Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone

After Memegate went viral on Friday, the usual battle in our virtual Civil War raged on. I had this exchange on X and was answered by Conor Friedersdorf:To Trump’s enemies, this was yet another crisis not to go to waste. It was the perfect way to reel back some of those Nicki Minaj supporters who might be thinking about flipping to Trump. The midterms are coming up, and they’re desperately worried about losing votes of yet another necessary demographic. That’s all it’s been for ten years now, emotional blackmail to convince us that Trump really is that bad while offering nothing in return. They have addressed nothing. They have fixed nothing. They have offered only a fanatical cult and a rigid ideology of an oppressor/oppressed mindset, and then demanded everyone go along with it, or they’re racists, homophobes, bigots, Nazis. Here is a TikTocker:The Democrats and the ruling class that props up their collapsing empire are in a hell of their own making. They never addressed the people's needs after their 2016 loss because that would mean acknowledging their own failures. Instead, they made Trump the enemy and went to war, a war they’re losing.All they ever had to do was offer the people something better, but they couldn’t even do that because what they want is their utopia back, the one I helped build, and the one I escaped once it became a Doomsday Cult. Had they left him alone, just allowed his four years to play out like a normal president, as opposed to Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden attempting to frame him as a Russian asset, the Demcorats impeaching him, the legacy media and all of culture taking a side against him and his supporters, maybe he would have been a one-term president and gone back to a life of golfing at Mar-a-Lago.But instead, they whipped up a World War II fantasy in which they were “brave resistance” fighting an existential crisis that threatened to topple America and the world, with very little evidence to show for it, then or now. That made it oh so easy to blame Trump and not themselves.I look now at those still trapped inside the Doomsday Cult that I escaped, and I can’t believe the level of delusion. Look at this post by musician Jack White, which is liked by Jimmy Kimmel. So let me make it perfectly clear for those who might be wondering after the scandal du jour: I don’t regret my vote for Trump and I never will, because even now, the Left is worse. Their reaction is worse. They are never telling the truth, not to us, not to themselves. All they have to sell is hate and fear. They aren’t getting less crazy and more sane. They are not becoming kinder, more tolerant, and more forgiving. They still have no idea what democracy means - spoiler alert: you can’t always get what you want. They have never learned the lesson in ten years. They still believe that winning their war is forcing all of us to go along with their distorted version of reality. And add that to these crazy people on TikTok, and you start to see that the reason Trump won is that he’s closer to normal than they are. They just don’t realize that they’re the problem. Their totalitarian tendencies left over from 2020 never fully died because there was never any accountability in the mainstream. Remember that crowd that swarmed that woman and demanded she raise her fist for Black Lives Matter:Here are a bunch of crazy women at a Core Power Yoga studio in Minneapolis doing the same thing: go along with us or else.That same autonomous zone that was erected in 2020:Well, that’s back too, only this time the police got rid of it much quicker, knowing Tom Homan and Trump won’t stand for it.Do they really expect us to vote for these psychopaths? Put them back in power? And why, because Trump accidentally shared a meme with a racist image of the Obamas at the end of it? Sorry, they have to deal with the fanatics who have swallowed up their party first because they are still too erratic and unhinged to lead this country. What are they going to do with all of us? With Trump? Throw us into re-education camps? Gulags? Shoot us outright?GET TRUMPThe Left’s 10-year campaign to get Trump is like watching Yosemite Sam go after Bugs Bunny. They always think they’re just seconds away from catching him at long last.They believe deeply in their mission to destroy Trump, just as Yosemite Sam does. It’s just that we see Bugs Bunny a little differently. Whatever else Trump is, he’s not the guy they say he is, and for that, they will always be one step behind, swinging and missing. I didn’t get that until I found my way out. As someone who got online 30 years ago, I wasn’t ready for the effects of the feedback loop on my brain, and I don’t think most people on the Left even realized they were living inside a reality-distorting machine. I had to watch Trump videos on my own, get to know him and his supporters, and humanize them. I found that I unexpectedly empathized with Trump. It wasn’t just that I could finally see the real human being, but because I, too, had been demonized and attacked for being a person I knew I wasn’t. All I had to do was walk in the shoes of his supporters to see what monsters they really are on the Left. The more they attack Trump, the more his supporters rally to protect him, not just because they have been thrown away like human garbage by these people, but also because they look at Trump and they see a flawed hero, someone who doesn’t always get it right, who makes big mistakes, who is anything but perfect. But he’s also someone who fights for them.Our culture used to understand flawed heroes because they were in so many movies and books.Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark:Humphrey Bogart Casablanca.Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven.What counts isn’t their past or their goodness or their purity, but their actions. We all treated Obama like a religious figure, and still do, which partly explains the over-reaction by the Left. It’s blasphemy to mock Obama, whereas it's an American pastime to mock Trump. Today’s Left seems to desire perfection from cradle to grave and is unforgiving of flawed heroes, especially white men. But Trump is a great character of history, a living legend. They just got the story wrong. Here is Dominic Sandbrook on Triggernometry:Trump is a hero to so many of us, not because he’s perfect or “good” but because he is a fighter who got the dirty job done and saved the day. Crimes against humanityI asked Conor Friedersdorf the same question I would put to any Democrat. Can you name something — one thing — Trump has done that is worse than sterilizing children who can’t consent? Destroying their bodies with medical experiments? Never having the courage to stand up to the cult? Now that the lawsuits are coming, and prominent groups like the AMA are openly opposing gender transition treatments for minors, the Democrats will pretend they were always against it. But we can’t let them do that. The Democrats have not just supported it every step of the way; they have actively blocked any action taken to safeguard children. It took the Republicans standing on the right history yet again, as they did during the Civil War, to push this thing through, and it took the election of Donald Trump to finally bring the hammer down.Only Trump, in his plain-spoken, flawed hero kind of way, had the guts to say it out loud, without fear, and that gave others more courage to fight back. But Trump wasn’t only saying things. He was doing things. And before long, the dominoes began to fall. What could Trump have done that even comes close to what has happened to kids at the hands of 15 years of Democrat rule? What’s worse? Saying “Quiet, Piggy” to a reporter? Tearing down the East Wing to build a ballroom? The Kennedy Center? An offensive meme?Their climate of fear and culture of silence made it too dangerous to take a brave stand, which is why it was left to the brave men and women who risked their lives and careers to put a stop to the madness once and for all.And along with their ever-increasing authoritarianism, we’d be the UK if Elon Musk had not bought Twitter and turned it into X, and if Trump hadn’t won.Here is Graham Linehan speaking in Congress:So when people say, “You could have picked a different Republican, but you picked Trump,” I flip it back onto them. Tell me what Trump has done, just one thing, that comes close to this, and be prepared to answer it 20 years from now, because I promise to hang it around your necks like a dead cat for as long as I live. Here is a TikToker:On this alone, I would have voted for any Republican. I’d always say, “I am not a Trump supporter but…” Then, they raided Mar-a-Lago, and when they indicted him, when they tried to throw him in jail, that made me a Trump supporter. That made me the Braveheart meme.There won’t be any Sister Souljah moments in this Democratic Party.I have been waiting for six years for the Democrats to snap out of it and come back to reality. That day never came. If anything, they’re crazier now than they’ve ever been. Anyone who wants their votes has no choice but to go along with it. The Democrats can’t snap out of it even if they wanted to. Gavin Newsom can’t sell anything but hate and hysteria. Even Jon Ossoff, a guy I once supported and fought for, must sell the same thing because they have nothing else.They have given people like me no path back because the only option is going back to the Doomsday Cult that insists I call Trump and the other half of America racists when I know that it isn’t true. A cult that demands I buy into the oppressor/oppressed mandate, and demands I look the other way as they indoctrinate our kids and destroy every great thing this country ever built.I could have been one of those who hovered reluctantly in the middle and held my nose and voted for Trump. Maybe I could have salvaged some of my reputation such that when I died, they might say good things about me instead of dancing on my grave.I could have spent my t

In this episode, I talk to my friend Andy Schaalman, who has Substack, Fourth Turning Chronicles but whose work can be found mostly on his YouTube page, where all of his great videos are. We talked for almost three hours, so it’s a real Joe Rogan-type deal. Both of us have been interested in the Fourth Turning for many years. He is a millennial, and I am Gen-X. We get pretty deep into it, so it probably might not be interesting to anyone who isn’t interested in the concept. But if you are, have a listen. Referenced in our podcast is this episode:But many of his videos are worth a watch. You can find them here.Meanwhile, here is some Fourth Turning info referenced in the podcast.Here are some quotes from The Fourth Turning, a link to the book, and videos.“At each of these great gates of history, eighty to a hundred years apart, a similar generational drama unfolded. Four archetypes, aligned in the same order—elder Prophet, midlife Nomad, young adult Hero, child Artist—together produced the most enduring legends in our history. Each time the Gray Champion appeared marked the arrival of a moment of “darkness, and adversity, and peril,” the climax of the Fourth Turning of the saeculum.”“What will America be like as it exits the Fourth Turning?History offers no guarantees. Obviously, things could go horribly wrong—the possibilities ranging from a nuclear exchange to incurable plagues, from terrorist anarchy to high-tech dictatorship. We should not assume that Providence will always exempt our nation from the irreversible “tragedies that have overtaken so many others: not just temporary hardship, but debasement and total ruin. Since Vietnam, many Americans suppose they know what it means to lose a war. Losing in the next Fourth Turning, however, could mean something incomparably worse. It could mean a lasting defeat from which our national innocence—and perhaps even our nation—might never recover. As many Americans know from their own ancestral backgrounds, history provides numerous examples of societies that have been wiped off the map, ground into submission, or beaten so badly they revert to barbarism. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

Dear Hillary,Imagine my shock when I saw you wrote an op-ed in The Atlantic. Before I even read a line, I knew what the point of the article would be because I know you.You write:This crisis also reveals a deeper moral rot at the heart of Trump’s MAGA movement. Whatever you think about immigration policy, how can a person of conscience justify the lack of compassion and empathy for the victims in Minnesota, and for the families torn apart or hiding in fear, for the children separated from their parents or afraid to go to school?That compassion is weak and cruelty is strong has become an article of MAGA faith. Trump and his allies believe that the more inhumane the treatment, the more likely it is to spread fear. That’s the goal of surging heavily armed federal forces into blue states such as Minnesota and Maine—street theater of the most dangerous kind. Other recent presidents, including Joe Biden, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton, managed to deport millions of undocumented immigrants without turning American cities into battlegrounds or making a show of keeping children in cagesI see the game. You know selling open borders is an election killer, so you think selling “empathy,” or compassion, will help bridge the gap and maybe win back independents who don’t want an open border but are troubled by what they see on the “news.” As with everything else, it’s a manufactured delusion you too must sell, which explains why the Democrats are in this position now, resorting to the first violent attacks on the government since the 1970s, and no, January 6th doesn’t count. These are coordinated, orchestrated, well-funded attacks - not protests as much as flirting with terrorism. And you know that too, don’t you, Hillary? And you’re worried. You should be. You also know that no president, not Obama or Bush or Clinton, ever had to deal with a cell phone brigade who are screaming, spitting, body slamming ICE agents everywhere they go, stalking them, blocking their paths, building makeshift networks online to find them, harass them, and stop them from doing their jobs. You know this is a first, and you know exactly why.But that won’t stop you from lying, Hillary. What else is new? You are setting up the argument to slime your way out of this moment, where the Democrats are too crazy to lead and are looking more like the Manson family every day.I had to laugh, though, at the misappropriation of yet another word, empathy. As if any of you ever had any empathy for anyone other than those who will be voting blue, no matter who. No, you can’t call the other half of the country “racists” for ten years and then pretend to have any empathy. Just look at Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway on a recent podcast talking about how we’ll have the Nuremberg trials, should all of you crazy people ever get back in power, “and we will,” Galloway says. This obsession with calling Trump Hitler and a Nazi began in 2016 because you could not stand the sting of humiliation when you lost to Trump. So you and the most powerful people in the world decided it was your right to disenfranchise the millions of Americans who voted for Trump and had every right to representation. I used to think you were a person of integrity, I did. I supported you. I fought for you. I was proud to be a Democrat. I made this video to humanize you for independents who did not want to vote for you. I thought I could help them see you the way I did. At least, back then.I was a good Liberal. I repeated the lie that Trump’s win was an existential threat and it required a “hearts and minds” campaign to RESIST everything he tried to do. Oh, the lies, Hillary. The lies. I can barely live with myself; I don’t know how you manage it.After ten years of those lies, there is not much to show for it. Trump is back in power because all of you failed so spectacularly. The people said yeah, we’ll take the twice impeached, four times indicted, convicted felon. That’s how badly you failed. Because you don’t see them, you don’t see them as people, you don’t care about what they need. In other words, you’re lacking in empathy.So now you think you finally have Trump on the ropes, and all it took was throwing federal agents under the bus, demonizing them as hateful, Nazi-like thugs, lying about the “rot” at the heart of MAGA. Here is Tom Homan:The empire is collapsing. A once-thriving culture has been sucked into a cult. Everything I used to love is gone. Movies, books, great journalism, science, and history. Vanished. Replaced with dogma and fanaticism. Because all of you walled yourselves off from the rest of the country, you lost touch with reality, which is why it’s so easy for you now to slip into the fantasy world and blame ICE agents for their lack of empathy. Shame on you.Where is your empathy for the victims of Biden’s border policies? Do you remember the rape van? Yeah, there was a van where an illegal immigrant locked women away in it and raped them for hours. How about the Venezuelan gang that overtook an apartment building?Here is one illegal immigrant living on public assistance after multiple rapes, assaults and crimes — and was still out raping women. Not enough for you, Hillary? How about this story?And that’s all before we get to the young people who were lured into the Left’s fantasy world and told that if they take drugs and get surgery, they can become the opposite sex. So you can fool those who read The Atlantic, Hillary. But you can’t fool me. I know you too well. Empathy? Yours is conditional. In fact, empathy was strictly forbidden on the Left lest you empathize with the wrong people. Not the victims of rapes or terrorism by illegal immigrants, not the victims of crime if the criminal is the wrong color, not victims of the crazy gender cult. And you most certainly can’t empathize with Trump or his supporters. If you do, you’ll lose everything.Some Democrats gave the standard statement condemning violence after Charlie Kirk was murdered, but then we watched everyone on the Left celebrate, some even losing their jobs. No one on your side wrote any op-ed in The Atlantic about empathy. Ezra Klein tried to empathize with Charlie and was viciously attacked for days, with calls for him to be fired.We watched Jimmy Kimmel play the free speech martyr because his inhumanity in the wake of the murder was so horrific that millions of Americans flooded the station with calls to remove him. I watched them dig the knife in deeper on X and on TikTok. I watched them mock Erika Kirk. Then I watched Barack Obama and all of the celebrities call Charlie a racist when he wasn’t here to defend himself.No, empathy vanished on the Left long ago. You were all resentful, you see, because you could not win the election. America broke up with you twice, and you haven’t taken it well. You should see some of the videos on TikTok. The hate is so deep and thick you could cut it with a knife. Empathy. I don’t think so.It is now your last best resort for emotional blackmail to try to slither out of yet another moment where all of you are defending the wrong people, demonizing law enforcement, and spinning wild fantasies in hopes of tricking beleaguered voters to the polls. Maybe your op-ed was a way to try to find some middle ground - deportations, but with empathy. Yeah, we tried that. We know how it ended up. So you’ll have to sell open borders like you sell no genders because none of you has the courage to stand up to the psychos, not even to protect women and girls, Hillary. Not even that.Maybe if you still had empathy, you would not be here now, defending unhinged mobs who think it is their moral right and their duty to go to war on the federal government. Maybe you would understand why Americans voted for Trump a second time. Maybe you all could stop your decade-long campaign of dehumanization against half the country.But since I know empathy vanished on the Left long ago, I know there is no saving the Left. There is only saving America from all of you.// This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

Part One | Part Two | Part Three“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”― Sun Tzu, The Art of WarBecause Donald Trump understands this fundamental rule of The Art of War, he reached a compromise in Minneapolis. It was an easy shift for him because he knows himself and he knows the enemy.He knows all they wanted was months of warfare and chaos between ICE agents and the citizen army on the ground, who are now becoming an organized militia, some of them even arming themselves, all in hopes of producing viral content for the churn to keep the hearts and minds of their voters activated and mobilized ahead of the midterms.They wanted him to show up as the dictator, to crack down on protests like the United States had suddenly become Iran. But Trump is too smart for that. He knows once he becomes the version of him they invented, the war is over. He also knows they will ignore the important news of his presidency. The economy is strengthening, crime is declining, and Trump continues to make big moves on the global stage.By contrast, the left is losing but thinks it’s winning because they don’t know themselves. If they did, they would understand that the clever game they’re playing only takes them so far. Creating chaos throughout 2020 meant they scared Americans into voting Trump out and putting the Obama coalition back in power. But they were the dog that caught the car. They had no idea what to do once Joe Biden took office.It was worse than that. Biden failed in his first major move as president with the botched exit from Afghanistan that left 13 soldiers dead and sparked two wars, as world leaders laughed in our faces at the man in the White House.As Biden’s numbers began to fall, and America woke up from the haze of fear from 2020, they wondered why they ever voted out the guy with the strong economy to begin with, and why they were now stuck with a whole new set of rules we were all meant to follow.In truth? Biden was the face of normalcy for the fanatical cult that has now consumed the Democratic Party. They are the socialist socialites who are both the ruling class and the oppressor/oppressed fundamentalists who have no place for America’s silent majority anymore. When the story of this moment is told by their ever-reliable unreliable narrators, they will cast themselves as the Underground Railroad to free the slaves or the Kindertransport to save Jewish children from the Nazis.So we have to ask them and make them answer: who is it they’re liberating now? What are they fighting for? Mass migration? Open borders? True, they want to keep the 10-20 million who crossed over under Biden and will vote blue no matter who, but what is the endgame here? Do they even know?Trump’s greatest blessing and his tragic flaw is that he cannot lose. That’s what makes him a great leader; whether he’s leading a family, a business, or a country, he wants to win. When you’re standing behind him, you get to be a winner too.Some in his base want him to step on the gas, to crack down on protesters and not back off from Minneapolis, but as with so many hard calls Trump has had to make in his second term, he has to somehow find his way through the storm as a guy who, in the end, trusts only himself because he knows himself. If he became the dictator now just to please those in his base, he’d be eaten alive by the empire.They Don’t Understand ThemselvesThe chaos in Minneapolis was designed for the legacy media. It was resistance theater that played well on the Nightly News and on social media. The objective, as we now know from the Signal chats and the ongoing soldier training for activists, was to push ICE agents into acting out, to capture those viral moments to paint a picture in the minds of social media users—ICE are violent thugs, they will conclude.If you see enough video of ICE agents pushing women to the ground and detaining children, well, what is a normal person to think? How could the polls not result in the Left’s favor? What you don’t see is everything that led up to it. You don’t see how many times ICE agents are assaulted, obstructed, body slammed, screamed at, spat on, with whistles blaring in their ears, stalked, harassed, and doxxed.But on the Left, they don’t see that side of the story, just like they didn’t see that side of the story in 2020. The mob terrorizes citizens, and law enforcement and the media call it mostly peaceful protests. I was on the Left. I know that no one was allowed to talk about the violence lest they’d be called a racist. But not being able to say the truth, let alone know the truth, meant we were all walking around in a constant state of confusion. We all knew that Derek Chauvin did not murder George Floyd, but we had to say he did. We knew Trump wasn’t bragging about sexual assault on the Access Hollywood tape, but we had to say we did. We knew that many of the Me Too cases were either made up or greatly exagerrated but we would be punished if we questioned any of it.Each side gets its own version of events, but these were never two equal sides. The Left still has most of the media power, says Megyn Kelly:But they have become too comfortable with confirmation bias and their ability to control the narrative that they no longer even know what is true.Important words have lost all meaning: Fascist, racist, dictator, resistance, democracy, racist, rapist, pedophile, man, woman, boy, girl, abortion is healthcare, trans women are women. Every time someone blurts out “regime,” or “occupation,” “insurrectionist,” “election denier,” “anti-vaxxer,” or “anti-masker” we are conditioned to snap to attention. Once the words are gone, and the Newspeak implemented, it’s easy to lie in headlines for the same reasons. An image is even more powerful than words. Those lies meant we could not know ourselves or the enemy. We were led around by hyperbole and caught up in a dreamscape where nothing is entirely real. That meant comedians, Hollywood, and politicians couldn’t really read the room, but they had to mirror that delusion, lest they get booted out of utopia too.Recently, Scott Bessent gifted Gavin Newsom with a nickname that will stick. “Sparkle Beach, Ken.” It’s funny because it’s true. When Newsom then tried to play on Trump’s level with the knee-pads joke, it fell flat because it isn’t true. Trump isn’t that guy. If they knew themselves, they would understand that they are not the working-class poor who have any business marching around with No Kings posters. If they knew themselves, they would shut up about the Epstein Files because they know it’s way worse on the Democrat side. If they knew themselves, they would not shout “fascist” because they would know that they are, at heart, the real fascists.If they knew themselves, they would understand why, even now, they are still the crazier side, and no matter the smoke and mirrors, the chaos, the viral videos, the mass hysteria, they can’t do the one thing they would need to do to win this war: offer the people something better.If they knew themselves, they would understand that the Boy Who Cried Wolf was not just a children’s story. It is a deeply profound statement about people who scream about everything until their screams fall on indifferent ears. The only reason they’ve gotten this far with their madness is that Trump isn’t a fascist or a dictator, because if he wanted to, he could crush all of these folks like bugs as the Commander in Chief of the most powerful military in the world. They also don’t seem to realize that a handful of granola crunchers arming themselves is no match for MAGA, either, should it ever come to that. The only reason the Right hasn’t yet taken up arms reminds me of that scene in Grizzly Man where the bears think there might be something wrong with Timothy Treadwell, so they leave him alone, at least for a little while.But when one bear gets frustrated and hungry enough, we see just how easy it was for the bear to eat Timothy and his girlfriend in the Grizzly Maze.They don’t know TrumpThe Democrats have been fighting a villain they created, but who never existed. I was one of those who sobbed on my couch after 2016, donated to Jill Stein, marched in protest, and felt myself part of the resistance. I would take to the treadmill at the gym to the Styx song Come Sail Away and I would imagine making a video to rally the troops on the Left. I would think those MAGA “racists” are not prepared for the strength of our battlestation. We have all of this power, and they have none of it. And yet, even as I imagined this, I didn’t realize what I was saying because I didn’t know myself, or my side, and I most certainly didn’t know Trump and MAGA. What would snap me out of it was seeing what we eventually did with our power. It wasn’t a grassroots uprising. It was one political party becoming more powerful than any other and then using that power to demonize, dehumanize, and marginalize half the country. When we decided we had the right to take over the 2020 election to “save Democracy” that was when I began to pull back.I was like Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2, who sees the guy she thinks is there to kill her, but instead, he’s the guy who has come to save her.Because we didn’t know ourselves back in 2016, we had to cover up our failures with lies about Trump. We concocted a false World War II fantasy where we were the “resistance.” Once we started that big lie, we were doomed because there was no way out of it, and there still isn’t.I would find out in 2020 that all I got from the legacy media was the worst things Trump said, extracted from a much longer speech to paint a picture of someone who did not exist. I had to find that out all on my own, knowing that to do so would cost me everything. Why should ju

Dear Mr. Baker,I am but one in a sea of many Americans viewed as a threat to the established order. I was once a part of that order. I helped build it. It would turn out I couldn’t survive because I couldn’t follow the rules of thought and speech that are mandated by everyone on the Left, especially those at the New York Times.It’s personal, you see. I used to believe that if all I did was read Page One of the New York Times, I’d be well-informed. Brainwashed is more like it.It’s easy to spot the bias now where it wasn’t before. For instance, this was the New York Times on January 12th, and one of the strongest activists for the Democrats pretending they’re pushing some sort of objective conclusion on X.But that’s just another day at the New York Times. I know you didn’t write this piece, Michelle Goldberg did, but it is worth mentioning as an aside that no, the “resistance libs” were not right. They were never right. I was one of them until I wasn’t. It’s been an ugly road out of the Doomsday Cult of the Left, but now, I live free as an exile.We were never the “resistance.” We were always the empire. We colonized the internet, after all, and, together with Barack Obama, the rise of Silicon Valley, social media, and the iPhone, as society migrated online, we were in control of all of it.But that’s a story for a different time, Mr. Baker. This letter is much more urgent regarding the matters at hand. Your “analysis” and observation about Trump and protests is so wildly off base, a complete distortion of reality, that I felt compelled to write you this letter. You wrote:You write:President Trump had a ringing message of solidarity on Tuesday for demonstrators in the streets. “KEEP PROTESTING - TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!!” he wrote on social media. He decried “the senseless killing of protesters,” and added that those pulling the triggers “will pay a big price.”He meant the protesters in Tehran, not Minneapolis. By contrast, the people in the streets of Minnesota, he wrote just 63 minutes earlier, were “anarchists and professional agitators” trying to cover up a fraud scandal. He vowed that “THE DAY OF RECKONING & RETRIBUTION IS COMING!”The eruption of protests on opposite sides of the planet at this moment in history has brought Mr. Trump’s views of democracy and popular dissent into stark relief. The situations in Iran and Minnesota, of course, are different and complicated, but the president’s rule of thumb seems simple enough: Those who take to the streets supporting a cause he favors are laudable heroes. Those who take to the streets to oppose him are illegitimate radicals.I read this, and my jaw dropped open, Mr. Baker. Where have you been for the past five years as we watched a split screen of protests in the Summer of 2020 and then on January 6th? Are you actually saying that you at the New York Times and anyone on the Left saw these things as comparable? Democracy and popular dissent in stark relief, boy, I couldn’t have said it better myself.Tell me this is satire. Tell me you do not live in such an isolated bubble that you can’t possibly see the blatant hypocrisy here? The treatment of these two events was very different and will be written about in opposite ways in history books forever. One will be seen as heroic and democracy in action, and the other, as dangerous. An insurrection in action. People like me were pulling our hair out, not because we would justify the riot at the Capitol, but because all of you said nothing about what happened in the Summer of 2020, a year that broke America and broke me.It wasn’t only your paper that lied that Trump “incited” a mob to storm the Capitol and that it was a threat to “democracy.” That was the narrative pushed by every legacy media outlet, with no kind words for the protesters who were also doing what protesters do - getting angry and having their voices heard by a government and a culture that had demonized them, dehumanized them, and abandoned them. Trump included.The Democrats put up a Green-Zone-like fence around the Capitol. Ordinary Americans had their doors kicked in as the FBI hauled them off to jail. Anyone who even attended the “mostly peaceful” protest on January 6th was called an “insurrectionist” and “election denier,” and anyone who dared to question the 2020 election or who voted for Trump was inspected under a microscope by you all as some kind of insect or insurgent terrorist. Vice President Kamala Harris likened it to 9/11 and the attack on Pearl Harbor. These were American citizens, many of whom had been on lockdown, their businesses destroyed after COVID, and had watched the absurd events of 2020 play out. Masks, no masks, “systemic racism was more urgent than COVID,” then the pivot back to COVID, changing election rules, preventing people from gathering and thus, preventing campaigning, a surge of mail-in voting that won the election all before Election Day, a revolution in the streets that almost no one in the mainstream was even talking about once they got really bad, lest they hurt the Democrats.Oh, I know the game. I know we’re all supposed to see the Trump supporters as racists, angry that Black and Brown people were in government, a second Confederacy flying their Dixie flags on January 6th, and that the protests over the Summer were about racial inequality and therefore justified. But here’s the thing about democracy. You don’t get to decide. We either all have the same rights or we don’t have a democracy.There was nothing in your coverage, or the Liz Cheney show trial, that was, in any way, fair to the Americans who protested that day, and even to Donald Trump, who had a right to have their voices heard. No, they didn’t have the right to riot. Ashli Babbitt lost her life over it, and then her memory was dragged through the mud by all of you.Here is how the Times covered Ashli Babbitt:And here is how they covered Renee Good:You see, one is treated like human garbage, and the other is treated like a hero. So just say it. Just admit that this has become a two-tiered society, you are among the ruling class, and the underclass has none of the same rights. You will decide they are “racists” and thus have no real stake in what happens in this country, even when they win the popular vote. Now that the protests in Minneapolis are violent, as violent as, if not more so than, January 6th, still you say nothing and pretend they are fighting the good fight. What has changed in ten years? Nothing except the Democrats failing to address the problem, allowing millions to flood over the border, and shaming Americans for caring about it. It’s a sickness on the Left by now, a reality distortion that spilled out into real-world violence. Just look at what happened at Evergreen College. These students believed they were protesting “racism” at one of the most liberal colleges in America. Why? Because Bret Weinstein did not think it was right that white people should be asked to leave the campus on a “day of absence.”This kind of strange, new, justified violence by people who don’t live in the same reality as the rest of us has become the new normal on the Left, backed up by all of you. How dare you compare them to the protesters in Iran? Complicated, you say? Oh, it’s way beyond that. Pampered, privileged, bored white women and bratty college kids attacking ICE are, in no way, risking their lives. Yes, if you attack a police officer or an ICE officer, you are risking your life. Every American knows that if they live in the real world. In Iran, you are risking your life just for standing there and protesting peacefully, or speaking out of turn, or anything they decide is a crime punishable by death, which include adultry, dissent against the government, and blasphemy. At the New York Times, you want the tragic death of Renee Good to be the symbol for protesters dying at the hands of the regime, but, as usual, it is not the truth. That won’t stop you from perpetuating the mass delusion and injecting it into the veins of your already unhinged readership.Here is Page One of the New York Times today. Every headline is about Renee Good. That is still the most important news of the day, even as hundreds, maybe thousands of Iranians are slaughtered.Followed by non-stop negative Trump coverage:The protests in Minneapolis are not against ICE. They are against democracy. The wrong people won the election, and that means the Left throws a fit. They’ve been throwing fits for ten years, starting in 2015 when they attacked a group of Trump supporters in California, calling them “racists,” because all of you sold them that lie. The violence continued on through Trump’s inaugural and protests all through his first term. The Summer of 2020 was the biggest by far in modern American history, yet the legacy media, your paper, Mr. Baker, did not capture the truth of what happened. The baby tyrants who run your newsroom insisted the one op-ed by Tom Cotton, Send in the Troops, was itself violence and that caused the resignation of Bari Weiss and James Bennett, a shamefulprotst moment that should live on in infamy if people tell the truth. The Left’s protesting now says one thing: Do what we want, or else. That is, Mr. Baker, closer to fascism than Trump will ever be. // This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

Part One | Part Two January 6th was terrifying for many Americans. After all, they saw it on television. But what did they really see? Did they know what actually unfolded that day? Did they even ask? Trump is the Jan. 6 President, proclaims the New York Times’ Editorial Board.And the text:What I learned, living through these events as a former Democrat, is that the New York Times Editorial Board is lying through its teeth. Or maybe they aren’t lying. Maybe they really do believe it. They exist inside the Doomsday Cult of the Left, after all, along with all of those high-minded “journalists” at the New Yorker and the Atlantic.But to make the bold proclamation that any protest, or even riot, against oppressive forces, whether you believe them to be oppressive or not, is un-American proves they don’t know this country or its history very well.There were two sides to this story. If I’d never left the Left, I would have believed their version of the event. I would have been just as horrified. I would have thought it was an attack on democracy. But protests are the voices of the unheard and a healthy sign of any democracy, and for a grassroots movement, and millions of Americans who had been disenfranchised by the four years Trump was in power? This was the best way for them to be heard. The only way for them to be heard.They just didn’t know they were walking into an ambush by forces far greater than them, and more powerful than any political party in American history and what they wanted to do was use that protest - a moment of desperation for desperate Americans abandoned by the government, the culture and most institutions - and demonize them further by calling them extremists, terrorists, Nazis, insurrectionists. January 6th was played on a loop by the Democrats and their propaganda machine, once known as the legacy media. And why wouldn’t it be? It was everything they needed at just the right time. See, there’s a Confederate flag. See, there’s a hangman’s rope. See, there’s some guy in horns howling inside the Capitol. Zip ties, hanging Mike Pence, Trump watching the mob, and hoping they wouldn’t stop. It all painted a picture in our minds of an angry president amidst a violent coup. In our age of algorithm-driven mass hysteria, we’re no different from the Puritans in Salem who believed in “spectral evidence,” what you can’t see but can only imagine. January 6th finally provided them with the proof they needed of their campaign against MAGA.It’s just that none of it was true. Why would Trump have wanted a riot? He’d gone to great effort to convince Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz to debate the election in the Senate. All the riot did was hand absolute power to the Democrats, Reichstag Fire style. Not only did the media sell that lie, but you’d be severely punished if you asked any questions, especially about the 2020 election. Yes, we lived through that and more. Just because the Democrats have memory-holed everything they’ve done in the last ten years to cling to power doesn’t mean it didn’t happen or that we shouldn’t talk about it. There was nothing wrong with talking about an election that was anything but free and fair. I naively went into it as a major Biden advocate, believing he could win the old-fashioned way. I didn’t know they’d hide him and Kamala Harris in the basement and let the legacy media do all of the heavy lifting. I didn’t know they’d planned it—everything that happened throughout 2020 to ensure Trump was taken out of power, like they were meddling in some third-world country’s elections. It’s all written down in TIME Magazine. They planned on saving an election that was not theirs to save. Who gave them that right? The American people decide, and if one political party believes itself to be above the people, then that is an insurrection, not against the government but against all of us and a fair process we depend on. They justified everything they did by the lies they told themselves about who Trump really was and how dangerous he was supposed to be. They rigged the election by manipulating the media, changing any law that got in their way, using COVID as an excuse to push ballot harvesting, funded by a $400 million cash infusion, and all the while pretending they were “saving democracy.”By all accounts, I should have been cheering them on. Yes, get Trump! Anything and everything should be allowed as long as we were saving the country from Hitler! I believed that at first. Why wouldn’t I? I was straight out of Central Casting as a Resistance Lib. This was the back of my car in 2012.This is who I was.Before that, I was just a lowly Oscar blogger spending my time writing about superficial things, but suddenly, in 2015, everything changed. I was in a panic about the Greenhouse Effect and the sea level rise. I threw myself into politics to help the Democrats win. Overnight, I became someone who mattered online, with a growing following, adoration, and kindness from strangers. The warm embrace of the elite Left felt intoxicating: invitations to exclusive parties, friendships with high-status blue-checks on Twitter like Steve Schmidt, Rick Wilson, and Oprah, so much love and support online - after all, I was helping to save democracy and the planet! I was even invited to an early fundraiser for Joe Biden in May of 2019. It was necessary. I was important. I mattered.You can imagine, then, how surreal it would have been for anyone who knew me that way to see me starting to question the official narratives. For me, it began with what I believed was mass hysteria that had overtaken my side. Just as the Southerners had whipped themselves up into a frenzy, believing that if the slaves were freed, there would be chaos and violence, so too did we believe that if Trump won, that was the end of everything. But, looking back, all it really was was a populist revolt against a ruling class that just decided what America would be now. Class no longer mattered, only skin color and gender identity did.Little by little, I began to pull away as things got weird. The more I tried to speak out, the worse it got for me. They went after me hard on social media for years. But none of that would have driven me away from the Democrats. As with so many others, 2020 was the turning point for me. I suddenly could see the strings, and I wondered who was pulling them. Trotting out experts to say “systemic racism” was more important than a global pandemic, and trotting them out again to discourage Trump from sending in the National Guard. And again, to say the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation. How stupid did they think we were?We lurched from COVID to racism back to COVID to lockdowns, and all the while, as I would come to realize, the aim was only to GET TRUMP. Imagine completely taking over an election to take out a one-term president with a strong economy. Why?I asked the same question then as I wonder today. Why did it have to be an existential crisis? Why drive half the country to the brink of insanity? Why cosplay Trump as Hitler and pretend this was World War II? Couldn’t they win the old-fashioned way with better candidates and better policies? Russiagate, spying on his campaign, two impeachments, four indictments, convicting him of a felony, taking his mug shot, two assassination attempts, trying to throw him off the ballots, and needing the Supreme Court to shut it down, and the American people still chose Trump. Shouldn’t that have been the wakeup call? Shouldn’t that have been the moment their stupid, futile, destructive war ended?No. It wasn’t about politics for the Left. It was deeper than that. It was as deep as preserving the South before, during, and after the Civil War. January 6th allowed them a way out of what they’d become, not what MAGA had become. They were the violent ones and had been going all the way back to 2015, when a mob descended upon Trump supporters.They rioted at Trump’s inaugural. They believed themselves justified in attacking Trump supporters because they were convinced they were “fascists.” But their words meant nothing because they distorted them beyond comprehension. What does it mean to call someone Hitler, a fascist, a dictator, a rapist, a pedophile, a racist, a white supremacist? These words mean nothing now. And then came 2020, the point of no return. For me, it was the recognition that my side didn’t care about democracy or the truth. They only cared about defeating an imaginary enemy they invented but never existed. And were prepared to bring this country to its knees to achieve that goal.When I saw this video of Sue’s 100-year-old mattress store, I posted it on social media, and the response was, “How can you care more about property than people”? By then, they had already called me a racist many times, and they were pushing me out of utopia and farther and farther away. Was I a racist because I cared about Sue and the older man who defended her with a fire extinguisher? Trump’s speech at Mt. Rushmore was the first time I’d heard anyone in public life talk about what we could all see but almost no one would say out loud. The media called it dark and divisive because, of course, they did. Are you getting it yet? This only goes one way. That was for me yet another layer of the onion being pulled back to reveal what the legacy media had become. They were not reporting the news. They were telling us what to think, and they still are. After I started watching Trump’s rallies for myself, I kept waiting for the version of Trump we were sold to emerge. He never did. Instead, a guy who would stand in the pouring rain to speak to his supporters showed me what MAGA was really about. It was a love story. Trump had their backs, and they had his.Just listen to them as he visits East Palestine, Ohio after the train derailed and spilled toxic waste in their tiny forgotten town.That’s why they showed up in DC on January 6th. Not to storm the Capitol. Not to hang Mike Pe

The Democrats have never been less popular than they are right now. They are suffering from many of the same problems that are causing Hollywood to collapse. They are dominated by white women and the LGBTQIA movement that looks more and more like a cult every day. Only a white woman and a gay man could have come up with the Vanity Fair photo shoot that made Susie Wiles look surprised and confused, as if to say, “What am I doing here?” JD Vance as the villain in a superhero movie, obliterating his glittering aqua eyes because those make him look too good. And depicting Marco Rubio tipping over as though all it would take is a gentle push, and down he goes.But they saved up their best for the woman the Left calls KKKaroline. Shown in extreme closeup in high resolution with every pore and every wrinkle visible, not to mention injection marks on her upper lip, they turned the beautiful and young Leavitt into the cartoon version they see in their mind’s eye. They made something beautiful into something ugly. And on TikTok, they all had a big party. These are the same women who spent many months mocking Karoline Leavitt’s smallish upper lip. On and on it went, the bullying videos on TikTok. When that failed to destroy the Press Secretary, they harassed and destroyed a running influencer named Kate Mac just for talking to Leavitt.These women and probably lots of gay men are the monsters. They’re the wicked stepsisters in Cinderella who seethe with jealousy at the pretty blonde girl who is so confident and articulate at the podium. They’re the evil queen in Snow White who can’t stand that someone out there is prettier than she. So Vanity Fair became the Magic Mirror and the Huntsman. They lie to their readers that they are the fairest of them all while they try to extinguish or destroy the object of their unending obsession. Oh, how they must have laughed and laughed as they chose these photos, knowing their readers would eat it up and lick the plate clean. The women who stab lawn signs into the ground, pretend to stand for something, and portray themselves as the “better side” were celebrating to see Leavitt humiliated in a photo. It was, for them, like winning the lottery. It scratched an itch so deep they couldn’t even tell you where it was. It felt good, that was all.The editor is this guy, seen here as the date for Princess Bea in high heels:Guiducci was present during the photo shoot, which should have been a good indication that this would not go well for them, though I would imagine he was dripping with fake niceness to make them trust him. If you know, you know. Here is Megyn Kelly:The other editor was Jen Pastore, seen here bragging about the photoshoot and now treated like a hero by the Good People of the Left.Back in 2014, the New York Times covered her wedding to Mark Hannah:Pastore was lovingly captured this way: “The bride burst into laughter at least once during the vows, showing off an impossibly wide smile that was half Anne Hathaway, half 1990s Julia Roberts.” You see, even in 2014, they had to stipulate, yeah, you know, back when Julia Roberts had not aged even a day? They couldn’t get away with that now, or maybe they could. They make the rules, after all. It is nice to be among the privileged ruling class in America, among the Good People of the Left who see their mission to spread that goodness. And if you don’t along with it, they will destroy you. Well, at least that was the plan. Trump upended it, and they’ve never figured out exactly why. Even now, they think all of us should want to live inside their puritanical, suffocating bubble of goodness. Newsflash: we don’t. The truth is that they are not a party defined by goodness so much as all-consuming hatred for the “lesser” half of the country. It buzzes behind their fake Anne Hathaway/Julia Roberts’ smile like flies buzzing around rotting meat. Their hatred is everywhere. Usually pooling and coagulating on Blue Sky, but every so often it seeps back to X, where they marshal their forces as a hate army to attack those they deem “toxic,” “dangerous,” or “disgusting.”Why did they lose to Trump a second time is a question they would never ask. Is it them? No, it couldn’t be. Everyone wants to be them. They’re the special people, the good people, the chosen people, the Woketopians that will take America into the future. I know what it feels like to see myself through their eyes, even though I was once one of them. They sent a photographer to take my picture for a New York Times profile of me at a time when they were trying to make it seem like they kind of, sort of cared about the half of the country that voted for Trump.Don’t do it, my friend warned. Send them a selfie. I should have listened to him, but, like the Trump administration, I was far too trusting. How bad could it be?Well, it was nothing less than the worst photos of me ever taken, appearing in the world's most widely read outlet. So there I was, looking fat, ugly, and old, which is the message they wanted to send: don’t be like her, or this is what you will look like. They say it openly and freely now, this is what “hate” does to you, and they define “hate” as disagreeing with their politics. The photographer was nice. She took many photos of me. And maybe it’s true they were all just as bad as the one the editor chose, but I think, as with the Vanity Fair photos, they picked the worst ones because that is who they are, and if they didn’t, they’d have been accused of elevating the wrong people, the bad people, the racists, and the fascists.This way, they signal to their readers - women and gay men - that they’re still on their side, they’re still on board with the real hate campaign, one they’ve waged for ten years now and counting. They have no plan for the other half of the country. All they want to do is take back power again and raise the drawbridge to their Queendom. While it’s true that the Right will mock how women look, especially the Wicked Witch of the Left, Jennifer Welch, you’d never see that at Vanity Fair, or the New York Times, where women on the Left, especially minorities, are depicted as saintly. In refusing to “normalize” the wife of a “fascist,” all magazines boycotted the beautiful Melania Trump. Nothing she could do would ever change their conviction of who they believed she was. They use every magazine, every late-night comedy show, every Hollywood movie, every article in every magazine to push that lie. When they mocked Kellyanne Conway’s age, she did something about it. She took that one thing off the table. They found something else. When they mocked Sarah Huckabee Sanders for her makeup and her weight, she did something about it, but they found something else. And now, when they mocked Karoline Leavitt for her thin upper lip, she didn’t say anything about it, and they punished her for it. The truth doesn’t matter to them. It never has. They can’t even face the truth about themselves, let alone the other half of the country. Ivanka was always to be portrayed as the daughter of a Nazi, as are all the Trump children. There has never been one moment when they were given the credit they deserve, not because they’re American royalty, but because we, the people, voted for them to fight for us. That used to matter in a country not under the control of an elite ruling class that sees itself as better than everyone else. Trump, his administration, and his voters have to be whatever they say they are. If they need them to be kings, so be it. Hitler, sure thing. Let us know what you want, women and gay men who live in a fantasy world, and we’ll give it to you because you have been elevated inside the Woketopia. The funny thing is, all they do is expose what liars they are. We all know what Karoline Leavitt, JD Vance, Marco Rubio, and Susie Wiles really look like. This wasn’t about telling the truth. It was about giving their readers the comfortable lie. See, it’s okay to dehumanize them and treat them like toxic waste because they deserve it. Oh, Vanity Fair, did you have to make it that obvious? They must wonder why so many Americans don’t see them the way they see themselves. Or maybe they don’t wonder at all. Maybe they never ask. Maybe they’ve been united in hate and dehumanization for so long that they don’t know the difference anymore between what is real and what is a manufactured delusion.It isn’t that the Right didn’t mock the Democrats’ press secretaries, Jen Psaki and Karine Jean-Pierre. They did. It’s that the Left is the side that has always pretended to be our moral betters because they aren’t like that, they don’t criticize women, they don’t tear down other women, except that they do. That was Lesson Number One for me almost ten years ago. They are exactly like that, and I remember thinking, we aren’t the good guys anymore.The women on TikTok, those who have helped make our culture intolerable by always portraying women as victims in fiction, in Lifetime movies, in Hollywood, become the very monsters they once pretended to oppose. So all Vanity Fair did was prove not who the Trump administration is, but what the Left has become. They are nothing but a grease stain where a once mighty movement used to be.Karoline Leavitt is not only beautiful, young, smart, and successful, but she’s also confident, and that’s what they really hate about her. If they can’t destroy her, they will try to humiliate her. It has become a ritual in the media by now, but never quite as blatantly as with this Vanity Fair piece. Maybe their readership is declining. Maybe they’re bored. Maybe they don’t know any other way to be anymore. Whatever it is, the stench of failure follows them around every time they signal to the rest of us that they are still this helpless and this desperate to lie to the American public with nothing less than lowly propaganda disguised as journalism. Vanity Fair, Hollywood, the New York Times - they don’t exist for all of us anymore. They don’t v

I have angels in my comment section who report when commenters lose their cool and fly off the handle at me. Most of the time, I delete them. Sometimes I don’t. This one sailed through my inbox, and it will finally get this person banned after almost 6,000 comments in three years, and he’s not even a paid subscriber. Please excuse the profanity:I can’t lie and pretend to be excited for Supergirl. It’s not a movie made for me, and I’m not sure I can handle one more girl boss movie, especially one whose tagline is “Truth, justice, and whatever.” Maybe my daughter will like it. But let’s move on to the red meat of this, shall we? What is this “non-stop hate binge” I’ve been on lately? It’s true, I have been out in force on X, fighting the wave of what I would define as “hate” aimed at Erika Kirk and Turning Point. It’s not something I could or ever would ignore. I’m not built that way, which is how I got into this mess in the first place. I’m Gen-X. We tend to say what we really think. We’re not good with the comfortable lies, and we weren’t raised to shrink back from conflict.And, like Trump, I have a bit of an impulse control disorder when it comes to social media. If I didn’t, my life would never have changed the way it has. I began fighting the Left when I saw how they were dehumanizing the Right, Melania and Ivanka Trump, MAGA supporters, and even Trump himself. It cost me almost everything. Smarter people know how to shut up. They know how to keep their heads down and go along to get along. I’ve never been that way. I’ve been online for 30 years of my life, entirely too long. I’ve wasted years arguing pointlessly on X or Facebook. It is spitting in the wind. It does nothing to change anyone’s mind, and it only makes me unlikable and a target. But I can’t help it. I don’t know how any reasonable person could not be thoroughly disgusted and horrified by Candace Owens and how she has exploited the murder of Charlie Kirk. It’s not only dividing the Right, undoing so much of what Charlie did, but it’s exposing ugliness and dehumanization on the side I have always defended.I can’t help but think Candace is jealous, not of Erika, but of Charlie, his reach and popularity, how beloved he was and is, especially in the wake of his death. So she just decided to steal from him - his legacy, his reputation, his movement, his influence. She did this by co-opting his story and spinning a delusional yarn about what is a fairly open and shut assassination case, one that pins the blame on the fanatical Left. She doesn’t need the money. Her husband, George Farmer, is worth between $180 and $200 million, not to mention how much Candace is making by spinning tall tales to feed her audience of mostly bored women who need drama in their lives. Lifetime movies don’t cut it anymore because they, like everything else in Hollywood, went “woke.” Even psychological thrillers and romance novels have gone “woke,” as have true crime podcasts. So instead, they follow the snake oil salesman, the huckster, the Barnam and Bailey lying YouTuber down any rabbit hole she chooses to offer up, anything to make it seem like they’re involved in some gossipy, dirty, evil secret, that they know something no one else does. It’s easier to believe we can control inexplicable horrific tragedies, whether it’s the Democrats always blaming guns or it’s a faction of the Right always blaming Israel.No, Candace is not doing this for money. She’s doing it for that insidious word for the internet age: clout. As long as they’re talking about you, as long as you’re a trending topic, your clicks and views will rise. You will be highly ranked on the podcast charts, and you’ll see that as a success. At least, until it isn’t. Who could resist what it must feel like to have millions of people tuning in to hear what scandalous thing you’ll say next? How could anyone not become addicted to it and constantly feed the beast, hungry for more? The algorithms have ravaged our brains and nervous systems, and in Candace Owens's case, her morality.True, she needs a new narrative to wipe off the sticky scum of humiliation now that her “Brigitte Macron is really a man” conspiracy collapsed. What better way to pivot away from that and redefine CANDACE? The hatred, bullying, and ugliness aimed at Erika Kirk come from both the Left and the Right. Each side has its reasons for wanting to destroy her and Turning Point. On the Left, it’s obvious. Even Barack Obama called Charlie a racist, more or less, in the wake of his death. They can’t abide a movement like his that was attracting so many young people. They couldn’t just accept the death of Charlie. They had to work every day to kill off his legacy, and that meant going after his widow, Erika. If some on the Left have abandoned their decency and humanity to stay in power, some on the Right are doing it out of a deep-seated hatred of Israel and distrust of the Jewish people. There is no other way to say it. That is the stinking rot that lies in the soul of Candace Owens, what drives her popularity on YouTube and social media, because Jew hate is global. And yes, it’s also banal, as Walter Kirn explains here with Matt Taibbi on America This Week. I know what Jewish hate feels like. I am half Jewish on my dad’s side, which meant I was never technically Jewish but Jewish enough for the camps. My sisters and I knew that we felt some hesitation saying we were Jewish around some people. It was just something we grew up knowing. What Candace is doing, what so many of her minions are doing, is in service of what I believe is evil and ugly. I don’t even think the recent massacre on Bondi Beach would pull any of them out of it, Left or Right.Standing up to Candace Owens and her mob of psychos and sociopaths is no easy task. Almost everyone is afraid of her because she brings out the knives, and she goes for the jugular. Her army of minions will do her bidding like the monkeys in the Wizard of Oz. She will destroy you if she can. Lucky for me, I’m so insignificant she wouldn’t bother. But Tim Pool is not insignificant. He has a large platform, and he put it all on the line to stand up and do the right thing. He let her have it in a well-deserved viral rant.He then went on Piers Morgan and explained it even further:Another brave voice is Matt Walsh, who gave, I think, the best and most passionate explanation of why these conspiracy theories are hurtful and damaging to not just Erika Kirk and Turning Point, but to the country, because this madness threatens to destroy the MAGA movement. No one has said it better.I would never have guessed that the two heroes to emerge from this mess would be Tim Pool and Matt Walsh, but here we are. These kinds of moments test all of us. That’s not to say people can’t criticize Israel, or that the United States should fight Israel’s wars or give them money. But this goes deeper, and making this MAGA’s biggest political issue is a losing proposition. Here is Carl Cannon of RealClearPolitics, along with Tom Bevan and Andrew Walworth, on the Megyn Kelly show. The “Woke Mind Virus” destroyed the Left, and the “Woke Right Mind Virus” threatens to destroy MAGA if it keeps heading in this direction, as Walter Kirn and Matt Taibbi discuss on America This Week. As I watched the video on Bondi Beach, I thought about Ana Kasparian saying on X, “I would never step foot in Israel.” I think about how Candace Owens will spin this as some false flag operation, and I worry for what’s coming next.Humans have been at war for over 90% of our existence. It is in our nature. We will go to war whether it’s on social media or in Gaza or Bondi Beach. To fight any war requires dehumanizing the enemy. Once you get there, where even a shot in the neck that kills a husband and a father, makes no difference to you whether you are on the Left or the Right, then you are beyond saving because you have lost your humanity, like the Good Germans in World War II, like the Good White People in the South after the Civil War, like the Puritans in Salem. The Left mocked these Trump supporters for showing empathy and solidarity to Trump after he was shot. They said it was a cult. They laughed at them. But I saw the decent people I’ve come to know over the past decade. That’s the kind of humanity we need. These past ten years have taught me that I will never go along with dehumanizing other people. I’d rather lose everything. The reason I’m here on Substack is the same reason I will lose subscribers for this post. I couldn’t do the other thing. I couldn’t shut up. If that makes me a “bitter old woman,” then so be it.Here is Frank Turek:We must be brave. We must be decent. We must hold the line. ///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

Route 66 will turn 100 next year. It slithers along I-40 as a road that almost didn’t think it needed to be there. So much of roadside America vanished once they built the interstate, but you can still see signs of it here and there.While glancing over at Route 66, as I drove back from Ohio to California, I couldn’t help but see how America has become so divided between those who exist in the virtual new frontier of the internet and those who still live in the long-forgotten old America, an America Big Tech will soon leave behind. A week or so ago, while driving through Lakewood, Ohio, I saw two police officers helping a ranting and raving woman open her locked car door. They just stood there, with their heads down, doing their job as temperatures sank to 20 degrees and the snow flurries swirled around their heads. They wanted to be home with their families, but there they were, doing their jobs.Cleveland is a symbol of an America in steep decline. Emptied out factories, some areas so crippled by poverty, they look like third-world countries. The businesses have been abandoned, graffiti covers almost every block, and most people know to stay away from these neighborhoods.My daughter was commissioned to paint a mural on the side of an abandoned building near a vacantd lot in a lower-middle-class neighborhood in Cleveland to dress it up a little. It is cities like Cleveland that Trump was elected to help fix. And it is why bringing in millions from poverty-ridden countries only means these Americans are pushed to the back of the line. His methods might be crude and in some cases, reckless, but his intentions have always been the same. Not just to Make America Great Again, but to Make America Safe Again. The Democrats can’t keep America safe because they have become disconnected from real life and exist inside a self-perpetuating feedback loop that tells them only what they want to hear.They can’t keep us safe on the streets. They can’t keep businesses safe. They can’t keep us safe on the roads. They can’t keep families safe in cities ruled by gang warfare. They can’t keep women safe from violent attacks by random lunatics who should not even be roaming the streets at all. They can’t keep women and girls safe in locker rooms. They can’t keep children safe in classrooms where they insist upon rewriting America’s history and foisting an ideological cult upon the young so that they, too, grow up believing they can change their gender if the color of their skin makes them bad people. They can’t keep those strung out on fentanyl safe either, the hundreds of thousands of overdoses every year. If anything, the Democrats are fighting to protect the rights of the drug cartels, like they fight to protect the rights of illegal immigrants, and like they fight to protect the rights of criminals. The Democrats exist in a protective bubble. They never see or hear the stories that come in brief flashes: a woman was punched on the subway, a man was carjacked with his toddler watching, a store was robbed, and a family was shot at a fast-food restaurant. Protesters beat someone up for wearing a MAGA hat, and a woman is kicked out of a gym for accurately calling attention to a naked man in the locker room. They can’t really address any of these problems, so they shapeshift their message to see what works. Once they win, they can’t deliver. Trump is trying to deliver, and all they’re doing is trying to stop him. Democrats RisingTyler Robinson has never looked better. He was smiling as he strode into the courthouse on trial for the murder of Charlie Kirk. And why wouldn’t he be smiling? He knows he’s a hero on the Left, and he knows that a loud faction of the Right is defending him by blaming - wait for it - Israel.Amanda Seyfried has refused to apologize for saying Charlie Kirk was “hateful,” even if her words echoed Robinson’s, who said that Charlie deserved to be killed because he “spread too much hate.” Seyfried, who has a major movie coming out in a couple of weeks, will be celebrated for her comments and will likely earn an Oscar nomination for a different role in which she plays the presumed second coming of Christ in the Shaker movement. Oh, the irony. The Kirk assassination should have rocked America to its core, as previous political assassinations have. Maybe it would have shaken us all awake so that we could ask, How did we ever get here? But if the Trump near-assassination didn’t do it, if so many of the Real Housewives of the Democratic Party celebrated with cold glasses of Chardonnay and an Instagram post, nothing would.The Democrats have the wind at their backs with major wins in elections all over the country, including the first Democrat to win in Miami in almost 30 years. They believe they have the messaging right and are hitting on affordability, healthcare, and a living wage. So by the looks of it now, nothing can stop them from taking the House in 2026 and the presidency in 2028.They haven’t changed a thing. They haven’t tacked to the center. They haven’t confronted “gender affirming care.” In fact, they’re openly bragging about supporting it, at least if the performative meme factory of frontrunner Gavin, the Great White Male Hope for the Democrats in 2028, is any indication.Here is Ben Shapiro.To them, opposing “trans kids” is “hate.” And that is what got Charlie Kirk killed, except that his death was like lifting a fallen tree in the forest. All of the creepy crawlies came out. It isn’t just the Left. Some on the Right are making a play for the giant hole Charlie left behind. “I don’t care about the midterms,” says Candace Owens. “I hate the Republican Party,” says Tucker Carlson. Marjorie Taylor Greene is enjoying her fifteen minutes of fame by being a useful idiot for the Left, telling CNN and 60 Minutes everything they want to hear. MAGA is tearing itself apart. What separated Charlie Kirk from the parasitic vultures who have flown in to peck at the corpse is that he wasn’t in it just for clicks and views or for money. He was in it because he believed in it, and he was dedicated to helping defeat the Left to save this country, especially its youth. Without him, however, the Democrats can use their powerful media machine to manipulate the message, even to deflect from their own craziness long enough to fool the public into trusting them before they once again demand that all must comply or else. That’s our potential future if the Right can’t get it together to mount a proper offense.The problem for the Democrats is that the mass delusions they push onto the American public have almost no practical application in the real America, the one I’ve just seen as I’ve driven across the country.What I saw was an America that needs politicians not just for “affordability,” but to keep things running - buses, grocery stores, schools, and most especially, to keep them and their neighborhoods safe, something the Democrats can’t and won’t do. Trump telling working-class Americans to buy fewer dolls this Christmas is the kind of thing that can sink a presidency and a legacy. True, he isn’t running for re-election, but it’s the kind of thing that will stick. The truth matters less than the perception, and for now, the Democrats control the media and thus, the message. To defeat the Democrats, Trump and MAGA will have to find a way to tell Americans to buy as many dolls as they want because now they can afford them. Sticks and StonesThe greatest crime imaginable to the Good People of the Left is a bad word. I was there when we began curating our soft language. Make the words inoffensive, and the problems will be solved. There is no homelessness; there are the “unhoused” people. There are no drug addicts, but mentally ill people. We don’t give away our pets, we “rehome” them. It isn’t catastrophic, life-altering medications and surgeries that sterilize children and wreck their bodies for life. It’s “gender affirming care.” So, of course, Trump would be their biggest enemy. He got famous for saying anything, even if — especially if — it was shocking. The Left knows this and yet, they can’t help themselves. It’s “dangerous” because bad words are “dangerous” in a Woketopia ruled by soft language.They exist in an ecosystem that turns the story of a Cinnebon employee caught on tape using the N-word into the biggest scandal of the week. That convinces them that every terrible thing they’ve said and done for ten years has been justified. This country is infested, they believe, with “racists,” and they plan to do something about it once they take back power. How will they do that? By mandating thought and speech, just as they did last time. The internet gives them that kind of control to decide who gets to stay and who has to go. They won’t only use it, they’ll expand on it. But words are nothing compared to a bullet in the neck, a punch in the face, or a knife across the throat. But even if the victims are not white, crime remains an elusive concept for them because crime presents as “systemically racist police,” or mass incarceration, or something Trump and MAGA did. They especially ignore crimes by illegal immigrants. Cleveland and other cities like it have been ravaged by crime and drugs. Trump’s answer was to send in National Guard troops to protect ICE agents and clean up the cities. Then he began bombing the cartel boats bringing drugs to the United States. Everything he does is to keep America safe, and yet, to the Democrats, that’s criminal activity. So the citizens languish, overdose, and die, and the only person to ever do anything about it is the guy they still want to impeach, destroy, or even kill. Of Thee I SingI have just spent the past few weeks driving across this big, beautiful, complicated country, and I’ve never seen a greater disconnect between the traumas foisted upon Americans by the Democrats and the reality of life on the ground. In real life, we can still see each other as fellow Americans.

The deal is done. Netflix will purchase Warner Bros. Discovery for $82 billion. Yet another corporate monopoly drives a nail through Hollywood’s coffin. It was bad enough when Disney bought Fox, Star Wars, and Marvel. Now, Netflix will be among the most powerful corporate monopolies, replacing what Hollywood used to be.America gave up on Hollywood because Hollywood gave up on America. The result is empty movie theaters all over the country—one bomb after another. Of course, Warner Bros. knew. You’d have to be an idiot not to know. Does anyone think Netflix is sweating the online memes accusing it of being too woke? No, they aren’t. They are making too much money to care. With streaming, there is no free market pressure, no quality control. You don’t have to motivate people to leave their homes. You don’t need big stars to drive box office, and best of all, you can ignore the silent majority that has tuned you out long ago. Hate the trans agenda being shoved down everyone’s throat? Too bad. Your boycotts are a drop in the bucket at Netflix. It’s the perfect solution to Hollywood’s problem. They can have everything they want — a virtue signaling paradise — and never have to worry about big budgets or low box office ever again. That’s the easy way out. The truth is harder to swallow. They destroyed themselves. They wrecked their brand and alienated their audience. Hollywood built a ship of failure when it split into two divergent paths around 2003, after the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings franchises brought in ungodly profits not just here but around the world. The branding was the key, the IPs. For years, they dominated the global box office and brought people to movie theaters across the country.Meanwhile, in the other Hollywood, in the “prestige” niche lane where the Oscars live, things began to get smaller, more isolated, more aligned with politics, especially under Barack Obama. His win influenced almost everything, as he loves to put out his top-ten lists every year and even has a deal with Netflix. These two Hollywoods existed side by side like the First Class section of the airplane vs. Coach, where they “let them eat Marvel.” You can see the rise and fall in one image, from Box Office Mojo:This year might mean that, for the first time since 2020, China will dominate the Worldwide box office rather than Hollywood, unless Jim Cameron can bring Avatar: Fire and Ash over the 2 billion mark.In 2019, Hollywood put out over 900 movies. Last year, just 624, and many of them bombed. So what happened? 2020 happened. The one-two punch of COVID and the Great Awokening brought Hollywood to its knees. The Oscar race this year is loaded with unwatchable movies that swirl around things almost no one outside the bubble of Hollywood cares about, identity mainly. Mothers’ caterwauling their oppression, like Die, My Love, If I had Legs I’d Kick You, and even One Battle After Another feature women who seem to hate their children. The people who run Hollywood are still mostly rich white men, but they must always genuflect, with women or people of color as shields to protect them from accusations of sexism or racism by the mob online. The rise of female directors who get these jobs for no other reason except that they’re female has transformed a once-great industry into a DEI film school. Every couple is interracial. Every movie must have significant actors of color. The GLAAD lobby demands representation everywhere. Why would anyone want to pay money to have them shove their ideology down our throats?Success doesn’t even matter to them. That they project “goodness” is all they care about now, their status inside utopia. The EndAs I drive across this country, I sometimes see a multiplex in a mall. It looks as deserted to me as the old drive-ins once did, and I can’t help but think this really is the end for movie theaters. They’ll go the way of the record store, limited to enthusiasts in the big cities. Everyone else will numbly scroll through Netflix for whatever they can find, but it will never have the same cultural impact as a great movie when we’re all under one roof, sharing a story.It’s yet more separation, more isolation, more internet, more social media, less of what we all need as a society.“The Future is Coming, and You Aren’t In It”After COVID ended for rational Americans, we all wondered whether people would return to the movies. The paranoid mask-wearing Liberals did not. Even Peggy Noonan noticed.In 2022, a miracle arrived in the form of Tom Cruise starring in Top Gun: Maverick. It made so much money that it wiped clean the argument that Hollywood was over and movie theaters were dying. Although it was nominated for Best Picture, it lost to the woke screed, Everything Everywhere All At Once. That was a sign that Hollywood was not ready for the iceberg right ahead.The following year showed promise, with “Barbenheimer,” “Oppenheimer,” and “Barbie” becoming cultural sensations on TikTok. The Oscars did the right thing and gave their awards to Oppenheimer. Though things seem to be moving in the right direction, it’s too little, too late. Audiences don’t trust Hollywood anymore, and I can’t blame them. Of all the Warner Bros. movies that were successful this year, the Oscar will likely go to the anti-ICE, pro-ANTIFA, anti-Trump rallying cry, One Battle After Another. No film in recent memory has better captured the singular worldview of the progressive Left.As Curtis Yarvin wrote for The Spectator:Fundamentally, One Battle is a religious film. It is entirely set in the fantasy landscape of the great American religion, progressivism, the 20th-century evolution of our ancient Puritan tradition. If you are a true believer, imagine watching Battlefield Earth without being a Scientologist. For non-progressives, One Battle may be necessary viewing. It displays the interior landscape of the narcissistic narrative of our world’s dominant cult of power. We seldom get to strap a GoPro to the inside of a lib’s forehead. And he continues:So this film is out there – recruiting damaged people by presenting them as romantic heroes in a propaganda fantasy. Few will kill. But many will clap. When bad movies succeed, as One Battle will, they diagnose something bad in the audiences they entertain. Corrupt art is the pathognomonic mark of a corrupt society. Shitty people will watch this shitty film, and love it. Shitty journalists have already given it a standing ovation – the politics makes them hard, like Lockjaw. This evil is at the very heart of our culture.As Leonard Cohen noted: “I have seen the future, brother. It is murder.” Murder is as old as Cain. The anonymous internet is young. Nobody asked for the combination. But they’ll get it.So, of course, the critics have gone nuts for it. It IS religious for them. It’s already won many awards and is on track to win Best Picture. Trust me, Hollywood has no desire to save itself. One Battle After Another cost upwards of $140 million and only made $70 million in the US, with the bulk of its profits made overseas on Leonardo DiCaprio’s name, which is why it’s assumed he demanded his usual fee of $20 million. Old Hollywood understood that you don’t reward failure with film awards. New Hollywood cares less about the money and more about the message. The public used to matter because the box office did. No wonder WB is selling out after watching one bomb after another this past year. Why wait for bankruptcy? Why not cash out now on a high note?This is the kind of thing Hollywood pumps out now:And therein lies the problem. They forgot it wasn’t about them. They believed their own publicity. They fell in love with their own image, like Narcissus. They began to believe they were important. We loved movies and celebrities for what they gave us, not for who they are. We don’t care. We don’t need them to fix us. Or teach us. Or lecture us. Or scold us. We just need them to entertain us. Well, now the billionaires have arrived to prove to them how little they matter when it comes to the bottom line. And if you think that’s bad, wait until the AI tsunami wipes out half the industry. The audience was always their best hope for survival. As long as we showed up, Hollywood and its stars had power. Now that audiences have vanished, well, the ship is made of iron, and it will sink.Who knows, maybe Congress or Trump can stop the merger. That still won’t fix the fundamental problem of what Hollywood has become and why the public turned away. On the upside, the giant hole Hollywood leaves behind, like the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, might open up movie theaters to a new breed of filmmaker. Maybe they can make movies Hollywood or Netflix never would - trashy comedies, cheap horror, romantic comedies, Dirty Harry movies. Who knows, maybe we can Make Hollywood Great Again. What better way to rebuild a counterculture?Altamont, Illinois, 8:42AM. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

They might look like ordinary women as they Instacart from Bristol Farms or strengthen their core at morning pilates. You might be standing behind them in line at Starbucks as they order their half-cream, half-caff, no whip, no foam, triple-pump chai latte with oat milk. They seem to be everywhere once you know how to recognize them. They’re the target demographic for Audible’s Bestsellers list. They account for the bulk of spending on sites like Amazon and Skims. Ever wonder how it is that Goop still stays in business? They live in the Hamptons, Brentwood, or Malibu. They’re married to talk show hosts like Jimmy Kimmel. Or they’re married to themselves. They’re having Thanksgiving in a gated community in Montecito. They’re cloning duplicates who parrot the talking points of the coven like abortion is healthcare and no human is illegal, and trans women are women. They’ve taught them to be strident, demanding, and intolerant with standards too high for any man, job, or country to meet. Their world before was idyllic - a utopia that kept them at the top because they ordered this new world in such a way that nothing and no one threatened their power. The future is female. It’s time for women to rule. White Dudes for Harris. They call it the Great Feminization, but really, it’s a coven of witches.Just before Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Jezebel and Etsy cast a dark spell on Charlie. Why? Because they couldn’t shut him up. In their world, they decide what people can and can’t say, think, buy, or do. They’ve taken down the “story,” but it still exists on the Wayback Machine:These days, witches cater to more than just personal grudges. And it’s not uncommon for them to channel their energy toward thwarting Republicans (there’s even a subreddit devoted to casting nightly hexes on Trump). Are you interested in punishing Kirk for the years of regressive rhetoric he’s shouted at America’s youth and anyone within earshot? Here at Jezebel, we’re about to find out if there’s a spell for that.And:After placing my first spell, “MAKE EVERYONE HATE HIM,” I was left with more questions than answers. How long would it take to kick in? Should I have splurged for a pricier spell to make it work faster? Shortly after, the witch messaged me trying to upsell me a $50 “spell booster.” When I asked what it did, she explained it would “amplify the energetic support” of the main spell, or else I could let it unfold “in its natural timing.” I decided to trust the witch’s will.And her closing paragraph:Sunday, August 24, passed. Nothing. Monday, still nothing. Tuesday rolled around, and I began to wonder if I’d been scammed. But then I reminded myself: this is witchcraft, not Amazon. The forces operate on their own schedule.Megyn Kelly reported exclusively on how this affected Erika Kirk after Charlie was assassinated, leaving behind two small children and a widespread movement that touched millions:What bothers them so much about Erika Kirk, other than that she is brave, kind, beautiful, and true, is what I once believed about the Christian Right. I’d never be able to live like that, I always thought. Then I saw what happened to the Left, to all of us, without religion. Now, we are a movement that believes it’s okay to sterilize children and mutilate their bodies without their consent. We treat abortion like it’s an act of empowerment.Erika Kirk put her faith in God and in her husband. These are mortal sins to the Wicked Witches of the Left. Thou shalt have no God before ourselves. We are the power because we are empowered. But unfortunately, it has resulted in a movement ruled by and defined by evil and hatred. Jennifer Welch, a prominent Wicked Witch of the Left who podcasts alongside a Renfield-like puppet whose name no one knows but who nods along numbly as Welch spits out her invective - “I call him Canks,” she says about Trump after her “Cankles McTaco Tits” went viral. These are the same people who pearl clutch over Trump calling a reporter “Piggy.” Bill Madden and Marco Foster are two of the feminized men dominated by the witches. They do nothing but post the ugliest things all day long on social media. They have found their perfect voice now in Jennifer Welch.Here is Walter Kirn and Matt Taibbi on Jennifer Welch:After Charlie Kirk was assassinated, the witches and their compliant male counterparts decided it was more than justified to celebrate his death, to splash around in his blood like the Manson family after they hit the home of Sharon Tate. It didn’t matter to them even a little bit, just as the near-assassination of Trump didn’t matter. Even death didn’t satiate the beast. Charlie’s brutal assassination wasn’t enough. They wanted — NEEDED — more. And so the witches convened once again, with Joy Reid, Jennifer Welch, and her sidekick, whose name no one will ever know or remember, to word-vomit about their perceived enemies. Megyn Kelly was having none of it:Even the Real Clear Politics gang had words (full video here):And here is Erika’s response, the one Tom Bevan references:If the spell on Charlie Kirk was to “make everyone hate him,” then it failed. If it was to shut him up, it also failed. His message will carry on. He is more beloved today than he ever was in life. It turns out that love is harder to kill than even people. Love lives on in the hearts of all of us. It spreads. It unites us. It redeems us. Love was what hundreds of thousands expressed in the wake of Charlie’s death and even now. Charlie’s memory lives on in clips of his tiny daughter running into his arms. In how he told the story of meeting Erika:And how he explained Newton’s laws to his baby.Or money matters:They believe those who do not agree with them must be gotten rid of, and nothing else will satisfy. They will use emotional blackmail, uniform caterwauling, non-stop whining and complaining, and all of the other ways women have learned over the millennia to drive society to the brink of madness, and none of it will work.Unfortunately for the Wicked Witches of the Left, their power is about as useful as their policies and their candidates. Limp, dull, flaccid.Women like I used to be and witches like they are tend to our needs and our fragility. For years, we treated ourselves to therapy, yoga, meditation, Oprah, de-aging, antidepressants, and keto.Eventually, when we fixed ourselves and attempted to raise our perfect children, we overprotected them. In the wake of Columbine and 911, everywhere we looked, we saw danger. We thought every man was a potential child molester. We worried about school shootings, we worried about microplastics and pollution. We thought we could protect our kids to raise them with high self-esteem, but we forgot about strength and resiliency.We abandoned that in ourselves, and we never taught it to our children.What I’ve learned coming out of this era is that you can’t control the world. Even if, as women, as mothers, as wives, as business owners, we’d like to have complete control over everything because we believe we could create a perfect world, I eventually realized you can’t. It’s not possible. Trump came along because we needed to be reminded of what it is to survive things, events, tragedies, wars, and words. The answer is not to control everything and everyone. The answer is to be strong and just to survive.And that’s why these women are now witches, huddled over their cauldron, chanting out that their spells will never succeed and never hold power. Because they can’t survive. If they can’t survive words, and they can’t survive Trump, and they can’t survive open debate and Charlie Kirk, then they most certainly can’t be in charge of this country. All anyone had to do was listen to Charlie and hear what he had to say. If you disagreed, debate him. Yet, you can hear in their messaging who they thought he was, and this was the worst they could say about him, from Jezebel:A cornerstone of Kirk’s nightmare ideology is his insistence that, since gaining more independence, Western women are more miserable than ever. He tells auditoriums full of young women that our freedom is a flaw, not an achievement. He’s obsessed with declining birth rates and idealizes the 1950s, when women’s only “job” was tending to children and husbands. If we all abandoned our careers and returned to motherhood, we’d be happier, according to Kirk. Indeed, he fails to realize that I would be happiest if he would just shut up.She could not offer up a stronger argument to the contrary because look at her. She is proof that he was right. She’s miserable. Jennifer Welch is miserable. All of the witches are miserable. I was miserable too. I know what it is to live the feminist lie, and I know what it is to look back at my life with regret. How can they sell that to young women? The Jezebel writer consoled herself with a petition that was launched on the Utah campus that would become the site of Charlie’s murder. The petition was launched on Friday, August 22, and had already been signed over 3,800 times. Could this be the “MAKE EVERYONE HATE HIM” at work?”But the petition grew to 6,829, all of them in agreement that the university should prevent Charlie from speaking:Sign this petition to send a clear message that we stand united for a university that upholds the tenets of inclusivity, respect, and enlightenment. Let us work together to ensure that Utah State University remains a campus where all students feel safe, valued, and respected.Yeah, shutting him up by any means necessary sure sounds like “inclusivity, respect, and enlightenment” to me. Sounds more like the very definition of fascism, “conform or else.”These wicked witches and so much of the Left’s once-mighty empire invented a version of Charlie Kirk that never existed and transformed him into a monster of their own making. They wanted to send a message to anyone who might think about disagreeing with them, on a college campus, no less. What are they teaching these kids? Not free spe

I remember when Generation Woke decided to take Thanksgiving. The narrative fit right into the oppressed/oppressor mindset. America was a rotten, fetid empire of colonizers who marauded through the pristine countryside and then forced the Native Americans to eat with them for Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving was now “problematic.” Celebrating it, even more so. High-status influencers who made a great living off of our Capitalist system pronounced their objections to this once-great American holiday, to take a brave stand against it, because, especially in 2020, every white person was expected to atone for their sins of the past and their white privilege now. “We’re not celebrating Thanksgiving,” so went the lengthy, agonizing, virtue-signaling posts on Instagram. Maybe they’d be out feeding the poor, though still celebrating Thanksgiving, just not for themselves. Charity could wipe clean the shame.Once Trump was pushed out and Biden put in power, the waters calmed, the screaming stopped, and Thanksgiving was no longer a curse upon all of us.Now, here we are, Trump is in power again, and Thanksgiving has now become yet another crisis that must not go to waste. We are to enter the holidays thinking of the president committing illegal acts and whether or not members of the military will take a stand against him and start a hot Civil War. Thanksgiving must be a reminder of the Nazi occupation that is starving the poor, especially the Black and Brown people, who are being hunted down and thrown into concentration camps. The order has come down that all must be miserable. Four long years to make Americans suffer for the crime of the Democrats losing an election to Trump again.Says Senator Patty Murray. How dare we speak Happy Thanksgiving! How dare we speak Merry Christmas! With all due respect to those trapped inside the Doomsday Cult, no. Just no. This is one day you can’t take from us. You can’t shame us out of it. You can’t tell us not to gather with our loved ones around a table and enjoy a meal. Thanksgiving is not yours to take. It never was. You can be miserable if you’d like, but those of us who are grateful just to wake up another day, let alone to cook a meal or get invited to a meal, are grateful for the bounty. Grateful for life at all. Grateful for each other. And, for many, grateful to God. Yes, we dare speak Happy Thanksgiving. Fond MemoriesI always thought Thanksgiving was the great unifier. It wasn’t like Christmas, where only some people celebrated. It was an everybody thing. That was how we saw it and how we were taught to understand it. Thanksgiving for most of my life was held at my grandmother’s house in the San Fernando Valley. With her tattered framed letter from Bill Clinton hanging on the wall, her ceramic Siamese cats frozen in place on her glass coffee table, the plastic lining that covered her good sofa, the piano in the corner nobody played, her gold-plated flatware, the good dishes, and the nice tablecloth, freshly laundered and ironed, her Thanksgiving was one of my fondest memories. She spent all day cooking the turkey, and when it was finally done, it would be presented as the greatest thing any of us had ever seen. And so it was. I’m not saying it was straight out of Norman Rockwell or anything. It was pure chaos most of the time, and often a powder keg, but somehow on that day, we all knew how to behave.My grandma’s turkey was one thing. Her pies were legendary. She would put too much cinnamon in the pumpkin pie, but that’s what made it good. It was the warm house on a cold winter day, even in California, that I remember most, and the way we could smell the food cooking even outdoors. We did not eat all day, preparing to fill our bellies until we could not breathe.We were poor in the early days, and on welfare, so Thanksgiving at my grandma’s house was one way we felt normal, doing what every other family did. Even those at rock bottom need a day to say thank you and give grace, no matter their circumstances in life. That’s what it’s for. It elevates us out of our misery, or at least it can. We didn’t say thanks or grace back then because in my family, that could spell trouble. It was all about the meal, about my grandma’s infamous cooking, and all of us seated together in a cramped suburban home, talking to each other, spending time together, time we’d never get back.Over the years, Thanksgiving moved from house to house. When my grandmother was too old to host, she’d offer to bring up the Turkey to my brother’s house in Ojai, California. Once, we waited three hours for her to arrive with the Turkey, now cold, sitting in her trunk. Once, she accidentally used salt instead of sugar when baking her apple pie. Before long, she couldn’t make the drive, and Thanksgiving, for her, was over. I still can’t think of it without thinking of her. I think of her every time I roll out homemade pie crust, using the glass of ice water she taught me to use, or the way she taught me to cut the green apples, throwing away the peels and dropping the flesh into a bowl of lemon water to keep it from browning.I think of her whenever I see a turkey coming out of the oven, and I remember how she liked her stuffing inside the bird rather than the modern way of cooking it separately in a casserole. I think of how much she loved America and its traditions and how faithful she was to all of them. My grandmother taught us what it meant to be grateful for all we had, even if it wasn’t much. Thanksgiving isn’t about the cost. It can be celebrated on a paper plate in a food kitchen or in the park, just as easily as it can be in my grandmother’s dining room or at a restaurant. It’s the idea of it, one of the few rituals we have left that we can share, at least among those of us still holding onto the fragile idea of an America at all. On their live version of America This Week, Walter Kirn and Matt Taibbi reported on how so many high-minded outlets see it as their duty to treat Thanksgiving like a funeral for America, but here is what Thanksgiving is really about. I guess that’s why I drive six days across the country every year to see my daughter on Thanksgiving. It turns out that it means a lot to me, too, and I always want to make sure I don’t miss even one. I have cooked more than my share of Thanksgiving dinners, and I hope I’ve created memories for my daughter. Maybe someday I’ll be the grandmother to her children, and the ritual will begin anew. It isn’t just a day to cook or eat but a day to say thank you for the blessings in my life, for the luck I’ve had, for the love I’ve experienced, for the beauty I can still see in this country and its people, from state to state. If we can do this on this one day, maybe we will be okay.That is why I’d like to thank all of you. It’s been a hell of a ride these past five years. Thank you for the warmth and kindness you’ve given me, the support, the praise, the criticism, the subscriptions, the donations, and the encouragement. I don’t know where I’d be without you. I hope you have a Happy, yes Happy Thanksgiving. All the best to you.//_______________ TIP JAR This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

When I look around at the crumbling empire I helped build, I wonder how it all went so wrong. How did so many people lose their minds, the legacy media lose its objectivity, and so many so-called “educated” people lose their grip on reality?What is Trump Derangement Syndrome anyway? I think, as someone who lived it and has been online for the last 30 years, that the people with all of the power could not let go of that power, just like the South during the last Civil War. The South had built for itself a utopian version of America, one not rooted in reality, but one they deeply believed in. The same is true for the Left today. I know, I helped build it. I believed in it too and thought it would last forever. Trump’s win in 2016 was a sign that half of the country was not happy with how things were going and wanted change, just as much of America understood that a country that proclaimed all men are created equal could not keep slaves.And just as the freeing of the slaves sent the South into mass psychosis that would lead to Jim Crow laws and the oppression of Black Americans, after eight years of deeply rooted propaganda that said Trump was a racist and for him to win would be an existential threat to our way of life, one our country could not survive, sent those of us inside utopia cascading into madness.And so we began fighting a Civil War. Not at Gettysburg or Shiloh, but on Facebook, Twitter/X, YouTube, and TikTok. But only one side is cutting off friends and family. Only one side has no plan for the rest of America on the outside. Only one side seems prepared to become violent to preserve their utopia. I thought November of 2024 was like the burning of Atlanta. Not quite the end of the war, but almost. Now, after Charlie Kirk’s assassination and the fracturing of the Right, I’m not so sure.What I do know is that so much of what defines our Civil War, so much of what explains the Left’s mass psychosis, took root in 2008.What is an American?2008 was the crisis that sparked the Fourth Turning, according to Neil Howe, who co-wrote the book with William H. Strauss. It wasn’t just the election of the first Black president, or the launch of the iPhone, the rise of social media, or the $800 billion bailout of Wall Street that birthed two populist movements on the Left with Occupy and on the Right with the Tea Party. It was also the year an idea contagion began to spread.In April of 2008, Obama was recorded writing off half the country as people who were “bitter” and clinging to “guns and religion.”“Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton activated her entire campaign apparatus to portray Mr. Obama’s remarks as reflective of an elitist view of faith and community. His comments, she said, were “not reflective of the values and beliefs of Americans.”Those comments were not seen as racist, yet months later, in October, when Sarah Palin said more or less the same thing, she was called an “Islamaphobe.” Seven years after 9/11, that is what the Left was worried about, not “Radical Islamic terrorism.”From the Washington Post, “Palin’s words avoid repulsing voters with overt racism. But is there another subtext for creating the false image of a black presidential nominee “palling around” with terrorists while assuring a predominantly white audience that he doesn’t see their America?”Race and racism became the dividing line after that. By 2010, the idea that the Tea Party was racist became a big story. ABC News still had some objectivity and attempted to tell both sides.Reason’s Michael Moynihan made a video montage showing how widely accepted it was to call the Tea Party racist. Two years later, in 2012, amid Obama’s re-election, Mitt Romney and the Republicans had no idea what they were up against. I was among those fighting Obama’s media wars on Twitter, having followed him since the beginning. We were his loyal flock, building the narratives, correcting the bad news, reshaping, retooling, deconstructing, and reconstructing reality to push pure propaganda and keep our side in power.As wealth shifted leftward, thanks to the rise of Silicon Valley, Big Tech also leaned Left. Google, YouTube, Facebook, Amazon, Audible, and book publishing. It was in every university and every institution as society began migrating online. We were in control of all of it.To combat the idea of the racists and the “bitter clingers,” public schools and universities began teaching Critical Race and Gender Theory. It was the beginning of the Great Feminization and the Great Awokening. This contagion was seeded on sites like Tumblr with the oppressor/oppressed mindset, free Palestine, open borders, and a choose-your-gender worldview. It wasn’t just Twitter by then. It was all of Hollywood, too, and most of our culture. That’s why, in February of 2012, HBO released the movie Game Change, a retelling and repurposing of the 2008 election.Where Palin had been portrayed as a ditsy know-nothing we all laughed at on SNL…Now, Julianne Moore’s version was darker and more sinister. A Never Trump narrative was just beginning as Steve Schmidt of the Lincoln Project and Nicolle Wallace were portrayed as the heroes, not to mention the only “good Republican,” John McCain, who stood up to the “racists” and “bitter clingers.” Our superpower in the Obama years was manipulating the flexible nature of words to make them mean anything we wanted them to mean, like “binders full of women.” That would become “Good people on both sides.” Or “Fight like hell.” “When you’re famous, they let you do it.”The reality we shaped was everywhere - at gas stations, airports, and magazine covers in the check-out line. Having control of that - the background noise - is what the Left has been fighting to preserve. It is a fight they are losing thanks to the rising voices on the Right, and Trump himself, who are exposing them.But it was accusations of racism and Islamaphobia that would become Obama’s most powerful weapon to win. It is the cryptonite of the Ruling Class and what has divided this country for ten years. What a difference 17 years makesBack in 2008, Obama was accused of being a Muslim Socialist, not born in America, who “palled around with terrorists.” Now, one of the new leaders of the Democratic Party is a Muslim socialist, not born in America, who pals around with terrorists. Zohran Mamdani not only feels no shame in admitting this, but he also won because of it. Identity is everything now, so why not scream it from the rooftops? Anyone who complains can easily be dismissed as a racist or an Islamaphobe. In Mamdani’s New York, there is an oppressive ruling class keeping the Black and Brown workers poor, instead of the reality, an enclave for the guilty white liberals who fund their movement. But for those checks to keep flowing in, they have to give those guilty whites what they so desperately crave, confirmation that they are the Good White People Doing Good Things, and those “bitter clingers” over there are the “racists” who want to oppress the Black and Brown people they protect. Just give us absolution from our sins of wealth and privilege.Guys like Ken Burns live comfortably away from the harder realities of everyday life in America. Trust me, I know. I used to see him every year at the Telluride Film Festival. His telling of the American story must lead with race and must be yet another lecture to those with less wealth, less power, and less representation in culture - hated people in their own country, forced to accept that America is a corrupt, rotten, imperialist, and white supremacist empire. Making everything about race justifies the ruling class’s place atop the wealth hierarchy. Nothing in that hierarchy can be disrupted, so the oppressed must remain oppressed. And for now, there is no way out except to do what I did, escape. Find the truth. Get to know the people they’ve been told to dehumanize. The Left’s idea of utopia erases the value of being an American citizen. It seeks to align with a global world order of like-minded people. Yet, for so many in MAGA, being born American is hitting the jackpot. Nothing is more valuable than the rights all of us have as citizens, no matter our skin color. And yet, the ruling class in America for the past 17 years has decided none of that should matter because our identity is not where we were born. Our identity is whether we are white or not. If you oppose illegal immigration and support mass deportations, you are a racist, according to them, and your citizenship matters less than your white privilege. And that is how illegal immigrants became the oppressed group that governors like Gavin Newsom and JB Pritzker are willing to fight to protect. And ordinary American citizens can be thrown away like human garbage. The New York Times’ Peter Baker loved reporting how bad the ticket sales are at the Kennedy Center, never once acknowledging how Trump tried to open it up to the underclass who’d been shut out for years. They see Trump’s inclusion of the wrong half of America as taking something away from them, their glory days of utopia. The ballroom will be something lasting, a monument to the half of the country that fought for representation and a permanent structure to remind them of that fight. Here are Walter Kirn and Matt Taibbi from America This Week.The Bitter ClingersNow, it’s the Left who are the bitter clingers. They can’t accept defeat, and they won’t let go of the past, of utopia. Hillary Clinton is a bitter clinger who can’t get over the 2016 election. Barack Obama is a bitter clinger who had to call Charlie Kirk a racist when he felt his own legacy dimming. Nancy Pelosi is a bitter clinger who helped manufacture a delusion about January 6th just to obtain absolute power. Barbra Streisand, Rosie O’Donnell, Katie Couric, Richard Gere, Rob Reiner, Bruce Springsteen, Martin Sheen, Robert De Niro, and Jane Fonda are all bitter clingers who have never even seen the other half of the country, much less understo

For a brief moment in time, the Democrats were humiliated in defeat. November of 2024 was the body blow necessary to end the war on Trump. They lost. Trump won, and that was that.They never absorbed that loss, however, except in the way that it made them meaner, angrier, and more willing to blow through norms and abandon what remained of their humanity to chase victory by any means necessary. That would include spending hundreds of millions on Prop 50. It would include celebrating the murder of Charlie Kirk and fantasizing about Trump’s imminent death.It would be about sacrificing being “good people doing good things” to “stop fascism.” And somewhere in there, they took a dark turn. I watched it. I wrote about it. I warned about it. I could see it in their attacks on Tesla and their destruction of Elon Musk in an attempt to kill him and his business.I could see them at the No Kings rally, angry and motivated. Their desperation to find a Joe Rogan or compete with the memes on the Right failing at every turn. They looked to me like the monster in The Thing that could imitate but could never be what they thought won Trump the election.Their men are attempting to appear more masculine. Gavin Newsom and JB Pritzker have no problem fomenting insurrection against the government, and the newly elected Mayor of New York just taunted Trump to “turn up the volume.”The women bask in it and pretend they’re still feminists when all they wanted all along was to be rescued by men, and here we are again. It’s funny. But not so funny.To them, all is justified in the name of “saving democracy.” But that’s never been what any of this has been about. They are totalitarians at heart, and they are prepared to sacrifice almost everything - friends, families, marriages, whole industries of culture and education - to attain it absolutely.Utopias only have two potential paths. They become totalitarian, like the Soviet Union, like China, or they collapse. What you sacrifice in chasing utopia is personal freedom, art, journalism, comedy, and common ground with those who disagree with you. A totalitarian system wants it all and is prepared to take it if it isn’t given willingly.They were already halfway there before Zohran Mamdani became the new leader of the new Left. Matt Taibbi calls this the end of the Democratic Party, and he’s right. Totalitarianism will mean giving up even that. It’s all for one and one for all, and those who aren’t on board will be left behind.Here is Ben Shapiro:For now, they are holding their not-famous, bland, cookie-cutter centrists —like those who won in Virginia and New Jersey —whose names and faces no one remembers, close enough to not scare people away. They’re centrists in name only. The new socialist wave will obliterate them, and if they don’t realize that yet, they soon will.This came through my mail, even though I was never put on any list, and I have no idea how it arrived after five years of trying to leave the Democratic Party.Does the Right have anything like that? Are they in any way prepared to go up against people this fired up? No. They aren’t. They have Scott Pressler, and they had Charlie Kirk, and everyone else seems to be invested in building their platforms for clicks and views, not for votes. MAGA is on the ropes.The heart of a totalitarian is that all things are necessary to achieve the singular goal of absolute power and dominance for the cause. The cause is usually a Marxist-like government system, but it doesn’t have to be. It can be fascist, too. But even that has its roots in socialism because in totalitarianism, there is no power for the individual against the state.Over at the Free Press, Olivia Reingold looked deeper into the DSA:…The Free Press reviewed thousands of pages of internal Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) documents, which show that the organization’s leaders view Mamdani as a tool in their agenda to abolish prisons and borders, and ultimately end in what they call the “barbaric order of capitalism.” The DSA, founded in 1982, is a political body dedicated to the doctrine of democratic socialism, which is a variety of socialism that simply specifies how it would like revolution to occur: peacefully, through the subversion of democracy. Mamdani, a dues-paying DSA member since 2017, is the tip of that spear.The Democrat machine cultivated “cancel culture” and used it as a method of societal control. No one would dare say anything that would get them banished from Utopia, except those of us who did and were. That form of policing was straight out of the Cultural Revolution, or Stalin’s Komsomol or Hitler’s Youth.In our bubble of the Left, we required no military because the system we built made it possible to destroy people with a single accusation. Over time, our hearts and minds had to be captured or suppressed. If you could not go along with it, and I couldn’t, you were out.For a society that had migrated to the virtual frontier, that didn’t mean you were sent to a gulag or killed, but it did mean you could lose everything and have to rebuild. Not the end of the world, but still, imagine a system like that attaining absolute power because MAGA dropped the ball?That totalitarian practice of punishing thought crimes and dissent spread to government when Joe Biden took power, which is why they censored the internet with impunity and would have continued to do it had the richest man in the world not bought Twitter and freed speech, which allowed for a counter movement to rise and win.Joe Biden and his administration, along with the Democrats, thought nothing of indicting Trump on weak charges, raiding Mar-a-Lago to paint him as a criminal. Their dehumanization and rage for him knew no bounds. They wanted him in jail. They wanted him off the ballot. They wanted him out of their government, their culture, and their country. They wanted him dead. And still do.Jay Jones’ texts fantasizing about the death of Republicans and their children are not an exception. It’s the rule. They openly talk about “when it happens” to Trump and plan to celebrate that day with playlists and dancing in the street. That is where they were mentally before this November 4th, and their blue wave revived the movement. Now, they are winning.You’d think, given that, they would ease up on the ugliness, the dehumanization, and the hate. Think again. These aren’t people who want to share this country or even share the same restaurant as Trump and MAGA. You can’t lie about a whole group of people like they have, calling them Nazis and racists and bigots, and not have it end as easily as one election. This is, to them, war.Mamdani’s speech proved it. It was masks off, and here comes the revolution, and the enemies are the rich, the Capitalists, and the free thinkers. You think cancel culture was bad? Just you wait until they have control of AI, YouTube, Facebook, and all social media platforms, not to mention all of Hollywood, book publishing, universal preschool, and the universities.And what happens when the money runs out? Even now, Mamdani needs money, and he’s asking for it to help pay for his transition team. Get used to it, rich people. You are the ones who will fund this production.The policies matter less than their total control of the country they believe belongs to them. But the one person they can’t control is Donald Trump, and that’s how he’s gotten the better of them again and again. They believe this time, they finally got him. They think the time has come to declare victory. I wouldn’t be so sure.When you control the corporate press, the universities, the public schools, the culture, you can create any reality you want. That’s a totalitarian paradise, and why they’ve constructed it that way. A Trump win was never in the plan. It took them a while to find just the right narrative to preserve utopia, which was in a state of collapse.All it took was for Trump to focus on tariffs and not the economy, to celebrate a lavish Halloween ball amid a government shutdown, and most of all for voters to get a taste of Republicans ripping away SNAP benefits and rising healthcare costs. So they shut down the government to manufacture a crisis because, of course, they did. It was Defcon 1.Victor Davis Hanson on Emily Jashinsky’s After PartyThat handed the Democrats their oppression cosplay, lining up the shot perfectly. How did the GOP not see this coming? They became arrogant and too comfortable with the idea that the Democratic Party had imploded. The only reason they imploded is that they didn’t have the right script. Now, they do.The forces at play to destroy MAGA are everywhere. Do you think totalitarians play around? They do not. Now that Tyler Robinson conveniently assassinated Charlie Kirk, the vultures have flown in, and there is division everywhere.Nick Fuentes, boosted by the New York Times, will become the face of MAGA over the next few years. Excusing him, excusing those who interview him, or apologizing for him is a gift handed to the Left on a silver platter like the Epstein Files. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.The more people try to censor someone like Fuentes, however, the more energy and popularity he will attain. Anger among the public, especially the young, will find its way out and land somewhere. It will be sucked up by the totalitarians on the Left, or the identity-obsessed faction of the Right.Vivek Ramaswamy:Fuentes is popular, and no amount of scolding will change that. Shutting people up will never be the answer, and it won’t work anyway in the age of influencers, clicks, and views. Brett Cooper and others will want a piece of that audience. And so they will placate, they will lean in, and they will excuse.But a Fuentes Right plays like a Reichstag Fire for the totalitarians. MAGA will not survive unless they have some beacons of morality, of true virtue, like Charlie Kirk, guiding them.As Konstantin Kisin points out:There is no saving the totalitarians. They already thought Ch

[I meant to get this out before Halloween, but life got in the way — previous Janet stories — Part One | Part Two ]Janet left Two Moons Yoga Studio, where a gaggle of concerned American citizens — the true patriots — held an emergency “No Kings, Cancel Halloween” meeting to save democracy. The attendees were Janet’s age. They were her neighbors, but she didn’t know most of them. They were all directed to join the NextDoor app to get to know each other better online.Janet used the app frequently. Even though they had a rule about no politics, she would use NextDoor to inform her neighbors if ICE agents had entered the town’s perimeter. She would also warn neighbors about the e-bikes speeding through town, endangering animals and pedestrians. She would take pictures of people whose dogs left messes that their owners did not pick up and post them on NextDoor, and she would make sure to let everyone know how many people were responsibly wearing masks at the Farmer’s Market.COVID wasn’t over, Janet knew. It was still a constant threat, especially to the marginalized, trans people, Black and Brown people, and immigrants. It was her duty to wear a mask at all times, even at the meeting at Two Moons Yoga. Only some people there were wearing masks, but not all. Janet was sure to jot down their names in case she needed to warn people later.The meeting went well. Everyone was on the same page that democracy and their way of life were now under a grave threat. This is not normal, said Barack Obama. Janet agreed. Their action plan was to go door to door and inform their neighbors that Halloween would be canceled due to the government shutdown and the fascist occupation of the country. They had even bigger goals, like canceling Thanksgiving and boycotting Christmas, too. But one step at a time. Halloween was in just a few days, and it was time to send a message to the government that we would not be buying candy or trick-or-treating while Nazis roamed our streets.Everyone had a list of the neighborhood’s sections. Janet would go that evening after she watched MSNBC. She didn’t want to interrupt her neighbors, who were probably just as glued to their TVs. That was the only way to stay informed now that the country has been overtaken by fascists.Nothing else can be trusted now. The media is terrified of Trump, not even the ladies of The View talk politics anymore. Janet can only watch for five minutes before they move on to shallow interviews and publicity hits. Trump has intimidated everyone, suing networks, disappearing Jimmy Kimmel for a joke, and that has had a chilling effect on free speech. Janet wasn’t exactly thrilled about knocking on doors, but she had to do something. She couldn’t just stay home and post about HIM on Facebook and NextDoor. Some had suggested giving out bags of groceries to those whose SNAP benefits would run out. Yes, a community effort for the poor and downtrodden. It’s just that Vista Butte isn’t a town full of poor people. It was expensive to live here. Were there poor people in this town? Then she remembered the maid who comes to clean her house once a month, and everyone has a gardener. Maybe she would approach them with a bag of groceries when she saw them at work. Would it be weird to take a selfie and post it on Instagram to show how important it is to recognize the poor right now?Assuming the maid was poor just because she cleaned houses for a living wasn’t racist, was it? Is it offensive to call her a maid? What’s the appropriate term? Janet asked ChatGPT. The answer: housekeeper, house cleaner, or domestic worker.” Okay, so domestic workers might be the poor people in Vista Butte, like immigrants. Janet did her best not to offend marginalized people. She didn’t know if any such people lived in Vista Butte. The town was, after all, 96% white, affluent, and very liberal. But on the off chance she might encounter one, she wanted them to know she cared about their health, too. That’s why she wears a mask outside every day.Janet began walking up her street and could feel the October breeze. This was the best time of year in Vista Butte. It wasn’t too hot and it wasn’t yet too cold. It was one of those perfect fall days. Every so often, you could smell smoke from a fireplace off in the distance. She didn’t want to think about HIM on a day like this. She needed to be living in the moment more. Self-care. Meditation. Daily walks. Breathing exercises.The election was almost one year ago. Janet’s hair had finally grown back after she shaved it to protest THE FASCIST in the White House. She thought about keeping it because people were so kind to her when they thought she was battling cancer. She never said she was. They just assumed, and she kind of let them. It felt good to have people be nice to her.Things aren’t getting better, Janet knew. They’re getting worse. Much worse. He disembowled the East Wing to put up a Nazi building. He defiled the Lincoln bedroom’s bathroom and put in a Roman bathhouse. Everything is ugly, tacky gold. He hates America! He had a late-stage Roman Empire ball at Mar-a-Lago, apparently. While millions were about to starve because of the government shutdown. He was having a party for billionaires!Janet tried not to think of it. Instead, she looked around at all of the Vote Yes on Prop 50 signs that were stabbed into the lawns of all of her neighbors. What good people they were. They raised $120 million. Imagine that. Of course, it will pass. We have to save democracy, she thought, by adding more seats in Congress. Janet herself donated around $300. Somewhere in the distance, she could hear buzzing, whirring, what is that sound? She knew before she even saw them that it was those kids on the electric bikes that had been terrorizing the town. E-Bikes. Everyone had complained on Next Door. Even the MAGGAt, who goes by the name RedHat. Even he, or she, or they, no he or she, hated them. They were dangerous. They were loud. It was the only time she and RedHat agreed on anything. He was always the first to chime in on her ICE posts. “Good job, ICE,” he would say. “We need to protect American workers,” and “the media is lying about ICE and scaring people.” But Red Hat was living in a Fox News fantasy world, Janet knew. Their fights got so heated that Janet had to block RedHat and then warn everyone on Next Door not to engage with him. There is no point, she would say. He is too lost and can’t be helped. All we can do is block him. But he just made a new account. What will we do with all of these racists who voted for Trump? She thought, We can’t live with them. We can’t forgive them. Their days are numbered. Already, the Democrats are leading in the polls. It’s just a matter of time before we take back the country and save democracy. But what to do with all of those bad people? Janet didn’t know. But she hoped someone did. Red Hat was right about the bikes, though. The kids didn’t know how to control them. They went too fast down the road. They scared dogs and cats, and they scared Janet. She could hear them off in the distance now. Then, she could see them. There they were, a gang of about six boys speeding right toward her. Janet was still holding her No Kings sign, which she’d brought to the meeting, which said No KKK No FASCIST USA and NO KINGS. She held it up in front of her so the boys could see her clearly in case they weren’t paying attention. Could they see her? They had a devilish look on their faces and were speeding right toward her. Were they planning on hitting her? Would they hit a middle-aged woman in a mask carrying a No Kings sign? Yes, Janet knew, they would because they’re DUMB KIDS. It was now a game of chicken, and Janet was not playing that game. Just as they got within a few feet of her, she leaped out of the way and stumbled, falling face down onto the concrete. She could hear them screaming with laughter as they sped by. “Chicken!” one of them called out. Janet was furious. She ripped her mask off her face and stood in the middle of the road with her cell phone aimed right at them. “I’m recording you!” She said. The boys screeched to a halt on their bikes and turned around to look at her. They apparently thought this was really funny because they could not stop laughing. “Go ahead, No Kings,” one of them said, and that cracked them all up even more. “I will!” Janet said, “And then I’ll call the police! How do you like that?” “We didn’t do anything,” another said. A couple of them had their own cell phones out and began recording her. “You tried to kill me!” Janet said. That made the boys burst into yet more uncontrollable giggles as they began mocking her. “Oh, no! She almost died!” ”Death by E-bike!”“You don’t even live in this town, do you?” Janet said. “Why don’t you go back to where you came from?” “Why don’t you?” One of them said. “I live here. Do you?”They didn’t answer, but just thought the whole thing was either super funny or a waste of time. And with that, off they went, with their noisy, irritating, dangerous E-Bikes headed for who knows where. Janet searched around for her mask, but the strap was broken. She was too traumatized to bother picking it up. She did take her sign, which was wrinkled and dirty. She looked around to see if any of her neighbors had witnessed the ugly scene. She might need a witness if she called the cops. But why bother? What could they do? She would keep trying to get E-Bikes banned so the neighborhood could be peaceful and orderly again. She was just a block away from her house now. Tears were streaming down her face. Why did those kids have to be so mean? Why are they so aggressive? Boys, that’s why. Boys who grow up to be men. Boys who can’t be controlled. That’s what is wrong with our society, Janet knew. Just look at all of the damage caused by Trump. The Gestapo was disappearing people off the streets and putting them somewhere, ripping children from the arms of their mothers and putting them on trai

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

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