Podd: Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone

Finally, a Real Celebration for MAGA

20 januari 2025 | 27 min

One Last Ride….

=It’s been a long time coming, hasn’t it MAGA? What a ride it’s been for you.

As people like me were arguing with Bernie bros about the 2016 nomination for president and were caught up in our unending phantasmagoria about a “reality TV star” who was rising in the ranks on the Right, you were being verbally and physically attacked already, bullied at rallies, spit on, kicked, called racists, Nazis, fascists, bigots. It would only get worse.

How far you’ve come from the last inaugural when so many protesters burned cars and smashed windows, screaming, “Not my president.”

The beautiful and elegant Melania Trump never graced the cover of any magazine. They mocked her Christmas decorations and called her an uncaring Nazi.

But almost no one got it worse than Ivanka Trump, although all the Trump kids were put through the dehumanizer the Left had become. They were called ugly and inbred. There were jokes about Trump sleeping with his own daughter just because he was proud of her and praised her, as he does all of his kids. This was mainstream on the Left, dehumanization on a grand scale.

As long as that was the version we told ourselves — that they were the rich, hollow, power-hungry elites like the cast of Succession, we could convince ourselves we were the hard-scrabble people lifting up the minority class and making the world a better place one marginalized group at a time. But what of the majority?

It would eventually lead to the government and their media lying about you on January 6th, riding the hysteria to ban the social media app Parler from Amazon’s web server and the then-sitting president of the United States from YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter.

It seemed there was no place for you in America anymore. But what did you do in the face of that kind of social and political oppression? You rose up, and you fought back. You didn’t have to do it by smashing windows or protesting. You did it with true grit, organizing, fundraising, and keeping the MAGA spirit high. You never lost your faith because you knew exactly what you were fighting for and what you were up against.

And most of all, your unbreakable loyalty to Trump kept hope alive that one day there might be fairness in government, in our culture, and in our major institutions that decided it was perfectly fine to treat you like hostile invaders in your own country.

But people like me had no idea that it was happening. What we heard was that Trump’s rallies were violent, that his supporters were beating up Black people, and that his rallies were like Hitler’s. If you scare people enough, they’ll go along with anything.

We were the side that had all of the power. We were the empire. We were never the resistance. That we turned our helplessness and fanaticism into dehumanizing half the country is a shame we should never live down.

I didn’t realize it until 2020. I was so trusting of people like Rachel Maddow. I listened to NPR without even thinking about their political bias. We were the side that told the truth, I believed. We weren’t fooled by Fox News and Breitbart. How could anyone not trust NBC News? How could I ever think that what they told me on CNN might not be the whole story?

I didn’t realize until the Tom Cotton op-ed disaster at the New York Times that my information was being carefully curated. I watched all of my friends and colleagues crucify Bari Weiss on Twitter for allowing the Cotton piece to be published in the New York Times. It was harm, they said. It would get people killed, they said. It terrorized their staff, they said.

Tom Cotton was a United States Senator who merely reported what most Americans already believed. The protests were violent and destructive. A majority of Americans wanted the military to be brought in. Bari Weiss was trying to give the majority a voice in the paper of record.

But as we’d done with almost every news story since the beginning of the Trump era, we stretched the truth like taffy to suit our needs. Trump was Hitler, and this was fascism— we’d all convinced ourselves to believe, and with the help of the military “experts,” they trotted out to agree.

The truth? They needed the protests to be as violent and chaotic as possible. They encouraged them to make Trump look bad.

By 2020, I’d already been the target of so much abuse from the Left. I was called a “white supremacist,” a bigot, a racist, and a transphobe. Many on the Left now just assume it’s true —that I “went to the dark side.”

Not a day goes by that someone from my former side does not lob me with some kind of hateful insult. Just yesterday, I was told by a long-time follower of my film site that I was a “vile person,” and they regretted ever following me for all of those years. “Enjoy MAGA,” he said.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

A Farewell Address to a Woketopia Gone Wrong

16 januari 2025 | 13 min

Joe Biden said goodbye. He wanted to mirror Eisenhower, who once warned of the Military Industrial Complex, but Biden saw something equally alarming—the Big Tech oligarchy. He sees Zuckerberg and Bezos attending Trump’s inaugural. He greatly fears the power of Elon Musk. He realizes that his side lost control of it and now, he wants all of us to be afraid.

Well, I’m sorry, Joe. I can’t play that game anymore. It’s time to say goodbye.

Farewell, Joe Biden, farewell, Democrats. Farewell, hysteria. Farewell to mandated preferred pronouns in everyone’s bio. Farewell to being forced to lie about whether or not masks work. Farewell to not being allowed to give people the benefit of the doubt. Farewell to being too afraid to ask questions about an experimental vaccine. Farewell to Critical Race and gender theory in elementary schools.

Farewell to the ruling oligarchy — yes, Joe. You were the frontman for it. You can’t fool me. I was part of it, too. It was like a daisy chain of paper dolls—Hollywood, all major corporate and cultural institutions, Big Pharma, and all of the ads they pumped into the veins of Americans that showcased the American utopia in all of its splendor. Just take this pill, and you, too, can be with us, in the happy place.

Farewell to a government censoring speech via social media. Farewell to the absence of masculinity. Farewell to worrying about every word that comes out of our mouths, what we drive, what we wear on Halloween, what we buy, what we eat, what we watch, what we desire.

Farewell to being made to hate ourselves and everything we know to be true but can’t say out loud. Farewell to being the oppressors or the oppressed defined only by the color of our skin. Farewell to hating our history, hating our country, hating our heroes. Farewell to virtue signaling our goodness. Farewell to always being told that it’s better to keep your head down and say nothing about any of it.

Farewell to never being able to take a joke. Farewell to seeing problematic content in every movie and farewell to the warning labels now affixed to all of them. Farewell to seeing all men as predators and all women as victims.

Farewell to a country ruled by fear because our leaders can’t see it any other way. Farewell to a president who called half the country “ultra fascists,” “ultra MAGA,” and “extreme MAGA Republicans.” Farewell to a government that believes its biggest threat comes from the people of the United States.

Farewell to life inside the doomsday cult, where every single day is the end of the world. Farewell to every word taken literally and seen as another chapter of Mein Kampf. Farewell to repression and sanctimony. Farewell to the long, dark winter. Farewell to lawn signs. Farewell to pretending Kamala Harris wasn’t a terrible candidate installed by the deep state.

Farewell to ever having to worry about speaking the truth. Farewell to the unshakable hopelessness, the unending sadness, the mourning of the long-forgotten Old Left. It’s never coming back. Everything has to be rebuilt. Welcome to the beginning of the rest of your life. At least now, you can have a life.

Bringing it all Back Home

Watching the confirmation hearings was bringing it all back. Adam Schiff was still out of his mind, braying like he’s Cotton Mather in the Oyer in Terminer in Salem, demanding Pam Bondi say Joe Biden “won the election.” Why did it matter so much to him? Are there really that many Americans out there who need to hear those words said out loud?

The nominees’ worth depended on whether or not they would stand up to the tyrant fascist racist rapist dictator that they impeached twice, indicted four times convicted on a bogus felony charge, all of which eventually landed in the fevered dreams of a washed-up surfer hippie from Hawaii who got himself a gun and tried to kill the president to SAVE DEMOCRACY.

And they still lost. They lost the Electoral College and they lost the popular vote. I never get tired of saying that. Talk about owning the libs. What can we do except quote Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire. HA. HA HA HA.

That’s how much America hates them. After all, how hard could it possibly be to beat Hitler?

The problem with utopias is that they can’t last. They either must become more authoritarian and thus, less utopian, or they collapse. By the end of our utopia, anyone we knew could be one of those things.

A bad person. A sexist. A racist. A homophobe. A bigot. A transphobe. Toxic masculinity. White feminism. Everyone was either an abuser or a victim. The weaker we were, the more we were celebrated.

We’d snuffed out all independent thought. We were under constant surveillance by the government, advertisers, AI, algorithms, and each other. We began to wonder what real life even was anymore.

It was like Winston and Julia in 1984 trying to carve out some love and lust from the dystopia under Big Brother’s ever-watchful gaze, with children spies at the ready to tattle—and cancel—those who broke the rules.

So if you say Joe Biden won the 2020 election, like you say 2+2=5, then democracy might have a chance. But if you dare think for yourself and start looking behind closed doors and see things you aren’t supposed to see, well, now you threaten democracy.

When I pushed open the door of the doomsday bunker and escaped, I knew there was no going back. I also knew I couldn’t save anyone, much less the once-great culture I used to love. There is no saving whatever it was we used to call the Left. There is only saving America from what it had become so that all of us at least have a fighting chance.

No, it won’t be perfect. Yes, it might be chaos — entertaining chaos — but chaos all the same. We’ll have to learn how to tolerate each other again, live together somehow, and learn this new way of life suddenly foisted upon us with the internet. Now, we know what it looks like to shut ourselves off from people and ideas we cannot control.

If the Democrats on Blue Sky and in the Senate Confirmation hearings are any indication, nothing much has changed on the inside. They’re still transfixed by the one guy they couldn’t cancel, the one guy they couldn’t destroy.

1984 Part Two

And maybe now we’re about to find out what happens in the sequel. Does Big Brother find a way to regain power by destroying Elon Musk to retake X and make it Twitter again? Do those of us exiled and canceled remain on the outside? Does the New York Times beg Bari Weiss to come back, or The Atlantic to throw themselves at the feet of Walter Kirn, or Rolling Stone magazine, the crap rag it has become, offer Matt Taibbi millions to write for them again?

Can those on the inside who have speciated with a whole new language and belief system learn to live with the unwashed masses again? Can they tolerate offensive speech? Can it all be one big, happy, dysfunctional family?

On the inside, the news that Carrie Underwood and the Village People were playing at the inaugural birthed a fresh new crop of mass hysteria and rage. So I’m guessing Saturday Night Live won’t have Trump back any time soon. The Oscars won’t ask him to attend, and those who still believe they control this country will hold onto their collapsing empire until ashes, ashes, it all falls down.

I don’t know. But it doesn’t matter. Because today we say farewell. And oh, how sweet it is.

//

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Dear Democrats: This Time, You Can't Blame the Republicans

13 januari 2025 | 29 min

Six years ago on Medium, I wrote the following:

The Republicans have systematically turned climate change into a partisan issue, you know, like abortion, and have done so to manipulate their gullible electorate into believing the lie that there is no such thing as man-made climate change. They spew the dumbo rhetoric any time they can, that “oh the weather changes all the time.” Or “I don’t believe climate change is real — even if the planet is warming, it isn’t our fault.”

Yeah, it is. You dig up fossil fuels and you burn them, that warms the planet. They were buried for millions of years which, in turn, cooled the planet, making it an ideal atmosphere for all kinds of different forms of life, including us. What’s coming next is uncharted territory for humanity. We have no idea how bad it’s going to get. We just know it WILL be bad.

I was not only furious with rage, but I was quick to blame the other side for deliberately sabotaging our noble efforts to stop the warming of the planet, as though we ourselves were not contributing to it. We acted like we could buy a hybrid here, go vegan there, recycle our plastic, and be absolved from contributing to this existential crisis we all now must face.

It isn’t that I don’t believe the planet is warming, or that sea level won’t rise, or that it is directly the fault of so many people on the planet. What has changed is that I no longer blame the other side, and I no longer see my former side as the good guys in the fight. No, I see them as hypocrites. I was a hypocrite too.

I’d been in a bubble for much of my adult life because I lived online, in virtual spaces. Yes, I was raising my daughter in public schools, but those were a bubble too. We all belonged inside the same utopia. We read the same articles. We watched the same news. Our worries were the same worries. We spoke the same language, and all of us shared the belief that the biggest threat we faced was climate change and that the biggest obstacle we faced was the Republicans.

And then, my daughter moved across the country, and I got a couple of dogs. Rather than fly and leave my dogs at home, I began driving across the country. Those drives changed everything for me, not just how I saw climate change but how I saw my fellow Americans. This was how people actually lived, not how we did, inside our haze of paper straws and cotton diapers.

I saw the trucks driving on the interstates to deliver food and goods, the many hotels that require air conditioning and heating, the slaughterhouse trucks providing food for so many in this country, and the tiny houses in the middle of the desert with one embattled air conditioner sticking out of the window.

Looking at all of this, all of these places, and all of these businesses, it was easy to see that there was no turning this thing around. There is no way to convince every state and citizen to hop aboard what is an existential crisis for the upper class. Life just isn’t like that.

Everyone wants things that work, cars that run, planes that fly. They want washing machines, dishwashers, flat-screen TVs, office buildings, emergency rooms, and new computers and tech support lines, to buy groceries they can afford, to get fruit in the middle of winter, to watch movies and doom scroll social media — and “every Tweet warms the planet,” as Roy Scranton once wrote.

Even if we could convince every single American to accept our fixes, what would we do about Russia, India, or China? We seemed to have gone all in on fantasy but we’re disconnected from reality.

What we believe on the Left, or at least we used to, was climate change was Armageddon, doomsday, the end of everything. Therefore, what mattered to us isn’t so much that we solve the problems to survive climate change, but that we convert everyone else to our way of thinking. If we could do that, we believed, we could start making the big changes to our country and world.

The Left is still haunted by the ghosts of the past, back when we really did have the power and the opportunity to make real change. We squandered that power, and then we blamed the other side. In so doing, we could wash our hands of real solutions, whether it was gun violence, poverty, failing schools, floods, fires, or hurricanes.

And now, in the perfect cocktail of high Santa Ana winds, no rain for months, and a city caught off guard, the fires rampaged through the beaches of the Pacific Palisades and Malibu and the mountains of Alta Dena and continue to burn.

There were rumors of not enough water, not enough firefighters, and no way to control the speed of the flames as they ripped through the dry brush, burning one house after another as we watched the tragedy unfold on live television or YouTube.

This time, the narrative swirled around California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, and the Los Angeles Mayor, Karen Bass, newly elected in 2022 as the first female and second Black person to serve. Bass had left the country in January, known as the last month of the Santa Ana cycle that comes every Fall.

From the University of California:

The region sees about 10 Santa Ana wind events a year on average, typically occurring from fall into January. When conditions are dry, as they are right now, these winds can become a severe fire hazard.

//

end

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

January 6th and the Obama Unreality Machine

6 januari 2025 | 33 min

As we approach the four-year anniversary of January 6th, I keep hearing Robin Williams's words from way back: “Reality, what a concept.”

It is not reality but unreality that so many on the Left live by. Want to know why Joe Biden’s age was covered up for so long? Why didn’t anyone speak up against puberty blockers before? Why is box office for Hollywood films in near-total collapse and ratings for cable news shows in freefall? Look no further than Obama’s unreality machine.

In that unreality, Liz Cheney is not a formerly low-level rep from Wyoming with a famous last name who was voted out in a landslide but is instead an American hero who “put country over party” when she turned what was left of her career into a vendetta against Donald Trump. For that, she was love-bombed by the propaganda press and an instant star in the Democratic Party, the “one good Republican,” as they saw it. Mitt Romney and Adam Kinzinger would be relegated to supporting players.

In the unreality, it makes sense for Joe Biden to bestow upon Liz Cheney the Citizens Medal to rapturous applause by the Left.

TV appearances and glowing headlines in high-minded outlets like the New York Times reminded me of that line in the Robert Redford film Quiz Show, when they ponder why Charles Van Doren would have to cheat just to win. Because “he’s not going to get on the cover of TIME Magazine as Mark Van Doren’s son.”

And so Liz, with her sensible suits and the authoritative tone she got from her father, played an important role in the greatest scam ever perpetrated on the American public, or at least one of them, that Donald Trump was so evil, so dangerous, so powerful he could destroy not just the Constitution but democracy itself.

And that his supporters were cult-like obedient zombies who picked up their weapons and stormed the Capitol to hang Mike Pence and overthrow the government. Oh you mean the one protected by the most powerful military force the world has ever known? That government? In the unreality, you must accept that, or you will suffer severe social consequences.

The truth was never going to be enough. They needed star witnesses like Cassidy Hutchinson to toss into the media churn to keep the story on Page One every day of the Biden presidency. They needed a Soviet-style primetime show trial wherein the Trump side was not even allowed a proper defense. General Milley and Benny Thompson made guest appearances to remind everyone of what it was all really about - WHITE RAGE.

They must really think the American people are that stupid. They had lived through months of violent protesting all Summer, and they were supposed to clutch pearls at a riot at the Capitol? Yes, it was violent, but so were the protests in 2020. Ah, but those protests were “mostly peaceful” and justified in the unreality.

It’s the government’s job to meet the needs of its people, not the people’s job to meet the needs of the government. January 6th was a day our politicians should have recognized that their unreality machine left millions of people out. And it was those unheard voices that should have been heard that day. Yes, some of them got violent and breached the Capitol, and they should be punished fairly, but that isn’t what our government did. They went to war on their own citizens, something the Left had never done, not since the Civil War.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

What Christmas Meant to Me Then and What it Means Now

24 december 2024 | 27 min

It is my heart-warm and world-embracing Christmas hope and aspiration that all of us, the high, the low, the rich, the poor, the admired, the despised, the loved, the hated, the civilized, the savage, may eventually be gathered together in a heaven of everlasting rest and peace and bliss, except the inventor of the telephone.Mark Twain - Letter to the Editor, New York Evening World, 23 December 1890

If you grow up on the Left, you grow up without religion. After the counterculture movement split from conventional religion in the 1960s, we’d done everything we knew how to do to fill up the eternal emptiness that had us chasing everything from sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll, cults in the 1970s, gurus, and ashrams, the self-help movement, the mental health movement, and eventually, we ended up back where we started.

We “found religion,” but this time as the politics of identity, where our happiness depended on how we solved the problems of society, like racism, homophobia, transphobia, misogyny, and climate change. It came from needing to feel good about ourselves and our world, but it was followed by anger and resentment when we could not convert the entire country to our way of life.

The truth about the Left is that they know no other way of life. This was the problem for the Southerners after the Civil War. They, too, knew no other way of life and could not evolve out of their hatred, fear, and hysteria. All they could do was preserve it by banishing those who threatened it.

I wish I could say I’ve come out of these past several years with a renewed faith in humanity. The truth is exactly the opposite. What I saw was what collective hatred, fear, and tribalism can do to otherwise decent people. I saw what we’re all capable of when our power is threatened. I saw how easy it is to go along with the crowd, even when what they’re doing is wrong.

I always thought the people I called my heroes were made of tougher stuff. Better stuff. Kinder stuff. I always thought my side was the side of the good guys who would be immune to group dehumanization. I also did I think we would ever be the ruling class aristocracy sneering at the middle and working class, gathering all of our culture, wealth, and institutions, and hogging them for ourselves.

Now that the empire is in collapse, those with all of the power are scrambling, not just to explain it but as a way to get back some of what’s been taken. Good luck with that one.

Take yet another agonizing, unbearable column by your typical Leftist elite, Jill Filipovic, writing for The Guardian:

Worse than what, Jill? Indoctrinating children to choose their genders, then surgically or chemically sterilizing them? Or does it just come down to immigrants and their right to cross the border illegally by the millions, their safety, and our safety be damned?

Corruption? You mean like government censorship on a laptop or covering up the mental incapacity of the Commander in Chief for four years? Weaponizing the Department of Justice?

Immorality? Like what exactly? Lying to the public via the propaganda press? Calling half the country “garbage” or “White Supremacists” or “Nazis”?

And what rights? The right to have an opinion without losing your job, status, or social standing? Your right to play in sports as a biological female without having to compete with biological men? Oh, of course not. She means abortion, as usual. Honey, if you want an abortion, there’s a pop-up clinic down the street.

People like Jill examine half the country as insects in a jar, watching how they behave in tightly confined spaces, how they respond to being called racists, or how they are de-banked or canceled off of social media. It’s fun, right? To watch the insects get stressed and claw at the glass for a way out?

The disgust drips from every word, even as she tries to make nice-nice, now that her ass has been handed to her in a historic, humiliating defeat.

Trump won again, Jill. Eat that for breakfast.

It isn’t you people who have to learn to tolerate Trump voters. It’s you who have to apologize to them for what you’ve done not only to them but to this country. You have destroyed every great thing you ever built, and listen to you now, pretending you still have the moral high ground.

She then tries to explain why she’s writing this at all:

To paraphrase a line from Carrie, “Shut up, Jill. Just shut up.”

These are the kinds of people I used to call home. I knew them, mingled with them, read them, RT’d them and was Facebook friends with them. Now, they terrify me.

They are the banality of evil. They are the side that would go along with segregation, even if they’ll never admit it. They’re the side that would lock arms as the Jews were carted off to camps, and no, they’ll never see themselves that way.

She writes:

Oh, poor deluded Jill. She has no idea what just happened, does she?

It would do her a world of good to start opening her mind to reality, escape the fear bunker, and start interfacing with the truth. She should read David Samuels’ piece in Tablet, one I’ll be writing about in more depth for my next piece:

“Trump’s head turn was a perfect example of an event that has no explanation outside the favor of the gods, or whatever modern equivalent involving wind factors and directional probabilities you might prefer to the word “God.” Trump was fated to win, just as Achilles was fated to overcome Hector, because the gods, or if you prefer the forces of cosmic randomness, were on his side, on that day, at that moment. That move not only saved his life by allowing him to escape an assassin’s bullet; it revitalized his chi and set in motion a series of subsequent events that generated a reordering of the entire world.”

“You can’t stop what’s coming. It ain’t all waiting on you. That’s vanity.”

A Christmas Story

I was always the first to wake up on Christmas morning. It was almost like a job. I’d scramble into the living room before the sun even came up to gaze upon the abundance of treasures beneath the Christmas tree.

I never believed Santa was real, but those presents got there somehow. It was my grandmother who enlisted my older sister to help her wrap all of the presents after the rest of us had gone to sleep. It was a magic trick she performed every Christmas to keep the illusion of Santa alive in our imaginations.

She thought she had us fooled. We let her pretend. It didn’t matter because every Christmas morning was a rare moment of pure joy. One after the other, we’d tear through the presents, not waiting for each person to finish before moving on to the next. Pure carnage but oh what fun.

I never really thought much about what Christmas really means until recently. If it is only about driving the economy or buying stuff, then it isn’t worth celebrating. But if it is about something much bigger than ourselves, a way to unify us as one people under God, well, then it means something.

I began thinking back on my life, on my childhood, and how religion fit into it. Most movies during the Hays Code era (before the 1960s and 1970s) were infused with Christian ideology, especially Christmas movies. And why wouldn’t they be?

George Bailey prays in It’s a Wonderful Life, and an angel shows up to answer his prayers.

In A Charlie Brown Christmas, they sing about the “Newborn King,” who is, of course, Jesus. We all used to share that as a country. It was a thread that united us, along with being American citizens.

We all watched these movies because we understood the foundational principles of what made America. That isn’t true anymore. To even reference religion, as I’m doing now, is practically a revolutionary act. There is a new religion in town, a fundamentalist one that offers no path to redemption or forgiveness and demands total compliance or else.

What does any of it mean to us now? Is it really just about the list of things we buy? Is it about the movies we all treasure every year? Is it about what unites us, not what divides us? Is it about something bigger than ourselves? Are we still even allowed to say “Merry Christmas?”

I don’t have the answers; I just know that I was raised by a devout atheist who hated religion, and thus, I never thought about Christmas other than as a way to give things and get things. But now, thanks to my four years of getting to know Trump supporters, I see that and many other things differently.

I wandered out of darkness and despair toward what looked like a golden light of hope and optimism, surrounded by people our ruling class deemed “dangerous” at best and “human garbage” at worst. I knew every step that brought me closer to them would be one more step that separated me from everyone and everything else.

As I’ve written so often here, it was another Christmas movie, maybe the best one, that reminded me of what happened to me. It was The Grinch Who Stole Christmas. The moral of that story is that you can’t steal Christmas. It isn’t something you can buy or attain. It isn’t even something you can give.

That’s why the Whos in Whoville are still celebrating and singing even after the Grinch takes away every last symbol of Christmas. He couldn’t take away the one thing that mattered most - what was in the hearts and minds of those celebrating.

I can’t call myself a Christian or even a person of faith. I lean in, and that’s farther than I did before. But I also know I have learned the same lesson the Grinch did. I saw people abandoned by our political establishment, institutions, and culture - people who should have been angry and bitter. But they weren’t. They were happy. That’s how my heart grew and why I think differently about Christmas now.

It wasn’t Trump supporters who demanded I pick a side—it was the Left. They have imagined an unbearable reality for most of us. Perhaps it comforts people like Jill Filipovic, but for the rest of us, we choose the better way, one that values forgiveness, redemption, and humility.

And one that allows us to say, even shout, Merry Christmas.

So thank you, dear readers. When I say you saved me, I really mean it. You did. There, but for the Grace of God, Go I.

//

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

Paywall Removed: Trump's Hero's Journey - Extended Cut

22 december 2024 | 75 min

How Trump's Enemies Manifested His Hero's Journey

19 december 2024 | 60 min

[Introduction: I made this as a special gift for Christmas or the holidays because I wanted to do something more than just a regular podcast to say thank you for your support, your friendship, your letters (yes I read them) and just for being great people. I hope that you will get something out of it. I tried to keep it short but it’s too long. Either way, it’s a learning curve! The transcript with most of the video references is below).

Every so often, I say out loud, “Trump won.” I repeat it in my head a few times because even now, I barely believe it. Eight long years of conflict, madness, division, corruption - there have been convictions, jail time, even suicides among Jan 6ers whose lives were destroyed because they were faithful enough to Trump to have his back when the chips were down.

What our government, our media, and the ruling class wanted was to terrorize Trump supporters out of their loyalty to him. “It’s a cult,” they continue to insist. But even after all of that, Trump won. He won the Electoral College and the popular vote.

There has never been a story like this one in all of American history, and even the Good People of the Left know that. But there have been stories like this in all the most beloved films and books. This story is one we all know. It’s called The Hero’s Journey, and any honest person knows that we just watched Trump live out his.

By the end of it, he has people like me wandering around saying “Trump won.” His victory meant more than just winning an election. It meant the return of reality and normalcy somehow, I know it sounds crazy to say that but it’s true.

Trump refused to stand down, no matter what they threw at him. He refused to cower in the face of an assassin’s bullet. He soldiered on, as the best heroes do, passing every test, humiliating his rivals, and even those who hated Trump can’t help but be impressed.

One only needs to look at the two covers of TIME Magazine, which feature Trump as Man of the Year, to see how it started and how it’s going.

Trump didn’t write this story; his enemies did, and in so doing, they sealed their fate to become but a footnote in the unforgettable story of the greatest political comeback in American history.

Says Victor Davis Hanson:

So, how did we get here? What is the Hero’s Journey, and how does Trump’s story fit so well?

Trump’s Hero’s Journey

We could leave it at that, but I’d like to go through the stages one by one.

Part One - The Ordinary World

To massive ratings success, millions of Americans welcomed Trump into their ordinary world every week. He was already a star. People tuned in to hear him say “You’re fired.” But they also tuned in to hear him say what was true but couldn’t be said out loud. They knew him, and they loved him. Reality TV was about to become actual reality.

In 2016, America could be divided into two groups: those who watched The Apprentice and those who did not. If you knew Trump from that ordinary world, nothing he said would shock you. But if you were like me, already insulated in a protective cocoon of extreme political correctness, a utopia where offensive language is not to be tolerated, and a class of people who would not be caught dead watching The Apprentice, his words would be paralyzing, enough to cause fits of mass hysteria that would last for years.

Trump has been a fixture in American culture since the 1980s. He mocked himself and was always in on the joke. Just one year before the Left decided he was Hitler, he hosted Saturday Night Live.

Despite Trump’s wealth and the Left’s attempts to portray him as an out-of-touch billionaire, he speaks the language of ordinary working-class Americans somehow.

Trump is the guy who eats at McDonald’s. He’s the guy who talks to the golfer and the caddy. But to make him into Hitler, it took a village of liars who had no intention of handing over power to Trump or any of the Americans who voted for him.

But Trump’s ordinary world was not politics. He was an outsider, the perfect hero to be plucked from one world and thrust into the special world, one he did not fully understand.

Part Two - The Call to Adventure (refusing the call)

The Hero is always reluctant to answer the call. Trump was asked again and again if he’d consider getting into politics. The answer was always no.

Running for president seemed to be the last thing Trump had left to do and he knew that. He was right, in those early days, to say that America wasn’t ready for people who tell it like it is.

Part Three - Accepting the Call

Trump, like so many others born outside of Manhattan, maintained a chip on his shoulder that drove him to not just become one of the Manhattan elites but to earn their respect.

So it stung when Obama called him out and humiliated him in a room full of people who thought they were superior to Trump in every way.

Obama was hitting back after the “birther conspiracy” most on the Left deemed “racist.” But really, he was playing his most powerful card — that he was accepted by the ruling class, and Trump was not.

This set up the epic battle between the two men for the next decade, one Trump would ultimately win.

Obama wasn’t just accepted by the ruling class. He was their symbol of virtue. As wealth concentrated on the Left, what they, we, needed was absolution from our sins of privilege. Obama provided that. He was the closest thing we had to religion.

By contrast, Trump represented our collective sins. If we could blot out the Sun, we could somehow deny those bad qualities in ourselves. That guy over there is the bad guy. We’re not like that.

But by 2015, Trump was finally ready.

The Hero is always unprepared for what this step actually means. They might start the journey almost as a lark. But once they accept that fateful call, there can be no turning back.

Trump famously vanquished his primary opponents, picking them off one by one as a country already addicted to reality shows watched this one. That’s what it looked like, anyway. Every great reality show needs a great villain. And there was no more entertaining villain than Donald Trump.

Who would dare talk to Jeb Bush like that?

And who would dare talk to Hillary Clinton like that?

Part Four - The Mentor and the Talisman

Trump had several key mentors, including Roy Cohn and his father. But the one who matters most in Trump’s Hero’s Journey is Steve Bannon, who was busy building a populist movement that needed a tough leader like Trump. Here, Bannon talks about their first meeting.

Bannon took the long view then and now. He’d read The Fourth Turning by Neil Howe and William Strauss. Ten years after the book was written, he lived through the 2008 financial crisis. Bannon made the movie Generation Zero about what was coming next. He has always had an eye on how America must land after the Fourth Turning - in the direction of populism, not globalism.

On October 7, 2016, the infamous Access Hollywood tape dropped as an October surprise. As Bannon tells it, the wolves were at the door. Trump had a decision to make: a mea culpa with David Muir and ABC News or fight, fight, fight.

Bannon is the Yoda to Trump’s Luke Skywalker because he helped sculpt and guide the hero toward his ultimate goal. Though Trump pushed him out in his first term, Bannon remained loyal to Trump and even spent four months in Danbury prison. For Bannon, it’s never been about Trump specifically but about guiding the ship in the right direction. He needed Trump then, and he needs him now.

Part Five - Crossing the Threshold

For Trump, the 2016 election was the threshold between the ordinary world and the special world, a win that shocked even him.

Winning was supposed to mean that the American people accepted him as their president. He didn’t understand why they were protesting in the streets, as they were saying he was “illegitimate” and #notmypresident. He won, after all, so why weren’t they treating him that way?

In 2016, those of us on the Left decided that this country, its culture, its government, and its institutions all belonged to us. If we proclaimed Trump a racist, Nazi, fascist and thus, rendered him ineligible to serve, we had every right to treat him and his supporters as unwanted invaders in our country.

Part Six: Tests, Allies and Enemies

Being a Trump ally is not for the faint of heart. He is no walk in the park, especially not then. He’ll insult even those closest to him and spend much of his time in office antagonizing the press and the swamp creatures. But Trump’s role was not to be liked by any of them. It was to represent the people who voted for him, as is.

Nonetheless, the establishment government ate Trump alive in his first term because he wasn’t a lawyer or a politician. He had to hit the ground running, and was met with oppositional forces who sought to sabotage, discredit, and ultimately push him out of power. It was a slow-moving coup, and Trump was no match for the empire.

Nancy Pelosi ripped up the State of the Union. The Democrats took the House and impeached him two years into his first term, just as Steve Bannon had predicted. Trump’s agenda to drain the swamp and close the border had to be pushed aside as he fought for his own reputation and his presidency.

Part Seven - The Approach

For Trump, The Approach was the 2020 election. Trump could see what the powerful forces that opposed him were doing to rig the election. Even I could see it as a Biden voter. It was not hard. Nothing made sense.

What we would all find out much later is we didn’t imagine it. They bragged about it in TIME Magazine.

2020 was one of the hardest years for Trump. He was in over his head and no one in DC or the media wanted to help him deal with the pandemic. They wanted — needed — him to fail, just as they needed the protests over the Summer to be bad enough to threaten Trump and his family.

Trump caught COVID, survived it, and then went out and did five rallies per day in hopes of making up lost ground. He knew the pandemic crashed the economy, his strongest selling point for a second term. But his campaign was starting to move the needle. Why? Because the Left had lost its mind.

The problem was they weren’t playing by the rules of the game. They made up their own rules, and Trump was no match for him. All he had was his First Amendment right to have his and his supporters voices heard, which they did on January 6th as part of a mobilization effort by MAGA to protest the election. They called it “Stop the Steal.”

But the riot at the Capitol was Check Mate. It was over. His court cases, his attempts to convince Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley to debate the rule changes in court, his MAGA movement — all collapsed in an instant. How convenient that was for the empire.

Had they left Trump alone and allowed him to enjoy the rest of his life in Mar-a-Lago, maybe things would have ended there. Maybe they would have actually won the war. But they weren’t quite done with Trump, and he most certainly wasn’t done with them.

Part Eight - The Supreme Ordeal

Biden’s incompetence became clear to Americans when the botched exit from Afghanistan woke everyone up to who was now the leader of the free world - someone who, despite a lifetime in government, did not listen to his military brass. 13 American soldiers dead, military equipment left behind, a humanitarian crisis left in its wake, it was a disaster.

Biden’s approval numbers crashed and they never recovered.

To cover up for their failures, they leaned into corruption.

They raided Mar-a-Lago. They indicted Trump four times. They convicted him on a bogus felony charge. And all the while, the idiots on MSNBC and the high-status voices were cheering them on. All they wanted — needed — to see was Trump, in an orange jumpsuit, frog-marched off to prison.

All that did was ignite the Hero’s Journey, making Trump the hero and, thus, instantly more popular. Everyone was rooting for him from the sidelines. He was a folk hero, a working-class hero, a hero of those mistreated by law enforcement. Only the ruling class couldn’t see it - they had lost their connection to the reality of everyday American life and, thus, the ordinary world.

And then came the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13th.

Just days later, a wounded Trump walked onto the stage at the GOP convention and faced a large crowd for the first time.

Trump had the wind at his back with his triumphant return to Butler, PA. Even though Americans had almost seen Trump’s head blown off on live television, but for a miraculous turn of his head at just the right time, Trump brought the tragedy full circle by doing what he has always done. He turned it into a way to entertain the crowd.

Trump picked up where he left off.

“As I was saying…”

Part Nine - The Reward

What had been among the darkest days in American history, not just Trump’s four years in office, the two impeachments, COVID and the lockdowns, the Summer of 2020, January 6th, and the weaponization of the DOJ and the criminal justice system became a celebration of hope and renewal.

People who were consumed by hatred of Trump because they trusted the media now humanized him and were realizing for the first time how much they’d been lied to.

It was something you could feel: minds and hearts changing gears, people waking up and seeing Trump differently. They were openly endorsing him, supporting him, and ultimately voting for him.

He was hitting nothing but green lights, even if the villains of this story were still paralyzed by their fear and hatred of him. America was moving on.

Part Ten - The Road Back

They can keep destroying themselves, trying to destroy him, but Trump’s triumphant return was evident when he was invited to be the first president since Ronald Reagan to ring the bell at the NYSE. The city that made him now had no choice but to tip its hat.

Part Eleven - Growth and Atonement

What is so ultimately moving about this story isn’t so much Trump himself but those standing behind him, sticking by him, his ride-or-die MAGA family.

Trump has changed. He knows he defeated the most powerful and perhaps corrupt administration in American history, and there has to be eternal satisfaction in that. He rescued his legacy, his family’s name, the Trump brand, and all of us Americans who were living under the dark cloud of madness and hysteria for much too long.

But Trump’s true redemption has to be how he showed his gratitude to those thrown away like human garbage by the ruling class but gave Trump the kind of love and support to carry him through the darkest days.

Part Twelve - The Return

Trump was never Citizen Kane. He was never the guy who wanted to be loved. He was raised to be a fighter and a winner. Maybe that wasn’t what the country needed 20 years ago, but it is what the country needs right now, especially the young. He came along just in time to pull them out of their cocoons of fragility.

Not just them, all of us.

And that is why we need heroes and are so drawn in by the Hero’s Journey. We need to see David go up against Goliath and win. We need to see the powerful forces of evil vanquished. We need to believe in them so we can believe in ourselves. And so now, those of us cast out of utopia can’t stop saying those two words to remind us of what we just lived through: Trump won.

Video Credits (non-youtube links):

The Fighter, Jon Kahn Victor Davis Hanson: Donald Trump is a Great Man of History (GBN News)The Hero's Journey, Marco Aslan 34 year old Donald Trump asked if he'd ever run for President.Re-Live Donald Trump's Most Memorable TV Show and Movie Cameos Donald Trump Teases a President Bid During a 1988 Oprah Show | The Oprah Winfrey Show | OWN A Portrait of Donald J. Trump, by Vic Berger & VICE News Trump's Road to the White House (full documentary) | FRONTLINE The Kiffness (Eating the Dogs)

If I’m missing any, let me know.

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The Audacity of a Counterculture

10 december 2024 | 25 min

I’ll admit that this Thanksgiving road trip wasn’t exactly fun. Oh, don’t get me wrong. The minute I see my daughter, I am over the moon. Thanksgiving was as it should be: warm family, good food, and giving thanks. I never want to say goodbye and I hate that she lives all the way across the country.

It was the before and the after when the trouble began. Somehow, last May’s road trip did not bring the darkness, but this one did. It was too much time spent thinking about things I’d been pushing aside for too long. I feel like I’ve been running just ahead of a tidal wave. And no, that doesn’t mean anything like depression but just the plain truth of what has become of me and my life after the past four years of moving from one side of a Civil War to the other.

Was it a Civil War, or was it a revolutionary war? I can’t really tell. I just know that it was a war with two sides. You had to pick one. However, no one on the Right punishes anyone on the Left for believing what they believe, not really. They boycott companies that sell their ideology, like Budweiser. But they don’t disinvite you to Thanksgiving.

I knew I could not discuss politics with my daughter’s boyfriend’s family, and I didn’t. Whatever they believed, I was willing to put it aside because we were all together for a holiday about appreciating everything we had. And in the big picture, I have much to be thankful for. I feel lucky in that way.

Last May I ended up in the ER twice on my road trip, once for slicing open my palm in Lincoln, Nebraska and once while trying to outrun a screaming ambulance with my elderly dog barely able to make it across the street. I tripped and landed on my elbow, breaking my arm. But the dog was fine.

Nonetheless, I wasn’t haunted last time like I have been this time. If my life was a novel, those injuries might have been warnings for something much more serious to come. Not serious like the death of a loved one or a terminal illness, but serious in a different way, a life-shattering, unavoidable way.

But my life isn’t a novel. Maybe the tidal wave finally caught up with me now that I had so much time to think. At home, I am always online, reading and listening to like-minded people and not feeling so alone. But in a car driving for hours, there was no escaping it.

This isn’t some nightmare I’m living through, and one day, I will wake up. I’ve bought a one-way ticket aboard the Counterculture Express, and there’s no turning back now.

It wasn’t so much everything I’ve been writing about and saying for the past four years that haunted me. It was what’s just happened to me in the past few months. I’ve spent almost a decade being that one person who stands on the side of those being canceled, using whatever online clout I’d attained from a life lived mostly online to defend them.

I have even stood up for those accused of being sex offenders. I’ll never forget spending much of my reputational clout standing up for a writer named Devin Faraci. Long before Hollywood blacklisted me, the worst thing they could say about me was that I was a rapist apologist. And they said it all of the time.

Later, when I began drifting away from the Left and writing here on Substack, I was interviewed by Megyn Kelly. Somehow, Devin Faraci saw it. After being a patron on his Patreon, writing columns defending him, and standing up for him at great cost - he threw me under the bus. He called me out on Twitter because he had to let everyone know that he might be a sexual assaulter, but I was now on the other side of the war, and that was worse.

But even as horrible as that was, it wasn’t what had occupied my thoughts for the past two weeks while doing something I usually love. Driving. No. It was how I’d wasted so much of my time working a 24/7 job, investing my whole life in an industry that would completely turn its back on me in the way they have. It has always been chilling to live through it, but somehow, I’d avoided really thinking about it, and now, as I drove nearly 3,000 miles to Ohio and back, I couldn’t think of anything else.

It’s Oscar season, and I’m doing what I’ve done every year since 1999: reporting on the Oscar race. Even back in May, I had a whole staff working with me to proofread my stories, remind me of breaking news, or run a contest form. Now, it’s a ghost town, and it’s just me. But driving all day means I can’t do the job alone.

I was playing with fire, I always knew, and said so many times when people asked me how I was able to get away with writing honestly here on Substack while the climate of fear and the culture of silence crippled so much of Hollywood. How had I remained untouched?

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A Democrat's Lonely and Hopeless Thanksgiving

28 november 2024 | 24 min

(If you have not yet listened to Part One, that is here)

Janet was dreading Thanksgiving this year. She dreaded it every year. Holidays made her feel a sense of foreboding. What was coming next, she thought, how much worse could it possibly get?

It had been a rough few weeks for Janet and countless other women in the country. She barely remembered election night except that at some point, she rooted around in a closet, dug out her ex-boyfriend’s electric razor, and … shaved her head. Did she really shave her head?

As she lay in bed, still too depressed to make coffee, she ran a palm over her scalp and felt the stubble. She’d actually done it. She’d shaved it all off. And how could she have forgotten? One morning, she stumbled into the market in her bathrobe and was greeted with sympathetic stares by the cashier. No, it wasn’t the election they were referring to. They all thought she had cancer.

“Can I do anything for you, dear?” One of them said, touching Janet’s arm. ”You can get me a new president and a better country,” Janet had snapped back. The woman’s face melted from concern to a shared knowing of the tragedy that had just taken place. Janet could see her working it out in her mind. Janet was one of those women who shaved her head after the election.

Well, so what? Janet thought as she clutched her robe tightly around her body before ducking back into her house, slamming the door behind her. The only reason she’d gone out was that she’d emptied every wine bottle in the house, and now, she needed another glass. Yes, it was the morning, no, don’t ask her about it. Janet knew that if there was any time to remain permanently drunk, this was it.

What a terrible night that was. November 5th. She figured the election would be close but Rick Wilson had assured her that Trump would lose and lose badly.

She’d watched the results come in until she heard the independents flipped to Trump in record numbers. That was when her heart sank. It was like watching the Needle at the New York Times flip from Hillary winning by 95% to Trump winning by 95%. Now, the needles were all pointing Trump’s way again, all of the swing states.

How could this be happening? After all the ways the Democrats and the media showed the American people how evil and monstrous Trump was? Now, she had to wait months for her hair to grow out. What had she done?

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How the Left Lost its "Cool"

25 november 2024 | 30 min

The Democrats and the Left are still working their way through the seven stages of grief over the election. Many of them continue to be in denial as to how so many people could have voted for Trump and made the popular vote even close at all.

In their defense, this wasn’t just an election loss. It was the single most humiliating defeat probably in American history. They spent eight years doing nothing but selling hatred and fear of Trump. They pulled out the stops, from Hollywood to the Justice Department. Headline after headline told the Democrats that all of the evil known to mankind was embodied in this one man, and all they had to do was stop him, and their village could live on peacefully.

Trump became the monster, the volcano that required sacrifices so that it didn’t destroy the crops. He was the Devil riding into Salem. He was HITLER. Now, they’re grappling with 77 million people in America who don’t believe their hysteria anymore. It’s been punctured at long last.

But those are the rational ones. There are still many of them trapped inside the fear bunker who are now trying to survive in a country they view as full of Nazis and bigots, full of hate and white supremacy. Or else toxic masculinity won the race, and now how to raise their daughters in a country full of rapists?

But if they’re honest with themselves, really honest, they will have to face the truth. Sure, they abandoned the working class. Joe Biden got out of the race too late for them to mount a proper campaign. Kamala Harris was a terrible candidate (I threw that last one in there, though it’s a truth they have yet to accept or admit). Elon Musk rigged the election (yes, they are saying that).

But they have yet to address one fundamental question about why they lost: Why aren’t they cool anymore? Being cool means thinking critically, but that was abandoned years ago on the Left. It means being a rebel against the system, but they are the system. It means being counterculture, but they are the culture.

True, it’s hard to be cool when you are crippled by mass hysteria, and when every tweet by Trump is the end of the world, I know because I felt it too. But it started even before that, even before Trump. One might say the Left losing their cool opened the door for the rise of Trump. Why? Because Trump is and has always been cool.

He was cool in the 1980s when being rich was cool, and saying whatever was on your mind that disrupted the status quo was cool. In the 90s, he became an icon in hip-hop culture. Maybe things shifted a little when he starred on a Reality-TV series, those weren’t cool, and especially once he got into politics as Obama’s rival, that most definitely was not cool.

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Sorry, Democrats. America is Just Not That Into You.

17 november 2024 | 25 min

There’s almost nothing worse than getting dumped. You’ve done everything right. You had all the money in the world — a billion dollars! You had all the celebrities — Harrison Ford, Beyonce, Taylor Swift, Julia Roberts, George Clooney, Meryl Streep and Barbra Streisand! Who could ask for anything more? Well, it turns out 76 million people.

This wasn’t just a “don’t call me, I’ll call you” or “we can still be friends” or “maybe someday in the future we could…” No, this was a “get lost, lose my number, forget you ever knew me” kind of break-up. The Democrats aren’t handling it well, to put it mildly.

They’re shaving their heads. They’re uninviting family members to Thanksgiving. They’re obsessing over everything Trump is doing and saying, refusing to go quietly. In other words, they’re turning into Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction.

It isn’t enough to blame the “woke” and the crazies for the collapse of the empire. It goes much deeper than that. Yes, they’ve lost their minds, and Americans are fleeing faster than rats off a sinking ship, but the truth is the Democrats orchestrated their own demise. Even those who think they get it, don’t really.

Bill Maher, for instance, is given pats on the back for kind of, sort of getting it but if you listen really close, you’ll hear the tell-tale TDS worming its way in. Trump is crazy, his voters are dumb.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, Democrats, but this isn’t 2004, as Nate Silver has proclaimed. It isn’t 1988 or 2000, either. No, you must go much further to find a period like the one we’re living through now. You have to go back to 1972.

More specifically, the swing between 1968 and 1980, as Ben Shapiro has often discussed in books and on his podcast. His comment was one of the things that drew me to the Right because, finally, someone said something that made sense. He tweeted this in the Summer of 2020, though it would be four more years before 1980 actually arrived.

And 1980 has arrived right on time. That makes me think it’s not about just four more years of Trump. This is the long game. This is probably 12 years of Republican rule.

Navigating a moment like this depends on confronting the truth, not the preferred truth, not the denial, but the real reason why Trump won such a massive victory after the Democrats spent almost ten years trying to destroy him. The answer isn’t to double down on Trump being a “monster” or a “fascist” or a “sociopath.” All that will do is postpone the inevitable, and it will only make Trump more popular.

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It Wasn't an Election. It Was an Intervention

11 november 2024 | 39 min

It was like watching SEAL Team Six spelunk into a dangerous war zone and release the hostages from inside the bunker. Millions of us wandered out. We felt as though a great weight had been lifted. The sun shined once again after one long, dark winter. We were half-celebrating, half in a state of shock. “You mean … we’re finally free?” Yes, said the soldiers. You are free.

And as the author jotted out those words above, she thought to herself, can I actually write that? Will people say I am exploiting the suffering of the Jews during the Holocaust or still being held in Gaza? Will they say I don’t know real suffering, and how dare I write such a thing? Yes, they will say that. But no, it won’t matter anymore.

The truth is that I was always free to write it. I just had to do it outside of the doomsday cult the Left has become. It wasn’t some orb out in the middle of the Mojave. It was every major institution in America. And they most certainly aren’t giving up without a fight. Heed the words of Peter Boghossian:

Trump drove so many mad, from the Never Trumpers to the Woke Left, because they destroyed themselves trying to destroy him. Their biggest problem was that they were never fighting the real Trump. They were fighting one they invented, a supervillain whose mere presence could end democracy itself.

It’s hard to imagine such smart people losing their critical thinking ability. Power will do that to you, though. No one gives it up willingly. But still, you’d think some of them might have had an inkling America was ready for change by now.

It’s like that Milan Kundera quote about Totalitarianism:

That’s what’s happened to America in the past four years. Our SEAL Team Six came just in time to liberate us from the tyranny of the minority.

Did Rick Wilson really go into election night thinking Trump would lose that badly? How could he have been so confident to make this video the day before Election Day?

How could the disconnect from reality be that profound? And when he was thoroughly and completely humiliated, along with all the other Never Trumpers, he blamed the voters. He blamed America.

Meanwhile, a wellness check is needed on Jojo from Jerz, another who was so certain her daily rages on X, which earned her so many likes, represented, in any way, the majority in America:

The country can’t be run by people like Jojo from Jerz. She’s just too crazy. No reality has ever once entered the chat. And there are too many just like her that control the entire Democratic Party.

Even if Trump only serves one term and JD Vance is somehow beaten by a Democrat (I wouldn’t hold my breath), they can always be credited as the liberators who freed all of us, our culture, our economy, our institutions from a cult.

For those living in agony for the last four years, you can come out, come out wherever you are.

A Mental Health Crisis

Just before the election, Mark Halperin predicted a mental health crisis in this country if Donald Trump should win the election.

At first, I thought he was exaggerating, but as I watched the reaction on the Left in the wake of another shocking win, I realized he wasn’t. Isn’t it just possible there is something wrong with the messenger if these folks are shocked yet again by a Donald Trump victory? I was shocked along with them in 2016, but by 2020, I got it.

The more educated people are, the more they rely on NPR, the New York Times, NBC News, CNN, the New Yorker, New York Magazine, and the Hollywood trades—the less likely they are to see things as they really are rather than how they want them to be. And while it’s true reality distortion exists on the Right, it’s nowhere near the same level.

The media is turning the so-called “4B movement” into a bigger story than it actually is because that, too, is a way to sell fear. These young women are the equivalent of an adolescent who is mad at her parents and refuses to eat her vegetables. NO, I WON’T DO IT!

They somehow think this will cause any man in America one second of grief. The last thing they want is to have sex with any of them. Moreover, it’s funny that they would think Conservatives would be mad that they aren’t having sex and getting pregnant because all that means is less abortions.

All of them are using whatever weapon they have to exact revenge on anyone who voted for Trump. They are people who already see themselves as victims. They see Trump and his voters as victimizers. They’re living out some kind of fantasy where they can cosplay oppression. In a weird way, Trump gave them exactly what they needed.

Inside Woketopia, the more marginalized you are, the more elevated you are. Black and trans people are treated like holy icons. Much is made of how to talk to them, how to make sure they feel safe around you because your white skin is so triggering. Each of them uses their marginalized status as a way to impose their will upon the rest of us. It’s blasphemy to criticize or confront them.

And herein lies the problem for the Democrats. They can’t confront the crazy, let alone eradicate it. They are too afraid of the activists and the bullies on social media. They’re afraid their careers will be over, like everyone else inside the doomsday cult.

A Trump win makes them all believe that they have, in one election, lost all of their power. That’s why you see so many Instagram posts about suicide hotlines but only for LGBTQIA or Queer women, or BIPOC. No white woman or man will get any sympathy for daring to use the moment to suggest they are in worse pain.

But the psychosis is real. Watch this mother use her children to draw sympathy from them — yes, from them. Their hysteria and pain feed her need to feel like a victim. This bad thing just happened to HER, so everyone should have to pay, even her own kids.

These kids will one day realize that they have been raised by a virulent narcissist, which is what drives this movement more than anything, and perhaps they will be among those who lead the next liberation should America once again be overtaken by a cult.

The End of Days

The women on the Left have centered their entire movement on the act of aborting a child they helped produce, as though the fetus itself, that got there through no fault of its own, is their oppressor. They worry for their daughter’s inability to get an abortion, as though that’s something every girl should want.

//

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The Left's Empire Takes a Hard Fall

6 november 2024 | 35 min

For four years now, maybe longer, I’ve been saying like a mantra, “There is no saving the Left. There is only saving the country from them.” And so America has, definitely and decisively.

But scrolling X this morning, I’m reminded of the scene in Michael Mann’s The Insider when 60 Minutes continued to remain in denial after their corruption had been laid bare:

It took 60 Minutes too long to accept what they’d participated in with the Jeffrey Wigand scandal, just as it will take the Left too long to accept what they’ve done to themselves and this country. But time marches on without them.

And as the line goes from Citizen Kane, they’re going to need more than one lesson and they’re going to get more than one lesson.

I say the Left, but it’s really the perception of reality shaped by the legacy press, the New York Times, CBS and NBC News, the Washington Post, along with MSNBC and CNN. They’ve been lying every day to the American people and for that their reputations will pay a high price.

I’ll never forget Christmas of 2020, when my nephew, who had gotten COVID and was now immune, wanted to visit. But he wasn’t vaccinated. Because of that, several members of my family became hysterical. When I shouted at them, “HE ALREADY HAD COVID,” they sent me links to NBC news articles that said it was contagious unless you were vaccinated, which was a lie.

Donald Trump was not running against Kamala Harris so much as he was running against the media industrial complex which now, like so much of our culture, is inseparable from government.

The New York Times headline, “Trump storms back,” is designed to pander to those who are still stuck on January 6th.

They have to sell fear because that is how they feel now that they are forced to share this country with the “basket of deplorables.” They think they still speak for all of us but their ability to do that ended long ago. Now, they speak only for those still trapped in an elitist bubble that only wants Trump to go away.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

The RagTag Revolutionaries Who Made the Empire Sweat

5 november 2024 | 21 min

In Breaking Away, the Cutters have everything against them. Their bike barely works, their shoes are old and tattered, and only one of them can ride. But they still want to compete in the big race against the best and the brightest rich college kids.

Something in us, something in me, feels an eternal ache to see the underdogs win. No one needs to tell us who they are, and we can see if we’re watching the same movie. The Cutters are the team we want to win despite the enormous odds against them. They’re riding in the race of their lives, fueled by a desire to prove they are just as good as the college kids. They’re not just as good, they’re better.

Good writing can be boiled down to one simple principle: be hard on your protagonist because everyone reading or watching will be invested in that protagonist overcoming the obstacles and winning. That is the Hero’s Journey, and it is the story, at least so far, of Donald Trump and his Basket of Deplorables.

And now, as we head into the last day, I find myself on the edge of my seat, just as I was when I first saw Breaking Away. Will they actually win? Can I get that lucky to taste that kind of sweet relief?

Rooting for the underdog can sometimes mean rooting for the loser, too, like in Rocky when an underdog fighter dares to dream big. Even if he doesn’t win the fight, no one comes out of it thinking of Rocky as the loser.

Or, as Google AI explains, “Rocky's personal victory comes from going the distance, making it through all 15 rounds of the fight. Rocky's performance demonstrates that he honors his family and friends and that you can't humiliate someone who doesn't want to be humiliated.”

I can’t think of a paragraph that better describes Trump, MAGA, and the three elections that made the empire sweat and rewrote the rules of how and who can run for the presidency.

Hollywood doesn’t make movies like Breaking Away or Rocky now. They don’t see white men as having any obstacles because they’re born with “white privilege,” and the only people worth focusing on are those people of color who are born into obstacles. These are the rules of equity Kamala Harris has lived by and believes. And the rules that might elect her leader of the free world.

It’s surreal watching the people with all the power sweat their last battle against Trump. They are the team that wants to win so badly they’ve become corrupt, relying on a propaganda press to coddle and protect Harris, as they try to cosplay making history.

But if you’re paying close attention and you’re following the plot, you’ll be able to see who the good guys are in this story and who the bad guys are. The bad guys use Harris as a shield, a symbol of virtue, to hide their own identities. They are mostly white men and women of enormous wealth who desperately need to appear virtuous lest the people rise up and challenge their power.

I’m invested now. I want the right ending. I don’t want to have to sit through the ending that wouldn’t sell a single ticket. Sure, if Harris had gotten there on her own - if she’d fought hard through a tough primary and then ran for the presidency if all of that business with Joe Biden hadn’t been so down and dirty, with everyone lying about what really happened even now, if her husband hadn’t been accused of slapping a woman because of a jealous tantrum - maybe I could celebrate the first woman of color President of the United States.

But the Democrats and the media have been gaslighting us for years now, though it’s never been quite as bad as it’s been this past year heading into their final battle.

It’s all so fake. It reminds me of what happened in the Oscar race when the rich white elites that run Hollywood decided they needed absolution and all were in agreement to start awarding people of color nominations and wins to make it seem as though things had really changed. But they hadn’t. The same people run the show now as always. They are just wearing masks.

The irony is that the real Hollywood movie is on the other side. That’s where the good writing is. There has never been a hero like Trump, especially as we watched him survive their unprecedented attacks on him, from the demoralizing raid of Mar-a-Lago, to the lurid Stormy Daniels trial, to the Fani Willis debacle, to Leticia James and her idiotic charges against him.

And all the while, the media played along, pretending like it was legit in hopes of rewriting the hero as the villain. Ah, but the people aren’t that dumb. They know bad writing when they see it.

I think of Steve Bannon, who helped unite people abandoned and invisible to our culture and government to give them a voice, something to fight for, to work toward, an American dream. He sought to build what he called “inclusive, participatory, nationalist populism,” and now his dream has been realized as the oligarchs bleed Black and Hispanic voters.

These monsters threw Steve Bannon in jail not because of anything he did but because he said stuff they didn’t like. He inspires people they see as human garbage. And I really don’t want to watch the version of this story where all of them are rewarded for what they’ve done to working-class Americans who deserve so much better.

I became a Trump supporter because I believed in this story. I believe in these people. Everyone on the Left is miserable. They’ve hollowed out their culture. They can’t laugh at jokes. They’ve become humorless scolds. Yet, the Trump voters are not. Their happiness, their carefree spirit is infectious. Who wouldn’t want to them to win?

At the same time, the empire is the empire for a reason. They have built a system that is nearly impossible to defeat. This isn’t Breaking Away. It isn’t a matter of being the best bike rider on the track. This is deep corruption by people who have all the power and don’t want to lose it.

For most of my life, our government has been locked in a deep state, an establishment that is impossible to penetrate. People don’t just come from the outside like Trump. They need institutional backing. A whole generation is now growing up with something I never had - a big, bold challenge to that power.

Half the country doesn’t see it. They’re watching a different movie. A boring one. They have bought the lies of the media. They fear an outsider like Trump and his audacity to challenge the results of the 2020 election, with or without the riot. Ah, but that is democracy. What they represent is institutional power that they have decided doesn’t belong to any of us. That is what Trump has challenged. And that is why they seek to destroy him.

It’s breathtaking to watch, at least to me. But then again, I’m a movie kid. I like this story. I want to see the underdog, the hero, prevail.

We should prepare ourselves for a loss that isn’t really a loss, like Rocky, despite the hideous people on the left — the bad guys — who will want to gloat and rub it in.

Yeah, they will have won the same way they won in 2020 by pushing a fourth Obama term on the people, but no intelligent person will ever see it as fair. She has the entire legacy press propping her up, and Trump has them pushing him down and showing the worst of him day in and day out.

What Trump has done, what Steve Bannon has done, and what all of the MAGA deplorables have done is nothing less than a revolution, one the people of this country desperately needed. They’ve built a foundation. They aren’t going away. This is only the beginning.

Why? Because they love this country. They’re patriots. They know this country belongs to them — to us — as much as it does any American citizen. It was disgusting and unacceptable watching how the powerful shut them out of culture, the economy, social media, and politics. Who do they think they are?

So, let’s get this straight one last time. When you are born in America, you have rights given to you by God, not by the state. Those rights cannot be taken from you: free speech, the right to protest anything you want any time you want, and the right to equal protection under the law.

I hope Trump wins in a landslide. They have it coming to them, and America would be so much better off. Hand the government back to the people because whatever they’ve built, it is no longer serving our needs.

But if he doesn’t, he will finally be able to take a well-deserved rest. He most certainly earned it. His place in history is secured. There will never be another like him.

And to all of you I’ve been with for the past four years I’ve been writing on Substack, you have given me so much, taught me so much, and been so kind to me when almost everyone I knew threw me away like human garbage.

It bothers me that Trump supporters continue to be verbally and physically abused just for wearing a red MAGA hat. Because I know you, and they don’t. Like this man who recently beat up a Trump supporter:

So here is me in my MAGA hat. My dark MAGA hat to tell you thank you and godspeed, MAGA. Godspeed. Trump2024.

So let’s have it, one last dance.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

The Democrats Deserve to Lose

1 november 2024 | 28 min

The Democrats have been chasing the dragon for so long even they don’t know what they stand for anymore. Shaped by identity politics and social justice, Kamala Harris sure looks the part. But peel back even the surface layer, and there’s nothing - just the failed dreams of a utopia gone wrong.

No one says it better than Kenneth L. Khachigian at the Wall Street Journal:

Ms. Harris was unprepared to enter the rough and tumble of national politics and at the 11th hour relies on being propped up, as she has throughout her career, by patrons—Barack Obama, his operatives and a national media that is predominantly desperate to prevent Mr. Trump from re-entering office. Ms. Harris is a victim of her own success through moving up the political ladder without being fully tested by challenge and conflict.

Joe Biden wasn’t supposed to defy the rules of the Ponzi Scheme. He was supposed to do what every Democrat does. Go along with the mounting deception. But even Joe Biden’s win was a deception in and of itself. We were promised a moderate. What we got instead was a George Spahn, who allowed a cult-like movement to move into the White House.

They hid Joe Biden’s age even then. I know because I stood just five feet away from him at a donor brunch in May of 2019. I was plucked from the internet as an influencer because I’d been such a passionate and devoted Democrat, a good Liberal who voted blue no matter who, ever since George W. Bush narrowly defeated Al Gore.

I loved Joe Biden back in 2019. He was old, I knew, but he could do the job. How else to take out a one-term president with a strong economy but to pull the country back to the last time they felt safe? Pulling the country back meant a return to the Obama era. Only later would I discover what a mistake that would turn out to be.

Trump should have served a second term. He was cheated out of it, as were his supporters and all of America, who would have likely voted for him just based on the economy alone.

The Democrats could have taken the loss and rebuilt a new movement with new blood and a new direction. But the Democrats were never going to let that happen. They had to preserve the empire under Obama, an empire now in collapse. They’ve held on too long and now, there is nothing left.

Joe Biden was already too old by November of 2020. They hid him in the basement so none of us could see how fast he was declining. I could see it because I had seen where he was back in May of 2019. But instead of facing the problem head-on, the Democrats kept hiding Joe, lying to the public with their full-court propaganda press happily playing along.

They elbowed out the brave truth-tellers like Dean Phillps and RFK, Jr., And they handed Joe Biden the primary win, corrupt though it was with their army of eager beaver lawyers meddling in our elections by removing Cornel West, Jill Stein, and anyone else who dared to challenge their authority, from the ballot. They even tried to remove Trump, which forced the Supreme Court to smack them down.

Then, when Joe Biden’s age was finally exposed, and there was nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide, the Democrats instigated a coup. But Joe Biden wasn’t going along with it, shockingly. It took Obama’s yachting pal George Clooney to write an embarrassing op-ed in an attempt to push out old Joe, arguing that they should choose a candidate, speed-dating style.

Well, they didn’t do that, did they, George? They hand-picked Kamala Harris without a single vote, and you went along with it, too, didn’t you? You wiped your chin and did your duty as the Good Liberal you are. Welcome to the pages of history, for better or worse.

I knew the Democrats were in trouble even before the 2020 election. I tried warning them. I said Trump would win if they couldn’t find their way back to sanity. Oh, how naive I was. I didn’t know back then how much power the Left had amassed in the Trump era - an unprecedented alignment that reached from Hollywood across Silicon Valley to the universities and public schools through corporations and the Big Pharma monopolies.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

A Terrifying Night in a Good Liberal Town

31 oktober 2024 | 29 min

Janet had a choice to make. Would she wear the T-shirt that said, “What’s so funny about peace, love, and understanding?” or would she put on the one that said, “Trump is a scab.” It wasn’t a hard choice. The election was in a week.

Every morning, Janet took her coffee to the window, where she would watch her small California town residents walk their dogs, drive their kids to school, and get in their morning fitness regime. She kept a sharp eye out for those who didn’t clean up after their dogs. There was always that one person.

This morning was no different. A woman still in her bathrobe shuffled down the street with two dogs. One looked like a collie, and the other was a tiny poodle. The bigger dog waded into a deep thicket of shrubs and did his business.

Janet watched the owner start to shuffle off. “Aren’t you going to clean it up?” yelled Janet from her window across the street. Usually, the person she shouts at will apologize profusely and start digging around for a bag. But this woman didn’t do that. She looked at the window and flipped Janet the bird, shouting, “Mind your own f*cking business. I’m walking AROUND!”

Janet watched the woman shuffle down the sidewalk and walk behind the bushes. That was supposed to make Janet feel shame for assuming the worst, but she didn’t. She assumed the worst because people always make bad decisions when they think no one is watching. But Janet was watching.

The woman waded her way through the bushes, sticks and dried leaves clinging to the cotton fleece of her bathrobe. She pulled at the leash of the smaller dog, who refused to follow her. The dog wouldn’t budge. “Fine,” the woman said, propping the leash on a branch. The bigger dog was sniffing through the bushes as the woman angrily ripped off a green plastic bag and scooped up the pet waste.

Then she looked over at the window where Janet was sitting and held the bag: “SEE!? ARE YOU HAPPY?” Then she flipped her off again, gathered up the two leashes, and shuffled back down the street.

Janet thought she didn’t have to get so upset about it. Was there a better way to handle it? Was she just supposed to have waited to see if the woman would pick it up even though she didn’t look like she would? At least Janet could help keep the street clean.

A Good Town Full of Good People

Vista Butte was a town of responsible citizens who do the right thing. People followed the rules, which is why it was so safe. There was no crime, and it was quiet. They had to work to make it quiet.

Like when they built a pickleball court in the middle of town, which drew so many kids to play after school. The court made so much noise that it disrupted the peaceful harmony of the town center, so the city decided to move it to the outskirts of town.

But it upset the school kids because they liked having a place to go after school and release their pent-up energy instead of staring at their screens all day. Did they really believe that or did their parents tell them to say that? Either way, they went door to door to get signatures to save the Pickle Ball court.

It was a waste of time because there was a perfectly good court on the East End. True, they had to pay to park, and kids would need their parents to drive them there, but they could be as loud as they wanted, and it wouldn’t disrupt the serenity of the townspeople. Janet voted against the measure because everybody in Vista Butte has to work together to keep the town quiet and clean.

As Hillary Clinton said, it takes a village.

Today, Janet was going to do some yard work before Halloween. The Santa Anas were coming, a wind storm. That meant fire season, and she needed to clean up the brush in her front yard. Firebugs get it in their heads to set off a blazing wildfire when the warm wind kicks up. Always men. No woman would do something like that.

Janet could drive down to the corner where all the migrants waited to be picked up for a day's work. It would only cost her about 50 bucks for the whole job. One guy could handle it. It wasn’t that much work. That was much cheaper than the town gardeners, who charge you $50 an hour.

Well, what the hell? She figured she might as well get in some exercise. She wasn't getting any younger, and her body wasn't getting any thinner. Yard work was a good way to get the steps in and grow her fitness circle on her Apple Watch.

Janet had five Harris/Walz signs on her lawn. One of them was just an old Biden/Harris poster, which she ripped off the top where Biden was. It was a perfect metaphor for the election: Rip off the old white guy’s name and elevate the woman of color. It didn't matter that there wasn't a primary. When you have to save the country from rising fascism, you do what you must.

But it made Janet happy, making history, even if it wasn’t exactly the democratic process. Old white men don't like getting out of the way to allow marginalized groups to rise—the history of America. The white male patriarchy is keeping all of us down.

It’s long past time for a woman to lead, Janet thought. We need change. We need to turn the page. Harris cares about the middle class. She cares about immigrants. She cares about poor people. She’s not rude or mean or crude or nasty or abusive. She’s not a racist or a sexist or a misogynist or a bigot.

Janet was ready. In fact, she'd already voted, like most women in America. Vista Butte was, Janet knew, 99% liberal. It had to be, what with all of the Harris/Walz signs everywhere.

Harris/Walz - Obviously.Harris/Walz - Save Democracy.Harris/Walz - We’re not going back.Harris/Walz - Vote for freedom.Harris/Walz - Democracy or dictator.

For a minute, she thought, why are we even bothering with an election? Maybe they should just do what they did for the primary: just place Kamala Harris. Trump is the one who is not qualified. He's a criminal; he's a felon.

Besides, Project 2025 will become the law of the land. They’ll throw Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski in prison. Abortion will be banned, and we’ll never have an election again, so why not get ahead of it now? Why are we wasting time convincing people to vote? Why are we pretending that democracy even applies in this situation? It doesn't.

We’re seriously going through all this worrying about the swing states, focusing all of our energy on undecided voters? Why is the fate of the Republic, the fate of the world's future, resting on people who are too stupid to know now who they want to vote for? That's what our elections have come down to, those people who sit in a Frank Luntz focus group. Come on.

Those are the kind of people who sit in the Starbucks line for an hour deciding whether they want the Caramel Ribbon Crunch or the Pumpkin Spice Frappuccino blended. Pick something and move on! Pick something!

It was Halloween. Janet wasn't going to allow herself to get upset, not today. Halloween was her favorite holiday. She remembered the old days when kids dressed up in costumes they made themselves. They weren’t brands disguised as costumes. Everything is advertising now.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

Where I Was on January 6th, and Where I Wasn't.

29 oktober 2024 | 18 min

On January 6th, I should have been huddled on my couch and glued to MSNBC. Their hysteria and fear would have validated everything I already believed about those awful extremist racists and incels waving their “white supremacist” MAGA flags, climbing the walls of the Capitol, and fighting with police officers.

But that isn’t where I was on January 6th. I was scratching my head in confusion. A riot? People were trying to break into the Capitol? Why? Most of MAGA were standing before Trump as he spoke to them about the election we’d just lived through. He had convinced Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz to debate the election in the Senate when, all of a sudden, a riot erupted.

That was when I knew something very bad was about to happen. No, not to our government officials. I knew they’d be fine. It was the Trump supporters who would not be. They had no power.

It wouldn’t matter, I knew, that we’d seen unprecedented violence over the Summer and that those protesters weren’t treated like terrorists or insurrectionists. It was different with MAGA who were by then, already named enemies of the state.

Most people I knew on the Left had no clue what Trump supporters were really like. Most of them existed inside the protective bubble of the Left. We’d built our Shining Woketopia on the Hill after Obama rose to power. And we essentially abandoned half the country and never looked back.

We carefully curated our information streams, our language, our movies, our music, our fashion. We “wokeified” it piece by piece until we’d come close to reaching our ideal as a society. And then Trump won in 2016 and our whole world turned upside down.

Trump supporters were, to us, everything we wanted them to be: angry white men who wanted to tie women to beds and keep them pregnant and having babies like pigs in gestational crates. They were crude and uneducated. They were racists and bigots and drove around in gas guzzlers, wrecking the planet. They were incels who hid on 4-Chan, trolls who did nothing but hurt all of the vulnerable groups, especially women.

They paraded so ridiculously around with those racist red hats and those garish flags. We were traumatized just seeing them. If we saw a Trump supporter in our neighborhood or in our public spaces, we would have to alert the manager and have them removed like a dead animal the cat dragged in.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

Meet the Real Fascists

27 oktober 2024 | 22 min

"The essence of propaganda consists in winning people over to an idea so sincerely, so vitally, that in the end they succumb to it utterly and can never again escape from it," —Joseph Goebbels

It was on a Sunday that the Nazi army marched into New York City and gathered at Madison Square Garden.

They came in all skin colors, white and Black and Brown, and from all different backgrounds, Asian, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, atheists, young and old, rich and poor, Left and Right, gay and straight as American citizens who desperately wanted to taste freedom again, security again, a government that cared about them again, and to Make America Great Again.

What they don't know is that they're Nazis. Barbra Streisand and Hillary Clinton have said as much, so isn’t it time that they listened?

How dare they gather, Hitler-like, at Madison Square Garden to worship at the altar of the fuhrer himself, Donald Trump. That’s what the New Yorker says, what the New York Times says, and what John Cusack says.

I know what you’re thinking. John who? John Cusack. Remember him? Once a heartthrob of sorts back in the 80s? Yeah, that guy.

We were all so in love with him. Every boyfriend we ever had was John Cusack in one form or another. But that was then. Things have changed now that fascism has arrived in America.

So to protect us from it, Cusack didn’t hold up a boom box, no. This time, he woke up in his penthouse, tossed around in his high thread count sheets, gazed upon the streets of Manhattan, and remembered Donald Trump was holding a historic rally at Madison Square Garden. He fumbled for his phone and spit out his testimony:

Donald Trump is Hitler, and his supporters are Nazis. How do we know that? That’s just what we’re all supposed to believe. So far, Trump has done nothing to warrant such an accusation ah, but we don’t really care about that. We care about the thing we police at all costs: speech. What Trump says IS fascism. Free speech is fascism.

But if you need proof, let’s say that Trump has said he will deport the 10 million migrants who flooded through America’s weakened border under the Biden/Harris administration. This was after the Democrats spent four years declaring Trump’s border policies were RACIST and FASCIST. So when Biden won, why wouldn’t they come?

It’s funny that Americans are thinking about themselves at a time like this. I mean, they should be anti-fascists, putting their own needs aside. The definition of fascism might be all power to the state against the individual, but that’s in ordinary times.

Power to the state against the individual is how you stop fascism now. Because if free people choose the guy who says he’s going to fix the border problem and yes, that might include some deportations — that means we are no longer able to staff our labor force and grow a stronger coalition in the swing states.

So we dumped them into towns like Springfield, Ohio, and expect everyone who lives there to share our existential angst about racism. Forget about your kids in school, your social services, and your safety. All power to the state means you say nothing, you do nothing, you suck it up.

You see, the anti-fascists are the ones who demand you drop all of your friendships if you vote for the fascists. It might sound confusing, but it’s not. All you have to do is conform or else.

You might have heard that “conform or else” is the very definition of fascism, but really, it’s how you get rid of it. You pressure everyone you know to do what we tell you to do, think how we want you to think, speak how we want you to speak or we will DESTROY YOU.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

Bruce Springsteen and The Death of the Joy

25 oktober 2024 | 23 min

“I came for you, for you, I came for you, but you did not need my urgency. I came for you, for you, I came for you, but your life was one long emergency.” Bruce Springsteen

To be on the Left in America is to live in one long emergency. It’s depressing and exhausting, and it’s time to move on. It is the misery of the upper class, the misery of a disrupted utopia, and the misery of people who have too much power and have become too comfortable with it, so much so that they do not want to let it go.

I can’t really blame Barack Obama. What must it feel like to feel like a god, to have all of American culture worship you, upend what used to be great movies, great books, great rock and roll, and now, in its place, a reflection of you? That would mess with your head. It would be hard to let go. No wonder he keeps showing up. No wonder he demands that the only people allowed to run for president are lesser, duller versions of himself.

Imagine what it must feel like to be George Clooney, Julia Roberts, or Tom Hanks. Yes, you are among the highest-status Americans inside utopia because you have befriended the man who would be King. But none of them have come from such a high place and fallen so hard as Bruce Springsteen, who abandoned the badlands for the mansion on the hill.

Bruce Springsteen was my idol growing up in the 1980s. I wrapped my legs ‘round his velvet rims and strapped my hands cross his engines. I was just a scared and lonely rider who had to know how it feels, who had to know if love was wild, who had to know if love was real.

Me and Bruce, hiding on the backstreets, going down to the river. I wore out the groove on every single album he ever produced and then could only listen to live bootlegs. Now, I can’t listen at all.

What I know about Bruce is what I know about the modern-day Left. He doesn’t know America anymore. He does not even know the kinds of people who needed his music and who made him rich. He joins the list of once and former icons who helped lift up the lost and forgotten Americans, to make them feel included in something important in our culture.

And now they sneer at them. Stephen King, Steven Spielberg, Barbra Streisand, JJ Abrams, Taylor Swift, and Beyonce sit on a pile of money given to them by the same Americans they now call Nazis.

That’s why you see idiots like Jack White or the Foo Fighters throwing a hissy fit that Trump might use their precious music at a rally. Yeah, heaven forbid the truck drivers who deliver their food or the nurses who wash off the vomit and urine after a night of partying should be able to hear their music and forget their troubles for a night.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

Trump for Dummies

22 oktober 2024 | 34 min

Years from now, the question will go something like this, “where were you when you first realized the media was lying to you about Trump?”

Me, I was watching Trump speak at Mount Rushmore in 2020 just as the COVID lockdowns had abruptly ended to make way for the largest protests in American history. They said it was about systemic racism, but I knew it wasn’t. It was about Trump and all of the forces at play to remove him from power.

Yes, even the protests.

Trump was the first person of any kind of prominence to call out the madness of “cancel culture,” the burning of cities, the violence the media suppressed, and he vowed to do something about it. I didn’t agree with everything he said, but I realized then and there that he was not who I thought he was.

At least half the country has been trapped in a mass delusion for ten years, maybe longer. What else can explain what has happened to so many of them, how they could be so consumed by hatred that they would go along with any punishment enacted upon Trump, or whomever the next person in line behind him will be. Elon Musk? JD Vance?

We joke that it’s TDS or Trump Derangement Syndrome, but I think that’s being too kind.

The good news is that more and more people are waking up to what has been done to us all in the name of preserving the American utopia built under the Obama administration. Trump had to represent racism because how else could they sell him as an “existential threat” to the country?

Says Adam B. Coleman:

I try to remember when it started, this idea that America was under an urgent threat of rising racism and “white supremacy.” It happened around the time of the Tea Party’s founding, the only grassroots movement I’ve ever seen coming from the Right.

For most of my life, the Republicans were the establishment party. After the 2008 Wall Street crash, the Tea Party began mobilizing and forming a powerful coalition that must have worried many in our establishment government.

Just arguing class or economics or dismantling the bloated administrative state would not have convinced hearts and minds to turn on them. They had to be so toxic Americans would never want to associate with them, help them, support them, or even listen to them.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

Why This California Liberal is Voting for Donald Trump

13 oktober 2024 | 30 min

“Once upon a time you dressed so fineThrew the bums a dime in your prime, didn't you?People call say 'beware doll, you're bound to fall'You thought they were all kidding youYou used to laugh aboutEverybody that was hanging outNow you don't talk so loudNow you don't seem so proudAbout having to be scrounging your next mealHow does it feel?” - Bob Dylan

I’ve listened to Bob Dylan’s anthem of alienation, Like a Rolling Stone, so many times throughout my life, but it’s never hit home quite the way it does now as I’ve been exiled by almost everyone I once knew. How does it feel, Bob Dylan asks? It feels like tumbling through space with no place to land. It feels like being trapped in a nightmare. It feels like nothing I’ve ever gone through before.

But it’s too late to turn back now. It’s full steam ahead. Yes, I am a California Liberal voting for Donald J. Trump. Why am I doing it? Why was I willing to destroy my so-called “career,” end friendships overnight, and lose any status I’ve attained in the past 30 years I’ve been online, which, granted, isn’t saying much? The answer is easy. I couldn’t do the other thing.

For many of us, 2020 was like Devil’s Tower in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. We all had the same idea all at once, but we didn’t understand it. We might have come from everywhere, but we all ended up in the same place.

For some, it was the government’s authoritarian crackdown on masks and lockdowns. For others, it was the lies about COVID. But for me, it was suddenly seeing that unseen hands were manipulating us as a form of social control.

It sounds paranoid. I’ll grant you that. I don’t know how else to explain it. I was very much inside the insular feedback loop of the Left. I genuinely believed everything they said on CNN, MSNBC, and the New York Times.

They turned on a dime from COVID hysteria to “systemic racism,” which allowed millions to pour into the streets - the largest protest in American history - amid a global pandemic that had closed schools, churches, and businesses. What was going on?

None of us knew. They wouldn’t tell us anything they did not think we needed to know. As I was crying out on Twitter about how crazy things were getting on the Left, Neera Tanden DM’d me. “You’ve changed,” she said.

I was worried Biden would not win because the protests were too violent. By then, I was finding my news on the Right, where they weren’t as afraid to post videos about what was happening on the streets.

I told Neera Tanden that Trump would benefit from the public's desire for law and order. She told me to keep quiet until after the election. I told her I couldn’t do that, but it did strike me as odd that such a high-level Democrat would care what I thought. But that’s how it is on the Left. No one is allowed to stray from the mandated narrative.

Even now, most people I know on the Left have no idea how bad it got. That’s why they don’t understand the comparisons to January 6th. They only saw one violent riot but they saw it over and over again, yet more proof of social control.

It wasn’t until Bari Weiss resigned from the New York Times after exposing their unwillingness to publish the truth about what was happening on the streets for fear it was racist even just to report on it, that I realized I had to separate myself from the hive mind whose sole mission was to support the Democrats. And that’s how it went for the rest of the year. It was “don’t ask, don’t tell” for a once-mighty movement that now cowered in fear.

But for many of us, it was the summer when we stopped trusting our institutions and our legacy media to tell us the truth about anything.

Everything that happened in 2020 was designed to push Trump out of power. I watched them all but rig the 2020 election using the same unseen hands. I walked away from that election no longer a registered Democrat for the first time in my life.

But that would only be the beginning. The Democrats had the White House, and they had four years to show America they really were the better side, the side that cared about all of us.

Instead, whatever fundamentalist cult had overtaken the Left now spread throughout our government. Biden took his role seriously, using equity for policy and staffing his administration mostly with women, women of color, and members of the LGBTQIA lobby.

And in so doing, he neglected to address the core problem for the Democrats, one that began back in 2008, the crisis that sparked the Fourth Turning. The Wall Street meltdown and subsequent bailout of the banks to the tune of $700 billion.

Two populist movements that threatened the government meant a pivot to what Vivek Ramaswamy calls “woke capitalism.” Focus on identity politics and woke ideology, and they get to do whatever they want to the people of the United States.

They ignored the problem until it exploded in 2016 with Trump’s win. They failed to address the urgent needs of the people and instead went to war on Trump. Now, here we are, all of these years later, and the Democrats still can’t even see the problem, let alone address it.

Instead of unity, we got division. Instead of hope, we got despair. Instead of freedom, the Biden administration and the FBI began censoring speech on social media platforms.

Maybe none of that would have been bad enough to make me a Trump supporter, but it meant I could never vote blue no matter who, ever again, and worse, we now had an even bigger problem to deal with. Could we ever win an election against this unprecedented alignment of power?

I never thought I would vote for Republicans, but that is exactly what I have done, largely due to the embrace of “gender-affirming care” for minor children who cannot consent and the lack of protection for female athletes to compete fairly.

Even now, there are no women, no feminists, no “girl dads” in the Democratic Party. They are too afraid of the activists. So it has to be up to those of us who do have the guts to stand up to them and who are strong enough to survive their attacks.

That was when I knew I had to throw whatever power I had as an American citizen and political activist online into voting for the Republicans. But still, I was not quite ready to cross the Trump line.

Braveheart

It was the humiliation of a former president when they raided Mar-a-Lago, with the whole world watching, that was the last straw for me. It seemed there were no limits to what they could do to Trump, and all of the legacy press and their obedient voters would go along with it, believing any wild fantasy they manifested.

Trump might be selling nuclear secrets to North Korea. Trump might pull out a machine gun and spray the FBI with bullets like Al Pacino in Scarface.

It just got worse from there. The indictments, the Civil trials, the felony conviction - none of the cases were even legit. Here is Megyn Kelly running them down on the All In podcast:

And that was how I transformed from a lonely, shut-in I’m-with-her Democrat into a MAGA meme on X.

Now, I am left wondering why I wouldn’t vote for Trump. Why wouldn’t I do the one thing I know that could end this madness? I know that the minute he wins and he shows them all that he’s not a dictator and he’s not Hitler and the world won’t stop turning on its axis, all of this will finally end, and we can get back to some kind of normal life.

In This House, We Believe

When I began spending time in MAGA world, watching Trump rallies and hanging out with Trump supporters, at least online, I got to know them well. When I reported back to the Left's fear bunker, I tried to explain it to them. I tried to humanize those we’d all been conditioned to hate.

I remember seeing pictures of the faces contorted by hate when schools were ordered to allow Black students to attend — and no, you freaks, I’m not comparing them; I’m just saying that hate is hate, dehumanization is dehumanization, and people always feel justified doing it, and history always condemns them. Always.

But they would not listen to me. They would scream at me, attack me, shun me, try to destroy my business. Even just being kind - practicing what they preached - was crossing a forbidden line.

The attacks against Trump supporters began right around 2015 when Trump’s warnings about the border were interpreted as Hitler-esque racism. That is what justified punching, kicking, spitting on, and, in some cases, even killing Trump supporters.

What is their solution to the “MAGA problem” anyway? Gulags? Concentration camps? Re-education camps? Just exile them to the outer regions and forbid them from participating in the thriving new economy online or in our elections?

Why am I a California liberal voting for Trump? I wake up in a cold sweat every night, and panic runs through me. What have I done? But then I remember I couldn’t do the other thing.

The Case for Trump

I would have voted for Trump just on the lawfare alone, but a funny thing happened in the past few months. Trump built an unprecedented alliance with RFK, Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Vivek Ramaswamy, Nicole Shanahan, and Elon Musk. It was more than I could ever imagine would be on offer in an American election.

Trump’s choice of JD Vance might be the best of all. He chose a running mate who isn’t just window-dressing like poor Tim Walz but a strong leader in his own right.

I’m not getting my hopes up, considering that the powerful people who now control our government have turned to corruption just to cling to power. What won’t they do to stop Trump and drag the unprepared Kamala Harris over the finish line?

But it doesn’t really matter. They might win the battle. They won’t win the war.

I am so proud to be an American today. I finally know why. I know that “Whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.” That’s the wild beauty, the untamed spirit of the American experiment.

It really does look like a brighter future for the kind of America I want to fight for. And suddenly, I feel grateful for the founders who built this crazy people-run government. It was built for moments like this when we all must come together and prove that yes, this is a Republic, and yes, we can keep it.

Trump’s gift is that he doesn’t preach from on high. He makes us all feel like we’re on the same journey, sharing the same space, all one family. How does he still manage to do that after all he’s been through? I don’t know, but I do know that’s the kind of leader, the kind of “dad energy” America needs.

Donald Trump isn’t perfect, but then, neither am I. But I know he loves this country, no matter how many lies they tell about him. He’s changed everything, this “Gray Champion” of the Fourth Turning. And we’re not going back.

//end

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The Slap Not Heard Round the World

9 oktober 2024 | 31 min

When the New York Times asked professional women if they’d ever been sexually assaulted, I answered them, and my story appeared just before the Harvey Weinstein allegations broke. It was Trump’s Access Hollywood tape that turned our world upside down. We’d convinced ourselves that America had just elected a “racist” and a “rapist.”

As a Democrat, you have to be willing to lie. Elections can be won if everyone is on board with the same lie. We lie about our candidates. We lie about the opposition. We lie about ourselves. Otherwise, we’d show weakness. We’d be thrust back into the era of disunity, feckless candidates, and elections we could not win. Oh, but the new Democratic Party knows better.

I lived those lies for years, pretending inwardly that even if it wasn’t the whole truth, it was for the greater good, so it was okay.

When the story broke with a credible accusation that Doug Emhoff, the “wife guy” of Kamala Harris, slapped a woman so hard she turned around, it might have become the kind of story that dominated the headlines for weeks. Only in ordinary times would the press chase a story like that. These are not ordinary times.

If I were still a party loyalist, I, too, would be dismissing and debunking the serious allegation that Doug Emhoff went to a glitzy event at the Hotel du Cap, drank too much, and assaulted his girlfriend of three months because he thought she was flirting with another man.

I would have cheered Jen Psaki on as she helped prop up the image of Emhoff as the shining example of men who stand behind women and support them, not as the guy who allegedly paid off the nanny he knocked up to keep her quiet.

And maybe that’s why the Republicans can’t win elections. They aren’t willing to do what it takes to win. They aren’t willing to come together as one unbreakable chain that goes along with every lie.

If only those who dissent at the National Review or the Wall Street Journal were fully on board with pretending Trump wasn’t who he is - a deeply flawed candidate who happens to be tough enough to go up against the machine. Ah, but the machine didn’t get there by accident. It got there because everyone agreed that lying was the better path forward.

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Trump's Triumphant Return to Butler, PA

4 oktober 2024 | 33 min

Tomorrow, on Saturday, Trump is returning to Butler, PA. Trump and Butler seem connected in ways that make for one of the greatest stories in American history. It wasn’t just the assassination attempt. Butler had come to stand for the quintessential town of the forgotten working class who turned to Trump as their last best hope.

Just before the 2020 election, Tucker Carlson gave the most insightful, eloquent monologue about Trump and his supporters I’d ever heard. It went viral because no one has said it better before or since. And a myth was born. Butler, PA, was the forgotten town that came alive when Trump decided to shine a light on it.

So it was already MAGA lore by the time Trump returned to Butler to campaign for his 2024 run and was very nearly assassinated. What could represent the time we’re living in better than that? The Democrats will tell themselves it’s “just the guns,” and that their gun control would have stopped this shooter from attempting to take Trump’s life.

Yet we know that is not the truth. It wasn’t random gun violence this shooter sought, but fame. We don’t know everything there is to know about that day. The press has not exactly been drawn to this story, probably because they fear it will help Trump. So, we don’t know much about the shooter. As of right now, he remains a mystery, as does the strange coincidence of Trump being nearly killed in Butler, of all places.

In yet another strange twist of fate, Tucker Carlson and his producer, Justin Wells, happened to be filming a documentary following Trump on the campaign trail. That meant a full camera crew was ready to capture every second as it unfolded. Most of the footage shown in this documentary has never been seen before, and it is extraordinary.

Episodes 1 and 2 of The Art of the Surge are now playing on Tuckercarlson.com. Here is a clip of the assassination attempt combined with various videos from rallygoers:

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It's The Crisis of Masculinity, Stupid

30 september 2024 | 26 min

It seems to have suddenly occurred to the Democrats that they have a problem with men. Oh, we know they have a problem with men. That’s all we’ve heard about for the past ten years ever since Donald Trump committed the great crime of beating Hillary Clinton.

I know because I used to be one of them — the #stillwithher type who marched with hundreds of thousands of women to protest the Trump election. And the one who said #metoo and fought every day as a brave member of the resistance? Yeah, that was me. But to quote Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven, I ain’t like that no more.

And speaking of Clint Eastwood, you know what was a universal attraction for men and women? Masculine male heroes. And you want to know what Hollywood decided it didn’t need anymore? Masculine male heroes. Hollywood’s problem is now the Democrats’ problem. The box office has become a ghost town, and men are fleeing the Democratic Party in droves.

This gave someone in the Harris/Walz campaign the bright idea to form “White Dudes for Harris,” one of the most ill-conceived campaign pitches of my lifetime. It’s as though an extraterrestrial came down to the planet Earth and thought, “How can we lure in the males of this species?”

Apparently, the Harris campaign is spending $10 million on this mess. Do they really think they’re going to convince a single “white dude” with that ad? Maybe the self-hating ones.

But it won’t work. The reasons they cite for choosing the Democrats are all of the main reasons so many are voting for Trump in the first place. To quote Robert DeNiro playing a man afflicted with “toxic masculinity” in Raging Bull, it defeats its own purpose.

The only men who would proudly and publicly join that group are men who have no self-respect left because they’ve spent much of the past decade apologizing for their existence and de-centering themselves from the narrative, all the while getting a pat on the head from the women in their lives. The more wealth and power they have, the more likely they’ll put on that shirt and shake that groove thing.

And they’re surprised somehow that it didn’t work, that men didn’t flock to join a group that drained their testosterone faster than walking in on James Carville’s grandma naked. How did they think this was a good idea again? What preachy millennial childless cat lady made that call?

Meanwhile, Jen Paski does what many of the women of the Left do: attempt to redefine their idea of masculinity. Even Doug Emhoff isn’t buying it. He looks terrified, like he’s gotten in too deep, and he can’t find his way out of this mess.

I don’t want to insult Tim Walz or Doug Emhoff. I would never want to make them feel bad about things they can’t help, like masculinity, but BRUH. They would be what one might call sensitive men. No one out there is buying that Tim Walz is the masculine male role model that will bring back male voters. He’s just not that guy.\

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Mama Bears for Trump

26 september 2024 | 25 min

I’ll never forget the moment when I realized what being a mother meant. It wasn’t the 18 hours of labor or crying out for the nurse to hand me my newborn daughter or that I held her to my chest for a full two weeks after I brought her home. No, it was the day she walked behind me, and I dipped my toe in the pool. When she copied me, she fell in. I didn’t realize it at first, but then I didn’t hear her behind me anymore. I turned around to see her in the pool starting to sink.

As I dove in to save her and felt that superhero strength all mothers are born with, I knew at that moment there was nothing I would not do to keep this child safe. I wasn’t just a mother, though. I was a Mama Bear. You know, the most feared animal in nature? No one messes with a mother grizzly. They know what will happen if they do.

Mama Bears are not born, they are made. It’s a pilot light that is only ignited when danger is near. Even now, with my daughter grown, just try it, pal. Just TRY IT. We are Mama Bears because we know it’s a dangerous world in many ways. No one can guarantee a life free of car accidents, mass shootings, random explosions or violent crime.

We never had a man around to protect us, which would have been nice but for me, it was my boot camp. I had to keep her safe. At some point, I had to let go and allow my daughter to live her life. But I sit here, across the country, with a pilot light forever lit. Just try it, pal. JUST TRY IT.

I knew I had to leave the Democratic Party in 2020 because I believed they’d lost their minds and lost their way. I could no longer align myself with people who believed all of this country, its government, its culture, its economy belonged to them - the party of the elites.

It wasn’t until I started venturing out of my feedback loop of the New York Times, MSNBC, and NPR that I began to see things I’d never heard about before. Had I not been listening to Blocked and Reported, I would never have heard of “gender-affirming care” or the rising crisis of children sucked into what I now believe is a cult.

I knew some kids were trans. It didn’t become a thing until my daughter was in high school. Only one of her friends said she wanted “top surgery” and to now be referred to as a boy’s name. But when she went to college, two of her roommates had swapped genders, a boy she had a crush on had fully transitioned to female. I did start to wonder, what’s going on?

The more I heard about it, the more I began to panic. Young girls were showing off scars where healthy breasts used to be. Young men being castrated and all of them losing their fertility long before the age of consent because of puberty blockers? And worse, there was a growing ideology that children as young as toddlers should be able to decide their gender.

But it wasn’t until I heard the stories of detransitioners that I knew we were facing a once-in-a-generation medical scandal, and everyone was too afraid to say anything about it. If you mentioned it, you would be attacked and even, at one point, banned from Twitter.

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Dear Hollywood: Read the Room

24 september 2024 | 26 min

Rachel Maddow and the Madman

19 september 2024 | 37 min

Trump's Surprising Secret Weapon: Sympathy

12 september 2024 | 28 min

Kamala Harris believes she “won” the debate. It’s hard to argue with that conclusion. But there were unintended consequences her team did not factor in. And that is sympathy for Trump, or as they would tell it on the Left, “sympathy for the Devil.”

Please to meet you. Hope you guessed my name.

I, too, thought Kamala Harris had won the debate. By the end, I was so demoralized, so sad, and so full of despair that I just went to bed and hoped it would be gone by morning.

I knew it wasn’t just a debate. It’s much bigger than that. It’s a TIME magazine cover. It’s Frank Luntz and the Spectator declaring the debate will cost Trump the election. It’s a thousand points of light on Twitter, a once-great coalition undone by ugliness for ten long years.

It’s a Stephen Colbert monologue. It’s a Taylor Swift endorsement. It’s the center of Bill Maher’s entire universe on Friday night. It will be Saturday Night Live. It’s too big. Too insurmountable. It’s everything, everywhere, all at once.

Or is it?

When I woke up, scrolled through TikTok, and read the post-debate polls, I found headline after headline declaring voters' choice for president unmoved. It made no difference whatsoever, and, if anything, sympathy tipped in Trump’s direction, and Harris suddenly became as unlikable or “likable enough” as Hillary Clinton.

Why?

Because the Trump haters have destroyed themselves and any good thing they ever stood for trying to destroy him, and at some point, the worm turned.

They are so close to what they believe is the total destruction of Trump they can taste it. But I watched Trump somehow survive the debate unscathed. Something about his ability to not attack Harris adequately worked in his favor. Call it the Charlie Brown effect.

Harris made the fundamental mistake of leaving her JOY™ and unity hats at the door and putting on her prosecutor’s hat. Had she shown up as a gracious, respectful, serious person ready to answer serious questions, she might have won over some voters. That wasn’t what happened. She showed up as a hybrid between Hillary Clinton and the ladies of The View.

We have a brighter future ahead, she declared. But those words ring hollow since she’s been in power for almost four years. How many more false promises can the Democrats make at the people’s expense? They promised that they were the better side, the optimistic side, the unity side, the ADULTS in the room.

Not only have they failed — in Afghanistan, at the border, at our grocery stores, in our schools, and on our streets — but they have lurched toward corruption unseen and unprecedented in this country’s history, up to and including hiding a cognitively impaired president — who is still in office, by the way — and pulling a fast one on us that Kamala Harris is suddenly something new.

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Interview with Me by Paul Finn of the Generation Report

10 september 2024 | 82 min

WaPo's Matt Bai is Okay with Dehumanizing Trump Supporters

9 september 2024 | 33 min

There is nothing more loathsome to the average upper-crust liberal intellectual than an American holding Donald Trump’s book in one arm and the Bible in the other. At least, that’s what the stock image on Matt Bai’s column in the Washington Post tells us.

Matt Bai — political columnist and one-time screenwriter for a DOA film about Gary Hart called The Front Runner — is going to give the Left all the justification it needs to continue their ongoing hate campaign against ordinary Americans.

He writes:

But now? After the violent sacking of the Capitol? After Trump’s promise to behave like a dictator (well, okay, I guess if it’s only for a day)? After eight years of bigotry and baseness and flat-out lies?

To say that Trump’s voters aren’t aware of these things, or don’t fully comprehend them, or are firmly in the grip of misinformation, is to say that they’re simply fools. And I’ve met way too many rural Americans to believe that. If they’re ignorant, then their ignorance, at this point, is willful.

It’s a rebuttal to a column by Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times pleading with the Left to find their humanity when it comes to Trump and MAGA.

It isn’t enough that Kristof writes:

By all means denounce Trump, but don’t stereotype and belittle the nearly half of Americans who have sided with him.

We can’t separate them, argues Bai. If they support Trump then they are the named enemy. They are not worthy of our empathy, at least not until — he hopes — Kamala Harris wins the presidency. Then, they might thaw out and treat them like they belong in the country they love. Don’t bet on it. Bai writes:

These voters don’t support Trump because they labor under some illusion that he’s going to rescue their communities — not anymore. They support him because he’s willing to blow up the country if it means teaching insufferable intellectuals a lesson, and so are they. It’s the same vengeful impulse that leads to autocracy in unequal societies all over the world. It is, at its core, unpatriotic, no matter how many flags you fly, or how many ways you try to rationalize it.

Are you starting to see why The Front Runner flopped?

The Frontrunner is a rescue operation for Gary Hart’s legacy. It was the mean old media, you see, a media that has suddenly grown a conscience because now they don’t do their jobs of chasing stories lest they weaken a weak candidate like Gary Hart or Kamala Harris. Instead, they spread propaganda on why America should hate and fear Trump and his supporters lest they be accused of “normalizing” them.

The Front Runner was bad for the same reason The Washington Post and the New York Times are unreadable: their bias suffocates any practical purpose they might have otherwise had. It’s like spending time with the kid who sits in the front of the class, always raising his hand with the right answer. After a while, you overdose on the sanctimony.

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Kamala Harris’ Run for the Presidency Looks Like an Oscar Campaign.

6 september 2024 | 27 min

America is Being Love-Bombed by the Harris Campaign

25 augusti 2024 | 32 min

America is being love-bombed by the Kamala Harris campaign. It’s been confusing and disorienting, but so many are going along with it because how can they not? Being love-bombed is hard to resist.

Yes, love-bombed. That is what all of this looks like. And as any dimestore trauma therapist will tell you, those who are the most insecure are the ones who must love-bomb to erase any doubt or critical thinking.

They know Kamala Harris is one bad interview away from losing this election. They know she’s still the same Kamala that turned off so much of the American public. They know that sooner or later, she will get triggered, and that temper will come out. They know they have nothing else but this big lie they’re all going along with.

None of the past four years will mean anything, not amid a storm of love-bombing. Harris can say anything, be anything, pretend anything, and she will get nothing but eyes in the shape of hearts looking back at her.

Yes, much of it is “mass formation psychosis,” coined by Mattias Desmet, as we slouch toward a technocratic totalitarian state.

During 2020, while we were all on lockdown, those online became part of a mass formation. Once they came together as one group that would go along with no masks, then masks, then mostly peaceful protests, then systemic racism, then vaccines, then lockdowns, then “cancel culture,” and finally, a weaponized DOJ against Trump - they were both terrorized and compliant by the end of it.

They had a volunteer army of fanatics who would punish them publicly if they said the wrong thing or stepped out of line. That kind of fear does strange things to a community, and it hasn’t gone away.

The formation is so united and so full of hatred and rage that our government could erect concentration camps or gulags and start throwing Trump and MAGA away, and all of them would celebrate. Bette Midler, Barbra Streisand, Rob Reiner, and Stephen King would cheer.

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The Weirdness of Manufactured Joy

19 augusti 2024 | 24 min

Adopting Positions from Her Rivals is a Signature Move for Kamala Harris

18 augusti 2024 | 34 min

"Joy" ™ or How to Beat a Forever Regime

11 augusti 2024 | 32 min

How do you solve a problem like Kamala Harris? If you criticize or attack her, you’ll be seen as a “racist” by the powerful people on the Left, which fuels their momentum and reminds them of their collective sense of purpose.

Why is she ahead in the polls now? Because it feels good to vote for her, it’s as simple as that. It’s time for a woman, they proclaim, especially a woman of color.

Kamala Harris has now made history four times as the first woman and first woman of color District Attorney, Attorney General, Senator, and Vice President. She only has one more win for a clean sweep, President of the United States.

They tried so many different ways to recapture the magic of the 2008 Obama coalition only to realize it was there the whole time. All they needed was the “female Obama.” Everything else fell into place.

Their Obama/Trump origin story of the angry white man who tried to destroy the angelic Black man is all coming back in a Proustian rush. Let’s finish the job, they all think. Let’s finally vanquish the bad orange racist man forever with our warrior, Queen Kamala.

So what do you do? How to beat her? For one thing, you don’t allow her to define your campaign. MAGA is not the party of darkness. MAGA is the party of joy. The Democrats have given us one long dark winter since Biden took office. They can’t just suddenly pretend that Harris wasn’t part of that.

Their propaganda machine is astonishing:

Imagine how the Bidens must be feeling right about now. Are they feeling any joy™? Do they like it that George Clooney and Reid Hoffman pushed him out and selected Kamala Harris? Do you think they’re feeling joy™, watching the mania play out with happy smiles, laughter, and awkward dancing from Tim Walz? Yay we got rid of Joe, aren’t we happy?

I want Trump to win not just because of the lawfare that sets a dangerous precedent going forward, especially with Harris as president. But also because I worry that the nation’s schoolchildren will be indoctrinated into the madness of the Left starting as early as preschool. Just imagine the kinds of Executive Orders Harris will sign.

But beating them is not going to be easy. We now see they will do anything, say anything, tell any lie, become anybody, corrupt the system any way they want just to win.

The Trump campaign has their work cut out for them.

Start with this:

They are not the party of JOY™

What Trump did with “fake news,” he can do with the word, “Joy™” Take it back.

Joy™, per the Harris/Walz campaign, translates to: “Let them eat cake.”

Let them eat fentanylLet them eat high crimeLet them eat inflationLet them eat the flood of illegal immigrantsLet them eat high gas prices

Examples:

Attacking Her Directly Will Backfire

The rules on the Left are different from the rules on the right, as we learned from this poll that showed white Liberals dumb down their speech when talking to minorities, and Conservatives don’t.

The press won’t be hard on her for that same reason. They’re deathly afraid of being called racists. They could lose their jobs for that. Independents might feel the same way, protective of her and hostile toward Trump and Vance.

Let the Trump/Vance team now be the party of hope and change, because for millions of Americans, that is exactly what it is.

Barack Obama owns “hope and change,” but the only change they meant was making history. The change that’s needed now is about class, not race. But using these words will put the Harris side on defense and will probably make them angry, making it harder to take the high road.

How to Campaign against Kamala Harris

The first thing you need to know about campaigning against Harris is that she did not come to play. She has been preparing for this moment nearly all of her life.

Harris is no amateur when it comes to winning elections. There is nothing she does better than what she is doing right now: making history by winning an election against a white man.

She already believes this is her ultimate battle against the “evil racists” who stormed the Capitol. Someone on Twitter made a video intercutting her January 6th speech with the riots and the violence in the Summer of 2020. But listen carefully to what she says.

The Good White Liberals see themselves as saviors, so even just mentioning the riots in 2020 is strictly verboten, but everyone should remember how they hid much of that from us and shamed us for caring about the people whose lives and businesses were destroyed.

Harris has been making history all of her life with only wins and no losses, but she also prepared a statement, a quote from her mother, when asked about it.

She said the same thing on the Oprah Show where they called her the “first African-American female District Attorney.”

Her star continued to rise when she was profiled on Lifetime right around that same time:

That led to her being name-checked in the New York Times even before Barack Obama won in 2008.

Harris aligned with Obama early, and their relationship has been essential, not just because she had the golden light of The King upon her, which elevated her profile—she was even called the “female Obama”—but because he likely “saved” her from bombing out in the primary and was likely the main reason she was selected as the candidate (don’t buy the lie that he did not endorse her).

She began her run for Attorney General right after Obama won in 2008.

On her YouTube page is a practice speech from 2008, “If I were president.” She was crafting an early message that America has problems and you don’t have to love your country unconditionally.

Eight years later, she gave more or less the same speech with some changes.

The thing is, if you are running for president you do have to love your country unconditionally because that’s your job. Trump should call her out on that.

Harris first made history when she became the first woman of color in the DA’s office in San Francisco, where she ran what Politico called a “Ruthless” campaign,” and sent out campaign ads to remind voters of the all-male, all-white history:

//

end

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How Did Orwell Know?

6 augusti 2024 | 28 min

A few days ago, a reporter from one of the trades asked me for an interview. I knew there could only be one reason she would want to interview me, and it wasn’t to talk about how I ran a website for 25 years on the Oscar race.

It wouldn’t be that I raised a baby as a single mother and launched my site out of a guest house in Van Nuys, California, or that I’d worked as a sports photographer, a fake horoscope writer, a film reviewer, a janitor, and a teacher’s aide to raise my daughter without sending her to daycare and somehow built a successful business anyway.

No. This had to be about my politics and why they changed.

How did a Barack Obama devotee, an I’m With Her Hillary Clinton supporter, and a Joe Biden faithful from way back find my way into not only voting for Trump but actively trying to help the Republicans defeat the Democrats?

Now that’s a story, “How Did an Oscar Blogger become a far-right radical?”

The pitch wasn’t exactly about that. It was more about how I plan to navigate being a dissident heretic while also running a successful business in an industry that is now the same organism as the government.

I’ve been asked this question many times by people on the Right and have given many interviews to explain “what happened to me.” But this is the first time anyone on the Left, or inside the bubble of the Left, asked me to explain it.

And that’s because one, two, three, all eyes are on me. I did a boo-boo on Twitter that now has me in the crosshairs at long last. It was one thing when I stood up for JK Rowling or Ansel Elgort or when I pushed back on the hysteria that Green Book was “racist.” When Trump is involved, it’s bigger than just your average internet pile-on. This time it could mean the end of whatever it is I’ve built over at AwardsDaily.com.

The story will be about how my politics changed, or more specifically, why I felt like I could get away with a satirical tweet that said “White Power” while mocking the “White Dudes for Harris.”

Is it bad to mock white people? I thought they were fair game. Or is just saying those words bad? Some people decided that it meant something beyond that. I don’t check my mentions anymore, so I had no idea this wave of hysteria was even occurring. But then a friend wrote to “ask me about it.”

It was as though I was secretly joining the white power movement on Twitter and was signaling to all of my friends in the KKK that, look, it’s cool to be white people celebrating our whiteness again! Of course, it’s not. It’s just that they have a habit on the left of memory-holing their insanity and moving the goalposts. We’re all supposed to keep up.

Four years ago, there could have been no “white dudes for Biden” or “white dudes for Barack Obama.” It would be called any number of things, from white saviorism (which this most surely was) and even borderline racism. But not in 2024! Anything goes because they say so.

I could have deleted the tweet and apologized profusely. But I know the game, brother. They once called me a “white supremacist” for saying it wasn’t only white people who committed hate crimes (fact check true). But in my world, no matter how crazy or blatant the hypocrisy gets, you should never say a word about it.

Apologize and beg for forgiveness. Maybe they’ll give you a break. No, they won’t. They will screenshot the tweet and send it around and around. By the end of this madness, it will land in the lap of a reporter who wonders, “What happened to her?”

How did Orwell know enough to write Children's Spies in 1984? How did he know the young would be so susceptible to fanaticism? Because, of course, he knew. That’s why capturing the youth is so important to cults and utopias and why they separate the kids from the parents, as the Democrats are trying to do now.

It’s my own fault. I could have shut up, kept my head down, and complied with all of the demands—think they do, write like they do, believe what they believe, and always apologize for “mistakes made.” I could have done that. But then I think about Winston Smith and 1984. How did Orwell know?

He knew that utopias must become totalitarian dystopias because how else to maintain the purity and the vision? We’re living everything from that book, even a government that has now been weaponized to punish thought crimes.

They have condemned and convicted Trump and his supporters as “racists,” which means anything can be done to them, and no one will say a thing. Steve Bannon is in prison for the crucial months leading up to the election. The last time someone was in jail for that crime was Ring Lardner of the Hollywood Ten.

If Orwell wanted to write a book that would call out to the future to warn us that this isn’t what we want for our country, much less our culture, then loudmouths like Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and me will have to take the hit because no one else will.

Winston Smith is an obedient member of Oceana whose thoughts take him to dangerous places. Big Brother doesn’t like him remembering great books or language deemed useless. Even love is strictly forbidden. That’s how Winston finds himself being forced to admit 2+2=5.

I still feel like a liberal at heart. I still care about climate change. I still believe we should all have access to good healthcare, no matter how rich we are. So many of the issues that used to be standard for Democrats have been warped and distorted beyond the point of recognition.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

[Listen] JD Vance is a Hero

4 augusti 2024 | 14 min

[This is the podcast version of an already posted story]

It’s too late for me. I followed the feminist lie through most of my life, only to wake up much too late to have lived it a better way. You see, it takes a while to realize that it really is about the warm body next to you. It is about the laughing children and grandchildren. It is about the stories, the recipes, the memories, the picnics, the vacations.

No, life is never going to be perfect. There will be problems with every family, unforgettable tragedies, broken hearts, and dreams deferred. And there are sometimes mothers who become addicted to drugs. Not everyone grows up easy. Some of us barely make it out alive.

As I watched The Machine surround JD Vance like a pack of hyenas going in for the kill, I was disgusted on so many levels. I am sure if the Right had that kind of power, they’d probably abuse it, too. People are people, and power corrupts. But still, the level of depravity was shocking, even for them.

The absence of empathy in a culture defined by trauma is what defines the new Left. Their trauma. Someone else’s trauma. Trauma from our past. Every kid growing up on the Left will be fed one psych med or another.

When Donald Trump was shot, there was just a moment where there was a pause. Wait, they all seemed to think, are we supposed to feel something?

Yes, you are supposed to feel something. It’s called humanity. Empathy. I have been cursed with too much empathy. I get a double dose from each of my parents. My dad loved his cat Freddy so much he couldn’t bear to get him “fixed,” so he let him out to produce untold amounts of wild kittens. One day, Freddy was hit by a car, and my dad never really recovered. He loved that cat.

My mom had so much empathy that for a while there, she couldn’t bear to see her chickens sitting on unfertilized eggs, so she went to the pet store and bought fertilized eggs so they could hatch. But she kept producing too many roosters and didn’t know what to do with them, so she moved the roosters to another property she owned. I joked with her that it was like a male prison. Please, send over some hens.

And me, well, I can barely clip the leaves off of a basil plant without feeling bad about it. I save spiders. One video of an abused dog will ruin my entire year. It’s a curse—too much empathy.

But that’s what I feel when I think about JD Vance, what he’s gone through in life, and how he’s come out of it such a fine young man with a beautiful family and a promising future.

It reminds me of that wonderful scene in The Shawshank Redemption, written by Stephen King before he became Trump deranged, and back when Hollywood could still make great movies.

JD Vance said something, so what? You can’t grow up with a foul-mouthed Mamaw and not fire off a zinger now and again. I grew up with that kind of mother, a mouth so foul she’d make a sailor blush. I often remember her screaming at cars that drove by, “You mother f*cking c*cksucker!”

That’s probably why I can’t shut up. And probably why JD can’t either. But that’s not why he’s my hero. That’s a different story entirely. It has to do with growing up like a weed. You don’t really belong any place. You grow up strong anyway because something in your DNA makes you a survivor. No hothouse flower was he, nor carefully tended garden plant, but a fast-growing, persistent, ever-present weed.

I grew up not that differently than he did—the kind of family where the men leave, and the women go a little crazy. At least there were no drug addicts, but I know what it is to long for normalcy so bad it aches. I know what it is to visit “normal” families and feel envious that there were two parents, that they sat down and ate dinner, and there was lunch money.

I know what it is to keep going, no matter what ghosts chase you. I know what it is to be underestimated by everyone, but never let anyone stop you. I never fought in the Iraq war like he did. I couldn’t last one day of training to be a Marine. And I’m pretty sure I couldn’t become a Senator like he did, much less a candidate for the Vice Presidency. But I know what it is to try at life anyway.

JD Vance is my hero because everything he’s done so far in life has not killed his faith in himself, his family, his mother, and his country. I would say in his God, but I don’t know if he is religious, and I would feel like a phony if I said it that way. I’m not quite there yet. I guess I just mean this life can take you down. If you can somehow survive it, it’s a miracle.

Donald Trump said JD Vance cares about family to explain away why he is adamant about supporting mothers with kids. You’d have to grow up the way he did and the way I did to understand why someone would be so protective of the family unit. He did not have it growing up, but it was something he longed for. I know that because I felt the same way.

If the worst thing he ever did was generalize about “Childless cat ladies,” that’s not that big of an offense. The second part of it was specifically about politicians who have less of a stake in the future. Yes, it will probably alienate some voters, but honestly, is that really how you go about voting? Something someone said turns you off so you’ll vote for the totalitarians?

Maybe Trump could have picked someone who would pull in a swing state, as the Democrats do. He could have picked “a woman.” But I’m glad he picked a survivor, a tough Marine who can take whatever they have to throw at him. We know that because he’s already survived the worst of it. We hope.

I don’t know what will happen in this crazy election. It’s the totalitarians vs. the populists. But anyone who blames JD Vance for Trump’s loss, should he lose, is a fool. Trump and Vance aren’t running against other candidates. They’re running against an entire system. Don’t kid yourselves. They will attack and destroy anyone who threatens their power.

So here’s to you, JD. Thanks for fighting the good fight.

END//

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[Listen] Yes, Trump Should Debate Harris

4 augusti 2024 | 31 min

[This was already posted as a story, here is the podcast version]

Trump is under no obligation to debate Kamala Harris, who was hand-picked for the nomination without so much as a single vote. They can’t just change the rules and expect everyone else to comply. On the other hand, it might not be a bad idea.

Trump can do the job the media will not. A debate might be the only time Harris will be made to answer any tough questions before the election. True, Trump runs the risk of the debate going badly for him and tipping the race to Harris - and he should listen to smarter minds than mine — but here are some things to consider.

He towers over her

If it’s a standing debate people should see the height differential. Do we want a tiny woman of 5’2 facing off Putin and Xi?

Even Hillary Clinton, at 5’5, is taller than Harris.

Here is Harris and Biden.

Trump should debate town hall-style or a standing debate for this reason. Americans are looking for strength, not weakness.

Harris likes attacking powerful men, but it often backfires.

Her attacks on men often seem, at least to me, like sound and fury signifying nothing. She tends to ask the same question repeatedly, and because it looks and sounds serious, we’re all supposed to see her as “tough.” But much of the time, there is no THERE there.

Harris went along with pushing Al Franken out of the Senate. She was a passionate believer in Russiagate and is thought of by women on the Left as the Trump destroyer. I have my doubts.

* Trump can make her look bad by coming off as a kinder, gentler version of the villain the media sells.

* Trump should be the sane one, not the crazy one.

* Trump should be nice when she is being mean.

* Trump should always pivot away from personal attacks against him to how they should be serving the people, as in, “If you spent half as much time trying to make life better for Americans instead of trying to put me in jail maybe your approval numbers would be higher.”

* “All you had to do in four years was offer people something better. You never could. That’s why they want me back. They’re desperate for anyone who will care about them instead of focusing only on identity politics.”

* “The American people are disgusted by how authoritarian this administration became. Harris will only make that worse. You won’t recognize this country after she gets through with it.”

* “This election shouldn’t be about making history for one person. It should be about making America great again for all people.”

Question her competence since becoming Veep

Harris has always been greeted with admiration and love by the media. She has failed upwards in her career, thanks to her mentorship by very powerful men, including Barack Obama.

That’s not to say she isn’t a good Attorney General or Senator. But as Vice President, she failed. She was the worst Vice President in United States history.

As long as Trump stays completely away from race or her sexual past and keeps it focused on her incompetence, she will flail.

She Betrayed Joe Biden

Harris betrayed Joe Biden not once, but twice. First, she launched an emotional accusation of racism against him:

She even sold t-shirts.

She then wrote it off as “just a debate.” Even sycophant Stephen Colbert was taken aback by this lame excuse.

She was lying at the debate, later to Joe, or to Colbert. Either way, she was lying.

She acted loyal to Joe Biden, but when it came down to it, she was happy to agree to the 25th Amendment her good friend Joe to force him out. That’s the story, anyway.

Trump should call her out on that. Who else will? If Trump does not debate her, the American public will never hear any of it.

The Last Person in the Room

Per Joe Biden, Harris was “the last person in the room” on his worst decisions—the last person in the room on Afghanistan, the last person in the room on the border, and the last person in the room on inflation.

Harris owns all of it. She owns being that close to Joe Biden “multiple times per day” and saying nothing of his cognitive decline. Here, just after the debate, she insists Biden is capable and just had a bad night. Did she really believe that or was the plan already in the works and she was playing the part of the loyal Veep?

She owns the withdrawal from Afghanistan. If Joe Biden didn’t know what he was doing, she most certainly didn’t. Is that who we want as Commander in Chief?

Afghanistan:

The Border

Harris must be held accountable for the rapes and murders because of the failed border policy.

Here is a montage of the crisis at the border, with the rapes and murders intercut with Harris’ excuses.

Inflation

It goes on and on. This administration has been one failure after another. She will never be held accountable unless Trump debates her.

How she loses her cool…

For the entirety of Harris’ career, you can count the number of hard interviews or criticisms she’s received on one hand. When confronted, which is rare, she doesn’t handle it well. As Bob Dylan would say, “She breaks just like a little girl.” AND THAT LITTLE GIRL WAS ME!

You just have to know which buttons to press. With Harris, nothing sends her into a tailspin like questioning her competence. Although she has been praised for decades for being a winner, she was a loser throughout the Biden administration and is now responsible for the state of the country.

She is not just running on Joe Biden’s record but also on her record as the “last person in the room.”

Lester Holt pressed her on her competency and kept pressing until she snapped.

This reporter did the same thing. It didn’t go well.

Her laugh, or her cackle, seems to hide the intense emotions that bubble up within her. She will lash out when she gets angry enough, and Trump should expect to see some of that in the debate.

Here is an example making the rounds on social media:

Trump should do everything he can to hit those pressure points where she feels weak. For her, that’s anyone questioning the job she has done. She could not handle the low approval numbers she received because, for her entire career, she’s been love-bombed by the media.

Here are some suggested pressure points:

* “If it weren’t for Obama, she’d never be Vice President or a presidential candidate. No other candidate who did that badly in the 2020 primary would have been made Vice President. And certainly no Vice President who did that badly would not be selected to run as President.”

* “She wrecked San Francisco.”

* “She’s more sympathetic to illegal migrants than the citizens of the United States.”

* “She went to visit Jacob Blake’s family after Kenosha burned to the ground on the lie that Blake was unarmed and there to break up a fight. He was armed, and he was about to kidnap the children. She didn’t care about the destroyed businesses or the crime in the cities after Defund the Police. She bailed out protesters.”

* “Who is the real Kamala Harris? No one knows. They’re just going to put her in office and see what happens. What could possibly go wrong?”

* “She flip-flops on whatever is popular at the time. No one even knows where she stands on any issue. She pretends to be tough on crime. But she refused to seek the death penalty for a cop-killer, choosing politics over justice.”

* “She believes in equity over equality of opportunity.”

* She is fully on board with “gender-affirming care” on minors and is supportive of biological men playing in women’s sports.

* “It’s time to turn the page. The American people want change, not the same old thing by people who don’t care about them.”

None of this will get through unless Trump agrees to debate Harris, even on her terms. It might be the only chance the American people will have to hear her speak without a teleprompter.

Trump should agree to debate her on ABC and still follow through with the debate on Fox. He should use that time to dismantle the Harris candidacy and potential presidency, with special guest stars JD Vance, Tulsi Gabbard, and Glenn Greenwald.

If Trump skips this opportunity, the media will write the narrative, and that will help them drag her over the finish line. And that won’t be the worst thing in the world. Their empire is collapsing no matter what. Trump can go play golf and live out his life having rescued his legacy. On the other hand, Harris is exactly the kind of president who will make the Biden DOJ look like child’s play.

//end

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"Get Me a Normie White Guy"

30 juli 2024 | 22 min

Just when you thought America was No Country for White Men, the Democrats have once again rewritten their own rules. White people, even white men, are in. And all to show up for the coronation of the first woman of color to win an election without ever having won a primary.

It was never losing democracy. They were worried that the wrong people would have a say in this democracy. And in their minds, it was white men. Well, what a difference a Joe Biden stepping down makes.

Next, on the Greatest Show on Earth will be the choice of Veep. Desperate not to fumble the ball on their way to making history, it has been decided that it must be a WHITE MALE, preferably heterosexual.

After five years or more of de-centering white men and heterosexuality from movies, culture, and politics, it’s the white guy they now need. But it can’t be a white guy at the top of the ticket. The dream machine would never get away with that. He has to ride shotgun, like a driving instructor at the DMV.

We’re all supposed to pretend like history is really being made when, in fact, it’s history being manufactured. Harris did nothing to earn her place except be a woman of color.

I would not call that DEI, only because it’s an easy way for self-righteous people to get up on their high horses and start lecturing you about racism. No, I would talk about equity instead. If someone hands you a job you either aren’t ready for or don’t deserve, you never get the credit. The white person giving you the job gets the credit. But if you fail, you’re on your own.

For white people, especially rich white people, that’s the greatest thing ever. Finally, real purpose at long last. Finally, absolution for their sins of wealth and privilege.

The hunt for a white dude to fill the slot of Veep is looking like The Bachelor back when all the contestants were white, a legacy that would come back to haunt them later. So far, none of the shrill social justice warriors are demanding Harris pick someone other than a white male. They care about winning, too, so whatever.

The problem for them is that the names buzzing about now are all politicians who might upstage Harris. How to pick the Tim Kaine of the bunch and still defeat Trump?

We know identity matters on the Left more than anything, so this isn’t really about whether Harris can do the job. It’s whether they can prop her up to make it seem like she can.

Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro, Arizona’s Mark Kelly, and Minnesota’s Tim Walz all would have done better in the primary than Harris if there had been a primary. They have twice her accomplishments and a better record. But for now, they will merely be a symbol of reassurance, like a security camera to ward off criminals.

I guess “normie white guys” are good for something after all.

Vote for Kamala Harris or you’re a racist!

No group is more narcissistic and yet more self-hating than liberal white women. I should know. I was one. We spent so many decades on self-improvement to try to rid ourselves of the self-hate. Therapy that went nowhere except to make us focus even more on ourselves. Drugs that perhaps took the edge off like booze used to do. Fitness, meditation, and eventually Ozempic.

That must be why the Harris campaign thought gathering all of those white women on a Zoom call to “show up” for Harris was a good idea. Suddenly, the Harris campaign is defined by “white power.”

A white Veep to temper Harris, and now, white women to get a strict talking-to about how they have to do everything they can to ensure the woman of color wins. But just in case, they’re hitching a white man along for the ride.

To sum it up in agonizing, torturous detail is Ariell Fodor, one of those terrifying millennial women who want to control everything we say, think, do, eat, and drive. They all read “white fragility,” and they’ve already de-centered themselves from the narrative. She probably has an abandoned Tumblr out there populated with cancel culture call-outs and social justice screeds.

White power at long last, courtesy of the Harris campaign:

Not to be outdone, the white men were ready too.

The Great White Heterosexual Man Scare

I didn’t need this political election to see that the Left has all but eliminated heterosexual men from the narrative. They’ve vanished from movies almost completely. If they do exist, they’re shunted to the background as the girl boss saves the day.

It now seems obvious that what was threatening about Trump has been his unapologetic masculinity. It isn’t that Trump showcases it, but he is a masculine man who has a long history of womanizing. That he could win an election against a woman drove the first major mass hysteria event on the Left, and sparked the Me Too movement.

All manner of sexuality is allowed in parades, in parks, and in restaurants as long as the male is gay or trans. Heterosexual men are seen as perverts and predators if they express any of their sexuality.

And it’s their sexuality that the Democrats are attempting to target with this new ad depicting them as creepy and “weird.”

The word of the day that the zombie robots on the Left repeated and repeated and repeated.

There’s just one problem. They’re the weird side, and everyone knows it. In their minds, anything normal is bad. Having kids is bad. Having abortions is good. Getting married is bad. Casual sex is good. Serving in the military, attending college, and becoming a Senator is bad. Bouncing around on psych meds aimlessly until you decide you were born in the wrong body is good.

To them, this is normal:

And this:

Normal to them is using the word “chestfeeding” and calling biological men mothers and biological women fathers. Normal to them is Chelsea Handler skiing down a mountain with her dog in a backpack, smoking a joint, and bragging about being childless. Methinks the lady doth protest too much.

Topless transgender people at Joe Biden’s White House. Nothing weird about that.

They want this to be seen as normal:

And this:

White men, according to them, have always been the problem — until right this very minute, and now they refuse to appoint anyone other than a white male. Does that seem normal to you?

There is no such thing as a moderate Democrat.

The Veepstakes will be about finding a moderate to help Harris win in the swing states. But remember, despite how they look and how the press will position them, they are just as radical as she is. They have to be. They couldn’t survive today’s Democratic Party if they weren’t.

Normie White Guy #1

Josh Shapiro seems like a moderate. He supports Israel in the war in Gaza. He supports school vouchers. But to really expose the extremists on the Left, they have to be able to pass the “gender-affirming care” test, which none of them can. Even Shapiro appears to be supportive.

Normie White Guy #2

Tim Walz of Minnesota is among those “normie white dudes” calling JD Vance “weird,” but he’s fully on board with “gender-affirming care.”So who’s the weird one?

Normie White Guy #3

Senator Mark Kelly seems to be the closest thing to a moderate. He talks a good game and, from the looks of it, has no baggage. Does he pass the test? Nope.

Kelly was among the Democrats who voted to strip a bill of a ban on “gender-affirming care”:

A handful of Senate Democrats voted last month against legislation that would bar a military health benefit program from covering gender procedures on children that could result in sterilization — including hormone therapy and puberty blockers.

All 12 Democratic members of the Senate Armed Services Committee — as well as independent Angus King of Maine — voted June 29 to strip the provision from the must-pass 2024 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), opening the door for the Pentagon to fund so-called “gender-affirming care” for minors.

Panel Chairman Jack Reed (D-RI) joined Sens. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), Tim Kaine (D-Va.), Gary Peters (D-Mich.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.), Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) and centrist Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) in opposing the provision during the committee’s markup of the bill.

The Democrats pulled a fast one on us all in 2020 when they sold America on the “normie white guy” Joe Biden. He’s not a woman, not a woman of color, not a gay man, not a socialist. He’s a moderate. And yet, when Joe Biden took power he tacked far to the Left in a way that shocked us all.

And that is a cautionary tale. Her Veep choices might fool voters because they look like “normie white guys,” but in reality, they will follow Harris anywhere she wants to go. And where she wants to go is even farther to the Left than Joe Biden.

As long as Republicans push out that message, they can give independents the heads up of just what kind of fanaticism they’re about to put in power.

//

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Feminists for Trump

26 juli 2024 | 32 min

Republicans have a problem: a fast-moving narrative that will dominate the news cycle for the next few months if they allow it to. This comes courtesy of some eager beaver operative who dug up this clip of JD Vance from 2021 that has now gone viral.

The old me would have joined the outrage train on X, distorting what he said into an opportunity to wax sanctimonious and proclaim that it’s great to be a woman who chooses not to have children, and how dare he say such a disgusting, sexist thing?

She made news. Lots and lots of news, which shows you what the GOP is up against.

Team Kamala now has a great piece of propaganda to juice her already energized base.

The “Childless cat ladies” echoed what James Carville said about the Democrats not too long ago, that they were dominated by “preachy women” and that it was alienating voters, especially men."

Both of them are essentially saying the Left is dominated by a certain kind of woman, whether childless or not - meaning - they are up in everyone’s business all of the time.

I know that kind of woman. I was that kind of woman. The kind that used to be a powerful consumer demographic back in the 90s, in the Oprah era, but no longer is. Women who have been sidelined by the social justice movement that has decided feminism is too exclusionary. So what else did we have except to ask to speak to the manager and fuss over politics?

When Hillary lost our entire world collapsed. It was as though there was nothing left. We were the center of the universe one minute and invisible and powerless the next.

If anything, Vance’s comments hurt women who can’t have children more, not those who have chosen not to have them. Women have struggled with infertility, even with IVF. Aniston might be one of those women; if so, my heart goes to her. I live with regret every single day of my life that I aborted babies I could have and should have had.

Now, the abortionists want young women to see their babies as just a “clump of cells” and that it doesn’t matter. But guess what? It does matter, and they’re lying to women about it right now.

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The Beginning of the End of Woketopia

23 juli 2024 | 20 min

It began with the nation’s first Black President, but it would become much bigger. It would become a movement that captured every major institution in this country, including public schools, universities, corporations, and nearly all of culture. This could not last only two terms. No, this had to last forever.

When Donald Trump won in 2016, the power concentrated in the Obama coalition refused to step aside. Trump was the problem. His supporters were the problem. They didn’t like this new utopia that had become America and wanted change. But that change would never be allowed to take place.

The coup began even before Trump took office. A group of powerful elites decided it was their choice who could and could not represent the people. If one of them offended the ruling oligarchy, he was seen as a “racist” and had to be stopped by any means necessary.

They used every lever of power to stop him, to remove him, and to destroy him. They did this with the full cooperation of the nation’s press corps. They did it in full view of the Security State. And they did it with the enthusiastic support of their voters.

Get him. Destroy him. Remove him.

I was one of them. I wrote endless pieces about why Hillary Clinton had to win because history had to be made. I spent years pushing woke ideology into the film industry. It made me feel important. I was part of a movement, something bigger than myself. I had the admiration of my friends and pats on the back by powerful people. Why would I ever give that up?

I believed Donald Trump was a racist because the Democrats told me so. I believed he was a Russian spy because I watched Rachel Maddow. I believed he was a danger to our country because I read the New York Times, and I believed that the only thing that mattered in our lives was that those of us who were among the white majority did everything we could to elevate the oppressed minorities.

I

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Donald Trump and the Angels

20 juli 2024 | 40 min

"Courage is not having the strength to go on; it is going on when you don't have the strength."— Theodore Roosevelt

In 1912, Teddy Roosevelt was on his way to deliver a speech when he was shot in the chest with an assassin’s bullet. James Strock writes:

The history of 1912 leaves breadcrumbs if we summon the humility to look.

In the moment Roosevelt was, to put it mildly, controversial. Seeking a third term as president, he split his political party. Longtime accusations of “Caesarism” were given new life.

Nonetheless, Roosevelt’s undoubted courage under fire was acknowledged, including by political adversaries in the closing weeks of a hard-fought campaign.

Trump was shot in Pennsylvania, but he gave his speech in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the same city where Roosevelt gave his 112 years ago.

Politically, and in a variety of ways, TR and Trump are worlds apart. But they have one thing in common. They’re the Man in the Arena.

As I watched Twitter watch the last night of the Republican National Convention, I felt something shifting inside of me. I don’t know if it was the vulnerability on Trump’s face, his sadness after his brush with death, or his courage to give his speech anyway and do it for 90+ minutes that elevated me beyond our usual politics and forced me to look at who we are.

Strock does much of this in his excellent column on the failed assassination and how ugly things have gotten in the press to bring us to this point. That was only half of the story. The other half is how so many gathered around to “judge” how well Trump did and whether or not this means he will win in a landslide or whether it’s now a toss-up.

They want Biden’s debate and Trump’s speech to level the playing field. There’s just one problem. They’re not the same things, and everyone knows it. Trump was polling ahead of Biden even before the debate. He’s still polling ahead because there is no fixing what the Democrats have done to this country. For now, Trump has the wind at his back, whether or not he gave a great speech.

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Finally, They Said Their Names

19 juli 2024 | 27 min

“President Trump represents America’s last best hope to restore what — if lost — may never be found again. A country where a working-class boy born far from the halls of power can stand on this stage as the next vice president of the United States of America.” - JD Vance

Tulsi Gabbard’s voice is greatly missed from the Republican National Convention. However, it still resonates profoundly in our culture, especially after Vice President Kamala Harris insulted JD Vance’s love of country and called her out as only Tulsi Gabbard can.

So many of us, especially on the Left, don’t think much about the people who put their lives on the line every day in service of this country. However, in JD Vance, Trump found someone who can offer more than just empty words.

According to Military.com:

Vance, 39, is the first post-9/11 veteran to find a spot on a major party ticket and, if elected, would likely be the first Marine veteran to serve as the second-in-command… He is the first veteran on a major party ticket since John McCain in 2008.”

That mattered when the Gold Star families took to the stage to “say their names,” a chant heard over and over again since the catastrophic exit from Afghanistan, the first real sign to the American people and to the world that the leader of the United States did not know what he was doing.

What a difference eight years makes. When he was still green as a politician and not yet the leader he is today, Trump famously made fun of a Gold Star dad after he read out loud the Constitution at the Democratic National Convention in 2016. The press made much of it at the time, but they’ve said nothing about how our government memory-holed the deaths of 13 American soldiers.

Say their names.

Democrats and the media have repeatedly excused the disastrous military operation that would ultimately destabilize the global order — nothing to see here; move along, move along. It wrecked Biden’s approval ratings, and they’ve never recovered.

Say their names.

Up until Night 3 of the Republican National Convention—Make America Strong Again—there had never been any major ceremony or remembrance of the fallen. We saw their military funerals. There was a hearing in Congress.

But their names, faces, and personal stories had never been properly memorialized in any major way, not in the State of the Union, and wholly forgotten during the first presidential debate of 2024.

Say their names.

The general public has never called them heroes. That changed last night.

Before their appearance at the RNC, a short documentary played with interviews from the Gold Star families, all of them angry that the Biden administration had mostly ignored them while Trump hadn’t. He’d given them his time. He knew their children, they said. That matters if you’re the Commander in Chief, a job neither Joe Biden nor Kamala Harris are suited for.

When the families finally appeared on stage, tears were already streaming down the faces of almost everyone in the hall, as they often are when we come together to talk about military deaths. We know they died serving their country. Some grown men could be seen openly weeping at the unimaginable loss of an avoidable tragedy.

///

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Sarah Huckabee Sanders Gets the Last Laugh

18 juli 2024 | 29 min

Beautiful, elegant, strong—when Sarah Huckabee Sanders glided out on stage on Night 2 of the Republican National Convention, I could not help but think of the film Carrie. In it, the shy wallflower emerges as the beautiful prom queen moments before she’s sabotaged by two mean and bitter people who want nothing but her total humiliation.

But of course, they don’t realize what they just stepped in as Carrie turns to them, flips the switch that turns on her supernatural powers, and enacts her revenge.

It’s one of the best scenes in film history made when Hollywood could still make great movies, and Stephen King wrote great books rather than endless anti-Trump tweets.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders didn’t need to set the place on fire. Her success is her best revenge, as she’s now the Governor of Arkansas, the first woman to hold that position. Take that, bitter leftists.

What a moment that was. They did everything in their power to crush her, to humiliate her, to shame her, to destroy her. And guess what? It failed spectacularly, just as it has with Trump.

I remember back in 2018 when Michelle Wolf told unfunny jokes, selling a version of Sanders that doesn’t, in fact, exist. Her words stung, and Sanders’ reactions reflected that. Even though I was a loyal Democrat back then, I loudly criticized Wolf and my Democrat friends for defending her.

And when she was refused service at the Red Hen, a thing that happened in the Jim Crow South or Nazi Germany, Stephen Colbert did his usual sociopathic ranting disguised as humor.

I always thought we were the guys, I said. Are we the side that now mocks the way women look? Oh, she’s supporting Trump; they told me back then. She is normalizing a fascist. She deserves what she gets.

It was blatant hypocrisy from the side that proclaims tolerance and love. But there they were, as mean as Nancy Allen in Carrie.

That’s who you are now, I told them. You’re the mean girls. It was verbal abuse disguised as comedy, but it still wasn’t enough. Look at how far they had to go in an attempt to destroy her, destroy Trump, and defeat the grassroots movement known as MAGA.

Maybe that assassin wasn’t killing Trump because he thought he was Hitler. But did it matter that much? It seemed to manifest their collective hatred, with nowhere to go except pulling the trigger. Too bad you missed means two different things, depending on which side you’re on.

If you can imagine, we’re at the moment where people on Twitter are arguing over whether it’s cancel culture to fire someone who said they were upset that Trump was almost assassinated but happy that one of his supporters died.

For the record, no, I don’t support firing some dumb woman who works at Home Depot because she wrote a disgusting Facebook post. But I also would not want someone with a dark heart like that working for me.

We should never let them off the hook for who they were and what they did, especially to people like Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who did nothing to deserve it except work for Donald Trump.

I heard her tell the same story about Trump she recounted at the RNC on a podcast a few years ago—I don’t remember which one—and it humanized Trump in my eyes. It made me think differently about him, and I understood their relationship better. For Sanders, Trump is a ride-or-die, as she explains here.

That wasn’t the only bright spot of the night, but it was the most remarkable. Nothing has ever felt as satisfying as watching her living her hot girl summer phase - an invisible EFF YOU to the haters.

It was a night for powerhouse mama bears who have lost their loved ones either to high crime or the fentanyl epidemic, something the Democrats seem to care nothing about. Oh, those people in the red states, they don’t matter, the racists.

Like Madeline Brame, who blew the roof off the joint and earned the rare standing ovation from Trump.

And Sara Workman:

And Anne Funder:

Real people, real problems. Your move, Democrats.

//

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The Courage to Change Your Mind

16 juli 2024 | 33 min

“Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.” ―George Bernard Shaw

Last night, at the RNC Convention, Make America Wealthy Once Again, Donald J. Trump walked into the room like the Gray Champion he is, battle-scarred but standing tall. Teddy Roosevelt would be proud. His supporters gave him the hero’s welcome he deserved. There was not a dry eye in the house.

It was apparent to anyone watching that this wasn’t your grandfather’s Republican Party anymore. The head of the Teamsters Union, Sean O’Brien? Big Tech whiz kid David Sacks and a former model named Amber Rose? Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.

It’s Donald Trump’s party now, and he’ll build it the way he wants with what Steve Bannon calls “inclusive, participatory, nationalist populism.”

If the party could leave it to Trump, he’s got this. He’s got this so hard.

A clip with Pastor James Roemke doing a great Trump impression before the blessing.

And a powerful new Trump campaign ad:

Unfortunately, we know the Republican Party, right? We know they can’t just take the W. They will mess it up somehow, as James Lindsay says:

There’s an old joke that used to cycle around Hollywood. A filmmaking crew walks through the desert and comes upon a beautiful oasis. The writer can’t stop talking about how beautiful it is. The director envisions ways to bring it to the big screen. The producer? He whips it out and starts taking a leak. “What are you doing?!!” the others cry out. “Don’t worry,” the producer says, “I’m making it better.”

And so it goes with some of the old-guard Conservatives who are now grumbling about the MAGA takeover of the GOP. They want the party to be what it once was. But those days are gone, brother, and they ain’t coming back. It’s millennials and Zoomers from now on.

Welcome to the Fourth Turning. Once the dust settles and it’s all over, we’ll hopefully have a freer country that feels brand new. We’ll have rescued the country from the grips of the bloated leviathan that now rules over it with an authoritarian fist. It will be a country for the people, by the people, and of the people, and oh, how sweet it will be. If only the GOP could get out of their own way.

The Changing of the Minds

There is no chance I would have ever been accepted or invited into the old GOP. I lived my life exactly the wrong way, according to them. I followed the feminist lie and believed that the only thing I needed to do in life was serve myself. I had casual sex, I never got married, I had a child out of wedlock, and I had abortions. I’m not proud of it. I would take it all back if I could. I promise not a day will go by that I don’t mourn the loss of what could have been.

I did not see my life differently because I found religion or because I’m now a Conservative (I am in some ways but not in others). I see my life differently because I changed my mind.

There is nothing wrong with changing your mind. It’s healthy. And it’s brave. It took guts for the beautiful Amber Rose to take to the stage at the RNC and explain how and why she changed her mind. Her father, who served in the military, loved Donald Trump. She told him he was a racist, and her father said, prove it. But don’t listen to me, let her tell it:

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Oh, the Inhumanity

15 juli 2024 | 29 min

When I found my way to Trump’s rallies in the Summer of 2020, I felt like I had crawled out of a desert searching for signs of life. No one could know my discovery. I had to keep it a secret. If anyone found me out, I would be MAGA. I would be a Trump supporter, and that would be the end of my career and most of my relationships.

Despite how often I’d become the target of the fanatical mobs that rule over social media and the Left writ large, I’d knew not to cross the Trump Line. That would be the last straw. I would be shunned, I knew.

Yet, every time I got that notification from Right Side Broadcasting’s YouTube channel that Trump was about to take the stage, even now, four years after I first began watching them, my mood was immediately lifted.

I love those people, I would always think. I didn’t belong anywhere but I somehow belonged there. They still had their senses of humor well intact. They loved this country and were proud of their heritage and patriotism. They were every skin color, every gender, even gay and trans - all under the same tent, an Island of Misfit Toys - all MAGA.

Once I figured out what great people they were, how their time with Trump was precious, I began to worry. What was going to happen them, I wondered. My side had all of the power. They were the Empire and they wanted nothing but the total obliteration of MAGA and especially Trump.

I thought, if only they could thaw out their systematic dehumanization campaign, if I could somehow break the spell cast upon them by the media and their social media feedback loops, then they could just shrug and move on with their lives.

But that isn’t what happened. We summoned a hungry beast that needed to be fed. It was anger at having a political enemy, but there was more to it than that. It was a sadistic, indulgent bacchanalia of hatred that united the Left and became its main form of entertainment.

Who are Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert if they aren’t sucking on the bones of Trump night after night? Whatever audience now remains to watch their terrible shows or the MSNBC power lineup is there for one reason and one reason only. The beast is hungry, and the beast must be fed.

I too once felt the hate within me. It connected me to my community online. It seemed like nothing else mattered all of a sudden except this rising hysteria none of us could manage. We began purging anyone accused of assault or racism. There was no due process. It was simply a matter of tossing them out of utopia.

We’d be fine after that, at least for a little while. But the beast always got hungry again; sooner or later, it would return to Trump.

We were winners when it was just us, Obama, and our online paradise. Now, we were holding back the inevitable pendulum swing, desperate to cling to the past, unable to relinquish our war on Trump. If only we could stop him for good and destroy him forever, things would return to normal.

But they never did. For me, the hatred began to feel like toxic sludge in my veins. I couldn’t take it, not for one more minute. I knew enough about history to know what we were doing was wrong. Yet, how do you convince the New York Times, MSNBC, CNN, Hollywood, and the entire Democratic Establishment that what they’re engaging was not just bad for our country but dangerous?

It didn’t occur to me until much later, long after I escaped the bubble of the Left, that they needed to hate Trump because it was the only way they could feel something, anything.

Their addiction meant they needed a stronger and stronger hit. It wasn’t enough to call him a rapist or racist. It had to get all the way to dictator, all the way to a threat to end American democracy as we once knew it.

Arthur C. Clarke wrote in 2001 that “newspapers of Utopia … would be terribly dull.” And that’s what’s happened to culture on the Left. It’s boring without Trump. They kept dragging him back to their cable news shows daily, dragging him back to the headlines in the New York Times. On X, Trump humiliation was the only fun they seemed allowed to have.

Trump, then, was their release valve. They were dancing with the Devil and they liked it, they liked it. It became an abusive relationship for them, with Trump’s defiance keeping them engaged in the fight. The more he fought back, the more satisfying it was to see him crushed.

Here is Megyn Kelly:

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All the News that's Unfit to Print

12 juli 2024 | 25 min

Oh, That Sweet Sweet Schadenfreude

10 juli 2024 | 32 min

They've Been Hidin' Biden and Harris Since the 2020 Election

4 juli 2024 | 33 min

Donald Trump, Taylor Swift and Me

28 juni 2024 | 38 min

Hollywood Can't Save itself, Let Alone Joe Biden

21 juni 2024 | 37 min

The Deep State Meets the Honey Badger

13 juni 2024 | 44 min

Joe Biden's Eternal Nightmare

5 juni 2024 | 35 min

Trump and The Hero's Journey

27 maj 2024 | 42 min

Nellie Bowles Thoroughly Humiliates the New York Times

18 maj 2024 | 25 min

In 2024, the most radical act imaginable is telling the truth. Nellie Bowles has done just that with her new book, Morning After the Revolution. She lays out in painful but funny detail the madness we’ve all just lived through that almost no one will talk about.

Bowles is too nice to humiliate the New York Times outright; she was their “golden girl,” after all, once upon a time. But her book humiliates them all the same, just by doing good reporting and telling the stories they refused to tell.

In one riveting, tragic, hilarious passage, Bowles describes what happened at the Wi Spa in Los Angeles:

“Wi Spa billed itself as “a convenient and affordable place to de-stress and be pampered,” but one summer week in 2021 it became a site of great stress because of one (allegedly, partially) erect penis that had manifested in the women’s room.”

She continues:

“The spa, in Los Angeles’s Koreatown, has separate men’s and women’s areas where people go naked. The penis went bobbing through the women’s space. The penis had been seen soaking in the women’s communal soak pools. Women enjoying their spa time were upset. One went to the front desk asking for help, saying there were children present and that there was a man in the bathroom. The front desk could not help. The person with the penis had a California driver’s license that listed their gender as “female.” The penis was white, and some of the women who didn’t want to see it were black Hispanic, which in the summer of 2021 might have helped draw knee-jerk public sympathy, but apparently did not.”

For a movement afraid of harm being done by mere words, they seemed to be perfectly comfortable with real harm being done to young girls, to women in sports, and pre-teens sucked into “gender-affirming care.”

Bowles doesn’t just describe what happened at the spa; she tracks down the sex offender himself and discovers that, yes, he’d done it deliberately, and, yes, he was erect while doing so. But was there ever any major reckoning in the press? No.

I quickly searched the New York Times for “Wi Spa,” and of course, there was nothing about this scandal, even though it was such an interesting story. Why didn’t they want to touch it? Because it called into question their absolutism about “trans women” being women.

The Times should be as thoroughly humiliated by Morning After the Revolution as NPR should be after Uri Berliner’s essay. They no longer care about chasing the story at all costs. They only care about serving the ideology at all costs.

It shouldn’t be surprising that the Times and other “prestige” outlets would pan Bowles’ book and attempt character assassination on her. What else are they going to do? Admit that they gaslighted Americans and allowed themselves to be manipulated by a “Lord of the Flies” contingent of crybaby brats who felt unsafe around reporters like Donald McNeil? Will they come clean and admit they essentially work for the Biden administration as a slightly more sophisticated version of Joe and Mika? Not a chance.

The publisher isn’t taking their criticisms seriously, nor should they. Instead, they celebrated their takes:

The negative reviews read like a chapter in Bowles's book. The Washington Post’s Becca Rothfield disguises her resentment and embarrassment by casting Bowles as the condescending elite. The lady doth protest too much, methinks:

She writes:

The real question is not about whether there are “Narrative Enforcers” at the New York Times, as Bowles alleges, but why there is a market for so many books like this, even though they are all so predictably indistinguishable from one another. Bowles’s book appeals for the same reason that other conservative memoirs of political “growth” do: because they reassure their readers that progressivism is not a genuine political philosophy but an almost biological byproduct of youth, like acne. Bowles and her ilk are thereby absolved from contending with the principles of those who oppose them, or from seeing their political nemeses as rational moral agents.

Then there is Laura Kipnis at the New York Times, whose CV reads exactly like Rothfield’s: academia, awards, universities, citations, more awards, more citations. They could be the same person.

She writes, “By fringe, she means trans. She’s peeved that some trans women are trying to redefine feminism in ways that seem to her to be anti-woman, resents that lesbians risk being erased by trendy all-purpose queerness and fears that as a married lesbian mother she will have her own rights swept away by anti-trans backlash. Given the Dobbs decision, all precedents are possibly imperiled, but the culprit isn’t transgender-rights activists. It’s the religious right and the Supreme Court, both of which get a pass from Bowles, as do Donald Trump and every elected Republican.”

And there it is, the message loud and clear: those bad people on the Right are the problem, not us, not the crazies who have destroyed nearly every great thing about American culture, and have destroyed feminism. Not will. Have. It’s been gutted. It no longer exists.

And then we get Mollie Fischer, yet another carbon copy of the same kind of writer/thinker/activist at The New Yorker:

What can we expect from someone whose last article was “Why We Choose Not to Eat, Can the decision to forgo food be removed from the gendered realm of weight-loss culture?”

This is the sad, silly fact of what the Left has become once it aligned with power, wealth, and politics: boring. Insular. Naval gazing.

Michelle Goldberg decided the review in the Times wasn’t enough and wrote an entire op-ed about Bowles:

“There are aspects of the New Progressivism — its clunky neologisms and disdain for free speech — that I’ll be glad to see go. But however overwrought the politics of 2020 were, they also represented a rare moment when there was suddenly enormous societal energy to tackle long-festering inequalities. That energy has largely dissipated, right when we need it most, heading into another election with Trump on the ballot.

Trump Trump Trump. The closer anyone gets to Trump, the farther away they get from the MISSION. It’s one or the other. You’ve read 1984. You know the deal. Love Big Brother or you’ll be another enemy of the state. You’ll be Goldstein. You’ll be unpersoned.

The reckoning I waited for is never coming. I know that. Just as I know many of my friends will never apologize or ever have any awareness of what they went along with. I knew that back in 2020 when a local news station told the story of Sue and her 100 year-old mattress store. I was screamed at by my friends for even mentioning it.

Now, many of them must feel a combination of fear and shame but would not dare risk their place in utopia to talk about it, even if more and more people seem to feel comfortable doing so. So down the memory hole it will go.

As Bowles said in her appearance on Bill Maher, there has never been any apology or acknowledgment of what we’ve just lived through. We’re owed at least that much, not just for how they treated their own reporters, editors, or researchers at the hands of fanatics but also for the stories they refused to tell that the American public deserved to know.

In their podcast, America This Week, Walter Kirn and Matt Taibbi discuss the short story Christmas Not Just Once a Year, by Heinrich Böll. The story is about mass delusion and why almost no one can or will put a stop to it because it’s just too hard.

When I think about what’s happened to this country and I try to find something that is horrifying enough to warrant a comparison to what happened in Germany, I land on “trans kids,” this bizarre new idea that has been normalized in our culture to the point where all schools, all institutions and all politics on the Left are going along with it, even though it sends children down a dangerous path they can’t come back from.

I’m not saying it’s as bad as the Holocaust, but I am saying the madness is on par with what people have gone along with at the worst moments in our history. That’s why Sweden, the UK, and other countries have backed way off of “gender-affirming care.”

It’s almost Pride month. They will fly the flag at elementary schools right next to the US flag. What chance do any of these kids have? With so many parents so afraid to stand up to the activists lest they be called a “bigot,” we’re left with few choices when it comes to November 2024. If you want this stopped, you can’t vote for Democrats.

Yet, Nellie Bowles probably will. She is a lesbian married to Bari Weiss, and pregnant with their second child. But at least she is a voice the New York Times can’t ignore.

How did a book like this even get published anyway? We all know the rules. Sensitivity readers and activists posing as staffers are constantly breathing down the neck of the editors to ensure full compliance.

Enter Thesis, an adjunct of the Penguin Group that launched in 2023, that was “committed to publishing bold ideas that shape tomorrow’s discourse.” You might call them the first major “heterodox” publishing house that hovers in that sweet spot outside the clutches of the “woke” Left but still enough inside as not to cross the Trump line.

They are ahead of the game, joining a growing group of voices just before the inevitable counterculture revolution hits. Expect to see more like them and more voices like Nellie Bowles.

At the end of the book, Bowles mentions how someone she knew ended their friendship because she refused to cancel a colleague. Now that story is in print for all time. That woman will have to live with being one of the bad guys, even if it will be years before she realizes it.

//

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The Democrats' Stormy Hypocrisy

13 maj 2024 | 34 min

It's the Democrats Turn to Scare America

4 maj 2024 | 37 min

"Let Joe Be Joe" has been a Disaster

28 april 2024 | 31 min

Joe Biden has been a failure as the leader of the United States. There has never been one moment in the past four years when he has thought of us, the American people. He has only thought of himself and how badly he does not want to lose to Donald Trump, so he stands before the press at the White House Correspondents Dinner, and he lies.

He lies about January 6th. He lies that Trump said there would be a “bloodbath” if he lost, a false media narrative that should have shamed every so-called “journalist” sitting in that room, and most of all, he lies about what threatens the American people. It is not Trump. This country is facing far more serious problems, and yet no one has apparently told Joe Biden.

The past couple of weeks have been an unmitigated disaster for the Biden presidency, even if the press, the obedient sycophants that they are, won't admit it. Someone thought it was a good idea to free Biden from his gilded cage and set him loose on regular folks - to let Joe be Joe.

In March, the New York Times laid it out:

What could possibly go wrong? Well, everything.

Everything that could go wrong did go wrong. Biden did not just have a major brain freeze while reading off the teleprompter, it also wasn’t hard to see that most of the “Joe being Joe” events were staged.

When Biden read the instructions—that he was supposed to pause so the crowd could erupt in rehearsed chants of Four More Years—his face froze, and for a minute, he looked lost and confused. Yes, that’s the President of the United States, in case you were wondering.

Biden seems increasingly like a fake president, not a real one. And that’s just fine for the people at the top. What does Howard Stern care about real life? They’ve been detached for so long, they can’t see beyond the safety of their own bubble.

That’s not true for much of America, which is so desperate for real leadership that they’re willing to disregard Trump’s failings as a luxury they can’t afford.

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It Takes a Village to Trans a Child

24 april 2024 | 41 min

Dear Hillary,

In 1996, you wrote:

“The African proverb “It takes a village to raise a child” summed up for me the commonsense conclusion that, like it or not, we are living in an interdependent world where what our children hear, see, feel, and learn will affect how they grow up and who they turn out to be.”

That’s still true, Hillary. But now, you are no longer protecting children. You no longer seem to care what is happening to them at the hands of the Left and the Democratic Party. The release of the Cass Report, on the heels of the WPATH Files, leaves little doubt of what amounts to medical experiments on children with irreversible, long-term damage to their bodies.

Here is Helen Joyce laying out the ugly truth:

But what I want to know is this — what happened to you, Hillary? Why don’t you care? Why doesn’t it motivate you and other feminists like Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi, and Amy Klobuchar? You’ve not only scurried off into the shadows, but all of you have been complicit in it.

To give you the benefit of the doubt, Hillary, maybe you are just ignorant. Maybe you’ve been so cut off from normal life that you no longer know what is happening in America. This isn’t likely to land on MSNBC any time soon. Like you, they are obsessed with only one person, Donald Trump.

But what the Democrats have been doing is far worse than anything Trump could ever do. History will not be kind, Hillary. You might not realize this but all of you will be to blame when the hammer comes down. You might want to know a little more about it. I would like to help you.

Imagine yourself back in the 1970s when you first graduated college. Remember that? Remember the young, famous feminist Hillary Rodham? Now imagine she lands in the modern day, and sees this video on TikTok.

A mother celebrating her daughter’s first day of “T.” In case you don’t know, “T” stands for testosterone. Why is the mother crying, you ask? Is her child sick? No. Her child believes she was born in the wrong body and “T” is going to make her feel like herself, like a boy.

Her mother is very into this identity as the mother of a “trans kid.” She has a platform on TikTok which shows her child injecting herself with hormones. She wrote this on the celebratory day of her child’s journey toward irreversible harm.

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The Lawfare made me a Trump supporter

13 april 2024 | 37 min

An Interview with Writer John Nolte

11 april 2024 | 55 min

How to Spot an "Election Denier"

5 april 2024 | 37 min

Ronna McDaniel Wouldn't Deliver Enough Hate for MSNBC

29 mars 2024 | 29 min

Why Trump is Polling Ahead of Biden

24 mars 2024 | 19 min

Too Black to Fail

22 mars 2024 | 39 min

What Really Happened to Matt Drudge?

17 mars 2024 | 34 min

The Proposed Ban on TikTok is Election Interference

15 mars 2024 | 38 min

Respectfully, Mr. De Niro, Get a Grip

11 mars 2024 | 31 min

Dear Mr. De Niro,

I trust you had a wonderful evening at the Oscars. Watching you bask in the comforting embrace of the special people was a reminder of who you really are—a movie star.

By the looks of it, the Oscars are back. They have a host now and they gave their top prize to a movie people actually saw. It won a whopping 7 Oscars. There were dance numbers and jokes, beautiful people in their finery—a grand celebration to revive the lifeless body of Hollywood.

I was shocked that they kept politics mostly out of it—well, until near the end when Jimmy Kimmel just had to bring in Trump—not just to mock him but to show the country which side all of you are on and to let them know, in no uncertain terms, that they are not invited to this party.

Turns out, Trump really did write that:

But might I say, Mr. De Niro, none of you seem able to figure out if Trump is such a criminal/fascist/dictator/rapist/racist, why he’s kicking Biden’s ass in the polls six ways from Sunday? Funny, isn’t it, Mr. De Niro? Didn’t Bill Maher ask you this same question on Real Time? You didn’t have an answer except to say that Trump is a “monster,” a “mean, nasty, and hateful person.”

And that if “We want to live in a world that we want to live and enjoy living in, or live in a nightmare. Vote for Trump, and you'll get the nightmare.”

Let me get this straight. You said that you would never play Trump because there is “Nothing redeemable in him.”

So, Max Cady in Cape Fear, Al Capone in The Untouchables, and William Hale in Killers of the Flower Moon had redeemable traits? They were all mass murderers, Mr. De Niro, yet you not only delighted in playing those roles but also earned Oscar nominations for two of them. And I’m betting a nice fat paycheck at the end of the day.

Al Capone was connected to hundreds of murders, William Hale committed a near-genocide of the Osage people, and Max Cady, well, need we be reminded?

Trump is not nice to you, Mr. De Niro. That is true. He isn’t very nice to Hollywood or Jimmy Kimmel, or to the establishment. But did it ever occur to you that so many people love him because he isn’t one of you? And that your crazy ramblings about him only make his supporters love him even more?

You, like Hollywood, like the Democrats, like Bill Maher, have become so disconnected from the lives of Americans that you can’t possibly understand why Trump is by far preferable. You seem to think you have the right to tell them what they should want, what they should care about, and that your own personal happiness should be a factor they consider.

Have you driven through any of our cities lately? Have you driven down to the border? Have you gone to a grocery store? Have you gone into Walmart only to see everything locked up, from baby formula to batteries to deodorant? Have you driven across America to see what this country is really like?

I’m guessing not. Why would you? You go from the film set to your multi-million dollar property, and you turn on MSNBC and CNN and you RAGE RAGE against the man they keep telling you is a dictator and fascist who will never leave office, take Bill Maher off the air, and then hunt you down like you’re Robert Redford in Three Days of the Condor.

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The Red Pill Revolution

3 mars 2024 | 40 min

The Fourth Turning Explainer - Why is it called that anyway?

26 februari 2024 | 21 min

Why Joe Biden isn't Sweating

25 februari 2024 | 29 min

This is What Totalitarianism Looks Like

20 februari 2024 | 37 min

The Democrats Are Going Down with the Ship

15 februari 2024 | 32 min

Gaslighting Biden's Troubles Away

10 februari 2024 | 24 min

I don’t know what’s going to happen. All I can say is this: The man we saw speaking from the White House tonight, on February 8—that man will not be reelected president. Maybe Biden can become a new man. Maybe he’s had an off week. Maybe they can adjust his meds. Maybe. But probably not. Right? Probably not. —John Podhoretz, Commentary

They’ve been lying about Joe Biden’s cognitive abilities since at least 2020. COVID allowed them to hide both Biden and Harris far from the prying eyes of the press and the public while the system won the election for them. They just needed to exist as more of an idea rather than a reality. Voters would choose them as the more moderate option. And, more importantly, take Trump out of power.

But I’d stood a few feet away from Joe Biden in May of 2019. The man I saw give a speech that day and mingle in the crowd was not the man who emerged more than a year later to make minimal appearances during campaign season. He’d gotten through the primaries okay. He was old but hanging on.

Heading into the election, however, it was clear something was not quite right. Now, he looked lost, with eyes that appeared vacant and unless someone was guiding him, he wandered around in a dream state.

I told my friends I was worried that Biden was in the early stages of dementia, like my dad, who was consumed by it in 2018. They snapped back that Trump was a fascist, and it didn’t matter how incapacitated Biden was. They’d still vote for him.

What did they know, and when did they know it?

Besides ushering in a fanatical cult, the first real sign of trouble was the exit from Afghanistan in August of 2021. Word had it Biden had ignored his top brass and was arrogantly aiming for a 9/11 photo op.

But with bodies falling off airplanes, 13 American soldiers dead, there was no way even the most skilled operators in the media could spin a visibly botched job. Even if it was barely a news story, the public took notice, and no doubt, world leaders did too.

That “x” is Afghanistan. His numbers have never recovered.

[source: Real Clear Politics]

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Confessions of a Corrupt Liberal

7 februari 2024 | 31 min

Taylor Swift's People Meet Joe Biden's People

1 februari 2024 | 21 min

What Trump and MAGA Are Up Against in 2024

29 januari 2024 | 31 min

Why I'm Rooting for the 1972 Landslide I Once Feared

18 januari 2024 | 36 min

I am not supposed to be rooting for Trump and MAGA. I’m supposed to be one of the million and change who huddles on my couch in terror, watching MSNBC as the results from Iowa trickle in. I’m supposed to somberly nod when Rachel Maddow tells her viewers they won’t show Trump’s speech.

Shut down the speech! I am supposed to say, as if any of this is normal. I will not watch it. I will not listen for myself and think for myself and judge for myself. I will instead fill my head with what Lawrence O’Donnell, Joy Reid, and the Queen of media, the Multi-Million Dollar Baby, Maddow herself tells me!

“Yes, turn it off,” Bette Midler says. “Yes please!” moans Barbra Streisand. “It’s the right thing to do,” says Rob Reiner, “to save democracy.”

“This is a difficult decision,” Maddow told her viewers to justify censoring Trump’s speech. Somewhere deep inside, this must humiliate the journalist she once was. On some level, she knows this is as bad as what Vladimir Putin does in Russia to protect his people from bad news.

Saving Democracy includes censorship, in case you didn’t know, along with throwing your political opponents in jail and removing them from the ballot, not to mention persecuting political protesters for thought crimes and using the legacy media as your own personal propaganda delivery device. Are we sure this isn’t Putin’s Russia?

Is this really where we’ve arrived as a country, as a people, as the once-mighty Left? Yes, there is no point in pretending otherwise.

We’ve watched the whole game play out this past week as they twisted what Trump said — yet again — about “poisoning the blood of our nation.” They decide what his words mean; replacing “illegal immigrants” with “immigrants” makes it racist. So here is yet more proof of the person you need to fear.

Oh, the lies they tell.

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January 6th and How the Press Became the "Enemy of the American People"

5 januari 2024 | 36 min

An Ex-Democrat's Case for Trump

23 december 2023 | 19 min

Rob Reiner's Misery

22 december 2023 | 28 min

Rob Reiner and the Sea of Oswalds

20 december 2023 | 47 min

Rob Reiner's Wilderness of Mirrors

13 december 2023 | 30 min

"Elon Musk Says Go F*** Yourself"

30 november 2023 | 27 min

Meet the Real "Insurrectionists"

14 november 2023 | 25 min

The Democrats Win on Abortion But Future Generations Might Look Back in Horror

9 november 2023 | 22 min

DeSantis Has a Charisma Deficit

6 november 2023 | 29 min

Is it Anti-Semitism or "Anti-Whiteness?"

2 november 2023 | 37 min

Our country, at the hands of the Left, is falling apart. There is no center. It is as though termites have eaten away the foundation as we allowed so many activists to dismantle their “systems of oppression,” otherwise known as our heroes, our history, our movies, our achievements, our books, our poetry, our art. If America built it, it is corrupt, say the Woketopians.

We’ve seen them edging ever so close to violence as a means to an end. We’ve ignored the warning signs because it was so much easier to demonize and dehumanize Trump and MAGA, and now, I fear, we’re heading into the danger zone.

We’ve been here before. Right around the time of the Manson murders in 1969, the silent majority was waking up to what the Left had become, something not unlike today’s Left.

In March of 1970, as the Manson trials were getting underway, the New York Times wrote an expose of the radical Left’s Weather Underground:

The outbreak of explosions at a variety of establishment targets— corporate offices, police stations, draft and induction centers and the like—underscores a new mood among frustrated radicals. It appears to have been intensified by the outcome of the trial of the Chicago Seven as well as the various pending Black Panther trials.

One letter by the Weather Underground reads as follows:

“To work for the industries of death is to murder. To know the torments Amerika inflicts on the Third World, but not to sympathize and identify, is to deny our own humanity. It is to deny our right to love—and not to love is to die. We refuse. In death‐directed Amerika there is only one way to a life of love and freedom: to attack and destroy the forces of death and exploitation and to build a just society—revolution.”

Charles Manson parroted these talking points to brainwash his cult. His words are indistinguishable from theirs, though noticeably less articulate. When Manson had his followers scrawl the words “death to pigs” in the blood of their victims, it was meant to throw law enforcement off track and blame Black radicals.

As horrific as that sounds, we’re seeing echoes of that kind of mindset in today’s young, whipped up into a frenzy they can’t quite control.

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Cancel Culture Warriors Get a Taste of Their Own Medicine

26 oktober 2023 | 17 min

Book Review: Borrowed Time, An American Masterpiece

20 oktober 2023 | 19 min

Once Upon a New York Times: A Cautionary Tale

18 oktober 2023 | 23 min

The Attack by Hamas Shatters The Lies About January 6th

12 oktober 2023 | 39 min

The GOP Might be Chaotic, but at Least They Aren't Sterilizing Children

7 oktober 2023 | 34 min

Gods and Monsters in America

3 oktober 2023 | 29 min

The Kamala Calamity

29 september 2023 | 27 min

Nicolle Wallace Wants Gulags

22 september 2023 | 31 min

Why Trump, Why Now

15 september 2023 | 28 min

The Counterculture Revolution is Already Here

5 september 2023 | 24 min

The Mugshot "Heard" Round the World

29 augusti 2023 | 29 min

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,Their flag to April's breeze unfurled,Here once the embattled farmers stood,And fired the shot heard round the world. -Ralph Waldo Emerson

You maniacs. You finally did it. You finally made people like me actually want to vote for Trump — not just vote for him because he’s a Republican, and he’ll do the dirty job of putting the brakes on “gender-affirming care.” I was already there. But actually wanting to vote for Trump specifically, to believe that only Trump can finally end this ongoing insanity in our government, culture, and country? Well, that seemed impossible.

I know the cost of crossing into enemy territory. I know that it means— into the garbage can with me. I know that it is social and career suicide. But I can’t watch them go after him like this, busting through norm after norm, relishing his humiliation, and not want to, at the very least, use my vote to protest what they’ve done.

Here is Tulsi Gabbard:

The first thing people will say to me is “stop lying, you were always a Trump supporter. You’ve just finally unmasked yourself.” They probably believe that’s true - it certainly makes it easier for them to sleep at night knowing their monstrous, unforgivable behavior was justified in their minds.

I was with them when they protested Trump’s win in 2016. I was with them when we marched in protest throughout Trump’s presidency. I was with them all the way up until the election of 2020, when I saw for the first time the threat the new left posed to our formerly free country.

I live in California, so my vote hardly matters. It’s more symbolic to say that I do not consent to my government or my tax dollars being used this way. I do not consent to a partisan, weaponized DOJ. I do not consent to show trials, performative indictments, or a two-tiered justice system. And I certainly don’t consent to mugshots of former presidents. It weakens our standing in the world. It makes us look small. It makes us look insane. It makes us look corrupt.

Here are Glenn Greenwald and Patrick Bet-David:

Trump must prevail because otherwise, they’ve shown us there will be no end to any of it. Once they’re done with Trump, they’ll move on to the next threat. More power for them means less freedom for us - in our lives, online, and in our culture. They will never stop on their own. They have to be stopped.

#resistance cosplay

Like the raid on Mar-a-Lago, the mugshot was totally unnecessary. It was petty and vindictive, yet another episode in their ongoing melodrama that casts themselves as the oppressed victims beating back centuries of White Supremacy and racism that they somehow see embodied in Trump.

The Netflix series Black Mirror has two great episodes, and both offer up criticisms of what life on the Left has become. One is Nose Dive wherein people are given credit scores and worry about being judged by others. By the end, the only way out is to abandon all of it and learn how to live with people who say things that might offend.

The other is Hated in the Nation, where social media users attack people using a hashtag. A hacker programs armies of robotic bees to attack those who engage in dehumanizing swarms against others.

The Left believes this is Trump’s episode of Black Mirror. He is their crazed fascist racist white supremacist traitor insurrectionist seditionist rapist supervillain at the mercy of an extreme partisan Democrat DA who forced him into the worst jail in Georgia and made him take a mugshot. MAKE HIM SUFFER. Make him PAY.

But maybe this is really their episode of Black Mirror. No matter what they do, they can’t kill the love the people have for Trump. Everything they do backfires on them, and his popularity only grows.

This was especially true for Black voters on Tik Tok:

In all of the Left’s hysteria and mania over the past seven years, they’ve done nothing to address those who have felt abandoned by what our government has become. Why? It is much easier for them to kill the messenger.

Money drives politics; everyone knows that. But when Trump’s small money donors chipped in and raised $7 million almost overnight for Trump’s defense, it was proof enough of the widespread affection so many people have for Trump, and it was threatening for people who have all the money and believe that entitles them to all of the power. Well guess what? It doesn’t.

Un-electable?

I feel Ben Shapiro’s pain when he points out, as he does every day, that this is the grand plan for the Left, just as they did in 2022 to great effect - boost Trump and MAGA in the primary, destroy them in the general.

The Daily Wire has laid out the trial dates, set conveniently to line up with the election year — they aren’t even bothering to hide it anymore and the media will never call them out on it — and this is meant to tie Trump up with court cases, win or lose, that will keep him from campaigning or make his entire campaign about his legal troubles, and not, say, the failings of the Biden administration and the cult that has overtaken the party.

While it’s true DeSantis won’t have legal troubles to contend with, he, like most of them, never found a way to appeal to the energized wing of the GOP, aka MAGA.

It’s more likely than not that any GOP candidate could defeat Biden - probably even Mike Pence. But for any of them not to harness the grassroots energy embodied not just in MAGA but in the rising counter-culture movement, is leaving too much money on the table.

They would be fools to ignore what turned Oliver Anthony into a superstar overnight and landed Sound of Freedom higher than Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny and Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning on the annual box office chart.

Besides, I actually think Trump could win. While it’s true his presence in the race will allow the Democrats to do what they did in 2020 - use their deep pockets to drive around operatives to collect ballots, Republicans can do that too. Trump still won Iowa, Florida, and Ohio - that tells us he was very close to winning, even with the war against him during his presidency.

Trump has one secret weapon. That would be Vivek Ramaswamy’s mission should he choose to accept it. Ramaswamy has said he does not want to be anyone’s Veep. But if Trump asks him and he accepts, he could be helping to take America through a 1980s-Reagan-like moment where the entire ship turns around. He can serve not just four years as Trump’s Veep, but he could theoretically do eight years after that as president.

Vivek Ramaswamy has what Trump has - the ability to instantly go on offense when attacked. He can do this anywhere, in any setting, facing down any opponent - the wokest of the woke, traditional Conservatives, the media. He can help grow the multi-ethnic, multi-generational movement Trump already started and finally, America can be rid of the monopolies controlling it at the top.

The Left has all of the power, wealth, status, culture, and institutions. But they can’t offer the people what Trump can, the essentials for winning a presidential election: Hope. Optimism. American exceptionalism.

We’re in trouble as a country if the current regime gets away with what they’ve done to Trump. Every American must stand up against it and send a message to DC that we don’t go along with this grotesque overreach and abuse of power. No, we do not believe in that kind of America, and no, we do not want that kind of America.

For the last three years, I’ve been accused of so many things online that, shockingly, many friends went along with: I was a “white supremacist,” a “rape apologist,” a “TERF.” As a Hillary supporter, I was accused of being a “rich, white feminist,” a “neocon,” a “Wall Street shill” and a “cat lady.”

If you’ve been online as long as I have, you know how to handle online bullying. You must remind yourself that they don’t know you. They are targeting a version of you they see in their heads, one that gives them free rein to dehumanize and attack at will.

But the worst thing I could have been called, and I always knew this was true, was a “Trump supporter” or MAGA. And yes, not only have I been called that, but people have written things about me online that I’d gone to the dark side. One guy thought I’d had a brain tumor. Another thought I was having a mental collapse.

In all of that time, I was able to say, “I voted for Biden,” or “I’m not a Trump supporter,” or “I’m not a Trump voter,” or “I would never vote for Trump.”

But then they took the mugshot.

//

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Hurricane Hillary and The Wicked Queen

20 augusti 2023 | 31 min

The Democrats are Paper Tigers

17 augusti 2023 | 39 min

Yes, David Brooks, You Are the "Bad Guys"

6 augusti 2023 | 32 min

Dear Mr. Brooks,

Your column might be the best thing written in the New York Times in the past seven years. You’ve undoubtedly been subjected to a fair amount of abuse for it. You should probably never have written it if the comments are any indication. But those are people in the bubble. They don’t represent either the majority or the future. They think they do, but they don’t.

Your question, “Are we the bad guys”? The answer is yes. You are the bad guys. You have systematically dehumanized half the country because they dared to want to be represented by someone you don’t like. You have gone along with a warped distortion of who Donald Trump actually is, and you have perpetuated that lie to your own detriment.

Oh, it’s much worse than that, Mr. Brooks. Are you sitting down? This is the moment just before the aristocracy you write so eloquently about comes crashing down around you. You might say you have just spotted the iceberg on the horizon. The water is too still. The ship is moving too fast. It can’t be turned around in time. The ship is made of iron, and it will sink.

Like so many times before, an aristocratic minority can only stave off its ultimate collapse at the hands of the discontented majority for so long. Just look around at the abandoned mansions of the Gilded Age, a world that once was. Or take a trip to France and look at the chateaus in the countryside, or you might even look around in the American South at the plantations and high society before it was all Gone with the Wind.

I’m not necessarily saying the red states are going to drag America back in time - that’s your narrative and the false opinion of the ruling class. This is about a new America waiting to be born once the establishment elite gets out of the way.

You do get points for noticing, Mr. Brooks, even if it is too little, too late. You write:

Are Trump supporters right that the indictments are just a political witch hunt? Of course not. As a card-carrying member of my class, I still basically trust the legal system and the neutral arbiters of justice. Trump is a monster in the way we’ve all been saying for years and deserves to go to prison.

Neutral arbiters of justice? Did you really just write that with a straight face, Mr. Brooks? Do you really believe that? Yet here we have proof enough that you can’t be the good guys if you can’t even see that these investigations and indictments are designed only to stop Trump. Biden has said as much.

No news on Joe Biden’s blatant corruption with his son, potentially protecting oligarchs from sanctions, influence peddling? And a DOJ that pivots to another Trump indictment every time there is bad news for Biden? Neutral? I don’t think so.

Surely you’re not suggesting that, because you believe Trump is a “monster” that he deserves to “go to prison” without any trial? Is that what we call innocent until proven guilty, Mr. Brooks? Or is that what we call trial by mob? Tell me, what books have you read that paint yourselves as the good guys? Trump was never revealed to be the “monster” you promised. In fact, quite the opposite.

He could have, as a fascist, shot protesters on the street in the Summer of 2020 oh wait, Biden did that when the Capitol police shot Ashli Babbitt. He could have jailed protesters, throwing them in solitary without a trial, convicting them in the court of public opinion as “white supremacists,” oh wait, Biden did that too.

Censor social media outlets (oh, oops, Biden too), weaponize the DOJ (oh, darn it, Biden again), edge us closer to Nuclear war (D’OH also Biden), and attempt to jail his political opponents to hold onto power for the foreseeable future (YA, that’s actually Biden). Darnit. Will the real fascist please stand up?

Trump might aspire to be an authoritarian but never had the necessary institutional support. He had just the opposite - every institution was at war with Trump every day of his presidency. I expect you’re educated enough to know that fascists require an alignment of power across all corporate, cultural, and political life — kind of like the Democrats, Mr. Brooks. Are you sure you have the right fascist? Or Tyrant or authoritarian or monster?

For those who now say, “he led an armed insurrection to overthrow the US Government and install a white supremacist army to kill all the Black and Brown people,” or anything related to January 6th, I call b******t. The Trump emergency happened long before 2020, as any honest person knows.

Steve Bannon accurately predicted in 2017 that the Democrats would take the House in 2018 and immediately impeach Trump. It didn’t even matter what it was for. Everything our FBI and the Democrats, along with you Never Trump Republicans, did to reject the duly elected President of the United States was unprecedented and evidence of an elite ruling class that does not want to give up its power to the people.

I could spend a few paragraphs on January 6th, as I bore witness to a fake media narrative blooming out of the events that day, just as I could spend an equal amount of time talking about the violent protests in the Summer of 2020 that the media all but ignored, but instead, let’s stay focused on the task at hand - are you the good guys or are you the bad guys?

I know you are a Never Trumper, who has counted on the ratf*ckers like Rick Wilson and the Lincoln Project, or the high-minded intellectuals at the Bulwark, or the pretentious ramblings of a Joe Scarborough — it feels so good, doesn’t it, to have the affections of high society finally? To be let into the club and on the A-list now? Yeah, I bet it does. To quote Bob Dylan, I used to be among the crowd you’re in with.

I’ve only recently gotten to know the Conservatives such as yourself. I am a lifelong Democrat who voted for every Democrat that ever ran for president starting in the 1980s. I was a prominent Hillary Clinton supporter. I marched, I protested, and I wrote op-eds. I said Me Too. I supported and voted for Joe Biden. And yes, I wrote about race and gender for years on my website. Yeah, I was that guy (girl).

It would take me a while to realize you were all wrong about Trump. First, I had to find out all of these years later that your paper of record was not telling me the truth, which I did in June of 2020 when the New York Times upended itself over the Tom Cotton essay, then threw two of its editors under the bus.

That moment was, for me, like the lantern dropping out of the sky in The Truman Show.

My whole world changed. But it was hard to explain it to my friends and family. I would say things to them like, “I can’t explain it to you because you’re in the bubble.” And they would look at me like I was insane.

All that really meant is that they still trusted the New York Times. They still trusted you, Mr. Brooks. But little by little, people like me are escaping the bubble and discovering a whole wide world of freedom outside of it - freedom of the mind, most especially. Imagine, not having to fret every word that comes out of your mouth. Imagine people seeing each other as people and not as partisans in an imaginary war, not as “white supremacists” or divided by race or gender.

If the Tom Cotton debacle wasn’t bad enough, the Times sunk itself even further into the morass when it demonized and chased out respectable COVID reporter Donald McNeil after some entitled brat tattled on him that he’d used the “n-word” on a field trip. Oh, he must be a RACIST, concluded the gaggle of gossips and pearl-clutching wokesters in the newsroom.

Are you the good guys, or are you the bad guys for allowing lunatics to take over the asylum? For bringing on board uptight thought police to bully your journalists for trying to tell the truth. Most of that is not your fault, but since you stay at the paper and say nothing, you are complicit. You’re building a rat ship, as Al Pacino once opined in Scent of a Woman.

I like to think I would have resigned in protest and in support of James Bennett, Bari Weiss, and Donald McNeil. But I know it’s hard out there for a propaganda pusher, I mean a journalist, so I don’t blame you for keeping your job and staying quiet.

That intense focus on race and racism pushed and adopted by the Times, has had a catastrophic effect on the news business and American culture writ large, but especially so in the Trump era. A revolution of devout woketopians crashing up against Trump, a guy who will say anything he feels like saying, did this to the NY Times:

This is the ticket to ride at the Times now, Mr. Brooks. You are trapped in a hell of your own making by now. Look at the “Reader’s Picks” comments. It is hard to resist a comment that has 7,000 plus upvotes telling you to abandon your humanity and continue the ongoing dehumanization of half the country.

Why can’t they, or you, trust the voters? Why can’t you find better candidates and better policies? Why can’t you allow an outsider to shake things up in a people-run government? Moreover, who gave you permission to claim this country for yourselves and decide for American voters what they should want? That is not how things are supposed to work in this country.

You’ve all been treating Trump like an elusive mob boss who engaged in dirty dealings, drug smuggling, prostitution, bribery, and even murder, which justified taking extraordinary measures against him to put him in prison finally. But the evidence at hand does not bear this out. He’s a rule-breaker by nature, he always has been. He likes to upset people. He likes to antagonize, tease, and sometimes bully, but we can’t even get to Turmp’s real problems because of your tsunami of hyperbole.

The so-called charges against Trump will look ridiculous in time, just like the perjury charge against Bill Clinton does. By now, you all should be sued for wasting our time and money policing a president who had the nerve to win an election and offend the ruling elite. And then had the nerve to protest the most corrupt election in my lifetime. But again, we won’t go into that.

These charges show pencil-pusher detailing that doesn’t amount to anything serious enough to meddle in yet another election, and nothing more serious than what Joe Biden is alleged to have done — no one at your paper would put together the billions being sent to Ukraine with Joe Biden and Hunter Biden’s payoffs, just like you’ll never tell the truth about the FBI’s involvement in January 6th, but sooner or later, someone will.

I know you probably don’t really care what the majority of Republicans think of you. But still, it has to be a bit of a drag that the “paper of record” is now on par with MSNBC in the minds of the public, per this poll:

When I headed over to Trump World and watched his rallies, I did not see a racist or a bigot. I didn’t see a frothing-at-the-mouth Hitler-esque tyrant. And I couldn’t lie about that anymore.

This isn’t about telling you to support Trump or that I will even vote for him. It’s hard to talk about anything else because of YOUR obsession, not ours. He has to dominate the news because it drives traffic on your site and ratings on cable news and because God forbid any of you will actually report on the Biden administration’s obvious failings.

Some people got it long before I ever did, like David Horowitz, a former lefty, who wrote a brilliant book on the 2020 election and January 6th called Final Battle. His introduction goes like this:

“Trump’s final seventeen hours of campaigning had included more than 3,000 miles of flights and motorcades, 367 minutes of rallies, and—in the words of one Wall Street Journal reporter, “five awkward and hilarious stage dances to [the popular song] ‘YMCA.’”A Trump rally was always an entertainment.”

At one point in the evening, the crowd became so ardent—as similar rallies had before—that it began to chant “We love you!” and did so over and over, until Trump responded: “Thank you. Don’t say that. I’ll start to cry and that wouldn’t be good for my image.” It was an uncharacteristically emotional moment, displaying a self-awareness and even self-deprecation, that went generally unacknowledged by Trump’s legion of haters.”

The same rally was referenced by Tucker Carlson, who has now been fired by Fox News to protect the delicate ruling elites from hard truths they studiously avoid. Carlson wrote this before the 2020 election.

And that was really it for me. The journalists, so many people I knew and in the highest reaches of culture and power, had the story completely wrong. They didn’t know Trump at all and had no clue why so many people supported him. All they could do was spin around, wondering how could anyone like and vote for a MONSTER like Trump?

Calling them all racists led to real-world violence, as in this rarely covered event from back in 2015:

But Trump makes them feel seen, in the parlance of the Left. The people most of you through away like human garbage had one guy with balls of steel taking on the entire machine. If you don’t think most people are rooting for Trump to skate these charges, then you aren’t paying attention.

Oh sure, the Beckys and the Karens are waiting for their money shot, but most people can’t help but root for the underdog. Sorry, folks. You’ll have to confront the lies you’ve been selling for years because the people are way ahead of you.

Lastly, you write:

But there’s a larger context here. As the sociologist E. Digby Baltzell wrote decades ago, “History is a graveyard of classes which have preferred caste privileges to leadership.” That is the destiny our class is now flirting with. We can condemn the Trumpian populists until the cows come home, but the real question is: When will we stop behaving in ways that make Trumpism inevitable?

The answer, Mr. Brooks, is never. As with most aristocracies, power must be taken from you. No, not with a violent revolution, but when the American people realize what I finally did — that they can no longer trust the media, and that the media have become the bad guys. When that happens, it’s all over but the shouting.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

Trump and the Seeds of Mass Hysteria

3 augusti 2023 | 29 min

The Two Faces of Joe Biden

29 juli 2023 | 38 min

“Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts... perhaps the fear of a loss of power.” ― John Steinbeck

I not only believed in the myth of Joe Biden, I helped sell it. My father had just died and it was easy for me to transpose my grief onto Joe as I tried to convince my fellow Hillary supporters that he was the only candidate to beat Trump. Yes, the “old white guy” whose moment had finally arrived. He would save us, we all thought. He was empathetic and kind. He was, I insisted, a good man.

He’d once crossed the street in DC as the then Vice President to talk to my daughter’s 5th-grade class. My daughter stood just inches away from him. Who didn’t love Joe?

Scranton Joe is the good man, the good father, who rode the Amtrak train home from DC every day to be with his family. He’s the forward-thinking progressive who fought for the Black community, for victims of sexual assault, and for gay rights before even Obama did.

He was famously almost too young to serve when elected to the Senate in 1972. Here he is alongside his family, celebrating his birthday just one month before his wife and baby daughter would be killed in a car crash.

How could so much good fortune be cut short by a tragedy that would leave his two boys without a mother? His young son Hunter suffered from a head injury while his other son Beau survived with broken bones.

Joe Biden was sworn in at the hospital as his two young sons looked on with confusion. He pledged to put them first, and abandon his political career if it ever came to that.

But there is another Joe Biden. It’s the one who has shunned his granddaughter he pretends does not exist. At least with the Biden name she could make something of herself. But no, says Joe. She isn’t one of us.

It’s the Joe Biden who would exploit a family tragedy to hold a press conference and photo-op that was good for his image while being sworn in in1972. It’s the Joe Biden who claimed the death of his son Beau kept him from running as Obama’s successor in 2016, when the truth was that Obama didn’t want him to run. He wanted Hillary instead.

"The incredible bond I have with my children is the gift I'm not sure I would have had, had I not been through what I went through [after the fatal crash]. But by focusing on my sons, I found my redemption." - Joe Biden, Yale Commencement Address, 2015

As a Senator in 1972, Joe Biden would bear witness to the downfall of Richard Nixon, just two years away from resignation. He could not know all of those decades ago that he would face something far more serious than being caught on tape offering to pay off a blackmailer.

No, this isn’t obstruction of justice Biden is accused of participating in. It’s out-and-out corruption, the worst kind, being a politician who traded power and influence for profit.

Comparing what Biden is alleged to have done with even the most serious charges against Trump is laughable. The more of Biden’s story that is revealed, the worse the Trump hunters will look.

As always, the legacy media is the only thing standing in the way of a Nixon-like downfall for Joe. They’re in way too deep now. If Biden goes down, so do they. After all, they were responsible for helping put Joe in power in 2020, to absolve themselves of the sins of Trump. Now, they will pay a price for ignoring the Biden scandal.

All the President’s Sons

It’s hard to look at Joe Biden’s life and not think about East of Eden, the Steinbeck novel turned into a movie in 1955, based on the story of Cain and Abel. It’s not the same story, but it’s similar enough.

The golden child, Beau, was meant to carry on the family name and was preparing to run for governor when he died tragically in 2015.

The other son, Hunter, the wayward Cain, or Cal, was nothing but trouble for his father, acting out in obvious ways to get his approval and attention, but never quite getting it, engaging in corruption to enrich the Biden family.

Hunter didn’t just engage in high risk behavior with cocaine and hookers, he did it on camera, uploaded it to porn sites, and left it all on his laptops, which he then abandon at a computer repair shop.

He wasn’t exactly hiding it - if anything, he seemed like he was begging to get caught, to finally experience some of the much-needed consequences that might have changed his life. But they never came then and they won’t be coming now.

But what about Joe? Did he have anything to do with the pay-offs by foreign leaders to buy influence?

If he skimmed off the top and feigned ignorance, it would be one thing. But it’s far more sinister than that. If the allegations against him are true, Biden used the son with the dirty reputation as a go-between, knowing if they ever got caught, Hunter would take the fall. Biden would make sure he didn’t go to jail.

Even as his son was spiraling into drugs and alcohol and his other son was dying of brain cancer, Joe Biden still managed to push forward to cash in on the Biden name and his position in the Obama administration.

In 2013, Hunter Biden started a fund with the Chinese government, with Joe bringing Hunter there to meet with the CEO, the Chinese then greenlighted the fund, and Beau Biden was diagnosed with brain cancer

In 2014, Burisma appointed Hunter Biden to their Board of Directors, paying him $83K monthly, and while he and Devon Archer formed Rosemont Seneca as Joe Biden flew to Ukraine to speak against corruption, a “Kazakhstani oil company and Burisma joined with the Chinese company to announce a transnational financial arrangement.” [dw]

In 2015, Hunter Biden organized a dinner at Cafe Milano where Joe Biden dropped by to meet a high-level Burisma official, Vadym Pozharskyi, Beau Biden’s cancer has returned, and he died in May of 2015.

Also, in 2015, a Burisma source said, “It costs 5 million to pay one Biden and 5 million to pay another Biden.” [dw]

In April of 2019, Hunter Biden dropped off three damaged laptops at a computer repair shop. By October 14, 2020, the New York Post would break the story that was then silenced by Twitter and Facebook and dismissed as “Russian Disinformation.”

In October 2020, Tucker Carlson broke the Tony Bobulinski story, which the legacy media and late-night comedy hosts roundly mock.

In 2021, NPR’s story on Hunter Biden: “Biden writes that his addictions entered a particularly dark phase after Beau died of brain cancer in 2015. It got to the point where in an intervention in early 2019, his father held him in a bear hug, saying, "I don't know what to do."

In 2022, Elon Musk bought Twitter, and the Twitter Files exposed corruption at the FBI, pushing Facebook and Twitter to bury the laptop story and protect Joe Biden in the run-up to the election.

Follow the Money

The legacy press have become zombie-like in their ongoing Trump trance, refusing to chase what has to be the biggest political story of the decade, maybe of the century.

With Nixon, the cover-up was far worse than the crime itself, but in Biden’s case, both the crime and the cover-up are equally bad. Dozens of government officials, experts, activists, and journalists have had Biden’s back and covered for him. Now, as the house of cards they’ve built, the Madoff-like empire of lies finally collapses, all of them will be dragged down with it.

When will the reporters figure this out and start aggressively chasing the story? It’s hard to know. They’ve all been mandated to track the Trump indictments, which seem like child’s play by comparison, and Jack Smith is just a few headlines away from looking like a fool.

Peter Baker of the New York Times tweeted something that indicates he’s at least asking the right questions:

As long as the Justice Department and the propaganda media keep the focus on Trump, they can deflect from high crimes by the Biden family. Yet, this story goes all the way back to the “perfect phone call” that led to the first impeachment. Imagine that. Trump getting impeached for daring to ask about the Bidens’ involvement in Ukraine.

We’re witnessing unprecedented corruption at the top, yet, here we are, with only a slim GOP majority in the House aggressively chasing the scandal and a handful of outsider reporters who give a damn.

Everyone else shrugs and moves on. But that was exactly how Watergate went down too. It wasn’t a story until it was a story.

From The Spectator:

We’re in the middle of corruption bigger than our own democracy. We, the people, are not equipped to manage something that involves an actual hot war. Yet, we deserve to know just how deep Biden’s involvement goes with the Ukraine government.

Since they tied Trump to Russia, and many Americans side with Ukraine the same way they side with Democrats, no wonder the scales of justice have been so lopsided lately. They have conflated Putin and Trump, yet it’s really Biden and Ukraine that deserves closer scrutiny.

Explained here by Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn on America This Week:

I left the Democratic Party in 2020 after I watched them rig the election with dark money and well-educated lawyers who could simply rewrite any law that got in their way, not to mention a permanent propaganda press to do their bidding. I already knew they were corrupt and that they were lying to the public about almost everything, from COVID to lockdowns to voting to the protests in the Summer and January 6th, and that meant all of the experts they dragged out to back them up were lying too.

Health experts say racism is more important than COVID.

Military experts tell Trump not to send in the military during the protests over the Summer.

And yes, from Politico:

It just tugs at your heart, doesn’t it? That they could lie so brazenly, thinking themselves on the right side of history because they were stopping a once-in-a-generation threat to “Democracy”? But at what cost to the rest of us?

How long will they be able to keep the balls spinning? How long can they fool the public? How long will the legacy press turn a blind eye? And worse, how will we ever trust our government, our FBI, our experts ever again?

We used to have journalists in the mainstream who cared more about the public’s trust more than they cared about their own image on social media. What hope do we have now except our faith a few good Republicans with a slim majority in the House to bring forth witnesses who will risk everything just to tell the truth.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

Of Communism and Oppenheimer

22 juli 2023 | 31 min

This is a supplement to the piece I posted yesterday that needs clarification. It is all too easy to see both Barbie and Oppenheimer as two sides of the same coin - Barbie as the ultimate “woke” movie and Oppenheimer as a movie that attempts to vindicate or sympathize with Communism.

But that would be a mistake. Barbie reflects our society now, a society not unlike what the Communist hunters most feared: ideological capture of our major institutions, our culture, our schools, and our government.

I enjoyed Barbie because laughing at a silly movie was fun, but it is important to put it in context of what we’re living through now.

As Critical Drinker explains:

Barbie is light-hearted and not intended as propaganda, but it makes assumptions about our shared reality that really only has meaning for those on the Left who go along with it. Men are bad, women are good, but gender is not a binary, etc.

Oppenheimer is about the America before the war and the America after the war. Everything changed dramatically in the wake of Hitler, Stalin, and the bombs dropping on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which would eventually take us to the Cold War.

Oppenheimer was never a Communist. The film Oppenheimer is not about Communism. It isn’t even really a Left vs. Right film. There isn’t much politics involved at all. Some might react to the movie without seeing it, falsely believing it’s Communist propaganda — understandably, because of Hollywood’s reputation of late. But that would be unfair and a misread of what Oppenheimer is about.

In the 1930s, amid the Great Depression, Hooverville, and the New Deal, it was a “Great Awokoning” of a kind. Those on the Left who cared about social justice started organizations to help those left behind. FDR’s New Deal, for instance, left behind Black Americans.

In the book about Oppenheimer, he was so well-read, compassionate, and worldly that he understood it was an unequal society, just like Orwell or any decent person who lived back then would. That is what drew him, and Orwell, at one point, to Communism. And both would eventually abandon it once they saw where it led.

Oppenheimer and Orwell were free thinkers. They valued freedom of the mind more than anything, just as I do. That is why Orwell wrote 1984, and it’s why Oppenheimer’s quote about science is such a good one:

Does anyone think today’s Left still believes that? They do not. They don’t believe in freedom of the mind at all. They believe in forced conformity and ideological compliance in art, science, education, and even relationships between people, language, comedy, and everything else they control, which is almost everything.

Oppenheimer’s first girlfriend, Jean Tatlock, was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party. Many of Oppenheimer’s friends were also Communists. They continued to try to recruit him, but he always refused to join — he was a singular thinker and did not want to belong to any group or have any allegiances.

He also, and I want to be clear here, BUILT THE ATOM BOMB THAT ENDED THE WAR. Anyone who wants to dump on Oppenheimer has to understand his place in history, and if you are applying his suspected ties to Communism as being more important than BUILDING THE ATOM BOMB THAT ENDED THE WAR, then you are no different from the screeching fanatics on the Left.

Whether you think he should have built the bomb is beside the point. He helped end World War II, full stop. He was hailed as a hero for doing so. Our government wanted to build what President Ike warned against in his farewell address, the Military Industrial Complex:

Oppenheimer did everything he could to prevent the arms race, which put him at odds with the government and the military.

Oppenheimer was Jewish, which meant he was already an outsider and felt like one his entire life. But playing such an important part in history — with the caveat that they dropped the bomb on Japan and killed hundreds of thousands of people, of course — mattered to him. He believed he was building the bomb for Hitler, not Japan.

The paranoia in our country was understandable. Communist spies were working in our government. There was a united effort to indoctrinate our citizens to their ideology. There was Communist ideology injected into Hollywood screenplays. There was a Communist movement here. Their fear was not unfounded.

Many of those involved in the Communist movement in the 1930s would ultimately abandon it once they saw Stalin’s murder of millions and his extreme totalitarian ideology. Most people on the Left did not know the extent of it because then, like now, only useful information filtered through.

I grew up thinking Communism was “good,” and would only later understand how that ideology had manifested in the former Soviet Union, in China, in North Korea. Has it ever worked out without becoming a dystopian nightmare? No.

That’s why Winston Churchill concluded this about Democracy:

Yet, with the mass hysteria after the Rosenbergs were caught and executed, and the shooting in the Capitol, our government wanted to purge not just actual Communists but anyone who ever knew Communists or read a book that might be thought of as having Communist leanings.

This is why Arthur Miller wrote the play The Crucible to bring back the Salem Witch trials to illustrate another era when mass hysteria caused us all to look at one another suspiciously, and terrible things followed in its wake. And why Rod Serling wrote such profound dissenting viewpoints in so many of the Twilight Zones epsiodes, like the Monsters are Due on Maple Street:

Now, we’re seeing our country overtaken by something similar to Communist ideology AND the persecution of those trying to fight back. It’s a hard pretzel to wrap one’s mind around. It’s easy if you separate the mass hysteria from the ideology.

Now, the hysteria is (and I’m writing a longer piece about this for next time in Part Three of America at the Hands of a Cult) rooted in the idea that it’s the “Communist” ideology that must be preserved and anyone trying to dismantle it is a racist, sexist, bigot, transphobe, etc.

The two sides have completely reversed themselves. The Left is now where the Right was then. But if you stand on the side of freedom, you will always be on the right side, no matter your ideology. America is founded on freedom, and it’s freedom we must always reach for.

What will frustrate me the most about the Left’s reaction to Oppenheimer is that they will see themselves as still on the right side of history because the Republicans were persecuting him and ultimately removed his security clearance. Maybe that means they still see themselves as the good guys still fighting the good fight. But they would be wrong.

Even those who are against “cancel culture” and understand fanaticism and dogma have captured all of our major institutions, from culture to education to science to government, will never be able to take one step further to understand that the source of the hysteria is the person that disrupted the utopia: Donald Trump.

It’s a little like saying witchcraft is real and there are real witches, just not those you accused of witchcraft. To understand the source of the hysteria — Donald Trump is a racist and a rapist — is to understand the purges and persecutions.

This is why I no longer draw that line, why I write so much about Trump and MAGA even at the cost of my own reputation, and why I live my life publicly defying that direct order to divide myself from half the country. I do not buy into it, and that, I think, is our only way out.

Until they can do that and humanize Trump and his supporters, they will never fully grasp the moment we’re living through and will still kick the can down the road for years before it all comes home to roost. And it will. It always does.

All one has to do is look at their behavior, and our behavior, since Trump was elected to understand what they’re doing now, to Trump, to anyone who isn’t fully on board with their “Woketupia” is still mass hysteria. It’s still a mass delusion. It will still be regarded with the same disdain we now regard the witch hunts in the 1950s.

At least in the 1950s, they had the excuse of WWII — Hitler and Stalin. Now, all we have is Trump, MAGA, and the Tea Party as their greatest threat. They believe it’s the “white male patriarchy” and the “white supremacists” trying to remove the “Black and Brown and the LGBTQIA people from power.” And this is because Obama did remake this country into a “woke utopia.”

The film Barbie is a great example of just how accepted this ideology is - that regardless of its dramatic changes over the past few years - they can still point to “The Patriarchy” as the ultimate evil.

We’ve now become almost numb to watching our fellow Americans, millions of them, treated as enemies of the state, not to mention the unprecedented persecution of Trump — Jack Smith’s indictment as the most recent example, but the raid on mar-a-logo, Russiagate, the two impeachments, and a propaganda media that refuses to report the truth, the casual dehumanization we see against them on social media when the Left holds all of the power is a terrifying moment in history to be living through.

It isn’t hard to stand on the right side of history. You just have to recognize what fear and delusion can do to people when they don’t have strong leaders like Eisenhower to guide them through the storm.

I hope that clarifies my intent with the piece.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

The Politics of Barbie and Oppenheimer

22 juli 2023 | 33 min

How Sound of Freedom Dominated the Box Office and Embarrassed Hollywood

16 juli 2023 | 30 min

The Day Journalism Died

14 juli 2023 | 39 min

How Hollywood Destroyed Itself

9 juli 2023 | 29 min

How Hollywood Destroyed Itself

9 juli 2023 | 29 min

What I Love About America

4 juli 2023 | 17 min

Welcome to America's Religious War

3 juli 2023 | 50 min

America at the Hands of a Cult

25 juni 2023 | 53 min

Happy Father's Day

18 juni 2023 | 13 min

The Big Lie About Trump

12 juni 2023 | 42 min

"What is a Girl?"

7 juni 2023 | 44 min

What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff — I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye. - JD Salinger

Taylor Swift’s concerts have become cultural phenomenons, religious-like experiences for so many people worldwide, especially little girls. Happy moms post videos of their flushed, excited faces and near-hysteria at the first sight of their idol.

It’s girl world, to be sure. But it’s also become, like so many other things in American culture, LGBTQIA world too, like the upcoming Barbie movie is sure to be. There doesn’t seem to be anywhere left that belongs only to girls. From locker rooms to sports to clothes and makeup, girls are vanishing.

Recently, Taylor Swift “got political,” and was no doubt backed into a corner by activists demanding she take a loud public side against what they believe are “harmful” laws hurting their community. Which laws? They don’t say, and you aren’t allowed to ask. They’re all bad, they insist. You’re with us, or you’re against us.

There is one law growing in prominence not just here but in other countries too, and that’s to put the breaks on “gender-affirming care” for minors. But if you support gay marriage or you want to be a good ally, you have to go along with that too, you have to be part of a movement that is sterilizing children legally, in the United States in 2023.

Most people, including Taylor Swift, have no idea just how bad things have gotten. I too was mostly unaware of what “gender-affirming care” actually means. I also didn’t know how bad things had gotten for women in sports. Denying biological reality seems to be something fundamentalist religions do, not educated liberal societies, yet here we are, insisting trans women are women. They can believe that if they want to but it doesn’t make it true.

The media does such an expert job of pandering to activists, pretending like it’s a small percentage of athletes. But the truth is that there is widespread suppression of dissent and a climate of fear that keeps so many from speaking out about how this is not just a tiny movement anymore. It’s the core identity and belief of the Democratic Party.

They can’t see this as a social contagion because that news never enters their feedback loop. All they hear, over and over again, is “protect trans kids.” Does protecting them include making them infertile? Does it include surgery that creates a false opening that must be dilated several times a day, or it closes up? Does it mean eliminating their sexual function? For life?

Standing up to any of it is hard. We all saw what happened to JK Rowling. The activists are out in force, patrolling reading lists, science labs, school libraries, and all media outlets. Just in writing this, I run the risk of losing everything. But so what?

I’ll take my talking points from exiled scientists - the new heretics of our time, like evolutionary biologists Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein:

As long as we still have a First Amendment, there is no justifiable reason to stay silent on something so urgent. Controlling speech has been the only reason this madness has gone as far as it has. But thankfully, the voices of dissent are getting louder, and there is strength in numbers.

When Twitter, under Elon Musk’s ownership, struck a deal with the Daily Wire to stream What is a Woman on the first day of Pride, they got spooked enough to pull the deal unless they removed two scenes they labeled “hate speech.”

One of those scenes included a desperate father who had been charged with child abuse for misgendering his own daughter, as he fought to stop her from life-altering medical intervention.

Thankfully, Musk stepped in and put the kibosh on Twitter censorship, even tweeting out the film to his followers. By the end of the weekend, it had been viewed close to 200 million times.

Because of Matt Walsh standing up and speaking out, and because Elon Musk bought Twitter, more people know about what goes on behind closed doors at gender clinics, at universities, and in the minds of so many well-meaning politicians.

How is it we have arrived in 2023 and the people sticking up for truth, science, and reason are the Conservative Christians?

Here are some of the film’s best scenes:

The activists have pushed the American public too far. While most everyone was accepting of gay rights and gay marriage, they kept moving the line. Now, elementary schools are making Pride somehow part of their curriculum.

But Pride isn’t what it used to be. It’s not the many gay parents I got to know while I was raising my daughter. It’s now expanded like a mushroom cloud to include this unforgivable abuse of minor children under the Orwellian term “medical care.”

At this point, I know beyond any doubt that there is no fixing the Left. There is only leaving - leave the schools, leave the therapists, leave the online bubbles, vote them out.

Here is Ben Shapiro on the growing backlash:

Too many moms now are finding their march toward progress nothing but feet getting stuck in the mud, unable to move, trapped in a movement that seeks to erase them and minimize their power as mothers.

Some moms found out all too well, and all too late.

“America is Wrong” but Heather was Right

Dooce, aka Heather Armstrong, came up alongside Ree Drummond, the Pioneer Woman as mommy bloggers with great cameras who recorded their daily struggles raising their kids.

But Dooce would never get a cooking show on the Food Network nor sell merch like an air fryer with her personal design on it. But she was a great writer who was funny and brilliant, and there is no doubt she loved her kids. Much to the shock of her longtime readers like me, she killed herself last month after a long battle with depression and a relapse into alcoholism.

Dooce had two daughters. The younger daughter was Marlo (pictured above), the absolute girly girl. Dooce described this aspect of Marlo’s personality often. She loved tea parties, pink dresses, makeup, and princess costumes but had emerged in our post-2020 dystopia as a “non-binary they.”

When I saw this on Dooce’s Instagram, I immediately thought, oh, there she goes again. Surfing the latest trend, so of course, one of her kids would be trans. She’ll get much mileage out of this online with all of those Good Liberal White Women clucking about, using the correct pronouns, and settling into the only activism they have left.

But something wasn’t adding up in my mind. I wasn’t sure why. Something made me think more deeply about Dooce, her kids, and her suicide. Was there a story there?

Then I saw this from NBC news:

Armstrong’s impulse to put her most private feelings on display occasionally forced her readers to reckon with sentiments they might have found troubling. In a lengthy blog post published in August 2022, most notably, she expressed views some deemed transphobic.

The post in which she wrote "Biological gender is scientific" and "we are tossing around these pronouns like goddamn candy" was later removed. But some fans remained disappointed; some said they stopped reading her blog.

And even after her suicide, a tweet by Nicole Rosenleaf Ritter (she/her/hers) says: “After almost 20 years, I stopped reading @dooce after her terrible TERF moment last year, but I always hoped she would come out of that so I could delight in her singular voice again. I hope she has found peace, and I ache for her loved ones.”

No matter what else Dooce was, no matter how “delightful” her voice, women like Rosenleaf Ritter drew the line at her opinion on trans issues, even when trying to save her daughter’s future. That is why there is no saving the Left. Fanaticism has obliterated objective truth and humanity itself.

Heather was, more than anything else, a good mother. She knew both of her daughters well, and had tracked their lives for years on her blog, with loving, hilarious, tender detail. What came flooding back when I unlocked my memories of reading Dooce all of these years — her daughter Marlo was a girly girl!

Does the above photo, Princess in the Garden, look like gender dysphoria in any way, shape or form? Or does that look like an adorable girly girl? If there was a textbook definition of what the Gender Cult thinks defines a girl early on, Marlo would be it.

I don’t go along with the idea that there are such well-defined gender stereotypes. I know this isn’t true from my own experience and watching my daughter grow up. Neither of us fit what they would call upon to decide what gender we were. But never in that time did any of us even consider, for one second, whether we were girls or not.

So what exactly was so offensive as to make so many of Dooce’s readers turn on her? While her post, America is Wrong, has been deleted, it’s still available on the Wayback Machine.

It is a long, rambling, desperately sad depression spiral that was a clear sign she was in trouble mentally, emotionally, and physically. In it, she already confesses to having attempted suicide. But just as she heads for the edge of the cliff, with nothing to lose, she lays it out, all of it, the whole ugly truth of what she and every honest mother knows, otherwise known as “Her Terrible TERF moment.”

She wrote:

For the kids who are still with me — and you’re still with me, right? You can trust me, and I need you to believe that. It will become very clear why. I may be a little scary because no one in your life is allowed to talk to you about gender dysphoria.

Those words are super loud and clarion clear to all of you, aren’t they.

Gender dysphoria. There. I said it again.

Every adult in your life has been told by the government to AFFIRM AFFIRM AFFIRM your gender dysphoria because you are out there co-opting suicidal ideation. You are throwing that phrase around as if you own it, as if you have any f*****g idea what it means.

Yes. I am calling you out, too. All of you. And I will calm down a little bit, maybe, because you need to be able to trust someone who loves you. And I love you more than you will ever comprehend because I am you.

And she continued:

White progressive moms, I am talking to you now. And I have no f*cks to give should any of this hurt your feelings. I feel your pain, too, because when my they/them told me they wanted to change their pronouns I believed they were riding this massive cultural shift in acceptance and inclusion.

But I was wrong. America is f*cking wrong.

During my recovery process I began to realize that I was not asking the right questions about what we think is a radical new way of celebrating diversity.

White progressive moms, are you asking yourselves the right questions? Maybe you should so that I don’t have to do the work for you. But since none of you are doing the work, lean in close and let me give you the answers to the questions you won’t ask.

Gender dysphoria is social contagion.

Should your theys and thems be afraid to read this or disinterested in the manic rambling spiral of some looney white anorexic on the internet, this part is for you and your kids together. Read this part together calling upon the pain of your childhood that in hindsight might have made you realize that your girls are experiencing normal human sadness. They are teenagers. They were once your precious baby girls.

They are experiencing the same sadness you experienced when you were their age.

Your children are perfect. They were born perfect. And you love them just the way they are.

Let me say it again, and you need to repeat this over and over again to your girls. Every single day for the rest of their lives because WHO KNOWS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN WE DIE:

Your children are perfect. They were born perfect. And you love them just the way they are.

This was her Marlo - the textbook “girl” by their own definition of what defines a girl. How does a gender clinician talk their way around this?

Heather posted this photo of her own withering body, to emphasize the damage caused by a lifetime of body dysmorphia.

You’d think, given that, a little bit of sympathy would be on offer for all of her pain. But no. She has broken the sacred trust of the Ordnung and for that, she must pay.

And a Tweet from Fatemeh Khatibloo that says:

So. Heather Armstrong (aka as Dooce) has, in one utterly unhinged post:1) Outed herself as a TERF parent to a non-binary child2) Demeaned neurodiverse adults everywhere3) Co-opted the pain and lives of Black women4) Disappeared Black trans women entirely

This poem on Heather’s Instagram, and the accompanying photo, reveals how hard it was for her and what it would mean to abandon everything she knew about her child.

She might have seen Marlo’s transition as her mental health issues visited upon her youngest, despite the therapy, despite the self-help, despite being a “good liberal” and doing everything right. But that isn’t true. Like so many young girls, Marlo has been taken in by a movement that looks a lot like a cult that gives her the acceptance every adolescent needs.

Does any of this mean her daughter, the gender clinics, the internet or any external forces are responsible for Heather’s suicide? Absolutely not. That was her decision to end her life, just as it was her decision as one of the mommy bloggers to put that life, and the lives of her children, online.

But Heather left her daughter, and countless other girls a precious gift: a trail of breadcrumbs back to the real Marlo. It’s all there. The photos, the smiles, the stories, years and years of history - once a mommy blog, now an archaeological dig, a historical record of what really happened in the life of a young girly girl with curls, dimples, and a lisp.

I can’t know what happened with Marlo, whether she was in the process of taking “T” or not, but Dooce’s desperation in America is Wrong is a warning. And that tells me that she was likely worried this was her daughter’s future, defined only by the drugs she would have to take for the rest of her life.

Heather was not a TERF, which is a hateful slur to punish and control women to shut them up. She was a worried mother like so many worried mothers going up against such insurmountable forces, from Taylor Swift to the President of the United States.

It shouldn’t be surprising that to gain control of our youth, they must first gain control of women by driving a wedge between them and their kids or co-opting them as happy cult members sending their kids into the lion’s den.

But if there is one thing everyone knows to fear in the wild, it’s the Mama Bear. We are ferocious when it comes to protecting our young.

One such Mama Bear is Megyn Kelly, who has taken on the fight too. Her explanation of why she will no longer use pronouns has recently earned almost 1 million views.

It should go without saying that standing up for women and girls doesn’t mean being abusive or cruel to trans people. What they do as adults, how they choose to live, is their business, as long as it doesn’t mean trampling the rights of others to live the way they choose to live, to have fair competition in sports, to feel safe in locker rooms, and to mature fully as biological women, or men, before they decide to alter their bodies permanently.

And don’t force us to go along with your version of reality. Don’t force us to say something that isn’t true or force us to use pronouns because no one should be forced to believe anything. That’s fascism.

Despite Dooce’s declining mental state and her withering physical form, she had enough Mama Bear to risk even her carefully cultivated reputation to go up against her own audience and perhaps lose everything. That, right there, is true grit.

Dooce.com is Heather Armstrong’s legacy. They can call her whatever they want. Her beautiful words will remain.

She wrote:

Dooce wrote:

July 17, 2014 - My Little Mermaid

Marlo is currently obsessed with mermaids and not because of Disney, no. Leta has been watching an Australian show on Netflix called H2O: Just Add Water with Marlo tucked in on the couch beside her. She got several mermaid Barbies for her birthday and has been requesting that I leave her hair down “like a mermaid” before I send her to camp. Before I left for Southeast Asia I bought a passport cover in faux pink crocodile that she calls my mermaid wallet, and when I returned she claimed it as her own. This is one of those adorable yet at times annoying phases (if I let her she would swim in the bathtub “like a mermaid” for hours and hours) that I’m glad I’m documenting so that I can remember it years from now. And remind her that she used to sleep with my passport cover.

Rest in Peace, Heather BArmstrong, AKA Dooce. You were right. America is wrong.

But don’t worry, I got you. They’ve awakened the Mama Bears now, and they better run.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

The 2020 Election and The Fog of War

31 maj 2023 | 45 min

The Left's Incurable Munchausen by Proxy

17 maj 2023 | 31 min

Fox News Goes the Way of the Landline

11 maj 2023 | 24 min

Joe Biden's Ghost Ship

8 maj 2023 | 47 min

Schumer, AOC and Rupert Murdoch Unite to Silence Tucker

3 maj 2023 | 47 min

Tucker Carlson Ousted Before He Could Respond to 60 Minutes and Ray Epps

26 april 2023 | 36 min

The Democrats Have Abandoned an America in Crisis

24 april 2023 | 49 min

No, Elon Musk Did Not "Ruin" Twitter

20 april 2023 | 29 min

beware those who are quick to censorthey are afraid of what they do not knowbeware those who seek constant crowds forthey are nothing alone - Charles Bukowski

An old friend texted me recently to ask how I was handling the “new Twitter.” I had to think for a minute, and then I realized that in the language of the Left, he meant that Elon Musk had bought the site, and now it’s overrun by hate speech and neo-Nazis. Do I still feel safe using it?

“Oh,” I texted back. “I’m not in the bubble of the Left anymore, so it doesn’t bother me. I like it. I am a fan of free speech.”

There was a long pause, something I’ve become accustomed to when conversing with someone on the Left. They don’t want to argue. They don’t want to go any further. They just want to slowly back away.

The idea that Twitter was now overrun by “hate speech” was just an accepted reality because that is how much power the blue-checks on Twitter have to influence the mainstream media narrative, which trickles down everywhere.

But when a viral video circulated with a BBC reporter who could not name even one example of hate speech, that didn’t make news in the mainstream because it contradicted the narrative.

The story will make the rounds on the Right, but the mainstream narrative has more power, and if a story contradicts the government’s official narrative, it will never make the news. That’s still true with Musk as the new owner, but it’s a step up from the government using Twitter as a filter to silence dissent.

That Twitter users had enough power and status to decide reality is what made Twitter dangerous. This has been true since the beginning, as it slowly became the most powerful propaganda tool the Democrats had.

Once Musk took over Twitter and decided the blue checks were granting status to people deemed “special” but not to others, he set about messing with their own self-importance by taking away their privilege of the verification badge, giving users who pay a monthly fee the opportunity to have a blue check instead.

What is brilliant about this, and maybe most people don’t get it, is that Musk understood the collective power of the blue-check army and now he’s punctured it, dismantled it, like stealing all of their horses in the middle of the night, leaving them nowhere to go to fight the next battle.

But they aren’t used to anyone challenging their power. Musk has been feeling the impact of their collective wrath ever since. HOW DARE YOU!

“I’m not paying for that,” they proclaimed. But oh, how delicious it will be to see some of these once-mighty prominent legacy blue-checks naked without that little verification symbol.

Supposedly that’s somehow ruined Twitter. What it’s done is democratize it. It might be more chaotic now, maybe even slightly more unpredictable, but that makes it more thrilling, not less.

What “ruined” Twitter was the #resistance, transforming the platform into one massive propaganda outlet for The Democrats in an imaginary battle with Donald Trump that began in 2017, when the company tweaked its algorithm to push more engaged tweets to the top of everyone’s feed.

Even if they have the choice to see “latest Tweets,” most prefer to see what tweets are driving the narratives in a given day so they can ride the wave of outrage, whatever is trending, whatever person is “it,” who can be dunked on, humiliated or bullied into an apology or chased off the platform entirely.

The bullying on Twitter had become a problem, not just for users, but corporations and institutions that were suddenly worried about being hurled into the public arena for shaming. That is Twitter’s curse and power, which is why Musk never needed to sweat competition like Substack Notes.

As someone who has been swarmed and bullied more times than I can count, I already feel a little more free using Twitter now. They’re right that it has changed. But Musk didn’t ruin it. He rescued it.

Elon’s Stumble

Elon Musk has made, by my calculations, only one major mistake since he took over Twitter, and that was assuming journalist Matt Taibbi owed him something after the two broke the all-important Twitter Files story. He thought Taibbi should move his Substack over to Twitter to help Twitter profit.

But this vindicated the hysterical rantings by people like Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Mehdi Hasan. They accused Taibbi and others of being bought and paid for by “the Richest Man in the World.” Now they had proof that was the intention all along.

Taibbi, however, was never working for Musk, and if he has any loyalty, it’s to Substack, where he’s built his substantial following of readers like me who rely on him to tell us the truth. It’s also his main source of income. Musk isn’t paying him.

It wasn’t so much what he did to Taibbi that was the mistake. It was more about giving up a powerful Chess piece he had with the alliance of journalists investigating the Twitter files. Despite how the legacy media has been trying to downplay it, it is the story of the year, maybe of the decade. This was not a fight worthy of Musk and the power he now holds with Twitter.

And frankly, Taibbi didn’t deserve it. He put his reputation on the line, and was interrogated by Democrats in Congress who treated him like a traitor to his own country. He had to sit there as Mehdi Hasan performed some odd “gotcha” theater just so he could send out Tweets, anticipating the pats on the heads from the smug and self-righteous brigade. GET HIM, they collectively hissed. How dare he try to embarrass the Security State! To hold the powerful to account! How dare he do journalism!

Taibbi and Musk were on the same side, and fracturing that relationship, and devaluing the Twitter files, is too big of a win for the blue-checks.

Substack Notes was never going to be a threat to Twitter. No other social media site has the power to humiliate influential, high-status people. It is the designated arena for public shaming, and it’s the only one. Unfortunately for the left, they don’t realize they were largely responsible for making Twitter that powerful. And now it’s backfiring on them.

Musk should have Taibbi back to work on the Twitter Files to keep up the pressure and drive heat from Substack back to Twitter to form a powerful resistance against the dominant groupthink.

Musk is under enormous pressure now, with the legacy media attacking him daily, not to mention our government seeking his destruction. To the Biden administration, he barely exists except as a threat, not with his SpaceX program or Tesla. That does illustrate perfectly what the modern Democrats value, and it’s not success or hard work or innovation.

Regardless, Musk’s power in working with Taibbi and others on the Twitter files, whether they continued or not, was making them sweat. Otherwise, there would not have been such a massive effort to pretend they were meaningless.

What a sad state of affairs when people like David Frum, your classic blue-check, marinate in their own smug satisfaction. Their fame, such as it is, being a big fish in a tiny pond, hopelessly addicted to the hearts and the RTs. Imagine being a guy who did matter once, now having to turn to a flattering reflecting pool to feel a tiny flicker of importance.

Their job was supposed to be to chase the story as Taibbi did. Instead, their jobs became chasing the reporters.

Elon’s Warning

2016 was the first time Mark Zuckerberg put his powerful new toy, Facebook, to the test, and it helped Trump win. But by 2020, Zuckerberg, probably because he wanted to absolve himself of the guilt of 2016, “helped” the Democrats with not just a $400 million cash infusion but also that same technology to “find” the right voters not to suppress their vote but to collect their ballots.

If Zuckerberg has data on almost 300 million Americans, imagine how easy it would be to find those exact voters to pull in wins in key swing states where the “enthusiasm gap” would have led to a second term for Trump. While no one can ever prove this is what they did, Mollie Hemingway’s book on the 2020 election details just how deep Zuckerberg’s involvement went.

Now, factor in the power of AI. Democrats are ready to use influencers already whoring themselves out to big brands to convince a generation raised on brands to imprint on the Democratic Party. It won’t be that hard to use AI to ensure the right news gets to the right people, and the bad news stays out. They don’t even need the blue-check army anymore with AIs shaping the media narrative.

The Democrats seem to only want power now. They’ve sacrificed everything they used to value, from objecting to dark money and Citizens United, to aligning themselves with the Deep State, defending the FBI and the CIA. They’re certainly not the Democratic Party I grew up supporting.

The War of the Words

So much of the reaction to Trump had to do with what the Left had become before 2016. If political correctness was already a problem in the 90s, by 2015 it had become almost a crisis in America. Everyone noticed it.

From 2015:

Even before that, back in 2011, this video talked about the rise of political correctness, tying it to the Frankfurt School and its influence on colleges with Critical Theory. Watching this video is shocking because it could have been made today. What was confined to college campuses has now become our entire country at the hands of the Democrats and their powerful alliance with cultural and corporate America.

The Left colonized the internet first, and especially the social media empires. Twitter was co-opted by Barack Obama’s campaign back in 2008 as a revolutionary way to mobilize young people. From then on, the Democrats, or left-leaning, college-educated eggheads, dominated Twitter.

Trump was the first major threat to that power as Trump used Twitter in a way no other Republican or even any politician had. He used it to go over the heads of the media and get his message to the people directly. The more he tweeted, the bigger his follower count grew.

Trump was the existential crisis to the Left not because of anything he did but because of what he said. That he was overtly offensive at a time of extreme word policing was his superpower, and the thing about him that sent much of the Left cascading into waves of hysteria for the four years he was in power.

But that was always what Trump represented. He was the guy who shocked people with what he said because it was brutally honest. That was true in the 80s and true on his show. Anyone who was a fan of The Apprentice often took what Trump said with a grain of salt. But the eggheads on Twitter, the intellectuals, weren’t watching The Apprentice so they took what he said literally.

Here is a clip from The Apprentice and 1980s Trump.

So much of the battle for Twitter is simply about words. Words control ideology, which ultimately controls the people. Musk’s objection to how Twitter was being managed was that they had the power to decide what words were allowed, what jokes were allowed, and what news stories were allowed, and that, he rightly believed, was not only destroying Twitter but it was destroying our country too and everything we value.

I’ve heard people say that Elon Musk cares what people think of him, as though they’ve cast him as a supervillain with no feelings or compassion. Why wouldn’t he care? Not many people can take that level of incoming and wipe the slate clean the next day.

But we need him. We need more people like him to thrust a bold middle finger at the information monopoly the Left controls. We need more people with courage to carve a path out of this crippling sea of misery we’ve created. We need role models who are resilient and who send the message to the young that words are just words. We can survive them.

Musk is still a superhero for the modern age, smart enough to notice what threatens our civilization, brave enough to speak up about it, and rich enough to buy Twitter for 44 billion.

The tweets by the blue-checks that they seem to think matter are just cyber dust - a layer of data to trap them in time as people who were caught up in their own unearned importance before the whole thing came collapsing down, before Twitter and this country were wrestled free from their grasp.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

We Need to Talk About Audrey Hale and Riley Gaines

15 april 2023 | 36 min

Biden's America - A Society That Has Given Up on Itself

8 april 2023 | 47 min

Sorry, Democrats, You're Not the Good Guys Anymore

3 april 2023 | 44 min

Democrats Have Nothing Left But Trump

26 mars 2023 | 37 min

The Pledge of Allegiance to the "Woke"

21 mars 2023 | 34 min

How I Knew The Democrats and The Media Were Lying About January 6th

16 mars 2023 | 36 min

The Best Film of the Year that Won't Win Best Picture

7 mars 2023 | 29 min

Biden Gets Trumped in East Palestine, Ohio

1 mars 2023 | 35 min

Did I just Leave a Cult?

16 februari 2023 | 22 min

Caligula at the Grammys

8 februari 2023 | 17 min

How the Legacy Media Lost My Trust

6 februari 2023 | 32 min

The Great Reset vs. The Great Uprising

30 januari 2023 | 33 min

The Kavanaugh Delusion and the Hillary Democrat

23 januari 2023 | 29 min

The Fall of Hollywood's Empire

15 januari 2023 | 32 min

A New Year, a New Hope

1 januari 2023 | 22 min

The Shameful Jan 6 Show Trial and the Puppet Press

20 december 2022 | 17 min

Musk Derangement Syndrome

15 december 2022 | 31 min

Yes, the 2020 Election was "Rigged"

5 december 2022 | 30 min

It's Elon Musk Who is Trying to Save Democracy

29 november 2022 | 29 min

Thank You, Readers for Saving My Life

25 november 2022 | 21 min

Mr. Trump Goes to Washington

21 november 2022 | 33 min

Trump was nearing the end of a campaign speech for Marco Rubio in Miami, days before the midterms when it started to rain. The MAGA faithful used their Trump signs as makeshift umbrellas. Trump’s mic cut in and out. He could barely read the teleprompter.

“Is everybody having a good time?” he shouted to the crowd.

The answer came roaring back. They were having the time of their lives, even as thunder cracked in the sky and the rain came down in sheets.

Covering Trump’s head was the red MAGA cap. Trump did something he doesn’t often do. He took it off, smiled at the excited crowd, wiped his brow, put the hat back on, and continued his speech.

“I’m not leaving,” he said—the crowd roared.

Maybe it was the rain, thunder, or something else but I couldn’t help but think I’d never seen anything like this. The music he’d chosen to close out his speeches might not always work, but this time, it not only worked, it was some kind of crazy magic.

Is anyone else seeing this, I wondered? I have watched all of Trump’s speeches since 2020 because I want to know what is true about what’s said about him. Most of the time it isn’t true. It’s the usual delusion meant to drive fear and panic.

The music served to raise the drama of the moment. His face soaking wet, his voice strong, I just kept thinking, how is it possible anyone who has gone through what he’s gone through still has the energy in him, the fight in him, to stand there, rain be damned.

No one there had any idea it was about to come crashing down. They didn’t know that the midterms would bring disappointment. They didn’t know MAGA wouldn’t be delivering that red wave as promised.

They didn’t know the GOP, Rupert Murdoch, Ben Shapiro, and other high-profile Conservatives would turn on Trump and MAGA or that Mitch McConnell would close the loop by saying “bad quality” candidates frightened Americans.

They knew none of this as the music played, the rain came down, and Trump moved them in ways no other politician ever had, at least not in decades. It was captured in time by the only streaming channel that plays all of Trump’s speeches, Right Side Broadcasting, and maybe a personal cell phone video.

One thing I knew for sure while listening to it, the mainstream media would never report on it. They would never tell the story of that moment in Miami when the rain came down, and Trump stayed.

Guess Who’s Back?

Last night Elon Musk reinstated Trump’s account after two years without Trump’s tweets. As you can imagine, chaos ensued. Powerful people don’t like things taken away from them, and there has never been a more powerful propaganda tool for the establishment Left than Twitter. It belongs to them, they believed, just like they believe America belongs to them.

But more than that, they count on Twitter to be the official story of the Biden Administration. A hive mind of Press Secretaries to make sure everyone is on point. They can’t afford dissent. They don’t mind that there are alternative sites like Substack or Rumble. They know the media only validates Twitter.

Musk has taken the place of Trump because nature abhors a vacuum. There is a fundamental need for people to tell the whole truth and to hear the whole truth, no matter how inconvenient it is. Musk’s takeover of Twitter has The Machine quaking in its boots. How long before they go after him the way they went after Trump? Probably not long. Matt Taibbi has a great piece on this about witch burnings.

Yeonmi Park escaped the fascist regime of North Korea only to come to America and find censorship and suppression of free speech. She is cheering Musk’s action to reinstate Trump:

Trump’s Twitter is important for history. He was our president for four years and used Twitter as his main communication outlet for much of that time. That is also our history. It belongs to the people, even if Twitter is a “private” company. The government co-opted it, creating a filter to violate the First Amendment. Now, they have to contend with Trump’s last tweets, which might be tough to help them prove he incited violence on January 6th:

Elon Musk is just getting a taste of the Washington machine, the same machine that has been trying to crush Trump and the MAGA movement for six long years. For a minute there it looked like they were going to lose. The scrappy Davids were going to take on the Goliath and win. They were going to win without the big money donors, without the mainstream media but just by hot-footing it door to door, talking to people the establishment government has long since abandoned.

The Long Con

Regardless of what you think of Trump, there is no good explanation for the ongoing persecution to “find something” to remove him from power, discredit and destroy his presidency because the Administrative State wanted him gone.

Trump, or Elon Musk, isn’t as pure and innocent as Jefferson Smith in Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. But this film, more than just about anything ever written, goes right to heart of the matter.

Released in 1939, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington was loosely based on the Teapot Dome scandal of the Warren G. Harding administration, which held its place in history as the biggest scandal in Washington before Watergate.

Jefferson Smith is appointed to the Senate after the sudden death of one of their cronies. When he first comes to DC, he gasps at the Capitol Dome, the Lincoln Memorial, and the weight of our Nation’s founding. He believes in all of it. He’s a patriot and an idealist.

When the press mocks him for being nothing but a superficial “yes” vote and a puppet of the Senate, he tells Senator Paine, his mentor, that he’d like to write a bill for a Boys’ Camp in the wilderness, so kids from all different backgrounds can experience the wonders of the natural world, to spend their lives “like they just came out of a tunnel.”

But when his bill threatens a network of corrupt politicians doing the bidding of a powerful oligarch named Jim Taylor, he’s warned to step away, say nothing, and become just as corrupt as the Paynes and the Taylors.

But Smith, like Trump, is an outsider. He can look at the game with fresh eyes. He defies their demands and tries to expose the graft on the Senate floor. Senator Paine then accuses him of trying to push through a financial scheme for his own profit.

None of it is true, of course, but the mechanisms in place are almost exactly what happened to Trump in his four years in power and even the two years after.

They hold a Senate hearing to expel Smith from Congress with fake witnesses, fake handwriting experts, and a massive media machine to back it all up. In other words, a show trial like the January 6th show trial. They work a massive PR campaign to demonize and discredit Smith, whose only crime was threatening their hold on power.

When Saunders sees that Smith has packed his bags and is leaving town with a broken heart, she encourages him to fight back. And with that, we have the now infamous all-night filibuster where Jefferson Smith, against all odds, attempts to clear his name.

But the “Taylor Machine” has the media and corrupt politicians in his pocket, and Smith is no match for any of it. Saunders even tries to enlist a youth army to print their version of what Smith is saying, but Taylor sends out his goons to silence them by destroying their bicycles, hosing down their parades, and derailing their efforts to get the word out.

The result is a wrecked Jefferson Smith, who can barely stand by the end of it. But it’s when Senator Paine brings in boxes of telegrams from his hometown, proving even those who know him now despise him, that he reminds Senator Payne he once believed lost causes were the only causes worth fighting for. And with that, he finally exhausts himself and collapses on the Senate floor.

Wracked with guilt, Paine attempts suicide before hurling himself into the chamber and confessing everything, vindicating Smith.

But this isn’t a Frank Capra movie. No one is going to confess to what they’ve done. They’re going to play out the long con to the bitter end until Trump is destroyed and the grassroots movement of working-class voters is dead. That’s what they want for this country to be like Twitter used to be. All theirs.

Trump and MAGA were no match for The Machine. Trump thought he could beat them, that he could give a press conference every day during COVID, and they would appreciate someone who devoted that much time to getting us through a crisis. Instead, they mocked him, cherry-picked everything he said, and painted him as an existential threat.

We needed our president during that time of crisis. We needed a country to come together. But to The Machine, their power was more important than anything else, even managing a global pandemic.

Nothing would compare to what they did in 2020 and with January 6th. We’re not just talking about Trump being a target. His MAGA faithful are now being called “domestic extremists” and treated like enemies of the state. The bogus “seditious conspiracy” charges were like a slap in the face to people who carry around pocket Constitutions and stand in awe of the flag.

Now we know January 6th was an FBI operation because of course, it was. How could it not be? From Crossfire Hurricane to the Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping, it was clear they had an objective to bring down Trump by any means necessary. They were willing, and are still willing, to weaponize the DOJ or any major government institution to stop Trump and MAGA.

None of this means that Trump can win in 2024. And even if he could, he would only have four years, and they would sabotage him every step of the way during that time. If you want to blow them out of power, pick someone like Ron DeSantis, he will at least have the backing of the establishment Right and all of their deep-pocketed power players that Trump didn’t have.

Their long con worked. They did well in the midterms. Biden’s ugly speeches made him the first president in my lifetime to demonize his own citizens. If you’re looking for fascism, look no further than that. Far from being punished for it, he was rewarded for it, so too were the Democrats for their immoral double standard of funding the same candidates they called enemies of the Republic.

The truth doesn’t matter. That’s why they must keep control of Twitter. They want their negotiated truth to be the official story. They want to tell the history of Trump and the movement he inspired to make themselves the good guys. There might have been a moment way back when they actually were the good guys. Their corruption, however, now overshadows any good they ever did.

Trump took his place behind the podium at Mar-a-Lago and did the only thing he could do by now to clear his name. He can either let them write his legacy or fight to take it back. He announced he was running for the third time. Of course, they laughed at him. Of course, their machine whirred to life as Merrick Garland announced a Special Prosecutor.

Now they have to decide if they will finish the job, their long con, or if they will allow Trump to run again knowing that their machine can beat him.

I spent time in Trump World because I knew I wasn’t getting the truth about him or his supporters anymore. I know what is true and what isn’t. I have been moved by this scrappy group of outsiders who keep fighting no matter the cost. I don’t know how they endure, considering they’re treated like human garbage, shut out of American culture, mocked, and ridiculed by comedians.

I would be lying if I said my heart didn’t sink when they lost as badly as they did in the midterms. It wasn’t just that I felt bad for them; it’s that I’ve seen Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Frank Capra believed in the America I believe in. The storytellers in Hollywood used to believe it too. They don’t anymore.

Emily Dickinson said hope is the thing with feathers. It’s so fragile that it can take flight anytime, leaving you with nothing. I don’t want to live in an America where the Paynes and the Taylors win. I want hope to be alive, for Smith to win. I wanted to see all of MAGA’s efforts were not for nothing. I don’t want to see them to lose hope. What can I say, I guess I believe that lost causes are the only causes worth fighting for.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

Joe Biden: The Man Who Wasn't There

14 november 2022 | 20 min

America's Road Ahead: 1980 or 1984

11 november 2022 | 23 min

Will the Real "Election Deniers" Please Stand Up?

9 november 2022 | 25 min

[Apologies for the audio - it was raining pretty hard here and the power kept cutting off]

“We had to do something [in Bush v. Gore], because countries were laughing at us. France was laughing at us.” ― Antonin Scalia, The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court

I grew up in the 1980s thinking my vote didn’t matter. I became an “election denier” because that is what the Democrats have always been. I grew up with cynicism and mild hatred of the government. My childhood was spent living through the last time the Democrats took a major fall, from Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan with Watergate and Carter in between.

Democrats felt hopeless until Bill Clinton came along in 1992. He was the first Democrat to serve two full terms since FDR. But by 1999, the cynicism was back because Bill Clinton had been impeached, the party humiliated, and our last best hope hung on the Vice President, Al Gore, the man with no charisma to speak of.

I was one of those angry Democrats in 2000 who watched the Supreme Court stop counting ballots that handed the presidency to George W. Bush. We weren’t thinking about the reasons Gore might have lost, like gun control. We blamed the Court, and we blamed Florida. We blamed Ralph Nader. We blamed everyone but ourselves.

The Supreme Court was corrupt, we believed. So were all of those operatives in the GOP that rigged the election for Bush. A rigged election would result in two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. If only the Supreme Court hadn’t “selected” Bush.

I remember Oliver Stone’s film Nixon, his best, which suggested that Nixon had JFK assassinated so he could one day rise. And rise he did. To Stone, though, that caused the Vietnam war and all the ravages that followed. That is some election-denying. Nixon himself had believed that the 1960 election had been rigged. After all, he and Trump are still the only two people to have won Florida, Iowa, and Ohio and lost the presidency. Nixon chose not to object to any of it. Trump chose to fight.

Back then, the Left felt Nixon’s win was so destructive that it ended everything for them: their optimism and their counter-culture revolution. Warren Beatty made the film Shampoo to suggest that they were all involved in silly narcissistic games before Nixon won and the world ended. They all blamed Nixon for Vietnam. But they also resented him for ending the 1960s for good.

Coming out of the 2000 election, our main complaint was that Gore gave in too easily and quickly. Many of us thought he should have dug his heels in and fought harder and that we all should have been more insistent in objecting. That’s another word for protests. We didn’t because we were still burned from the landslide loss in 1972, blamed on the the Left’s anti-war protests.

Some protests started around that time, like against the World Trade Organization. But it wouldn’t be until the $700 billion bailout that a whole protest movement would rise, Occupy Wall Street on the Left, and eventually, the Tea Party would form on the Right. Something was happening that would only grow as more people got online and were more connected than ever before.

By 2016, we were again in a protesting state of mind, and we believed America belonged not to Trump, not to his supporters. But to us.

Anyone who pretends like we accepted Trump’s win is lying. There has never been an elected president with that many forces working together to take him out of office. Never. There have never been worldwide protests against the election of a US president. There have never been the kinds of violent protests we had in this country over an elected president.

We didn’t hold “not my president” rallies and pay investigators to see if Russians had hacked voting machines. We never had nervous breakdowns, we never had so many marches. Clearly, we all viewed Trump’s win as an invasion of a foreign entity, or a virus, that had to be immediately purged.

We did not accept him as the legitimate president. We were ELECTION DENIERS.

From The Hill:

“According to data from the latest Harvard-Harris poll provided exclusively to The Hill, 68 percent of voters said Democrats have not accepted that Trump won fairly and is a legitimate president.

That figure includes 69 percent of Republicans, 69 percent of independents and 65 percent of Democrats.”

One of the reasons Kari Lake is such a strong candidate is that she comes from the media and has no problem calling them out on their hypocrisy and their double standard:

It was much bigger than a violent riot at the Capitol and lawsuits by Trump and his supporters who insisted there was “widespread fraud.” No, the FBI was involved when the establishment got in on it. The media was on board. And by 2020, they were willing to crash the economy to ensure Trump was brought down.

We were now not only of a protesting state of mind, but of a revolutionary state of mind. We called Trump an “existential threat” because waves of mass hysteria consumed us for the four years he was in office. The Me Too movement and, eventually, the Black Lives Matter movement would lead to witch hunts, and mass firings, and a climate of fear.

We all believed that all we had to do was get rid of Trump, and everything would return to normal.

If you take the largest protests in American history under the four years Trump was in power and then think about the Summer of 2020, you can see how the Left of this country was ready for Civil War just to take Trump out of power.

The weird thing was that they could not paint the Trump supporters as equally violent. The Proud Boys showed up; there were sometimes brawls. They would be armed and forming a kind of citizen army to protect property, like Kyle Rittenhouse. But they weren’t violent the same way the Left had become. They weren’t burning buildings or assaulting police officers.

In fact, if anything, they prided themselves on being non-violent. That is why January 6th was so out of character for them. Even a large protest in DC that day was out of character for them. It meant a lot to have their collective voices heard.

I’d been, out of curiosity, following the Stop the Steal movement on The War Room podcast. I knew what they were planning to do. They wanted to have Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz debate how the election laws had been suddenly altered, using COVID as the pretext.

Trump supporters were watching his speech, not planning to bust into the Capitol and stop the count, certainly not to overthrow the government. That is its own “big lie,” and it’s ugly. These are patriots who love their country. The last thing they would want to do is overthrow or destroy it. Whatever was going on with the Oathkeepers, and the breach had nothing directly to do with Trump and seemed to be driven by someone else’s plan.

The only explanation was that the FBI had to have been involved. When you read up on the Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping story in Esquire, where there were more informants than kidnappers, it’s clear that this FBI was prepared to go the distance to do what they could to meddle in the 2020 election. That story will not be told for a while, but if the GOP takes the House, maybe it will.

For four years, Trump supporters watched their president attacked every day, with everything he said cherry-picked and thrown into the media churn to drive the news cycle. They watched them mock Kellyanne Conway’s age and Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ makeup, the size of Trump’s hands, his hair, his family.

Since Trump was never accepted as the legitimate president, no fashion magazine would have Melania Trump on the cover. To do so was to met with vicious attacks on Twitter.

The idea that the President deserved respect from the country was abandoned. Democracy? What Democracy? We’re in charge. Get out of our country. Get out of our White House.

The one thing they couldn’t do, though, was defeat Trump. They still can’t. It took $400 million to fund private companies to collect ballots, change election laws in the swing states, and a completely biased propaganda news media to twist the narrative and gaslight the public to make sure everyone knew what to do on Election day. And even then, Biden barely won.

Democracy says that if someone campaigns to win the vote of the people, then that vote should be respected. Democrats don’t believe that, unless a Democrat is in power. Now, they’re trying everything they can to subvert Democracy to block Trump from even making a run for office. Does that sound like people who have faith in American elections?

But good luck trying to have this conversation with anyone on the Left. They will shut you down. Their game is that they get to say what happened, how it happened and why it happened. They are fed a narrative that they believe. Few will question any of it for fear of being called a “conspiracy theorist.”

If you bring up the hypocrisy of 2016 and 2020, Democrats will always say, “but we didn’t breach the Capitol.” They might not have breached the Capitol on Inauguration Day, but they breached the Capitol in Michigan and Wisconsin in years prior:

Then they say, well we weren’t trying to stop the peaceful transfer of power. Okay, but what do you call what happened with Justice Kavanaugh? What do you call pressuring Senators to vote your way?

When you watch the Kavanaugh hearing back, it’s easy to see just how unhinged the Left already was.

Then they will next say that they aren’t politically violent. But we know they are:

The assassin who wanted to kill Kavanaugh had zip ties. So did the man who broke into the Pelosi home. Do you think the media treated these two incidents similarly?

I know the people whose power might be challenged tonight will not take it well. Just look at recent history. They’ve successfully flipped the script to make MAGA the violent side, the “election-denying” side. But in the next few years, we’ll see protests that make 2020 look like child’s play.

When laws start to change, and the Conservatives start pulling our country Right, those who are used to having control of everything aren’t going to go along with a “peaceful transfer of power.”

For years after Reagan won in 1980, the Left was powerless. By the time Barack Obama won in 2008, they could take control of nearly every corner of American life, culturally and politically. They influenced and redefined almost everything. They built an empire - a new “shining city on the hill.”

To hold onto that, they have been willing to take political protests to the extreme, exploit our formerly objective media, and outright lie about the people they share this country with.

But worst of all, they have been consumed by fear. They have become so panicked they imagine all sorts of terrible things. They see it in their mind’s eye, and to them, it’s real, just like witches flying around Salem and “spectral evidence,” which is evidence you can’t see but can only imagine.

They never had a utopia to lose so they don’t know how to handle it. They just want to be what they used to be. They want to be admired as the best and the brightest, living their best lives, showcasing those lives on social media, tinkering with their re-imagined America, with a president they like and admire watching over them.

Now, their utopia is crumbling. The Hillary feminist that represents the base of the Democratic Party is now being asked to step aside for transgender rights. That’s why Gretchen Whitmer has to say, “People with periods.” The Hillary feminist that marched with the pink hats and screamed at Kavanaugh is fading. That, probably more than anything else, marks a major pendulum shift they never saw coming.

So who are they now? How do they define themselves? They can only see Trump. The thing they fear. It’s all Trump all the time. Their unprecedented prime-time show trial did the exact opposite of what they thought it would do. They expected it would look important, which would scare his supporters away. But all it did was make him look more powerful.

Worse, it made our country look ridiculous, weak, and terrified. Whatever you might think of Trump, the fact that he looms as large as he does proves that there is no leadership on the Left.

As of writing this, I do not know how the midterm elections will turn out. But I know that the people who control the Democrats now, the loudest voices on Twitter, and the massive media machine that does their bidding are fueled by an ongoing hysteria based on ongoing delusions.

They have gone all the way to the most extreme every time. They’ve been this afraid for six years since Trump won. They are strung out, desperate. How much longer before they upend American Democracy completely to make sure nobody like Trump ever has a shot at running for president?

Their fear will get worse until they understand that this country, its culture, and its government, economy, and history don’t just belong to them. It belongs to all of us. The grassroots movement on the Right challenging them today is not going anywhere any time soon.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

The Collapse of Biden's Woketopia

3 november 2022 | 24 min

Can Elon Musk Save the Democrats from Themselves?

31 oktober 2022 | 17 min

The Democrats Are Out of Touch and Out of Time

24 oktober 2022 | 21 min

Meet the Temporary Republicans

14 oktober 2022 | 22 min

The "Antiracists" Come for Herschel Walker

10 oktober 2022 | 23 min

What Gets Lost in the Abortion Fight

6 oktober 2022 | 22 min

The Myth that MAGA is Driven by "White Rage"

28 september 2022 | 44 min

No matter how justified you think it is, prosecuting someone for what lives inside their minds and hearts is a road to ruin. It’s even worse than that. It’s a road to moral panics that lead to systematic dehumanization that wrecks whole societies.

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg might have been selling secrets to the Soviets but that didn’t mean everyone in America who ever supported Marxist ideology was a traitor. Fear of what you can’t see leaves it up to your imagination, and when it comes to human beings, that is an unreliable source.

Systematic dehumanization meant that newly freed slaves had to be turned into existential threats to an otherwise pristine uoptia in the South. They were thieves, murderers and rapists. In Nazi Germany, Jews were parasites, draft dodgers, and uniquely evil.

It’s been decided that Trump supporters, or MAGA, are all angry white men. They are an existential threat because inside their minds and hearts is the unique evil of racism. This has never been questioned. It is a fear that has become a certainty across all institutions, culturally and politically, not just on the Left but on the Establishment Right.

That is the kind of rot that must live inside the mind and heart of Hillary Clinton so that she could casually compare working class people to Nazi Germany. She saw them raising their hands to Trump without looking a little more closely to see that wasn’t the Nazi salute but cell phones.

Trump supporters have no status. They don’t have a net worth of $120 million, or an Apple-TV show, or a house in Chappaqua, New York. They’ve been beaten, spit on, screamed at, demonized, and called every name imaginable from Nazi to Fascist to Racist, and now to “domestic extremist,” “insurrectionist,” “election deniers.”

Even before Trump won, the Left believed their violence against Trump supporters was justified:

We can survive political differences. We can’t survive this.

What I realized over the past few years as I’ve gotten to know the world of MAGA it’s that we have a choice: assume the worst about people or give them the benefit of the doubt.

I would like to say I would give Hillary the benefit of the doubt. After all, I was the person who made this sign and marched along with millions for the Women’s March:

But with a teenager possibly run down and smeared as a “Republican extremist,” with Biden’s militant fascist speech, with a death threat on Justice Kavanaugh’s life, all running parallel to a dangerously politicized Department of Justice, I’m much too concerned with the fate of the country to worry about protecting Hillary one more time.

White men and women are the new existential threat to the Left. But it is existential, not based on skin color. Black men can be “white supremacists in BlackFace,” like Larry Elder. Non-white women can be “Far Right Latinas” like Mayra Flores. Black women can be viciously attacked and trend for days on Twitter, like Candace Owens, receiving none of the protection she would get from the “antiracists.”

Steve Bannon’s secret weapon is that he knows MAGA isn’t driven by “white rage.” He’s been actively engaged in building a coalition of working-class Black and Hispanic voters, or what he calls “inclusive, participatory, nationalist populism” for at least five years.

Anyone who dips a toe into MAGA Land quickly sees it’s not about racism at all. It’s driven more by class and yes, by Judeo-Christianity.

From a story on Breitbart:

“We’ve got to start having access to capital to black and Hispanic entrepreneurs,” Bannon said.

During the financial crisis, Bannon said that the Wall Street class were taken care of by the government but that the smaller banks got crushed since many of them loaned money to working-class people who didn’t get rescued by the government.

“The elites took care of themselves,” he said.

Bannon said that he was putting together a “task force” of black and Hispanic entrepreneurs to help them build their communities.

That, he explained, was the way to evolve the Republican party into a working-class party for all Americans.

“That’s why the media and that’s why the Democrats are freaked out about that,” he said.

Up until recently, Christianity was the beating heart of this country that united most Americans by roughly 80%. I was never raised with any kind of religion because I am a child of the Left. Most Conservatives, though, don’t look to politics for their collective sense of purpose. They look to God.

This might explain why all of a sudden a new term has been dropped into the mix to demonize the MAGA movement: White Christian Nationalism:

Only recently has the idea of someone being a Christian become a clear and present threat to the newfound religion of the Left.

Says a story in Politico by Stella Rouse and Shibley Telhami:

Christian nationalism, a belief that the United States was founded as a white, Christian nation and that there is no separation between church and state, is gaining steam on the right.

Prominent Republican politicians have made the themes critical to their message to voters in the run up to the 2022 midterm elections. Doug Mastriano, the Republican nominee for governor in Pennsylvania, has argued that America is a Christian nation and that the separation of church and state is a “myth.” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia hard-liner, declared: “We need to be the party of nationalism and I’m a Christian, and I say it proudly, we should be Christian Nationalists.” Amid a backlash, she doubled down and announced she would start selling “Christian Nationalist” shirts. Now Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis seems to be flirting with Christian nationalist rhetoric, as well.

Always pivoting to racism is a convenient out for the Biden administration, which is disgraceful. But it’s also a great way to sabotage this country, to keep us weak and divided.

Although they don’t yet realize it, the Left is gambling with its own existence. They’re hoping to solve our population decline with the migrants flooding in from mostly Latin American countries. Most of the countries are rooted not in Wokeness but in Catholicism. Democrats believe they will be so grateful they’ll vote Blue no matter who, but are they so sure about that?

By hanging their entire platform on urging women to see abortions as no big deal, or even an act of empowerment, they’re flirting with disaster if America begins to rise once again as a Christian nation, thanks to the influx of millions of new migrants. Not to mention most of them are likely to be socially conservative, which will run counter to the platform of the new Left.

With declining sperm counts and fertility rates, not to mention population decline our future will not be siding with those who have the most abortions, but with those who have the most babies. It’s simple math.

Awaiting the Rapture

Unless you were part of it, it’s hard to explain the rapture most of us experienced when Obama rose to power. It was not just pure love for him, or that he had so much charisma, no scandals or baggage, a perfect family, or that he’d graduated from Harvard and had such sophisticated tastes, it was the idea that America had its first Black president. A new religion was born.

For my generation and the one that came before, growing up without religion was cool. Only Republicans were church goers. Boomers traded their Christian upbringings in the 1950s for a cultural renaissance in the 1960s, Black Power, the Feminist movement, Civil Rights - it all exploded outward, away from traditional religion.

As children of the “me” generation, we helicopter parents were spiritually adrift, aimless, and emotionally destroyed. We sought fulfillment in self-help therapy, where we talked about the abuse we suffered at the hands of narcissistic parents. We had Oprah every day at 3 pm where we worked out all of our problems as a society. Then came the McMartin preschool scare, Columbine, and 9/11.

By the turn of the millennium, we were dealing with one threat after another. A 24-hour news cycle thanks to the OJ Trial, and now, the internet would provide us with second-to-second input of all the threats everywhere. We were primed and ready for one person to rise and give us all a collective sense of purpose. That person was President Barack Obama and the Obama coalition he built mostly online, Twitter specifically.

As our kids took to the internet to escape our nonstop attentive coddling, an entire generation came of age as social media natives. They were forging new virtual identities, with new rules and new ways of seeing and identifying themselves with one another. What better way to do that than by skin color, gender, or victim status? If you were marginalized, you were protected. If you weren’t, you were an oppressor; therefore, it was open season.

For white kids without any cultural identity, gender became their way of distinguishing themselves from “cis-gendered, hetero-normative, colonizing white supremacists.”

To them, identity was and is everything. They absorbed our growing fear about the rise of racism in America, which took root in 2008, with Conservatives like Steve Schmidt and John McCain concluding Sarah Palin was a xenophobic warrior for the White Race. We see this epiphany play out in the HBO movie Game Change.

And just like that, the birth of the Never Trump movement and the idea that there were “good” Republicans and “bad” Republicans, and all of it was based on racism, was born. It just so happened that The Tea Party was challenging the whole system, Democrats and Republicans alike, who had sold out the country with a $700 billion bank bailout and bad trade policies.

How convenient, then, to target them as racists:

And when Trump questioned Obama’s birth certificate, what else could that be, we all thought, except blatant racism? Obama graciously supplied a copy of his birth certificate but then mocked Trump publicly at the White House Correspondents Dinner.

The two locked horns in 2011, and we’re still watching a battle between Obama’s America and Trump’s. It also has morphed into a war between the Great Awokening and the Judao-Christian ethic.

Many of the Zoomers, children of the newly Woke religious Left, grew up with the certainty that America was not only a systemically racist country, but they were living among millions of their fellow Americans who were racists.

The social justice movement that now dominates the Left began in virtual hives on social media. Those kids went to the indoctrination factories our universities have become, grew up, joined the workforce and essentially did to America in 2020 what a group of activists did to Evergreen University.

The Democrats, like the administration at Evergreen, the people who run the Motion Picture Academy, and all other members of the 1% buckled under the pressure.

The New “Red” Scare

If history had gone differently, a moral panic in America in 2022 might have looked like another Red Scare. A discovery of Harvard professors selling information to the Chinese Communist Party, colliding with the virus from Wuhan, not to mention a near-complete takeover of our manufacturing jobs, might have set Americans on edge that Communists were once again at the gates.

But look at the date. January 28, 2020. The focus wasn’t on China, Chinese spies, or even the COVID pandemic, which was just starting to make its way into the United States. Americans were in the grips of a different kind of moral panic.

This moral panic is destroying us in all ways, turning us against ourselves and making us much more vulnerable and weak to our adversaries. Russia, China, North Korea or any major enemy of the United States would no doubt have figured out that there was one surefire way to bring the most powerful country in the world to its knees: accusations of racism.

The Chinese have our number. They even have a special name for it:

Sooner rather than later, we’ll need leadership that can’t be so easily undone, that isn’t given to nonstop fits of mass hysteria. We need a steady hand to guide this ship at such a dangerous time.

MAGA Land

At some point in 2020, I found myself staring at my Twitter feed and had what I can only describe as blood poisoning. There was so much hate - it was in my heart, it was in my veins. I just could not live with it anymore. I decided I had to find out - was it true, were they really racists?

I’d already experienced what it was like to be called a racist. When I pointed out on Twitter that not all Asian hate crimes were “white supremacy,” members of my own community targeted me as a white supremacist. It didn’t matter that I’d spent at least ten years advocating for Black artists to win Oscars on my website. It made no difference. I was seen only by my identity as a white woman online.

I then decided to take a trip to MAGA Land.

I began following a youtube site called Right Side Broadcasting. They are Christian-based and staunchly pro-life. Each video begins with an image of a fetus in the womb. They hold weekly prayer meetings and live stream all of Trump’s rallies. They usually set up early in the day and begin recording as the crowd begins to form.

Hours later, the music plays - the same song introducing Trump to the crowd.

… And I'm proud to be an AmericanWhere at least I know I'm freeAnd I won't forget the men who diedWho gave that right to meAnd I'd gladly stand up next to youAnd defend Her still today'Cause there ain't no doubtI love this landGod Bless the U.S.A.

Then Trump finally shows. He often has a handful of red hats that he tosses out into the crowd.

Trump’s speeches are almost always the same. They’re funny. He tells jokes, a lot of the time, at his own expense. In the old days, back in 2016, his speeches were much darker and angrier. Now, they aren’t. Being banned from Twitter seems to have changed Trump for the better. This is a cautionary tale of the evils of a social media algorithm that feeds off of outrage and hysteria.

You can’t dip a toe in MAGA land and come away seeing it as a movement driven by racism, not if you’re being honest. That tells you a lot already about what kind of media class we have in this country, that they were leading the charge for what has become shameful, systematic dehumanization of a whole group of people with no benefit of the doubt, no due process, no path to redemption.

But the truth still matters, even if it’s met with a tsunami of mass hysteria and moral panic. I have watched every Trump rally since he began holding them in 2020 - every single one — and not only is the MAGA movement not driven by “white rage,” but they are far more diverse and multicultural than the media or the Democrats seem to believe.

And these Trump supporters I follow on TikTok:

And if you want to know why so many Latinos are flipping red?

So if it’s not about racism, what’s it about? Well, Ungar-Sargon has an idea:

She has been fearless in her efforts to bridge the divide between the mass hysteria on the Left and the working class on the Right. She and Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, Megyn Kelly, Walter Kirn, and Tulsi Gabbard have maintained their objectivity, humanity, empathy, and willingness to see the bigger picture.

As Matt Taibbi often points out, we seem to be missing the old-school lefties like William Kunstler, who would defend Civil Liberties at all costs. Now, only one remains—Alan Dershowitz, who has taken on the lost cause of Mike Lindell. Lindell is a hero in MAGA land and a joke to high-status folks like Jimmy Kimmel and Jon Stewart. A man whose life was nearly ruined by addiction found God and started not just a charity, but a business called My Pillow.

When you see how beloved Lindell is with MAGA, much of it is to do with their shared faith, that cross that hangs around his neck. He, like Trump, gives them hope. These are people not driven by hate or rage, but by love.

For people who had been shut out of every part of American culture, demonized for six long years, called the worst names imaginable, not welcomed in many places, lost friends and family, they somehow haven’t lost their hope and their optimism. A lot of that has to do with Trump, believe it or not. He’s one thing they haven’t been able to take away from them.

As enemies of the state - they have plenty of reasons to be angry. We saw some of that on January 6th. But 2020 was a year that broke people. Only one group was ever held accountable for losing it, even though Trump supporters pride themselves on being non-violent. Now, the state has managed to intimidate them to prevent them from using their Constitutional right to protest.

But to take love of country away from people whose entire identity is wrapped up in patriotism seems to me an act of unimaginable cruelty. However, they still have a vote, and if they turn out in large enough numbers, they can have more of a voice in DC.

MAGA voters have every reason to be mean and bitter. But you know what? It’s people like Hillary Clinton, the Never Trump Republicans, and most in the media and on blue-check Twitter who have become the mean and bitter ones, abandoning basic human decency in their desire to eliminate a group of people they see as an existential threat to their otherwise pristine utopia.

But, as with the Grinch Who Stole Christmas, they will soon learn that what MAGA voters care about most is not something they can’t take away.

I don’t know what Hillary saw. My guess is that she was looking for what she wanted to see, not what was really there. If she watched a MAGA rally, really watched it, she would not see miserable people, upset that they aren’t allowed into the country club, or mouth-frothing Nazis. Instead, she’d see mostly happy people, like the Whos in Whoville.

That is happiness that only comes when your mind and your heart are free.

So if you want to understand MAGA start there.

Plenty of people gravitate to Trump for different reasons - a rebellious spirit, their religious faith, but what unites them as a movement is love of country.

Nationalism is not itself fascism or even racism. James Strock’s Substack focuses on the need for an invigorated new nationalism, writing:

What a calling is to an individual, nationalism can be to a commonwealth. It can be a source of solidarity. It’s expressed over space and time through a unifying narrative. From history it derives values and experiences that can inform our navigation of the present. These elements yield a vision for conjuring and creating a future.

Our moral panic that there are racists, racists everywhere is nowhere near finished. At the very least, however, we must vote out those politicians who are primed and ready to convict people on what they think exists inside their minds and hearts.

Liz Cheney and the January 6th Committee will continue Joe Biden’s ignorant campaign to use racism as the justification for their authoritarian show trial, and politicization of the DOJ. History will shame them for it.

Ultimately, though, the way I figure it, hate eventually exhausts itself. Love wins.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

Moral Superiority Won't Fix the Border Crisis or Anything Else

19 september 2022 | 27 min

How Joe Biden Lost My Vote

8 september 2022 | 25 min

The "Semi-Fascists" Are Coming from Inside the House

29 augusti 2022 | 31 min

“The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerated the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That in its essence is fascism: ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power.” ― Franklin D. Roosevelt

The same week Mark Zuckerberg admitted the FBI pressured him to deep-six the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop, Joe Biden called the populists on the Right “semi-fascists.” From the FBI’s raid on Mar-a-Lago, to the use of social media to police the Biden administration’s idea of “misinformation” to the surveillance of political enemies of the state by an all-volunteer army of social media users — “semi-fascism” is all around us.

Naturally, this gave many hyperbolic Twitter users a jumping-off point to get those juicy, juicy likes, as they continue to cheerlead Biden in all the wrong direction.

So let’s get a few basics out of the way, shall we? The side policing speech are the “semi-fascists.” The side demanding ideological compliance? Also, the “semi-fascists.” The side throwing political prisoners in solitary for upwards of a year with no charges? “Semi-fascists.” The side that dehumanizes and scapegoats whole groups of people and encourages cutting them off from the economic system? “Semi-fascists.”

The side with the FBI pressuring Big Tech to suppress negative information about a political candidate? You guessed it. The “Semi-fascists.”

The power of the Democratic Party is shrinking and focusing on the most elite in our society. Their attention has narrowed significantly to the point where they are alienating more voters than they are attracting.

From the Wall Street Journal’s interview with Ruy Teixeira:

We’re living in a country where most institutions are dominated by graduates of colleges and universities that have made it their mission to proselytize on behalf of crazy ideas. That includes the Democratic Party to a vastly greater extent than the GOP, especially the post-Trump GOP.

Mr. Teixeira acknowledges that this is a development “The Emerging Democratic Majority” failed to foresee: “We didn’t anticipate the extent to which cultural liberalism might segue into cultural radicalism and the extent to which that view, particularly as driven by younger cohorts, would wind up imprinting itself on the entire infrastructure in and around the Democratic Party—the advocacy groups, the foundations, academia of course, certainly the lower and middle levels of the Democratic Party infrastructure itself.”

Voters chose Biden partly because they believed he was a moderate. Instead, he’s become a kind of George Spahn figure who passively allowed the Manson family to overtake Spahn Ranch. No, I’m not comparing the “woke” fanatics to the Manson family, but it is important to understand what we’re dealing with here.

Biden’s ongoing dehumanization of Trump supporters is dangerous because of how people on the right, or those who push back against the newfound religious zealotry on the New Left, is reaching dangerous levels not seen since 1930s Germany.

This example of the reaction to Ben Shapiro appearing at a podcast event is funny but also downright chilling. They don’t fear Shapiro because he’s an Orthodox Jew. They fear him because of his political views. Can you remember any other time in American history where opinions held contrary to one’s own made people feel “unsafe”?

You can just feel that one, can’t you? Like a punch in the gut. You don’t just dismiss something like that. At least The Babylon Bee, still banned from Twitter, mocks the whole concept:

You can see why so many still turn to Trump out of desperation because Trump is not scared of them, even with everything they’ve thrown at him. Even facing an inevitable indictment, Trump just mocks them.

How does the American system survive someone they can’t control? They’ve never had to deal with a Donald Trump, that’s for sure. Trump is testing the Constitution every day, proving why it is such an important document. The Constitution is the only thing preventing our current government from graduating from “semi-fascists” to full-blown fascists. Or how they used to refer to Stalin’s regime “red fascism.”

They use their systems of power to subvert Democracy, violate the Constitution, and weaponize the Department of Justice. As long as the media backs them up and the polls work in their favor, they won’t stop.

One of the great things about social media is that supposedly everyone has a voice online. But now, under Biden and in our post-2020 environment, our government is using Big Tech as a filter to violate the First Amendment, using “misinformation” or “disinformation” as a catch-all for speech they don’t like.

I posted a Tik Tok video of a high school coach ruminating on the Mar-A-Lago raid. He said he didn’t believe the claims of a rigged election until he saw just how far the Democrats were willing to go to get Trump. His video was honest, heartfelt, and, more than anything, his right as an American to speak his mind.

Youtube removed the video citing “misinformation.” When I appealed, telling them they had become authoritarians, I got this response:

You can watch that video for yourself on Rumble.

Sites like Rumble, Substack, Gettr, Truth Social and other alternative platforms give the illusion that there is equal access to all, but if you’ve been online a while, you know what it means to be dumped from the major organs of the new economy online. These big sites got there first. We trusted them by handing over our attention, information, relationships, shopping behavior, and history. Now, they have betrayed that trust.

Will the Real Fascists Please Stand Up?

So many people don’t understand the word “fascism.” They throw it around because it plays well on Twitter and cable TV. It seems so unequivocal. Trump is bad. Fascists are bad. So Trump must be a fascist.

Here is how Yuval Noah Harari defines Fascism in Lessons for the 21st Century:

“The word “fascism” comes from the Latin fascis, meaning “a bundle of rods.” That sounds like a rather unglamorous symbol for one of the most ferocious and deadly ideologies in world history, but it has a deep and sinister meaning. A single rod is very weak, and you can easily snap it in two. However, once you bundle many rods together into a fascis, it becomes almost impossible to break them. This implies that the individual is a thing of no consequence, but as long as the collective sticks together, it is very powerful. Fascists therefore believe in privileging the interests of the collective over those of any individual, and demand that no single rod ever dare break the unity of the bundle.”

If Trump had been a fascist, there would not have been any protests in 2020. Protesters would have simply been shot on the spot or thrown in jail. There would have been no CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times or any newspaper criticizing him or even existing at all.

Do you think the speaker of the House would have ripped up a speech if standing behind a fascist? Do you think a fascist would have allowed nonstop dehumanization and bullying on Twitter every second, not to mention on late-night comedy shows and awards shows? Stephen Colbert? Arrested and convicted without a trial. Bill Maher? Solitary confinement. Hillary Clinton would have been locked up. AOC along with her.

With fascism, you don’t have to worry about bothersome things like due process, presumption of innocence, freedom of speech, or Democracy. You have absolute power and control over the state, which has absolute power over the citizenry. You can’t tell me the zealots on the Left wouldn’t want that.

Sure, you might say, Trump, denied the results of the 2020 election, making him a fascist. But that makes him someone who has an unpopular opinion of something. Perhaps you find that bad or scary or an abuse of power and bad for the country but calling it “semi-fascist” is a reach.

MSNBC, CNN, and many of the legacy media outlets painted January 6th as a “fascist coup” and did a very good job using video footage of a riot as a powerful piece of propaganda. But a violent protest against the government is not “fascist.” The crackdown of that riot is fascist, especially when they used powers put in place after 9/11 against their own citizens.

None other than Vladimir Putin called this out, which is yet another example of how the Biden presidency and the insanity over Trump is weakening America’s standing in the world. We look like a broken, fragile nation in our non-stop attacks against a former president and his supporters.

Because of the Democrats’ dominance of Twitter, media, government, Hollywood and all other major institutions, as they’ve become more uniform in their ideology and more militant in their demands that you go along with them, we are beginning to see the darker side of “collectivism” at work.

After William H. Strauss and Neil Howe wrote The Fourth Turning in 2007, Roy H. Williams and Michael R. Drew took on the theory of the generations and tweaked it slightly in their book, Pendulum: How Past Generations Shape Our Present and Predict Our Future. They transformed Howe and Strauss’ 80-year generational cycle into two 40-year cycles. One is the “me” cyle (individualism), and the other a “we” cycle (collectivism).

Looking over the patterns of history, they have noticed that the pendulum shifts in one direction until it wears out its welcome, then it swings back in the other direction. Their overall hypothesis is that humans always take a good thing too far. When that happens, the pendulum spits and grinds and eventually swings back. We’re now at the worst part of the “we” phase, the witch hunts, reaching its peak in 2023. Here it is right on schedule. The only question is how bad it will get in the coming year.

They write:

The second half of the Upswing of “We” and the first half of the Downswing from it (2013–2023) bring an ideological “righteousness” that seems to spring from any group gathered around a cause. The inevitable result is judgmental legalism and witch hunts. The origin of the term witch hunt was the Salem witch trials, a series of hearings before county court officials to prosecute people accused of witchcraft in the counties of Essex, Suffolk, and Middlesex in colonial Massachusetts, between February 1692 and May 1693, exactly at the beginning of the second half of the Upswing toward the “We” Zenith of 1703.

Senator Joseph McCarthy was an American promoter of this witch-hunt attitude at America’s most recent “We” Zenith of 1943 (see the “House Un-American Activities Committee,” 1937–1953); Adolf Hitler was the German promoter (see the Holocaust, 1933–1945); and Joseph Stalin was the Soviet promoter (see the Great Purge, 1936–1938). Our hope is that we might collectively choose to skip this development as we approach the “We” Zenith of 2023. If enough of us are aware of this trend toward judgmental self-righteousness, perhaps we can resist demonizing those who disagree with us and avoid the societal polarization that results from it. A truly great society is one in which being unpopular can be safe.

In a free market Capitalist country like this one, consumers ideally have the power. We tell the corporations what to do, not the other way around. The more we migrate to online spaces, the less power we will have as consumers.

Neil Howe marks 2008 as the year that sparked the Fourth Turning. The Wall Street meltdown and subsequent crisis supposedly kick into gear events that will eventually take us to a major shift, a war, or some kind of revolution. We can feel the battle underfoot right now with the complete takeover of all institutions of power and government vs. the populist uprising of the working class. The ultimate outcome remains uncertain.

But 2008 is also the year Vivek Ramaswamy targets as the moment the corporations swapped “woke” ideology for any sort of concrete solutions to the problem of rising monopolies. He says that marriage was one of convenience. It meant the activists felt heard and catered to while the corporations had the freedom to do whatever they wanted without the activists breathing down their necks:

And the net result was the birth of this new woke industrial complex, a new force a new Leviathan. In modern American life that was far more powerful than what Thomas Hobbes envisioned 400 years ago, far more powerful than what our founding fathers envisioned 250 years ago when they put into motion, a three part system of government with checks and balances not envisioning a fourth branch of government in the private sector itself.

That would suck the lifeblood out of the constitutional government that we put into motion. And it is a new monster that actually duped both sides into submission.

The old left that used to be skeptical about the aggregation and misuse of corporate power was defined and deflected by the fact that actually, they were distracted by the fact that these new guys are going to advance the causes the progressive causes that we love so much that they forgot about their principled opposition to settling political questions through corporate power.

Conservatives were duped into submission by memorizing and reciting slogans that we all memorized back in the 1980s, saying that the free market can do no wrong without recognizing that that free market does not exist today. And that's the story of how both sides actually contributed to the creation of possibly the most powerful force in modern American life, this merger of state power and corporate power.

“Woke capitalism,” as Ramaswamy calls it, is still not “semi-fascism.” Once Biden took power in 2020, however, he then took the iron throne at the top of all of it. It’s more than just the activists and the corporations. Now, it’s the administration executing top-down activism for much of the same reasons the corporations did it - so that we would all look the other way as they abused their power against ordinary citizens.

In other words, how convenient to have a scapegoat like MAGA where suddenly their Constitutional rights no longer matter because they’ve been so dehumanized by the media, the blue-checks and now, Joe Biden. But if their Constitutional rights no longer matter, neither do ours.

Now is the time to push for a new amendment to the Constitution, an “Internet Bill of Rights” of sorts to protect ordinary Americans against the “semi-fascist” forces that seem to be all around us in just a few short years. At the very least, all Americans should have access to the new “town square” and hub of most of our growing economic systems online.

We still live in a Democracy, but it is something we will have to fight for. The Democrats won’t. It will have to be up to the Republicans, should they take back Congress, to stand up to the powerful monopolies that now threaten the very foundations of our free country.

The six-year-long hunt to get Trump, the FBI’s involvement in suppressing potentially damaging information, the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, and the inevitable indictment of Trump we know is coming are all much bigger threats to our Democracy than Trump will ever be.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

'Trump Derangement Syndrome' is a Luxury Few Can Afford

23 augusti 2022 | 33 min

“I don't like that man. I must get to know him better.” - Abraham Lincoln

We live in a time where there are more people connected than ever before, and there are more people alive than ever before. Every day, each side of this Cold Civil War broadcasts nonstop agitprop against the other side. It’s Orwell’s two minutes of hate, except it’s 24/7.

The problem is that these are not two equal sides. 65% of Twitter users are Democrats. The platform increased by 21% after Trump was banned. The media listens to Twitter; the Democrats listen to the media. Together, they have built an insular feedback loop that is increasingly out of touch with most Americans outside of it.

Because so many people are connected, we’ve seen a steady stream of uprisings against the government in recent years, not just in the United States but worldwide.

Here in America, it began after the crash of 2008 with Occupy Wall Street. Then came the Tea Party. Then came the Capitol breaches in Wisconsin and Michigan. Then came Black Lives Matter. Then came the Democratic Primary protests against Hillary Clinton. Then came the largest protests in American history against a sitting president. Then came the Summer of 2020. Then came January 6th.

Only one of these uprisings was treated as a dangerous threat against the government. It wouldn’t be the first time an act of protest against a government handed absolute power to that government.

Reichstag fire, burning of the Reichstag (parliament) building in Berlin on the night of February 27, 1933, a key event in the establishment of the Nazi dictatorship and widely believed to have been contrived by the newly formed Nazi government itself to turn public opinion against its opponents and to assume emergency powers.

In the wake of January 6th, our government has gone to war against its own citizens, behaving as though they are the ones waging war. They seem to genuinely believe that the Trump movement is the second Confederacy and that they’re trying to overthrow the government to turn it into a White Nationalist empire that brings back slavery.

Liz Cheney compared this moment to the Civil War. They might want to dust off their history books and look at what happens when an insulated aristocracy fends off uprisings by the peasants. It doesn’t go so well.

They’ve called worried parents “domestic extremists.” They smeared anyone who showed up in DC on that day as “white supremacists.” They built a Green Zone-like fence around the Capitol and kept it there for months as an act of intimidation. Just a decade before, Democratic activists were pounding on the doors of their state Capitol in Wisconsin, shouting, “Whose house? Our house!”

Those who control our government, mainstream media, and the big tech companies see those who would voted for or support Trump as a clear and present danger to their power. They seem to believe they at the very top can go to war with the majority, and it’s somehow going to work out well for them. They seem unwilling to do the one thing they would need to do to stop Trump: offer the working class something better.

It’s odd to be living through something that has happened so many times before. Three little words keep otherwise reasonable people from all political spectrums from accurately reading this moment: Trump Derangement Syndrome.

TDS mainly affects the ruling class. They just can’t believe they swapped a classy, sophisticated Harvard Law graduate like Obama for a guy like Trump who is crass and offensive, has a toilet made out of gold, eats at McDonald’s, and says whatever he wants to say. Trump is the living embodiment of everything the progressive aristocracy hates about America — a rich white man who doesn't follow the rules.

What drives TDS is that Trump is mostly indestructible. He has no shame. After non-stop attacks by the media, two impeachments, the Mueller investigation, the Access Hollywood tape - who but Trump could have gotten COVID in his 70s, survived it without a vaccine, then went on to hold five rallies a day in the run-up to the 2020 election? No wonder they see him as an omnipotent force they have to rally the troops to defeat.

But that indestructibility makes him the hero of the working class our government has all but abandoned. Trump is their battering ram. He’s what Victor Davis Hanson called necessary “chemotherapy.” It gets the dirty job done because his support hasn’t diminished, even after he’s been kicked off Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube. If anything, he’s become more popular.

Why? Because the Left has become crazier. Surely this would have dawned on one of them by now, but it hasn’t. Those who write brilliantly here on Substack to mount some kind of offense against the Neo-Marxist takeover of our government almost always stop at the Trump line. They just won’t cross it, like the baseball players in Field of Dreams. They know if they cross that line their careers are over.

They have even written pieces urging desperate Americans not to flee to Trump just because they hate the “woke.” As if the many out there struggling to get through the day are going to find their substacks, read them, and conclude - yeah, you’re right. I guess I’ll just suffer through the rest of my life because Orange Man Bad.

For many Americans, Trump is their last best hope to fight for the fundamental principles of this country: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, not to mention the basics - law and order, freedom of speech, and love of country. These Americans can’t afford Trump Derangement Syndrome. That is why Liz Cheney lost by 30 points in Wyoming.

Any politician who takes on the Left will do very well with the American public. The problem is, most won’t, not Liz Cheney or any of the Never Trump Republicans. And certainly, no Democrat.

Instead, to defeat Trump, they have become a kind of Doomsday Cult. Every single day it’s the end of the world. At least on Twitter, which fills up the mainstream media’s gas tank for an all-day joyride of apocalyptic fear porn.

No person with TDS can be trusted to truly assess the moment we’re living through. Unless they take the broad view, their essays about this moment will fall short. TDS creates a blind spot for journalists, comedians, filmmakers, and everyone else.

Says Barton Swaim writing in the Wall Street Journal:

On the subject of Donald Trump, we each lament the inability of some otherwise serious people, on the left and the right, to talk about the 45th president in anything but the language of civilizational catastrophe. Why is Mr. Hankins, the author of a 700-page book on virtuous political leadership, not similarly undone by Mr. Trump? Because his profession has prepared him to take the long view.

“I think of it as an historian,” he says. “Many people don’t think deeply about what it would be like to live in a different time. They have no sense of comparison. Thinking long about history, you get a much broader view of human life. History is a road to sanity.”

It’s not good enough for Bill Maher to broadcast his hysteria over Trump while also criticizing what has become of the Left. He offers no solution, just leaves powerless Americans twisting in the wind.

Sam Harris’ recent appearance on Triggernomitry is an example of someone whose hysteria around Trump proves that there was nothing they would not do to keep Trump out of power. For all of their talk about Democracy Itself, they seem perfectly willing to subvert it where Trump is concerned.

Ben Shapiro was quick to point out how Harris is the smoking gun that proves that our government, our media, and our DOJ will blur the ethical lines of a supposedly blind justice system, a supposedly objective media, and a supposedly democratic country.

Harris attempted to explain himself but he only dug himself in deeper. That’s because if you have TDS, it is impossible to escape the affliction unless you do the one thing required to end the madness: humanize Trump.

It seemed funny at first, but with Trump polling so high and directly influencing so many wins in primaries, not to mention the unequivocal beat-down of Liz Cheney, they’re getting ready for war. Against their own citizens.

Who knew even the former director of the CIA was this fragile? Perhaps he ought to stop watching so much MSNBC and CNN until such time as he can get a grip on reality, not to mention what other countries must think of an administration that afraid of its own citizens.

Rick Wilson and James Carville are supposed to be sharp political strategists, yet they continue to insist all Trump supporters are stupid or racist.

From a political standpoint, that’s just pure lunacy. They might be able to convince Zoomers and wealthy white women who spend too much time on social media that this is the biggest problem facing Americans, but the reality is that Americans have practical problems that must be addressed and not many people willing address them.

Hysteria by Any Other Name

Can those afflicted with TDS not see that most Americans have more pressing matters on their mind than existential angst? And not all those who vote for Trump do so because they have no other option now?

Imagine, for instance, you are a young white male graduating high school in Ohio or Colorado. What kind of future will the Democrats offer you? Is there even a place for you in the Left’s America? You’ve been told you are an oppressor and that you must not even try to succeed because that means you benefit from white supremacy. How does an 18-year-old process that?

Conversely, if you are a young Black student graduating in Portland, Oregon, you’ll be told your skin color oppresses you from birth. The only success you’ll ever achieve is at the hands of programs designed around equity. You’ll never get there on merit. The system is stacked against you.

Imagine Coleman Hughes, one of the smartest thinkers out there, now being judged solely by the color of his skin rather than the content of his character. What do you imagine that does to his soul? He can wrestle with it, to contemplate why this happening and not allow it to impact him, but what about those who can’t? What is the long game here anyway? To re-introduce oppression to keep the traditional hierarchies intact?

Or imagine you are an immigrant family that escaped a caste system in India to pursue the American dream with your children that you’ve pushed towards accelerated programs so they can be doctors or rocket scientists and escape the fate of their birth. Now imagine they’re being told that none of that matters anymore. Everyone must arrive at the same place because that is how equity works. So forget all about that “land of opportunity” thing. Now it’s about the “land of equality of outcome,” or Marxism.

Imagine you’re a parent of five kids in a rural state or a big city. Imagine having to keep them home during lockdowns and school all five of them for over a year. Imagine how hard it was for just one of your kids to concentrate and learn, let alone all five. They can’t catch up now. They fell too far behind.

Or you’re a truck driver or a dishwasher or a waitress, and the price of gas is eating a hole in your budget. You’re drowning in credit card debt, with no real prospects to rise in your hometown because manufacturing has vanished. Then the government wants a big pat on the back for passing a bill called the “inflation reduction act” which has no hope of reducing inflation and is really a climate bill in disguise. Tax credits for electric cars? That’s the answer?

Or you’re a white farmer who didn’t see a dime of money from the government during COVID as your family’s business swirled down the drain. The money was promised to Black farmers to make up for past injustices. But now even that money isn’t coming.”

What if you’re a family in Chicago, and every weekend, gunfire whizzes past your window, with one murder after another, mere blocks from your home? What if you are too nervous about letting your kids out to play? What if you live in a border town and migrants are flooding in, and you’re worried about your own family’s limited resources?

The high-minded journalists and Twitter users look down their noses at Trump’s America First candidates, but they’re missing the story. They should be asking why Democrats don’t have such a motivated grassroots movement that is attracting voters rather than alienating them.

Most people don’t care if Trump says offensive things or he sends the government into paroxysms of hysteria. They care that he is fighting against the people they fear, and that he is fighting for the America they want.

Four Words on a Red Hat

Any Democrat or establishment Republican will have to find a message better than Make America Great Again.

You won’t find many Americans out there right now who can argue that America has never been greater. We’re missing the fundamentals we need to keep our experiment intact. At the top of that list is American exceptionalism.

Even if it is a grand illusion, it is a necessary one. It might be the invisible thread, fragile though it may be, that ties each of us to the other. This country can’t survive without it. We are the world’s dreamers, an experiment in a people-run government. So why get in the people’s way?

They should be asking why can’t they do what Trump does? Name one person in Washington who can stand there for upwards of two hours talking to Americans? Anyone? The pitch to the American people is going to have to be better than how Trump closes every single one of his speeches:

And it will only get stronger with each passing day. And with the help of all of you here tonight and the millions of Patriots all across our land, we will make America powerful again. We will make America wealthy again. We will make America strong again. We will make America proud again. We will make America safe again. And we will make America great again.

Please tell me, all of those who are committed to the idea that Trump is the greatest threat to Democracy the world has ever known, how you’re going to top that. What can you offer Americans that can lift them up from their despair, that can promise them a better life, that can give them hope to face a new day?

Because if all you’ve got is “Trump is bad” you’re going to lose. Pushing an apocalyptic doomsday scenario every day will not solve the fundamental problem. The threat level rises daily because those in power are failing. Do they think Americans are too stupid to notice?

As Victor Davis Hansen writes:

The war between blue and red and mass versus elite is really grounded in the reality that those who feel they were the deserved winners of globalization and who are the sole enlightened on matters of social, economic, political, and military policy have no record of recent success, but a long litany of utter failure.

They have become furious that the rest of the country sees through these naked emperors. Note Merrick Garland’s sanctimonious defense of the supposed professionalism of the Justice Department and FBI hierarchies—while even as he pontificated, they were in the very process of leaking and planting sensational “nuclear secrets” narratives to an obsequious media to justify the indefensible political fishing expedition at a former president’s home and current electoral rival to Merrick Garland’s boss.

The masses increasingly view the elites’ money, their ZIP codes, their degrees and certificates, and their titles not just with indifference, but with the disdain they now have earned on their own merits.

And that pushback has made millions of our worst and stupidest quite mad.

Those who have abused their power against the people of this country by becoming authoritarians, waging war against our citizens, or allowing social media oligarchs to police thought and speech might want to remember that America is a country of the people, by the people and for the people.

As Eisenhower once said, “I like to believe that people, in the long run, are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it."

Since we don’t have leaders like Eisenhower, this one will have to be up to us.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

The Raid that Red-Pilled America

16 augusti 2022 | 28 min

The Democrats, the media, and the blue-checks on Twitter have no idea how many people have been red-pilled over the past three years.

No one who watches Joe and Mika or Rachel Maddow or reads the New York Times will ever be red-pilled. They simply believe that is the only reality. How could it not be if every high-status person in America is going along with it? If your friends and family go along with it, if your social media feed confirms it every day with links. If it’s in the media, it must be true, right? How do you not trust it if it’s on NBC News or the Washington Post?

Waking up to the media’s near-total collapse during the Trump years is a big part of being red-pilled. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. The only way to escape the media’s hold on the narrative is to cut it out completely, at least until you can see that there is another reality, and very often, the actual truth.

If they hadn’t already given up on the “establishment” watching them crush Bernie Sanders like a bug in 2016, 2020 would do it. The response to COVID was a big one. Dividing the country the way it did into the compliant and the non-compliant. What it did to businesses, to the minds of children, to everyone who was locked down and locked in - unable to attend funerals, weddings, and death beds.

But the raid on Mar-a-Lago very likely has red-pilled Americans even more, especially when you put it together with the authoritarianism during COVID, the suppression of speech, the silencing of dissent, and the dehumanization we all live with every day.

To watch our Department of Justice raid a former president’s home months before the midterms, where the Democrats were expected to do very badly, looks suspect to anyone. If they were trying to create distrust in our institutions, they succeeded.

Most Americans have seen, maybe for the first time, that our government has become too powerful, too punitive, and too authoritarian in crushing dissenting voices and outsiders who challenge that authority. We call that being red-pilled.

More worrisome is the ongoing mass hysteria that started on Twitter, spread into our institutions of power, and now has spread to our government. To have such a complicit and compliant media is even more terrifying. What wouldn’t they go along with by now? Gulags?

We all thought “cancel culture” would be confined to social media but clearly it has become the modus operandi for our establishment government. It’s hard not see this as yet another extension of the insanity and hysteria over Trump.

As the Wall Street Journal’s Kimberly Strassel writes:

Trump derangement syndrome has a curious way of scrambling coherent thought. Witness the Democratic-media complex’s blind insistence the Justice Department raid on Donald Trump’s home is just and necessary—rather than a dangerous move for their party and the republic.

In descending on Mar-a-Lago, the department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation shifted the U.S. into the category of countries whose ruling parties use government power to investigate political rivals. No attorney general has ever signed off on a raid on a former president’s home, in what could be the groundwork for criminal charges.

The Mar-a-Lago raid on its own would have one thing. But it comes right after Merrick Garland announced the “largest investigation in American history” against a former president. That came on the heels of prime-time hearings that aired on every news network except Fox, led by Liz Cheney, where they compared January 6th to the end of slavery and the Jim Crow South. This, after Kamala Harris, compared January 6th to Pearl Harbor and 9/11.

A red-pilled America is probably starting to think the reaction to Trump, rather than Trump himself, might be the even bigger threat.

They were already losing voters by the millions. Hispanic voters, Asian voters, even Black voters were being red-pilled and drifting rightward. That meant there was likely a red wave in the November midterms. Biden’s catastrophic poll numbers meant Democrats could lose and lose big. That was unacceptable.

It shouldn’t be too surprising that they used that moment to hold their primetime extravaganza of Janaury 6th. If they can’t win over voters with better candidates or policies, they will scare the living daylights out of them. Donald Trump hadn’t even announced he was running for office, but the failure of Biden and the Democrats alone was enough to launch an all-out war on Trump, his henchmen, and his supporters.

Instead of bringing more voters in, the administrative state has now red-pilled even more Americans. That’s certainly true of Hispanic voters, as a recent Spectator article outlines:

It’s likely that many of these voters agree with Rep. Mayra Flores (R-Texas) who responded to the Mar-a-Lago search thus: “The FBI raid on the residence of the former POTUS is unprecedented. We do not live in a third world country.” This point will certainly resonate with many first and second generation Hispanic immigrants, many of whom came to the United States to escape countries where such secret police raids are all too common. It’s doubtful that Flores or her constituents were satisfied by Attorney General Garland’s dilatory and defensive acknowledgment that he approved the decision to seek the search warrant.

Whether the newly red-pilled Americans will become GOP voters or whether they will support Trump at all remains an open question. But many of them will be coming out of August 8th with a high distrust for a government that would use the Department of Justice to sabotage its political enemies.

The Spectator’s Gary Anderson wonders if Biden has crossed the point of no return:

Rome’s republic collapsed when its politicians started using the law to eliminate opponents, a custom that began with the Marius–Sulla civil war. The guy in power used the judiciary authority of the Roman Senate to eliminate his adversaries. The intended victim would raise legions and fleets in self-defense; this took money. The contender who could raise the most troops or who was the better tactician got to be in charge. Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon because he knew that his opponents in the Senate had decided to have him executed if he returned to Rome without the protection of his legions. He had violated several Roman Republic laws during his invasion of Gaul, but there would be no fair public trial. The concept of Roman justice was dead. From that point on, might made right.

Is this the beginning of the great war that will define the Fourth Turning? Writes Neil Howe and William Strauss:

“Decisive events will occur—events so vast, powerful, and unique that they lie beyond today's wildest hypotheses. These events will inspire great documents and speeches, visions of a new political order being framed. People will discover a hitherto unimagined capacity to fight and die, and to let their children fight and die, for a communal cause. The Spirit of America will return, because there will be no other choice.

Thus will Americans reenact the great ancient myth of the ekpyrosis. Thus will we achieve our next rendezvous with destiny.”

Here we are, almost two years into the Biden presidency, and Biden has proven himself to be beyond incompetent, despite being continually propped up by the media. It isn’t a coincidence that they are coming for Trump the same week they are desperately trying to boost Biden’s poll numbers.

They might be able to keep the people afraid enough to be distracted. Still, there is no getting around what happened a year ago when Biden’s sloppy exit from Afghanistan led to the deaths of a dozen American soldiers and sent his poll numbers crashing down:

A 20-year-old man who was the brother of one of the dead soldiers recently killed himself near the memorial for his brother. Except for the Daily Beast, only Conservative sites covered the story. It would be shocking at any other time except the one we live in now.

The media and our government willfully ignore the carnage left in the wake of Biden’s bad policies, whether it’s Afghanistan which likely caused Putin to invade Ukraine, China to flirt with invading Taiwan, the rising murder rate in cities with “defund the police,” or the two January 6th rioters who have committed suicide, or Ashli Babbitt shot point blank by a member of the Capitol Police - these Americans just don’t matter because they don’t serve the narrative.

What is most frightening about watching the media spin on a story like the unprecedented raid on a former president’s home, or any story on any day, is how they always offload the bad stuff onto Trump and MAGA. Now, they’ve pivoted away from the naked abuse of power displayed by a politicized DOJ and towards the reaction by the GOP against the FBI.

While it’s true that a man showed up at FBI headquarters with a nail gun, it’s not like that’s the only act of political violence we’ve seen lately. They control the media, however, and can drive fear and hysteria however they want.

That’s just pure gaslighting. Why shouldn’t there be a volcanic response? Do they want everyone to lie down and pretend to like it? They can protest as loudly, and as violently as they want over every single thing Trump said or did for the four years he was in power, but the GOP is not allowed to be angry about this?

The media has long since lost touch with reality. They listen to Twitter, not the American public. For too long now, the Biden administration has been taking its cues from the wrong people. They think if it makes Joy Behar happy, it’s worth doing. They think it's the right move if Rob Reiner approves on Twitter. Twitter is a small pond with way too many big fish driving ongoing hysteria and preventing the Democrats from focusing on the problems of average Americans.

Chasing Trump for six years based on one mass hysteria event after another has destroyed the Democratic Party and possibly our Department of Justice. Just because they can indict Trump on some procedural error doesn’t mean they should.

The problem with mass hysteria is that it often leads to the dehumanization of whole groups of people. While most see it as more of a physical affliction, like coughing fits or laughing disease, it can also work when a threat spreads quickly in a tight-knit community. Think about a snake slithering into a tent. The more who are connected, the faster the hysteria spreads.

That can be helpful in life or death situations, but when it comes to what is mostly an existential threat, like witches or Communists, or even Jews, or newly freed Black Americans after the Civil War, that fear eventually morphs into dehumanization. That often leads to the worst crimes against humanity. Once people are dehumanized, as Trump and his supporters have been, there are no limits to what can be done to them.

That’s not to compare Trump supporters with Jews during the Holocaust or the Jim Crow South; it’s just to say that the mechanisms are the same. The “good Germans” had been conditioned to dehumanize Jews, which meant they could be carted off to concentration camps long before anyone knew anything about gas chambers. The Germans believed Hitler was making Germany safer and more prosperous now that the “parasites” had been purged.

The hysteria only ends when they’ve gotten rid of the bad thing. That is why we watched person after person purged and persecuted from their jobs, Hollywood, and social media all through the Trump years, a practice that continues to this day. In 2016 there are more people online and connected than ever before. In 2020, even more people were online and connected.

Dehumanization is the red line we should never cross, not necessarily because of what it does to other people, but because of what it does to ourselves, nothing less than the total destruction of the human soul.

In Salem, over 200 people were accused of witchcraft, all because a few adolescent girls began faking symptoms. With limited education - they only had the Bible, and only men were allowed to study it - and an isolated new utopia, the Puritans were constantly under siege by direct threats. It was freezing cold. Native Americans were attacking them without warning. And then came the Devil Himself, their greatest fear.

Witches had no way out of the accusation, just as someone today is always guilty once accused. They could confess as a witch and live or refuse to confess and be hanged among members of their community who cheered on their deaths. But not everyone was compliant, just like now. Giles Corey was a terrible person by all accounts. He beat his wife regularly. But he refused to confess to being a witch. They tortured him with heavy stones placed on his chest until his tongue fell out of his mouth, and he died.

Then there was Thomas Maule, a Quaker, who spent a year in jail to make sure the story of Salem was told and remembered. Maule understood persecution because in Salem, they didn’t only jail accused witches. They didn’t much like anyone who wasn’t a Puritan. They jailed Quakers all of the time and treated them like outsiders, much like our Left now does to non-compliant Trump supporters.

Maule is credited with leading the way toward the First Amendment and as the founder of objective journalism that held the powerful to account.

There were no real witches in Salem, America is not corrupt to its core with “white supremacy,” and Trump is not an omnipotent Super Villain. We’re all just human beings, flaws and all. Trump is still the same gadfly from the 1980s whose fame revolved around his opulent lifestyle.

He’s the same guy who starred in Celebrity Apprentice. Trump is not secretive - if anything, he’s an over-sharer. He doesn’t hide things or tries to grab power behind the scenes. Everything is right on the page, warts and all. He perplexes the Left because he still believes in an America where everyone has a right to say what they want, lives how they want, thinks what they want regardless of the fast-changing rules of behavior mandated by the new Left.

Trump’s rise is no coincidence. He is overtly and deliberately offensive. He mocked a disabled reporter. He made fun of John McCain. He called Marco Rubio “Little Marco.” He often seems like a bully. But there is a side to Trump people don’t know and don’t see. The human side of Trump. When you take the time to see that, dehumanization evaporates.

This doesn’t mean I’m suggesting you “like” Trump, see him as a good person or even support him. It just means we should get a grip before things go too far to turn back around. We’re already there.

There is nothing left of the Trump hunters. They have been destroyed by their addiction. It defines who they are now and defines what they are. For people who have everything - money, culture, art museums, every major corporation in the country, all Big Tech platforms were undone by their need to destroy one man.

Americans are looking at the January 6th committee hearings, and now, with the raid on Mar-a-Lago and thinking, do they not trust their own candidates or policies to win in November? Why are they so worried the people will vote for Trump instead? Shouldn’t they be fixing themselves rather than trying to take out their opponent before he’s even announced he’s running?

They can’t quit Trump because he went at the Kings and the Queens - Obama, Bill Clinton, the Bush’s, the Cheneys. The Squad. Nancy Pelosi. He mocked all of them. He got his MAGA fingerprints all over the furniture in the White House. Now, they’re done dancing around it. With a fully compliant media and a rabid blue-check army on Twitter they are ready for their authoritarian closeup.

To quote Paddy Chayefsky’s brilliant screenplay for Network, Trump has meddled with the primal forces of nature, and for that, he must ATONE.

While discussing Network, Chayefsky warned against what he called “the destructiveness of absolute beliefs.” He then added, “That the only total commitment any of us can have is to other human beings.”

Our government leaders should spend less time with their ruthless, grotesque power grabs and more time trying to make us see each other as human beings again. Or as Jefferson Smith, an outsider who came to Washington only to see his character smeared, once said, “love thy neighbor.”

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is a film about government corruption and the one man who went into the machine thinking he could make a difference. I do not doubt that the intentions of Adam Schiff, Liz Cheney, Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden aren’t good. But in their unending hunt to destroy Trump, they’ve destroyed themselves.

I never thought anything could shake my faith and loyalty to the Democratic Party. I trusted them. I believed in them. That doesn’t mean I think the Republican Party is any better, but they don’t control everything as the Democrats do.

They will probably indict Trump. That will mark the last gasp of their collapsing empire. The red pills will be eaten like candy. No American will ever see them the same way again.

I am not MAGA. I am not a Conservative. My friends and family do not understand why I care about Trump and his supporters. They want me to join them in their hatred. They want me to be inside the same group hysteria as they are. I know where they’re coming from. I used to be among them. I did everything they’re doing now.

But the red pill is a powerful one. Once you find your way out of the bubble of hysteria on the Left, it feels more like normal life. People are people again. And that, my friends, is worth waking up for.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

The Ultra Elite vs. The Ultra MAGA

1 augusti 2022 | 32 min

In 2020, an unprecedented alliance of the richest and most powerful entities in the country came together to rig an election. Now I’m not saying they did anything illegal. Or that there was widespread fraud. But really, does that matter?

By now, after they spent four years trying to remove Trump from power, impeached him twice, and now Merrick Garland has launched the “largest investigation in American history,” all to boost the Democrats chances in the midterms and try to knock Trump out to keep him from running in 2024, you gotta wonder. What are they so afraid of?

The election was rigged because they were afraid Trump would win in 2020. Indeed, a one-term president with a strong economy is unbeatable. To bring him down they would have to take control of the media narrative, deliberately crash the economy, and discredit everything Trump ever did to manage the COVID pandemic.

All that because they couldn’t beat him with just Joe Biden. I know it was more than that. I know they were pressuring the media to “fix” their obsession with Hillary’s emails in 2016. They were pressuring Mark Zuckerberg to “help” them win this time, since he “helped” Trump win last time. Facebook offered the same “help” to the Clinton campaign, but she turned him down.

They were worried about a scandal erupting as the “October surprise.” You know, like the Access Hollywood tape in 2016? It’s okay when they do it. Trump tried to do it with the Hunter Biden story, and you’ll never believe what happened next.

“Hey ya, Mr. Dorsey? Yes, this is a shadowy figure who works for the apparatus, and we think you need to bury that Hunter Biden story. Why? Well, it looks bad for Joe. Also, it’s Russian disinformation. Also, if you post it, you will be complicit in spreading Russian disinformation. Also, you will be helping a racist/fascist win the presidency. We good?”

All of the other major Silicon Valley dude-bros complied. What did they have to lose? Nothing. They know which side butters their bread.

What we saw in 2020 was the richest and most powerful people essentially subverting American Democracy.

In their efforts to remove one president they didn’t like and install another, we lived through probably the most corrupt election in American history by a group of people who really do believe they have the right to manipulate an election. With enough money and lawyers you can do anything.

Normally, you’d have reporters at the Washington Post and the New York Times doing detailed reports of how corrupt our government had become. They’re not above the American people. They’re not above American Democracy. But that isn’t what you see. Even now, you still see them taking one side. The Twitter blue-check side.

Who are they, you might ask? You know who the ULTRA MAGA is thanks to Joe Biden’s decision to dehumanize half the country. Now meet the ULTRA ELITE.

The ULTRA ELITE is the blue-check army on Twitter of the most revered, famous, wealthy, and powerful high-status people in the country - Stephen King, Bette Midler, Patricia Arquette, Taylor Swift, Beyonce, Obama, Michael Beschloss, John Dean, Howard Dean, and then, of course, the Never Trumpers like Rick Wilson and Steve Schmidt - they called themselves “The Resistance.” But really, they were the ULTRA ELITE.

They’re the Obama coalition. They’re Netflix and HBO Max. They’re Nike and Microsoft. They’re the Grammys and the Oscars. They’re Audible and Home Depot. They sit atop the food chain, making the most money. Almost every major corporation in America, almost every university, research lab, opera house, art museum are all in alignment with the ULTRA ELITE.

They listen to NPR, they read the New York Times. They think the Washington Post is still a legit newspaper and they are all in agreement that Trump incited a “violent insurrection” on January 6th and that his supporters were a “white supremacist” army about to overthrow the mighty United States of America. Imagine our country is that vulnerable it was threatened by an unarmed mob of protesters.

But the ULTRA ELITE lives in fear. They hide in their bunker and want the bad people to disappear. They send out scouts to see if they’re gone. If they see one ULTRA MAGA you know, walking around without a mask or wearing a red cap - that means it’s not over yet. They just want their utopia back. Their perfect little world before Trump wrecked it.

The truth still matters though it is in limited supply. Watching the entire media take a side on the January 6th show trial is frightening. There isn’t even a question of due process or presumption of innocence. They’ve been convicted in the court of public opinion, and that’s all that matters.

Over the past six years, we’ve just become numb to living in a country that disappears perceived wrongdoers. Cancel culture replaced the presumption of innocence and due process with trial-by-mob. Why wouldn’t that hysteria swallow up the government too? Joe Biden has been targeting Trump voters ever since, smearing them as “racists” and “insurrectionists” and “election deniers,” “anti-vaxxers,” and “white supremacists”.

On the Left they believe you should be as forceful and aggressive as possible to fight for your rights. When Trump supporters do it, they’re the wrong class of people. They’re not the ULTRA ELITE. They’re ULTRA MAGA. That’s bad. So they should never try to fight against a government they feel has betrayed them. Not this government. It’s ESG-infused fashionable fascism.

One day the whole story will be told, and history will not be kind. No group of people who dehumanizes another fares well in retrospect. How will you explain the treatment of people who breached the Capitol after so many on the Left have done the same thing? “Oh, they were racists” - is that the plan?

This was the Capitol breach of Wisconsin:

The media is part of the ULTRA ELITE that runs this country by controlling the chosen narrative and micromanaging a manufactured consensus on Twitter. They are the ones who get to say if it’s right or wrong, fair or corrupt. It’s like the end of Chinatown when Evelyn has nowhere to turn because Noah Cross owns the police. The ULTRA ELITE can’t check the media because they are the media.

But it’s one thing if they’re just winning an election, bending the rules with a nudge wink wink, which did more damage to Americans’ faith in “Democracy Itself” than January 6th. It’s entirely different from waging a 9/11-style “war on terror” against anyone who might think about voting for Trump. It is an abuse of power that I believe they will regret one day.

For the President to use such definitive language for people who have not yet been convicted of these crimes would be shocking if we weren’t already used to the idea that the ULTRA ELITE do whatever they want and there are no checks or balances on that power.

There is enough exculpatory evidence to contradict many of the findings revealed in the Primetime hearings, including the Oathkeepers helping Capitol police at least three times to calm down the crowd, hundreds of hours of footage that has never been released. There is video of Trump supporters attempting to stop windows from being smashed, including one of Ashli Babbit punching an unidentified rioter who broke the window just before she was shot.

At best, you have “disrupting an official proceeding” or the “disrupting a peaceful transfer of power.”

That was never good enough for the ULTRA ELITE. They had to dig out something that looked more “insurrectiony,” so they came up with “seditious conspiracy.” That was the first sign our government, at least to me, had become corrupt, that they were now distorting reality to suit the narrative, which is what the media and our politicians did all through 2020.

There aren’t many people brave enough to get the story — the whole story — of January 6th, but a few have. Julie Kelly’s book is a must-read. And over at the Conservative site Epochtimes, they’ve assembled some of the footage never shown to the American public. It’s worth a watch. For all of their sneering at sites like Epoch Times, none of the mainstream journalists have looked at January 6th, or anything else since 2020, with a critical, objective eye.

Two rioters have since committed suicide, probably because our government took away what they valued the most, love of country. If you take that away, you take everything. It isn’t enough that so many of them come from places that have been emptied out and turned into ghost towns all across America. Mom and pop stores were replaced with the same familiar franchises. Anytown, USA became Anybrand, USA. There is no answer from the Biden administration for that.

If you drive across this country, you’ll see much love for Trump everywhere. Tractor trailers festooned with his name across them. The Trump flag is planted on lawns, front yards, and fields. There is no doubt that much of America is Trump country. Not the ULTRA ELITE but the people who help keep this country running, farmers and truckers, waitresses and gas station attendants.

The Biden administration has no way to reach them. After all, he has now demonized them, wrongly, by calling them racists and “white supremacists” and “insurrectionists” - blaming them for COVID deaths because they didn’t wear masks or get vaccines. Now we know masks barely stopped the spread, if at all, and vaccines never did.

So what’s the plan? Just keep scaring the ULTRA ELITE with the ULTRA MAGA? Will that distract people away from their real problems? What happened to the minds of the young during lockdown, what about gas prices, rising rent, inflation? To the ULTRA ELITE, what matters is what they put in their bios on Twitter? The war in Ukraine, their pronouns, BLM.

Yuval Noah Harari wrote in his book, Lessons for the 21st Century, the following:

“Democracy is based on Abraham Lincoln's principal than you 'can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time. If a government is corrupt and fails to improve people's lives, enough citizens will eventually realise this and replace the government. But government control of the media undermines Lincoln's logic, because it prevents citizens from realising the truth. Through its monopoly over the media, the ruling oligarchy can repeatedly blame all its failures on others, and divert attention to external threats - either real or imaginary.When you live under such an oligarchy, there is always some crisis or other that takes priority over boring stuff such as healthcare and pollution. If the nation is facing external invasion or diabolical subversion, who has time to worry about overcrowded hospitals and polluted rivers? By manufacturing a never-ending stream of crises, a corrupt oligarchy can prolong its rule indefinitely.”

Harari was referring to the first war on terror, but his words apply to Biden’s abuse of power to distract from his failed Afghanistan exit, his inability to stand up to the insane Left, and a crashing economy.

Like it or not, Joe Biden is Ashli Babbitt’s president too. He’s the President of every desperate Trump supporter who showed up on that day fighting for Trump. He owes them the same protections as he would give the protesters over the Summer in 2020.

Pride goeth before the fall

If history is any indicator, we’re witnessing the collapse of the once-mighty empire of the counter-culture Left. They took back power using resources most Americans don’t have access to. They showed us what an America under their rule would look like. They might clean it up nicely on cable news and on their Twitter feeds but the reality is dystopian.

The media simply ignored all of the warning signs heading into 2020. We had good reason to be worried about what might happen if the rising madness on the Left got into government. So many victims of that Summer that were never even mentioned by the Democrats at their convention or even now. They just don’t care, just like the dead soldiers in Afghanistan.

Like the abuse suffered by police officers in Portland.

Like Two women were arrested and charged with beating a US Senator in August.

Publishers, editors, and professors were all being fired. The hysteria was whipped up every day online. This was starting to scare Americans away from the Left. That, more than anything, is why Trump won as many millions of votes as he did and won Iowa, Ohio, and Florida, and would have won the election if not for the banked votes the Zuckerberg army had amassed.

By August, Trump had something new to campaign on, which is what he’s campaigning on even now. It was handed to him by the insane cultural revolution that took hold over the Summer of 2020, and how so many corporations caved to pressure. Trump has a good instinct for what people care about but isn’t being covered by the mainstream media. That is probably one of the reasons why he’s resonating even now. The reality the ULTRA ELITE give Americans daily doesn’t match their reality. But if they hear Trump talk about it, they think - wow, someone has the guts to say what everyone thinks.

He gave a speech at Mt. Rushmore that was the first time any major public figure had talked about what was happening in a critical way :

1776 represented the culmination of thousands of years of Western civilization and the triumph of not only spirit, but of wisdom, philosophy, and reason. And yet, as we meet here tonight, there is a growing danger that threatens every blessing our ancestors fought so hard for, struggled, they bled to secure. Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children. Angry mobs are trying to tear down statues of our founders, deface our most sacred memorials, and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities. Many of these people have no idea why they’re doing this, but some know what they are doing. They think the American people are weak and soft and submissive, but no, the American people are strong and proud and they will not allow our country and all of its values, history, and culture to be taken from them.

Enough people were noticing to drive votes towards Trump, particularly as we headed out of the Summer. In many states, early mail-in voting had started in late September. And in the swing states, very early as well.

There wasn’t time to overcome the massive lead of early, mail-in voting. They had stockpiled enough that they knew they already won even before the count started. But in the end, Trump's strength showed a shift was happening. That is why elections should be held close to Election Day, so candidates can make a strong case for Americans to choose which direction they want to take the country. That didn’t happen in 2020. They were given a government they never asked for.

The Left has become so insane they are making the case for any Republicans to vote them out. The Democrats think selling fear, panic and hysteria is the way to drive their movement forward. It isn’t. Americans need optimism, hope, patriotism, law and order and every other tried and true campaign pitch.

The media have never been held accountable for their ongoing distortions in 2020.

Sharyl Attkisson has collected the definitive list of the media “mistakes” during the Trump years. I think it’s safe to say that journalism has collapsed. That’s a big part of the empire of the Ultra Elites. Eventually, it will all be coming down. There is no surviving if they’ve lost access to the truth, and they have.

There are many examples of this, but let’s just pick one. When the story broke that Trump had used teargas to clear the area for a photo op, it took A YEAR for that story to be corrected. This story was a lie that the media ran. The weird part was, that no one among the ULTRA ELITE cared. They wanted Trump out. Everything else came secondary.

But they paid too high a price for their collusion. The media has lost all credibility now among the public. Or anyone who isn’t a member of the ULTRA ELITE.

Have you No Decency?

In 1954 Joseph McCarthy went too far with the McCarthy hearings. He decided to showcase them on Primetime television, just like the January 6th committee. Even though much of his work had been valid - there WERE spies in government and Marxist zealots in Hollywood - by 1954, he had become paranoid. He was drinking too much and he went too far.

That was when Eisenhower stepped in. He helped discredit McCarthy, a fellow Republican because he could see it was destroying unity and American morale. Americans were starting to turn on each other. This was explored so beautifully in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and in The Monsters are Due on Maple Street.

Without access to the truth, there would never have been a Twilight Zone. We live in a time that would produce the most interesting books and screenplays, but the ULTRA ELITE will prevent those stories from being told. If you are a white male, you mostly can’t get a writing gig or a directing job unless you’re a big name. And since white people are still the majority, that makes for a very odd hiring pool.

But even if they could get work, the strident limits on storytelling is oppressive and strange. We get these rigid self-conscious movies depicting the ULTRA ELITE's ideal utopia. Their casting is always multiracial because that helps them look like they’re doing the work of “antiracists.” But it often sets storytelling off in strange and unpredictable ways.

They tell us to think about nothing but the racial dynamics between white and Black people; then they cast them in a way that tells us we should not even see color. The microaggressions we’re supposed to be aware of suddenly disappear when watching a movie, television ad, or TV show. They want us to always think about race or never think about race. Which is it?

Access to the truth is Edward R. Murrow speaking out against McCarthy - this speech could apply today to Merrick Garland, Joe Biden, Liz Cheney, Jamie Raskin, and all media that have sold out their profession by their failure to look at this story with any objectivity. We don’t have any leaders in Washington like Eisenhower, that’s for sure, and we certainly don’t have members of the media like Murrow.

One of the reasons so many people watch Tucker Carlson, and listen to Ben Shapiro and Joe Rogan is that they are looking for people who will tell them what they think instead of speaking in the measured, guarded tone of the forever frightened ULTRA ELITE. How refreshing to hear someone just rip through the hypocrisy of the most uptight puritanical oligarchy this country has known since its bloody revolution from King George.

Carlson is not on Twitter. He says his main touchstone is a waitress in Yosemite who tells him what she’s going through as an ordinary American citizen. That makes him more able to relate to Americans than the cable news hosts who live online in the cocoon of the ULTRA ELITE.

Trump supporters don’t have many people who will stand up for them. They definitely have one strong fighter in Carlson. He shows no signs of fear toward any of the ULTRA ELITE. He ruthlessly mocks high-status media, and both political parties, and seems to have a soft spot for the people with the least power. He is most definitely Public Enemy Number One for the ULTRA ELITE.

I bring him up because he is among the very few voices on cable news who, to quote Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman, takes a flameflower to this place. You get called a racist and a bigot if you watch Carlson, but I’m still waiting to see this kind of fearlessness anywhere else.

The Way Out

Biden and the ULTRA ELITE can continue to ratchet up their authoritarian control, then turn around and warn Americans against the authoritarianism on the Right. There is no question about who is the bigger threat. 2020 gave us a glimpse into our potential future. It looks a lot like 1984.

It is heartbreaking to see the once formidable movement of the late 60s become the sellouts they used to hate. What happened to the protest songs? What happened to sticking it to The Man?

They became the Lotus Eaters. They found their Lotus Plant on Twitter, which felt too good. How powerful they are to control the media narrative and the Democratic politicians. How else is a guy like Adam Kinzinger going to get so much instant feedback? The likes! The sweet, juicy likes! None of them have emerged from that Lotus Plant looking very good.

The only way out of this mess is for the hysteria around Trump to dissipate. When that happens, we will likely have found our way through our darkest days. Those who think they can do battle with the “woke left” but still draw the line at Trump saying things like “but the far right is worse,” haven’t yet understood that it’s all the same thing.

If Joe Biden was a great leader, he would understand what Trump experienced for the four years he was in power, and how undemocratic it was for our media, government, and the blue-checks to treat him the way they did. Biden could bring the country together that way. But you know he isn’t a great leader and doesn’t want to unite the country. The ULTRA ELITE only seeks to purge or reform the non-compliant ULTRA MAGA. Same old story, eh?

Either way, I figure the Democrats are seeing their last desperate days, particularly if they go through with an indictment for Trump. They would have served the blood thirsty blue-checks what they most wanted but it will come at a great cost for the country. America will turn on the Democrats. And after what they’ve done with January 6th, they have it coming.

We need a leader who can bring the country together. We have tough fights ahead with other countries, future pandemics, and who knows what else. The ULTRA ELITE have overstayed their welcome. It’s time for them to shrink back into the shadows.

Power to the people.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

How the Left was Lost

13 juli 2022 | 35 min

What has become obvious to anyone paying attention is that we are living through a kind of revolution.

It is not a physical one. As my friend Abe Greenwald wrote in Commentary Magazine, it “is not being fought within the physical limits of a battlefield. It is instead happening all around us and directly to us. It is redefining our culture, our media, and giving new shape to our public and private institutions. It is remaking the nation before our eyes.”

In other words, this is a revolution of culture. A revolution of ideas.

—Bari Weiss, The New Founders America Needs

Everyone has their own version of how the Left was lost. This is mine.

I tell my story as someone who was very much a devoted Hillary supporter in 2016 and an early Biden supporter. I tell this story as someone who got online in 1994 with one foot in the real world, and one foot in the virtual one. I also tell this story as someone who is no longer a Democrat.

Any slim chance there might have been for me to support the Democratic Party has been eliminated by the undemocratic partisan show trials of January 6th, an authoritarian power grab based on the lie that Trump brought the Proud Boys to DC to launch a violent insurrection against the US government.

Trump would not have urged Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz to debate the election in the Senate if he wanted to overthrow the government. All the violent riot did was interrupt the case he was trying to make and hand absolute power to his enemies. He might be a lot of things but dumb is not one of them.

Yes, the Democrats have used January 6th as a Reichstag Fire to grow their power, punish citizens and present a litmus test to anyone who dares to question the results of the 2020 election.

After the American people watched the Democrats and the media completely memory hole what happened in the Summer of 2020, most are looking at these hearings and the reactions to January 6th overall, as an existential crisis the political aristocracy has time and money to care about.

Biden’s America

By the Summer of 2020, I could see that there was something very wrong with the Left. Because I still wanted Biden to win, I was worried they were abandoning three basic fundamentals this country relies on:

Freedom of Speech - cancel culture was ragingLaw and Order - “Defund the police” was trendingPatriotism - attacking Federal buildings, and historical statues, saying America was “systemically racist.”

Not only did no one listen to anything I had to say, but they were angry at me for saying it. Neera Tanden wrote me personally and asked me to stop criticizing the Democrats until after the election because defeating Donald Trump was the main priority. But I was beginning to worry more about this new version of the Left taking power than I was even Trump.

If the things we were seeing at newspapers and across all institutions - silencing dissent, firing people right and left and this suddenly strident doctrine that was being forced down everyone’s throat got into government? Then our country would start to look a lot more like an authoritarian utopia of the 1984 kind.

Turns out, we have become that authoritarian utopia, at least online. We trusted the Big Tech oligarchs with our data, our friendships, our preferences, our financials. Now they’re turning on those who are non-compliant and tossing them out of what looks a lot like the “Inner Party” in 1984.

The Left was never the “resistance.” They were always the empire. You can’t be that rich, that power, and control almost every area of American culture from Hollywood to book publishing to media to science and big tech and not be the empire. Trump’s side was the “resistance” and still is.

It feels eerily like 1984 now that the internet is ruled by a partisan cabal doing the bidding of the government. Even the Two Minutes of Hate feels like every day on Twitter or the January 6th show trials.

That’s because George Orwell recognized the hypocrisy of a movement supposedly based on equality that was still totally unequal. It’s kind of like how the Left has those lawn signs that say “This House has no Hate” but of course, they are filled with hate of those they have deemed the “bad” people.

Moral superiority against those with less power than you have is not a good look for the Left. They justify it because they have re-ordered the power hierarchy in this country, which puts the most marginalized people at the top and the least marginalized at the bottom.

If you are white, to them, you are powerful therefore you must be dropped to the bottom of the new hierarchy. Likewise, if you are Black and extremely wealthy, you are still marginalized and at the top of the hierarchy. They are hard-liners when it comes to skin color but fluid with gender.

The first time I heard that the Left no longer believed class to be an issue was pointed out by Conservative analyst Victor Davis Hansen who wrote:

During the 1980s cultural war, the left’s mantra was “race, class and gender.” Occasionally we still hear of that trifecta, but the class part has increasingly disappeared. The neglect of class is ironic given that a number of recent studies conclude class differences are widening as never before.

Middle-class incomes among all races have stagnated, and family net worth has declined. Far greater percentages of rising incomes go to the already rich. Student debt, mostly a phenomenon of the middle and lower classes, has hit $1.7 trillion.

States such as California have bifurcated into medieval-style societies. California’s progressive coastal elites boast some of the highest incomes in the nation. But in the more conservative north and central interior, nearly a third of the population lives below the poverty line — explaining why one of every three American welfare recipients lives in California.

There are two conflicting world views not just in America but in other countries — global elitism vs. nationalist populism. To the Left of this country, and much of Gen-Z, they have come of age online so they aren’t so locked into the idea of America as a place with states and borders. Ideology matters to them more. One kind of future would be like 1984 where many countries have come together to form a broader, virtual union.

But there is another movement across the globe to push back against it. Some have called it “Far Right” nationalism but it is the side that opposes the “woke” indoctrination, and the new environmental policies. There are already uprisings against what many countries have done with masks, vaccines, and now the climate.

The Democrats, the media, and Biden tell Americans every day how little they care about their problems. Only the wealthy can afford to sit around all day ruminating on January 6th and the existential crisis of Trump.

Batya Ungar-Sargon was on the Progressive Left but, like so many others out there, and understands that the working class of this country is not reading the New York Times or watching MSNBC. They’re mostly watching Tucker Carlson. So she goes on his show because she knows she can reach a much broader audience. She is, to my mind, the kind of guiding light we need moving forward.

And that is why I watch Tucker Carlson, because he is the most-watched cable news host and he’s the most-watched among the working class, which my former party has all but abandoned.

The Empire’s New Clothes

2008 turns out to be a pivotal year. It was the year that Neil Howe and William Strauss predicted would spark the “Fourth Turning,” which would be something along the lines of the Civil War.

Here is how Howe and Strauss describe the Fourth Turning on their site:

The Fourth Turning is a Crisis…This is an era in which America’s institutional life is torn down and rebuilt from the ground up—always in response to a perceived threat to the nation’s very survival. Civic authority revives, cultural expression finds a community purpose, and people begin to locate themselves as members of a larger group. In every instance, Fourth Turnings have eventually become new “founding moments” in America’s history, refreshing and redefining the national identity.

Howe has said that he believes it was the financial crisis of 2008 that led to the $700 billion bailout that sparked the Fourth Turning. And indeed, two populist uprisings sprang to life in its wake - Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party. There were other uprisings during Obama’s presidency, like the storming of the Capitol in Wisconsin and Michigan, not to mention the formation and activism of Black Lives Matter, all of these mobilized by whole communities connecting online.

The ways in which social media spurs political mobilization and even violence have only been applied to the Right but think about this: Kenosha burned to the ground before journalists got the false narrative corrected, that he was unarmed and “breaking up a fight.” They only seem to worry about the Trump supporters but I expect in a few years they will come to regret that.

2008 was also the historic election of the nation’s first Black President, Barack Obama. That would spark not just a movement, but a full-blown religion that would influence American culture in ways not felt on the Left since JFK.

The other major turning point that occurred in 2008 was that Obama became the first President to use a social media platform, Twitter, to build his coalition. Twitter became the Church and the fulcrum for the Left. It would only intensify over time and in 2020 Twitter would become the authoritarian arm of the empire, which was now controlled by the Democratic Party.

Obama’s first term win would send the Left into a kind of rapture. For a community that was already trying to aim towards self-improvement with the rise of therapy and anti-depressants, not to mention daily talk shows like Oprah where we began to understand the difference between “good” people and “bad” people. We were already on the path towards perfecting our new utopia even before Obama rose to power, but once he did, the utopians had a leader and a religious figure.

The rapture would last just four years. By Obama’s second term, 2012, the Devil had come to the Left in the form of racism. Before that, most of the country was pleased Obama had won. It felt like an important milestone in a country whose history and legacy were stained not just by slavery, but by the Jim Crow era of the South that destroyed whole generations of Black citizens.

Obama had been a uniter. That was until things started going badly for his administration. His progressive policies drove an extreme reaction by the rising populist movement on the Right and eventually, in his second term, Obama had a solid red Congress.

The more Obama was obstructed by Congress, and the more the Tea Party rose up to oppose Obama’s policies, the more the focus on racism began to permeate the consciousness of the Left in a new way. Racism was baked-in. It wasn’t anything you did it was something you were. An accusation is enough because how can anyone prove that they aren’t?

Any white person who opposed or even criticized Obama, who had become and remains a god-like figure on the Left, had to be racist. By 2013, Critical Race and Gender theory would spread from college campuses to high schools to online social media sites like Tumblr.

Even before Trump ran in 2016, there was this idea that racism was everywhere and in everything. That 2013 generation on Tumblr went to college and enacted their online justice ideology in real-world activism. Remember, if your only experience of presidential leadership is Barack Obama — and you believe half the country is “white supremacist” then your activism is going to center around “fixing” the omnipresent racism the same way the Puritans were chasing witches to purge the Devil from their otherwise devout village.

And since this generation understood that you broadcast your identity online and on social media, what you did, what you stood for, and what you fought for defined who you were and separated you from people who weren’t doing that. I remember during the Summer of 2020 my niece was begging me to put something about antiracism on my Instagram but I had been writing about racism and advocating for Black artists for years on my website, awardsdaily.com. That felt performative to me and frankly, she sounded like she was in a cult - they were urging her to drop her relatives who weren’t committed to racial justice.

This was in 2015:

My daughter told me she first started noticing what we call “Cancel Culture” originating on Tumblr in 2013 with the website “Yur Fav is Problematic” wherein a self-appointing army of strident thought-police would call out celebrities or anyone whose platform was growing if they committed any sort of crime against the new doctrine.

Here is just a sample of what that looked like.

Naturally, as the Left was becoming more politically extreme, so too did the Right rise up to challenge that movement and push back.

Around 2013, Trump began “getting political” on Twitter. Part of it was his alignment with the Tea Party, though really its representative was Sarah Palin who ran as John McCain’s running mate in the pivotal year of 2008. The Tea Party was already considered a “racist” movement by the Left, thus anyone involved in it had to be racist.

Here is Steve Bannon way back in 2012 explaining what would become the Trump strategy to win in 2016. Bannon has also been labeled as a racist, along with the MAGA movement.

Minute 222.

One of the biggest disadvantages for the Left and even the Never Trumpers is that they are now being caught with their pants down since they are losing Hispanic and Asian voters. Even Black voters are starting to flee the Democratic Party. The America First movement per Steve Bannon has been actively trying to recruit those voters. Anyone who knows the movement knows it isn’t based on race or racism. Once they become aware of that, the entire Left and the media instantly lose credibility.

The media and the Democrats have been whipping members of the Left into a state of hysteria for six long years. Longer. They never stopped to think about what that might be doing to the formidable minds coming of age online.

That kind of delusional thinking is what got us to Evergreen and what got us to the Summer of 2020.

The Fourth Founding

There are some offering us a way out, a new “founding” of sorts. Bari Weiss whose Common Sense offers a path forward that retains some of the altruism of the Left in its current state but also seeks to build a new foundation of American life that preserves the things that define this country. Weiss has written a brilliant manifesto of sorts from a speech she gave at the new “free-thinking” university she helped build:

1. To be a founder in 21st-century America means to reject the politics of resentment and to recognize our privilege.

My dad lost a younger sister to cancer. My dad also has MS. So why does he constantly say he is the most privileged man in the world? Because he grew up in a stable, loving home with two parents. Because he has meaningful work. Because he has Judaism and the community that comes with it. Because he married the love of his life.

And, above all else, because he had the great, good fortune to be born in America.

Even with all our flaws and failings, even with inflation and polarization and tribalization, anyone who is honest will admit that there is nowhere better to build a life.

Saying that right now feels radical, because grievance and resentment define the current cultural moment. It’s a dead end. We must get back to gratitude.

James Strock who writes of America’s Fourth Founding in a must-read piece called Who Lost America lays out exactly what has happened to this country since around 2013:

Demands for recognition and respect of non-majority identities are by no means new. They recur through the course of our history. They’re a feature, not a bug of our national experiment. They prompt periodic resets of American political life, sweeping more people into full participation. Those holding power are persuaded to acknowledge the rights of others, in the ceaseless cause of aligning our practices with our ideals.

What’s different now is that the most conspicuous variants of identity politics reject the ideals of individual rights and autonomy for all. Instead, they assert that existing hierarchies are irredeemably illegitimate, built on oppressor group power dynamics. Rather than making it possible for more people to compete and earn places in talent and competence hierarchies, these critics seek to invert them. Those classified as members of historically marginalized groups would be placed at the top based on immutable characteristics. This approach inclines toward rule by an elite, tending toward autocracy rather than democratic self-governance.

This yields a banquet of consequences. Group victimization is venerated; individual achievement is derogated and deconstructed by frenzied packs of injustice collectors. Institutional power is honored; political persuasion is neglected. Representative democracy is discredited as built upon past, unjust assumptions and institutions, rather than safeguarded as a foundation for the ongoing pursuit of progress.

When we put it all together and we look at what this country has become at the hands of the Left, we have a larger majority that will reject it. They will reject Hollywood movies that are soaked through with dogma (almost all of them are). They will reject candidates who drive some of the more extreme policies of the Biden administration. They will reject what appears to be indoctrination in our public schools.

And hopefully, they reject this bizarre new religion that seems to exist only to alleviate the guilt and shame of the most successful and wealthy Americans who loved Obama enough that they wanted to atone, eternally, for their sins of white privilege. Watching them alternate between white guilt and being white saviors is exhausting. It seems so self-serving and punishes those in the middle or at the bottom who have no marginalized status to allow them entry to the inner party. They are asked or demanded to be “good allies” and give up their talent or their skills and take a step back to allow for equality of outcome rather than opportunity.

But we are a country that still needs to be based on the hardest working and the very best to rise to the top regardless of status, race or any other way societies categorize and rank their citizens from birth. We should be giving everyone a shot, not telling others to slow down for those behind them to catch up.

Strock ends his piece by saying we can’t wait for any savior to rescue us:

How will we diagnose and alleviate the pains afflicting our body politic? Are we experiencing America’s death throes? Or is a new nation struggling to be born?

The answer is unlikely to be found through the calamitous clarity and contingency of foreign war. And it’s unlikely to be delivered from on high here at home, by a leader as yet unidentified.

As with the generation of 1776, the Civil War generation, and the Greatest Generation, the American future depends on us, ordinary citizens bound one to another in a extraordinary, fateful experiment.

The Left I used to know stood up for the little guy, the working-class poor, not just those they choose to help because they are ideologically compliant. We didn’t punish or cancel artists. We didn’t censor and bully journalists. There is no doubt we have lost our way. Perhaps a massive red wave will give the Democrats a chance to collapse completely and then rebuild with new blood and a better path forward.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

The Season Finale of Catch Trump if You Can

30 juni 2022 | 19 min

If there is one thing I learned watching the Johnny Depp and Amber Heard trial it’s this: you can’t just hear one side of the story.

Because of social media, apparently, convictions in the Court of Opinion have now replaced due process and the presumption of innocence. Had Depp never sued Heard, we would never have known Heard was the abuser.

The January 6th hearings look a lot more like the show trials in the Soviet Union under Stalin. Witnesses would only be called if they backed up the accusations made against various prisoners of course. They would be found guilty, of course, because dissent was not allowed, nor was a fair defense.

The point of show trials was to intimidate anyone who might consider thinking for themselves or seeing Stalin in a negative light. In our country now, journalists are expected to go along with whatever the state tells them is true. If they step out of line they will be viciously bullied on Twitter, forced to apologize or, in some cases, fired.

The same team that tried to impeach Trump after January 6th are back in the Season Finale, this time to drive the DOJ towards criminal charges against Trump. It’s like holding a hearing to find out whether Johnny Depp was guilty or not but only presenting Amber Heard’s side. Those of us who watched the whole trial know the evidence presented destroyed Heard’s case.

Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony is somewhat reminiscent of Amber Heard’s. It is sincere but overly dramatic. She’s pretty, with a husky voice, and definitely someone most people would want to believe. But of course, her story is starting to fall apart.

You might wonder why would she risk her career to lie under oath? Why would Heard have done it? In Heard’s case, she believed she was going to win the trial because in the wake of the Me Too era, there was no such thing as a defense against an accusation of abuse or rape. For Hutchins, she essentially had no career left. Trump would not hire her after he left office. Her resume wasn’t going to get her much work. Ah, but to be a star witness for the Left she’ll get the Liz Cheney treatment. She’ll get a golden ticket into the land of the special people, the ruling class, MSNBC. She might even make the cover of TIME.

She’s a hero now. She can go on Rachel Maddow’s show. She will be praised to the high heavens by people like Rob Reiner and Stephen Colbert. Hey, even Barbra Streisand is out there singing her praises. This, as opposed to starting out her political career as Mark Meadows’ aide. She would be tainted forever. Now, she’s a star.

The media and the public, however, need for it to be true, just as they needed Amber Heard’s story to be true because they serve a much larger narrative. But some of us need more than that. We need the truth. The January 6th committee has never been about the truth.

For four years, the Left, the Never Trump Republicans, and the mainstream media have been actively attempting to undo the results of the 2016 election that put Trump in power for four years. It wasn’t just his slim victory, it was the kinds of people who supported him. They pretended it was about “white racist trash” but really? Wasn’t it just about their refusal to adopt the ideology of Obama’s America? A fast-moving social justice movement that was changing almost everything?

Never before in the history of this country has a president been under attack by so many forces at once from Day One, with not just the largest protests in American history, but protests abroad. A “resistance” that aligned social media, the richest people in the world, corporate America, Hollywood, Big Tech, the Democrats, and the Never Trumpers all to discredit, destroy and remove a sitting president.

Why isn’t anyone talking about it?

At the time, those of us in the “resistance” believed we were stopping the fascist takeover of America by a guy who looked a lot like Hitler. We were afraid. The fear was so overwhelming that two major mass hysteria events gripped the country for the four years Trump was in power. For a country that valued decency above all else, careful language adopted and mandated to prove that decency, a guy like Trump who says whatever he wants to say, was as dangerous as the Devil riding into Salem in 1692.

By the time the 2020 election rolled around, the “resistance” formed a “cabal” that used every resource in its massive war chest to bring down Trump and install Biden -manipulating the news narrative, burying the Hunter Biden story, blaming every COVID death on Trump, even wanting the economy to crash because that is the one surefire way to bring down a one-term President. The protests and riots of 2020 were in reaction to Trump - the worse they got, the worse it made him look, or so they believed.

I had been the most strident and loyal Hillary supporter, a well-known blue-check on Twitter. I was also one of the first Biden supporters early in 2019. Here is a picture of me at an early fundraiser on May 8th, 2019:

I was heavily involved in politics, to my own detriment. I genuinely believed Biden could have beaten Trump fair and square. It wasn’t until the Summer of 2020 that I realized the media was manipulating the narrative to ensure Trump’s loss. It started with the Tom Cotton essay debacle at the New York Times. During the protests, I kept urging the Democrats to try to stop the violence because I thought it would make them look bad and put Trump in power. It was completely ignored by the media, memory-holed by the blue-checks on Twitter. It basically didn’t happen.

It was such a red-pill moment for me. I guess I always thought journalists would still get the story no matter what. But that summer, and that year, the media became part of the “resistance” and that was that. Two years later, they still behave like activists and mouthpieces for the Democrats. I trusted all of them. Now I can’t trust any of them.

For all of their talk about “Democracy Itself,” they don’t seem to believe that everyone has a right to fight for what they care about in this country, even if it disgusts the ruling class. That is what Democracy is.

Democracy is not a massive influx of $400 million from Mark Zuckerberg to close the enthusiasm gap by hiring operatives to drive around and collect ballots. It is not the largest political alliance in American history dragging Biden over the finish line. That Trump still won the bellwether states of Iowa, Ohio, and Florida is proof enough he probably would have won without the mail-in ballots.

By the end of all of it, Trump was pissed, and his supporters were pissed. It all felt like a dirty rigged game to them. Meanwhile, the media and the Democrats pretended it had all gone normally, like nothing at all was wrong in any of it. For some of us, it was a pulling back of the curtain to reveal the old man pulling the strings.

Does that mean he should have called the election “fraudulent”? No. But Democrats did that for four years straight after Trump won. The only difference is the class of people involved and yes, January 6th.

But here we are in 2022 and Trump’s presence is more alive than ever. It’s as if he never even lost the election.

You’d never really know Biden even won except when you look at the latest polls, which tell us just how bad it’s all going. Otherwise, given the nonstop Trump obsession, you could almost convince yourself that Trump was still in power.

Maybe if Joe Biden’s exit from Afghanistan hadn’t been a legacy-ruining catastrophe, maybe if they’d figured out sooner how to bring back the economy, maybe if the lockdown hadn’t wreaked so much havoc on the minds of young children, maybe if the crisis at the border hadn’t exploded, maybe if Putin hadn’t invaded Ukraine, maybe if a social justice revolution hadn’t overtaken the Left like Invasion of the Body Snatchers — they wouldn’t have to bring back Trump for the Season Finale of Catch Trump if You Can.

It’s hard to endure days like yesterday when the media swells with certainty, dragging out the likes of Carl Bernstein, John Dean, and all of the once-respected journalists. None of them can actually bring down Trump because, as I’ve said prior, they aren’t doing battle with the real Trump. They are doing battle with their own creation of him, the character they wrote, the character they sell to the American people every day.

I know because I did the work they never did. I watched every single one of Trump’s rallies, all five a day, up to the election. I got to know actual Trump supporters. I was able to see just how distorted the media narrative was - and trust me, I am not alone in this.

I came of age when Bill Clinton was the one being chased by the Right. They dug into everything from his past and watched every move he made. In the end, they could only get him on something he SAID. Here, Bill Clinton lied about an affair with Monica Lewinsky under oath. They impeached him. He survived it. The public soured on the Republicans after that, which helped drive negative sentiment towards the George W. Bush presidency. But even that was a stronger case than what they have on Trump.

While in office, and even now, Trump has never been charged with anything he’s actually done, only things he has said. Whether he said them in the White House, he said them on Twitter, or he said them in press briefings - most people didn’t hear them firsthand. They heard them through the media’s cherry-picking of the things he said.

“Decent people on both sides” turned out to be a cherry-picked lie. “Tell the Proud Boys to stand back and stand by” was misinterpreted as a call to violence. Something Trump said transfixed the nation, or at least half of it, as proof to who he was. But that wasn’t who he was or who he is.

Hacking Hillary’s emails - something he said. First impeachment — something he said. Second impeachment — something he said. January 6th — something he said.

Because they can’t arrive at criminal charges on something Trump said, which is covered under the First Amendment, they now have brought up something someone said about something someone said.

They are hoping to charge Trump with “seditious conspiracy” or “obstruction of justice?”

Here are two examples of those charges:

* Richard Nixon would have been charged with obstruction of justice, but he resigned instead. Nixon was on tape saying he could find hush money to silence a witness. John Dean’s testimony was backed up by recorded evidence.

* Seditious Conspiracy — I wrote about that in-depth here, but the short answer is that it has been used in the past to punish anti-Americans, namely Puerto Rican Communists who opened fire in the Capitol to fight for their independence. This was in 1954, right at the height of the Red Scare. White Supremacists have been charged as well in the past for threats to overtake the government. Trump was the sitting President at the time of January 6th, so technically it couldn’t have been a coup — if anything, it was an attempt to stop the peaceful transfer of power.

It isn’t that everything Trump did was right on January 6th, or that it wasn’t irresponsible of him to deny the election results and hold a rally. It’s the lie that Trump knew about and was somehow connected to the riot.

It makes no sense. Trump had convinced Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley to argue his case against the election results in the Senate. They were doing that. Trump gave a speech, then said to march “peacefully” to the Capitol.

At the same time, there were Proud Boys who did plan to bust into the Capitol. There are people on video telling supporters to go into the Capitol. They have video evidence of that. Are they FBI informants? Who knows? No one in the media will ever ask. They write it off the same way they did everything else since 2020. They give you the narrative they want to be true.

I have no doubt that “hearing” is persuasive to those watching. They are a living, breathing extension of what it’s like to be on Twitter. The problem is that they are preaching to the choir. They are making an already hysterical group of people more hysterical. The pressure is mounting on Merrick Garland to charge Trump with something. I think he’s too smart to do that. He knows there is no THERE there. Trump is covered by the First Amendment.

Ben Shapiro lays out the best analysis of the testimony and January 6th overall. He graduated from Harvard Law so he knows his stuff. He’s also more objective when it comes to Trump than most on the Right, and is a DeSantis guy. That’s the unintended consequence of this mess for the Democrats. They have put all of their eggs in the Trump basket, for six long years. And they’re about to get blown out by a massive red wave.

There are a couple of journalists who are asking hard questions but not many. They are 100% in the tank, with zero critical thinking on any of it. It is then left to those outside the mainstream to do the job journalists no longer will:

Very few journalists this time around, not even the usually reliable Bari Weiss, were prepared to do the hard work of giving Trump the benefit of the doubt on this obviously flimsy testimony. They believe what she said because they put a picture in their minds and once they saw that picture they believed it was true. That is why a proper defense matters, as Megyn Kelly points out so well.

We need a better investigation of January 6th, one that isn’t the season finale of Catch Trump if you Can.

At this point, I no longer care who runs or wins the presidency. What I want back is truth in art, in science, and in journalism. We can survive having a corrupt government, plenty of countries do. But when we lose touch with the truth, there is no coming back from that.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

Dobbs Was a Middle Finger to the Invasive Activism of the New Left

27 juni 2022 | 21 min

Since 2020, after the protests and the riots erupted on the streets of major cities, causing over one billion dollars in damages, implied threats have become the norm on the Left.

Windows are boarded up in anticipation of more. During the Derek Chauvin trial, the crowd outside, including some politicians, openly threatened violent riots should he be found not guilty. Random beatings go unnoticed on the streets because they only play on Right-wing channels.

Like my friends on the Left, I mourn the overturning of Roe v. Wade because I think it will drive a deeper wedge between the two Americas. To the Left, a fundamental right has been taken away. To the Right, a fundamental right has been granted.

I keep hoping for some kind of unity. But now, the ongoing hatred by each side against the other is likely to only get much worse. The division is going to take the shape of red states and blue states, or as future generations will know them, abortion states and illegal abortion states.

There was a moment between the unprecedented leak of the Dobbs decision and the final decision. Some justices might have been persuaded not to overturn a 50-year precedent. Some had suggested the leak was intentional for that reason.

You’d think, given that, there might be some civility on offer for the Trump appointees. You know, the whole “you attract more flies with honey than vinegar” approach. But if you thought that, you’d be wrong.

The Left, the Democrats, and the media did the opposite. They never let up. They seemed okay with using high-pressure tactics on justices who have been taking all manner of incoming for several years now.

They stalked and harassed the SCOTUS justices in their homes. A group called Jane’s Revenge torched pro-life centers and vandalized property, sending the message “if abortions aren’t safe then you aren’t either.” And a would-be assassin showed up at the home of Justice Kavanaugh and threatened his life before calling 911 and turning himself in.

Was there blanket media coverage by any outlets other than Fox? Of course not. What were they focused on? The January 6th show trial. Did the protesters stop marching outside their homes? No. The idea was that the justices deserve everything they had coming.

For several years now, Justices Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, Barrett, and Thomas have been casually, routinely bullied in the press, harassed, and all but crucified by the Left on a daily basis. Because of their hatred of Trump, they have normalized dehumanization against his supporters, and his appointees. Whatever they think of Trump, however angry they feel about Mitch McConnell blocking Merrick Garland’s appointment but going along with Trump’s, treating Supreme Court Justices this way undermines their claim to care about “Democracy Itself.”

Chuck Schumer had all but threatened violence against Kavanaugh and Gorsuch way back in 2020, though he downplayed it:

Justice Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing alone was unlike anything we’ve ever seen. We don’t have a press that would ever cover it that way, not amid the Me Too movement, but banging on the door of the Supreme Court, disrupting the confirmation hearing, screaming at Senators in hallways - was the exact kind of invasive activism that is endangering not just the Left itself, but the country at the hands of the Left.

Kavanaugh was convicted without due process in the court of public opinion, smeared as a rapist. His family had to absorb all of it. Everyone Kavanaugh knew throughout his whole life now looked at him that way. The idea was to make him as weak of a Justice as possible, the Clarence Thomas treatment, so that the public would sour on the Court over time.

There was never one moment where the Left backed off of any of it.

When Amy Coney Barrett was being confirmed, she was labeled a racist (even though she has adopted Black children — even that was condemned), the media said she belonged to a religious cult and was called Lydia from the Handmaid’s Tale.

Clarence Thomas has been hated by the Left since his confirmation, but only recently has it intensified, as Twitter blue-checks and the media suggest he should be impeached because of his wife’s thought-crimes on the election.

They dress it up like “news” but it’s more of the same - mass hysteria, Trump obsession, the bottom dropping out.

The treatment of Krysten Sinema in particular has been disturbing. Activists find her in airports, follow her into bathrooms, and even disrupted a wedding. The bullying and harassment on Twitter help to dehumanize her to the point where they don’t see a problem with stalking her in real life.

All because she won’t agree to go along with the party-line. They don’t seem to realize that the way it works in America is that we elect people. We don’t throw massive fits to intimidate them to go along with what we want. The new Left doesn’t see it that way. They believe fits of hysteria and dehumanization are the right course of action. It just makes them less reliable as leaders. We need calm heads and steady hands, not the political equivalent of the children in Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory.

I never understood why activists thought all of this was the right course of action. I always figured it would only make things worse because outside the media bubble and social media feedback loop, most people are horrified when it crosses the line, as it often does.

Our country is in the middle of a Cold Civil War. There is no doubt about that. Unfortunately, we have a media that seems to profit off of it, not to mention social media that does better with a divided country than a united one. Every day, each side is hammered with negative stories about the other, driving hatred and rage, not to mention dehumanization.

If you only read news from one side, you will never understand the other side’s position. Navigating between both worlds it’s easier to see where media manipulation drives outrage. The Democrats and the Left can’t mount a proper offense against Donald Trump because they are fighting a cartoon version that doesn’t exist in real life. That, I think, more than anything explains their ongoing sense of helplessness.

If you watch a Trump rally, you won’t see desperation, panic, rage or outrage. Trump is easy-going, confident and funny. Yesterday’s rally in Illinois, for instance, he joked about a potential candidate for governor plucking a hair off of his head. “We’re still looking for that hair,” he said.

The only thing the media pulled from that entire rally was when one of his endorsed candidates, Mary Miller, accidentally said: “thank you for saving white—right to life.” Because of that, “Nazis in Illinois” trended all day on Twitter. They genuinely believe that this will help them win elections. It just makes people hate them, more and more every day.

Trump’s side is using the “radical Left” to draw support from the middle. And guess what? It’s working. The Left is radical. They live up to that label every single day.

Democrats are not doing anything to draw supporters to their side because they are driven to extreme outrage over almost everything. It lasts a couple of days until a new one replaces it. They don’t seem able to get a grip.

They also seem to continually justify this brand of invasive activism, which scares ordinary Americans and has since it burst onto the scene in 2020.

The Democrats and the Left have called parents worried about their children being indoctrinated into the Left’s new religion, “Domestic Terrorists.” They went along with gaslighting Americans all through the Summer of 2020 when so many small businesses were destroyed, many with no insurance to rebuild, many of them minority-owned. At the time, it was like so many stories on the Left, a taboo subject.

Michael Tracey was one of the few brave enough to wade into those waters.

The national media might have “moved on” from the riots in Minneapolis, but residents have nowhere to go. Much of the Twin Cities is still in ruins. Boarded-up storefronts still display makeshift notices that read “black owned” or “minority owned” to ward off further destruction. Many locals are reluctant to speak on the record, but some are eager to do so.

“It’s been agony,” says Mohamed Ali, a native of Somalia. “I respect the public anger, but I think we carried it too far, to burn our city.” At the height of the chaos, rioters set a large fire in front of his apartment, which sits atop several streetside shops. He spray-painted desperate appeals onto plywood affixed to the storefront windows: “Don’t burn please . . . Kids live upstairs.”

While the overturning of Roe v. Wade has spurred some into action, they still have their ongoing problem with the language of inclusivity and what issues they are prioritizing. How can they, for instance, fight for women’s rights when they aren’t fighting for women’s rights in sports?

I saw one sign that said “Abortion is a human right.” But it isn’t. It WAS a right to terminate a pregnancy granted to a woman at a time when women were forced to endanger their own lives to have an illegal abortion. This was done both for economic reasons, and, as with Gloria Steinem, so a woman’s entire life wasn’t derailed by an unwanted pregnancy.

It is not, nor has it ever been, a HUMAN RIGHT. Life is a human right. Terminating life is not. It is a controversial procedure that we will be debating for the next 100 years.

I don’t think abortion should be illegal in this or any other country. I grew up in the post-Roe 1980s and I know how casually my generation and subsequent generations used abortion as a form of birth control. I also know what it feels to regret having had an abortion and how you live with that sorrow your entire life. It is just never discussed much on the Left.

I think this is a good time to have a longer and deeper conversation about abortion since this isn’t 1972. We have advanced forms of birth control, like the IUD and patches. We have apps that track your menstrual cycle.

Abortions are down significantly since the era when I came of age. That should be another conversation we have. Pew research says:

Things are changing. The world is changing. The predictions for future populations are starting to become worrisome. That doesn’t mean women should be forced to have unwanted pregnancies, but it is something that should be widely discussed. Who knows where these stats might go.

Fertility rates are down across the board. The Census announced that in 2021, US percentage change in population was its lowest since its founding.

Male sperm count is declining. Generation-Z is having less sex, and many millennials have said they aren’t interested in having children at all. More women are choosing to have kids later, which means it’s more difficult to even get pregnant. Elon Musk has said there aren’t enough people and that civilization will collapse if people don’t start having more. Even if you are fine with that grim prediction, those who determine the future are going to be those who have the most babies. It’s simple math.

The best plan for the Left is to use the overturning of Roe to mobilize voters ahead of the midterms, with the idea that if they can flip two Senate seats and regain a majority, they can codify the right to abortion into law. It doesn’t seem that hard. But the Left in its current state, lurching from outrage to outrage, using increasingly invasive intimidation practices, not to mention the New Woke Order, and the crashing economy, still has their work cut out for them.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

"Are You Now or Have You Ever Been a Trump Supporter"

21 juni 2022 | 50 min

The January 6th riot was ugly and violent. It was one of the worst things to happen in this country after one of its most difficult years. Protests are the voices of the unheard. The MAGA supporters who gathered in DC that day were exercising their First Amendment right to protest at their Capitol. At the same time, agitators near the Capitol were whipped up into a frenzy, believing they had a patriotic duty to stop the election of Joe Biden.

The footage was proof at last of what the Democrats had been warning the country about - the “white supremacist” terrorist uprising had finally come to pass. It would also turn out to be the most important piece of political propaganda in over 50 years that would hand absolute power to those who sought to remove Trump the minute he was elected.

It was not, however, an attempted coup or an “insurrection.” For one thing, Trump was the sitting President on January 6th. If anything, they were trying to prevent the peaceful transfer of power. In their own minds, they were trying to stop a coup, not launch one. Whatever fantasies drove people like Ashli Babbit to become desperate enough that they would sacrifice their own lives is only used to further stoke the flames of hatred and division by our government.

That the media, the blue-checks on Twitter, and the political opposition have declared it an “insurrection” without due process is yet another sign that we no longer have a working media. But we already knew that.

Most Americans know something bad happened on January 6th. Many believe Trump was responsible. But everyone knows these hearings are for: to stop Trump’s movement from overtaking the GOP, getting into Congress, and perhaps recapturing the presidency in 2024.

The thing that scares them the most is that Trump might win. The Democrats have made such a mess of things and turned this country into a dystopian nightmare that Trump is the preferred option, even after the January 6th hearings began.

One of the reasons Donald Trump remains popular is that he’s not afraid to mock the powerful. He’s called the media the “enemy of the people.” He destroyed the presidential prospects of Bush’s golden child, Jeb! He wrecked Hillary Clinton’s chances of being the first female president and knocked down the carefully constructed utopia Obama built. Trump is Public Enemy Number One.

After months of extremely violent riots alongside the Black Lives Matter protests, where the politicians who won in 2020 addressed their complaints and completely re-ordered American society, the January 6th rioters probably thought they would be considered and treated the same way. Hundreds of prisoners have been dumped GITMO style into solitary confinement in the DC jail, many without charges brought against them, enduring all manner of torments to get them to name Trump as their instigator.

Where are the reporters writing about this? Where is the ACLU or civil rights attorneys fighting for their rights as American citizens? As with all things in the post-2020 world, they dare not say a word lest they too be accused of being racist apologists and domestic terrorist sympathizers. Also, they see them as they always have seen them - human garbage as best, terrorists at worst.

The January 6th Select Committee hearings are dressed up to look like Watergate - Authoritative, serious, definitive. But they are not a good faith effort to uncover the truth about that day. Rather, they are about naming Trump and his movement as anti-American, which justifies their ongoing marginalization of the non-compliant. That makes them much more like the McCarthy hearings at the point where the Senator had gone too far.

Since Trump shocked the country with a surprise win, the idea that a “racist” could win after Obama’s two terms was an existential threat that sent this country reeling. Mass hysteria bloomed in the wake of 2016, and after 2020, there were ongoing witch hunts to root out racists on Twitter, in higher education, in science labs, in fiction, in movies. It was bound to make its way into government, and now, because these committee hearings are making them not about the riot on January 6th but the presumed ideology behind the riot — “white rage” — we have another witch hunt on our hands that looks a lot like 1954.

Joseph McCarthy was not wrong about the Communist threat. All of these decades later, it’s clear there were spies in our government, and screenwriters were trying to inject that ideology into our culture. Eisenhower shut it down because McCarthy had become paranoid that anyone and everyone might be a communist, including military members. Ike recognized that it was making the post-WWII American weaker, not stronger. That is why he helped destroy McCarthy’s credibility and end what we now call McCarthyism.

It is hard to police the minds and hearts of Americans in a supposedly free society. Here we are, decades later, and that Communist threat is alive and well and has all but consumed the Democratic Party yet again. But you won’t see a witch hunt about that, at least not yet. Trump’s America First Party is a threat to the established order. The problem is that they sloppily apply “white supremacy” to that movement. That is why the January 6th hearings feel more like McCarthyism than they do Watergate.

Even before Trump won, his supporters had already been spit on, beaten, and dehumanized by the public, whether it was mocking their makeup or age, weight, hair, or education, chasing them out of the restaurants to physically assaulting them all because the media and the politicians had convicted them of being racists, which, in the wake of the Obama era is the absolute worst thing you could be. Here is an example from the run-up to the 2016 election:

It never seems to have occurred to the media or the most powerful “elites” that smearing a whole group of people as “racists” might not be healthy for American Democracy. In a culture that tightly policed thought and behavior even before it reached its climax in 2020, Trump’s freedom to say whatever he wanted and mock whomever he wanted represents a “clear and present” danger to the utopian Left.

It was never about what Trump did. It was always about what he said. Even January 6th isn’t so much about what they did. It’s much more about why they did it. All points lead back to Trump.

They believe January 6th was about race because they believe Trump’s MAGA movement is racist. They believe Trump’s rise directly resulted from the nation’s first Black president, just as they believed the Tea Party was racist. It was just something everyone believed because the media cherry-picked imagery and clips from various speeches and rallies meant to prove all of them were racists. At some point, it just wasn’t a question.

The only problem is that it isn’t true. The Trump movement has always been about class, not racism. It’s about the American people who were left behind after that giant sucking sound that evacuated jobs and nearly wrecked the middle class. The Left now cares only about the most privileged and the least privileged. They don’t seem to care much about the ones in the middle, the farmers, the truck drivers, the bartenders, and small business owners.

How do I know Trump’s America First movement is not about race? Because I made an effort to get to know that world. I went looking for the smoking gun because I did not like belonging to a group that was dehumanizing another.

I never found the version of Trump the Left believes exists. For instance, Steve Bannon and the MAGA movement have been deliberately and actively recruiting Black and Hispanic voters for at least six years. Bannon calls it “inclusive, nationalist populism.” It’s not about race. It’s about a global worldview vs. a nationalist one. Somehow the Democrats and the media seemed to have missed this part of the story because it doesn’t fit the narrative.

That’s not to say that there aren’t “White Supremacists” in this country. They are a real threat, as we’ve recently seen in Buffalo, NY. But what the government and media are trying to do, label Trump and his movement as “white supremacists” without proof, is reminiscent of the McCarthy era.

What Really Happened on January 6th?

The Select Committee looks more like a show trial than a good faith effort to uncover the truth. During Stalin's and Mao’s Communist regimes, they counted on show trials to scare citizens into silence and compliance. Here, we have major media outlets and government officials repeating the false notion that it was an “insurrection” driven by “white rage.” If this were a serious committee in search of the truth of what happened on January 6th, the following questions would be addressed:

One:

How many people knew there was a threat to the Capitol before January 6th, and when did they know it? Polls show even those who believe Trump was responsible want to know the answer to this question. Granted, bringing this up to anyone on the Left means you’ll get two responses — the first, you are a conspiracy theorist, and the second is to rationalize it somehow. General Milley was worried about the protest; the FBI had to know. The Mayor of DC knew. How could the most powerful country in the world with the most powerful military in the world have put the Capitol police in such a vulnerable spot that day?

Two:

What, if any, was the FBI’s involvement? I know, I know. Rachel Maddow would not approve of anyone daring to ask this question, but there hasn’t been an adequate explanation so far. Why was Stewart Rhodes only charged a year later when he was the ringleader of the Oathkeeper’s plans to stop the certification of the vote? Why is Ray Epps still not charged even though he is on tape telling Trump supporters to go into the Capitol? Plenty of other people who never entered the Capitol have been arrested.

If the government’s overreach is so extreme, arresting anyone and everyone involved in the so-called “insurrection,” why not Epps?

From Julie Kelly’s book January 6 - How Democrats Used the Capitol Protest to Launch a War on Terror Against the Political Right:

“In the early 1990s, the FBI accelerated its focus on the white Christian Right after the events at Waco, Texas and Ruby Ridge; the FBI launched PATCON, short for Patriot Conspiracy, an alleged movement of Christian extremists. In one case, the FBI created a fictional rightwing militia group to use it as an organ to collect information about other suspected militia members. “The tactics of FBI agents infiltrating militias, as well as paid informants being coerced into spying on these groups, and, in some instances, even providing the means and encouragement to carry out violent plots before being arrested, have been criticized as constituting entrapment by using agent provocateurs—agents posing as criminals to justify the financial and social expenses of counter-terrorism,” a 2011 study published by Rutger’s University concluded.

Was this the case with January 6?

Kelly explains how Stewart Rhodes was widely accepted as Person One in the multi-defendant case and was, by all accounts, calling the shots.

She continues,

But nine months after the first arrests, he was still a free man.

“Given…Stewart Rhodes’s actions and words leading up to and on 1/6, and given that Rhodes is the leader of the major militia group associated with 1/6—why no indictment for Rhodes?” Beattie asked. Citing similarities to the [Gretchen] Whitmer case, Beattie continued, “If it turns out that an extraordinary percentage of the members of these groups involved in planning and executing the Capitol Siege were federal informants or undercover operatives, the implications would be nothing short of staggering. This would be far worse than the already bad situation of the government knowing about the possibility of violence and doing nothing. Instead, this would imply that elements of the federal government were active instigators in the most egregious and spectacular aspects of 1/6, amounting to a monumental entrapment scheme used as a pretext to imprison otherwise harmless protestors at the Capitol—and in a much larger sense used to “frame the entire MAGA movement as potential domestic terrorists.”

All those arrested in connection with Rhodes have been charged with various crimes. You can read those names here. You can look up their charges here.

Here are the only 11 charged with “seditious conspiracy” in a graphic I pieced together from the government’s site:

Of these 11, two have pleaded guilty to “seditious conspiracy,” Joshua James and Brian Ulrich.

Julie Kelly continues her convincing case against Rhodes:

“Rhodes then gave an interview, which seemed more like damage control, to the New York Times that revealed he had been interviewed by the FBI in May. “Against the advice of a lawyer, Mr. Rhodes spoke freely with the agents about the Capitol assault for nearly three hours,” reporter Alan Feuer wrote in a July 9 article. Rhodes told Feuer that his underlings had “gone off mission” and that he was “frustrated” so many entered the building. “Prosecutors overseeing the investigation of Mr. Rhodes have long admitted that they have struggled to make a case against him. His activities seemed to stay within the boundaries of the First Amendment, one official with knowledge of the matter said.”

But Rhodes’ posts and texts before January 6 were highly inflammatory, and contradicted his portrayal in the Times. Further, the argument that his online activity and his conduct that day—he did not enter the building, but neither did dozens of other protesters nonetheless charged for various crimes—were protected by the First Amendment also contradicted the government’s stance that the events of January 6 rose to the crime of insurrection, not a legitimate political protest. That certainly wasn’t the case for Thomas Caldwell, one of the first Oath Keepers arrested and indicted, who also did not enter the building.

Beattie followed up his initial reports with an updated piece in October that summarized the Justice Department’s nine-month prosecution of the Oath Keepers. Rhodes, Beattie explained, established the conspiracy, recruited the people involved, gave instructions including the use of illegal weapons, and activated the conspiracy, including the entrance into the building in a stack formation, that afternoon. Still, Rhodes remained uncharged.”

It took them nine months to finally arrest Rhodes, and to come up with the “seditious conspiracy” charge to lend some heft to their unprecedented treatment of political prisoners who were American citizens protesting against the establishment.

The only answer from the media on any of this is to ridicule anyone who would dare ask. It’s all a “right-wing conspiracy theory” to them. Ironically, they did the same thing to Woodward and Bernstein when they were investigating Watergate, as the opening of the film All The President’s Men illustrates:

The New York Times, along with all media outlets on the Left, are working overtime to disprove any FBI involvement and did clear up at least one part of the Ray Epps story, that he whispered into the ear of someone just before he breached the Capitol. According to this story, that is false. But FBI informants are under no obligation to reveal their identities. Epps remains uncharged even though he can be seen on video telling Trump supporters that they must GO into the Capitol.

Of course, because no one trusts the media anymore — and why would they — it’s hard to know what is true and what isn’t, but the point is, something looks fishy about Epps and Rhodes regarding January 6th. If we can’t trust media, and we can’t trust the FBI we need journalists whose jobs are to hold the powerful to account.

Three:

What happened to Ashli Babbitt?

Writing for the Spectator, Peter Van Buren asks, When will the Committee start showing the video of her being shot by Capitol Police? Babbitt, wearing a Trump flag like a cape, was one of the rioters who smashed the glass on the door leading to the Speaker’s Lobby of the Capitol. A plain-clothes Capitol Police officer fired a shot and Babbitt fell into the crowd and died. It was the only shot fired in the riot. A SWAT team just behind Babbitt saw the situation differently and never fired on her or those with her. Babbitt was unarmed and was not resisting arrest because the cop never got that far. He just shot her.

He adds another question that needs addressing:

“Why, and on whose order, did Capitol police allow 300 people to simply walk into the building without resistance on the afternoon of January 6? And who was the man in a bicycle helmet whom video shows initiating the window-smashing that ended in the shooting of Ashli Babbitt? Why was he welcomed behind police lines once things got out of hand?”

Four:

There were supposedly pipe bombs placed in buildings in DC, where there were plenty of security cameras. Whatever happened to that investigation? Julie Kelly on Twitter also asks the following question:

An Insurrection or a Violent Riot?

When Communist revolutionaries shot up the Capitol in 1954 they were charged with “seditious conspiracy” for fighting for Puerto Rico’s independence. The sentencing read, “this case makes it clear that these people and their followers have nothing but contempt for our laws, our courts, and our public officials.”

Eisenhower strengthened the “seditious conspiracy” laws after he had quietly and behind the scenes put an end to McCarthyism. He wrote while signing the law:

The American people are determined to protect themselves and their institutions against any organization in their midst which, purporting to be a political party within the normally accepted meaning, is actually a conspiracy dedicated to the violent overthrow of our entire form of government.

One could easily make the argument that the uprisings over the Summer were also political movements that sought to violently overthrow the US government. Or that the #resistance was a four-year-long coup to remove Trump that ended with the 2020 election. No one actually sees it that way because this moment in history is being written solely by one side.

But if we had an objective, honest press, they would see that violent protests against our government by the Left are never seen as seditious or treasonous. Rather, they’re applauded and admired, or they are simply ignored. Most of the political violence in this country’s recent history has come from the Left, not the Right.

You can’t tell me if it had been Democratic activists who had breached the Capitol, they would have been treated the same way.

Julie Kelly writes of the Kavanaugh hearing:

“The siege of government buildings escalated. Republican senators were angrily confronted in elevators and outside government buildings. Some received death threats. The outrage was heavily fueled by Democratic leaders including Senator Elizabeth Warren. “Hello resistance!” Warren shouted to a raucous crowd assembled outside on October 4. “I am angry on behalf of women who have been told to sit down and shut up one time too many. This is about hijacking our democracy.”

Thousands heeded Warren’s call for action. “We were planning to shut down the Capitol Building but the authorities were so scared of this #WomensWave that they shut it down for us,” the official account of the Women’s March tweeted that day. “1000+ women, survivors, and allies have gathered in the Hart Senate Building. Every hallway. Every floor.”

When Pence announced on the afternoon of October 6, 2018 that Kavanaugh’s nomination was confirmed, women shouted from the Senate gallery and were removed.

The nation was roiled by the Kavanaugh fiasco for more than a month yet activists opposed to his nomination were considered heroes, not villains, by the national news media.

The violence at the Capitol was unusual for Trump supporters because if there was one point of superiority they had over the Left, they were the non-violent side. They weren’t boarding up windows on Election Night because they thought Biden would win. They did it because they knew if Trump had won, cities would burn.

Now, because of January 6th, they’ve completely flipped the script. The formerly non-violent Trump supporters are the violent protesters, not the Left. The formerly cop-hating Democrats are now the side that suddenly cares about the Capitol Police.

Footage of the Capitol breach has been played over and over and over again, nonstop. By contrast, the media barely covered the riots over the Summer.

The fact is that the Left can be as violent as they want, as insistent and demanding of their rights as they want, to fight for the country they want - be as intrusive of public spaces as they want, all because they are protected by the media and blue-check Twitter who are ideologically aligned with them.

Trump supporters aren’t even considered human beings, let alone American citizens with those same rights. The 2020 election was unprecedented in the alliance of Big Tech, Big Media, and Big Money. It was the most expensive election in history. When you’re talking about that much power and money, what else do you have except your right to protest?

Whose Big Lie is It Exactly?

You can't talk about January 6 without talking about 2020. You can't talk about 2020 without talking about 2016. I plan on writing a different piece about these two elections, but for now, it’s important to remember what 2020 was - a reaction to 2016.

In the 2016 election, the Trump team had a very specific strategy to keep people home in specific swing states and win a slim Electoral College victory by a few hundred thousand votes. They used Facebook almost exclusively to target three groups to keep them home on Election Day: Black males, using Clinton’s “superpredator” comments, young feminists, Bill Clinton’s sexual misconduct allegations, and Bernie Sanders supporters who believe the establishment had rigged the primary against Bernie.

Facebook allowed Trump’s team to microtarget these specific groups in the key swing states. Hillary Clinton’s team was offered the same help but they’d turned it down. She was going for a landslide victory, focusing on winning states like Georgia. Trump’s strategy worked.

Zuckerberg was largely blamed for putting Trump in power, as was the media. Both major players would make up for that in 2020, with $400 million from Zuckerberg to fortify elections for both sides, supposedly. It really only helped the Democrats because they were the side with an enthusiam gap. Trump’s side never had an enthusiasm gap and still doesn’t.

Trump made a strategic error in convincing his supporters to distrust voting machines and save their votes for Election Day. No matter how many of them showed up, there was no way they could close the gap with the massive landslide of ballots Democrats already had collected.

2020 made clear that the media was using its power to swing an election. All of this was bragged about in TIME magazine. They patted themselves on the back for using all their money and resources to remove one person from power and install another. The TIME magazine headline uses the word ‘bi-partisan’ the same way the January 6th committee does: to send the not-so-subtle message that Trump supporters are not welcome in American democracy.

Here is Ben Shapiro saying as much:

It never made sense to me that Trump would have planned a violent riot when he believed Mike Pence, Josh Hawley, and Ted Cruz were going to convince Congress to stop the count and sift through the voting regulations that had been suddenly changed due to COVID and whether or not the ballots were legal. All the violent riot did was wreck his case and hand absolute power to his enemies.

To understand how you get to a rally on January 6th, let alone a riot, it’s necessary to understand how the frustration built up over the past six years.

Trump was not treated like the President of the United States not for one minute, not for a day in his four years in power. He was always treated like an imposter, a cockroach to be exterminated from the establishment so his human garbage supporters could disappear back to the hinterlands.

A podcaster named Darryl Cooper wrote a now-infamous tweet thread that lays it out. But it was when Tucker Carlson read the whole thing on Fox News, millions of people heard it. Our media and government would be smart to pay attention to this:

Why Should You Care?

Why do I care?

Why would I threaten to blow up any social cred I have left caring about Trump supporters or January 6th prisoners? It’s partly because no one else cares about them except a small handful of people like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz. Julie Kelly fights for their rights daily.

But more to the point, what I have in common with Carlson, Shapiro, and Bannon is simply this: I am sensitive to abuse of power against those with less power. It probably comes from having been bullied as a child. I will always stand up for those I feel are getting picked on, even at the expense of my own social network and status as a former blue-check Democrat on Twitter.

2020 was hard on all Americans. From lockdowns, to mask wars, to COVID, to isolation - suicides rose sharply, as did gun deaths. Mass shooters were radicalized almost overnight. Somehow people could understand how so many could spill out onto the streets for the largest protest in American history after being pent up for months but they could not extend that same understanding to the other side when they lost their minds on January 6th.

Probably the most insidious of all is the idea that people who call themselves Patriots, whose movement is called AMERICA FIRST, would be labeled “domestic terrorists,” “insurrectionists,” and traitors. The media narrative that they live in fear of “replacement theory” and are driven by “white rage” is false.

For many Trump supporters, in a country that has all but abandoned them, all they have is their patriotic love of country. Now the one thing they have left is being taken from them all in the name of politics, all because the Democrats and Never Trumpers have candidates who can’t beat Trump.

We get nowhere by dehumanizing each other. We need leadership to bring this country together under one roof before we go too far to turn back around.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

The Depp Verdict Shows How Out of the Touch Media Elite Have Become

5 juni 2022 | 55 min

PROFANITY WARNING — cursing all through some of the videos.

When Johnny Depp won his defamation case against Amber Heard it marked the first time a #metoo casualty had fought back and won. Unless you watched the trial, all of the trial, you would not know just how badly Amber Heard fared on the stand, how weak her case was, the many contradictions in her story and that here we have a true defamation case that could be proven with evidence.

What was telling, however, was the reaction by the media elite. From the New York Times to Slate to the New Yorker to Rolling Stone, to The Guardian it was one condemnation after another by people whose primary news source is their own feedback loop. They have proved beyond any doubt just how much the #metoo movement was driven not by activists, not even by victims, but by them.

There was only one social media platform that showed the groundswell of public support for Johnny Depp and that was TikTok. Anyone who uses the app saw the surge of support for Depp as he became a meme then a trend and at some point a full blown movement around a single hashtag - #justiceforjohnnydepp.

80% of Depp’s most ardent supporters were women, united across political, economic, cultural and racial lines in support of Depp’s innocence. Many of them were victims of Domestic Violence themselves who could easily recognize a woman who was grossly exaggerating, lying and portraying herself as someone that contradicts her own recordings of her relationship with Depp.

Meanwhile, the high-minded columnists flopped around like fish, with no clue as to why so many in the general public supported Depp. Now women will never come forward, they collectively squawked. Now, no woman will ever be believed again, they howled. The #metoo movement is over, they bemoaned. It isn’t so much that women will never be believed again as it is about the activist media on the left losing all credibility with the general public, if they had any left to begin with.

The #metoo movement, like almost everything else, was a media narrative created by and driven by the same columnists who are now clinging to that power. It first began in the wake of the Access Hollywood tape that caught Trump talking about everything he could do to women as a famous person. Even before Trump won, the New York Times collected a series of women’s stories. Mine was among them.

Because the Access Hollywood tape was an October surprise, it wasn’t exactly shocking that the New York Times would have put out this piece in October. The two areas that would bloom into full-blown mass hysteria events in this country during the Trump presidency circled around sexual assault/harassment/abuse, and racism. These were the two main fears about Trump. Even if they started out as much-needed reckonings, they evolved over time into witch hunts, fear, and paranoia that continues to this day.

But the pendulum is beginning to swing because it always does. Mass hysteria is inevitably punctured when a case comes along that is so preposterous it brings the whole thing down. In Salem it was the Governor’s wife being accused of witchcraft. During the McCarthy era, it was the “Have you no decency” moment. In Salem, they tried to cover up their embarrassing year where 20 people lost their lives amid a mass hysteria event that might have had the hashtag #believechildren. If not for a Quaker named Thomas Maul no one would even know about it.

Due process isn’t perfect but it’s still the best we have. When Al Franken was pushed out of Congress by the likes of Chuck Schumer, Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren he begged for due process and did not get it. For me and many others, that was a major red-pill moment. I could no longer belong to a political party that would go along with something like that.

Due process doesn’t always work, of course, particularly during times of mass hysteria where there is public pressure on juries to reach specific verdicts. For decades Black men were falsely accused of rape. It took the Civil Rights movement to shake people out of it. It has taken decades to undo the damage, and much of it remains undone.

Due process meant that all white, all-male juries often decided cases based on the pitchfork mobs assembled outside. They were too afraid, or too racist themselves, to return a proper verdict. It was a time that could have had the hashtag #believeallwhitewomen. That is the subject of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird:

Johnny Depp is no Black man during the Jim Crow era. To even suggest that would be immoral. But there is a similarity in how Mayella and Amber Heard testified. Both were melodramatic in a way that conflicted with who they were and how they behaved in real life. Heard has actual taped conversations of herself that never once talk about any rape with a bottle, any broken glass, any of the wild accusations she has hurled at Depp.

How it Started

Way back in 2016, Depp’s friend Doug Stanhope wrote an op-ed for The Wrap essentially laying out the truth.

For that, Heard sued him for defamation. She later dropped the suit when she and Depp reached a mutual settlement. She would receive $7 million and they would go their separate ways.

The Johnny Depp fandom so viciously attacked Heard that she announced she would donate the money to charity, that she didn’t want any of it. Among the truths uncovered at trial she never paid any of the money. Elon Musk, of all people, besotted with a woman once named the world’s most beautiful, forked out hundreds of thousands of dollars to her named charities, one of them being the ACLU.

She dumped him anyway, and even after filing a restraining order against Depp, Heard wanted him back. She found him in a hotel room and begged him to hug her. He would not touch her.

Depp has said in their many recordings that when it got “too violent” he had to split.

Heard downplays the violence in conversation after conversation. Her main complaint about Depp is that he always leaves, or “splits.”

He tried to leave any time they would argue, even at the very beginning because, he always maintains, they “got physical.” Amber admits to being the one who starts the violence. If Depp abused her at all it was in these moments where she wanted to physically fight with him.

Had she limited her claims to these specific incidences she would have been able to say she was a victim of Domestic Violence. He could have said the same thing. That isn’t what she did. For all of her obvious intelligence, she didn’t realize if she stuck to the truth she would have won.

When the Sun newspaper called Johnny Depp a “wife-beater” he sued for defamation. And lost. That was the first time the outlandish tales of monstrous abuse by Depp poured forth from the fanciful imagination of the brilliant Amber Heard.

Here is how she put it in Australia, presumably leaving off the bottle rape as “anexxed statement,” probably because the defamation case in the UK was only about “wife-beater” and not “sexual violence”:

But this is how she told it on the stand in Virginia, feeling the need for whatever reason, to give an actual dramatic performance. The problem was, as one viewer put it on TikTok, “she was an actress giving the performance of her life playing a character she didn’t understand.”

The transcription of this version as follows:

Don't see him anymore. It was even more. It wasn't him. It was black. My life he was but it was black. I couldn't see him. And he was looking at me and I was trying to get through to him. I was trying to say to him in some way that it was me I was trying to get through to Johnny and I couldn't see it my head was bashing against the back of the bar and I couldn't breathe and I remember trying to get up on it was slipping on the glass, my feet were slipping my arms were slipping on the countertop I remember just trying to get up so I could breathe, so I could tell him that he was really hurting me. I didn't think he knew what he was doing….I couldn't breathe. I couldn't get through to him. I couldn't I couldn't get up, but I couldn't get up, and I don't know how that ended I don't know. I don't know how…I don't know what happened next remember it was bent over backwards on the bar meaning my chest was up I was staring at the blue lights. My chest, my back was on the counter and I thought he was punching me…I felt this pressure…I felt this pressure his arm, I could feel his arm moving, it looked like he was punching me you could just feel this pressure …hitting didn't feel pain, which is a pressure on my pubic bone.”

After her monologue about the bottle, her lawyer asks her, “Did you bleed from the vagina as well?”She says, “I did.”Her lawyer says: “Did you experience any pain after that?”She says: “I wasn’t thinking about that.”

In her new version there are variations in Depp’s behavior. To cover for the inconsistencies she repeatedly says is “I can’t be sure about the sequence.”

But let’s just give her the benefit of the doubt that the two stories aren’t wildly different. Let’s say, okay fine. We accept that this happened, that you were beaten that badly, bled that badly, were violated with a bottle and bled afterwards, that you got no medical attention even when a doctor came to the house to check on Depp’s finger and bring him to the ER, that you took no pictures of your own injuries, which would be substantial if all of that were true - if you were flung across the floor, hit repeatedly, choked, nearly killed — let’s say it was all true.

Now listen to this conversation between the two of them all the way through to the end. You tell me if this would be how you would talk about what happened in Australia if you’d just lived through what she says she lived through:

Listen to what she says happened to them after Australia. Her main complaint is that he won’t allow her to fight with him anymore. She says that things were good, better when they were allowed to fight and he wasn’t always escaping to different rooms. Is that how any person would talk after supposedly going through what she went through?

Heard damned herself, mostly with her own recordings where she berated, mocked, and goaded Depp. He was a “baby” and a “pussy” and not man enough to stand up to her during fights. Here she admits to hitting him finally after he holds her to it.

This isn’t the only tape of Heard gaslighting, berating and essentially telling Depp that if he doesn’t stay in a fight, even when it gets physical, he’s a “baby.”

Here is more of that:

The Amber Heard that appeared on the stand was a character not found in evidence anywhere else. When she told her therapist she was three different people, that is exactly what we saw. We saw the domestic violence victim on the stand, but we heard a much different Amber on the tapes. We saw a much different Amber in the UK defamation case. Here, she can be seen dismissing his complaints of violence. Just imagine if Depp had been the one saying this about her (start at minute 8:14):

The cross-examination by Camille Vasquez was the first time anyone had ever really held Heard accountable for her growing and exaggerated accusations against Depp. That was bad enough. Though the case still seemed like it could go either way.

It was when Heard took the stand a second time and opened herself up to yet another cross that the house of cards came tumbling down. Was that her idea? Did her lawyers advise against it? Vasquez pinned her down and illustrated to the millions watching the trial that Heard’s many lies meant it was not possible to believe anything she said.

Worse for Heard several last-minute witnesses came forward to contradict her testimony. A reporter from TMZ testified that the leak for the Temporary Restraining Order came from Heard’s camp, along with the video of Depp hitting cabinets. She vehemently denied this. A manager from the Hicksville Trailer Park testified that the trailer Depp had stayed in wasn’t trashed, and in fact, it was Heard he’d seen yelling at Depp, not the other way around. Heard never expected him to show up.

Vasquez got Heard to say on the stand that all of them were liars, all of them were trying to be part of the Johnny Depp show. Either they believed her or they believed a multitude of witnesses that contradicted her.

By the end of it, the Depp team was able to close with a powerful argument that either you believed all of it or you couldn’t believe any of it. If any witness is caught lying even once during a trial it calls their entire testimony into question. Heard was caught lying multiple times about things she didn’t really have to lie about, like the pledged donations to charity.

In his closing arguments for Depp, Benjamin Chew can be seen choking up as he asks the jury to give Depp his life and his name back. Just this one clip has 3.5 million views.

22 million watched the closing arguments alone. Another 24 million watched and waited for the verdict. It’s safe to say that it was a cultural phenomenon unlike any other in recent memory, especially since content put out by Hollywood has become so safe lately. Is it any wonder people watched? The trial had everything. A beautiful femme fatale, a once-beloved icon fighting to clear his name. An array of colorful witnesses. Big names casually dropped like Hunter S. Thompson and Keith Richards. Then there was the money. Private islands, penthouses, private jets. There was sex - their first kiss that ignited their love story.

TikTok Revealed What the Media Never Understood

They had chosen Virginia in order to have the trial televised. The trial captivated the country for several weeks. It started small, with a few hundred thousand watching on Youtube. The first weekend after the trial began Depp became a meme on TikTok. The “megapint.” In fact, someone wrote a whole song about it:

The Depp case was on its way to consuming TikTok, with Depp as the obvious hero and Heard as the obvious villain. Heard became a meme too:

TikTok was having too much fun at Amber’s expense. For those who don’t use the app they can’t understand how something like this could happen - how could so many people be so mean to Amber Heard? It must be sexism! It’s rampant misogyny! The way it works on Tiktok, though, is that you “jump on a trend.” If everyone is doing something funny everyone else does it too. It isn’t something that anyone can force. It just happens. The Depp/Heard trial just happened on Tiktok and became an unstoppable force.

Even Depp’s lawyer got her own song:

A whole country, and mostly women, became emotionally connected to this story because they felt protective of Johnny Depp. They listened to his testimony. They believed his story. They heard the abusive screeching and taunting by Heard on recording after recording.

You’d think, given that, the media would vindicate Depp, with headlines ringing out, “Justice for Johnny Depp!” You’d think the media would reflect what so many people who watched the trial felt in the wake of the verdict. If you thought that, you’d be wrong. The media wasn’t going to give it to Depp. They weren’t going to vindicate him. He’d been found guilty by the #metoo tribal leaders and they would decide his fate, not the courts. Not the public. Certainly not TikTok.

This allows all of the devoted activists online to still shame and punish any executives who might think about hiring Depp. They will shame any critics who praise any movies Depp might make. It also means that they will revive Heard’s career, position her as the martyr for the cause. They will praise executives who hire her.

There will be documentaries, there will be more and more agonizing op-eds that shame and scold the public for seeing THE truth rather than their truth. Heard, not Depp, will get the career boost and the standing ovations. She will get the redemption that Johnny Depp deserves.

In this ever-increasing divide between the media elite and the general public, Depp has won the hearts and minds of the invisible majority. If any producers takes a chance on Depp they will be richly rewarded by the ticket buyers.

Some journalists have covered this story honestly, though they are independent or on the Right.

Megyn Kelly does not mince words:

And on Sharyl Attkisson’s podcast. She says:

I think the Depp case is not only a turning point in a narrative that was weaponized and taken too far, it's also a backlash against a steady diet of narratives, one sided news reporting, propaganda being forced down our throats on a minute by minute basis. A majority of the American public should not dictate over the minority. That's what America is all about —not doing that. But neither should a fringe minority dictate over the majority. And we've been under the tyranny of a vocal minority that too often proves guilty of the very behavior they claim to abhor — bullying, disinformation. Well, the Depp jury weighed the evidence and rejected what they what we were all told we had to believe. So the Depp victory is not only a landmark case and the legal realm of defamation. More importantly, it can be seen as a turning point in well funded and controlled efforts to manipulate public opinion and silence those who are often narrative. In that way, we should all be interested in the Johnny Depp verdict.

What Happened to Amber Heard?

How could such a bright, beautiful young woman with so much promise have gone so totally wrong that she found herself lying on the witness stand the way she did? I personally think that she saw herself as the smartest person in the room who could manipulate anyone and talk her way out of anything. That makes her a femme fatale of the noir kind. She got herself in too deep and convinced herself she was the saintly, abused victim of not just Johnny Depp but all men.

Although seeing how the media has covered the verdict, how Hollywood will likely continue to hold Depp accountable for things he never did, maybe Heard really was the smartest one in the room. Maybe she realized all she had to do was stick to her story and those who want to stay in control of the media narrative will side with her regardless.

The #metoo movement is not over because the jury proved Depp’s defamation claims against Heard. If it was always a narrative driven by the media and the media’s credibility is now called into question then it was indeed a house of cards. The New York Times, the New Yorker, Slate, Rolling Stone and The Washington Post need better writers because in the wake of the Depp verdict they have never looked more out of touch.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

The Richest Non-compliant Man in the World

22 april 2022 | 22 min

[Update: Since writing this, Elon Musk has actually bought Twitter!]

The American dream says that the best and the brightest can rise as fast and as far as their talent and perseverance will allow. The Democrats say - that isn’t true; only white men have that advantage because this is a sexist, racist country built on and supported by patriarchal white supremacy. Regardless of that disconnect, Elon Musk made his fortune the American way and is now the richest man in the world.

Musk’s “great man” image is undercut somewhat, I think, by his willingness to use chimps to develop Neuralink. But with Tesla and SpaceX, he has built a fortune any person on the Left should be proud of. Now, they see him as the enemy. Musk has committed the mortal sin of being ideologically non-compliant. That translates into “he says whatever he wants to say.”

Twitter was, at first, the great status leveler. Anyone could grow a following. But with the invention of the “blue checks” and Twitter’s strange way of deciding who should get one, they ended up forcing a hierarchy that was just one of the things that ruined Twitter.

For Musk, though, it all started with the Babylon Bee. He was a fan of the Conservative-leaning humor site already since he’d no doubt noticed, as anyone would notice, that the Left’s strident policing of thought had led to a stifling of humor. The Babylon Bee had no rules. They mocked anyone for any reason, not shying away from taboo or off-limit targets. The list of what is verboten on the left or even blasphemous grows longer by the day. Musk noticed the Bee was not afraid to go there and for that, they earned his admiration. When they made a joke about Rachel Levine, however, that got them suspended from Twitter until they deleted that tweet. But they refused.

I personally didn’t think the joke was funny. I felt bad for Rachel Levine. It must be a difficult position to be in. But I also don’t think Twitter should be in the business of declaring a joke “hate speech” or “hateful conduct.” That comes a little too close to the kind of retribution for parody and humor fundamentalist religions have. You know, like death threats for a joke.

Musk had already been swarmed for his views on transgender ideology, specifically the use of pronouns. Already he realized that declaring your pronouns was being demanded of him and everyone else. There was simply no way to not comply without being punished. But clearly, he is not someone who feels it necessary to follow those kinds of rules. He’s a Gen-Xer, like me, and we came of age questioning authority. It isn’t that I won’t use pronouns anyone asks me to but I don’t feel like I need to declare my own just to protect myself from the thought police. Now, activists routinely refer to Musk as “transphobic.”

Even before trying to buy Twitter, Musk interviewed with the Babylon Bee and talked about the rise of censorship and the “woke mind virus”:

Musk: I think the onion has done some extremely funny stuff over time. It just seems to be in recent years and when infected by the “woke mind virus,” so that just makes everything less funny. It's worldwide viruses, a world without humor.

BB: Why do you think wokeness is so destructive?

Musk: It is a prevalent mind virus and arguably one of the biggest threats to human civilization, I mean, generally, I think we should be aiming for like a positive society and that it should be okay to be humorous. Wokeness basically wants to make comedy illegal. Which is not cool at all. Wokeness is divisive, exclusionary and hateful, it basically gives mean people a shield to be to be mean and cruel armored in false virtue.

BB: The left is almost this religion now, where they're so serious and they believe what they believe with such intensity that for us to make fun of them, you know, for them it's like you're making fun of God or salvation. They're almost the new religious right in our view.

If you’re putting it all together you’ll see two colliding ideologies using Twitter as their battleground. Musk buying Twitter would be a big win not just for free speech advocates, but for free-thinking advocates.

Musk presents the biggest and most powerful oppositional force next to Trump that is rising up to challenge the vice grip on Twitter and, thus, all American culture. His tweets make news. If Saturday Night Live makes a dumb joke about him he can clap back with a Tweet that people pay attention to. When you have Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton urging Big Tech to become more censorious they aren’t trying to counter “misinformation,” they are really trying to silence voices like Musk’s that have “gone rogue” and do not parrot the party line. We can see the two Americas dividing, speciating, becoming two separate countries between the moneyed class and the working class, just as Orwell foretold in 1984.

If you think it’s going to stop you have another think coming.

So why would there be such a strong objection to Elon Musk buying Twitter not just by the shareholders of Twitter, not just by the blue-checks and their mainstream media family, but likely reaching up to the highest levels of power?

He’s right. It comes down to the need to control the narrative.

What is the narrative? Whatever they decide it is, whatever the Biden administration says it is. Whatever Jen Psaki repeats that it is, and whatever the blue-check army mandates it is. Everything that contradicts it is called “misinformation” or “disinformation.”

I didn’t realize that there was such a concerted effort to control the narrative until I watched Twitter throw a fit when Tom Cotton posted an op-ed about the protests over the summer of 2020. He was responding not just to a poll that said most Americans supported military intervention, but he was also representing half of the country’s views, the half that voted for Trump.

To Twitter, though, this meant a loss in an election year, and that meant editors and writers would have to be fired; the op-ed gave an exhausting, pathetic intro to “apologize” for publishing it. Eventually, the whole bizarre incident would lead to Bari Weiss’ infamous resignation letter and the rise of alternative platforms and voices for those desperate to escape the controlled narrative.

When Weiss left the Times, she made sure to mention how oppressive Twitter had become in shaping the news and policing its journalists:

Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor. As the ethics and mores of that platform have become those of the paper, the paper itself has increasingly become a kind of performance space. Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions. I was always taught that journalists were charged with writing the first rough draft of history. Now, history itself is one more ephemeral thing molded to fit the needs of a predetermined narrative.

Whether it’s Google or Wikipedia, the New York Times or the American Medical Association, the CDC, PBS, NPR or NBC News - they are all part of the same organism that lives in fear of and relies upon Twitter. For its part, the Times has finally decided to urge its reporters to stay off of the platform.

How it Started

Twitter wasn’t always an authoritarian force in American life. In the beginning, it was a fun platform that operated like one big chat room. Obama used it to grow his coalition starting in 2008 as an early adopter and influencer. He was credited with being a leader with his finger on the pulse of the fast-moving modern age.

Trump followed suit, gaining 88 million followers before Twitter permanently banned him from the platform. The Right would say Trump used it to counter the media narrative that lied to the people about him and Conservatives overall. The left would say he used it to spread “disinformation” and to incite violence in the wake of January 6th. The truth is that Trump’s presence on Twitter was a big enough counter to the ecosystem to make a difference. Now Musk has arisen as the next apex predator the site will want to remove. Eventually.

For Musk, it is less about money or power than deciding who gets control over the narrative. And thus, who gets to control what is true.

Like most corporations in America, Twitter didn’t become fully authoritarian until 2020. When the “Cabal” was formed to remove Trump, who was a one-term president with a strong economy, thus nearly impossible to bring down, they amassed an unusual amount of power to create a foolproof action plan that would ensure Trump lost way before Election Day. Nothing would be left up to chance. This would involve not just changing laws, hiring operatives to collect ballots but it would also involve manipulating the news narrative to be the story they wanted, NEEDED, to be true.

That is why Americans felt like they were being gaslit all throughout 2020 - because they were. The Democrats did not mention the police once during their convention because the police, we were told, were all racists killing Black people every day. The protests weren’t angry or violent. No one was dying. Nothing bad was happening. They were all peaceful. Finally, the riot on January 6th was treated like something on the level of Pearl Harbor or 9/11. Americans, having lived through the Summer of 2020, could see the blatant hypocrisy in a government that encouraged one kind of violence but discouraged another.

After Biden took power, January 6th created another convenient crisis for the “cabal.” Now they would work together to police all of what they considered inciting violence, domestic terrorism, or “misinformation.” Between that and the ongoing COVID pandemic, it was clear well into 2021, and especially now, the “cabal” was never giving up their power. Suddenly, in a country that once felt free, everyone is afraid of saying the wrong thing, offending someone, making a mistake that will get them called out or fired or worse.

With Twitter, they have a powerful weapon to silence dissent, boss around journalists to keep them in line and make or break someone who might need Twitter as a platform to attract readers or make a living. But really, this Twitter fight is about holding onto the power to control the media narrative.

Silencing dissent is not just bad for this country or for young people who count on adults to protect them, it’s also bad for the Democrats. They just have no clue how unpopular they have become because they are forcing compliance across the board.

Regardless of how you feel about the issue of transgender rights, there is no doubt that the demands for compliance on the Left are becoming more militant in their efforts to silence dissent. Just questioning it can get you banned off of Twitter if enough people report it.

Batya Ungar-Sargon takes on the issue of the Twitter account Libs of TikTok which was recently doxxed in the Washington Post (owned by the second richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos) as a class divide, which it is. She writes:

Putting aside the shoddy ethics of doxxing a private citizen for curating already public content, the Washington Post story rather disingenuously whitewashed the actual content of the videos that @libsoftiktok posts. For example, instead of stating what was in a video featuring a woman explaining how she teaches toddlers to touch their private parts, the article only notes that @libsoftiktok called the woman in it a “predator” and that the video went on to be featured on Fox News.

There’s a tell in that obfuscation: The Washington Post probably doesn’t want to defend the “sexy summer camp” counselor teaching toddlers to masturbate, a view that few trans people would defend, so instead it resorts to calling anyone who opposes such education anti-gay. The article characterizes @libsoftiktok as “a steady stream of TikTok videos and social media posts, primarily from LGBTQ+ people, often including incendiary framing designed to generate outrage.” Instead of telling you what’s in the videos, it tells you what @libsoftiktok says about them.

And continues:

A tiny elite that benefits politically and economically from portraying its opponents as bigots is using every tool at its disposal – social media, liberal legacy media, and executive action – to obfuscate the vast distance between their views and the vast majority of middle- and working-class Americans with normal views. Like the view that strangers shouldn’t teach toddlers how to masturbate.

“Environmental Social Governance”

Corporate authority in this country has now found a way to bypass the Constitution regarding access and use of their platforms. The divide between elite and working-class America is evident every time I turn on the television and compare the kinds of ads they show on the barely watched SAG awards versus the ads they show on the much more popular Fox News. But corporations care more about their image than anything in 2022, especially those who see themselves as among the “chosen” people, the utopians, the Barack Obamaians.

Twitter and other corporations are following various mandates to satisfy what we used to call in the 1980s “quotas.” But they are also pushing a new dystopian corporate ideology called ESG.

ESG means that investors can pull funds or choose to advertise only with companies they believe are acceptable or compliant. For instance, the Babylon Bee’s joke is defined as “hate speech,” meaning that, theoretically, advertisers would not want to invest in or advertise with Twitter. And that gives Twitter the right and justification to suspend the account.

Since the Democrats and the mainstream media have control of Twitter, and thus, the narrative, they don’t really care that Big Tech has become an authoritarian force in American life. What they want is their utopia back, the one they believe Trump and his supporters destroyed. They don’t realize it is never coming back. Not the way it was.

For his part, Musk is smart enough and brave enough to stare down this massive alliance of power and authoritarianism. He knows that buying Twitter means there is a new Sheriff in town, a winner in our Capitalist system knocking out other Capitalists, or modern-day “Robber Barons” in our new Gilded Age.

Says David Sacks from the All In podcast:

If you were to zoom out 30,000-foot view, the big struggle of our time politically and culturally is populist versus elitist. Elon is one of the rare billionaires who is sort of anti-elitist, he pokes fun at their pieties all the time. This is why they call him a troll. He wants to restore free speech. Somehow the elites are now on the site of censorship. They believe that in order to protect democracy, they need more censorship. What they really mean is to protect their control over democracy. They need censorship. Why? Because they're greatly outnumbered, there are more populists than elitists. So the more democratic this country becomes the more they are going to lose power and be kicked out, that is why they are so fiercely resisting the restoration of Twitter as a free speech platform. It means the end of their power.

In the end, the forces that control this country, Wall Street and Big Tech, will never allow Elon Musk to buy Twitter. But in trying to purchase it, Musk is challenging that power like sunlight blasting into a moldy dark shed. Even if he’ll never get away with it I’m glad he’s trying.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

When Reality Slaps You in the Face

4 april 2022 | 30 min

Will Smith slapping Chris Rock on live television was probably the most truthful ten minutes anyone in Hollywood or watching at home had seen in five years. It was ugly. It was violent. It was disturbing. It was unforgettable. And it was the truth. A real thing happened that couldn’t be scripted.

There is a reason this uncensored clip of Will Smith slapping Chris Rock has over 90 million views when the Oscar telecast only had 16 million. It’s because it was the truth at a time when the “Left” did almost everything they could to obscure it.

The Academy was trying so hard to boost its ratings and satisfy the Wokerati who watched every move they made, every joke told, and every fashion choice. Ever since 2020, people in positions of power have been terrified of losing that power, and the best way to do that is to make Twitter mad with some kind of transgression or to violate an accepted social norm.

The Oscar ceremony was produced by a Black man, Will Packer. Two of the hosts were Black women, Regina Hall and Wanda Sykes. The Best Picture contenders were intersectional and inclusive - two films directed by women (The Power of the Dog and CODA), one film directed by a Black man (King Richard), and one from Japan by an Asian director (Drive My Car). The first film with a predominantly deaf cast took the lead and ultimately won Best Picture. Who could ask for anything more?

No writer in 2022 could conceive of anything this dramatic, and if they could, they would not be allowed to write it because it would be too offensive. Only white characters are allowed to be written as bad. Black characters, or any marginalized groups, must always be portrayed as perfect. Yet, there was an event millions witnessed with their own eyes. There was no way to gaslight us over it, no way to memory-hole it. It was, simply, the truth.

It seemed clear that Will Smith believed he was in the right when he marched on stage and hit Chris Rock. He believed he was still in the right when he sat down and shouted, “keep my wife’s name out of your f*cking mouth.” He thought the crowd would applaud him. They didn’t. They fell silent. I did what everyone else was doing - I looked around at the people next to me and said, “was that real?” A woman sitting behind me said, “I have children watching at home.”

No one really knew what to do after that. You could feel the tension in the room that was filled with well-meaning, mostly white liberals who were in shock at what just happened.

But thanks to Chris Rock pulling it together and announcing the next award, the show could go on.

His face said it all. He quickly regrouped, having had a lifetime of dealing with bullies and having to hide his pain lest he is bullied even more, and gave out the prize for Documentary Feature to Questlove’s The Summer of Soul, or When the Revolution Could not be Televised.”

Like everyone else there, I was in shock, but I didn’t know it. I was just waiting for the endless ceremony to finally end. Everything that came after “the slap” was a blur.

You might not know it if you are part of the industry, but if you macro out, you will see their social justice voting choices everywhere. People in the future will look back on these awards and see nothing but “woked out” Oscar winners. Jessica Chastain won for playing Tammy Faye, who was sympathetic to AIDS patients (LGBTQIA), Jane Campion won for Best Director (a woman and an LGBTQIA-themed film), and Best Picture to the first film with a predominantly deaf cast. Best Supporting Actress was the first Afro-Latina, openly queer Ariana DeBose. Supporting Actor was Troy Kotsur (the first deaf male actor to win). CODA’s director won Adapted Screenplay, with the only white male to win a major award, Kenneth Branagh winning Original Screenplay for the film that should have won Best Picture, Belfast.

And last but not least, the Best Actor winner was Will Smith, only the fifth Black actor to win in the category. As they did their “good puritan” parade of deserved winners and waited for their pats on the back to show that real change had occurred, reality crashed through their glass bubble - leaving a mess that would need cleaning up. Hollywood and the Oscars have built a house of cards that denies reality at every turn to sell a preferred version of it.

By the time the Oscars were over, we all just hurried out of the theater as fast as we could. I am never invited to the Governors Awards afterwards so I just found the garage. The valet asked me, “how was the show?” “Well,” I said and he bowed his head, “yeah I heard about Will Smith.” He did not look sympathetic, though. He looked annoyed. Many people would take Smith’s side after that night. He was probably one of them.

I drank some bourbon when I got home and went to sleep. It wouldn’t be until the next day that my friend called me that I realized just how shaken up I was by the event. You don’t see that kind of thing at the Oscars. When my friend asked me about it I could not help but burst into tears. And as I did this I could hear Twitter scolding me for being a white woman centering myself. Shock is shock, though. You can’t police it out of your nervous system.

It doesn’t really matter how hard people try to make things true that isn’t true. Sooner or later, truth bubbles to the surface. The idea that “words are harm” and that no joke can offend a marginalized group is one of the many bizarre Orwellian delusions we are all forced to accept now.

So many people tried to make this about “white privilege” and “anti-black.” The Guardian’s Tayo Bero says that the Academy has seen worse and her example of this is John Wayne being restrained from approaching the stage while Sasheen Littefeather accepted Marlon Brando’s award:

It’s also not just about what Smith did; it’s where he did it and who was watching. Anyone who has been following these shows can see that Smith is being held up to much stricter standards than white men who have behaved just as badly or even worse in those settings. In 1973, John Wayne had to be restrained by six security guards when he tried to rush the stage and attack the Native American actor and activist Sacheen Littlefeather. Littlefeather was on stage to accept the best actor award on behalf of Marlon Brando, who was boycotting the awards in protest at Hollywood’s depictions of Native Americans.

She has no way of knowing what John Wayne planned to do had he gotten to the stage. She assumed she knew for sure he would attack her, but no one knew what he planned to do. That they restrained John Wayne, a prominent WHITE actor, doesn’t occur to Bero. Imagine if security had tried to restrain Will Smith. She has an audience and a platform, and she must give them what they want, which is a way to make white people feel bad for being justifiably horrified at this act of violence.

The new cult-like movement that has infected the ruling class in this country is about denying what is real, what you know, what you can see with your own eyes and replacing it with dogma. As a white person, you aren’t really allowed to criticize or dissent. They believe that your “whiteness” is the source of all of society’s problems, that you are born with it, and that you can do nothing else but shut up in the face of something so unequivocal as what Will Smith did to Chris Rock:

Watching my white liberal friends shrink back and say nothing because they do not believe it is their “place” is disgusting to me. It is an illustration of why people don’t stand up to bullies. It took Jim Carrey to say what needed to be said.

After that, more people found the courage to speak out and thus helped the Academy get closer to some kind of action against Smith. But Smith resigned before they could do anything.

I am not someone to stand in the moral judgment of others. I see an entire movement now to forgive Will Smith, and honestly, I am supportive of that, as long as it applies across the board. This is not a community that is supportive of forgiveness. It is a community that accuses, condemns, and destroys. When it stops being that way, I will be happy to be more forgiving of Will Smith’s remorse and apology.

The truth is that having the freedom to say what you feel, or tell a joke, even if it’s an offensive one, probably makes us less violent as a species.

As Ben Shapiro puts it:

The social compact by which verbiage and violence remain strictly separated is a delicate one. For most of human history, words were treated as punishable by physical response — dueling was commonplace in societies for centuries, familial retaliation for insult was regular, and wars were even fought over verbal slights. But over time, civilized people traded away the privilege of personal use of force in favor of rules; truly offensive words could sometimes meet with social disapproval or even ostracization, but certainly not violence.

Now we seem to be reversing the trend. The entire theory of “microaggressions” suggests that if you are offended, it is because someone has “aggressed” against you — and aggression requires response. To deny someone’s preferred pronouns is now an act of “erasure” amounting to violence, since the person so slighted might feel damaged in their sense of worth or authenticity. Once we reconnect the severed link between words and violence, civilization will begin to break down.

Will Smith went into the Dolby on March 27th, thinking it was the night of his life. His family was with him, including his wife Jada, whose battle with alopecia had motivated her, as with all things Will and Jada, to live it out loud and proud by shaving her head. She would not wear a wig. She would not hide what she was struggling with because that isn’t how Will and Jada live. Whatever it is that causes them the pain, they wish it away with empowerment. Jada brags about her grandmother introducing her to “self-pleasuring” at 9 and why that was so great. Will brags about how okay he is with Jada’s many lovers.

In that sort of mindset, how does anyone have a clear sense of right and wrong if nothing is ever wrong because everything is always right? Their self-help claptrap sounded good for a long time. In one night, though, it all came tumbling down like a house of cards. All of it.

Will and Jada live, love, laugh out loud. They distort every painful thing into an easily forgiven non-mistake. It is much easier to wade into dangerous waters without realizing it when you have no moral line.

Every boundary was crossed openly and on television or video. They seemed compelled to just leave nothing private because THEY had all of the answers, THEY were the enlightened ones, THEY have it all figured out. So when a joke is made about Jada - the all-knowing, all-seeing wise love goddess - that is like disrespecting Lord Jesus himself. And that is why Will Smith probably believed the crowd would be with him. His wife seemed to be, and she is all-knowing and all-seeing.

Back on Planet Earth, though, Chris Rock had no way of knowing whether she had alopecia or not - assuming he follows every utterance at the “Red Table” is wishful thinking. I had no idea she struggled with the condition until after I had made a joke on Twitter about her bald head. I thought it was a fashion choice because she looks great bald, and not everyone does.

His joke about Jada looking like Demi Moore in GI Jane was funny to those old enough to remember that movie. Back then, Moore was a lot like the Smiths are today -she believed in challenging perceptions, living out loud, and bragging constantly about her own empowerment, especially as she shaved her own head and beefed up her body to win the praise of her peers.

In truth, she was mocked for it because she appeared a narcissist of the highest order, like so many icons of the 80s and 90s. This was way before our culture was re-ordered into oppressed and oppressors, where your status depends on where you land in that paradigm. Back in the 90s, in the last gasp of individualism, personal success and icon status were everything.

Now you see some of the relics of that era trying to cling to their status, like poor Madonna. Tom Cruise, ever the nice guy, has to still be the King of Scientology while also clinging to his status as an action hero.

Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith were born out of that era but as Black celebrities, they did not expire the way the white ones did. They held onto their status.

Empowerment is out, marginalization is in, and in a country with mostly white, mostly “straight” people, how do they become marginalized? How can they be victims if they just spent decades becoming empowered and living their best lives? That is why there are many new categories of gender, sexuality, and everything else - even size acceptance. Anyone can be in an oppressed or marginalized group if they fit into these or one of the many other categories.

That is how you get to words being harm, where an offensive joke about a perceived or self-proclaimed marginalized group is WORSE than a slap across the face on live television.

Laughing relieves tension. Laughter brings us together. Laughter is a way to connect even if we don’t speak the same language. We understand what laughing means. That is why it is so important to preserve the freedom to be FUNNY, even if it means you might offend some people.

It occurred to me after March 27th that much of an entire generation might not understand what comedy is for. They might not understand what jokes are supposed to do. If you dissect them bit by bit you can find so much wrong with them. But the whole point of a joke is not to do that. It’s to startle you into laughter so you can release some of the built-up pressure inside.

It’s true that not everyone finds the same things funny, but it should not be the job of comedians, or comedy shows, to make sure their humor is for everyone. Late-night comedy, so-called, with Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, and John Oliver isn’t funny. Not in the slightest bit. It is a magic mirror for the Left, which only finds making fun of Trump supporters and Republicans funny. But that isn’t funny. Funny would be making fun of the self-important, self-serious, sanctimonious, uptight Left. They hardly ever do it because they are too afraid.

That we don’t have humor in our lives that is allowed to be free is very likely why it seems like we slip further into collective madness every day. This is why Ricky Gervais’ Golden Globe video has more views than any Oscar ceremony at any time in their history:

Ricky Gervais is the only comedian who should ever host the Oscars. They need someone unafraid of them and the morality police of Twitter. It is the only way to get back any sort of sanity and freedom.

If you are wondering why Trump won in 2016 and why he continues to resonate, draw crowds, and is currently being polled to beat Biden- this is why. By 2016, the Left had already turned America into a country where speech, language and every other thing was heavily monitored. That is why Trump was such a force to be reckoned with. He not only challenged the rules, he spit in the face of them. There is power in that, but there is even more power right now than there ever has been because we have become disconnected from the truth on the Left. It has simply been nonstop gaslighting by the media to force people to believe what they want to be true.

The Democrats are trapped under the thumb of Twitter. Many of them are simply resigning rather than face an election season where they’re about get steamrolled. The majority in this country can’t stand what’s happening to it at the hands of the Left. Even if, when you bring this up, they will start melting down over “Democracy Itself” and January 6th. As usual, they are digging in the wrong place and can’t see what’s about to happen to them.

It begins and ends with how a culture polices humor. Imagine any cult. Think about what kinds of jokes would be allowed. Now think about Putin or Xi, or Stalin or Hitler, and imagine what kinds of jokes would be allowed under their reign. Now you see why it has become so dangerous for our country to find ourselves here, a country that went through a bloody revolution for the right to tell offensive jokes.

Words are harm; words are violence; silence is violence. Criticizing the government, questioning the vaccine or masks, and refusing to use the right pronouns are all the ways the left is sabotaging itself by thinking this country is ready to become Tumblr circa 2013.

No society can survive if jokes are so bad that they inspire one man to walk up to another man and slap him across the face. We have to get back to a place where we can survive an offensive or insulting joke. We have to allow parents to talk openly about what worries them in their children’s classrooms. We have to be able to debate things without fear of being destroyed or fired.

We have to fight back against big tech oligigarchs policing the citizenry, no matter what it takes. We have to find a way back to truth - and the best way to do that is to let comedians, writers, artists and journalists out of their cages. And let freedom ring.

Otherwise, this country will fall into a kind of Orwellian nightmare that will destroy it. We might be living through the end of the era of great movies and the Oscars. We might be seeing the end of great books. All of them will bear the mark of their time - showing a creative class that was so afraid of criticism that they stopped telling good stories, and people stopped watching them.

When the Hays Code was implemented in the 1930s, it cleaned up Hollywood movies for two decades. The films made back then were covered with a veneer of phoniness. Anyone watching them today will think, why are they all acting and talking like that? Why do they never show toilets or pregnant women? It was the last time we lived through an era like this one.

And just like those movies are easily recognizable for their time, so too will everything produced now and for the foreseeable future be easy to recognize as the “woke” era. It took twenty years for Hollywood to break away from the Hays code and tell more naturalistic stories. I imagine we’re about halfway there now.

Until then, comedians and writers will have to find subversive ways of getting their messages out, as Stanley Kubrick did in Lolita or Hitchcock did in Psycho.

I would like to think the slap at the Oscars was a “hinge moment.” But I think it’s more likely it’s just the beginning of what will be a very dark time in our history.

Like all of us on Oscar night, however, we don’t have much choice but to make it through another day. There is always hot coffee and a sunrise. We’re alive, and that’s all that matters in the end.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

Lost Horizons: How the Oscars Became Hollywood's Shangri-La

25 mars 2022 | 24 min

This Sunday, the beleaguered Oscars will hold their 94th Academy Awards ceremony. I will be attending, as I have for the last several years. I get my one ticket that is usually on the highest tier. I put on a fancy dress. I drive myself to the ceremony, park in the garage, and take the escalator to the Dolby Theater, which is located in the same mall as the Mann’s Chinese, where I used to visit as a kid to look at the footprints and handprints of all of the stars.

I love going to the Oscars, even if the only people I have to talk to are the wait staff and bartenders. Each floor has two full bars outside each of the tiers of the theater. You are allowed to go in and out of the theater as long as you do it during the commercial breaks. One of the most thrilling things about attending the live show is listening to the waves of applause that ripple through the room when an award is announced, or a film clip is shown.

It looks very different on TV than it does live. I am usually way way up in the nosebleeds so I can’t see much of what is going on unless I look at the flat screens provided for us. I can go out and have a drink and watch the show on the TV monitor. Then you can see it better. But it is still fun to go. I feel really lucky to be invited every year as a member of the press.

How did I ever get here?

I have been blogging about the Oscars for 22 years. It never occurred to me in all of that time that the Oscars could go extinct. Now I think there is a good chance they probably will. Sooner rather than later.

The Oscars, like the Democratic Party, have created a fantasy world for themselves, an insulated, isolated utopia. It plays out in everything they do. They believe they solved the problem of racism that erupted in 2020 with Biden’s directive, and by forcing everyone who wasn’t a willing participant, across the country and in every institution to go along with their “antiracism” policies. They are now trying to make sure this ideology is taught in schools because it isn’t some obscure scripture studied in law school. It is the entire world view of the Left, and that includes the Oscars.

I used to be a true believer. Back when Critical Theory in race and gender was being taught at my daughter’s high school, I was spending my days on my website advocating for people of color and women to be nominated and to win. I was like every social justice scold you see on Twitter now. I believed I was doing the right thing. I believed that there was no purpose to the Oscars if they couldn’t change their history of awarding all white men all of the time.

My perspective would start to shift in the last few years as I watched the accusations of racism and the push for equity to be ultimately detrimental to the goal of what the Oscars are supposed to be about. It isn’t that I still don’t feel that the awards should be open to everyone, not just white men, it’s that I can’t go along with using the awards as a way to pat ourselves on the back and fake-pretend we’ve changed anything. Have we? Or is it all a show?

Film critics and Oscar voters seem to be okay pretending they are awarding on merit. But it doesn’t seem that way to anyone not inside their utopian bubble. They want to be rewarded for having made change - with their museum, with their casting choices, with the films they award, with how they staff their awards shows. They give the impression that things have changed. But they haven’t really. The Academy, and most institutions in this country, remain mostly white. The Academy is still 80% white, above the nation’s white majority, which is in the high 60s at the moment.

Watch any film or television ad produced by Hollywood and you would imagine that we live in a country that has an equal share of people of color and white people. But we don’t. Whites are still the majority. But on the Left, they feel bad about this and thus, they must prove their worth every time they take the stage, every time they put out a movie, every time they give out an award, every time they make a film.

The majority in this country, no matter their skin color, has about had enough. They’ve had enough of Hollywood lecturing them. They’ve had enough of their ideology and their strange new religion being foisted upon them and they are slowly pulling away from both the Democrats and the Oscars.

Although everything was already starting to be about race before 2016, it wasn’t until Trump won that things would start to radically change on the Left, on the Right - everywhere.

There are many reasons for the drop in ratings - the rise of superhero movies, the rise of great television and flat screens, but it also can’t be a coincidence that they really started to dip after November 2016.

Trump’s win upended almost everything on the Left, especially the film industry and the Oscars. They became overtly political, taking the side against not just Trump but half the country that voted for Trump.

Almost immediately, the mass hysteria began, starting with the frontrunner the year of the 2016 election, La La Land.

Because no one could do anything about Trump being the President, and because they could not hurt anyone on the Right with their moral outrage, their disgust, their constant dehumanizing and shaming, they began to eat their own. La La Land was accused of being racist, not just because it was a film that was about to win Best Picture, but because the film features a white man in it who loves Jazz.

I could feel the awkward silence every time the film’s name was mentioned. When they called it for La La Land at the end, I had already left the building because I too was caught up in the frenzy that a racist film was about to win Best Picture. I didn’t find out until a phone call from a friend that Moonlight, the film about a black gay man finding love and acceptance, had won instead. Everyone assumed Trump caused it because no one could take a movie like La La Land seriously when the whole world had so dramatically changed.

The following year, another controversy hit the film Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. In it, Sam Rockwell (who won the Oscar) plays a cop who has a history of police brutality. The film didn’t properly address it, according to critics and journalists. They believed it redeemed Rockwell. Even though the movie kept winning awards the outrage kept simmering. This time I argued against the smear. That was the first time I was called out and swarmed on Twitter. Despite my having advocated for years and years for Black filmmakers on my site, now I was being called a racist, in so many words, for defending Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.

Though it won the Golden Globe, the SAG ensemble award, and the BAFTA, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri would lose Best Picture to The Shape of Water. It must have been such a surreal experience to the film’s director, Martin McDonagh, to be suddenly branded a racist and a police brutality apologist. This was, for me, a major turning point. I could see that a mass hysteria event was unfolding but I could do nothing to stop it.

By far the worse event, though, was the next year when the film Green Book was up for the Oscar. It was so well-liked by everyone who saw it that it immediately won the Audience Award in Toronto. It won the Golden Globe. Then, when it won the Producers Guild it looked like it might win Best Picture and that is when all hell broke loose. It’s a film about a working-class New Yorker who drives a Jazz musician across the country during Jim Crow. Mahershala Ali played the musician who was also gay.

Not only was the film viciously and repeatedly attacked, but the filmmakers involved had their pasts upended and exposed. Director Peter Farrelly was accused of being a sex offender for once flashing someone on the set as a joke. The Screenwriter Nick Vallelonga who wrote the story about his own father was apparently a Trump supporter and had tweeted something criticizing Muslim immigrants. He was banned from the ceremony and never showed his face again during the race.

I went on a massive counteroffensive to defend Green Book, even getting interviewed in the Wall Street Journal.

Green Book was such a warm-hearted crowd-pleaser that the attacks against it backfired and it did end up winning Best Picture. Green Book’s win, however, would push the Oscars past the point of no return.

The “Green Book effect” would ultimately lead the Academy to turn inward, to manufacture a reality they wanted to be true because that was their only option. They had to bow to the activists pressuring them to make change.

The following year, despite films like Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, The Irishman and 1917 being nominated for Best Picture, they would opt to give their top prize to the first film from a different country, Parasite from South Korea, to win Best Picture and Best Director.

Sam Mendes’ 1917 had won the Golden Globe, the Directors Guild, the Producers Guild, and the British Film and Television Academy’s prize but lost the oscar to Parasite. Had 1917 won instead, however, all of the top prizes would have gone to white people - all of the actors and the filmmakers. That was early in 2020. A few weeks after the Oscars that year, COVID would hit. By the Summer, the country would explode with the George Floyd protests.

That the Academy walked away from the 2020 Oscars with rapturous headlines at their having awarded the first “International Feature” Best Picture meant that they had finally won the approval of the loud chorus that demanded them to stop being #oscarssowhite.

After the Summer of 2020, however, there was no further resistance from the industry. Big changes were implemented. The British Film and Television Academy (BAFTA) brought in a jury to select the nominees for the acting and directing category. Voters were ordered to choose half women and half men in Best Director. They kept the policy in place year which meant that not a single BAFTA nominee for Best Actress was also an Oscar nominee.

The Academy already had an inclusion mandate in place to take hold in 2024, so there was nothing more they had to do officially, but they did decide to display their history at their museum to almost completely erase everything about the Oscars, the film industry and Hollywood. They had not only erased their Jewish mogul origin story, but they had almost completely eliminated the Oscars that everyone knows. But of course, no one could say anything. They were too afraid.

As I walked around it I saw one person frantically pacing the rooms of the beautifully designed luxury museum saying into his cell phone, “none of it is here, not a single studio, no Warner Brothers, no Paramount.” And he was right.

After Green Book won in 2018, there has not been a film by a white man to win Best Picture. And there won’t be this year. Voters seem to understand this. I came to the Oscars at a time when great directors made great movies. But now, from the Sundance Film Festival onward, the priority of inclusivity has completely overwhelmed the whole point of awarding films in the first place. Whatever is happening now in Hollywood isn’t about finding the best of anything or anyone. It is simply another arm of the Democratic Party’s new religion.

I imagine if Joseph McCarthy came back today and saw just how influential the political movement of the Left is having on everything from education, to science, to history, and yes, to the Oscars he’d think the Communists finally won.

This year, we’re down to two movies for the top prize. Both are directed by women - Jane Campion for Power of the Dog and Sian Heder for CODA. Both are competing to be the first film by a streaming platform, not a studio, to win Best Picture. Netflix (Power) vs. Apple (CODA). Neither film made money at the box office, with CODA bought for $25 million at the Sundance Film Festival, earning just $1 million at the box office.

CODA is a heartwarming story about a hearing child with deaf parents and is acted by a predominantly deaf cast. Normally, the idea of awarding Apple or even Netflix their top prize, to give up entirely on that hard line between theatrical and streaming, the Academy voters would go a different way. But Apple made them an offer they could not refuse. A chance to make history by awarding the first film with a deaf cast as Best Picture. The cast was recently seen at the White House, as the guest of Joe and Jill who love the movie so much. Even though you have to be an Apple subscriber to watch it and it only made $1 million at the box office, this win will tell you everything you need to know about the Academy in 2022.

CODA earned just three Oscar nominations, the lowest of all ten nominees. If it wins on Sunday it will be the first film since the 1930s to do so with just Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Supporting Actor. In any other time in most of their history, this would be unheard of. But in 2022, no one can stop them from making history and looking like the good guys one more time.

Teenagers aren’t going to pay to see Oscar movies any time soon. They did go to see Spider-Man: No Way Home which is fast on its way to becoming the highest grossing film of all time. The Oscar voters aren’t going to vote for a movie like that. When you do the math, it’s hard to see any future for the Oscars.

Now that the Oscars, like the Democrats, have decided that skin color, gender, and equity matter more than merit there is no point in having a competition. Maybe it’s time to simply hand out certificates of achievement to those they believe deserve it most. Pretending like people are winning, though, is something the public can see through and something only the most privileged utopians find appealing.

None of the movies nominated this year are bad. Some of them are very good. It’s just that it’s an isolated world, a magic mirror, a Shangri-la that touches almost no one else outside of its atmosphere.

Sunday will be Oscar’s 94th year. They’ve had a good run. Most of us would be lucky to live that long.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

Putin and the Baby Bird

26 februari 2022 | 20 min

A long while back, during the Obama presidency, when my daughter was in elementary school, we were taking a walk with another mother and her daughter. We saw a baby bird that had fallen out of its nest. I urged the other mother to take the bird, as I had cats who would eat it. She was going to take it to the wildlife refuge but instead decided to raise it on her own, thinking it would be a good experience for her daughter.

She named the bird after me, Sasha, because I had encouraged her to rescue it from the sidewalk. She kept the bird in a cage, gave it food and water and it grew to full size. At that point, I once again stupidly urged her to give the bird a better life, to not force it to spend its entire existence in a cage. I have never liked looking at birds in cages. There is something so cruel about that. But this was bad advice.

The day she decided to set the bird free, she gathered her whole family around, and with a video camera rolling, she set the bird free. Within minutes, a hawk swooped down and killed the bird.

This was, to me, a hard lesson on the natural world. But it was also a lesson in my own arrogance and stupidity to think this was all some Disney version of baby birds and freedom of flight. That is not what the natural world is about. It’s life or death. It’s kill or be killed. This isn’t about happiness. That’s a luxury reserved for humans.

I often stare into the eyes of animals, both the ones I look after and those in the wild. I look at them looking at me too, knowing I am the most dangerous of all living things. They have all evolved to be afraid of us, and they should be afraid.

To me, Joe Biden’s attitude towards Afghanistan, Russia, and China is on par with the thinking that the bird was going to live a free and have happy life, without paying attention to the point of view of the hawk. The hawk is hungry. The hawk has highly attuned skills to capture prey. The prey it seeks has survival instincts of its own that it has evolved over time. But that caged bird had none of it. It was a poor, helpless thing that didn’t know from hawks. It had no protection, no awareness, only vulnerability.

Everything that happened since Trump took office happened in a bubble of entitlement, arrogance, and ignorance. Everything we did while Trump was in power, from impeachment to Russiagate, to the Me Too protests, the protests against the “Muslim ban,” and the largest protest in American history, during a global pandemic without a vaccine, the George Floyd protests in 2020 all the way up to January 6th - all of that was being watched by Putin and by Xi Jinping, not to mention other leaders in other countries. It turned out the whole world was watching. We just had no clue or any awareness of that.

On his Substack, James Strock wrote way back in February of 2021:

The Whole World Is Watching

Our global competitors and adversaries—most notably the Chinese Communist regime—are alert to signs of American decline.

How will they interpret the events of 1/6?

We cannot know. Nonetheless, the failure of officials entrusted with power to react instinctively, to put themselves on the line against fellow citizens invading the Capitol, might incline some toward unwarranted conclusions about the United States as a whole.

This isn’t to get Trump off the hook for the things he said to antagonize the Left or the ways he misled or even outright lied to the public, but there is no doubt that not for one day, not for one hour, not for one minute did the ruling class, the establishment, the media, or the Democrats treat him as the President of the United States. Worse, it was almost a crime to support him, during COVID or at any other time for the four years he was in power. He was not praised for a single thing he did. The media profited off cherry-picking the worst things they could find and then tossing it out for Twitter, MSNBC and CNN to chew on for days.

Everything that was encouraged on the Left, from doubting the results of the election, to protesting violently for a cause that was important enough, was condemned when the Right did it. It wasn’t enough that they had spent hundreds of millions to put Biden in power without his having to even campaign with a mandate to win, and bad enough that the election had been won even before Election Day through absentee ballots and early voting, but to then be called “domestic terrorists” and “white supremacists” and racists just for supporting Trump, or protesting mask mandates or vaccines - the message was clear: if you aren’t on board with us, we’re going to treat you like human garbage at best, enemies of the state at worst.

When they talk about Democracy and freedom and liberty and human rights, they forget how they have treated half of this country this past year.

All of this was going on as though there was no Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping. It was as if America is the whole world and there are no other outside threats we face. The protests of 2020 inspired the Biden administration to take power as though he’d just won the second Civil War against the Confederate Army. He went along with the idea that America was “systemically racist” and corrupt to its core. He has gone along with the condemnation of members of the military over vaccine mandates or “white rage.”

He has gone along with the idea that we should divide children in public schools into two groups of oppressors and oppressed, to teach them that their whiteness from birth means they have “opportunity” but if they aren’t born with “whiteness” they don’t. He has gone along with equity replacing meritocracy. He has gone along with every new rule the progressive Left puts in place that Americans must follow or be condemned by their peers or fired from their employment. He went along when they dragged the statue of Thomas Jefferson out of City Hall in New York. Biden has gone along with all of it. That is, at least partly, why his poll numbers are dropping. The America he and the fundamentalist Left are threatening is not the America the majority wants.

The blatant hypocrisy on display by the Biden administration goes unnoticed by the high-minded media that controls the mainstream narrative, but it has not gone unnoticed by Putin or Xi.

The Biden-led withdrawal from Afghanistan was so horrific that it leaves a catastrophic humanitarian crisis in its wake. With bodies falling off airplanes and mothers handing their babies over the fence at the airport, that probably seemed like the worst of it. But it was only the beginning. Now we hear of young women locked in their homes, forbidden from going to school. We hear of babies dying when they are born because their mothers are starving. There is no way out of what we have done. But Americans once again act as though we’re the only country in the world that matters, that everyone will understand our explanations as to why this was necessary. But that is not what happened.

Putin noticed that now there was little chance Biden could justify heading into another war. The exit made Biden look weak. His poll numbers began to plummet. Even if the media barely noticed, and the blue checks on Twitter were pretending it wasn’t happening, Putin noticed.

The media has been so focused on Trump that they didn’t even notice when our country - the once mighty United States of America, was mocked by Putin for jailing political prisoners who, according to Putin, came to our Capitol “with a list of political demands.” Putin made the point that we were in no position to criticize him for what he does to journalists and dissenters when we are doing the same thing here. Even if we weren’t, what has happened to the January 6th protesters and rioters is not America most of us have grown up with. Putin noticed. How could he not when all we’ve ever done is take the moral highground against him.

Here is Putin nailing the Biden administration on jailing political prisoners:

Then, if that weren’t bad enough, the other world power that is about to test Biden’s weakness, China, called Biden out for Black Lives Matter and the racism Biden was announcing defined America. Now, not only had Putin exposed our hypocrisy but so did Xi Jinping. The only people who either didn’t see it or refused to call it out was our own media that kept being Biden’s magic mirror, telling him he was the greatest of them all. The Left existed in their own little bubble as though there simply were no other countries in the world that might be watching or listening.

Both of these moments illustrate two major US enemies pushing back, criticizing, and showing a kind of dominance we would not have seen under Trump. Whatever their relationship was, Putin saw Trump more as an equal than he does Biden, whom he clearly sees as no threat whatsoever. Trump also blustered loudly, always saying things like “we’ll hit them with everything we have,” and “it will be a response like the world has never seen.”

Here in the US, the press mocked Trump for that one minute, then called him a dangerous madman the next. But whatever that was, it was a stronger response to these two dictators in Russia and China than the Biden administration was ever prepared for.

In fact, as Ukrainian Konstantin Kisin says so brilliantly, we were not paying attention. We were focused on our own fantasy utopia and we had no idea what was waiting back in the real world. To Kisin, we must exert our power, or else these countries will start to do things we’re not going to approve of. They have no reason not to. They have no one to fear. It is like what happened in blue cities with the “defund the police” policies that led to massive spikes in crime.

That’s because on the Left, and in the Biden administration, they are still living the glory days of the Obama renaissance. In this world what matters is lifting up marginalized groups, renewable energy, a country that doesn’t see our enemies abroad but sees them instead as friends. The only people worth fighting, to Biden, are Trump supporters. Even now, forces are rising up on Twitter to try to get Tucker Carlson banned off Fox, or have Fox removed entirely from the airwaves. Don’t think they won’t use the threat of war to do that. They will. They’ve already tried to say Carlson is pro-invasion, which he never was.

This clip, which was dated February 17, already has 2 million views. This must be what they are referring to:

Obviously, this shows how unprepared Carlson and others on the Right were where Putin was concerned. He wasn’t the only one. Plenty of columnists whom I also read didn’t believe an attack was imminent. But does that make Carlson an enemy of the state? You might not like what he says in this video. I don’t much like it. But Carlson’s job is to be contrary to the status quo. That’s why he is popular. The answer to speech you don’t like is more speech, not less. That is not only what I believe, but it is the American way. Not the Russian way, not the China way. The American way.

What the Democrats want, what Joe Biden wants, what the high-status voices on Twitter like David Simon, Rob Reiner, Joy Behar, and Bette Midler want is to have things back the way they were before Trump won. They want the moral high ground back. They want the run of the place back. They want the garbage out of their pristine utopia. It was so much better when they had no idea just how many people in this country couldn’t stand them, and didn’t want to live by their rules.

We can’t go back. We can’t ever go back. Trump’s win was a pivotal moment in history when the populists rose to power, a movement that had its roots going all the way back to the year 2000 with World Trade Organization protests. They continued on with Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party. That movement, with or without Trump, not only continues but has its eye on the House, the Senate, and the presidency. Again. There is no going back. There is only going forward through whatever the next phase will be.

If I were the Biden administration I would reach out to the populist Right. I would find a way to listen to them the way he is supposed to listen to all Americans. I would stop calling them terrorists. I would take down the political theater fencing around the Capitol. I would find out what they were worried about. The border, energy prices, freedom of speech, our schools, and I would find a way to meet in the middle. He will never do that. Think about David Simon or Rob Reiner’s reaction to that. To them, the populists could be carted off to camps and they would not blink.

But Biden is not them. He is, or at least once was, more compassionate and open-minded than they are. He is also the President of this entire country, not just the side that is acceptable to the Blue Checks.

America is in a very precarious place right now, not just because of the threats coming from Russia and China, but because of our own fractured condition. If we don't believe in this country if it is always being criticized and attacked by the people who govern it if there is a distinct oligarchal class that rules over a majority of discontents that doesn’t bode well for the future. You can’t have a powerful minority rule over a powerless majority and expect things to go well. They never have. Sooner or later the barbarians will be at the gates.

What they want on the Left and in the Biden administration is to be good - to be inclusive and diverse. They want a country where everyone gets a seat at the table and no one is marginalized or offended ever. At some point, though, their desire to be good was replaced by a desire for everyone else to go along with them, or else they weren’t good, they were bad.

The Left, right now, feels threatened that all of the progress they’ve made with women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, and rights for the Black community is about to be ripped out of their grasp by the marauding Right. They believe Democracy Itself is at stake. But really, the silent, afraid majority just wants to be able to have a reasonable conversation about the country the Left is demanding America become. It is their country too and no one ever asked them if they agreed with the new rules.

That is why Trump is such an existential threat to them even now, even after he’s been booted off of social media and is no longer president. He isn’t silent. He isn’t open to discussion. He has come to knock it all down. That has left them feeling scared and under siege.

Their problem was they believed Trump was their worst nightmare. They thought electing Biden was like opening the door of the cage and letting the bird fly to its freedom. But they forgot what was waiting for them in the trees.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

Joe Rogan, the Truckers and the Collapse of the Left

13 februari 2022 | 29 min

“Neil and Joni, if your side wins—and Spotify bends the knee to your demands—it will mark peak woke and the beginning of your end. In defeat, Joe will just go elsewhere and everyone with a genuinely liberal bone in their body will follow. Most importantly, our present “Eat Me Last” public posture—from which you benefit mightily—will crumble. Enough people will see clearly the threat you pose to open-inquiry and they will gird their loins, say “enough!” and start pushing back at scale.

It’s ironic that two aging hippies are waging a Tet-offensive of sorts against Joe Rogan. Walter Cronkite’s change of mind on the war was the tipping point that changed the American mind and turned it against the Vietnam War. The attack on Rogan just might mark the beginning of the end of the progressive war on free inquiry.” —A Planned Man

None of this is about the coronavirus. It’s not about protecting people. It’s about an entire ecosystem that has developed in our society, devoted to bringing down people who step out of line. You don’t even need government censorship anymore, because Democrat super PACs and social media and the 24/7 news cycle are so much more efficient. Today’s smear merchants work a lot faster than ol’ Joey McCarthy ever did.

Rogan will withstand it regardless. He’s got more money than he could spend in 10 lifetimes, and millions of fans who will follow him anywhere. He’ll be fine. No, this message is for the rest of us:

You see what we’re doing to this guy? You want it to happen to you next? No? Then shut your mouth.- Jim Treacher

The Tipping Point

In every mass hysteria event throughout human history, there comes a tipping point. It’s the moment you can no longer take accusations seriously and the whole thing comes crashing down.

In Salem, it was when the Governor’s wife was accused of being a witch.

During the McCarthy hearings, when members of the military were being accused, it led to this moment:

And now, it’s likely Joe Rogan as a target, along with the working-class uprisings of the Canadian truckers, public opinion is starting to change.

This is the moment when everyone notices. When they took the initial accusation against Joe Rogan of spreading “disinformation” and pivoted to accusations of racism that gave them away and everyone saw. That the Blue Checks and the media fell for it was yet more proof of what an insular feedback loop it has become, and just how disconnected they have become from average Americans.

Joe Rogan and the Body Snatchers

They look like us. They kind of act like us. But they are not here to live among us. They are here to turn us into them. They want us to think like they think. Like what they like. Believe what they believe. They have taken over Hollywood. They have swallowed up science. They have infiltrated education. They are not here to negotiate. You have only one option: comply or else.

It is the Evergreen College generation that now sees its mission to remove undesirables the way they tried to remove Bret Weinstein from Evergreen for having the audacity to suggest it is against the fundamental American right of free speech to absent a group from a shared space. You are not allowed to say such things if you are a white male. It is verboten. We’ve now seen so many examples of this it has almost become the new normal. It is for people who are plugged into the news cycle and social media but a good majority of Americans didn’t quite realize the force we put into power when we elected Joe Biden. But now they do. The Rogan episode has woken up a sleeping tiger.

Some will watch this Evergreen documentary series on Youtube made by Benjamin Boyce who was a student at Evergreen at the time and documented all of it, and feel that rising sense of purpose, as so many of my friends on the Left do. This is their newfound religion as a “good ally.” They know they are either racist or antiracist.

The dirty little secret is that studies have shown white liberals change their language when they talk to Black people and Conservatives don’t.

Do white liberals see themselves as caretakers of Black people and/or people of color? Do they see themselves as superior and therefore feel the need to always make amends? Has that sense of guilt has been carried over from the Boomer generation of the 1960s counterculture when the Civil Rights movement exploded much the same way the Woke revolution exploded in 2020? Must it now be visited upon the minds and hearts of children - they must be taught how to be racist so that they can then be antiracist to make sure the cycle continues. Is that really the plan?

It didn’t end well for Evergreen in terms of ongoing success, which should give you a good idea of where all of this is going. Enrollment dropped significantly. Maybe it helped move the needle in terms of marginalized students finding their voice and power, but when it spiraled into witch hunts that is when the bottom fell out. From the WSJ:

It turns out that students aren’t clamoring for the privilege of paying for an education in such a hostile environment. Evergreen accepts 97% of applications, but enrollment dropped to 2,854 full-time students last fall, compared to 3,810 the semester of the protests. Enrollment increased over the same period at other Washington universities.

The accusations against Rogan started out as “disinformation.” But considering how many times the government and media have had to backtrack on all of their strident conclusions about COVID, disinformation, it seems, is in the eye of the beholder. As Jon Stewart illuminates here, it’s a matter of changing opinion and shifting sands:

Bill Maher took it even further to point out how our government is guilty of spreading “disinformation”:

Because the "disinformation” campaign fell flat, they pivoted to … wait for it … racism. because, of course they did.

A Twitter user named Wokal Distance was also curious about how it pivoted from “disinformation” to “racism” and landed on a well-funded superpac.

But Rogan was the wrong guy. They picked someone who is popular but mostly, popular with the blue-collar, center left. Democrats have alienated Hispanic voters, Asian voters and now, Black voters. They’ve alienated parents and suburban moms. They only seem able to alienate people, not attract them. Their plan appears to be: accusations of racism and fear of Trump because Trump is a racist and that will get us votes. They don’t want voters. They want the right kind of voters for their utopia.

It goes without saying that this isn’t about excusing language that is that offensive. It is, however, about context and intent. This is not a sustainable way forward for the country. We have to practice tolerance, kindness, and forgiveness. That no longer defines the Left.

The best piece on Joe Rogan is by Kat Rosenfeld writing for the New Statesman:

Here is the heart of the campaign to push Rogan off Spotify. It’s not about stopping misinformation, and it’s not about reducing his influence; indeed, Spotify could renege and cancel Rogan tomorrow, costing themselves $100 million without costing him a single listener. What people really want is the symbolic satisfaction of kicking him out of the clubhouse. They had a nice place here, with good music and classy people, and here’s Joe Rogan, wearing the wrong clothes, rubbing shoulders with the wrong folks, flouting the etiquette of this rarefied space and generally stinking up the joint.

It’s less about politics than about class, less about disagreement than disgust, and less about what Rogan actually says than how popular he is for saying it. It’s realising that people love him, no matter how much we beg them not to. In the giant fertile chasm between liberal and conservative media, in a vacuum of trust in authority, Joe Rogan has taken root: irreverent, curious, immune to in-group pressure and utterly uncontrollable.

Will the real cult please stand up?

Democrats are comfortable calling Trump’s MAGA movement a cult. They have certainty about this but they do not have any proof beyond their own narratives around January 6th. While it’s true his supporters turned up in DC to fight for his refusal to accept the results of the election, they also didn’t blindly follow his lead when it came to taking the vaccine he takes credit for.

True that the MAGA Republicans demand that (what they call the) RINOS adopt the America First platform or face punishment, that isn’t that different from the Bernie Left demanding the same of the Centrists.

Cults are different, though. They silence dissent, demand ideological compliance and most importantly, cultivate utopias away from the rest of the population. It’s much easier to make the case that the Left has become a cult-like.

It isn’t hard to find evidence of this anywhere on the internet because it’s everywhere. They remind me of the “born again” Christians in the 1970s high on their newfound salvation.

This bombshell piece over at the Wall Street Journal by Paul Rossi and Andrew Guttman, “Inside the Woke Indoctrination Machine” illustrates just how baked into the school system the religious ferver is on the Left and how many schools now are training teachers to basically be like Evergreen. They write:

In “Feeding Yourself When You Are Fed Up: Connecting Resilience and DEI Work,” we learned techniques, such as “calling out,” that faculty and students can use to shut down conversations immediately by interrupting speakers and letting them know that their words and actions are unacceptable and won’t be tolerated. Several workshops focused on the practice of “restorative justice,” used to re-educate students who fall afoul of speech codes. The final step to ensure belonging is to push out families or faculty who question DEI work. “Sometimes you gotta say, maybe this is not the right school for you. . . . I’ve said that a lot this year,” said Victor Shin, an assistant head of school and co-chairman of the People of Color Conference, in “From Pawns to Controlling the Board: Seeing BIPOC Students as Power Players in Student Programming.”

They didn’t ask parents if they agreed with any of it. They are forcing this belief system onto all institutions of power in this country, including science and education. If I fought against religion in classrooms for most of my life, I am still going to fight against religion in classrooms, even if people on the Left believe it is the better way forward. They don’t get to decide that on their own. And they don’t get to throw fits if people disagree. This should be something we all debate out in the open.

The first thing all cults do is separate the children from the parents. Charles Manson did this. Scientology does this. Jim Jones’ utopian cult did this. They do it to free up the women for reproduction and to indoctrinate the children. It would not be such a big deal if it wasn’t so extreme all of a sudden, and if it hadn’t spread to our government. They are essentially giving parents and reasonable Democrats no choice but to abandon the party because it has so clearly become cult-like in its demands for compliance.

Asra Q. Nomani’s chilling piece “Why Antiracism Should Be Resisted” lays it out pretty well. Here is just part of it:

Bigotry, meanwhile, is back on the curriculum, thanks partly to a “Black Lives Matter at School” campaign, which last week recommended the book Not My Idea: A Book about Whiteness to children as young as six in Evanston/Skokie School District 65, outside Chicago. “Whiteness is a bad deal”, the book argues; it amounts to signing a “contract” with the devil, who is illustrated with an indelicate pointy tail. Meanwhile, in an English lesson in Fairfax County, Virginia, students played a game of “Privilege Bingo”; even “Military Kid” has been shamed as having “privilege”.

And:

The beauty of Martin Luther King Jr’s America was that everyone’s humanity, worth and potential was appreciated, not undermined. Fighting racism used to mean rejecting the notion of a hierarchy of human value. But today the morally twisted teachings of “anti-racism” preach that a new hierarchy of human value, with whiteness at the bottom, is acceptable — and even evolved and “progressive”. Education activists seem intent on pushing the race-shaming, bigotry and segregation of “anti-racism”.

The bigger problem, other than destroying the minds and hearts of children is, as with all cults, they raise people who can’t survive outside the cult. Once they remake their utopia to suit their ideology, suddenly everything will look like oppression to them. If they travel to Europe, for instance, or any country that doesn’t follow the strident doctrine of the Left how will they survive that? They’ll be like the Amish family in Peter Weir’s Witness, with no clue how the modern world works.

People on the Left now believe this country should accommodate them. But as they become increasingly sensitive and fragile that becomes impossible.

So what can we do if so many people are afraid to speak out? Well, people will start gravitating to those voices that aren’t afraid.

The first thing Tucker Carlson did upon hearing Rogan was being targeted as a thought criminal was to air the very clips by the very people that got Rogan almost fired. For him, it was a show of power, and an example of someone who isn’t afraid even a little bit of what they thinks.

There is a reason his ratings are skyrocketing right now. Carlson, like Ben Shapiro, is also drawing more eyeballs from the younger generation on the left, probably the men mostly, who have been told they are useless. Why wouldn’t they watch Carlson? Why wouldn’t they be drawn to people who bravely stand up to the rising hysteria? Biden certainly won’t. The Never Trumpers won’t. Blue Check Twitter won’t.

Dreaming the Biosphere

A healthy society has a balance of liberalism (magical thinking) and conservatism (pragmatic thinking). When one side has too much power it can lead to collapse, whereby the other side takes control.

Because humans by nature want to be free to express themselves, to dissent and to make their own choices, any utopia has two options -to loosen their grip or to tighten it. The next step when threatened, as the Left is now, is authoritarianism.

From the book Dreaming of the Biosphere, a letter by a disgruntled ex-hippie from the 1970s written to Modern Utopia magazine:

It is a benefit of magical thinking to strike forth and build utopias. This is very much an American thing, an American Revolution thing, a Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin thing. It has led to wonderful achievements, just at look at everything the Boomers inspired in the 1970s in movies, art, music and investigative journalism.

But unfortunately, right now, we are watching the collapse of all of it. This is not necessarily a bad thing. The time has come for the Boomers to step aside and allow for new leadership to redefine where the magical thinking Left will take this country next. That can’t happen unless it does collapse, and collapse it will. We are at the tipping point now, the Fourth Turning. It’s all coming apart.

A great example of this playing out was Biosphere 2 in the early 90s. It was a collaboration of a billionaire Boomer and a cadre of magical thinkers who ran The Theater of Infinite Possibilities before they inhabited a carefully constructed second atmosphere for two years. They had high hopes of a scientific breakthrough that would allow humans to build these biospheres on other planets. Their problem was that they prioritized purity and ideology over science.

Hundreds of millions of dollars were wasted, they almost suffocated to death without oxygen, they almost starved, they formed tribal alliances and turned on each other. Eventually, none other than Stephen K. Bannon was brought in to clean out the ideology and introduce practical business management. Yes, the same Steve Bannon who would lead the Tea Party populist uprising that would put Donald Trump in power was once the reasonable fixer that kept Biosphere 2 from failure.

It was conservative pragmatism brought in when the magical thinking liberalism could not sustain itself.

Biosphere 2 is now a research facility that tourists visit every year. Some of them know about the crazy people that helped found it. But most don’t. In fact, that book, Dreaming of the Biosphere, is really the only documented research of everything that went down. It’s easy to tell it was written before 2016, when everything changed, because it offers such an objective, critical view of the Left. If it was written today you bet they would have cast Bannon as the villain.

And that is why I know we have not built our leadership on the Left for the long haul. We have sacrificed truth for idealized propaganda. We have sacrificed objectivity for the preferred narrative. Now, as more and more Americans plot their escape, no one in the Democratic Party seems even half-aware of what is actually going on.

Had they loosened their grip a little bit in Biosphere 2, looked at the bigger picture of what they might achieve, they might not have been ejected from the project, which was completely overtaken by new management and turned into a research center. It is an interesting thing to visit but it is not what it was built to be. Even still, some good did come out of it because there was a healthy mix of liberalism and conservatism at play.

Now with Joe Rogan still facing daily attacks from Democrats online, which has to be among the most stupidest things a political party has ever done, the trucker convey is yet another example of just how out of touch the ruling class elites that run our government and Canada’s are. Matt Taibbi writes:

What’s happening in Canada and other countries seems less about specific demands than about the general principle of being listened to. Leaders like Trudeau could likely make this thing go away if they’d make even a slight gesture toward the idea that legitimate differences of opinion exist on questions like mandates, vaccine passports, surveillance tracking, lockdowns, the vaccination of children, and other matters. You don’t have to agree with people, just find a way to look at them without betraying your profound regret they were ever born. The longer this convoy phenomenon goes on, the clearer it becomes that none of the leaders involved knows how to do this. They’re not choosing to govern without listening. They just don’t know any other way.

We’re watching the collapse of the Left in real-time. This country will need fixers by the end of it, just like Biosphere 2 did. But when all is said and done, some good will come out of it.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

Whoopi Goldberg and Ilya Shapiro Prove Intent Does Matter

2 februari 2022 | 15 min

On his daily podcast, Ben Shapiro notes that many were outraged that ABC had suspended Whoopi Goldberg from The View for two weeks following comments she made about race and the Holocaust. But Shapiro notes that it isn’t good enough to suspend her, per the Left’s and The View’s OWN standards. He cites the Ilya Shapiro case wherein Georgetown Law is now trying to decide whether Ilya Shapiro should be fired for an offensive tweet. The students at Georgetown are holding a protest and demanding he is fired.

If Georgetown fires Shapiro, if the collective hive on the Left goes along with this, then they must, by their own standards of intent vs. impact, fire Whoopi Goldberg.

Says Ben Shapiro:

Okay, so here's the thing. They didn't just suspend Roseanne Barr, for making a racist statement about Valerie Jarrett. They fired Roseanne Barr and took the top rated sitcom off the air. So here's the deal. If you guys are going to play this game, where if somebody is openly identified as anywhere close to a conservative and they say something that is a bad thing, little trademark symbol, if somebody does a bad thing, and they're completely removed from their job, then you don't get to suspend Whoopi Goldberg, you have to fire her. These are the standards and you set them and you don't get to play by two sets of standards.

One of the most inexplicable untruths we’ve been forced to swallow over the past few years is the idea that intent doesn’t matter. When someone, or a group of people, feel hurt or offended it’s called impact. You caused them to be offended and thus, you are guilty.

Impact matters. Intent does not. You are still required to apologize and take responsibility for causing harm. As in:

But you can see how that would be a problem for the modern-day Left. They need villains. If Dustin Hoffman got handsy with a woman on a set 40 years ago, even if that was just what people did back then (it was), intent can’t matter. Punishment must be enacted because the story being told NOW causes harm to people who hear it.

Intent can’t matter when deciding whether the Roosevelt statue should stay outside the National History Museum in New York. Intent doesn’t matter if an old Hollywood movie has outdated stereotypes. These images still cause harm and must contain a warning or else be removed entirely. The image of Thomas Jefferson causes harm because he once owned slaves, regardless of how things were back then.

If a professor says something that people find offensive, he or she could lose their job. We don’t even argue about it much anymore. We just kind of go along with it. The Left is in power and they don’t really believe in forgiveness. They believe in punishing people for impact, like Donald McNeil at the New York Times.

The only acceptable response to Ilya Shapiro’s tweets about a “lesser black woman” is that he meant it because he is a racist. They would never consider the other possibility - that he did not choose his words wisely and was swarmed and persecuted as a result. He has apologized, of course, but that doesn’t matter.

This is covered quite well by Bari Weiss on her substack:

Led by a Slate journalist, the Twitter mob did what Twitter mobs do and stoked the intended result: In an email to the school the dean called Shapiro’s tweets “appalling” and “at odds with everything we stand for at Georgetown Law.”

Then Shapiro, who had already deleted the tweet, sent an apology addressed to the Dean William Treanor and the entire Georgetown community:

“I sincerely and deeply apologize for some poorly drafted tweets I posted late Wednesday night,” he wrote.

If you’ve ever been the center of a Twitter swarm you know that the last thing they care about is intent. They look at the words and decide what they mean. If enough people agree about the intent that becomes the “take” and the only acceptable one. I once defended Ansel Elgort whose girlfriend was 19 when he was 21. She had taken to Twitter to complain about how Elgort had treated her when they were together and after they broke up. Twitter reacted and within minutes Elgort was being called a pedophile rapist. When I said “sorry but a relationship with a 19-year-old is not pedophilia.” It was — and considering how many of these I have gone through by now — really bad. I never backed down, though. I never apologized. Instead, I wrote about it here.

That was in 2020. Almost three years ago. It is not getting better. It is getting worse.

They DEMAND that Ilya Shapiro be considered a racist. They DEMAND that the rioters on January 6th be insurrectionists. They demand that Joe Rogan is killing people with disinformation. And so they must DEMAND Whoopi Goldberg is an anti-semite.

To quote Jonathan Pie once again — this is what YOU wanted.

But intent does matter. It has to. If you are deciding who is “good” and who is “bad” and you are making it impossible for someone to have any kind of defense, then you are going along with what can only be described as a totalitarian movement. And the Left has become a totalitarian movement. They decide what is true and you have no right to dissent or refuse or deny that truth or you will be punished by the institutions of power that they control, which is all of them.

As we speak, Biden’s press secretary, Jen Psaki, has joined defacto government officials Harry and Meghan in pressuring Spotify to dump Joe Rogan.

As Ben Shapiro says:

The Federal government is now actually pressuring companies to violate free speech principles. That is a First Amendment violation. And this is super dangerous, which is why again, they should lose their job. Let's hold them to their standard, Whoopi should lose her job. She was purveying misinformation. This means she should lose her job. If they're going to do it, they made this bed, now they have to lie in this bed. You made it, you lie in it, or we go weapons down. And we tried to reestablish some sense of classical liberalism in the country by agreement. Otherwise, it will be all out warfare here.

I personally thought Whoopi Goldberg’s statements on race and the Holocaust to be a great way to talk about something that is getting lost over time. And yes, of course, it was about race. It was about wiping out the Jewish people who have always been considered a race for hundreds of years. If you are born with Jewish blood you are Jewish. I am half-Jewish. I wasn’t raised as a Jew. My mother was not religious and not Jewish. Still, I am considered a Jew and I have felt what it is like to grow up Jewish. It is something people know about you that is a defining characteristic whether you are practicing or not. It’s your nose. It’s your eyes. It’s, sometimes, your bra size (ahem). Most importantly, Hitler believed Jews had to be wiped out for the superior Aryan race to prevail.

You can watch a dehumanization event playing out in real-time right now. Trump supporters have been dehumanized to the point where they could be carted off to camps and Blue Check Twitter would cheer. Jen Psaki would make some comment about how they were too dangerous to have around and that would be that. But a Trump supporter can get out of it, even a white male one, by throwing themselves at the mercy of the Left. They care more about ideological compliance than they do, say, skin color. But Jewish people could not have done that. Even if they’d become Nazis they would be still sent off to concentration camps because of their Jewish blood. That is about race and it’s about genocide.

Likewise, Joe Rogan’s questions about Ivermectin or the vaccine’s side effects are absolutely worth discussing loudly and with transparency. Just because they believe in compliance on the Left doesn’t mean everyone does.

Dumping Joe Rogan from Spotify does not shut up Joe Rogan. It does not shut up “disinformation.” It is what they called a “show trial” in the Soviet Union. Both Stalin and Mao were fond of punishments in public. The higher profile the target the better. It is an act of intimidation and a show of power. That our government would wade into that debate is terrifying. It’s another in the long slow slide we’ve been watching over the past few years as the consolidated power in this country continues to align with the government against the people.

Intent does matter because it has to.

If you are driving down the road and you accidentally hit and kill a family of four that is not necessarily your fault, even if you are responsible for their deaths. But compare that to driving down the road and aiming your car at a family of four. One is obviously worse than the other.

Any politician who fights against this madness will be very popular in 2022 and 2024. The Democrats and Joe Biden should be taking a firm stand for the people, for free speech, and yes, for INTENT. We need leaders who can lead us out of this mess, not ones who keep driving us back into it.

At the moment, Spotify is holding firm and not firing Rogan. Ilya Shapiro is still only suspended from Georgetown. And Whoopi Goldberg is only suspended from The View. I guess we’ll have to wait and see how it all plays out.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

Are You Now or Have You Ever Been ...?

17 januari 2022 | 26 min

There is no doubt, at least to my mind, that we’re living through some kind of a mass hysteria event.

Writing on his site, John Kass says:

A weak president who is out of control, one who wildly denounces those who disagree with him as sinners against the state, blaming them for the failures of his extreme legislative agenda that can not generate enough votes in the Senate is not a hopeful business. It is a frightening thing. It is something out of bad paranoid fiction, or post-war Eastern Europe. But it is not fiction or history. It seeps from the babbling old man in the White House.

Most Americans aren’t worried about looking for racists on every block. They don’t think America is consumed by racial hate. They think America is a nice country. They like living here. They’re worried about other matters. They wonder why Biden and the Democrats won’t address their concerns.

The people are worried about inflation, not racist witches. After those wild spending and money-printing sprees from Washington, inflation is now higher than it has been in 40 years. It is eating a hole in their bank accounts, college funds and retirement savings. The people see the rising price of gas and wonder how long they’ll be able to afford meat.

They’re worried about confusion over vaccine mandates and vax passes and their kids being locked out of school in the lockdown blue states, of babies ordered to wear masks.

What they’re not worried about are the screams of the witch hunters, or whether to play some old-timey Democratic political game like “race cards.” They have lives.

Anyone can be seen as a Domestic Terrorist by Biden and Merrick Garland. Parents who protest school boards, anyone who might not want to take the vaccine. Anyone who objects to the practice of teaching “antiracism” to children, or even people who might object to gender theory being taught to their kids. If you misgender someone you can be banned for hate speech on Twitter. Is that now going to be the law of the land? Do the citizens have any right to dissent or object?

Worse, the Biden administration doesn’t seem to understand that the whole world is watching. They’re watching him confused and angry, demanding his citizens comply with his orders.

So insular and disconnected from reality are Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, not to mention the journalist class in the mainstream and the Blue Checks on Twitter, that they’re actually trying to sell the pitch that a bunch of rag-tag rioters, who were unarmed, had the power to bring down the mighty United States - to threaten our Democracy and to present any sort of challenge whatsoever to the most powerful military in the world. Imagine what Vladimir Putin makes of that. Or Xi Jingping. Or the Taliban leaders. Either they’re laughing at us or they’re kicking themselves for not realizing just how vulnerable the United States government actually is.

These aren’t leaders.

Writing on his Substack, Serve to Lead’s James Strock goes through how past leaders might have navigated January 6th to illustrate just how weak American leadership has become. From George Washington:

Would Washington have toyed with a mob from the White House—and not acted to forestall violence? This was the president who put down the Whiskey Rebellion.

Would Washington have fled the throngs marauding the Capitol halls? Would he have slipped onto an underground tram, repaired to an office building a quarter-of-a-mile away, barricaded himself in a bathroom in a colleague’s office, and tweeted that he was traumatized?

Would he have failed to recognize an oligarchy brazenly striking at the foundation of the Bill of Rights? Washington’s generation knew oligarchy and feared and fought it. Recall that the British East India Company owned the product that was thrown overboard in the Boston Tea Party.

And Teddy Roosevelt:

Were he a member of Congress, would he have allowed a police officer, perhaps one not equipped in riot gear, to shield him from danger?

On Monday, October 14, 1912, Roosevelt took a bullet to the chest, fired at point-blank range. The aging former president then spoke, without a microphone, for well over an hour, before accepting medical care.

Would any of the strongest leaders of this country project such an image of weakness to the rest of the world just to score political points? You think your average person on the Left looks foolish walking into a supermarket in a hazmat suit, imagine what the rest of the world thought of Nancy Pelosi’s Green Zone occupation of DC after Janaury 6th. We look like freaked out, hysteria-driven lunatics who can’t handle someone using the wrong pronoun or words that make us feel unsafe, let alone a riot that was not even as bad as the riots that followed the protests for months in the Summer of 2020. Whole businesses were burned to the ground. Dozens were killed. It was the closest thing to an actual revolution we’ve seen since the founding of the United States yet this one riot, in a futile, and frankly sad, effort to decertify the election count might have looked scary as portrayed on MSNBC but close up it was nothing this country hasn’t seen many times before.

Like in 2011 in Wisconsin and Michigan when protesters breached the Capitol to protest a vote on labor.

Like the actual bombing of the Capitol by the weatherman in the 1970s.

The difference was for four years the media had sold Trump and his supporters as domestic terrorists, White Supremacists and Nazi Brown Shirts. Your average Trump supporter holding a Trump flag and an American flag is an image Americans were already conditioned to fear. Had they never gone into the Capitol at all it still would have been to many the most frightening thing they’d seen in their lifetimes.

This is not to diminish what happened on January 6th. No doubt it was terrifying for those who lived through it, but it is how they connected it to what they believe is a “white supremacist” uprising that ties into a greater wave of hysteria and fear. Fold in the idea that only Trump supporters are anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers and you have a full blown dehumanization campaign aimed at one group of people.

Witches, Witches Everywhere.

In the book Pendulum: How Generations of the Past Shape Our Present and Predict Our Future, which is a loose interpretation of Neil Howe’s The Fourth Turning, Howe’s 80-year generational theory is divided into four 20 year-cycles, from a “me” cycle (individualism) to the “we” cycle (collectivism).

The authors Michael Drew and Roy Williams warned of what they call the “witch hunt phase.” As the “we” cycle winds down, the purges begin. Even though the book was written in 2011 or thereabouts, they tag the year 2023 as the height of our “witch hunt phase,” writing:

Senator Joseph McCarthy was an American promoter of this witch-hunt attitude at America’s most recent “We” Zenith of 1943 (see the “House Un-American Activities Committee,” 1937–1953); Adolf Hitler was the German promoter (see the Holocaust, 1933–1945); and Joseph Stalin was the Soviet promoter (see the Great Purge, 1936–1938). Our hope is that we might collectively choose to skip this development as we approach the “We” Zenith of 2023. If enough of us are aware of this trend toward judgmental self-righteousness, perhaps we can resist demonizing those who disagree with us and avoid the societal polarization that results from it. A truly great society is one in which being unpopular can be safe.

It has arrived right on schedule.

Back in 1692, the Puritans had come to America to flee religious oppression in England and were now building a “shining city on the hill.”

The Puritans were already locked into fear paralysis by forces beyond their control. Native Americans fought hard to keep their territory, murdered Puritans, kidnapped their children, killed their livestock. An epidemic of smallpox hit the community hard and it was a brutal winter in 1692. It is not all that surprising given those conditions and frankly, given ours, that they would collectively snap.

Into a utopia comes a major threat that triggers hysteria.

In Salem, it was adolescent girls thrashing around on the floor - the reason? They were possessed by witches. The girls accused any random person. Once accused, they were brought before the Oyer and Terminer and usually found guilty because there were no lawyers, there was no evidence and the only education on offer was the Bible. Once convicted they could confess as a witch and live, or deny being a witch and be hanged in the town square with people they’ve known all their lives cheering on their deaths.

20 people had been hanged before the bubble of hysteria burst. When the Governor’s wife was accused that was a bridge too far and the whole thing came crashing down like a house of cards.

Sooner or later, all episodes of mass hysteria do evaporate and history takes care of the rest. This depends on the society as a whole getting a grip. When you see half the country as your enemy, that is very nearly impossible.

We might be closing in on that moment but we are not there yet.

Have you No Decency, Sir?

The 1950s had all the markings of a manufactured utopia. Coming out of one of the most horrific eras in the history of mankind, World War II, American life in the 1950s had the facade of the same kind of “normalcy” as the American Left is living through today, only back then it was Conservative.

It was the epitome of Americana - though it always must be noted that this was not true for many of the underserved. President Eisenhower, among the many great things he did, would end segregation in public schools and in the military.

Back in the 1950s, like now, there was a happy alliance between the administrative state and Hollywood, or American culture. Many on the left were secretly Communist sympathizers, like many screenwriters and actors. They would be found out and Blacklisted after being brought before the HUAC and asked to “name names.” That was their version of a confession and it is seen as just as much of a dishonest move now. But it was the Republicans who were the main opponents as they tried to preserve what they believed was the American way of life. You can imagine how clearly defined that was in the 1950s.

They believed their very way of life was threatened by Communism - freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of religion, the right to rise in the free market system, to own property. And indeed, Stalin and other Communist dictators beat, tortured and starved millions of their own people to force compliance. There was no dissent allowed. Most lefties in America were blissfully unaware of just bad it was in Stalin’s Russia. The propaganda machine made sure only the positive news got out, just like in modern day China now.

The fear was that there were Communists everywhere injecting messages, spying on Americans, pretending to BE Americans. When actual Communists were uncovered, like the Rosenbergs, that kicked the hysteria into overdrive, making McCarthy a hero to the American public. He was so well liked that Eisenhower chose not to speak out against him when he was running for President in 1952.

When McCarthy started targeting members of the military, it was too much for even a stalwart Republican like Ike. He set about a negative PR campaign against McCarthy and was largely responsible for not just his downfall but the end of the mass hysteria episode against Communists, though the Cold War would rage on until the 1980s.

Racists, Transphobes, Misogynists everywhere.

Two things of significance happened in 2008. Barack Obama became the first Black President and the government bailed out big banks to the tune of $700 billion.

That year, two major revolutionary forces were born: Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party. In 2014, another revolutionary force would become a gathering storm, Black Lives Matter.

Occupy and the Tea Party began when social media was in its infancy. Obama was the first president to use Twitter to build his coalition online. It was seen as a smart way to campaign. Trump would do the same thing in the leadup to his run, around the same time - 2012. It was seen as the end of Humanity itself such that eventually Trump would be banned from the platform.

Back in 2008, the Left of this country had already been well on our way towards building our utopian America, our own version of the Shining City on the Hill. We were the beautiful people, the celebrities, the Silicon Valley whiz kids, the filmmakers. We were on the right side of the environment, women’s rights, LGBTQ rights. We were progressive, idealistic, fitness gurus, empowered women, who had spent the previous decade going to therapy and starting an anti-depressant regiment. We watched Oprah every day at 3pm. We vowed to do better, to be better, to offend no one. We were the “everybody gets a certificate” generation.

Our “goodness” was in how responsible we were. We recycled. We cared about the oceans. We worried about bullies and school shooters. And yes, we HATED the Right. They were the worst this country had to offer. They were “bad” and we were “good” and the Obamas were the leaders of all of it.

But we were also afraid of everything, even then. Our children were analyzed, scrutinized to see if they were sociopaths, psychopaths, bullies or geniuses. We drugged them, praised them, hoped for perfection but also wanted all of them to have an equal shot at success. They became teenagers afflicted with one disorder or another, which they wore like badges of honor, or identification. We did too. All of us on the left. We were both victimized by society’s structure and empowered to disrupt it.

Generation Z has now come of age knowing that they have to put people in categories by skin color, sex, gender and ideology. They know they have to announce who and what people are right off the bat and they somehow also know that the one thing you can’t be is a “white cis gendered male.” They also are smart enough to know that what you think or what you say might get you in trouble so they self-censor.

To challenge anything Obama did or said was considered, in itself, racism. This was especially true about the Tea Party and marginally true about Occupy Wall Street. People on the Left believe that Obama’s win threatened the White Supremacist empire that is America and his very presence led to a White Supremacist uprising called the Tea Party, which would eventually birth the Freedom Caucus, Sarah Palin and Donald Trump, to say nothing of its ring leader, Steven K. Bannon.

Racism would become fascism, which would become “white supremacy” which would become Domestic Terrorism.

I never questioned that it was based on racism. I believed this 100%. That is why I, along with many parents around 2013, began to spread the ideas of Critical Theory without even realizing it. We believed our beloved President was not being accepted by the White Majority. We began to see racism everywhere too. We also saw injustice everywhere. So did our children who came of age online, half of them social justice warriors that now patrol social media like the Children Spies in 1984.

The idea that we are all secretly racists or transphobes or misogynists or homophobes or rapists or we’re just one old Tweet or old photo or slip of the tongue away from being exposed and outed is driving us all collectively insane.

It was one thing when “Cancel Culture” was just a meme on Black Twitter. It was something driven by a community that had a collective voice online for the first time in American history. Eventually, though, it became obvious that Twitter was being used as an arena for public shaming and the mobilization of online mobs to destroy people’s lives. The fear of being targeted is so strong that most in power do whatever they can to avoid it.

Twitter’s mob rule now translates to on the ground protests, riots and mobs. How quickly did Kenosha burn before any of the facts about the Jacob Blake case came out? Due process was out the window because almost everyone was caught up in the wave of panic and hysteria. We should take a lesson from how fast that traveled from social media to the near destruction of one town. It does not bode well for the future. Somehow no one seems to have put all of these things together - the uprisings from 2008, social media, the Summer of protest in 2020 and January 6th.

“Cancel Culture” isn’t dangerous because of Twitter. It’s dangerous because corporations and now our government enact their own justice because of it. If the currency in an oligarchy is maintaining the image of “goodness” they will happily throw anyone under the bus to preserve theirs.

We don’t even need a dictatorship to police citizens in a Capitalist country. We just need the systems of Capitalism to adopt the ideology. And so they have. Vivek Ramaswamy has written a book called “Woke Inc” about this very thing. The average American citizen doesn’t have a chance.

There is not a corporation now, not a university, not a movie studio, or a book publishing house or a mainstream news outlet or a science lab that is not fully on board with the doctrine, who won’t side with the mob to purge their companies of undesirables, to preserve their power and their image.

All of the inane ways the big corporations are going “woke” embarasses them only they don’t realize it. They are pleasing a small minority of loud zealots who police them and will report them for their thought crimes but they are alienating the majority who most definitely is not in favor of this fundamentalism. The same is true of schools and now of our government.

The divide between the oligarchy and the working class is widening, and now with Joe Biden calling anyone who supports Trump, or resists their imposed doctrine, potentially a “domestic terrorist” or “white supremacist” what kinds of protections do our average citizens have? What lawyer would risk representing them? The more corporations comply with Biden’s doctrine, and the fear and hysteria that goes along with it, the more dangerous our country becomes for people with no power and no status.

A recent column in the Spectactor by Joel Kotkin warns:

The new autocracy rises from a relentless economic concentration which has engendered a new and fabulously wealthy elite. Five years ago, around four hundred billionaires owned as much as half of the world’s assets. Today, only one hundred billionaires own that share, and Oxfam reduces that number to a mere twenty-six. In avowedly socialist China, the top one percent of the population holds about one-third of the country’s wealth, up from 20 percent two decades ago. Since 1978, China’s Gini coefficient, which measures inequality of wealth distribution, has tripled.

And:

The time could be shorter than we think. The tech oligarchs are creating something similar to what Aldous Huxley called in Brave New World Revisited a “scientific caste system.” There is “no good reason,” Huxley wrote in 1958, that “a thoroughly scientific dictatorship should ever be overthrown.” It will condition its subjects from the womb so that they “grow up to love their servitude” and “never dream of revolution.” It will maintain a strict social order and provide enough diversion through drugs, sex and videos to keep their artificially narrowed minds occupied and sated.

The fusion of government with large oligopolistic companies, and the technologically-enhanced collection of private information, allow the new autocracies to monitor our lives in ways that Mao, Stalin or Hitler would have envied. A rising tide of money and administrative power defines the rising autocracy. If we as citizens, whatever our political orientation, are not vigilant, our democracy will become an increasingly hollow vessel”

Imagine a future when aritficial intelligence is tasked with policing our thoughts, our speech, our shopping habits, who we date, what we say online, what websites we visit. They can be as indifferent as Stalin’s army. They can simply erase or disappear anyone.

In its own way, Wall-E is about fighting back against authoritarian power disguised as “taking care” of its citizenry via artificial intelligence. There they lay, pudgy and compliant, zoned out on media, while their food is delivered to them. It is a wonderful metaphor for our potential future. With a government willing to sacrifice our image of strength abroad to satisfy panic and hysteria, and willing to use all tools at their disposal to stifle dissent, this future is not that unimaginable.

Here’s hoping a smart little robot like Eve shows up to help save us from ourselves.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

Truth, Justice and the American Way

1 januari 2022 | 22 min

What’s so funny about Peace, Love, and Understanding?

We’ll leave 2021 with no stronger grasp on collective truth than we had in 2020. One kind of dystopian nightmare is exchanged with another. I wish Biden had tried to unite this country. But he didn’t. I wish the Left had not gone so utterly insane. But they did. I wish I hadn’t seen just how corrupt our media class in this country is. But I did. I wish I didn’t wake up from the comfort of the delusion that I was fighting on the right side, but I did.

I have come out of 2021 as clear-eyed as I have ever been. There is nothing good about that. The more you see, the more you know, the worse it is. Indeed, ignorance is bliss.

I would be lying if I said I didn’t go through many very dark nights this past year. For most of my friends that would translate as: fear of Trump supporters destroying “Democracy Itself.” But for me it was the feeling of being completely and utterly alone. Physically alone. Emotionally alone. I had four animals around me at all times, hovering nearby for comfort and warmth. But I had no one to share quarantine with in 2020 or 2021. I only had the the terrible, abusive internet which I kept returning to again and again for friendship, warmth and kindness. What I would get back, though, was either more abuse, indifference, and cruelty. That can distort how you see the world and how you see yourself in it.

I have contemplated more than once if I was anywhere near close to ending it. I never would because I have a daughter, for one thing. Also, I would worry about my four animals. Who would take care of them? Then I would remind myself that this is what it feels like to live in an extremely polarized, algorithm-driven reality and that none of it was real. Then, I would take a walk outside, see the smiling faces of my neighbors, and feel my feet on the ground and I would remember what was real.

A good friend of mine dropped dead of a heart attack at 57, reminding me just how suddenly it can all be over. And that time spent on Twitter is time wasted. As hard as it is to quit, my goal in 2022, among others, is to spend much less time there.

I do want to say a big thank you to you readers of this Substack. Having you here, subscribing - whether or not you read my newsletter — has made me feel less alone. Less alienated. Some of you I know and some I don’t know. But just knowing you are here means the world to me.

What’s So Funny About Truth, Justice and the American Way

The one thing I wish for more than anything is to have a country back where we are allowed to express ourselves freely and openly without fear.

As Sam Harris wrote two summers ago:

“We appear to be driving ourselves crazy. Actually, crazy. As in, incapable of coming into contact with reality, unable to distinguish fact from fiction—and then becoming totally destabilized by our own powers of imagination, and confirmation bias, and then lashing out at one other on that basis.

This isn’t just politics and human suffering on display. It’s philosophy. It’s ideas about truth—about what it means to say that something is “true.” What we’re witnessing in our streets and online and in the impossible conversations we’re attempting to have in our private lives is a breakdown in epistemology. How does anyone figure out what’s going on in the world? What is real? If we can’t agree about what is real, or likely to be real, we will never agree about how we should live together. And the problem is, we’re stuck with one other.”

I had to think really hard about exactly what I wanted back in 2022. Then it finally hit me.

We need Superman.

More specifically, we need to be guided once again by his principles: Truth, Justice, and the American Way.

Truth

The alternative narratives are messing with our perception of reality. We watch every day as the narrative is distorted on the Left and the Right. It’s hard to know what is true and what isn’t. While many will blame Trump for this, he’s been gone for a year off of social media and it’s as bad as it’s ever been. The news media is less trustworthy than they ever have been. Objectivity is very nearly gone. We just seem to be stuck in this place of endless Civil War.

For me, it was when the New York Times and Twitter worked together in a struggle session over the Tom Cotton op-ed I saw for the first time how we on the Left distort the truth to serve the narrative.

How long did the Kyle Rittenhouse narrative rage out of control? Did the media ever walk back their accusations that he was a “racist white supremacist who used an illegal weapon to cross state lines and kill Black Lives Matter protesters?” None of it turned out to be true, none of it. And yet, most on CNN or MSNBC or Twitter had the courage to even ask whether it was true or not. That is just one example of how twisted our perception of reality has been for at least a year, but probably longer.

The good news is that there are still plenty of resources to set the record straight if you can pull yourself out of the media bubble and find it. My year would have been utterly lost without the genius that is Matt Taibbi. Notice how in this video he says he would never simply accuse someone of being a “white supremacist” without piles of documents to prove it? Where did that kind of ethics in journalism go? Well, we know where it went. It got fired from most of the publications in this country.

The New York Times’ biggest blunder of 2020 was losing Bari Weiss, who is a pioneer now in leading the way for new media voices. Weiss’ podcast and her Substack have been absolutely essential. I always immediately listen and I always immediately read anything that sails through my inbox from her.

It is Weiss who encourages her readers to be open-minded and brave. It is Weiss who understands that unless we all start speaking out we will continue to live in a country afraid of the truth. That is what is happening now.

There are so many brave voices online and all of them have been attacked at one time or another and have built platforms outside the mainstream. While it’s a benefit to people like me, we still lose much by having people like Matt Taibbi’s work not make the mainstream. At least Real Clear Politics will often link out to both Weiss and Taibbi, which ensures more people will find their way there.

Here are some other voices on Substack I have read and appreciated this past year — you should read all of them:

Freddie DeBoer Blocked and Reported’s Katie Herzog and Jessie Singal Walter Kirn Wesley Yang Michael Schellenberger Andrew Sullivan Katherine Brodsky James Strock Nancy Rommelman Antonio Garcia Martinez Jeff Einstein Glenn Greenwald Darryl Cooper Jeff Maurer Abigail Shrier The Liberal Patriot Glenn LouryPodcastsHonestly Pod (Bari Weiss) The Quillette Podcast Megyn Kelly Ben Shapiro Walk-ins Welcome with Bridget Phaetesy All-In Podcast with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg The Fifth Column Podcast with Kmele Foster, Matt Welch & Michael MoynihanUnspeakable Podcast with Meghan Daum

One of my favorite new discoveries is Sharyl Attkisson whose motto is:

She has gone through all of the media “mistakes” in the Trump era, and all of the media “mistakes” in the Biden era. She is an old-fashioned reporter who believes in objectivity and ethics. I know, right? What a shock. Her podcast has been a must-listen for me this past year as I know she will always get the story.

Justice

We have been subjected to trial by mob for at least five years now. When Trump was elected and the entire established order of this country, aka the ruling empire, believed itself to be the “resistance” everything went out the window. The press was blamed for putting Trump in power so they did nothing but subvert the truth to attack him on a daily basis. On Twitter, the presumption of innocence went out the window completely. Almost every case became partisan fodder, with justice being rendered by mob and no one really having the stones to stand up to any of it.

While Superman’s definition of justice might have meant taking the law into your own hands when institutions of power fail, I mean it here as restoring faith in institutions. Everyone deserves not only a fair trial but a path to redemption when “canceled” by the mob, for starters.

But worse than all of that is how Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and other elected officials have inserted themselves into ongoing cases without any verdict being rendered. This was true when Biden falsely labeled Kyle Rittenhouse a radicalized Trump supporter who was opening fire on protesters because he was a “white supremacist,” true when Biden expressed anger at the Rittenhouse verdict after a fair trial, true any time Biden has commented on a partisan side. That is not the President’s job.

Laying it out in painful detail is Jonathan Turley for The Hill, who warns Biden to change course heading into 2022 and he’s right. Says Turley:

A president plays a critical role in reinforcing our system of justice. He not only represents our constitutional process of representative democracy, but he is given specific power to correct injustices through pardons and commutations. When passions turn to rage, a president can bring a needed voice for fairness and patience in allowing our system to function without prejudice or prejudgment. Conversely, if the president rushes to judgment, he becomes an enabler of mob justice.

Every jury member in this country is potentially under threat from the mob and they know it. In our modern-day surveillance state where everyone is a “children spy” to make anyone famous for anything they do - where video clips are often taken out of context and misunderstood that is all the more reason to fortify our justice system and try to diminish the power of the mob.

It is immoral the way people can be accused of something online based on a tweet or something from their past and have no due process or any way to defend themselves. It isn’t easy standing up to it, but stand up to it we must.

The American Way

In the new economy of the internet and social media, no one is safe. You are expendable. It is considered a privilege to have access to a major platform like Twitter, Youtube, or Facebook, not to mention publishing houses, movie studios, even fast food joints, universities, libraries, the corporate offices of Coke or Nike. You have only one choice: SHUT UP AND COMPLY. If you can do that, you will thrive. If you dissent, your job is on the chopping block.

Does that sound like the American Way to you? It doesn’t to me. Even saying it out loud, “The American Way” feels like it’s verboten, doesn’t it? Why? Because calling anything American carries with it a source of shame, at least on the Left now. I saw a couple with a baby on Youtube offering up a recipe for vegan pumpkin pie say, “We no longer celebrate Thanksgiving because it’s representative of genocide.”

It should surprise no one that this year DC Comics decided to change Superman’s motto from “Truth, Justice and the American Way” to “Truth, Justice and a Better Tomorrow.” Though never part of the original series, The “American way” was added in the early 1940s as part of the WWII war effort, and changed to “freedom” in the 1960s. It sticks with me probably because it was revived in the 1978 Superman with Christopher Reeve.

But apparently, in the years since, The American Way just isn’t on-brand anymore. As CBS News points out:

Still, DC's decision to have the head of the company officially announce Superman's motto appears to be a pointed statement that the Man of Steel is a hero for everyone, part of a wider effort across the company to broaden its representation. Most recently, on Oct. 11, DC announced that Jon Kent — Superman's son, who also wears the iconic "S" shield as a superhero — would come out as bisexual.

Why wouldn’t people see America as the most inclusive country in the world because it is. No other country has so much inclusion, so much diversity and is such a cultural and religious melting pot as this one. We get to decide what this country is. It’s more than a little heartbreaking that in 2021 there is so much hatred towards America and the idea of America. She deserves so much better than that.

While the modern Left wants to tear down America and build a new utopia they forget that it already is a utopia. It is built on the idea that everyone in this country has the right to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. Just because these ideals weren’t upheld in America’s founding, that doesn’t mean they don’t exist or that we shouldn’t remember them or fight for them. America is the only country in the world that has Freedom of Speech written into its Constitution. At its best, we hold to those values, even when we disagree with what is being said.

America stands for the Land of Opportunity. People flee failing governments and oppressive regimes knowing that if they stake their claim somewhere in America they can build a business from the ground up. If their kids work hard they can become doctors, teachers, celebrities, tech moguls, and scientists, even millionaires here. No class system or caste system will hold them back, not if you stick to the founding principles of this country.

There is nothing funny about Truth, Justice, and the American Way, just as there is nothing wrong with Peace, Love, and Understanding. We need more of both everywhere and in everything.

I will close 2021 with this quote from a wonderful speech by Abigail Shrier - another Public Enemy Number One on the left - to the students at Princeton that she ends this way:

You will, each of you, have the chance to matter. You will find yourselves at hospitals or in banks or in courtrooms and at newspapers where you will see things happen that you know to be wrong—where you find that the standard line is actually a lie. You may have found yourself there already. If you’re fortunate enough, you may even find yourself one day with children of your own, knowing you are their best defense in this world. And you’ll feel the nub of your will, pressing you to do something—say something. And when that happens, don’t sit there like a sock puppet.

I’m 43, which I realize makes me very old to many of you. But not so long from now, you’ll wake up and be 43 yourselves. And when I look back on my life thus far, it occurs to me that the decisions of which I am most proud—the ones that strike like an unexpected kiss—are not the times when I obeyed the algorithm. They’re the times when I defied it and felt, for a moment, the magic and power of being alive. When I felt, even for an instant, the exquisite joy of not being anyone’s subject. When I had the unmistakable sense that I’ve existed for a purpose, that I stood the chance of leaving the world better than I found it. You don’t get any of that through lock-step career achievement and you certainly don’t get that by being the Left’s star pupil.

You feel that frisson when you choose a person to commit yourself to knowing full well that any marriage may fail; when you bring children into a world where there are no guarantees of their safety or success. When you summon the courage to fashion a life, something that will remain after you are gone. When you speak the truth publicly—with care and lucidity. And when you say to the world: you cannot buy me with flattery. Purchase my colleagues or classmates at bulk rate. I am not for sale.

Happy Happy Happy New Year dear readers. Thank you for reading. Thank you for subscribing. Thank you for being there. All the best for 2022.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

Houses of the Holy: The New Religion of the Left Threatens the Democrats

19 december 2021 | 24 min

The Democrats are out of touch and out of time.

There have been so many opportunities for the Democrats to turn things around since the wake-up call in 2016. To understand why Trump not only won but got that close in the first place is to have the kind of self-awareness that leads to genuine reflection and change. But that isn’t how it went down. As Barton Swaim puts it in the WSJ:

Which brings us back to Donald Trump. His nomination in 2016, and even more his election to the presidency, was an anguished outcry against decades of aggressions. It wasn’t wise or sensible, but it was understandable as a frantic attempt to stay the hand of an uncompromising cultural leftism.

The leftward-inclining elites who dominate American institutions didn’t interpret it that way. They classified it, as they had classified the tea-party revolt of 2009–10, as an expression of racism and hatred, thus relieving themselves of any responsibility to take it seriously or to discern its meaning. They employed every conceivable tool in an effort to remove Mr. Trump from office. Intellectuals and commentators called him a fascist; top-drawer authors blamed him for coronavirus deaths; officials of the Federal Bureau of Investigation worked with political operatives and for-hire spies to frame him as a Russian asset; the U.S. media accepted and publicized the hoax wholesale; former military and intelligence officials openly called him a traitor; federal security bureaucracies hatched plots to have him impeached; and the entertainment industry used every opportunity to cast him as a villainous madman and a snarling racist idiot.

They went all the way to Hitler with Trump. They genuinely believed a fascist had taken power and was about to start shooting people randomly on the street, silencing dissent, banning journalism, forbidding freedom of thought, and putting undocumented immigrants (illegal immigrants - meaning, they came here illegally but we can’t say that because it sounds bigoted) in “concentration camps.”

In the end, it would turn out that it was the Left, not the Right, that was exhibiting signs of authoritarianism. Not that you could ever convince them of that.

It doesn’t really matter how often they’ve been warned, they are digging their heels in, holding onto what they used to have rather than loosening their grip and understanding that they can’t micromanage an entire country to follow their newfound religion.

Now, every day there are more headlines aimed at the Democrats to try to solve the problem:

Voters are saying ‘no’ but Biden isn’t listening: Could the message to politicians be any clearer? Any louder?

Democrats’ only hope for 2024: jail Trump

A Pollster’s Warning to Democrats: ‘We Have a Problem’

Democratic Party’s brand is broken

The Democrats Need to Dump Harris Fast

The Democrats Mayor Pete Problem

Democrats lost in Virginia, but their win in New Jersey is more worrisome

Why A ‘Sister Souljah Moment’ Won’t Save Biden

And today’s latest offering from Benjamin Wallace-Wells:

What is the matter with the Democrats? On one level, the answer is simple. Voters with college degrees are increasingly siding with the Party, while those without are moving toward the Republicans, and there are more people in the second category than the first: about two in five voters in the 2020 Presidential election were college graduates. The Party’s prospects in the midterms do not look bright, and everyone involved in Democratic politics is exhorting the Party’s elected officials to do something about it. This has created a slightly comic situation, in which a group of highly credentialled people urgently instruct one another in how to appeal to those who are not.

But it’s worse than that. The small but loud minority that controls the Democrats is concentrated on Twitter, where the Blue Check army keeps all of the journalists in line, dolling out their daily “take” or talking points that actively distorts reality people can plainly see with their own eyes and spits it back out on the headlines of like-minded outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post, where it eventually trickles upwards to CNN and MSNBC. How you respond to these headlines will tell you everything about where you sit in the paradigm.

The problem for Democrats - they’re losing people. Daily. They aren’t bringing people to them. Who would want to exist in such a guilt-ridden, puritanical, judgmental community without humor or free thought?

If you watch any pundit on CNN or MSNBC try to struggle through any news report where they have to give bad news to Democrats you can see their inner panic. They have to offer up a sign that they still believe Trump is an existential threat to Democracy before they can finish a sentence. That, my friends, is a climate of fear. What are they afraid of? Twitter. Believe it or not.

The Best of Times

For a while there, things were really great. A new Camelot. The height was Lin Manuel-Miranda’s glorious Hamilton. It was a celebratory version of America where everyone had a shot at the dream because the founding documents are just that strong.

Hamilton represented the best of the Obama era where he rose to power and proved that yes, Black men in this country could be elected. Twice. In fact, Obama was instrumental in helping to inspire and promote Hamilton. This video was from 2009, when Obama had just been elected.

It should have been a sign that when Hamilton finally did open on Broadway the tickets were so prohibitively expensive no one in the working class could afford to go. It was, just as so much of what the Left does now, aimed at the privileged class.

By 2016, as Obama was leaving, Hamilton came back to the White House to perform again with its cast:

Cut to 2021:

Lin Manuel-Miranda’s In the Heights was deemed problematic because of “colorism.” They have just removed Thomas Jefferson out of City Hall in New York after 187 years.

It writes its own campaign ad.

Remarkably, shockingly, the Left is morphing into everything Trump said they’d be, up to and including removing the Jefferson statue.

The white liberals of the upper crust still use Obama, or black culture, or “antiracism” or “people of color” to give them a sense of purpose. You see this every day on social media. They “virtue signal” nonstop, along with self-flagellating, to prove they are worthy of their one true god.

As Darvio Morro puts it in Newsweek:

We're living in a golden age of awareness about white supremacy. You can't turn on your TV without hearing the phrase applied to the news, whether it's the explanation for Glenn Youngkin's victory in Virginia or Kyle Rittenhouse's actions in Kenosha. But more often than not, white progressives' newfound obsession with opposing white supremacy isn't helping. It's coming at Black people's expense.

Reverend Jerry McAfee of New Salem Church in Minneapolis has described white supremacy as a situation where white people are defining your reality and then forcing you to live under that definition. And sadly, that's what we're seeing now over and over: White folks on the Left defining a reality for us that doesn't comport with how we as Black people see things, then demanding we identify with it.

The reason is that this cultural-religious movement on the Left is not about race. It’s actually about class. Ideological compliance is still necessary. If you give them that you get to stay. If you do not, you have to go, no matter your skin color.

A New Religion

If the new ideology of the Left was and remains a religion, with a leader like Obama at the head of it, then it makes sense that when Trump won it would have sent the Left into a state of existential and spiritual panic. If they thought Trump was a racist, and everyone who voted for him was a racist, then this country must be racist and we need to ferret out racism from everywhere and everyone and everything. Every white person is potentially guilty of racism just by the color of their skin. We must teach our white children to understand this but we’ll it as “white privilege.” There is no escape from it. If you are white, you are an oppressor destined to succeed. If you are not white, or Asian as we now find out from a recent column on Loudoun County by Matt Taibbi, you are oppressed and destined to fail.

And it’s true that the Me Too movement was a reaction to Trump’s win, since Trump was accused by so many women and still won the presidency. They could not cancel Trump. They couldn’t shut him up. He stands as the most powerful person in the country, maybe the world, who spits in the face of the power elite on the Left, and his supporters not only love him for that, they excuse his faults and would follow him anywhere.

Because many of Trump’s supporters will follow him anywhere, the folks on the Left decided that meant they were in a cult. But cults force ideological compliance and punish dissent. That sounds a lot more like the left to me. There is also this idea that they are the protected people, the chosen people. How else to explain how the media went totally dark on COVID for the months and months when protesters poured into the streets by the hundreds of thousands. They were wearing the sacred cloth masks, that’s true, and their cause was bigger than COVID. Okay, but then when the protests ended, COVID became so serious it has completely wrecked the American economy and is leading to the collapse of the Democratic Party. Surely saving the country and the economy would be important too.

The truth is that somewhere between Trump, who was not cautious enough, and Biden who is too cautious is the right response to COVID. The one thing it never should have become is partisan. The red state/blue state divide is hurting this country. More people died in the red states but their economies are faring much better. Life seems almost normal in states like Florida and Texas, whereas in California, New York, Portland, and Seattle it feels closer to a dystopian nightmare of fear and rising crime and unemployment. What message does that send about Democrats in power?

Moreover, this idea that only they are allowed to protest, as violently as they want, and the media will cover for them, the politicians will encourage them, and the government and major institutions will overhaul all of their power structures to address the claims of systemic racism.

Unfortunately, for the Democratic Party at least, they’re about to find out just how many people they’ve now alienated and how bad it’s going to be in 2022 and 2024. I imagine the most religious among them, the mostly white women for whom “antiracism” is their newfound passion, will likely believe that the racists won.

The Worst of Times

Biden’s numbers didn’t really start to drop until August, after the disastrous exit from Afghanistan, where it’s not getting better, it’s getting worse:

Afghanistan Health Care on the Brink of Collapse [AP]UN: Afghanistan’s economy is collapsing `before our eyes’ [AP]More than 60,000 Interpreters, Visa Applicants Remain in Afghanistan [WSJ]On the front line as Afghan children battle malnutrition and measles [BBC]An Economic Catastrophe in Afghanistan [NYT]

The Independents bailed. The Blue Checks and the loyal Democrats hung on. Then inflation spiked, gas prices soared, then Biden backtracked on his promise not to mandate vaccines on a Federal level. Then Delta, then homicide rates spiked in cities, then smash and grab robberies, then the sudden and inexplicable lurch leftward by the Democrats such that you had General Milley mewling about “white rage” in Congress, and the Democrats with a handful of Never Trumpers could not stop talking about January 6th.

Bad as it was, it was not the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War. It is ludicrous to any American who watched the riots and the wreckage over the Summer, many minority-owned businesses without insurance burned to the ground, to say that. The Democrats said nothing about the attacks on police officers, nor showed any concern whatsoever for them until January 6th, then acted like they gave a damn.

Then came the disaster in Virginia where Democrats took their first big loss. The press said it was “dog whistles” and “White Supremacy.” Big mistake. It showed all of America yet again just how out of touch they actually are.

No one with a platform could dare venture down the road of what might have really gone wrong in Virginia. If “wokeness” is the religion and racism the ultimate evil no one would touch that topic, even if some of it was driven by parents desperate to get their impressionable children out of the hands of the lunatics on the Left.

The obsession with race and racism has led to purity tests where each person is expected to give their opinion that will show exactly where they stand on the issue. You have to completely support “critical race theory” or say it’s just teaching people about slavery or else you are a racist. This is deemed a “right-wing” issue but plenty of parents from all different backgrounds and skin colors on the Left are also opposed to the teaching of whatever it is that is going on in schools now. It isn’t CRT. It is a method of purging presumed racism from every white person in a way that resembles Scientology or Nxivm more than it does activism.

But it isn’t only that. There is all of a sudden a rise in transgender children that teachers and administrators are demanding parents accept, never question, and just happily go along with. This is a recent change in the Left’s ideology but it leaves no room for debate, for questions, for objections.

Biden’s numbers might climb back. Things might get better for the Democrats. The news coming out of San Francisco, that the Mayor was ready to finally confront the crime that has mostly destroyed the city is a good sign. But make no mistake, if you have shut down debate in a country that still allows for free speech, the dissenting voices are going to get more popular and louder, which explains why Tucker Carlson is the number one cable news host and Ben Shapiro is routinely at the top of the iTunes podcast chart.

Freedom of Speech, Law and Order, Patriotism

Last year, when the cities were exploding and we were heading into the 2020 election, I warned anyone who would listen that the Democrats were ceding three key American anchors to Trump:

* Freedom of speech

* Law and Order

* Patriotism

When I saw Trump’s speech at Mount Rushmore it was the first time any politician anywhere in our country, or any prominent person anywhere, said out loud what the majority of Americans were feeling but could not say. Here is what Trump said in August of 2020:

1776 represented the culmination of thousands of years of Western civilization and the triumph of not only spirit, but of wisdom, philosophy, and reason. And yet, as we meet here tonight, there is a growing danger that threatens every blessing our ancestors fought so hard for, struggled, they bled to secure. Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children. Angry mobs are trying to tear down statues of our founders, deface our most sacred memorials, and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities. Many of these people have no idea why they’re doing this, but some know what they are doing. They think the American people are weak and soft and submissive, but no, the American people are strong and proud and they will not allow our country and all of its values, history, and culture to be taken from them.

One of their political weapons is cancel culture, driving people from their jobs, shaming dissenters, and demanding total submission from anyone who disagrees. This is the very definition of totalitarianism, and it is completely alien to our culture and to our values and it has absolutely no place in the United States of America.

This attack on our liberty, our magnificent liberty must be stopped and it will be stopped very quickly. We will expose this dangerous movement, protect our nation’s children from this radical assault, and preserve our beloved American way of life. In our schools, our newsrooms, even our corporate boardrooms, there is a new far-left fascism that demands absolute allegiance. If you do not speak its language, perform its rituals, recite its mantras, and follow its commandments, then you will be censored, banished, blacklisted, persecuted, and punished. It’s not going to happen to us.

Make no mistake. This left-wing cultural revolution is designed to overthrow the American Revolution. In so doing they would destroy the very civilization that rescued billions from poverty, disease, violence, and hunger, and that lifted humanity to new heights of achievement, discovery, and progress. To make this possible, they are determined to tear down every statue, symbol, and memory of our national heritage.

Not on my watch.

Whatever you think about Trump, whatever you think about that speech, I can promise you that Americans are going to run into the arms of the Right if they are the only side fighting against whatever you want to call this new religion on the Left.

The future of the Democrats will depend on just how willing they are to confront this new religion that they are now foisting on America. I don’t see any signs that they are ready to do that. I see plenty of signs that Americans are getting more and more exhausted by them.

Maybe if they can stop being so afraid of COVID they can try to bring America back - but it’s hard to imagine they ever will. Inflation is not going away. The madness of “woke” is not going away. I don’t see a path forward for the Democrats and I haven’t for at least a year.

They’re losing young people. They’re losing Hispanic voters. They’re losing the suburbs. Right now, there isn’t any good reason to side with the Democrats. The only thing they are selling to Americans is fear - fear of voting rights, fear of January 6th, fear of COVID.

It plays on Twitter. In the rest of the country, not so much.

There are so many thousands of people out there that the Democrats, the Never Trumpers and the Left overall are just deciding don’t matter. That is not how you win elections. That’s how you lose them.

Let’s Go Brandon

A healthy movement, a healthy country can laugh at itself. But now, comedy can only really live on the Right, or at least not on the Left because they will not allow it in the mainstream. They are controlling everything they can and at the top of that list has to be humor.

Samantha Bee, Stephen Colbert, John Oliver, Jimmy Kimmel have become like preachers. Their comedy sounds like what you might hear on skit night at the Scientology headquarters. It’s not humor. If any political movement was more in need of lampooning it has to be the sanctimonious, holier than thou, zealots on the Left.

The Right did not use to be funny because they too had to stick to the party line, leaving all the great comedy to come from the left. Those days are gone.

Let’s Go Brandon is funny because it makes fun of a gaslighting media that desperately needs to be made fun of. It’s funny because it symbolizes how the press has been covering Joe Biden since 2020. The reaction to it makes it even more funny because it seems to really annoy the Left that it not only exists but keeps going viral.

It feels good to laugh, though, doesn’t it? We need laughter. Great humor is about dissent, which is about saying what can’t be said. Without dissent, without humor, without the truth, there is no saving the Left.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

The Kings of Film Twitter

21 november 2021 | 20 min

Barney was mostly invisible on Film Twitter. His 3,593 or so loyal followers hung around but he couldn’t break out much farther than that. He was a no-blue-check-nobody. You have to be somebody to get one. It’s a game of status. Who has it and who doesn’t. It was just outside of his reach. Was that fame? Maybe it was.

He knew he should leave Twitter. Just walk away from it. The sick game of begging for likes, validation, attention. Wanting to matter but not knowing where to start. No one cared what he thought. NO ONE. At least not on Twitter. He had a modest following for his youtube videos. That had given birth to a modest Patreon where he collected around $700 per month. That wasn’t bad but even he couldn’t live on that. And if he couldn’t live on that he could not move out and find his own place, something he dreamed about in that middle space between sleep and waking when anything seems possible.

He also wrote film reviews that were featured on Rotten Tomatoes, and the occasional Oscar predictions on his blog Where The Sun Don’t Shine. His readership averaged roughly 1,200 eyeballs a day. Zero cash there either. Mostly his readers agreed with him. He was just not someone anyone cared about. If they thought of him at all they just saw a rando normie writing things about movies that are probably not that interesting. He knew he needed to lay out the hot takes to get engagement. But the last shred of dignity he still had left kept him from doing that. He would play it straight. People would read or not.

Barney knew he wasn’t a somebody. He also knew he probably couldn’t get a job now anyway. He was a white guy and nobody was hiring white guys. At least not straight white guys. Not cis straight white guys.

“You were just born in the wrong era,” his mother told him. She wrote something on Instagram - about how she felt sorry for him but it was his turn to step aside, to let someone else eat at the table. She taught him how to be forgiving, she said, and he turned out great, she said. She was trying to get him to put his pronouns on his bio on Twitter: He/Him. But he couldn’t bring himself to state the obvious.

He/Him turned out great. Did she really write that? She did.

Barney flicked off tweets like lit matches. Some fizzled into a puff of smoke. Some had the power to set something ablaze. His followers liked him best when he was cruel. They liked the little fires and the big blazes. He routinely deleted the tweets that had no engagement. They fizzled out. Puffs of smoke.

It wasn’t every day Barney felt powerful. In fact, most days, he struggled just to look at himself. He would deliberately look away when he approached reflected glass or mirrors. He could not stand what he’d become after a year of lockdown. He didn’t like himself before that, even after being raised in the system of the granola crunchers in Los Angeles where the only valued trait was high self-esteem. Leave no he/him chubby gifted kid behind.

Windows and mirrors were everywhere, even in places where they shouldn’t be. On closet doors, on walls, in elevators. He practiced the art of not looking. His mother sent him a lot of old photos to remind him of their life together. Single mom and her perfect son. There he was ice skating. Totally alone. Not one friend. She caught him in an expression of surprise. His arms poked out like an upright snow angel, eyes too wide, mouth hanging open, hair that she’d tucked into a wool hat so that no strands were hanging down. He looked like a snowman caught in the headlights. Or was it snow person now.

“You have a memory from 2008,” Facebook told him. “You have a memory from 2010” his phone told him. He never knew what horror would surface each time the artificial intelligence decided he should re-engage with his past. Where would all of it go when he died? Would the memory algorithm just keep churning away? Does anyone ever really die online?

There was another photo of him taking riding lessons that he’d never wanted. But his classmates were all taking them, the girls were, so his mom wanted him to take them - you know, to look kind of like a normal kid. There he was sitting on a horse, not really smiling, his hair tucked tightly into a riding helmet. His expression was only slightly less miserable than the one on that poor horse. They made him ride that poor horse. No good could come out of that. He had to pretend again. Pretend the horse was into it too, pretend he was having fun, pretend he was normal.

He had to look at that photo before quickly deleting it. So much of it was for her, his “woke” white mom. Happy mom, happy son.

Her Instagram was a collage of happy and activism. Happy activism. Hapactivism. White wine glass in the sunset happy. Picking up trash on an “Environmental racism” meet-up happy. There was that flushed look white women get when they were high on “purpose.” His mother was all in with the pussy hats and the ongoing efforts to “dismantle the patriarchy” and destroy “systemic racism” and heal the planet before it explodes in a fiery ball of carbon. Goodbye planet. Poof. Puff of smoke. She was like your textbook “libs of TikTok” who fell to her knees and screamed at the sky when Hillary lost. She laid on the couch for a year and drank a bottle of wine every night. Then came the Women’s March, the Muslim March, Kavanaugh, the hashtag resistance. And before long, her face changed. She was flushed with glassy-eyed purpose.

But she was also picking apart everything he did. Like she woke up and he was all wrong. Her perfect son is not so perfect anymore. She also worried he had a dark side. Like he was an “incel.” She thought if he put his pronouns in his bio people wouldn’t think that about him. Everything he did seemed to set her off. Most of the time they ignored each other. Barney had no escape, not since COVID locked them in together for a year. She did march in the Summer for BLM. But that didn’t count. When you have a higher purpose you can’t worry about pandemics. That was what she said.

His mother seemed to be happy if you saw it from the outside. But if you knew her you would see how fearful she was all of the time, how she could not stop staring at her phone, how her fingers flew across the keyboard when she was getting in a fight with someone online. Hours she would spend tap tap tapping. Then they’d have dinner and she’d recount the fight. She had long since stopped talking to Trump supporters but there were still “problematic” people on Facebook who would say something offensive. Hours would disappear and she’d still be staring at her phone or computer, tap tap tapping away.

But she would not show that. Instead, she would snap a picture of their plates then post it on Instagram to show just how healthy it was, what a good mom she was, how normal their lives were. NORMAL normal. Just like everyone else.

Barney never allowed her to take pictures of him now. Enough of that. He couldn’t look at himself even in a photo. Even in a selfie. When he did accidentally see himself, like a memory eruption, it scared him. His hair was still too long. His eyes looked sad and droopy. They were blue, once upon a time. Now, against the dark half-moons that shadowed them, they looked colorless.

He knew he was two people. Himself, the quiet loner whose mom loved him anyway. A supercomputer nerd who has been online his entire life. He resisted the cliche of being a porn addict and chose instead to buy vintage nudie mags off Ebay. The kind with pubic hair. Even if he did use Pornhub he would never describe himself that way online. He couldn’t be that guy, even if he was that guy.

Online, he was someone else. A different voice came out, one that was in constant reactive mode to what he saw scroll down his feed. He was outspoken and brave, even angry. One tweet would set him off on a long, threaded rant that no one would read. A few hours later, with maybe one “heart” he would delete it.

He was starting to like who he was on Twitter more than he liked his real life self, even if he knew it was an intoxicating cocktail of dopamine, hijacking the amygdala and fight or flight that was keeping him engaged. He was smart enough to know that if you are getting content for free you ARE the content. He knew that but he could not stop. His 20 or so followers who engaged with him made him feel something. He knew he just needed the one day, the one viral tweet, to become a somebody. Then he could try for the blue check.

It was an ordinary day when Barney became Twitter-famous. It all had to do with “that b***h.” Everyone knew who “that b***h” was. She was always piping up to defend bad people. She was fearless in the worst way. She couldn’t shut up. Just shut up. But instead, on a day after the shooting in some town at a massage parlor was being labeled a hate crime, he called her a racist. Not in so many words. He insinuated she had written anonymously about a Chinese film director’s movie doing better because now all of Hollywood would be sympathizing with Asians.

All he wrote was, “I think I know who said that.” Everyone on Twitter knew that he was referring to “that b***h.” Because she was the only person with balls big enough to say something like that. She denied it, of course, but she was losing hundreds of followers. It was fun watching her flip out. It felt good somewhere Barney couldn’t even pinpoint. PING!

She was like, “I can’t believe no one on Film Twitter, people I’ve known for years, wouldn’t stand up for me. I can’t believe everyone is so silent. You know I would never have said that.” They were all laughing at her desperation. Barney knew it. He also knew on Twitter it didn’t matter if something was true or not. The ritual had to play out anyway. Each person cast in their roles and everyone showcased their morality when they took a side. If they liked her tweet that revealed their own ideology. No one wanted to risk that. Liking his tweet was rewarded. CRUELTY is good on Twitter. It is the heat and the combustion that drives the engine, baby.

Then his follower count started to balloon as more and more of the blue checks RT’d his revelation about who the baddie was today. She had so many haters and they were crawling out of the darker corners of Twitter to send him screenshots of things she’d said over the 14 years she’d been on there. Would that be Barney’s fate? Would he really give so much of his life over to a stupid website that took so much and gave so little back? Except today it was giving something back. He was gaining lots of followers.

At some point during the day she went on offense. Because of course she did. She was never one to back down. She tweeted, “In the old days it used to be you’re fat, ugly and old. Come on, losers, you can do better than this.” She was putting on a strong front but it was obviously hurting her, being called a racist and a white supremacist. Barney didn’t exactly say that but others did. By the end of the day five people had contacted the movie studios that advertised on her site and told them what she said.

“It wasn’t me,” she tweeted. “I think My American Life is a great movie and worthy of winning Best Picture so why would I say otherwise?” Then she became defiant, “go ahead and take away my advertisers. Go ahead and destroy my business. Do you think that will shut me up? Think again. Keep sending me those tweets. I’m going to make you famous for them.”

She was such a dumb woman. Didn’t she know when it was time to shut up? There was no coming back from this. The tweets just kept coming and coming. By the end of the day Barney had 1,315 likes and 5,670 RTs. His follower count went from 3,593 to 5,400.

Imagine thousands of people at once engaging with a little button shaped like a heart, formerly a symbol of love, now branded as part of a hive mind agreeing on something in a day. Pressing the symbol of love on the cruelest tweets was how Twitter was winning the game. You give love for hate. You love what you hate. You erase love for hate. And all the while you signal to other people that you agree with them. With their fake love-hate .

Barney wanted to make movies. That was his dream. For now, though, he put these little montages he made on Youtube. They were sort of popular. He was trying hard to build his platform. “Your WHAT?” His father had said, with that twinge of judgment Barney hated. His father lived in Texas with his real wife and family. An affair with his mom produced Barney but he calls every once in a while out of duty. He knows nothing about the online world. He has no idea what Twitter is.

“MY PLATFORM” Barney had to say back, weakly. How could he explain what a platform was to his boomer dad? His conservative boomer dad. His boomer dad who had voted for Trump - a fact he had to most definitely keep hidden. A stain on his otherwise mostly pristine invisibleness on Twitter. All someone had to tweet was “your father voted for Trump.” Maybe he could escape it. Maybe not.

“My platform,” he would patiently explain, “is about how many people I am connected with, who know who I am, who will engage with my content.””Engage with my content,” his father said, not even hiding his disdain. ”Okay Boomer,” Barney snapped back.

“Getting likes on youtube is not going to make you much money, Barney. I always told you to get a real job but you never listened. Your generation just wants a free ride. You complain about capitalism completely unaware that your entire life is ruled by things built by capitalism. Your phone, your laptop, your social media, you—-”

He did spend one summer with his dad and that family. They all ate at the dinner table, no cell phones allowed. The kids - a pair of blondes, a boy, and a girl, had chores they had to complete before they could spend time with their friends. They were church-going folks whose idea of a wild time was scoring a six-pack of Budweiser and drinking it by the creek before stumbling home beer drunk, which wasn’t drunk at all.

They were nice enough to him but every time he opened his mouth it was like they exchanged a glance of unspoken agreement where Barney was confirming their suspicions about him. He slept in the guest room and unfortunately heard his dad and his wife having sex in the middle of the night. Heavy breathing, grunting, and then it all went silent. Barney spent the whole time subtweeting about them to the amusement of his twenty or so followers back before Trump won and everything got too serious to do that.

No matter what else he did in life, no matter how big he got on Twitter, he was always going to measure his success by what his MAGA DAD thought. Like it mattered. He could make one anonymous phone call and send the DOJ after his dad. He was at that Stop the Steal protest on January 6th. Maybe he should let his dad know that he holds that kind of power over him. Is that a bad thing to be, he wondered, or would that make him a good citizen, helping to protect the country from terrorists.

Everything was tightening up and closing in. There was going to be a group that got to stay and a group that had to go. Barney couldn’t save his dad. They were living in two different countries now, more or less. Besides, Barney had enough to worry about.

He had about 20 DMs. One from a Slate reporter who wanted to do a story on him and how he found out Alexandria Anderson had been the person who wrote the anonymous comment about My American Life. He also saw he had a DM from Alexandria herself. She had unblocked him to send it. “Why are you doing this to me,” it asked. “What did I ever do to you?”

Barney stared at her words. He thought about any answer that would make sense to any person. He floated above himself then. He could see what he was. Staring into his phone, angry and frozen like his mother, a glow lit up his face. So this was it. This was all of it.

The next DM came from Alexandria and it had a screenshot of someone else that said, “haha, Twitter thinks that b***h wrote this but I did. More fun to watch her squirm.”

Barney was supposed to do something about that. He was supposed to fix the problem. But how could he delete a tweet that had so many likes? Heart heart heart heart. Love hate love.

No, he would not delete the tweet. He would answer the Slate reporter’s DM. He would do the interview. He would ride it until the wheels fall off. Maybe then he could get verified. A real blue check next to his name on Twitter. All he had to do was just finish the day. That’s what everyone on Twitter did. They just finished the day. Let the truth sort itself out later.

Barney wanted to take a walk. He could hear his mom furiously typing in the other room. It was getting dark. No dinner yet. Was there still a world outside? He didn’t know. He walked to the door, put his hand on the knob, and stood there, his heart racing, his cheeks flushed, his head swimming. No, he thought. Not just yet. And he went back to his room and picked up his phone.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

The Horror Movies I Love are Frozen in Time

31 oktober 2021 | 19 min

Stanley Kubrick’s sublime The Shining breaks all of the rules. It breaks the rules of adaptation by completely upending the plot and meaning of Stephen King’s original book. The plot of the movie doesn’t really even make sense from a story point of view. King’s book is very much about telekinesis inside people and inside the Overlook Hotel. The hotel wants the boy Danny because his powers are so great. In their way is the mother Wendy, strong and protective, who will keep them from getting the boy. They use recovering alcoholic Jack, a writer, to kill off the mother and bring the boy into the fold.

In the movie, Jack simply loses his mind inside the potentially haunted Hotel. Kubrick has simplified it greatly, to focus on the claustrophobia of the snowed-in hotel, and how that might break down a marriage.

If The Shining was released today it would be trashed by some 200 self-appointed critics who operate more or less as a hive mind that monitors issues of social justice, as every industry controlled by the left does, as much as it does anything else. But in 2021, there is no such thing as a purely great movie unless it crosses all of the t’s and dots all of the i’s. Amazon Studios has even written it into its DEI guidelines for filmmakers. The left has been consumed by its own righteousness and has become every bit the zealots of the Evangelical Right.

The Shining is allowed to mostly exist as a film made before the religion took hold (pre-2014). It would not be made now the same way. Not a chance. First of all, you could probably count on one hand those working today with Kubrick’s talent and ability. But secondly, there is no way it would be told the way Kubrick decided to tell it.

Kubrick’s The Shining would be described as misogynistic, no doubt, by many of those who cover film. The irritation with the actress Shelley Duvall by director Stanley Kubrick and star Jack Nicholson is clearly evident and, dare we say, hilariously funny.

But it’s funny in that way you might only get if you are a member of Generation-X, that is those of us who really were jaded throughout our young adult lives and preferred subversive art to almost every other kind. We think Taxi Driver is funny. We think Blue Velvet is funny and, yes, we think The Shining is funny.

But it’s also brilliant. The reason is, quite simply, that Stanley Kubrick was a great director. He took material that wasn’t his and made it his.

Kubrick’s The Shining spoke about the social issues of the time in a quiet whisper, like many of the films of the late 70s did. Feminism, in particular, was taking a hit. If you remember the 80s you’ll remember how no woman wanted to admit she was a feminist. It had a negative connotation, at least to any woman who wanted to attract a man. You heard “I’m not a feminist but…” a lot. It took a while for the word to come back into style. Of course, now it barely exists as a stand-alone movement because it’s been overtaken by trans rights, or non-binary or LGBTQIA+. Feminism? What’s that?

Stephen King wrote The Shining in 1977 and is (and was) most definitely married to and influenced by a feminist, his wife Tabitha. So his book isn’t the same kind of commentary that the film version of The Shining is. If you are familiar with King’s work you know what an important person Tabitha is to him. He has called her his “ideal reader” and there is no way she doesn’t get the first pass when he writes a draft. Because of that, even with the awkward sex scenes factored in, his books have always been feminist-friendly.

Kubrick, however, was having none of that. The film version exists inside the mind of a man who is driven so insane by his wife and son that he imagines a hotel driving him towards murder. If you had not read the book, that might have been your takeaway. I find the book actually scary and the movie kind of funny. Much of that is due to Nicholson’s hammy but hilarious and magnetic performance as Jack.

Nicholson appears to be trolling Shelley Duvall throughout, and though she famously had a traumatic or difficult experience on the set, the result is something weird and unexpected. The more distraught she becomes, the harder he is on her and somehow it becomes funny. This is one of the things about comedy that is hard to explain. If you dissect it and analyze it there is nothing funny about it. But it somehow it is.

Even though Shelley Duvall is mousy and bullied by Jack in the movie, she still manages to be the feminist hero in the film that she isn’t really as much in the book. That’s because she is “saved” by the character Scatman Crothers plays in the film (he’s killed in the film, leaving Wendy to be the hero).

The acting in The Shining is great, the story is pretty good but what makes it timeless is the directing. If you want to know what great directing is, watch this film. Shots like this one. Kubrick doesn’t have to make this scene funny. It’s supposed to be scary - it’s the scene where Hallorann realizes that Wendy and Danny are in danger. But he makes it funny anyway in the two zoom shots.

One of the bummers of living through 2021, if you love movies, is that the notion of what makes a great director comes secondary to their gender or skin color. A white man like Stanley Kubrick is expected to recede into the background to allow for marginalized groups to step up and be counted. And while there is certainly nothing wrong with inclusion, when it comes to great directing, enforcing “equity” can mean you are going to watch people praise movies that aren’t very good and ignore movies that really are great just to keep things equitable and fair.

The best horror movies ever made were directed by men, and those include Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and The Birds, Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, Brian De Palma’s Carrie, John Carpenter’s Halloween and The Thing, and They Live, Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist, Ridley Scott’s Alien, William Friedkin’s The Exorcist.

I also count Steven Spielberg’s Jaws and David Fincher’s Gone Girl as horror films, even if they don’t fit the traditional definition.

Jennifer Kent who directed The Babadook, and Mary Harron who directed American Psycho, are among the shortlist of women whose films are on par with the best of the genre.

I don’t know why men are better directors than women. Some would say a patriarchal society handed directing to men, or that men are mentored and guided where women aren’t. Some even say that men are more visually inclined than women since they were the hunters, where women were the gatherers. Most people I know don’t want to have this conversation. It is verboten. We have to all just pretend everything is normal and everything is going fine and the only thing holding women back was sexism. Maybe someday that will be true. Maybe more chances for women will mean they eventually make movies that are as great as the ones men have made. I don’t know. I just know that right now they do not. Not if we are counting the greatest films ever made.

From my perspective, I love great movies. I hope that the best directors will still be able to make them and be celebrated for them, regardless of whether they are male or female. I do sometimes worry that great movies will have to come second to the ideology going forward. Woke casting or storylines are easy to spot for someone like me, who grew up on movies from different eras. My daughter tells me she and her friends mock films and advertising that are too obviously “woke” because they know when they are being pandered to as any generation would.

Great movies have to tell a truth. They have to be true to what they are trying to do. To get there, it is sometimes necessary to, as is the case with The Shining, be willing to risk people saying it is “misogynist.” It might be, but there is no denying that it’s funny that a guy like Jack would be trapped in a hotel with a woman like Wendy. Backing off even a little bit from that essential premise and the whole movie falls apart.

A great horror film like Jordan Peele’s Get Out very much exists in the post-2014 universe of the “woke” because it is from the POV of a black filmmaker whose nightmare is racism. It tells that truth extraordinarily well. But going forward, it seems that the rules can sometimes hurt the story in various ways. Like the idea that only white people can be “bad” and people of color must always be “good.” Or like casting films in order to meet diversity requirements but in so doing throw the whole film off, as I have seen recently in a film that is not yet out. Here, they cast a black female in the role of what is written as a traditional WASP. It’s important that she is a WASP because the whole arc of the main character is about being shut out of that unattainable world.

The Great Awokening also demands that directors be pure and good from their childhood onward. They also are scolded for the harsh treatment of actors that drove them to their emotional brink, like Shelley Duvall in The Shining or Kim Basinger in 9 1/2 Weeks. The new requirements also forbid casual or gratuitous nudity or maybe even sex scenes. The nudity and sex in Halloween would be deep-sixed, and probably that way too graphic scene in Don’t Look Now with Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie that so many for so long insisted was “real sex.”

For all of these reasons and many more, I kind of think the best horror films, maybe the best films overall, are going to have to live in the past, in a time when artists were free to tell stories and direct films in ways that didn’t necessarily comport to good behavior or keep humanity on the righteous path.

Happy Halloween, Dear Readers. Go watch a great movie.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

Operation: Save Joe Biden's Poll Numbers

25 oktober 2021 | 17 min

Somewhere in Washington, in a parked car.

Ike: It’s a dumpster fire.

Mike: They’ll bound back.

Ike: Didn’t Elon Musk invent some kind of brain enhancement thing? Is it too soon to get that for Biden? Is it only chimps?

Mike: What?

Ike: Nutrisystem … Nutra grain …

Mike: Nuralink!

Ike: Is it too late to join human clinical trials?

Mike: Don’t be an ass. Everybody gets old.

Ike: Most people don’t get that old.

Mike: The boomers. They built it all. Now, they’re destroying it all. Everything is coming apart. Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer - how did it all go so wrong?

Ike: Seriously, calm down. It’s not that bad. He can bounce back. If he passes those bills the press will be giving him slobbery blow—you know.

Mike: Please don’t say it.

Ike: He’s putting on the heat with Manchin, the press keeps bullying Sinema - how long can she possibly hold out? Although her fashion sense tells me she doesn’t exactly want to blend in. Got Obama out in Virginia to drag MacAuliffe over the finish line. They have Americans whipped up into unmanageable panic and fear with January 6th. They’ll do as they’re told. Polls will rise because that is the story we’re going to tell. Reality is less of an issue than what we say the reality is. Reality isn’t what you think it is. Reality is just a matter of opinion. If we say everything is going fine, then everything is going fine.

Mike: What?

Ike: They’ll bounce back. He’s too big to fail. They are too big to fail. The press, the blue checks - they will not let him fail. They put him in power and they don’t want to look like fools. We got this.

Mike: It’s more than the polls. There is a disconnect between reality and fantasy. The people who are dictating what the Democrats do are themselves completely out of touch with at least half of the American people. What the Right thinks about the Left is closer to reality than what the Left has decided the Right is. The Democrats only have one option to win elections: To scare voters. Rolling Stone comes out with a January 6 piece just before a big election. But what no one ever says is that there were two separate events that day. One was legal and one wasn’t. They’re treating the whole thing, all of the people who were there to protest lawfully and rightfully into insurrectionists. They weren’t. And yet. If they can keep the people scared they can maintain some power. Once that fear goes away, though, they are sunk. But they need fear and fear is destroying the country. Democrats really think that this is the way forward. It is a way forward. To war.

Ike: You’re overthinking it. I’m telling you, the kind of power backing the Democrats right now is insurmountable. We just need to spitball a few ideas to throw out into the public to let them know the Biden administration is on their side. Maybe stop testing baby puppy beagles. Just a thought.

Mike: Oh you mean like removing Thomas Jefferson from City Hall? Pronouns Day by the State Department? This was not supposed to be America’s second revolution. You start taking down the statues of confederates, that’s one thing. Teddy Roosevelt - now it’s getting weird. You take down Jefferson, that’s the end of the American experiment.

Ike: Okay, so those didn’t work as well. We have to think outside the box here. Ice cream, bike rides, that disastrous Town Hall with Anderson Cooper…not working. So what about, you know, maybe a kind of casual fun thing. Slow jam the news?

Mike: BIDEN IS NOT OBAMA! He doesn’t have that kind of charisma. No one wants to see him on TV. The country is falling apart.

Ike: Do you want me to give you a “yeah but” or are you past the point of no return.

Mike: We just dig around in our pockets and find that one shiny penny that gets us off the hook. Yes it was a global pandemic, yes we were so freaked out we were wearing face shields and lining up outside of Costco but when hundreds of thousands hit the streets it was yeah but they’re wearing masks. Yeah but they’re outside. In May. Of 2020. I know what your “yeah but” is going to be. You’ll say yeah but Thomas Jefferson isn’t being taken down, he’s just being moved. But yes moved after being called an offensive racist! THOMAS JEFFERSON!

Ike: Yeah … but …what do you me to say?

Mike: I want you to say Biden will start facing reality. He’ll start being the guy who would never go for removing Thomas Jefferson from City Hall. It’s not that hard. It’s the least you’d expect from a president. The very least.

Ike: Those who voted on it don’t represent the Democratic Party or Biden.

Mike: Yeah but. Yeah but. Yeah BUT!

Ike: Why are you generalizing? Okay, so we all know what Thomas Jefferson did with Sally Hemmings and all that, what this whole country did building itself up to be the greatest country in the world, wasn’t exactly pretty. Do you think the elite class who own million-dollar homes are really going to give them back to the indigenous people they claim to care about? Like Gwyneth Paltrow and Laura Dern? No. Are they going to give away all their money to families living in poverty? Not a chance. Taking away the Jefferson statue allows them to feel as though the right people, long since dead, aren’t around to defend themselves or make excuses or virtue signals on Instagram, are the ones paying the price for progress. That is enough. Take down the statue and they can keep their stuff.

Mike: What we need is someone with courage. Wisdom. Someone to stand up to Twitter. Teddy Roosevelt took a bullet to the chest and still went on to give a speech. He could handle Twitter.

Ike: Biden is just trying to get through the day. And I don’t know if TR could handle Twitter. Public humiliation is a crippling fear.

Mike: They voted for the guy in the middle. The moderate. If you could sum up what they voted for it would be: Not Bernie Sanders. Not Elizabeth Warren.

Ike: They didn’t vote FOR anything. They voted against something. Or someone. The American people don’t know what they want. We tell them what they want.

Mike: What if America is being sabotaged. What if there is an entire army of spies infiltrating all of our institutions and slowly weakening them.

Ike: I think those are just Berkeley graduates.

Mike: It’s all starting to make sense now. What if you were smart enough to destroy a country not with bombs but with ideas. Idea pathogens. What if you could weaken their education system, weaken their military, weaken their scientific research by figuring out how to knock out those who are genuinely the best at what they do but because they might not meet the DEI requirements they have to go work at Costco just to find employment.

Ike: I’m sorry, you lost me, man. Get a grip. It’s not that big of a deal.

Mike: Not that big of a deal? The whole plane has crashed into the whole mountain.

Mike: Think about it: you have no choice but to hop aboard the Woke Express, destination: Utopia. And if you have no choice that means your military has no choice, your teachers have no choice, your media has no choice, your entertainment has no choice. How can a country function when it is at war with its own foundational principles? Think of how easy it would be to get on Twitter and call everything racist. The Chinese totally have our number on that. They laugh at us because of it. They know they just have to press that button and our entire system goes into DEFCON 1. Think of how easy it is to throw us off our game, to scare us into distraction and panic.

Ike: You’ve been watching too much Tucker Carlson.

Mike: Me and everyone else in America. It used to be easier to pivot when no one did.

Ike: But now they do.

Mike: Now they do.

Ike: Even Jake Tapper.

Mike: Even Jake Tapper.

Ike: Even Rachel Maddow. Especially Rachel Maddow.

Mike: I think people are watching because they’re angry.

Ike: Trump is gone. They have nothing to be angry about.

Mike: Except Trump isn’t gone, is he. They booted him off social media just to prove the half the country that votes for him that they are elites who are above even the President. Now he’s got some social media thing that is worth twice what the New York Times is worth. He is headed towards running a business worth 20 billion.

Ike: He’ll screw it up.

Mike: Doesn’t matter. This is only moving in one direction. It means the left is collapsing. You get that, right? Once they start firing editors at the New York Times for words they said on a field trip, it’s over, man. Thomas Jefferson - it’s over.

Ike: Come on, we have a whole army on Twitter. The blue checks!

Mike: What, that’s like 3,000 people max.

Ike: We have Zuckabucks.

Mike: America is an idea. An idea that is crumbling and being replaced by ideas that have already proven themselves failures. Even Vladimir Putin knows this. Even Xi Jinping knows this. They see what America is becoming. They also seem almost sad to watch its decline. I always used to go to sleep at night thinking I lived in the best country in the world and that every other country envied our scrappy tale. But look at us now.

Ike: Look, man, it’s really not that bad.

Mike: It is that bad.

Ike: White men have ruled this country since its founding. So they’re taking a well-deserved hit. Let’s recenter the narrative for a change.

Mike: Oh, yeah, no big deal, like every person who built this country, drove scientific achievements, made the best movies, wrote the best books. We’re just gonna pretend they’re expendable?

Ike: By stomping on and exploiting marginalized people.

Mike: Oh b******t. Right, like Einstein?

Ike: Pretending is not so bad. This whole country was founded on pretending. Jack Dorsey and Jeff Bezos and Joe Biden are the perfect patriarchs America wants. What you can see is fully compliant, what you can’t see still holds all of the power. Take away a Jefferson statue here, implement DEI mandates there, vote for Kamala Harris. We are all playing a game that all of a sudden we’ve solved the problem of inequity. But it’s all a game, man. It always has been. So let’s just pretend a little longer. That is what we’re paid to do so shut up and dance.

Mike: So what’s next?

Ike: We’re primates. We probably need an alpha male to take us out of chaos in the final analysis. Round and round and round in the circle game. No one on the left has that kind of courage right now so you do the math.

Mike: So after that all that, we’re primates, that’s it?

Ike: Well if I had to guess, yes. Of course if I said that out loud I’d be fired.

Mike: So in other words, Trump 2024.

Ike: Your words, not mine.

Mike: We are seriously going to run a candidate who couldn’t even beat competitors on her own side against Trump?

Ike: Do we have a choice?

Mike: Why don’t we have a choice?

Ike: Because if you critcize her or seek a replacement you will be called a racist, just as you would have in 2020 if you suggested she wasn’t the best choice for Veep. How else are we going to get an overeducated group of social justice Zoomers to turn out?

Mike: Let’s go, Brandon.

Ike: Yeah but.

Mike: Yeah.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

Getting Tired of the Puritans

18 oktober 2021 | 25 min

In 2021, there are only two paths for the left generally and the Democrats specifically to take: totalitarianism or collapse.

Some days, like today, when the New York Times’ Kara Swisher parrots the talking points of the progressive left (what does that even mean anymore) while pretending to write about Big Tech, it feels hopeless. The massive wave of support to cancel Dave Chappelle, or have Netflix pull his show The Closer, is overwhelming.

And yes, this too shall pass. As long as no one is being thrown into gulags or meth-addicted Nazis aren’t marching into France we’re on the better side of history. But still. This is America. And these are supposedly liberals. Suddenly it’s okay for a mob of mostly white people to condemn, chase and attempt to destroy the life of a black man for jokes. Jokes are harm, they scream. Words are violence, they insist. COMPLY OR ELSE they demand.

So few people have the stones to stand up and say ENOUGH. There aren’t adults in the room there are helicopter parents who pander and soothe and over-protect. Or they’re baby boomers who still think pushing back against mass hysteria is selling out. Don’t forget that those who marched against the Black List and McCarthyism were loathe to push back against actual Stalin. Don’t forget what led to the fear of communism. Don’t forget the gulags and the censorship and the propaganda and the forced conformity of thought. The struggle sessions are back but at least they don’t go hand in hand with starvation and torture.

Why are we here? Because of three simple words: intent doesn’t matter.

Intent doesn’t matter because inside of each person is a corrupt evil that must be exposed. Once exposed, that person is to be hauled out in the court of public opinion. Confess your sins and apologize, even if you did nothing wrong. Deny your sins and be banished from Salem Village, I mean Twitter, I mean your platform. You will be blacklisted in polite society, aka the revenue stream.

Of course, there is a market for those expelled from Salem Village, I mean Twitter, I mean the ruling class, I mean polite society. Outsider content can be found on Youtube, podcasts, right here on Substack - desperate sane people looking for voices of courage, looking for people who will say what they can’t spend a lot of money for some relief, for someone to remind them that they are not crazy, that none of this is normal.

Dave Chappelle was “transphobic” because he defended “transphobic” JK Rowling in The Closer. But Swisher, and everyone else, can’t humanize Chappelle so they can’t measure nuance in what he’s saying in his show because intent doesn’t matter. He doesn’t pull punches but he also calls his transgender friend Daphne a “she” and speaks of their great friendship. He tells the audience that Daphne took her own life, jumping off of a building after defending Chapelle on Twitter. He makes one final joke that “she couldn’t be a woman because only a man would do some gangsta s**t like that.” The crowd goes completely silent, and then he adds that he told that joke because Daphne would have loved that joke, and, he says, “that’s why she was my friend.”

He also said he set up a scholarship fund for Daphne’s daughter. Most people I know in real life don’t understand the sudden lurch in the direction of “there is no biological difference between men and women.” Most people I know don’t believe that and can’t believe the militancy around forcing people to accept that. Chappelle’s show, like it or not, reflects what the majority in this country thinks. You can’t change their minds by forcing policy, as the left is now doing. Trying to destroy Dave Chappelle and Netflix over it only makes that acceptance harder.

It is shocking that Ted Sarandos has held the line in standing up for Chappelle, who no doubt brings millions of subscribers to the platform. Shocking to see someone in the plain light of day in the moneyed class say something as truthful yet controversial as “I don’t believe jokes cause real-world harm.”

If you talk to anyone on the left they will brush it off. Either they deny “cancel culture” exists at all, or they say you are painting the entire left and the Democratic Party with the same brush as a small but vocal group of activists. Or they say the punishment is not that severe, after all, Joe Rogan and Dave Chappelle, even Louis C.K. can still make money outside of Salem Village, I mean Twitter, mean the ruling class, I mean polite society.

Whatever it is that people call “Cancel Culture” exists. It always has. It is also called mass panic or mass hysteria. It afflicts a community of people who are connected to each other enough to feel the same fear at roughly the same time.

This study concluded that fear spreads on social media like a game of telephone, growing every time it spreads from one to the next. It also concluded that “unbiased factual news of a story does not seem to halt growing panic.”

The study followed 154 participants on social media. The total group was divided into 14 chains of 8 people. The first person in the chain reading multiple neutral and factual news articles and then writing a message to the second person regarding the story. The second person then wrote a message to the next person until all eight members of the chain had been involved in the news thread.

When the sixth person received a message from the fifth person, it was sent with the original news story.

In all 14 chains, news stories that dealt with “dreaded” topics became more and more negative and tended towards fear and panic as it progressed through the message chain. Importantly, the effect of this distorted dread was not changed when the unbiased facts were presented to the sixth person. The neutral/original article had relatively zero impact on changing people’s negative outlook.

The study’s author concludes:

“Society is an amplifier for risk. This research explains why our world looks increasingly threatening despite consistent reductions in real-world threats. It also shows that the more people share information, the further that information gets from the facts and the more resilient it becomes to correction.”

So far, Ted Sarandos is among the very few in the corporate class to take a stand against the ridiculous notion that words, essays, jokes cause “harm.” Most of them have not only caved but are using this “woke capitalism” to keep themselves in power by selling to those who care about their own virtue. In other words, you shop at Whole Foods because you can afford to shop there but you’ll feel good about spending your money if virtue is attached to it.

Just look at how quickly the elite class abandoned their “antiracism” when coming across people of color who don’t comply with the doctrine. Larry Elder is a “white supremacist in black face,” Candace Owens is a “Nazi sympathizer” and now Dave Chappelle, whose politics are on the left, is a “transphobe.” I won’t say these are modern-day lynchings - that isn’t my place to say. But I most certainly can say they are modern-day witch hunts because that is exactly what they are.

It was supposed to get better when Trump left office. It has only gotten worse. Those who continue to obsess on Trump without helping to crash the house of cards on the left are simply kicking the can down the road by treating the symptom and not the disease.

Biden was meant to be a bulwark against the “radical left” but he has not been. He acts as though he has just won the second Civil War and genuinely sees himself as a kind of savior to the black community under siege by half the country. There is a reality to this that can’t get through to Biden because he is managed by people who pay too much attention to Twitter and mainstream media and not enough attention to the outsider voices who are shouting from the rooftops about the crises at hand.

Don’t expect the mainstream Democrats like Chuck Schumer or Nancy Pelosi to push back even a little bit. They will not. No one can or will. Not in the New York Times, not in the Senate, not on Twitter. But Ted Sarandos did. Whether he can hold the line or not is a different story.

As Leonard Cohen would say, there is a crack - a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in. That’s how the light gets in.

Ted Sarandos is Like Thomas Maule

Thomas Maule was a quaker in Salem in 1692. Being a Quaker in Salem was almost as bad as being a witch. They were routinely beaten and banished, tormented because they did not accept the One True Religion of Salem Village. The Puritans didn’t leave the Church of England to erect their “shining city on the hill” only to have it then polluted by outsiders of a different faith.

Building their utopia meant they had to police their utopia constantly, handing out scarlet letters, and brutal punishments. They punished “fornicating” and blasphemy more than actual crimes. Salem was a miserable place. I imagine the only two outlets for their misery were fornicating and blasphemy. I imagine if they were then punished for these they might become a bit, shall we say, pent up.

It was a brutally cold winter in 1692. There was a small pox pandemic. They were under constant attack by the Native Americans. In fact, in the book The Witches by Stacy Schiff she wrote that children who were kidnapped by the Native Americans often wanted to stay with them rather than return to the oppressive nightmare back in Salem Village. The only education, offered just to men, was the Bible. They all believed in witchcraft to explain almost everything that could not be explained by God.

They lived huddled in fear. Fear of mysterious noises from the woods at night, of unpredictable attacks by the warring tribes that surrounded them, and eventually they began to fear each other as an imaginary wave of witchcraft began afflicting every kind person, and even some animals. In their own primitive way, they believed their trials were fair due process. But when your only evidence is spectral, fairness is not really the point.

When a handful of adolescent girls began throwing fits and pretending to be possessed by witchcraft their lives were transformed for a time. They were allowed more freedom from the daily grind of chores and prayer. They were suddenly powerful. More powerful than any man in town, that’s for sure. They were closer to God because they could see who was a witch and who wasn’t. All they had to do was point their finger and play-act to end someone’s life. The hysteria spread rapidly because the fear was unmanageable. It wasn’t just fear of the Devil. It was fear of real things that were killing them, threatening them in unpredictable ways.

Those accused were given a choice. Confess and live as a witch, or deny and be hanged. Looking back on it now, it’s easy to see who were the liars and who was telling the truth. Lying was what they wanted them to do. Lie about being a witch, confess and beg for redemption. That kept things harmonious in the town because then they knew who their enemies were. But if you denied it, it sent them into a frenzy of fear. The most famous of these is Giles Corey who was an angry, belligerent man who beat his own wife continually, but who, when accused, not only denied it but denied it defiantly. They put heavy bricks on his chest until he couldn’t breathe. Still, he denied it. He died with his tongue hanging out of his mouth rather than lie to God.

This conundrum caught the attention of Maule. He and his wife went along with the witch trials at first and testified against one of the first accused. But at some point, he saw what others couldn’t, maybe because they were already outsiders. Think of him like someone who writes on Substack. He saw what a scam it all was. 20 people were executed in four months with many more waiting in jail. Eventually, the accusations became too ridiculous for even the church leaders to go along with and the trials came to a halt.

The Puritans in Salem were so ashamed of their social contagion that had paralyzed their village in fear that they really tried to make it all go away. The story would never have been told but for Thomas Maule who wrote in 1695, “Truth Held Forth and Maintained.” In it, he stated, “[F]or it were better that one hundred Witches should live, than that one person be put to death for a Witch, which is not a Witch.” From the Maule Family’s website:

Official reaction to Maule's publication was swift and severe. By order of the Massachusetts Bay Colony Council and by warrant issued by the Lietenant Governor of Massachusetts, Maule was arrested, his properties searched, and 31 seized copies of Truth Held Forth were burned. He was charged with seditious libel, and imprisoned for at least a year. Brought before the Council and the Governor in Boston, he refused to answer any questions, and demanded to be tried in his own county by a jury of his peers. Finally, he was released on bail, and the grand jury brought a charge of slanderous publication and blasphemy. The trial took place at Salem, in 1696, before his Majesty's Superior Court of Judicature, Court of Assize and General Gaol Delivery, the justices present being Thomas Danforth, Elisha Cooke, and Samuel Sewall. Maule argued cleverly and causticly, Maule addressed the court and argued that with respect to religious matters the court had no power. He then addressed the jury, pointing out to it that it was bound by the King's law, no part of which Thomas had broken. He also told the jury that the presence of his name on the pamphlet as author meant nothing since it was the printer who put it there; this point had no basis in the law. The jury returned a verdict of not guilty, explaining to the court that the pamphlet was insuffcient evidence of the charges against Thomas Maule because his name had been placed on it by the printer. Though the court pressed the jury for a guilty verdict it rendered an acquittal whose impact was visible not only in the words and faces of the enraged judges but also in the events that unfolded thereafter.

The impact of Thomas Maule's acquittal cannot be understated. For the first time in a reported trial, the jury ignored the directions of the court to find a defendant guilty. The growing public impatience with secular interference with religious matters undoubtedly affected the jury, which made clear that it disclaimed any authority by the court over religious matters. The break between governmental control of secular matters and religious matters that surfaced in Thomas Maule's trial set a precedent that contributed at least in part to the First Amendment right to freedom of religious expression.

This past year we have all witnessed mass hysteria run amok on social media, with the mainstream media also unable to withstand getting caught up in it. Fear spreads like wildfire, gaining momentum as it moves through people. It isn’t just one person triggered. It’s potentially thousands. It is certainly not millions. The millions are the ones watching in horror as our culture collapses.

There is room in this country for different points of view. The idea that jokes could cause harm is simply not backed up by the statistics. While it’s true that jokes can lead to justified bullying which could definitely lead to harm, banning the jokes themselves is a road to ruin if, for no other reason, it makes them more powerful.

This is a good moment to look around. Who is standing up for freedom of expression and who is calling for censorship and who is staying silent? Remember their names. These stories will be told, just as the story of Salem Village was. History has never been on the side of those who crumble under waves of panic, fear, or hysteria. It has always been on the side that humanizes, empathizes, and stands up for the rights of the individual and the outsider in the face of forced conformity.

And that is why Thomas Maule is remembered as a hero. What Ted Sarandos does next will decide whether or not he will be remembered as a hero or a coward. The activists have turned what would have been a funny special people watched and laughed into a war that will demand people choose sides. How does that do anything for their cause? They are demanding compliance and in so doing will end up alienating far more people than they will attract. I know they don’t care, of course, but just saying.

As for the left, every day they make Trump more appealing because he isn’t afraid, even a little bit, of offending them. And that, more than anything, will define who wins elections and who doesn’t. Yes, all the money and power are still with the virtuous class, but Americans aren’t really built to obey totalitarianism.

What’s the way out? Bravery. Courage. Humanity. Reach out to those you are being told are your enemies. Don’t become a loyal tribe member. Defend those accused and attacked. Mostly, you have to be willing to not care if people accuse you of something, or hurl insults your way, or swarm you and attack you. If you don’t care, they can’t hurt you. This dynamic played out beautifully in the Black Mirror episode Nosedive, which is about learning how to be a nonconformist in a culture that demands it.

In 2021, we don’t have to fear hanging or torture. We just have to withstand being screamed at, hated, and shunned. That ain’t no big thing. It’s just another day in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

Reimagined History: Monica Lewinsky, The Academy Museum, and Kim Kardashian

10 oktober 2021 | 22 min

Probably every society goes through revisionist history. Usually this happens gradually, over time, as stories become myths which become legends. Truth or fiction, it doesn’t really matter, does it? Even now, stories are being retold to serve various agendas. The story of the election in 2020 has become a dark and witchy fairy tale on the left and a religious persecution story on the right. Each side clings to the myth that helps them sleep better at night. Yes, there are monsters roaming the countryside but it’s okay because we have MSNBC to protect us. Trump didn’t really lose the election because superhumans do not lose. Trump is an omnipotent force two ways it seems. Devil or Diety. Take your pick. The truth is much less complicated but it is risky to abandon the myths because the myths define us.

There probably isn’t a single event that can’t be told a different way, or from a different perspective. I often think about that one Quaker back in Salem who spent a year in jail to make sure the story of mass hysteria and hangings was told. The horrors of Salem are so much bigger and so much more terrifying that the kitschy way Salem is remembered as witch hats and broomsticks is misleading.

These are stories of children being forced to condemn their parents as witches. Poor women and their babies dying in prison. A man being crushed to death because he would not confess. Hangings that were applauded by the townspeople in the town square. Fear does strange things to us humans. Collective fear is unmanageable.

The Monica Lewinsky myth is being retold because in the post Me Too era even the die-hard Democrats have turned on the withering charmer. He isn’t now an echo of JFK whose romps with women were part of his legend at a time when men were applauded for their James Bond-like sexual allure. I remember being at a party in the 90s and making the joke about the Lewinsky scandal, “when they were handing out b*******s in the Oval Office where was I?” It wasn’t much of a joke. But people did laugh. I suspect every single person at that dinner party now believes Clinton Me Too’d Monica. Or Monica Me Too’d Clinton.

We women who lived through these eras remember full well what things were like, and even as far back as the 1970s when it was not uncommon for 12 and 13 year-olds to lose their virginity and brag about it. Molestation was everywhere, hidden from view or barely noticed or addressed. Adulthood was cool, childhood wasn’t. Not until the 1990s. Then those of us who grew up in the careless 70s began to notice that it was all bad, hardly any of it good. No seatbelts, smoking at 10, smoking pot, watching porno, rated-R movies. The parents who protected their kids tended to be Conservatives who still went to Church on Sundays. But kids of the Left? We were raised like weeds. Some of us made it, some didn’t. Then in the 90s we all watched Oprah and went to therapy. Then we figured out that everything was bad. We vowed to raise our kids better.

Monica was a kid of the 70s too who grew up in the 90s to think it was cool to chase a married guy with seismic charisma. She famously flashed him her thong to show interest. And back then, wearing a thong was kind of risque. Not like now when everyone wears them. Poor Monica thought he was in love with her and that he would treat her well. She didn’t realize that when she became a problem she’d be tossed in the garbage. And trust me, as someone who knows all too well what it’s like to get in the way of a man who is using you as a side piece, that doesn’t feel good.

To her credit, Monica doesn’t entirely blame “Predator Bill” for the affair. But she does tell a big lie in the casting. Beanie Feldstein is no Monica Lewinsky. They want it to look like Bill Clinton cornered a wallflower who isn’t used to male attention, and while that might have been how Monica saw herself, that isn’t how the world saw her then or now. She was vivacious and pinup-like in her beauty. Beanie Feldstein is pretty in a different way. There is no polite way to talk about the differences between the two women - it is a matter of taste and the fact is, Monica was his taste and Beanie Feldstein would have been easier to resist. Although I suspect that if she flashed her thong at Bill he would have still gone for it. It isn’t so much an insult to Beanie Feldstein as it is a distortion by Monica to edge ever so slightly to the person she wants the public to think she was, rather than the bubble-headed girl she actually was.

You see, the Me Too movement depends on one simple fact - women are never to be held accountable ever for anything they do regarding sex. It is always the man’s fault because men are predators and women are innocent. Always. To tell this story from the vantage point of now requires Monica be rewritten as Beanie Feldstein because that is the only way to see the power imbalance between the two. If they had cast someone more Monica-like, the show would have been accused of trying to blame the victim. They would say the show sexualized a child, even though Monica was in her early 20s.

It’s gross what Bill Clinton did, what Hillary Clinton did, and how all of us defended them for so long. To me, the worst thing he did was move her out of the White House when she became a problem. That is sexual harassment because he’s punishing her for their affair when in fact, he was an equal participant. Why should she have to suffer? No, he should not have been impeached for it, and yes it was yet another in an ongoing string of attacks to bring down the Clintons. And the public back then did not care because being “good” was not the ultimate goal of the left like it is now. Goodness rules everything. Monica wants to be seen as good and so this story helps her do that. Bill Clinton also wants to be seen as good but there isn’t much he can do about it now except keep apologizing and hiding from the press. But still, Monica was punished more or less and Bill Clinton wasn’t. I guess punished might be too strong of a word - after all, Monica has relied on this story her entire life for both her work and her image.

What bothered me most was the attention and time it took to chase the Clintons and the attention Bill Clinton had to pay to his impeachment instead of focusing on the job of the American people. After all, 9/11 would happen not too long after this. We need our elected officials with their eyes on the ball. That is their job. But the opposition party wanted the Clintons out because they had held onto power for so long because his charisma put him in power for two terms.

I feel that way now about the four years Trump was in office and how badly we all handled COVID in his last year. We could have and should have worked together rather than continue to rip the country apart to make sure Trump left office. The truth is that the Democrats wasted time and energy chasing Trump, energy that could have been spent a different way.

The Democrats are now in the same place the Republicans were back then - doing everything they can to destroy the other side to remain in power.

The Lewinsky story will always be told only one way from now on. Those of us who lived through it will soon die off, and all that will be remembered is that Bill Clinton was not JFK but something closer to Harvey Weinstein.

The Academy Museum is a Beautiful Lie

It is indeed beautiful, what the Academy wants to be. They, like all of Hollywood, all of science, all of the medical-industrial complex, heck even Nike and the NFL have decided that their very existence is exemplary of “White Supremacy” and that their history, their achievements, their glory and everything the public loves about them is not a source of pride but a source of shame. White shame. Or, as we used to say in the 80s, white guilt. I didn’t used to know what a “self-hating Jew” was back when I first heard the term. I was in my 20s and a Woody Allen fan. I would hear that phrase a lot back then, along with “white guilt.” Now I know what a “self-hating Jew” is. I know why they would be self-hating. I guess it’s similar to being called an “Uncle Tom.” It’s about moving beyond your own station, which is defined by your ethnicity, to join the ranks of the WASPs.

Woody Allen was called a “self-hating Jew” because his movies were, for a time, about escaping his own history and his own heritage and remaking himself as someone of that privileged, white elite on the Upper East Side.

Being Jewish in Hollywood was never all that popular when it came to whom they’d cast in movies, even if it was popular in who made those movies. The reason there were so few Jews in movies was probably baked-in anti-semitism throughout the country, but it was also because the country was mostly white and mostly Christian. The market decided what got made and justified its “white wall” when it came to the Oscars.

We woke up from 2020 without the free market to remind us of what actually sells and what doesn’t. 2020 was like a massive ship wreck that sends all of the debris floating to the surface, with everything seen in one big picture to be judged. Just as the Titanic had lower and upper classes, how the rich survived and the poor didn’t, the ship wreck tells the tale. There was no market so there was no justification and suddenly the ruling class scattered in a panic, caught in the bright light, their entire past suddenly upended and floating on the surface.

It did not go well. By the end of it, the Academy implemented an inclusion mandate to “instruct” production companies and creatives to make sure they hired BIPOC and women - at a time when there is some debate over what the word “woman” even means. My friends who crow at me about being a conservative apologist on abortion always say, “wait, you're defending the side that is robbing women of rights they’ve fought for over decades.” I always think, but don’t say, “you mean birthing people?”

The Golden Globes were cancelled when Tom Cruise, Scarlett Johansson and Mark Ruffalo were SHOCKED, shocked that racism was going on here, even though the HFPA nominated a black female director before the Academy ever did. Oh, wait, the Academy never has.

The British Film Academy (BAFTA) took the voting rights away from its members entirely, opting instead for a select committee to hand-pick nominees to meet the diversity and inclusion standards 2020 demanded. In the end, they picked two white actors for the leads anyway who they went on to win Oscars.

And we have the Academy museum, a beautiful building with some film memorabilia that is worth seeing, and a drop dead gorgeous Hayou Miyazaki exhibit, but it is most definitely a somber reflection to ease the pain of so many good people in the Academy who do not want to be seen as dirty rotten racists. That isn’t really something any good liberal in this town would want to admit, but take it from someone who knows Oscar history inside and out and has been covering it for 20 years — this is the Oscar museum that would very much catch 2020 Hollywood in a time capsule but it is not Oscar history.

Every part of it is like trying to head off any potential criticism that would become clickbait for the major newspapers and Twitter. The lesson of 2020: don’t become someone’s sanctimonious, self-righteous think piece that goes viral. They definitely subverted 90% of their actual history and cherry-picked what diversity they could find here and there to portray a reimagined version of the last 94 years. I know about the Academy’s White Wall. I have been writing about it since 2001. I wrote about it so emphatically that I lost half my readership in 2011. For a long time I was known as the only person covering the Oscars who wrote from the POV of “diversity and inclusion.” I remember when no one used the word “inclusion” at all and then suddenly just using “diversity” was wrong. I pushed for movies by black directors to be recognized, and for black actors to be recognized. I did this every year because I thought it mattered.

Walking through the museum you’d never know what their history was or why activists fought so hard for inclusion in the first place. Sacheen Littlefeather is now a point of pride for the Academy when it was a point of embarrassment way back when.

To date, only one black female has won in Lead, Halle Berry in 2001, but she is featured at the Academy Museum. They have devoted an entire room to Spike Lee and walking through you might think Do the Right Thing was nominated for Best Picture. It was not. He has won a single Oscar for writing BlackKklansman. You also might think that Citizen Kane, featured prominently at the museum, won Best Picture. It did not. How Green Was My Valley did but it is nowhere to be seen.

They have the gorgeous backdrop for North by Northwest hung on a wall. You might think Hitchcock won an Oscar for directing. He did not. Or that he was nominated for North by Northwest. He was not. They could not even show Mount Rushmore, however, without affixing a mea culpa:

Then why use it at all? Why hang the backdrop to begin with if you are ashamed of it? And if you are ashamed of it, why not put up all of the things you are ashamed of? I guess because this way they can have their cake and eat it too. They can display the cool art as long as they slap down the whites for their bad bad dirty rotten behavior of the past. Gee, sounds fun, doesn’t it?

What you won’t see are the icons the Oscars were actually made on, maybe because their histories are too problematic? The big studios aren’t even represented a little bit. The major icons who won Oscars aren’t there - no Marlon Brando, or Dustin Hoffman or Meryl Streep? Where was Meryl? Did I see her there, icon that she is? I cannot recall.

Steven Spielberg’s Jaws was nominated for Best Picture, but not Director. He is a big donor and has quite a presence in the museum. There are bits and pieces of the empire that Hollywood once was but they have been sidelined in order to amplify the marginalized faces and voices who fought so long and hard to be seen in an industry that was driven by the market and a market that was driven by the white majority. That’s the truth. But Hollywood does not want that to be the truth.

That’s why you’re seeing so much awkward colorblind casting now. I just watched a movie that took place in the late 70s that was based on a memoir of a working-class white male who got into Yale and pined for the Westport girl who was simply out of his league. She slept with him but never really considered having a relationship with him and ends up marrying the right kind of man. This is based on a true story but they thought casting a black female in that role was “inclusive” — in fact, it throws the whole thing off because you’re thinking about Yale and Westport and WASPS and the Great Gatsby and actual white supremacy and the white wall - and working-class New York who aren’t exactly woke and weren’t then. You can’t just erase that history. That is what led to the activism now. Otherwise, there is no need for diversity and inclusion.

But the point is to look good. That is what everyone in Hollywood and on the left wants more than anything.

I felt a little funny walking around the museum, knowing everything I know about the Oscars. But it’s very much in keeping with how I feel now, as a person from the left trying to make sense of what has become the left in 2021. I barely recognize it and they barely recognize me.

The good people of the Left will love this museum. It is a monument to their new religion, after all, their utopia’s screed writ large. This is who they will be going forward, and all they ever wanted to be looking backward. They are happy to have the heat of accountability taken off, even if it means sweeping everything under the carpet for a time. Maybe someday it will all be told, the good, the bad, and the ugly. But that day is not today. And that museum is not this one.

Kim Kardashian is Finally Accepted

It was a long hard road for Kim Kardashian. Hated for so long by a culture that just didn’t know she was what it wanted. She hung on. Her family has built an empire worthy of the gilded age and is maybe the best example of America in decline. How many billions do they make in a year? Kim is vegan now, as is her sister Kortney and Kylie Jenner has announced her entire product line will be going vegan. They display their massive wealth - their many cars - their huge mansions - their luxurious vacations - their revolving door of men - their next generation ready to carry on in their high heeled footsteps. America’s new aristocracy.

Twitter and Reality TV might have birthed Trump, but Instagram and Reality TV birthed the Kardashians. There isn’t any stopping any of them, especially since Kim is now part of the ruling class and an accepted member of the new woke elites who have gamed the system in order to indulge in their excess, guilt-free. Just signal your virtue and you’ll be fine.

I can’t criticize Kim too much. After the 2016 election, the only thing I could do was watch Keeping up with the Kardashians. I watched the entire show, season by season because it was so empty-headed, so pointless, there would never be a single thing to trigger me in any direction. I could just lay there and stare at them under all that makeup, eating their Health Nut salads and blathering about this or that. But Kim has made it. She hosted SNL. She is now one of them.

Like all of Hollywood, especially comedy, finding anything funny is not easy. They have sadly been sucked into the overly sensitive ideology of the new left where offending anyone is off the table. It’s a win-win to bring on Kim, a subject often mocked by the likes of SNL. Now they can scramble for ratings somehow, some way. Their ratings were way down for their premiere so they are in desperate need of Gen-Z love.

Kim’s appearance boosted SNL’s ratings from a 3.5 to a 3.8. They saw a similar boost when Elon Musk hosted, according to The Wrap. It’s not hard to figure out why that might be. Hollywood overall is alienating people with its politics. Take out politics completely, or people whose identities are wrapped up in politics and maybe you can start to bring around the rest of the country. It’s a trade-off. Success via the market or virtue without it.

It’s a beautiful thing, revisionist history. Gen-Z would never know, and will never know, just how hated the Kardashians once were. They’ll never know why anyone would care whether there was Reality-TV or not. The Kardashians aren’t doing anything major corporations haven’t been doing for decades: selling beauty to women whose identities still depend on it. It’s funny that in a time when gender is fluid and female sexuality is being purged from Hollywood action movies, the Kardashians wear their hyper-extended curves with such pride, caked in layers of makeup, stuffed full of fillers and implants - so female it’s practically visible from outer space.

How do those kids make sense of all of it? The cameras everywhere, the social media personas, the millions of likes on pictures of them, the massive birthday and Christmas displays of their lives for Instagram, the balloons, the flowers, the private jets, the makeup tutorials, the closets, the playhouses. Gobs and gobs of money and stuff.

Kim can now tell her life’s story with pride about all that she’s accomplished in the time she’s been in the spotlight. She’s finally gotten back her old body from before she had kids. She’s working on her law degree and freeing people from prison.

The Academy, Kim, Monica have erased how others saw them and have reimagined a better story. Those stories have become legends and will one day be myths. No one ever has to know the truth. After all, isn’t truth, like beauty, in the eye of the beholder?

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

Listen to: My Unfinished Near Future Sci-Fi Novel on Standby

4 oktober 2021 | 20 min

Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone

Essays on politics and culture from Sasha Stone's Substack.

Om podden

Avsnitt

Finally, a Real Celebration for MAGA

A Farewell Address to a Woketopia Gone Wrong

Dear Democrats: This Time, You Can't Blame the Republicans

January 6th and the Obama Unreality Machine

What Christmas Meant to Me Then and What it Means Now

Paywall Removed: Trump's Hero's Journey - Extended Cut

How Trump's Enemies Manifested His Hero's Journey

The Audacity of a Counterculture

A Democrat's Lonely and Hopeless Thanksgiving

How the Left Lost its "Cool"

Sorry, Democrats. America is Just Not That Into You.

It Wasn't an Election. It Was an Intervention

The Left's Empire Takes a Hard Fall

The RagTag Revolutionaries Who Made the Empire Sweat

The Democrats Deserve to Lose

A Terrifying Night in a Good Liberal Town

Where I Was on January 6th, and Where I Wasn't.

Meet the Real Fascists

Bruce Springsteen and The Death of the Joy

Trump for Dummies

Why This California Liberal is Voting for Donald Trump

The Slap Not Heard Round the World

Trump's Triumphant Return to Butler, PA

It's The Crisis of Masculinity, Stupid

Mama Bears for Trump

Dear Hollywood: Read the Room

Rachel Maddow and the Madman

Trump's Surprising Secret Weapon: Sympathy

Interview with Me by Paul Finn of the Generation Report

WaPo's Matt Bai is Okay with Dehumanizing Trump Supporters

Kamala Harris’ Run for the Presidency Looks Like an Oscar Campaign.

America is Being Love-Bombed by the Harris Campaign

The Weirdness of Manufactured Joy

Adopting Positions from Her Rivals is a Signature Move for Kamala Harris

"Joy" ™ or How to Beat a Forever Regime

How Did Orwell Know?

[Listen] JD Vance is a Hero

[Listen] Yes, Trump Should Debate Harris

"Get Me a Normie White Guy"

Feminists for Trump

The Beginning of the End of Woketopia

Donald Trump and the Angels

Finally, They Said Their Names

Sarah Huckabee Sanders Gets the Last Laugh

The Courage to Change Your Mind

Oh, the Inhumanity

All the News that's Unfit to Print

Oh, That Sweet Sweet Schadenfreude

They've Been Hidin' Biden and Harris Since the 2020 Election

Donald Trump, Taylor Swift and Me

Hollywood Can't Save itself, Let Alone Joe Biden

The Deep State Meets the Honey Badger

Joe Biden's Eternal Nightmare

Trump and The Hero's Journey

Nellie Bowles Thoroughly Humiliates the New York Times

The Democrats' Stormy Hypocrisy

It's the Democrats Turn to Scare America

"Let Joe Be Joe" has been a Disaster

It Takes a Village to Trans a Child

The Lawfare made me a Trump supporter

An Interview with Writer John Nolte

How to Spot an "Election Denier"

Ronna McDaniel Wouldn't Deliver Enough Hate for MSNBC

Why Trump is Polling Ahead of Biden

Too Black to Fail

What Really Happened to Matt Drudge?

The Proposed Ban on TikTok is Election Interference

Respectfully, Mr. De Niro, Get a Grip

The Red Pill Revolution

The Fourth Turning Explainer - Why is it called that anyway?

Why Joe Biden isn't Sweating

This is What Totalitarianism Looks Like

The Democrats Are Going Down with the Ship

Gaslighting Biden's Troubles Away

Confessions of a Corrupt Liberal

Taylor Swift's People Meet Joe Biden's People