Podcast
Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone
Hosted by Sasha Stone · EN
Essays on politics and culture from Sasha Stone's Substack. A former Democrat and Leftist who escaped the bubble to get to know the other side of the country and to take a more critical look at the left. Sashastone.substack.com
www.sashastone.com
www.sashastone.com
118episodes
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Can Paramount Skydance Save Hollywood From Itself?
1w ago00:20:53Summary readyHollywood is not trying to stop a monopoly by blocking the Paramount Skydance merger with Warner Bros. It’s trying to protect one.If a monopoly means near-complete control over what gets made, promoted, and rewarded, then much of Hollywood and the cultural institutions around it operate under the ideological consensus of the Left and the Democratic Party. Why do the Obamas have a long-running production deal at Netflix? Why do the Emmys consistently elevate late-night hosts whose politics align with that consensus? Jimmy Kimmel, John Oliver, Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart? Do you think they’d ever nominate Greg Gutfeld, whose show often tops them all in ratings? If that isn’t an ideological monopoly, I don’t know what is. Why did major awards shows stay silent on Charlie Kirk? Why did so many artists cancel Kennedy Center appearances after its Trump-era changes, and why did multiple acts drop out of America 250 events?David Ellison and Paramount Skydance are attempting something brave and unprecedented: an outside challenge to that consensus. Their roughly $110 billion bid for Warner Bros. Discovery would give them control of a major studio, HBO/Max, CNN, and a large portfolio of cable and streaming assets. While there has been some resistance to the biggest mergers in recent history, we’ve never seen anything like #blockthemerger. Meet the new resistance, same as the old resistance. 12 state attorneys general, including California, have sued to block the deal. The Writers Guild of America has filed its own antitrust lawsuit. SAG-AFTRA has publicly opposed the merger, though it has not joined the litigation. Opposition also includes the Future Film Coalition (which leads the #BlockTheMerger campaign), Democracy Defenders Fund, Committee for the First Amendment, Free Press, the International Documentary Association, and the American Economic Liberties Project, among others. More than 5,600 industry figures have signed an open letter against the deal, including Mark Ruffalo, Jane Fonda, Javier Bardem, Elliot Page, Emma Thompson, Ben Stiller, and Cynthia Nixon.Paramount Skydance has, for now, delayed closing. Can they hold the line under this unprecedented pressure campaign? Hope springs eternal. But you won’t read about that point of view in any of the trades. They’re a monopoly, too. Most of them are owned by the same entity, Penske Eldridge. Just today, it was announced that the Hollywood Foreign Press, the former owners of the Golden Globes, are suing Jay Penske for $150 million. They are claiming Penske orchestrated their downfall so he could buy the Golden Globes. Jay Penske already owns Deadline, The Hollywood Reporter, Variety, Indiewire, Gold Derby predicting site, Rolling Stone, a virtual monopoly on the awards race from soup to nuts. Gold Derby shapes the nominees, the trades take ads from the studios and the Golden Globes hand out the awards. But wouldn’t you know, when Rebecca Keegan wrote a hit piece on me, she did so in the Hollywood Reporter, owned by Penske Eldridge. I was a vocal and prominent critic of Penske’s growing monopolistic power on the awards race and one of the few willing to speak out. With one hit piece, the Penske company took out both a competitor for ad money and a pesky nuisance for the brand. That is what you call a monopoly. A Climate of Fear and A Culture of SilenceI found out firsthand how monopolies work in Hollywood when I was canceled in 2024. The day a Hollywood Reporter story labeled me a “MAGA darling,” one studio pulled its ads from my site that day. The last thing they wanted was to be associated with an accused and condemned witch.It was shocking how many of them fell in line in robotic fashion, gripped with fear. The response was swift and uniform. Every writer on my site left to protect their reputations. Friends of fifteen years ended the friendship. My Oscars ticket was revoked. Jane Fonda’s Women’s Media Center fired me from their annual Oscars report. Screening and party invitations dried up. I was benched on Gold Derby.Worst of all, the lucrative studio ad buys for the Oscars and Emmys vanished. As it all collapsed, I remembered in 2012, an advertising strategist telling me I could be making far more money if I sold the site better. “You have no baggage to speak of,” she’d said.That was true then. I was one of the few independent Oscar sites left, and still am, known around town for being honest to a fault. I stayed independent even as the ad money made life more comfortable for me and my daughter than it had ever been.There was never any question why my career ended in Hollywood: I had been outed as a Trump voter. I was on the wrong side of Hollywood’s progressive orthodoxy, and that meant I was finished.How it started…I started Oscarwatch.com as a single mom with a one-year-old baby living in a studio guest house in Van Nuys, California, in 1999. I was an early web pioneer with a 1200-baud modem and a really good idea. I was already catching the attention of publicists and rocking the boat, as all of us amateurs did back then. We were moving fast and breaking things. Traditional media was not ready. The studios weren’t either. They were used to having a monopoly on Oscar FYC ads in Variety and the Hollywood Reporter, their bread and butter. Until the blogs came along.By 2006, I was starting to make money because my little site had birthed a big bang of other Oscar sites, and by then even the New York Times had an Oscar blogger, the late great David Carr, who called himself the Carpetbagger.David Carr became a mentor of sorts and encouraged me to sell ads for myself, rather than piggyback off bigger sites. I was working three jobs by then: as a horoscope writer under a pseudonym (Laura Wilde), a janitor working my dad’s routes because he was a good guy and knew I needed the money, and a freelance film critic.Right around then, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences sued me for trademark infringement, and my site was renamed AwardsDaily.com. Now I was cleared to start making real money.David Carr was horrified that I was working as a janitor while the trades were raking in millions on Oscar ads and encouraged me to start sending out RFPs. But I didn’t have to, because before long the studios were sending them to me. My site became so influential that I never really had to pitch to them. They all wanted real estate on my site. Who could ever have imagined that? Certainly not me, someone who got online in 1994 back when no one thought you could make money on the internet.One of the first studios that bought ads was Fox Searchlight, an awards subsidiary of Fox. I called it Big Fox and Little Fox, and both advertised on my site. When I got my first $15,000 just to run ads, I was stunned. That was more money than I had ever seen on a check. I was just kind of faking it, pretending I knew what I was doing, but I really didn’t.Of course, it was also about promoting films the studio wanted to place in the Oscar race, and that’s still what it’s about. It’s not exactly pay-to-play, but most of the bloggers making money in the Oscar game are grateful and help keep the advertisers’ movies prominent. I did too.I barely noticed in 2019 when Disney bought Fox for $71 billion. The Writers Guild objected to the merger, just as they have to the Paramount Skydance merger with Warner Bros., but there was nowhere near the same amount of public outcry.Trump praised the Disney/Fox merger after having attempted to stop the 2018 merger of AT&T and Time Warner, leading to a trial, but the judge ruled against the Trump administration, and the deal went through. Again, no major public outcry.At some point after 2020, I’d noticed that Disney had stopped advertising on my site. I wrote it off as their shying away from my comments on “gender affirming care” for kids. I’ll never know exactly why, but all I do know is that once the merger went through, Fox and Fox Searchlight also stopped advertising. The Paramount/Skydance merger with Warner Bros. is significantly higher and covers more territory than any of the major corporate mergers we’ve seen as Hollywood reshuffles the deck amid the shift to streaming. Warner Bros. was selling. The only question was whether Netflix or Paramount Skydance would buy it. Both deals would have had the blessing of the Trump administration.But because it’s David Ellison and the team that bought CBS, and because Trump is an ally, the Democrats and the Left have turned #BlockTheMerger into another No Kings protest or battle for the “resistance.”After the story about me broke in the Hollywood Reporter, Netflix also stopped advertising. No other studio except Focus Features, an adjunct of Universal, had the courage to run ads on my site. I was now officially blacklisted. Emails to the various studio reps went unanswered.This past year, Paramount bought a modest ad package on my site for the Emmys to celebrate the success of Landman and The Madison. I felt lucky to get it, and it was a sign, at least to me, that Paramount, like Focus Features, was brave enough to take a chance on someone deemed too toxic by the industry.Landman, Taylor Sheridan’s Billy Bob Thornton drama, had become one of Paramount+’s biggest hits: its first season averaged 15.8 million viewers in Nielsen’s cross-platform ratings and ranked among the top 10 series of the...
Summary
Stop Gaslighting Us Over the 2020 Election
2w ago00:33:53Summary readyAny time Trump or one of his supporters brings up the 2020 election, insisting he didn’t lose it, we hear the usual chorus of groans: why can’t he get over it? He lost. Move on. The thing is, I can’t get over it either. 2020 was the year everything changed. My entire world was turned upside down because I could see, for the first time, that I was in a bubble, a feedback loop that had shaped my perception of reality. It’s just that it wasn’t actual reality. It was a curated, hysteria-inducing delusion. It wasn’t just me. Go on YouTube, and you’ll find hundreds, if not thousands, of people whose lives were fundamentally transformed that year in one way or another. COVID made them quit their job and move into a van. COVID made them decide to divorce. COVID made them learn how to bake sourdough. And a lot of us were red-pilled. It was as though someone pressed the pause button and all of us froze in place for a time. Like in the movie Weapons where the kids suddenly wake up one day…Isolated and shut in, we all turned to social media and the internet, which meant more people were connected than ever before at a time when there were more people alive than ever before. We’ve never really fully processed what happened to all of us that year.It was the year we stopped trusting the science, the schools, Hollywood, the legacy media, and the government. Children were locked down and staring at their screens, with many of the lost boys finding their way into the dark corners of the internet and would emerge years later fumbling their way toward a rifle and a rooftop.That isn’t all of it, or even half of it. None of us would emerge from that year unscathed. We can’t talk about it as a country or a people because we are still so divided. The big things divide us, like the vaccine, the masks, the lockdowns, and most especially, the 2020 election.We were stepping into something we did not understand and weren’t prepared for. Things have changed enough now that it will be hard to remember just how bad things got after Trump won in 2016. I remember because I was on the inside. I lived it with the Democrats and what would become a Doomsday Cult.We called ourselves “the resistance” even though we had all of the power. Trump and MAGA, they were the real resistance, or at least the revolutionaries going up against the most powerful machine in American history, maybe ever.All I knew was that I had to fight for my side. I woke up every day like a good soldier for the cause and went to battle online, wasting precious time with my daughter, or doing anything else except sitting and staring at a screen and fighting with people I didn’t even know over issues that didn’t matter with arguments that had no end and went nowhere.Inside the Doomsday Cult, we were awash with mass hysteria because every single day, every time Trump tweeted, the legacy media sent out more waves of hysteria that pulsed through the hive mind and kept reinfecting anyone who scrolled Twitter or Facebook. It was a new emergency every day. We were stuck in an unending state of trauma.The legacy media desperately wants to forget what happened, how they lied and gaslit the public. The consequences for these moral crimes have been minimal. A slap on the wrist for ignoring Joe Biden’s cognitive decline, but there has never been a reckoning for what they did to all of us, people who trusted them, in 2020.What Happened to MeMy daughter had to leave her senior year at college to have her graduation on my balcony, but we did it because we were doing our part to help save the country during this once-in-a-generation pandemic.Mobilizing for the cause meant sewing our own masks, displaying them proudly on Instagram. It meant mixing our own hand sanitizer because it was all out at the drug store. Some people were wearing face shields. We were living in fear. We were cowed into silence. Half the country fell into Mass Formation Psychosis. We weren’t allowed to attend weddings, churches, or schools, but somehow on Memorial Day, the George Floyd protests became the most important thing in America for months.Systemic racism, they told us, was more urgent than COVID. Really? Bringing the whole country — the whole world — to its knees was less serious than George Floyd dying at the hands of a police officer in Minneapolis? Yes. That’s what they were telling us, and everyone was mandated to go along with everything that came next.These were our idols, we were told. It was the new state religion, even if Trump was still the president. This is the ideology we’re allowed to gather for. This is worth tear ing down statues, burning buildings, carving out “autonomous zones” and demanding everyone put a black square on Instagram, capitalize the word Black and raise their fists to Black Lives Matter. The madness unfolding on the streets meant Democrats could actually lose in November, I believed. So why wasn’t anyone trying to stop them? Why were the Democrats encouraging them? I started wondering what the hell was going on. It felt like unseen hands were manipulating events behind the scenes, and we were all expected to just go along with it.As I began to speak out and ask questions, I was turned into an enemy. “You’ve changed,” wrote Neera Tanden on Twitter. She was right. I had. By the time Twitter pressured the New York Times to back off their Tom Cotton essay, Send in the Troops, I was done. Maybe I was naive. I didn’t understand the assignment. I’d seen too many Frank Capra movies. I’d begun to believe politics was like an Aaron Sorkin screenplay. I thought we were the good guys. We are the side with ethics and decency and fairness.I was like Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2 when Arnold Schwarzenegger shows up, and she thinks he’s a bad guy, but when he says, “Come with me if you want to live, she realizes that everything is backward. The people she thought were the good guys weren’t. The guy she thought was there to kill her was actually there to save her. By the end of 2020, I was as black-pilled as Jack Nicholson in Chinatown, disillusioned and wide awake. Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.But what I saw them do - how we were all manipulated, how they rigged the election to be too big to fail - I could see for the first time that my side had too much power. So much power that American democracy was now beside the point.It didn’t matter how the people voted, because we would decide who was allowed to win and who would become an existential threat to the world we were building, the utopia we were building online.When I left the party, I knew I couldn’t be fully honest about what I believed happened, though I did say that the election had been rigged. I also couldn’t be honest about what I knew about January 6th, at least not in the beginning. When I saw the riot break out, my first thought was, that’s not MAGA. They don’t do that.And anyway, even if they did, why couldn’t the Democrats chalk it up to months of lockdowns and highly enraged, radicalized people on the Right just as there were on the Left that Summer. Why couldn’t they? Because it was all still part of the long con, the mass delusion. These ideas were dangerous to hold for anyone in America but especially someone of the Left, and yet, I could not stop it. The truth began knocking. I ignored it as long as I could, but eventually, the knocking became a banging, and I had no choice but to open the door.How to Rig An ElectionOnce you start tugging on the question of why Twitter and Facebook censored the Hunter Biden laptop, you begin to unravel the bigger picture of just how deep the conspiracy went. But you don’t need the whole story. You just need to know this: The FBI and the CIA worked against the sitting president to lie to the public that the laptop was “Russian Disinformation.” It was just a standard run-of-the-mill October surprise, timed to help ignite a scandal before the election. But it was also information the public had a right to know, as we would find out later. So anyone who shames Trump for calling the election rigged and denying it was legit will have to answer for this. But if you keep pulling on that string, you’ll find the why of it. They were trying to fix all of the problems they believed caused Hillary Clinton’s loss. This would be payback for the email scandal that hit her campaign, which she called “Russian Disinformation.” That would also turn out to be untrue.But there were other problems that needed correcting, like lazy voters who assumed Hillary would win because she was so far ahead in the polls and didn’t bother turning out. They would fix this problem using COVID as the pretext to change everything about how people vote and how those votes are collected.They knew they had Pennsylvania won long before Election Day and it would only be a matter of convincing the public not to get too excited about a “red mirage.” To all of them, that’s the right way to win an election.Trump won Iowa, Ohio and Florida, not to mention the bellwether counties that have decided our elections. The only other time anything like this happened was in 1960, when JFK won in a squeaker. Compare that to 2020, and you can see that something was very off about the numbers. Since the Democrats believed Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook had handed Trump the win in 2016 by using their marketing machine (the Clinton campaign refused their help), it was time for Zuckerberg to undo that damage, which came in the form of a $400 million slush fund used to “fortify” the election but mostly in the heavily blue districts. Had all of this been shared with th...
Summary
The Dehumanization of Charlie Kirk
3w ago01:00:38Summary readyI will come out of this very surreal moment in American history and in the story of my own life, understanding the basic truth that our goodness is not determined by a political party. It isn’t the politics that make us better than anyone else. We all have our own ideas of what matters. Instead, it is our willingness to preserve our humanity when tested that really counts.We can blame the internet and the algorithms for what has happened to all of us in the last 20 years, to our politics, to our culture, to our relationships. But that can only take us so far. At some point, we all have to reckon with who we are and what we’ve become.I always thought we were the good guys. We didn’t mock, degrade, or dehumanize other people. We were decent and were empathetic. That is, until Donald Trump won in 2016 and all of that changed. What I saw happen to my own side was ugly. It was dark. I wanted nothing to do with it.It’s been almost two years since Donald Trump was nearly shot and killed on live television. The way the Left dealt with that shooting was shocking. They diminished it. They said it was staged or just shrapnel. They did everything but wake up to the radicalization on their own side. By then, they’d become consumed by hatred, having tried everything they had in their arsenal to take down Trump, and all of it had failed. How could they pivot back to their humanity?So when Charlie Kirk was assassinated on video, with the clip going viral to millions of views in seconds, they were primed and ready to once again leave behind their humanity and celebrate one more battle against their named evil, a guy who said things they didn’t like. It became a thing on TikTok:They all took to X and competed for who could be the ugliest and the cruelest. The more disgusting they were, the more their hate and dehumanization were rewarded. Social media has messed with our perception of what defines love and hate, with those tiny deceptive hearts we press every time someone scratches that sadistic itch.The reaction to Charlie’s assassination by the Left was unlike anything I’ve ever seen or anything I thought I would ever see from my former side. It might have been the people of Salem celebrating watching their friends and neighbors hang because they refused to confess. But this was America in 2025, not 1692. How could they not have been shaken out of their decade-long mass hysteria stupor? My mind goes to Charles Manson and his followers, who showed no mercy, slicing up the bodies of the rich in the Hollywood Hills, a pregnant Sharon Tate among them. To hear the Manson family tell it, they deserved it. They were the establishment. They had been dehumanized, and their lives didn’t matter. I bring up the Manson murders a lot because that was the last time we saw that same glint, the same wild-eyed happiness and glee at something as gruesome as a murder or someone’s death. I thought that would have been the end of it, back then. It was enough to end the 1960s, keep Richard Nixon in power, and send our society tumbling toward Ronald Reagan and the 1980s. But now, that same kind of bizarre, cult-like fury has overtaken the Left once again, and nothing can shake them out of it, not the near assassination of Trump, not the brutal murder of Charlie Kirk. Not the celebrating afterward.The hate bubbled up inside them so profoundly that even when Barack Obama tried to show some grace in the wake of Charlie’s death, his biggest applause lines came after he decided to repeat the cherry-picked, out-of-context lies pushed by the Left that led to the dehumanization of Charlie Kirk in the first place. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took her cue from President Obama and followed the same pattern. She offered a condemnation of political violence, but then launched into the kind of attack that they believe justifies all of what they’ve been doing for the past ten years.This is a country built on freedom of speech, and yet, the entire Left doesn’t believe in it, or they think it’s Trump that’s doing it. They control the culture, which is why they couldn’t even offer a word about Charlie’s death, not even at the Emmys or anywhere else. Jamie Lee Curtis had a moment of sorrow for Charlie when she choked up on a podcast. But the activists descended upon her, and of course, she was forced to “clarify” what she meant.All it took was losing one election for my side to transform into monsters who believed that as long as their fellow Americans stood in their way, they could justify anything that happened to them, yes, even an assassination.Even now, I still get twitchy when I see the blind, hot hatred coming from the Left aimed at anyone on the Right. I’ve never gotten used to it. I’ve never been able to overlook it. I certainly couldn’t be a part of it.I was reminded of that this week after Lindsey Graham’s untimely death. I watched the same pattern play out, the same ugliness, the same mocking TikTok videos demanding those inside utopia disconnect from their humanity. Even if Trump danced on the graves of his enemies, Rob Reiner and Robert Mueller, that doesn’t mean he spends his days wishing any of them would be murdered or dead. Plenty of people on the Right, even journalists in right-leaning outlets, had no problem condemning Trump for it. Why can’t they do that on the Left?Why are we now seeing them once again celebrating the death of a politician for the crime of disagreeing with them? They will keep doing this and as long as they do, someone out there will think picking up a gun will make them a hero. Celebrating the death of evil people should be reserved for mass murderers like Stalin or Hitler. That they believe Lindsey Graham, Donald Trump, or Charlie Kirk are on that level is proof enough that they’ve lost their minds, and it has taken us to a very dangerous place. Something Wicked This Way ComesWhen Charlie was assassinated, it was like the leg of a pier giving way and the whole thing crashing into the water. He held the MAGA movement together by his optimistic and inclusive nature, but once he was gone, a full-blown war broke out.It all started with the JQ group - the “Jewish Question” white nationalists - who instantly blamed Charlie’s death on Israel. This was then picked up and amplified by Candace Owens, who has now become more popular than she’s ever been by positioning herself as the anti-Charlie Kirk. She is now attempting to steal his legacy, bully and harass his widow, and destroy everything he ever built.Why? Who knows. Maybe because she’s a total zero and her friendship with Charlie was the best it was ever going to get for her. Maybe she was bitter and resentful about being sidelined by Charlie and TPUSA. Either way, she has now done the Left a solid by changing the conversation around Charlie’s death. It isn’t the rising fanaticism on the Left or their pathological need to control thought and speech. It isn’t that they’ve become so totalitarian that they fantasize about the deaths of their enemies and celebrate when people die?No, it was actually Israel!I didn’t think anything or anyone could ever match the level of insanity of the Left, but Candace Owens has done it. For clicks, views, and money, she sold out her so-called friend. Charlie has been dehumanized, yet again, this time transformed into nothing more than a stepping stone to success by a woman who can never get enough of it, who needs people to be talking about her, looking at her, thinking about her, doing anything but ignoring her.She’s stolen Charlie’s legacy and has now written herself into this story so everyone will notice she was once part of Charlie’s world. Not an important part. She was useful, for a time. Maybe she was even his friend, for a time. Now, she has shown her true colors, and it is the most evil thing I’ve seen in the 30 years I’ve been online. How lonely and empty does a person have to be to steal someone else’s life?That so many have followed her, that there is such a thing as the “woke Right,” that Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones and others have actually indulged this sick fantasy that anyone but Tyler Robinson could have done this, proves that goodness is not about political parties. It is about our humanity, whether we have it or whether we’ve abandoned it. Charlie’s Angels Something real and violent happened on September 10, 2025. The algorithmic, hypnotic churn of the internet, our absurd, pointless Civil War, the obsession on the Right with Israel, none of that could stop what really happened that day.There isn’t a person who was there or who was closest to Charlie that Candace Owens hasn’t consumed for content and blamed for his death. But she’s underestimated the strength of Charlie’s widow, his most powerful angel, Erika Kirk. Candace has used her too, laid her out like raw flesh to be consumed by sycophants, but somehow, that has only made Erika stronger, and now, Candace is the one who is about to understand what love really means. And what goodness looks like.Erika is Charlie’s angel, but lucky for him, he has a lot of them. They’re out there fighting every day to keep his memory alive and the movement he built thriving. And a sculptor is putting a statue of Charlie Kirk in Times Square, New York. We know how that is going to go. We know because we know the Left. The way the Left responded to Charlie’s assassination should be something none of us ever forgets. It is something they will all have to reckon with one day, and for many of them, wiping away its shame won’t be easy.It will be up to those angels of Charlie’s to continue his lifelong devotion to open debate, to talking to those you disagree with, and to preserve our freedom of speech and...
Summary
Happy Birthday America - There's No Place Like Home
Jul 500:26:05Summary readyIt’s been said that you can spot an American from a mile away. Travelers to Europe are advised to adjust their attire to blend in with locals and avoid looking so … casual. The French think Americans are loud and rude, and Europe has a long tradition of sneering at how classless we all are, even before Trump.I spent a month in Italy, and it’s a beautiful place. The slow living, the long naps when all the stores shut down for hours during the day, the tiny cars, the laundry drying on the balconies, the fresh food at the Farmer’s Market. I feel lucky that when I came back from Italy, I was pregnant and having my baby is the single greatest thing that has ever happened to me. But I’m also glad she grew up in America.I used to travel to France to cover the Cannes Film Festival, and again, I admired their way of life, the food especially. But every time I stayed too long, I began to miss my home in America. There is something thrilling about living in a free country that I’ve never felt anywhere else.It seems to me that if you are born here, you make up your life as it goes along. It is not planned out for you, necessarily, although in some cases, I guess it probably is. In my case, it wasn’t. I knew I could invent myself any way I wanted. And if I didn’t like that version, I could reinvent myself. We’re like our country, a work in progress. It’s always there for the taking, that promise of opportunity.Donald Trump is all of America’s freedoms wrapped up in one imperfect man. He broke through the thick layer of oppressive thought and speech and showed the world that here, you really can say anything you want - as long as some crazed totalitarian doesn’t try to shoot you. That’s the country I want to live in. It isn’t that the greatest writing or art has come from a place like America. Plenty of great works have come from places that don’t center freedom as their main objective. But once you’ve tasted it, you can’t give it up.In his speech last night, Trump said:The American founding represents the best ideas and traditions in history by the best people, like you. You can be loyal to Karl Marx or you can be loyal to America. You can be a communist or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both. As for those who peddle Marxist lies about our heritage, tell our children that we live on stolen land or that our heroes were oppressors, they’re doing something much worse than slandering our past. They are slandering and attacking our future. Not going to let that happen.They’re trying to tear down the great American character to destroy the people who declared independence, who crossed the Delaware, who settled the West and conquered the skies. You know who those people are. But we will never let that happen.In America now, two stories are competing to claim the right to rule the future. Trump is telling the better story, the one America was founded on and the one we’ve all believed, at least up until recently, when a new wave of progressives decided that the better story paints America as a corrupt, rotten, white supremacist empire that has to be torn down to the studs and rebuilt.They must be terrified about the 2030 Census because they’ve decided to die on the hill of illegal immigration, which is fast becoming their most important issue. That, alongside Democratic Socialism, is a recipe for disaster.This was Bill Clinton’s bummer message on the Fourth:I always thought Bill Clinton was a good president, but reading that just now makes me think he wasn’t. All he’s ever been able to do is point the finger at the other side and never offer any real solutions. He’s not the man in the arena. He’s the man on the sidelines.What I love about Trump and his supporters is how much they love America. They love it so much that they plant flags all over their homes. They admire the Founding Fathers. They call themselves Patriots. We didn’t have that kind of pride on the Left when I was growing up.And even now, so many see the American flag and the love of country as dangerous, racist, bigoted, fascist. Whoever told those people that is what MAGA is about lied. They’re protective of America’s laws and its border. That is out of love for the country. The Left has taken almost everything from them. They’ve locked them out of culture, forbidden them from participating in any of their major events, dehumanized, demonized, and disenfranchised them. But the one thing they couldn’t take was their citizenship. They hit the jackpot just by being born in America. To think it would be so easy for people all over the world to come here illegally and claim that prize or to come here and attempt to remake America into something it was never meant to be devalues the one thing they treasure most of all. I’ve always been a proud American. I’ve always preferred this country over any other, but only in the last few years have I understood what it means to be a Patriot, to be ready to fight for the country I love. And that is because of the people I’ve gotten to know on the Right.This country is worth fighting for. I might not agree with all of the policies on the Right, or even Trump himself, all of the time, but I’d rather have the future of this country in the hands of people who love it the way Trump does than people who hate it, the way so many on the Left do, just because their candidates are weak and their policies are toxic. I wanted to write 250 things I love about America, but it got too long, so this will have to do. Here are just some of the things I love:I love the interstates as part of the great legacy of Dwight D. Eisenhower.I love the Pacific Ocean because it stretches along the state. I love Catalina Island off the California Coast, where I spent many a summer with my best friend.I love seeing our history in the many cultures that came here, like Chinatown, Little Italy, Mexican food in LA, soul food in the South, Irish bars and pubs in the middle of nowhere. And yes, you can appreciate a nation of immigrants while still policing our borders now. I love how nice people are in some places, like California, Ohio, and Iowa, where they smile at you on the street.I love the weather extremes, from the dusty plains to the snowy mountains to hurricanes by the sea.I love the historic monuments from the Civil War and the Revolutionary War.I love the town squares that you can still see if you drive through the middle of America. Even though many are abandoned, they still look like hope to me.I love how each town square has a church, a post office, and a school.I love the many farmlands that blanket the Midwest.I love the small mom-and-pop coffee drive-throughs, and even the convenience of a Starbucks in nearly every town.I love Route 66 and how people still drive it and visit the forgotten places.I love the absurdity of Las Vegas, how it sprouts up impossibly in the middle of the desert.I love the American writers who helped shape our country’s sense of itself - Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Flannery O’Connor, Richard Ford, Maya Angelou. I love the musical traditions that started here: Jazz and the Blues. And became Rock n’ Roll. I love the Legend of Sleepy Hollow and the town that still remembers it.I love diners and dive bars.I love Gone with the Wind and how it’s still the highest-grossing film of all time when adjusted for inflation. I love The Twilight Zone and find it timeless, as relevant today as it was in the 1950s.I love the footprints at the (Grauman’s) Chinese Theater in Hollywood.I love the US military and its devotion to the country. I love the wildflowers that bloom in California every year.I love soft-serve ice cream at the DQ.I love Levi’s.I love New York pizza.I love Solvang in California.I love driving up the Oregon coast. I love the songs of Bob Dylan.I love the tap dancing of Fred Astaire.I love how anyone can be a star on YouTube, no matter where they come from, but YouTube couldn’t have been invented anywhere but America.I love how I could build a business as a single mom in a one-room guesthouse in Van Nuys, and that business would, five years later, become profitable because I worked hard and had a good idea. And then, when my career went up in flames in 2024 because I voted for Trump, I could build another career on Substack because that is what America is all about - inventing and reinventing yourself.I love the innovative spirit that built America in real life and online.I love reading about the early settlers, the Puritans, and the homesteaders, how much they sacrificed to help make America a home. And I love the history of the Native Americans, too, even if so much of it remains a tragedy now. I love high-speed internet and Wi-Fi that are available almost everywhere, and if they're not, I have a hotspot.I love the old American cars that were not just exceptional but beautiful.I love the tradition of baseball.I love that people faithfully watch football, even if I don’t.I love the tradition of sourdough bread all over social media.I love that the best basketball players in the world are from here.I love that every state is different from one to the next.I love Harper’s Ferry, how it’s frozen in time.I love that we found a way to move on from the trauma of our past with slavery and how we fought a bloody Civil War to end it. I love that we were the good guys in World War II. We did the right thing in entering the war and helping the A...
Summary
The Left at 250: Ask Not What You Can Do For Your Country...
Jul 300:26:33Summary readyIt took 65 years for that message to completely reverse itself in the Democratic Party and on the Left. Out is personal achievement. In is victimhood. Out is reaching for the stars. In is ushering in oppressed people from all over the world to ensure a steady supply. Out is the right of American citizens with their vote. In are people who don’t respect that vote.As Trump gives his speech at Mount Rushmore later this evening, Zohran Mamdani, who is supposedly just the Mayor of New York City, has positioned himself as Trump’s equal, the Mirror President for the other America. Thirsty as ever, in love with his own image, thinking who the hell he is, he has the audacity to sit in George Washington’s chair to make a speech about a new America he hopes to invent, one without borders, without Capitalism, without billionaires.His speech paints the American government as oppressive, while demonizing them for policing immigration:"We see it just as clearly in every American who still believes this country belongs to we, the people. We see America each time neighbors link arms with neighbors without asking how long they've lived here or what papers they have as ICE invades our neighborhoods. We see America each time working people demand more, not just for themselves, but for their fellow Americans."The irony is that he demonizes the rich, the very people who pad his risks in New York City and help him present a fake-pretend utopian fantasy that only works because of the rich people in the city, because they won’t let it fail. It’s absolution, after all, and there is no price high enough for that. It took America 250 years to arrive at a place where the country might finally, at long last, “be like Europe.” How many times did I hear that throughout my life? Why can’t we be like Europe? We were raised to hate our country, to see it as a Capitalist hellhole of the haves and the have-nots, a lesser nation than France or the UK or Italy. No wonder Mamdani thinks he speaks for everyone. But we didn’t have a bloody revolution just to copy England.Mamdani is like a cult leader who can now exploit whole generations who have been indoctrinated to believe that there is something rotting at the core of America’s heart, a disease of “white supremacy” and a history of exploitation, colonization, slavery, trauma, abuse, and poverty. Their only answer for this is to “be more like Europe.” At best, that is where they land. Really, it’s probably closer to “be more like China.”They’re already halfway there. Cancel culture has silenced all dissent. The DSA is rising, and the Democrats have kissed Mamdani’s ring.Not because it is easy…It’s not easy making it in America. It’s not easy making enough money for a decent home, to raise a family, and to take a vacation once in a while. No one ever said it would be easy, least of all, JFK:We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we're willing to accept.”JFK was assassinated before I was born. The Democrats were haunted by him for my entire life, until Barack Obama came along and was the first to erase the ghosts of the past and redefine what it meant to be both a Democrat and a person of the Left. That meant fundamental things would change. One of the biggest changes was going from believing in personal achievement to believing in victimhood. Obama took the obstruction of his policies personally. It was those racist Republicans. So they set about changing the hearts and minds of the young and teaching them that the only reason they couldn’t succeed was their victim status, and before long, that became the only thing that mattered about them. But for that movement to succeed, it required a sick country, not a healthy one. The Democrats were split in 2016 between the “white working class” in Bernie’s Democratic Socialism and the identity politics of Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. Now, what we’re seeing is a marriage between the two. Now, it’s not what Vivek Ramaswamy called Woke Capitalism, but rather, Woke Socialism. Isn’t it just another way to sell to Gen-Z?They are the most privileged generation ever to walk the face of the earth. Capitalism gave them social media, email, a computer in the palm of their hand, DoorDash, Google, Uber, TikTok, YouTube, streaming music, television shows, fast food, fast fashion, Instacart, Airbnb, influencer culture, and movies. And it’s not enough. Why can’t they be a Kardashian and have birthday parties with ten thousand balloons? Why can’t they travel to Europe? Why can’t they own a house? Why can’t they live on Manhattan’s Upper West Side? Why is Elon Musk a trillionaire with so many homeless people on the streets? Why are they so miserable, so full of anxiety, so full of hate? How can a life of convenience be so hard?They want an easy life as they have in Sweden, Italy, or France. They want to Free Palestine. They want their happy ending for all oppressed people all over the world, especially those crossing the border. They were told this was America's problem, so why can’t they change America to fix it?And if they can’t have it, well…They were raised to believe it should all be easy. If you have anxiety, take a pill. If movies and books trigger you, they’ll have trigger warnings. Bullies at school will be eradicated. Self-esteem is what matters most. Words are violence. If masculinity is too toxic, we’ll feminize society to make it easier.Mothers of my generation coddled the American mind. We helicoptered our children. We kept them from every imaginable harm, and we tried to clear a path to success. We taught them that you should only do things if they’re easy, not if they are hard. Because if they are too hard, that might lead to failure, and our kids could never fail.But we forgot to teach them the value of hard work and failure because we never wanted them to feel any discomfort. If their lives were easy, we felt like we’d accomplished something because they’d be happy. But happiness comes from service, from building something, achieving something, doing something hard. This country has always been “move fast and break things” but also “move fast and build things.” Invent things, envision things, start a business. I could never have started a business as a single mother in Italy as I did in America in 1999. America is the only country where anyone can build anything. The downside of that is that it’s hard. There is a price to pay for freedom. Unless you’ve felt freedom, real freedom, in your mind and heart, you’ll never love this country the way I do. I love feeling free and always have. I had to escape the Left and the Democratic Party because I no longer felt free, as they no longer believe in freedom. They believe in forced compliance and conformity.But freedom also means this:And this:They’re just too dumb by now to realize that they live in a free country where they can say and do anything they please without being shot on the spot or thrown in jail. They’re free to call Trump a fascist dictator because he isn’t one. They’re free to protest “No Kings” because Trump isn’t one. Mamdani wants to fundamentally transform America and turn it into a Communist utopia, and the Democrats are letting him. That is not the way to lead America 250 years in. No, we have to fight for what America is. It is not a failure, not yet. It is worth fighting for. Younger generations should be taught that they can do anything with their lives, no matter their skin color, and that they can make money right now on YouTube, Substack, and TikTok. They can start a business. They can go to trade school. They can use AI to get them where they need to go because it can make any ordinary person well-skilled and productive. And it’s free. It’s all there for the taking, but it will never be enough for a movement fueled by victimhood.A Nation built on strengthObviously, Donald Trump is not perfect. Every day, someone throws out another immoral or unethical thing they believe disqualifies him from leading. Ya, we got that. Your job was to beat him by making a better case to the American people, and you never did.Trump was called to this moment in history to hold fast and true to America’s founding principles. I’ve never seen a more patriotic American, let alone a president, in my entire life. He’s celebrating every part of it. He’s reviving our history. He’s making us proud of our country. Trump’s White House YouTube channel has videos like this:Endless amounts of them, trying to fill the cup back up to halfway full for future generations. Later tonight, Trump will once again be at Mount Rushmore to give a speech for America at 250. I already know what he will say because I know him, and I know no president in my lifetime has loved this country more. He’ll remind us what America is and what threatens us now. And seething in the background will be bitter, angry, jealous people who have to root for America’s failure, not because they hate him that much, but because they refuse to relinquish their power back to the people. They could have won the election, but instead, they went to war.They will have to hold on to that hate for years to come so they can pass it on to their children and make them understand why they could not celebrate a country that, to paraphrase U2, gave them everything they ever wanted … it wasn’t what they wanted. I live in a town that is full of we...
Summary
From Cancel Culture to Communism
Jun 2900:49:08Summary ready“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.Donald J. Trump, July 4th, 2020It’s been ten years since the purges began, and I still have a hard time believing it actually happened. Did so many of my friends really go along with it? Did institutions, corporations, and all of Hollywood allow themselves to be shamefully cowed by the fanatical mob? Yes. Not only did it happen, but it’s become the new normal on the establishment Left — in Hollywood, in culture, in government. Everyone is still too afraid to say what they really think. Just appearing at the America 250 or the Kennedy Center will still ruin your career. The only difference now is that the wheel of oppression keeps spinning. Now it’s illegal immigrants. Now it’s “Free Palestine.”I don’t know why I didn’t see it sooner: this direct line from cancel culture to Communism. I thought it was mass hysteria after Trump’s shocking win in 2016, and that eventually, as with other episodes of mass hysteria in the past, it would burst, and we could all go back to the way things used to be, where we weren’t fighting a virtual Civil War.But now that three Democratic Socialists won their primaries in New York against one of the party’s shining stars, Dan Goldman, all because of Israel, what we’re seeing is Communism, but merged with Woke tyranny and radical Islam. It is essentially the perfect storm to destroy America.Now, we can clearly see what ten years of Cancel Culture have done to the Left. It has given them enormous power to force compliance, not just to those of us who dissented, but to members of their own party. In other words, the mob is about to come for them, too. What do they want? What the millionaires and billionaires have. They want what’s coming to them after years of indoctrination that told them that they are oppressed because of the color of their skin, their gender ideology, or their ethnicity. America, they were told, was founded on White Supremacy and colonization, and they’re owed something for it.They seem to have no place for the working class that Mamdani is always talking about, not if they’re white. Bernie Sanders might have cared about the “white working class,” but not these folks. Some animals are more equal than others, and with this new fundamentalism, it is meant only to redistribute wealth, not from the rich to the poor, but from the white majority to the marginalized minorities.It isn’t their fault exactly. They’ve been indoctrinated. None of us noticed this was happening right around Obama’s second term, 2012. Racism, they believed, had infected the majority in America, and it had to be rooted out. They had to be re-educated on “correct” history.They were not taught the American dream. They were taught the American nightmare. Here is a video from Katharine Birbalsingh:And now, they’ve finally found their magic man in Zohran Mamdani, who is everything they need wrapped up in one charismatic leader. He’s TikTok-friendly. He goes viral. He is pop-culture literate, and, most importantly, he’s the Wokest of the Woke. He speaks their language. He wants what they want. He goes to the Pride Parade but not the Israel Parade, becoming the first Mayor of the city in 60 years not to attend.He doesn’t just want to be the Mayor of New York. He wants to be a worldwide inspirational leader, which fits the new Left well since they don’t really want to unite with the other half of America so much as with those other countries that are ideologically aligned, you know, like 1984?It might seem like one big party, but this is a disaster for the Democrats. Everyone knows that any Democrat who goes against them will be stalked, swarmed, and harassed before getting primaried out. All the Republicans have to be is the more normal side, and they can win. Some Democrats are now sounding the alarm that Democratic Socialists are overtaking the party and will alienate people, even James Carville:No Democrat is safe from the mob, not even one of their most progressive politicians, Scott Weiner, in San Francisco, who was just harassed in public for not being sufficiently pro-Palestine. And obviously, for being Jewish.Dan Goldman was banned from a coffee shop for the same reason just before getting voted out. Mamdani and his acolytes shield their true selves behind a warm smile and a viral video, but there can be no mistaking the language of the Cancel Culture Left.The Democrats know what this means. Even the Ladies of The View know. The DSA wins in New York were driven by a small group of mostly white, pampered college kids who are very online. It is the fault of the Democrats for not seeing the accident before it happened. They might have fought harder for Goldman if they had any idea just how bad it would be for them if these candidates actually won.And it’s bad.David Sacks from the All in Podcast:What people went through in Stalin’s Soviet Union or China’s Cultural Revolution is worse than anything any American has ever or will ever suffer, but let’s not kid ourselves. We’ve already seen what the Left will do, from three assassination attempts on Trump’s life, to the assassination of Charlie Kirk, to their violent riots for the past ten years. Burning Teslas, trying to throw Trump off the ballot, the impeachments, the indictments. Now, they’re threatening Nuremberg-like trials and another impeachment should they take back power in Congress, and the Right should do everything they can to make sure they don’t. We know there are no limits on what they will do. We know because history tells us. George Orwell told us. We’ve seen this movie many times before. Utopias have only two paths forward: they collapse, or they become more authoritarian. These folks don’t even know what words mean anymore, much less the point of 1984. No one ever taught them why Communism or tyrannical mobs are bad, so why wouldn’t they behave this way? I noticed it for the first time when a small group of fanatics at Evergreen College chased Bret Weinstein off campus, calling him a racist and holding the administrators hostage until they gave them what they wanted.All of those pampered, spoiled, overeducated-yet-still-uneducated brats made their way into the workforce, boosted by using their identity categories to secure high-profile slots at newspapers and corporations. The threat was implicit: hire us or you’re an “ist” or a “phobe” and we’ll get loud about it. Only the Republicans have taken a consistent and principled stand against this madness and done so since it began. The Democrats, however, have stuck their head in the sand and denied it even exists. That’s why they can’t address crime in the major cities, or the rapes by illegal immigrants, and why their wheel of oppression has amounted to the party standing for only three things: Socialism, illegal immigration, and Palestine. No one seemed to take it seriously on the Left because they never took Cancel Culture seriously. No, we weren’t being slaughtered by the millions or thrown into gulags, but we built this new civilization online and with it, the power to decide who can participate, who is accepted, and who must be hurled into the public square for character assassination and career ruination. No matter what the consequences were, it was wrong, and no one had the guts to stop it, and now, those chickens have come home to roost, and it’s the Democrats’ problem. They'd better get used to selling Democratic Socialism or else. This is what happened the last time the Centrists went up against the Socialists.Two years later, Al Franken would be chased out of the Senate by all of the top Democrats caught up in Cancel Culture and unable to stop the mass hysteria that drove it.And now, we have yet more insurrectionary behavior with Zohran Mamdani and some governors refusing to comply with the Supreme Court’s ruling on sending back Haitian migrants, and many states aligning to protest the Great American State Fair. It looks like we have a Democratic Party that wants to secede from the Union, again.In the old days of Bernie Sanders’ Democratic Socialism, they understood that taking care of American citizens required secure border programs like Medicare for All. Well, not now. The new kids want it all and believe they’re entitled to it all. Borders? Who needs those? They are oppressed and therefore deserving of our tax dollars to absolve us of our white colonizer guilt. The big picture here should be frightening for all Americans. Unchecked migration with the oppressor/oppressed mindset, while also demanding the government and the “billionaires” pay for all of them - that is what the Democrats will have to sell to the American public because the Cancel Culture machine that they helped build and did nothing about will demand it. The Gray Champion Rides AgainThe Republicans have a unique opportunity now to change the course of history. They have been given a gift b...
Summary
Obama's Museum: An Ivory Tower Made of Granite
Jun 2000:38:44Summary readyThe emergence of America’s ruling class in Chicago to celebrate the Obama Presidential Center Museum hit like a gust of hot, wet wind. Just days before, tornadoes tore through Illinois and Iowa, upending homes and wreaking havoc on the landscape. By the time Barack Obama and his Royal Court were ready to roll out the red carpet, the skies had cleared.The building perfectly reflects how Obama might see himself, but certainly how he’s ruled over the past 15 years. He still can’t let go of his position as God and King of the once-mighty utopia, one I devoted most of my life to building, protecting, and defending. I was a true believer and a good soldier.Obtuse, mysterious, and opaque, the building, like its inspiration, towers over the indistinguishable figures below, the swirling paths and gardens, not blending into the landscape but rather projecting outward, with a kind of bulk you could even see from space. Not even a tornado could make a dent.The quote on the side of the mighty beast reads:You are America. Unconstrained by habit and convention. Unencumbered by what is, ready to seize what ought to be. For everywhere in this country, there are first steps to be taken, there is new ground to cover, there are more bridges to be crossed. America is not the project of any one person. The single most powerful word in our democracy is the word ‘We.’ ‘We The People.’ ‘We Shall Overcome.’ ‘Yes We Can.’ That word is owned by no one. It belongs to everyone. Oh, what a glorious task we are given to continually try to improve this great nation of ours.”The quote comes from Obama’s speech, not in Chicago, but at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. Most of the rest of it has been trimmed away to make the statement appear more inclusive, shall we say.But note the use of the word “We.” His speech was full of flowery language about how we have to come together as a country.The sitting president of the United States and the majority of Americans who voted for him were not invited to the party. Not only weren’t they invited, but they’re also not allowed anywhere at any time in a society largely controlled by the Left.No, Trump would not be allowed in, and he never really was, which goes a long way toward explaining why he won the second time. Trump feels like one of us, who have taken the shape of Obama’s sworn enemies. We are rejected outsiders because this America, their America, depends on and is built around race and gender identity.Both Barack and Michelle Obama made a point of elevating the illegal immigrants who crossed over under Joe Biden and celebrated the citizen army that went to war on Federal officers, even after condemning such actions on January 6th.They prioritize the illegal immigrants because they are mostly non-white and thus have special protective status, as long as they vote blue no matter who, of course. And yet, for most Americans, they still don’t understand why they’ve been sidelined like this. Once you understand the rules of utopia, where an endless supply of oppressed people, along with an endless supply of racists, is what powers their engine.It’s an ideology that comes from Western countries overtaken by global elites, who need this form of virtue signaling to justify their power and their worldwide alliance, but it doesn’t do much for ordinary Americans, who don’t have the luxury of putting themselves last.It is a kind of class system that pretends to be about equality, about inclusion, and diversity, but really, it’s a way of categorizing us and deciding our worth. If you can participate in this game, you can go far. But if you don’t, out you go.Nate Bargatze dared to show up alongside RFK, Jr., and his wife, Cheryl. The internet found out about it, and things got so bad his publicist had to issue a statement that he wasn’t a Trump supporter. What kind of America is this? If they want to talk about unity, they have to call off their attack dogs.It didn’t used to be this way. Those of us who have been alive a long time remember when what mattered was the majority of Americans, the free market, democracy, and all that. Box office, ratings, and elections all decided the direction of our country and our culture. Not anymore.They want our country to look a lot like Obama’s kingdom, epitomized by his Brutalist monument - he’s way up there, and we’re all way down here. If you worship that way, we’ll all get along fine, they say, but don’t you dare vote in a way we don’t like, or we will go to war.So is that the plan from here on out? Must all elections be sanctioned and approved by the Democrats, or else?From Utopia to DystopiaObama was not born in Chicago, but his monument will reside there as a showcase of his preferred legacy. He’s the Chicago guy, not the Hawaii guy.The fortress will be a place for travelers driving across this country to stop and admire, along with other historic landmarks in Illinois, like the birthplace of Abe Lincoln and Ronald Reagan, two of Obama’s strongest influences, or so he has said.The Obama museum event was a reminder of how we all shaped this story, the bad guys and the good guys of Obama’s Camelot - Obamalot - the height of the glory days, where everyone had a seat at the table and we’d mostly eradicated the “ists” and the “phobes.”I think Obama thought that making history as the first Black president meant more than just winning an election, and that the influence he had and the power he attained made him more than just a two-term public servant. He was, after all, living history, and everywhere we look, we can see his fingerprints.It was the play, Hamilton. It was Bruce Springsteen before he shrank into a bitter old prune. It was Tom Hanks when he could still open movies. It was when Oprah still had influence.They think that showcasing their high status while locking out so many Americans is enviable. It’s U2 and Oprah. It’s Julia Roberts and George Clooney. It’s Jennifer Hudson and Steven Spielberg. It’s all four former presidents and their First Ladies. Obama made a point of saying that they are all of like minds except one president, the one who defeated them again after their ten-year war.Who do these people think they are? They don’t have the right to tell the American people who they can and can’t vote for. It is their job to make their best case to us to earn our votes, and either they do, or they don’t, but they work for us, not the other way around.Are we all supposed to cheer seeing them standing there as a united front against the sitting president? They have absolutely no self-awareness about how tone-deaf this appears to most people.Do they think we’ve forgotten? Do they think we don’t remember Michael Moore calling George W. Bush a war criminal at the Oscars?Their terrible, blatant propaganda films like Oliver Stone’s W.And Adam McKay’s truly awful film about Dick Cheney, Vice, one of the worst films ever made, with the sole exception of his next movie, Don’t Look Up.They’re not finished. They expect the other half of the country to choke down more of it, unending amounts of it, in hopes of forcing all of us into compliance through the worst art the film industry has ever seen because it is under the complete control of a totalitarian movement.Next year, we’ll be tortured with a sure-to-be-terrible Sean Penn film on January 6th.They still see themselves as fighting the oppressive forces against them when the truth is that they are the oppressive force. Trump was the way out.The clocks were striking thirteenIf any of us had been paying attention, we’d have known what we built mirrored Orwell’s 1984 and where it would ultimately take us.Every word of 1984 was a cautionary tale. Co-opting and distorting language, check. A Goldstein-like figure to sell two minutes of hate, check. A mandate to love Big Brother or else, check. An inside of accepted citizens ruled by the party elites and policed by the children spies, check, the abandoned working class, the Proles, outside of it, check.Trump’s win, to me, was like Winston Smith’s hope for the future, should the Proles rise up.That Obama and the rest of the establishment did worse than refuse to step aside but went to war on the duly elected president in an attempt to impeach, indict, discredit, and destroy him is the smoking gun that they no longer believe in American democracy. It’s their way or nothing. Americans have no way out.All the people ever had was Trump, and indeed, he was and remains a mighty force. He is the troll to Obama’s virtue signal, the two internet presidents who led whole armies online, facing off against each other for 15 years.Obama’s ten-year plea to the American people to choose him feels desperate by now. Choose me, love me, follow me, worship me. It doesn’t mean America is racist because they didn’t. That has been the Left’s method of policing all of us for far too long, and this country can unify the minute they snap out of it.They want us to see them as the better side, the special people, our gods and goddesses. But I look at them and see people who have long since cut themselves off from the rest of the country and have no plans to ever change. The museum reflects that better than anything ever has. What is inside? It doesn’t matter. It looms large.// This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe
Summary
Jane Fonda's Women's Media Center Fired Me Because I Voted for Trump
Jun 1600:28:21Summary readyJane Fonda, like so many on the Left, is the worst kind of hypocrite. She plays the part of a free speech warrior while participating in the most totalitarian movement this country has ever seen.There she was, yet again, yapping into a microphone to protest Trump’s UFC 250. The signs behind her are ablaze with pure lies - Civil Rights! The First Amendment! You can’t silence us! But Jane Fonda and the company she founded, Women’s Media Center, do not practice what they preach. They fired me for the crime of voting for Donald Trump. I had been regularly hired for almost ten years to write their Women in Oscars report until a story broke in the Hollywood Reporter calling me a “MAGA darling.” And just like that, my 25-year career as a “woman-owned” Oscar website went up in flames, as did my freelance gig for WMC.It’s true, I did vote for Donald Trump. Not only did I vote for him, but I also made my support for him known on social media, which is what caught the reporter’s attention in the first place. I was supposed to cower in fear. Support the Democrats or else. I could have done what a lot of people did and kept my vote for Trump secret, but I didn’t think I should have to. Weren’t we the side that stood up for free speech and free expression?No. We weren’t then, and aren’t now. There is a long trail of writers, thinkers, actors, artists, musicians, and ordinary citizens who have been destroyed by the Left’s machine for the crime of dissent. And thousands more who suffer in silence, knowing there are so many things they can’t say.Only one side regularly censored users on social media, and that was the Biden administration working with the FBI. Only one side used the FBI and the CIA to censor the Hunter Biden laptop to thwart the re-election of the sitting president. That wasn’t the Right.Because Jimmy Kimmel got a slap on the wrist and Trump sued CBS News, and there’s a merger with Paramount and Warner Bros., to people like Jane Fonda, that means the First Amendment is under threat. My message to her: clean your own house, Jane. Jane Fonda obviously wasn’t directly involved in firing me. She has no idea who I even am. It was someone else, someone I trusted, maybe someone who seemed like a decent person, but, like everyone else, from writers to publicists to friends, once I crossed that bright red line, I was no longer someone they would associate with at parties, let alone hire.It certainly wasn’t because I did not do good work. I did. I even asked Grok to fact-check my memory, and here is what came back:Nobody knows the Oscars like I do, and I did the best work for them on the cheap because I liked doing it. I tried to make my case as clearly as possible to the Hollywood Reporter that I could not go along with the unprecedented lawfare against Trump, and especially not “gender affirming care” on minor children. These things motivated me to do more than just vote. I had to go public. I thought my support would help others come out from the shadows. I knew as I was talking to that reporter that nothing I said would make a difference. I wouldn’t have even talked to her except she said she’d write the story anyway. She was reporting on what I thought and what I was tweeting, which was verboten inside utopia. And boy, did the hammer come down.After the story broke and I felt every door that had once been open to me slam in my face, I kept hearing yet another piece of bad news. The studios were pulling their ads. Yet another writer was leaving the site. I was not invited to screenings, parties, and premieres. The publicists all ghosted me. It was as though I had been arrested for committing mass murder.One of the last of the gut punches was losing that freelance gig at Women’s Media Center. I kind of knew it was coming because, of course, it would be. They all went along with it, and almost no one had the courage to push back or resist any of it. I wrote to them anyway because I wanted to hear it from them. And I got the expected answer.Jane Fonda founded the Women’s Media Center in 2005, along with Robin Morgan and Gloria Steinem. They describe themselves as “a progressive, nonpartisan nonprofit focused on increasing the visibility, influence, and decision-making power of women and girls in media.”They were perfectly happy to drop a woman writer for the sole crime of not agreeing with their politics. I’d say they don’t really support women in media so much as they support those who go along with them.I never played the woman card, but I could have. I built my site just to build it, and it became successful. I was a single mom in 1999 and raised my baby and my website at the same time. It is quite the story, especially for those who pretend to care about women in media. Why would it matter if I voted for Trump? Why would that mean I could no longer write the report? Why have they decided that all of this is okay, to treat half the country like toxic waste? How have they gotten away with it, and what will be their plans should they take back absolute power?They have painted themselves into a trauma corner with nowhere else to go, and in so doing, alienated themselves from much of this country. Where can you go when you’ve already gone as far as humanity ever has? Hitler, the Nazis, fascism. They’ve now gone to the only place they can go, wishing for and hoping for Trump’s death and vowing never to forgive anyone who voted for Trump. A Royal CourtThere was a time when I believed in all of it, too. The miracle of the first Black President and First Family. How one leader could bring together so much of American society, all of us reaching for the same goal because we all believed in a New America.We projected our fantasies of goodness onto them as they built what looked like a Royal Court of the most impressive and important people in the country, including rock stars like Bruce Springsteen and Katy Perry, actors like Robert De Niro and Julia Roberts. They were the party, and we were the adoring crowd. But all of that came with a price. If you want to be in the Royal Court, you’d best play ball because if you don’t, they can and will crush you. I had no idea that everything I built could be destroyed just because I dissented, and yet that is exactly what happened. Jane Fonda’s Women’s Media Center dropping me was the most disappointing because I believed in her, too. Now I know the truth. I am just one example. There are hundreds of people who are not welcome to work in the film industry if they are not ideologically compliant. We’ve been living with this for ten years now, and it’s become our new normal. Very few people are brave enough to stand up to them. Deep down, they all know it because they are too afraid to say the wrong thing, too. It’s easier to point their finger at Trump than confront what they have become - the blacklists, the shunning, the destroying of people’s careers. If they could do it to me, they can do it to anyone.What they don’t see, what they can’t see, is what they’ve done to the other half of the country for ten years. They want us all to think it’s perfectly normal that our late-night talk show hosts are purely partisan, or that it’s perfectly fine for Hollywood to continue to tell the story from inside their Doomsday Cult rather than the reality of all Americans.They don’t see themselves as the ones who can’t tolerate dissent or free speech and who fire people just for voting for Donald Trump. They believe themselves to be the chosen ones, the righteous few who have staked their claim on the New America, and those who aren’t on board must be purged. They’ve convinced themselves that it was perfectly fine that Jimmy Kimmel made an inhumane joke about Charlie Kirk moments after his brutal assassination, but when millions of upset viewers flooded the station with angry calls to have him removed, they called that a threat to free speech.They don’t seem to care that Biden imported millions of illegal immigrants into the country, and when many of them turned out to be murderers, rapists, and child molesters, they left a trail of victims, but those victims are invisible to the Left. They never even hear about them because in their minds, those illegal immigrants are to be protected above American citizens.So Julia Roberts and Bruce Springsteen continue to use the deaths of Renee Goode and Alex Pretti as examples of authoritarianism and to make American citizens feel shame for caring about their country and wanting a secure border and to be protected from harm. They never spent one minute comforting the mothers whose children were harmed by policies they supported.It wasn’t Trump who shot Pretti and Goode. They put themselves in a dangerous position to go to war against Federal agents who were doing their jobs. In the Left’s fever dream, they were battling Nazis. But they never notice or care or even try to understand why so many Americans wanted Trump to follow through on his promise to mass deport illegal immigrants, something every president has done. These mothers, like a lot of Trump supporters, had no other choice because this country, at the hands of the Left, means denying reality to serve utopia. You can’t talk about crime if the perp is an illegal immigrant or a person of color, just as you can’t discuss the harms of “gender affirming care.” I know, I’ve tried. They melt down like the housewife in The Stepford Wives who glitches at any confrontation of reality. That’s how it’s felt to me all these years, like I’m trying to talk to preprogrammed robots who know what you can and can’t say. I kept wondering what happened to everyone and why they were all acting exactly the same way. They were insulated from the rest of the country, and t...
Summary
60 Minutes and the Collapse of the Empire
Jun 700:31:28Summary readyCharles Manson famously said, “You can’t kill me. I’m already dead.” I thought about that quote as the 60 Minutes scandal erupted, with a conversation between reporter Scott Pelley and newly hired producer Nick Bilton. From the NYT:“She is murdering ‘60 Minutes,’” [Scott Pelley] said. “She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it, and she’s been doing exactly that.”Mr. Pelley added: “She has no qualifications for her job; you have slender qualifications for this job. The changes that she’s made at the ‘Evening News’ have been catastrophic, so why should we expect that any of this is going to be any better?”Mr. Bilton responded: “Well, I will show you. That’s what I have to say. That is my plan over the next two weeks. I’ll be meeting with everyone. I’m very excited to meet with everyone, yourself included.”Needless to say, it didn’t exactly go as planned. Several sanctimonious “don’t you know who I am” statements later, Pelley was out. 60 Minutes isn’t quite dead, but it is a relic of the past. In the 1990s, it was pulling in 20-30 million viewers. That dropped to 14-16 million in the 2000s. By the 2010s, it was down to 10-12 million. Now, just 9 million people tune in every week in a country of 340 million. Much of that is due to the changes in technology, but still. There is no doubt that 60 Minutes, like all of legacy media, is trapped inside the same bubble that thinks Jimmy Kimmel’s nightly monologue is still relevant, believes the Oscars still represent the majority of moviegoers, and that the New York Times has its finger on the pulse of everyday America. Like so much of what we might call “resistance era culture,” there doesn’t seem to be a place for 60 Minutes in our culture now, beyond being a propaganda tool for the Democrats, which explains why so many of them feel a profound sense of loss now that Bari Weiss was brought in to give them a refresh. Pelley’s statement to call out the new management at 60 Minutes was the hissy fit heard round the world. The irony is that his statement is itself bad journalism. He throws around serious allegations without offering any concrete examples:Pelley has since talked to the New York Times to explain what he means by some of this, but even still, these are all examples of his own bias, one he can’t see and refuses to admit even exists. Instead, he insists that 60 Minutes is now showing bias simply by representing the other point of view.In the interview, he explains how Bari Weiss wanted him to portray the other side of the story in the killing of Alex Pretti and Renee Good. He says he did not think she drove her car into the officer or that Pretti was in any way violent. While that doesn’t mean they should have lost their lives, there is no question that they were at war with federal officers in a way we’ve never seen since the last Civil War. His bias was front and center at a speech in 2025, where his mass delusions about what this country has become were laid bare. This guy was willing to give Bari Weiss a chance, come on.Already a legend in his own mind, Pelley is writing his own legacy now as a self-made hero who stood up to the fascist regime.Here is Michael Moynihan: A Woketopia, if You Can Keep ItSome say 60 Minutes never recovered from its biggest scandal, when CBS Corporate forced the show to censor an interview with Big Tobacco whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand, as depicted in Michael Mann’s brilliant film The Insider. The Hollywood of today would never make a movie like that unless it somehow blamed Trump and the Republicans. Not only wouldn’t they make it, but they couldn’t make it, no one inside the empire would allow it because, contrary to their own mass delusions, the fascism was always coming from inside the house — all sticks of wood bound together as one, where no dissent is allowed.I look around now, and I see relics of the old empire. They’re frantic and wild-eyed. They’re terrified that it all came crashing down. They don’t know why America turned away. But I do. We never set out to build an empire. For us, it was riding the wave of new technology, new social media, a new computer in our pockets, and a brand new president to bring us into the promised land.It was not Donald Trump's fault that our empire collapsed. It was the old cliche about how power corrupts. We acquired too much of it. Every company, institution, celebrity, movie studio, publishing house, and ordinary person has a social media platform. If you controlled social media, you could control them. Our public humiliation factory kept everyone in line, lest they be “it” on social media.That was true even before Trump won, but the tweak to the algorithm in 2017, Donald Trump becoming president and ruling over Twitter at the same time, sent those of us inside the empire into waves of uncontrollable mass hysteria. Many of them would never come out of it and are still locked in the spell of the mass delusion that a “fascist dictator, racist, rapist, criminal, pedophile” won the election in America not once, but twice. Somebody had to be lying. Pelley simply can’t tell the story the other way because he can’t see it. He’s still inside of it. I see them now, those who bought the dream like I did, befuddled as to what to do next. They just want their power back, their empire, their utopia. Use fear, that always works to drive lazy voters to the polls. Fear of what? Tax cuts for the rich? Fox News? No, fear of the big things, the existential things, like “fascism” and “democracy.”How do you even come back from that and make a pitch to the people that you should be put back in power to rule over a country you believe is under a Nazi occupation? How does Bruce Springsteen, Robert De Niro, Barbra Streisand, Katie Couric, Ellen DeGeneres, not to mention every single Democrat politician, come back from that?Maybe it’s the effect of the internet on our brains, but the so-called “resistance” seems to have lost touch with the tangible reality of history, of what it looks like to fight real fascism. What Nazis really were. When you can make any reality you want, why wouldn’t you?They are fine with the guy who has a Nazi tattoo because to them, that isn’t real. Of course, leave it to Salena Zito to do the job of a real journalist and remind us:70-80 million people died in World War II fighting to save the world from a fascist dictator, a real one. How can these people live with themselves by spreading the lie that we are living through anything like that now? And that, more than anything, is why the empire collapsed. It was built on a foundation of delusions and lies. Bari Weiss and the Fourth TurningI have Bari Weiss to thank for starting this Substack. Very few people had the courage or the moxie to stand up to the Twitter mob back in 2020, but she did. I was on Twitter the night the mob came for her. The screeching scolds had already been nipping at her heels at the New York Times after she was brought in to shake up the ideological chokehold the Left had on the paper (and still does). They hated her, gossiped about her, shunned her, and yet, there she was, showing up anyway. She is built of stronger stuff than the kind of person who would ever crumple under the weight of the mob. Tom Cotton's essay, Send in the Troops, reflected the views of most Americans, that if the riots over the Summer could not be controlled, the military should be brought in. Their opinions did not matter to the mob or, apparently, to the New York Times. While 60 Minutes spent many stories on January 6th, they barely touched the riots in the Summer of 2020. They didn’t talk about the false narrative of Jacob Blake in Kenosha. That was left to local reporters.They never told the other side of the story because no one did until Bari Weiss tried and was smacked down in a way that woke me up. It was like the lantern dropping out of the sky in The Truman Show. It punctured the delusion at long last, and I realized that I was not getting the truth from the legacy media. They were lying to us and gaslighting us because Trump had to lose the election, and nothing else could matter. But the truth still mattered to me. And it mattered to Bari Weiss. Eventually, she would launch a Substack revolution with The Free Press and urge others to follow her. And so I did. Weiss is a millennial, the generation that’s to take the baton from the Baby Boomers, per the book, The Fourth Turning. You can see this unfolding everywhere, but perhaps nowhere as profoundly as with what happened at the Times and now at 60 Minutes.Here is how the Times’ Lulu Garcia-Navarro’s interview with Pelley went on how he came to know Bari Weiss:Um, yeah, sure pal. That sounds like padding for an upcoming lawsuit, not the truth. There is no way the Scott Pelley, who gave that speech at Wake Forest, is going to give someone hired by David Ellison “the benefit of the doubt.” That he had never even heard of Bari Weiss or had no idea any scandal had erupted at the Times over the Tom Cotton op-ed says it all. The Fourth Turning is like winter. The old must die to make way for the new. Trump didn’t collapse the empire on his own, but he’s a “Gray Champ...
Summary
An Open Letter to Paul Krugman
Jun 200:20:41Summary readyDear Paul Krugman,You used to be the kind of journalist I thought was telling the truth. I looked up to you, as I did so many writers at the New York Times. I was a different person then. That was before everything changed. The year was 2020, a summer of riots and a breakthrough moment when many of us realized for the first time that the Gray Lady was not telling us the truth.I have been on the internet for 30 years. I watched the collapse of traditional media and the rise of opinion-based journalism, the kind you do, Paul. Do you mind if I call you Paul? Mr. Krugman sounds so formal, and really, I’d like for you to see me as a human being, someone worthy of your attention and respect.Now that I have confirmation of what I’ve assumed all along, that people like you, Kara Swisher, Peter Baker, and Susan Glasser would like people like me thrown into re-education camps or gulags, I feel it’s worth the extra effort to get you to see real people again.To the horror of many, you went viral last week for your comments on what all of you will do with Trump supporters and the system that elected him. It was ugly, Paul. As ugly as anything I’ve seen written by a high-minded journalist and certainly closer to what the Nazis believed about the Jews than anything I’ve seen in my lifetime:“Purging of the United States, we need a de-MAGAfication. I’m not going over the top by using a word that’s very similar to the de-Nazification that we pursued successfully after World War Two in Germany. It’s not just the MAGA ideology, but the whole structure of hugely unequal power, hugely unequal wealth that made this horrific moment possible. It’s not going to be easy, but, and maybe it’s not going to be doable, but we have to try, because this is an absolute, this is a nightmare, this is the nightmare beyond, I think, even the worst fantasies of progressives, beyond the worst fantasies of conservatives, who still have a conscience, there still are plenty of those, but they’re no longer MAGA. This has to be turned around, and we should not, above all, whitewash or forget this moment. This is where a lot of forces in America have been leading, and if we don’t do something beyond just getting rid of Trump, it’s going to happen again.”It can’t have been easy, watching Trump win a second time and this time the popular vote, or to admit you are no longer relevant and that the only value you have is in giving the base of the Democratic Party their daily dose of hate and fear. Why didn’t Americans listen to your constant bleating about the end of the world? That’s an important question to ask, Paul.After all, they’re your most popular videos.Your Substack, with over 500K subscribers, is no less alarmist:It looks like your Substack is paying you more than you made at the Times, that’s for sure. So why not keep pumping it out, day after day, like a broken record — fear, hysteria, hatred, more fear, more hatred. What could possibly go wrong? You all seem certain you’re about to take back power and put things back where they belong. The only question you seem to have on your lips is not how we can better address the needs of the people, but what you will do with all of those MAGAts.You don’t even pretend there is a whole country or even half of a country that voted all of you out, not once but twice. You have no shame in admitting you see yourselves as better than the working-class half of America. You fully admit it. You bask in it. You know your power, Paul, and that’s maybe the only true thing you know about yourself.So let me set you straight on a few things. You are not the Allied Forces after World War II, and Trump is not now, nor has he ever been, Hitler. The closest thing to Fascism this country has ever seen is with all of you in power. It became “all sticks of wood bound together as one,” a “fasci,” with all elements of our society mandating conformity or else. Your side ruled through fear and violence, and still does. You violently beat Trump supporters and feel emboldened to do so, just like Hitler’s Brown Shirts. You probably never even knew that in 2015, Trump supporters were beaten and harassed and called Nazis. On the Left, there is no such thing as free thought and speech, which is why cancel culture collapsed the empire and why Tyler Robinson had to silence Charlie Kirk. So who are the real fascists, Paul? On your side, thought and speech are heavily policed throughout our culture. Everyone is tracked, monitored, and under constant surveillance lest they like the wrong tweet, follow the wrong person on social media, or read the wrong news outlet. Just because people like you cosplay that ICE is the Gestapo doesn’t make it so. It took 80 years for the world to forget about the Holocaust. But no one should ever forget what that looked like, and it wasn’t mass deportations or even detaining a five-year-old or shooting Alex Pretti and Renee Good. Shame on you. Shame on all of you for even suggesting that what we’ve just lived through is on any level the same as what happened during World War II. 70-80 million people were killed. 600,000 in America alone. Even the war in Gaza can’t compare, and shame on anyone who suggests it’s the same. None of this should have to be said to a man who enjoys high status inside utopia, a well-educated elite who lives on the Upper West Side and enjoys a decent retirement while he’s discarding half of America like human garbage. You tell me who the real Nazis are.You don’t have to tell me. I already know. I escaped the suffocating dystopia that you live in. I escaped the world that no longer knows the meaning of important words like fascist, Nazi, dictator, king, and pedophile, never mind man or woman. I escaped that world because the truth always mattered to me more than being liked, making money, or having status.I can’t say the same for you, Paul, or any one of your former colleagues at the Times. We’re watching the destruction of legacy media in real time, just one of the pillars of your now collapsing empire. Trump won because ordinary Americans can’t stand living under the oppressive thumb of the high and mighty, like yourself.I didn’t see what kind of power we all had until 2020. We had built a Shining Woketopia on the Internet that gave us complete control of all institutions of power - educational, cultural, corporations, and institutions. We thought we could shape the America we dreamed of. The problem was that there was a whole other America outside our bubble, and it took Donald Trump to ignite a populist revolt. The idea that this was about racism and bigotry was a lie. It was never Hitler invading. You were never the resistance. You’ve been living in a dream world of your own making. You destroyed yourselves trying to destroy Trump. The real story of the last ten years will never be told by any of you, much less seen or understood.I still see signs of the MAGA I know. I just saw one near the memorial site for the deadly battle of Antietam. From the middle of America, on the side of a store just living out their ordinary days near the ghosts of profound history, this:I am no longer welcome in your world, Paul. Some days, that hurts more than others. But when I see what you have become, calling for a “purge” and “de-MAGAfication, I know you don’t know this country anymore. You’ve been isolated for too long, and you’ve been participating in a decade-long deception.I also know I have the truth on my side, and that makes me the lucky one.// This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe
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