Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone

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

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+2=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 sa

George Floyd was born on October 14th, 1973. Charlie Kirk was born twenty 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.

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-

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 wor

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

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 discus

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