they've gaslighted and shamed any Republican who dares to try to end the madness. They work hard every day to make sure young girls are told they do not have the right to speak up for their own protection, for fairness in sports, because it will ruin their lives if they do.Handmaids don't speak out. They can't. Handmaids do as they're told. Handmaids live in fear. Handmaids bow to their authoritarian leader. That's not the women on the Right, Hillary, that's you.Whatever the feminist movement used to be, it's been hijacked by approval-seeking narcissists who cling to abortion as the only act of empowerment they have left. They do not realize that all that does is further erode the rights of women. If babies don't matter, then mothers don't matter. If mothers don't matter, civilization collapses.The first thing cults do is separate children from their mothers. It's easy to see why. If you break that bond, they can be more easily controlled—both the women and the children.Like Hillary Clinton, Simone Biles might not know what Riley Gaines has suffered when she was trapped in a classroom and held hostage as activists surrounded her, screamed at her, and mocked her fear—all of giving a speech.Instead, Biles and the rest of the Handmaids of the Left have basked in the adoration bestowed upon them by the cult that rewards them for their obedience.But because of their “don't ask, don't tell” strategy of dealing with a problem they can't solve, it's been left up to a growing chorus of voices speaking out - loudly, boldly, and without fear.What does Hillary think that Trump, the man she called a rapist and a misogynist did what she never could, that he signed an Executive Order to protect women in sports.What does she think about his proclamation that it's time to end the madness of “gender-affirming care?” Does it bother her that a man has done the dirty work? Who knows, no one will ever ask her that question. She exists in her own insular bubble, a padded cell that keeps the hard questions out.But the man she insists we should all fear is the one who helped rescue women and children from the clutches of fanaticism.It Takes a Village to De-Trans AmericaThe list of those who have stuck their necks out includes women and men from all backgrounds, on the Left and the Right. Megyn Kelly has become a singular force in the movement. As her media empire has grown, so has her voice. Her videos are seen by millions every day. The story of how this war was won cannot be told without her.The women of the Right that Hillary Clinton smeared deserve much credit, too, for staring down the cult and using their power in Congress to give victims a platform.Many women who still consider themselves Democrats are out there fighting, uniting with Republicans to pass legislation, like Jamie Reed, a former gender clinician who now goes state to state, ensuring bills protecting children from “gender affirming care” are passed.Those the Left shunned and exiled for speaking inconvenient truths are also out there fighting, like Jennifer Sey, who has launched a clothing company called XX-YY Athletics, which celebrates female athletes and points out the differences between the sexes.Here is their latest ad.And then there are the parents who are mad as hell and aren't going to take it anymore.Outspoken Detransitioners like Chloe Cole and Prisha Mosley have given a face to the destructive effects of social contagion.There are even many in the gay and trans communities who understand cultists have hijacked their movement, and many of them are out there fighting too./// This is a public episode. 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I wasn't sure I'd be able to finish the Jake Tapper/Alex Thompson book, Original Sin. I downloaded the audiobook, narrated by Tapper, to listen to as I drive across the country from California to Ohio to see my daughter for her birthday. Out my window, I see the same running commentary of the real America I witnessed years ago, which changed my mind about Trump and MAGA. When you see Trump's name arising in unexpected places in nearly every state, from Arizona (“Viva Trump”) to Nebraska to Iowa to New York, you know something significant has shifted in this country.It felt like a secret cry for help among forgotten and abandoned Americans. I see it even now:I was not encouraged by the book's first chapter, which describes a world where the Democratic Party isn't corrupt, where they don't hand-pick candidates and then force everyone to “Vote Blue No Matter Who,” where identity politics don't rule the day, and where the democratic process is allowed to play out. What a load of garbage. To quote Deep Throat in All the President's Men, “Oh, but it's touching.” Just imagine Gavin Newsom attempting to challenge Kamala Harris. She might be the world's worst candidate, but all points lead back to her; you have to start there, whether they had a primary or not. They knew that, which is why they skipped the foreplay and went straight to a first-ever installed candidate for president. So I didn't think listening to an entire audiobook shaped by a false premise and awash in false media narratives would be a good use of my time. Maybe I'd listen to, I don't know, the new Mark Twain biography.As Victor Davis Hanson points out, Jake Tapper is an unreliable narrator because there would be no Biden cover-up if the media had done its job:Had Original Sin been written by Tom Wolfe, Gore Vidal, or even Walter Kirn and Matt Taibbi, it would have been the searing indictment of a deep state plot foiled by Mr. McGoo, told with bemused irony. But it is dead serious, for better or worse.But I must say, in the end, I'm glad I stuck with it. It might not be the definitive account of the rise and fall of a once-mighty empire I would have wanted, but it is a surprisingly revealing look behind the curtain all the same.Could it really be that Jeffrey Katzenberg and Steven Spielberg were brought in to “direct” Joe Biden with better light, sound, and acting coaching? Yes. Could it be that Rob Reiner and Jane Fonda broke down in hysterics at some mansion in the Hollywood Hills after the debate? Yes. If the aim was to scapegoat Joe Biden, they failed. He comes off as the most sympathetic, a victim of a massive machine of creeps that chewed him up and spit him out. Do they legitimately believe we would sympathize with some fat cat in Hollywood who threatens never to write another check unless they push Biden out? We're supposed to care about what the donors think? Tapper seems to have emerged from the grim experience with a bit of a perspective shift. At least now, he's able to talk about the problems the Democrats have in a way he hasn't in the past ten years. The value of Original Sin, at least for someone like me who fled the party in disgust in 2020 after watching them use their power to take our elections away from the people and decide their outcome, isn't so much that there are any new revelations. But it's a book written from the inside, with access to over 200 voices anxious to be heard. That meant following the events as they unfolded in real time, and let me tell you, there is pleasure in that. I found it cathartic, not just because the Democrats had it coming, and got everything they deserved, but for the sheer joy of witnessing the most most powerful people in the world have their asses handed to them by the very democracy they claimed they wanted to protect. That George Clooney, Steven Spielberg, and Jeffrey Katzenberg were so heavily involved in the politics of the Democrats makes it all look like the Wizard of Oz, pulling back the curtain and exposing the ugly truth. Hollywood might make this into a series for HBO or Netflix, but since the co-founder and chairman of Netflix, Reed Hastings, was one of the fat cats who threatened to withhold funds unless the Democrats got rid of Biden, I'm guessing we won't get the whole story. But if they wanted to tell it like it really happened, it would make one hell of a tale.The Story That Writes ItselfHollywood doesn't have the guts to tell the whole story. They can't because they're part of it. They're way too cozy with the Democrats, and if they really wanted to tell the truth, they'd have to admit, as with Michael Corleone, they are part of the same hypocrisy. At best, they could cobble together something that paints Trump as the ultimate evil that vain and selfish Joe and Jill Biden allowed to take back power. The real story is how they built a powerful coalition and had no choice but to turn to corruption to preserve that power. This would make a great long-form series.Episode One—The “hope and change” candidate lights up the world and chooses an “old white guy” to be his Veep, just as JFK did with LBJ, a cynical ploy to make his youth and inexperience (and, in this case, skin color) more palatable for a nervous electorate. Episode Two - The “hope and change” guy doesn't like the “old white guy” as the successor of his powerful coalition, which now includes all of culture, all corporations, all institutions, all media, and all social media. Why go backwards? The “old white guy” with a stutter who just lost his beloved son to brain cancer was no longer useful to the “hope and change” guy. No one thinks much of it as he's kicked to the curb and embarrassed as not electable enough, not desirable enough, and past his sell-by date. So, the “hope and change” guy picks the “Wall Street Sweetheart,” the former First Lady and Secretary of State, to become the “first woman POTUS.” With the help of a grassroots populist movement and an “Old Socialist” challenging the “Wall Street Sweetheart,” the party is fractured, and Trump wins. Episode Three - The establishment and the Obama coalition decide that Trump should not be allowed to rule, forget democracy! Who needs it? No “old white guy” was supposed to win, least of all that guy. Millions pour into the streets in an orgy of self pity, imagined oppression, fragility, privilege and narcissism — mass hysteria takes hold, cancel culture grips the left. Hundreds lose their jobs as they desperately try to undo the election results and get rid of Trump. They impeach him, they frame him, they smear him, they attack him. The OG “old white guy” waiting in the wings isn't looking so bad. An easy, lateral move. An establishment pick. One “old white guy” for another.Episode Four - 2020 is its own whole episode. It has to be. It was the year the Democrats sold their souls to the Devil to cling to power. They spent $1 billion with a “well-funded cabal” of elites to fund and amplify the racial protests, change election laws, $400 million to collect ballots, and trot in experts to lie about everything from the laptop to COVID to the protests. They censored Americans on social media, and the FBI forced censorship of the laptop. The country sinks. Media credibility is destroyed. Large swaths of the electorate abandon the Democrats. But the “old white guy” wins. So finally, he gets his dream at long last, to be president of the United States. Episode Five - The “old white guy” is finally the savior he always dreamed he'd be. He became a blank check for Black Americans, trans Americans, and especially women of color. He would finish what the “hope and change” guy started. Are we topless at the White House?But the “old white guy” bungles the withdrawal from Afghanistan, and his approval ratings tank. Americans don't see a nice old grandpa anymore. They see George Spahn, who just moved the Manson Family into the White House, and now they're running the country.Now what? He goes after Trump and MAGA, calling them fascists, extremists, and a danger to society. If the “old white guy” can't have the presidency, then no one will.The “old white guy” isn't so nice anymore. Trump is indicted four times, convicted, and takes a mug shot that goes viral. They've sold their soul to the Devil, after all, they're not going to give up power so easily. Episode Six - The final battle. Trump teases and torments the “old white guy” and forces him to debate. Trump mocks him mercilessly at his rallies for not knowing where he is. For Trump, beating him will be a cake walk for anyone not sucked into the false reality pushed by the legacy media.Trump and Biden debate rematch. The “old white guy” crashes and burns so hard it nearly sets Rob Reiner's hair on fire. “He just lost the election,” Dana Bash scribbles on a note to Jake Tapper. What now for the empire that was never the resistance?Trump survives an assassination attempt at Butler the following month. His entire campaign is transformed. Elon Musk joins his dream team. This was our last best hope for America. We wanted out. We wanted something new. We wanted to be set free:But inside the Bubble, it's Original Sin. It's denial. It's a legacy press that lies to the monarchs, lies to their voters, sending them cascading into yet more hysteria. Please make the bad orange man go away! For the sake of democracy! Please give us our utopia back! Jane Fonda, Steven Spielberg, Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, David Simon, Jon Stewart, Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young, and Rob Reiner are losing their minds. It's a dystopia full of aging, frustrated aristocrats who can't keep democracy down. We're about to lose our democracy, they cry. Biden will lose us our democracy, they insist. How can this be happening? Get rid of the “old white guy.” GET RID OF HIM! For the sake of democracy! “We need a new nominee,” says George Clooney. Who's we? What happened to democracy? Now, the duly elected nominee, aka “the old white guy,” must step aside to save democracy? Yes, that is where the Democrats arrived in their pitiful last gasp to salvage and preserve their power. They cynically install the “woman of color” because they know all points lead to Kamala Harris. Their flock will fall in line as they always have. Push him out, push the “old white guy” out in a palace coup worthy of a fading, useless, self-serving monarchy on the brink of collapse. Trump wins again. We see the “old white guy” grinning in the oval office and having the last laugh. They used him. They lied to him. They flattered him. Then, they kicked him out, all because they were exposed and couldn't hide the truth anymore.As the scene fades to black, we see a close-up on Jake Tapper lying in bed, working it all out. Holy s**t, he thinks. Someone has to tell this story. He picks up the phone, “Alex? Hi, it's Jake. I was wondering if we might talk.” I mean, come on. It's Ishtar Part Two. It writes itself.Do I think you should read Original Sin? Absolutely. It might not be the whole truth. It might be spin for the Democrats to regroup and recover. It might be reputation laundering for the media. But for me, it was an early Christmas present, if only for the delicious pleasure of watching them squirm as their corrupt plot to cling to power unravels. I can't think of anything more satisfying than that. Original Sin proves two things: the Democrats are creeps and they got exactly what they deserved.Somewhere in Iowa, 8pm.// This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson writing an exposé of the conspiracy and cover-up to hide Joe Biden's cognitive decline is like the Watergate burglars writing a book about Nixon's alleged corruption. The conspiracy and cover-up are coming from inside the house.“A cancer on the Presidency”To most of us who aren't inside the bubble of the Left, the Tapper/Thompson book looks more like a rescue mission than a Mea Culpa. They have a book to sell, and they know who their best and most profitable buyers are - people who read the New Yorker with disposable income who have thrown money at the Democrats for almost a decade, all with the promise that they'd make the bad orange man go away.What I know after a decade of irresponsible fear-mongering is that the “original sin” was the moment the Left, with all of the power, called itself “the resistance,” and with the help of a complicit press corps, went to war on a duly elected president and his supporters.Everything that came after that, up to and including Biden's decision to run, was the result of a ruling class that refused to relinquish power, did not respect the voices of the people, and used everything in the kingdom to systematically dehumanize, demonize, and exile the other half of the country, or anyone who did not go along with them.As part of the resistance after the 2016 election, I should have seen who Trump really was — the guy on Celebrity Apprentice, the real estate playboy we all knew from the 1980s. But in our collective fever dream, we thought he'd somehow been captured and compromised by Putin, and had transformed into an evil fascist, racist, rapist dictator second only to Hitler.We drew a line. We were on this side, and anyone who voted for, was kind to, or associated with anyone on the other side was kicked out of utopia. We owned everything, so we could raise the drawbridge and forget about everyone else. We cultivated a dystopian fear bunker that policed thought and speech and strictly forbade any truth-telling lest it hurt the Democrats and helped Trump.That's all they had left because everything else had failed. So, when a crazed lunatic surfer dude believed he was “saving democracy,” he picked up a gun and tried to shoot Trump. That was proof enough of the damage caused by the once-respected legacy press, and it was their “original sin.”And even after that, a freaked-out, unhinged group of people on TikTok actively call for the assassination of Trump with their “when it happens” and “somebody just do it,” memes.So when James Comey posts a photo of a message in the sand to “86” the 47th president, it takes on a different meaning than just a funny joke. He was, after all, the FBI director, and whatever happened with that other shooter in Butler?Their “original sin” has divided us, polarized us, and worst of all, betrayed our trust far worse than not reporting on the Biden story. Lying about Trump was worse. Making him a supernatural receptacle of all the evil in the world was worse.They're still out there doing it now - like Lawrence O'Donnell, Tim Miller, Rick Wilson, Rachel Maddow — All the President's Media perpetuating the kind of groupthink via deception that got them into this mess.Ten years of pumping hysteria into the veins of Americans, and what do they have to show for it? Nothing. Selling fear worked for a while, until it didn't. After ten years of it, with a new generation coming of age that wasn't plugged into cable news or the legacy media, Americans went looking for normalcy that they somehow found in Donald Trump.All anyone had to do was what I did, and what so many other people did: take a look for ourselves at Trump and MAGA. Once we did that, we'd never trust the media ever again.Follow the MoneyThe reason the excerpt in the New Yorker is about George Clooney is for their target audience. Who else would care? Frontloaded with Clooney's journey to Sudan and subsequent charity work seems designed to signal to the reader that the fate of the Democratic Party wasn't up to some actor past his prime. No, he was important. And for a time, he was.Nothing illustrates the disconnect of today's Democratic Party better than the fundraiser in LA that “shook Clooney to his core” because Joe Biden didn't recognize him. All that money, all that power, all that celebrity, was exactly the wrong message to sell to a beleaguered working class sick of the sight of them.His house in the South of France, his “big movie” for Netflix, his phone call to Julia, and his brush with politics all explain his New York Times op-ed that forced Joe Biden out and put Kamala Harris in. Clooney said that Biden “saved democracy” in 2020 and could save it again by stepping aside.Imagine that kind of hubris to believe Joe Biden had the power to save Democracy and that somewhere deep inside, George Clooney believed he could save it too. What they mean is to save their empire, to preserve their power. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

Whatever it is we did to kids that started around 2013 has led to whole generations of freaked-out, delusional cult members who can barely function now when things don't go their way. There is no turning it around. There is no changing what so many of them believe.This militant army worked well for the Democrats, but I do wonder if any of them looked at Kenosha or Portland and thought, What have we done?Because so many adults were too afraid to confront the problem until the problem grew up and joined the workforce, that power is out now, and it is destroying the Democratic Party, not to mention everything else the Left controls, faster than you can say Holy Woketopia Batman.That fear that has crippled all of them surprised me. I didn't know so many would be so willing to conform, stay quiet, say nothing, or join the mob and pick up a stone. I don't know, I guess I thought there would be more like me, people willing to stand up and push back.Lionel Shriver talks about this personality type while on a recent episode of the Triggernometry podcast.Speaking of mania, I'll never forget how a film critic named Sean O'Connell once wrote a film review about Pixar's Turning Red. He didn't particularly like the movie because he wrote from his perspective (normie white dude). The attacks came fast and hard, from young Asian girls who had begged for representation in movies, to the scolds on Twitter. Then came the agonizing op-eds. By the end, he didn't lose his job, but he almost did. He had to apologize and take down the review.It went all the way to this:Even after his apology, the tweets that flooded in continued to punish him for not liking what is (not a very good movie in the first place) about a 12-year-old girl getting her period. He was being honest, as film critics are supposed to do, but not anymore.They even escalated it and asked him to name names:Sean O'Connell should have stood up to them. He should have done what I did every time they came for me. You turn around and you flip them the double bird. It isn't that hard. Yes, you will lose almost everything, but in return, you will gain your self-respect.If they can't even tell the truth in a film review back 2022, how can they possibly fix what is wrong with any of it, from Hollywood to the Democratic Party?Send in the DudebrosIt's obvious to everyone that Democrats are repelling men. All men. Young men, old men, Black and Hispanic men. They've decided the reason for that is the “woke crap” that many can't stand but will never admit out loud.They say they've gotten the message. Now, they figure they don't have to do much, like offer the public a way out of the madness that has afflicted their party, and thus, all of the cultural, corporate, and educational institutions they control.No, it's a messaging problem, not a policy problem. They only have to dispatch a few mascu-bros to get the talking points out that they hate the “woke crap” too but they still want to be good people and do the right thing, unlike the other half of the country who are bad people, and don't want to do the right thing.It's easy to spot the likely paid influencers on TikTok who almost look normal until they start parroting the talking points of the madness of the Left. And then, just like that, we're sucked back into the crazy.Oh, it isn't as bad as the women who dominate the party and TikTok. If I spend too much time surfing that algo, as I often do for research, I come out of it thinking, is that really what became of it all-thirty years of progressivism, feminism, and activism, and it ends with delusion and mania?Influencer Henry Sisson has emerged as a supposedly brotastic anti-woke Democrat on Piers Morgan.Then, there was David Hogg on Bill Maher, pretending it's possible to bring some sanity to the party so young men can “get laid and have fun.”Perhaps it is a good strategy. Just give those who can't stand the wokeness a reason not to worry about it anymore.Reactions like that might help them accomplish their goal of bringing people back to the party, especially men, but I doubt it. Matt Walsh is correct when he says they were never cool.Ultimately, their reality disconnect prevents them from ending their ongoing mass hysteria. Take this piece at Daily Kos (yes, it still exists, shockingly), by this person, note the pronouns in bio:She/Her writes:That March story about Enola Gay was part of an electronic preliminary pull that flagged certain words that might unearth woke content. That didn't mean Pete Hegseth banned it. As with the children's book by Julianne Moore, it was put in the “to be looked at” pile, but that didn't stop the headlines.If you see that many headlines hitting your feed and it's spread far and wide, and people you trust and admire, why wouldn't you believe it? And if they are being misled to that degree, how can they ever be expected to pull themselves out of it? And if they are not telling us the truth but just trying to hurt Trump, how can we trust them?After all that, they dumped him anyway. Lesson learned, eh, David?The Democrats have become so afraid of blowback that they have to try to get their message out anonymously. But do they ever ask themselves how we can address the needs of the people if we are that afraid of our own party?Recently, Mark Halperin spoke for them in an attempt to force the Democrats to the table to confront some of it.Why They're Stuck with itWokeness isn't a “fad,” like a tramp stamp tattoo you mature your way out of, then seek to remove. This goes deep, probably deeper than anyone ever knew back in 2012 and 2013 when the “whole of society” effort began unfolding in schools, in institutions, and online to gently introduce Critical Race Theory as a new way of seeing ourselves in the world. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

“The last spectacular ball in the history of the empire ... [but] a new and hostile Russia glared through the large windows of the palace ... while we danced, the workers were striking and the clouds in the Far East were hanging dangerously low." - Grand Duke Alexander MikhailovitchThe theme of the Met Gala this year was Black Dandyism. In case you don't know what that is, The Met explains:Black Dandyism is cool and all as its authentic self. I'm not sure it maintained that coolness last night with “radical chic” on full display as a symbol of virtue for the powerful watching in real time as their empire comes crumbling down.You no doubt noticed the vibe shift. Something seemed off about it. It was like the Blue Origin flight. It felt inauthentic, all for show, a ritual to genuflect to their chosen status symbols while disguising who they really are.Not that they will be criticized by the people who matter to them. Those outlets that aren't owned by Donald Newhouse, the billionaire who owns Vogue and the New Yorker, worth around $18 billion, wouldn't dare say a word. Everyone is to applaud and praise them for their goodness and moral virtue.But as I watched the parade of famous Black artists walk the red carpet, alongside ashamed, self-hating white celebrities who looked like they'd been kidnapped and who couldn't wash away the fear in their eyes, I could see the man behind the curtain, or in this case, the woman.Who are they kidding? This was not power or progress, not for any of them. The Met Gala served the same purpose it always has: to make rich white people look good. How they measure what defines good is all that has changed.The white guilt among the wealthy in our modern Gilded Age is thick. They know something is ending. They can feel the ground shifting beneath their feet. Just as the very wealthy in the late 1800s did. They have no choice but to try to buy absolution by bribing the virtuous to be their facade.They have no choice. They know the mob would eat them alive if they didn't defer, de-center, elevate, platform, and do something to make their insular world seem like the good place, not the bad place. They have to be on the right side to survive a little bit longer, to hold their place in society, even as, especially as everything falls apart.They didn't call it “virtue signaling” during the Gilded Age. They called it Civic Virtue, which has a long history in America, going all the way back to the Revolution. It is one of the reasons we see so many of the big names from that era splashed across major institutions, like the Andrew Carnegie institution, etc.The billionaires alive today are all expected to give back to society in a way that justifies or absolves them of their sins. But something else entirely is going on with what we saw at the Met Gala and with Blue Origin. It wasn't Civic Virtue so much as virtue signaling.But it does seem strange in a year when Donald Trump and his MAGA Deplorables won the popular vote, where he is attempting major change to elevate the silent majority, to attend this spectacular ball and to send yet another message to America that you are not invited to this party because we think you are bad people, racists. So we'll celebrate in front of you. We'll rub it in as though we never lost the election at all.The wealthy aristocracy in our country has figured out that they need shields. They must hide behind people whom no one would dare attack or criticize. It is the reversal of the fanaticism that afflicted and ignited the mob when the streets were filled with protesters in the Summer of 2020.What we see now is their way of healing from the trauma of the agreed-upon reality that emerged that Summer. Most people don't remember how unprecedented this uprising really was. Remember chanting through the neighborhoods in Seattle?If you were cowering in your home as a Good White Liberal, what did you make of that? How much guilt did you feel? Their escape hatch for all of this madness we've been living through, a fake-pretend fix to oppression because Lulu Lemon and the Lifetime Network now center Black characters and de-center “whiteness.”I'll never forget my white friends in Santa Monica, of all places, hurling themselves in front of “Black bodies” because the cops were less likely to shoot them. They all believed this delusion, even in Santa Monica. But now, there is a reversal of that dynamic playing out. White people need Black people and other non-whites or LGTBQIA+ members to hide behind. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

Kamala Harris might have many gifts, but intelligence is not one of them. How else to explain her speech, where she compared today's Left to a herd of protective elephants?Here is the clip:As with most of Kamala Harris' speeches, there was no there there. It was delusional gobbledegook that seemed to get really obvious things wrong, especially the way she ended the speech by saying this country doesn't belong to those in the White House but to “we the people.” Yeah, uh, what part of winning the popular vote is not “we the people,” Kamala?I thought of that line in The Big Lebowski:The Democrats have decided their leader should be Kamala Harris, and they set her loose, careless metaphors and all. What else can they do? Tell the truth? “Sorry, we tried to make Kamala Harris happen again. We already knew she was a tragically weak candidate who couldn't even win in her home state of California, and is mostly known for her extreme cringe and her viral word salad clips. But she's a woman of color, and white women will never vote for a normie white dude, so let's make Kamala Harris great again?”Granted, most people on the Left have become so disconnected from reality that they can't see the big picture anymore, but even still, if there is one thing we know about elephants other than that they are intelligent, empathetic creatures, it is that they, like all mammals, protect their young to ensure reproduction and survival.And of all animals to drag into this mess, why must it be elephants? This is a strange thing to be outraged about, but I love elephants. I love them like I love pigs. It isn't just that they are intelligent, although they are ranked number five on the list from How Stuff Works (pigs not far behind).I love their deep empathy because I have too much of it and can relate. I love how they remember those who protected and raised them, even decades later. I hate that they are hunted and butchered (just as I hate factory farming with pigs). I realize I must accept these realities, but it doesn't make it hurt any less.But mostly, like all mammals, elephants are known for being ferocious protectors of their young, so much so that the entire group is often involved in saving even one calf.You should see what a mother elephant would do to anyone who came near her baby with a surgical scalpel or dangerous, irreversible drugs to sterilize them for life.Do you think elephants would be casually aborting their children or allowing gender clinics to guide them toward irreversible harm to their bodies, all in the name of some imaginary mass delusion? Do you think elephants would divide people based on skin color and gender identity and deem those the most vulnerable?Elephants are matriarchal because the older female elephants have gathered enough knowledge to help guide and lead the herd through treacherous terrain. The males must leave when they become adolescents and form a herd with other males who teach them what they need to know.For the Left, they like the part where elephants form a herd of females and exile the males. They don't like the part where the most important thing to them is ensuring reproduction and survival.That's last thing they do on the Left now. They seem to be actively trying to extinct themselves, whether it's buckling to a dangerous cult that sterilizes the young, or encouraging abortions to the tune of one million per year.Those who have paid the highest price for this are the children whose mothers can't protect them because they are cowards, not like mother elephants, that's for sure. Fathers, too. They've been castrated metaphorically and literally. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”―George Orwell,1984It isn't that one crazy, alleged animal-abusing Democrat who just introduced articles of impeachment against Trump who will define Resistance 2.0.It's the more serious threat that looms ahead should the Democrats take the House next year.Steve Bannon has become the harbinger. He predicted it in 2018, and he's predicting it now.He's right. They have no other plan for America, not in the four years Trump was in power the first time, not for Biden's four years, and not now. They have one directive: to purge Trump and MAGA from utopia.It's beginning to look a lot like 2016, only this time I'm watching from the other side of the door. I escaped, but only just barely. I sometimes look back at who I was then and scratch my head. How could I have been that easily manipulated? How could I have believed them?I believed it all. I read every book on Putin. I hung on every word that came out of Rachel Maddow's mouth. I believed the New York Times had our best interests at heart. I could not believe or even imagine that the people I trusted would eventually expose themselves as weaponized, partisan propaganda machines.I try to connect with the Democratic centrist I used to be because that is still where most of my friends and family are, not to mention all of American culture and most institutions. They live in a completely separate reality, and I live in this one.The only comparison I can make takes us back to just before the last Civil War. One reality not only justified slavery but also existed inside a utopian Antebellum paradise of Southern Belles and wealthy plantations, but also believed ending slavery was an existential crisis they could not survive. How else to convince so many to go fight and die for a cause?The pre-war propaganda whipped both sides into a frenzy that would eventually take them to war. From War History Online:In the decade prior to the Civil War, the American press began flourishing and evolved rapidly in terms of technology, output, and distribution. Meanwhile, the number of newspapers expanded and a new style of weekly pictorial publications filled with comics and illustrations became popular and widespread in northern and southern states.This mass distribution of picture-based media was eagerly and voraciously consumed by the American public. It also proved ideal for distributing and disseminating propaganda and successfully pushed divisive ideologies from both sides of the divide.Sound familiar?When the Union Army won the war, however, their utopian paradise in the South was upended, which kicked off episodes of mass hysteria that would eventually lead to Jim Crow laws, the KKK, segregation, and worse.It's easy, especially for the modern-day Left, to see those crimes against humanity as a disease that lives inside of white people, the sin of racism, a war they believe they're still fighting today.The side that suddenly had all of the wealth and power after the rise of Silicon Valley and the marriage between the Obama coalition and culture was lacking only one thing: spiritual reliefI was part of it. I was a “woke” blogger, though we did not use that word then, and many don't dare use it now. What mattered to me was elevating non-whites and other marginalized groups in the film industry. That gave me, a white woman, a sense of purpose, a deeper meaning for my work and my life, something I'd never felt before.But to be “woke” as translated for white people means believing you share your country and your culture with racists afflicted with “white fragility.” At first, it was an idea that spread, but by 2020, it was mandated.It makes sense when you consider our country expanding onto the new frontier of the internet, where the free market, cities, towns, and demographic groups mattered less than this giant swirling soup of humanity we suddenly had to make sense of. What better way than to divide us up into easily recognizable categories?2016 was, to all of us, a sign that the Confederacy had returned, especially since Trump was now a prominent figure on Twitter, just like Obama had been. We saw his win as an act of war. We were to obstruct, block, shun, attack, or resist. He was not to be allowed to govern, which would ensure his destruction, or so we thought.What we didn't do, however, was listen to the voters. They were invisible to us because we wrote them off as angry white deplorables clinging to their guns and religion. They don't deserve representation. No, it wasn't we who failed. It was Trump who invaded us and is now oppressing us.We couldn't see things any other way. Because we were the “good” side and those people over there had to be the “bad side.” The nation's first Black president, we believed, was hated by white Americans, and now, they were coming to dismantle his legacy, our utopia, and Make America White Again. They still believe that. It is existential to them, which explains the ongoing need to purge their utopia of threatening people.Those same realities that decided who got to stay and who had to go also existed in George Orwell's 1984. What is “cancel culture” anyway, but virtual gulags?Anyone who didn't agree with the reversed hierarchy was out. You couldn't just go along with it; you had to believe it. You had to love Big Brother.Orwell had it so right when he wrote in that last paragraph, “He was in the public dock, confessing everything, implicating everybody.”I could feel it, the mass dehumanization. It didn't sit right with me. I was disgusted by how my side was behaving, but it wasn't until I walked in the shoes of Trump supporters that I knew for sure that this really was a Civil War.No, Trump supporters were not getting lynched or put in concentration camps or a gulag. But the mechanisms at play are the same. I've never seen people in America feel emboldened to attack another group this way, but no doubt it has happened many times throughout our history.To justify that they are the “good” side, they must continue to find victims of oppression based on skin color or gender identity. They don't seem to care that much about the hollowed-out, torn-down neighborhoods in the middle of the country, where people of all skin colors are suffering. No, it has to be those who come from other countries, helpless and faceless, defined only by one thing: the color of their skin. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

The rage and hysteria are escalating. They're openly calling for Trump's assassination.They're marching, they're protesting, they're screaming into the void for what, they don't know. Something has been taken from them, something they desperately want back. It's been ten long years of fighting, but nothing has worked. There is no way out for them. They're trapped.If you talk to one of them, they will tell you they believe things that aren't true. Trump is taking away Social Security and Medicaid. They've eliminated the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. They've eliminated the Department of Education. They're “disappearing” people from the streets and sending them to concentration camps.The truth doesn't seem to matter and hasn't for a long time now. Hyperbole is all because they have nothing left to sell, no vision for America's future. Who would they be if they weren't the people hunting Donald Trump? They do not know. They've destroyed themselves trying to destroy him.The headlines fed to them supercharge their rage. These are mostly educated white women in real life, but in their fantastical imaginings of their cosplay resistance, they are warrior protectors of every oppressed group. It's all coming true. Doomsday is here.They don't like the word “hysteria” because it hearkens back to the dark ages when women's mental health issues were mislabeled that way. It's the word. It's always the word. They felt like no one could hear them scream. Out of that eternal frustration came the feminist movement, a movement now dead in its tracks.It's the word “hysteria,” like the word “woke,” like the word “illegal,” like the word woman like the word “homeless,” like the word “fat.” Change the word, change reality.These white women can't be feminists anymore because that makes them “white feminists” or “Karens.” They hate those words too. They must always defer, apologize, step back, de-center themselves, and elevate women of color who matter more. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

I have known Joseph Massey For quite some time now, we have always wanted to do an interview, but we never made it happen for one reason or another. Now, after we collaborated on a video (see below) and he's written a brand new book that has shot to the top of the charts at Amazon, thanks to an appearance on Megyn Kelly's show, we thought it was a good time to have a deep conversation about everything from his faith, to his poetry and of course, to the craziness of the Left and cancel culture.We will be giving away five free copies of America is the Poem. Joseph will select interested participants from the comments. Please leave a comment if you'd like to be considered. I will contact the winners for addresses.Have a listen to the podcast above, and here is a link to the book on Amazon:America is the Poem video, Joseph and I collaborated on together:Joseph's appearance on Megyn Kelly's show:A sampling of photos of Massey's work, but you can find more at his Instagram.For more or to subscribe to Joseph's Substack, click here: Joseph Massey Hope you enjoy our conversation, and let me know if you'd like to hear more interviews from me. I hope to post one more thing for Easter Weekend, but otherwise, please enjoy the holiday, and for those celebrating Passover too. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

The Wall Street Journal has dropped a hit piece on Elon Musk. Their headline suggests Elon Musk is farming out his seed and growing crops for a super-intelligent generation to colonize Mars in the near future. That's the story they wish to tell, and it's the story Ashley St Clair is grateful they will tell it. After all, the only thing she seems to want out of this is to be “not a secret.”The story is behind the paywall and I am not that invested to pay for this and other hysterical bleating from Rupert Murdoch's high-minded Conservative outlet. I was a subscriber for many years but lately, I'm not finding much difference there from everywhere else — it's an endless war on Trump. We get it. You don't like him. We get it. You don't like Elon, either.Instead, I'll draw from this piece from The Independent:St Clair, 26, went public with her claims that she and Musk share a child in February. Now she has claimed that the billionaire offered her a one-time payment of $15 million, plus $100,000 a month until her child turns 21, in exchange for her silence.Well, that probably explains Amber Heard's move to Spain and her mystery baby delivered via surrogacy. As long as she never says Elon Musk fathered it, she can live out her life with money and privacy, plus a baby she always wanted (she did not want Elon).Heard was scorched earth anyway by the time she moved to Spain. Maybe this was the cash infusion that got her there and allowed her to live out her days in comfort caring for her baby girl. Here is a picture of the two of them:Heard, like St Clair, went into this with her eyes open. Unlike Sinclair, and not needing a bounce of fame, Heard (maybe) took the money and ran.By contrast, St Clair seems to very much want everyone to know who fathered her baby, and why wouldn't she? In a time of influencer culture, what could be a better narrative than Mean Old Elon flew her somewhere exotic, filling her head with pretty little lies, and then filling her womb with sperm, whereupon a baby was made?Where did that baby come from? It came from you, Ashley. That's what happens when you spread your legs for Daddy. Take note.To pretend she had no idea this was where the whole thing would end up is absurd. She knew he wanted to father a child with her. She didn't know that no one would ever know about it and what good is sleeping with, much less having a baby with the richest and arguably second most famous man in the world if nobody knows about it.Good for her she came of age in a culture of victimhood. Everyone is a victim, especially grown women, didn't you know? As yet another single mother with a mystery baby, she is a nobody. As one of Elon's baby mamas, however, she can now become a somebody, a superstar of her wildest dreams. Maybe that's right, maybe it isn't, but money is nothing compared to fame, unless you're Amber Heard.St Clair acts like she just gave birth to the b*****d child of King Henry XIII and is fighting for him to be recognized as a royal. And now, has cast herself as the brave martyr, the poor peasant girl the King commanded to lay back and take it. She rejected the offer. “I don't want my son to feel like he's a secret,” St Clair reportedly told Musk's fixer Jared Birchall, who runs Musk's family office.And:St Clair claimed that Musk has used his wealth to silence some of the other women who have had his children, according to the report.And:St Clair gained an insight into Musk's “paranoid” way of thinking when they dated in 2023 after meeting in the spring of that year. Their romance began on Musk's social media platform X after he began to interact with her posts.She was invited by Musk to visit X's headquarters in San Francisco. From there, he took her on a separate trip to Rhode Island on his private plane, where the Space X CEO was visiting one of his sons at college, and then later on a getaway to St. Barts for New Year.During their time together, Musk frequently talked to St Clair about having children, she claimed. “The first time they had sex, Musk joked that they should ‘pick a name' for their future child,” the outlet reports.On the trip to St. Barts, she told Musk that she was ovulating. “What are we waiting for?” he reportedly replied, and their son was conceived, according to St Clair.I'm less interested in the part of the story where Elon Musk wants to populate to colonize Mars with his version of a super-intelligent offspring, or as the Left will very likely dub it, a “master race.” The part of the story I am interested in is the idea that Ashley St Clair, or any woman who spreads her legs for Elon or allows his sperm to be injected into her, is, in any way, a victim.Ashley St Clair knew exactly what she was involving herself in, but she could not stop herself because almost no young woman could. Many young women go through the ritual of pretending to fall in love with a rich old dude so they can then get pregnant and be financially taken care of for the rest of their lives. Everybody knows that. Get that honey, or else no money is the new get that ice, or else no dice. Ashley apparently thought she was Cinderella, that she'd get the fairy tale. Most women want that too. They want the romance. They want the wealth. They want a good father. They want the faithful man. They want a happy ending. They also want to be empowered. They want a man who will listen to them and hang on every word. They want a man who will be attracted to only them for the rest of their lives. They want a country that remains attracted to old women, fat women, and women who are not traditionally pretty. They want it all because they have been told they deserve it all, because they're “worth it.”Well, you can't have it all. If Ashley St Clair wanted a husband and a father for her child, the last person she would so willingly sleep with is Elon Musk, who made no secret of telling her yes, I would love to impregnate you.” But no, I'm not exactly looking for a commitment. What did she expect? He would abandon everything, rush by her side, marry her, and they could, oh, I don't know, go live happily in a SpaceX Tiny House?Fanatical activists are out there calling him a Nazi, fire-bombing Teslas, and trying to destroy his businesses, and here's Ashley whining, WAAAA, pay attention to ME!! That's not to say anyone should approve of plugging willing women in order to produce as many children as possible. But the FLDS does it too, minus the sex with underage children part. That's AmoreI speak from experience. I went to Italy to meet a man I fell in love with on the internet. I spent a month there. I came back pregnant. He was furious. He did not want me to have the baby, like every man who engages in casual sex except Elon Musk. Trust me, the used part is not “have a baby with me, and I'll pay you $15 million to keep it under wraps.” The used part is, “Let's have fun, and if you get pregnant, you'll abort the baby, right?” Would I have loved a real relationship and a real marriage with a happy home and lots of kids? Yes, of course. I wanted the fairy tale, too. But the whining by Ashley St Clair and the pearl-clutching by both the Left and the Right of what these women have CHOSEN to do with their bodies is nauseating. They are not children. They are not Handmaids. They are not victims. Ashley St Clair all but begged him, “Impregnate me Elon!!” And we're supposed to feel sorry for her now?The truth? She wants control of all of it. She wants the lavish lifestyle and to be known as the woman Elon Musk plucked off the internet to father his super-intelligent Mars space force. She was so pretty and so smart he chose her! What else is she going to be? How do you keep that a secret for 20 years? She didn't make that choice for her kid. She made it for herself. Own it, Ashley. And to Conservatives glomming onto this, I will quote an email I just received from the Daily Caller's Editor At Large, Geoffrey Ingersoll:It's for that outcry on the right to become so loud that Trump simply has to part ways with Musk. As far as motivations go, this much could barely be described as ulterior. Onlookers in public can see the real goal.I supported my daughter on my own. I worked jobs that I could do either with her in a backpack (sports photography), sleeping on my chest (movie critic), working from home (horoscope writer) or in a stroller nearby (working as a janitor). Eventually, I built my own business, which was successful enough that we would be fine—a “woman-owned” business everyone on the Left approved of until they found out I voted for Trump.But I don't regret that decision, just as I don't regret flying off to Italy and getting pregnant. Raising my daughter has been the best thing I have ever done, and there is no close second. But it was my decision. Just like it was my bad decision not to have babies I could have had. I wish I could blame feminism or the men who got me pregnant, but I have only myself to blame. And I live with that regret every day of my life.Do I feel sorry for the kids involved because they don't have a father around, and is that good role modeling for men? Sure, I feel bad for them. No, it's not good role modeling for men. Like my daughter, every kid deserves that. I'll never forget when she was dressed up for prom and came out to show me how pretty she looked, and how much it hurt my heart that no father was around to tell her.She's the one who paid the price for MY DECISIONS, just like Ashley's child will pay for hers, for better or worse, but honestly, you could do a lot worse than $15 million plus $2 million more. Take it from someone who once had to scrounge for change because the Tooth Fairy arrived one night unexpectedly, and I had no money to put under her pillow. No one offered me a payout, that's for sure. But it didn't matter how broke we were. That's the thing about parenting: you make it work. You aren't born a parent; you become one. Take responsibility for your own decisions, Ashley. You will need a good explanation when your child gets older, and you have to explain to him why he's so famous now.//end This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

I listened with an open mind to this illuminating interview between Bari Weiss at the Free Press and Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen, two of the founders of Axios, about how the public lost trust in the media.As we watch them scramble to explain why they covered up Joe Biden's cognitive decline, what we see instead of an apology is an excuse.There has never been any real reckoning of what happened to them after Trump won in 2016, all through his first term, especially in 2020, when they lost much of the public's trust for good.The legacy media took a side, but worse, they positioned themselves as superior to the other side, which meant that not only weren't they chasing the story, but they weren't paying attention to those who were.The Biden/Trump debate was Toto pulling back the curtain and exposing the Wizard of Oz. There was not much they could do after that. The jig was up.It didn't break news for anyone who got their news outside the bubble, however. There, the media is endlessly mocked for its pandering, weakness, and propaganda.How it StartedHow it's going:The opening paragraphs:The collective post-debate gloating from conservatives is in full swing this week, as Democrats reckon with the ongoing political fallout. But the immediate response on the right has focused less on the fact of Biden's potential mental decline than on alleging that Democrats and the mainstream press colluded to hide it.That's the kinder, gentler explanation. The alternative is that they are SO BAD at their jobs, such terrible reporters, so in the tank for one political party that they couldn't see what was right in front of them for four years. Pick one.It's hard to sympathize when so many of us were left twisting in the wind, dealing with major issues in American life, from COVID to the protests to lockdowns to the woke madness in our schools. We needed a legacy press that would tell us the truth, not do the bidding of one political party.True, they could have lost their jobs for it. That happened everywhere. Reporters lost their jobs for a headline, “Buildings Matter Too.” Donald McNeil lost his job at the New York Times because some overly fragile brat tattled on him and accused him of being a racist. But so what? Someone had to stand up for objectivity and journalism, didn't they?What Happened to MeThe mania around race and racism was on a low simmer after Trump won the first time. Cancel culture was in full swing. We'd already gone through the first wave of a mass hysteria episode around the Me Too movement. But none of that could compare to what happened to us when we were all locked down from COVID and the George Floyd video hit the internet.It was seen by millions all over the world within minutes. Right after the video hit, a fake image of Derek Chauvin wearing a “Make America White Again” MAGA hat also made the rounds, driving up the rage meter just before the largest protest in American history erupted on the streets, breaking lockdowns and forcing the Left to pivot from social distancing to masks.It would be days before the story of the fake photo was corrected. Probably even now, many still believe it was real. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

The worst thing that's ever happened to the Democrats is democracy.It must be quite an existential crisis that, after all that, the rest of the country rejected their opinion of Donald Trump. That the guy they said was a rapist, a racist, a fascist, a dictator, a Nazi, a bigot, a transphobe, a misogynist, a Russian asset, a criminal, a felon, a fraudster, a fake, a traitor, an election denier and insurrectionist, an extremist, a terrorist, a white supremacist, a phony that they impeached twice and indicted four times, and became the first presidential candidate with a mug shot, and to be convicted of a felony still won the popular vote.That has got to really burn.But it isn't the Trump side that is now in a perpetual state of shock because it existed inside a utopian bubble, cutting itself off from the rest of America. It isn't the Trump side that cosplayed World War II for so long that it lost touch with reality about either our world now or what really happened in World War II. It isn't the Trump side that was the empire.Their war-torn resistance fighters were so disgusted that none of the Democrats had done enough to “stop Hitler Trump and his Nazi leader, Elon Musk,” that their approval numbers were at historic lows. DO SOMETHING, their supporters cried.So Cory Booker took to the Senate floor to remind them of what they still stand for. And to rally the troops. He prepared in advance for the performance of his life. He denied himself food and water to go the distance. It was, for him, a chance to audition for the part of Charismatic Leader, the democrats so desperately need.Booker found a way: It's not Left or Right but right or WRONG.It's a far cry from Obama's “not red states or blue states, but the United States.” The Democrats no longer believe that. They went from “don't normalize Trump and his supporters” to it's more than justified to demonize, dehumanize, even terrorize them. They are “bad people.” They're no longer welcome. Not in our culture, restaurants, movie theaters, family gatherings, and, most of all, our democracy.Their anger stems from their class privilege of having everything they need, yet they can't accept losing something they want.Here is Batya Ungar-Sargon:Either the Democrats really are caught up in a mass delusion about who Trump is and why he won, or else they're the drama club, and none of it was ever real.Splendor in the GrassI wasn't just in the Drama Club in high school. I was the undisputed queen. Just ask anyone who went to high school with me. I was a terrible student. I barely graduated. My nickname was “no-show Stone,” but the one thing I showed up for was the Drama Club.That's me as Elizabeth Proctor in the high school production of The Crucible.In case you've never seen or read The Crucible, Elizabeth Proctor was John Proctor's pregnant wife who was accused of witchcraft but who was spared because of the presumed innocence of her baby. Her husband, John Proctor, would be hanged.I could never have known that all of these decades later, we'd all be living in a Salem of our own making, and I'd be once again an accused and condemned witch.Inside the drama club, I had a magic mirror - a small group of people who thought I hung the moon. My Drama teacher thought that too. I was his favorite, at least for a time. I didn't know the word “grooming” back then, but looking back on it, I see that's probably what he was doing—a pinch here, a grope there. On the last day of my junior year, he French kissed me just before I went away for summer break.That Summer, he drove up to my house and dropped off a copy of the play Splendor in the Grass. I took that to mean I would be cast as the lead, the part Natalie Wood played in the movie. As the queen of the Drama Club, I got all of the leading roles. Of course, I would play Deannie.But when it came time to cast the play, the part went to someone who wasn't even in the drama club. She was the prettiest girl in school: the Head Cheerleader and the Homecoming Queen. Our teacher had broken the silent code of the drama club - nobody from the outside is allowed in. Because if they do, our fantasy world is shattered.That's all we had. We weren't the popular kids, the cheerleaders, the jocks, the science nerds. We were people who didn't belong anywhere else. But we also liked escaping into a fantasy world of being another person other than ourselves.During the Me Too movement, my friends would always bring up our drama teacher, but honestly, I was more angry that he'd given my part away to a prettier girl.In reality, the Homecoming Queen was the right person to play Deannie, even if our teacher probably just had the hots for her. She was good, too—better than I would have been. Because she was popular, everyone in the school came to see the play.We were all big fish in a small pond, which gave us power we weren't willing to relinquish. But having the whole school see our play meant reality was here, whether we liked it or not.I often think about the drama club now when I watch Christopher Guest's hilarious Waiting for Guffman, which is about a self-important director of a small town theater group and their delusions of grandeur.And that's also what I see when I look at the democrats and all of the performative protesters and activists on the Left, from Eric Swalwell to AOC to Jasmine Crocket to Chuck Schumer to Cory Booker, to all of these delusional people who believe Musk did the Nazi salute and Trump is Hitler.They are Waiting for Guffman. They are the drama club.It's a cosplay fantasy, a dystopian Renaissance Faire. None of it is real. The American people have been watching this performative outrage for almost a decade. They wanted to turn the channel so badly they voted for Donald Trump a second time, and now, here they all are, once again, caterwauling about the very democracy that just took them out of power.They still believe that doing exactly the same thing for this long will get them a different result, the very definition of insanity.But there's a darkness too, a rising violence. What they all mean when they say “Hands off” is not just “hands off” our government, but “hands off” everything else too.Along with keying Teslas and violent outbursts against Trump supporters, there is a hashtag making the rounds on TikTok called “when it happens,” where users fantasize about Trump's death.Identity First vs. America First.During the last Civil War, the two conflicting realities were that a country founded on freedom could not own human beings vs. the false reality that slaves could not survive as free human beings and that there would be chaos and collapse if things changed.Now, we find ourselves once again at a crossroads with two factions believing in two completely separate realities. This time, it's not about westward expansion but rather our migration onto the new frontier of the internet, AI, and the upcoming robot revolution. What will this country be going forward? What will be our values? What will define male and female? What will decide power?You can see each of our potential futures laid out before us. Whole generations have come of age in virtual reality, where they can choose their own avatars and have their own audiences for their own show. It's all performative. But to be included, you must follow the rules. If you don't, out you go. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

Like everyone else on the Left, I grew up wanting to exist in the rarified air of NPR. It was, to me, like the green light at the end of Daisy's dock in The Great Gatsby: the place you don't belong but the only place you want to be.I was thrilled when NPR invited me to the studio in 2012 for an interview. I even took a picture of the parking lot—anything with NPR on it.I'd finally made it, ma—top of the world.I woke up with Morning Edition and spent the afternoon with All Things Considered. It required no effort at all. It was always on every time I got into my car and drove somewhere, and in Los Angeles, everyone drove everywhere.Long before controversial CEO Katherine Maher was hired at NPR, listeners were already dropping like flies. Any honest person knows that NPR changed dramatically. Even my sister, a die-hard Democrat, joked with me in 2020 that she had to stop listening because every episode seemed to be about a “transgender migrant crossing the border for an abortion in Texas.”Maher's testimony at the “Anti-American Airwaves: Accountability for the Heads of NPR and PBS” will be seen by most on the Left as something along the lines of the House of Unamerican Activities in the 1950s and for similar reasons. Here, in the most viral exchange, Rep Gill even brings up Marxism.Like this moment, this hearing will be shape-shifted into a story that paints them as the victims and their side as the side standing up for free speech.The truth? They abandoned objectivity long ago, if they ever had it at all. I used to think they did. I was a faithful believer in people I thought had our best interests at heart. It took me years to understand why the Republicans have been complaining about them since their inception.Maher is a stunner, even at her age, with her platinum blonde bob and Hepburn cheekbones. She's probably not used to being dragged before a tribunal and made to answer for how NPR has abused the public's trust. But abuse it, they have.She might not also be aware that this is a revolution. No, heads didn't roll, but the 2024 election was a triumph of the people, by the people, and for the people—a revolution made possible only by Donald Trump's alliance with Big Tech and Elon Musk especially.To the Left, in their delusional fever dreams, they are the oppressed side. They're the #resistance like back when German tanks rolled into Paris. But they're not. They never were. They were always the empire. How do I know? Because I was one of them. I was an enthusiastic participant in the movement that would overtake much of American society, grow its power with the rise of the internet, and spread its fundamentalism like a fungus, one that is now killing its host.A revolution because there was no other option.A revolution because the kids were at risk.A revolution because this isn't a country that likes to be ruled over by an elite, out of touch aristocracy and never has. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

Many of you have asked me to post the New York Times profile because you don't have access to it, but I think that might violate copyright laws. So, I thought I'd read it aloud instead, with some added commentary. If you're interested, have a listen.Here is a link to bypass the paywall.The first part is just me talking free-form and unscripted, so don't be alarmed that it doesn't sound like the usual. If you like the free-form style, let me know, and I'll do more of them. Song used at the end: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

I posted this story already, but I thought you might like a video version. The audio will go out on the podcast feed. You can find the text here. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

I have a soft spot for the Dirtbag Left now that I never used to have. Listening to them viciously destroy the Democratic Party scratches that itch. They were ahead of the curve, and the Democrats would have been better off not snuffing out the movement way back when.But snuff it out, we did. Back in 2016, I was in a Facebook group devoted to doing nothing but hating on the “Bernie bros.” I spent too much of my precious time trying to stop them as a movement because they threatened Hillary Clinton's win. Like every Democrat now, I was afraid of democracy.The Democrats find themselves in that place where the three characters from Jaws end up. They've tried harpoons and three barrels on him, and nothing has worked. They finally decide to try Hooper's shark cage, even though Brody knows there's no chance it will work. “You got any better suggestions?” barks Hooper.That Quint entertains the idea of bringing in Hooper's cage at all was the miracle. And the desperation.The Democrats are ready for the anti-shark cage, and so Bernie Sanders and AOC are on a western tour to “stop the oligarchy.” They finally have the exact right enemy in Elon Musk and Bernie's “billionaires.” Musk represents the death of their dream, that no one can get there on their wits, hard work, and ambition alone. No, this is a country where no one can rise unless everyone can rise.Trump's tariffs are a potential solution to America's crippling problem of income inequality that has destroyed the middle class. That's the MAGA populism at work. Bernie's populism fixes the problem with much bigger government. The rich pay more to redistribute the wealth.Is this finally the moment when we can Make America Socialist Again? A major step forward from FDR's New Deal and Johnson's Great Society? Do the Democratic Socialists have a real shot at winning the nomination away from the feckless, flaccid centrists?Is this finally the moment when the Dirtbag Left and the identity politics utopians merge to create one big movement, a Green New Deal? Will Trump's radical change finally be the thing that pushes the majority in a direction they never would have gone?Recent polls show that younger generations are much more accepting and fond of socialism than older generations. It's not that hard to do the math and see what might be coming next.How it StartedAccording to Neil Howe and William Strauss's 1997 book, 2008 was the crisis that sparked our Fourth Turning. This pattern plays out every 80 years, with each generation being born and living a lifetime before everything radically changes to restart America in a new direction, like the American Revolution, the Civil War, the Great Depression, and World War II.We still don't know how big or how bad our Fourth Turning will be. To Strauss and Howe, the $700 billion bank bailout was the moment the public woke up to the imminent disaster of income inequality and a bloated oligarchy. The bailout birthed two populist movements: Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party.Occupy Wall Street became the Bernie movement which, after Hillary's loss in 2016, was dissolved into the Democrat machine. The Tea Party became Trump and MAGA. The question we have to ask is which side will prevail when the Fourth Turning comes to a close, when the policies are cemented and the country is united?According to Howe's new book, The Fourth Turning is Here, he edges ever so slightly to the Left's side of things because the dominant generation, the Millennials, are a “go along to get along” personality type.At the moment, at least to me, the MAGA side offers more for ambitious millennials, especially young men. MAGA is now the side of innovation and economic growth. If they succeed, there will be no need for a rescue mission.But if they fail? Ben Shapiro has been dropping the prediction for a few weeks now that if Trump's economy begins to fail, the power that will rise is the equal and opposite reaction to Trump's populism: a lurch to the hard left.Bernie and AOC are ready to bring the movement back.Is this finally the moment where both Bernie and AOC have the right kind of anger and the right enemy they need to tap into the collective outrage of all of those crazy people out there losing their minds? People like this: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe