Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Violence is in the air after Luigi Mangione assassinated CEO Brian Thompson and became a hero of the Left. It’s in the air by politicians who now want protesters to get messy, to get bloody. All for a necessary photo op, they believe will finally, at long last, turn the public against Donald Trump.Mangione, as it turns out, was a useful weapon in this war. Back in December, novelist and co-host of America This Week, Walter Kirn, foresaw the connection and predicted the rise of a young, charismatic populist. Sound familiar?Kirn saw something much bigger. He could see the connection between what Mangioni represented to the Left and the gathering storm that would ultimately find its way toward Zohran Mamdani and the current wave of populist revolutionaries.From the New York Post:The NCRI study traces the cultural shift back to the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, allegedly by Luigi Mangione, in December 2024. What followed, researchers say, was a viral wave of memes that turned Mangione into a folk hero.With Karen Bass and Gavin Newsom in California, and Mamdani in New York vowing to obstruct ICE, we can see a culture already defined by political violence rising to new heights either to get a photo op that depicts Trump as an authoritarian fascist, or to start a stand-off with the military, one that could go down in the history books.But as with all of the pet causes by the Democrats, this one goes against public opinion, just as their support of biological men playing against women in sports goes against it. Most Americans are in favor of deporting illegal immigrants.The question now isn’t whether there will be violence as ICE continues to find and deport as many illegal immigrants as possible, but how bad the violence will be. What is a cause worth fighting and dying for? From Ben Shapiro:What they hope the violence will do is shift public opinion back in their favor. But they’ve never learned the lessons of the past, why Trump won in 2016, and why he just won again. For the “resistance,” there is no third option where they realize they’re the problem and reverse course. Instead, they double down on everything they’ve already been doing for the last ten years, which has only resulted in Trump becoming more powerful. The Power of StoryThe more people believe in a shared story, the stronger the movement. Our story? We’d solved America’s problems—maybe the world’s. Racism, along with every other "ism" and "phobe," was the enemy. Eradicate it, craft a language that welcomes everyone, and we’d be healed.Healed from what? The scars of our 1970s childhoods were shaped by the reckless "Me Generation." We emerged into the self-help era as victims or abusers, our lives battered by addiction and trauma. Entire industries sprang up to mend our wounds.We sought salvation in the self-help aisles of bookstores, therapy sessions, medications, and Oprah’s group chat every day at 3pm. Relationships crumbled—too many men were toxic or narcissistic. We studied attachment theory, embraced cognitive therapy, and chased perfection: the perfect parenting, car, words, diet, causes, schools. Our children became extensions of our quest, expected to embody that same flawless ideal.When they fell short, we fed them into the self-help machine to mold them into better versions of ourselves, even medicating them to make them more perfect - a practice that would lead us all too easily into “gender affirming care,” the greatest medical scandal in recent history. What we really needed was a higher purpose, a unifying movement. That arrived with Barack Obama, whose Hope and Change brought us together. To us, he was perfect, and even more than that, he was a perfect reflection of the America we wished we had. By then, thanks to the rise of the internet, social media, and smartphones, we had control and influence over nearly every aspect of American society. Why not use the new frontier of the internet to remake the America we wanted? Why not build our Shining Woketopia on the Hill? And so it was written, and so it was done. We closed ourselves off from the part of America that didn’t share our beliefs, and over time, we forgot it even existed. Trump’s shocking win marked the moment the dream was punctured and reality flooded in. A revolution by “we the normal.”Trump represented everything we believed was wrong with our country - he epitomized all of the bad things we complained about - racism, misogyny, sexual harassment, sexual assault. It wasn’t just that he offended our god and our King when he challenged Obama’s birthplace. It was that he said whatever he wanted to say, and in our Woketopia, then and now, that is strictly forbidden.Language must be curated, softened, and made more polite — a form of Newspeak for the modern age. But the flip side of that was people who were too fragile to accept the truth—truth in words, truth in politics, truth in comedy, truth in art, truth in science, truth in elections.And if words are violence, if words cause staffers at the New York Times to feel unsafe, if movies like Gone with the Wind need trigger warnings, there would be no surviving Trump and the rise of free speech in a culture that no longer believed in it.But violence turns out to be, for the Left, the answer to the fear inside them they can’t control, like dogs or bears or snakes who lash out when they feel cornered and threatened.A History of ViolenceWhat drove the early violence by the Left was the commonly held belief that Trump was a racist and his border policies were rooted in the Right’s desire to rid this country of Black and Brown people. Thus, when mobs acted out, like they did in 2015 and throughout Trump’s first term, it was justified. Racism was the ultimate sin, like being an accused witch in Salem or a Communist in 1950s America.Prominent Democrats pushed out the idea, which was then echoed and amplified by what Trump would eventually and correctly call “fake news.” The Democrats loved the violence, as it turns out, because they thought that the people would show the rest of America that Trump was bad. They also began to believe that their uprising against Trump was a fusion of both the Civil War and the Civil Rights movements of the 1960s.By the Summer of 2020, they funded and encouraged violence while also downplaying it. Buildings set on fire, businesses destroyed, and an angry mob banging on the fence of the White House were all excused as “mostly peaceful protests.”However, what I was seeing unfolding, which alarmed me enough to start speaking out, was that something was very wrong with the Left. It wasn’t until the Evergreen stories started coming out that I realized we’d built a fanatical army of not just woke scolds but a Red Guard-like generation who did not believe in limits on imposing their will upon the people.Diners were compelled to raise their fists in support of Black Lives Matter. The statues were coming down. Writers, editors, and celebrities were all being canceled and fired. Movies, literature, TV, comedy, architecture, science, even knitting, cooking, and exercise had to be transformed. It was tolerated because of what our culture had become after eight years of Obama and four years of Trump. The powerful, mostly white elites who run everything felt guilty. So they let it go on. I watched Hollywood devour itself. When the film Green Book won Best Picture, the Left exploded. It was a harmless movie about a friendship between a bigot and a gay Black man, and THAT was racist? Yes, because one of the screenwriters was a Trump supporter.The center could not hold. Though Joe Biden was dragged over the finish line in a corrupt election that would finally cause me to leave the Democratic Party, there was no coming back from what the Left had become. It was only a matter of time before the empire collapsed. I tried to warn them. Here is a DM exchange between me and Neera Tanden back in August of 2020:And then I predicted the future:The GOP did, in fact, take all three branches in 2024. But the message was never getting through. They didn’t want to hear it then, and do not want to hear it now, so what other option do they have but to try to persuade by force?Vive La ResistanceI cringe looking back on being a “resistance fighter.” To think we’d convinced ourselves that we were like the French singer in Casablanca who sings loud enough to drown out the Nazis.It’s that self-righteousness we felt, that entitlement, that moral superiority that would ultimately be our undoing, that Trump happened to us, rather than the people who voted for him. The fantasies by the wealthiest and most famous among us to viciously attack Trump, pull him from limb to limb, seemed to know no bounds. Somehow, violence has filled in the empty spaces. It’s what Walter Kirn could see in the reaction to the Mangione assassination: this idea that violence was another way to build clout, even to virtue signal, in a narcissistic utopia. We believed ourselves to be the chosen people. But because the people didn’t want us, didn’t love us, didn’t want our America - our shining Woketopia on the hill - we blamed them. We blamed their votes. We smeared them. That casual dehumanization did lead to violence. And it’s likely to get much worse.The Party of HateI’ve lost so many friends, people I've known for years, ex-boyfriends, and colleagues. It was surreal to watch them pull away, to block, to unfriend, or attack me so relentlessly that I had to block them. They don’t know who I am anymore, and I don’t know who they are anymore.They have become defined by that collective hatred, that poisonous intolerance that has driven so many people like me away from the party. The worse they get, the more violent they become, the less Americans will want them in power. When I start to think about whether there will be a blue wave in 2026, I think about 1972. In 1970, four students were shot at Kent State for protesting the war. It did nothin

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

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

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

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

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

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