← Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone
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- [00:00]
Sacha Stone
Hi, welcome to Free thinking through the fourth turning. My name is Sacha Stone. Happy birthday, Mr. President. You wrote your own story, and it's the better story. In the fall of 2021, Donald Trump was selling a hardcover book about his presidency called Our Journey Together. It would be self published because it had to be. No publisher would touch it, no author would write it, and no critic would be caught dead praising it. January 6th was meant to be the end of the Trump story. He was to slink back to Mar a lago, disgraced and a failure. They all said his book was a joke, a Putin like rewrite of what really happened in his first term. Obviously it had to be a lie, covering up the crimes, treason and corruption. But something told me I should get that book anyway and hold onto might matter someday. Maybe. I thought the Trump story wasn't over quite yet. So I paid a hefty price for a signed copy and waited. And when the package arrived, it came in a plain cardboard box. I breathed a sigh of relief because I thought if the UPS guy knew I was buying it, he might accidentally lose some of my packages next time. Or who knows what else. The book President Donald J. Trump, Our Journey Together. I knew I wasn't a Trump supporter because I was still holding on to what I thought were my principles as a lifelong liberal. I didn't vote for Trump in 2020, and as long as that was still true about me, I was protected from their wrath. I would find out years later just how bad it was to admit you supported Trump, let alone voted for him. Much of what we have experienced over the past 10 years will be memory hold. No one will remember just how treacherous it was back then to buy our journey together. Now I keep it to remind me of what it felt like to be that afraid and how foolish I was ever to give them that much power over me. That's what Trump has done for the past 10 years. He's refused to give the mighty empire power over his story. He's decided to tell it himself. Even if he has to self publish a book. He'll dress up in a tux with Melania and attend Les Mis at the Kennedy center. Even if some of them boo him. He'll celebrate his birthday on the same day as the 250th anniversary of the creation of the United States Army. Even if they mobilize their infantile no kings protest. Trump insists his version is the truth and the two narratives go to war every day. But the thing is, Trump's is the better story. It's like the end of the movie Life of PI, where the lone survivor of a shipwreck has the choice of whether to tell the good story or the bad story. One will destroy you and one will inspire you. It's used as a metaphor for religion, but it works here, too.
- [03:15]
Narrator
Can I ask you something? Of course. I've told you two stories about what happened out on the ocean. Neither explains what caused the sinking of the ship, and no one can prove which story is true and which is not. In both stories, the ship sinks, my family dies, and I suffer. True. So which story do you prefer? The one with the tiger. That's the better story. Thank you. And so it goes with God.
- [04:09]
Sacha Stone
Trump's is the better story because he's a better storyteller. For all of Trump's obvious gifts, that one has served him the best. He's mastered it for his entire life, starting all the way back in high school, where he would just stand in front of a crowd and tell stories. For the past 10 years, many people have needed to believe in Trump's story, many of them discarded and forgotten by the Empire. Over time, more and more people were drawn in as each side played its role. The left hunted down Trump and cast themselves as the villains. How could they have ever thought that was a winning strategy? That's what I find most inspiring about Trump. And that's why many of his supporters remain loyal to him and fiercely defend him even when, especially when he makes mistakes. Here's a tiktoker.
- [05:04]
MAGA Supporter
I'd like to take a minute and thank the Democrats and the liberals because if you hadn't chased Donald Trump for four years and tried to get him on all these trumped up charges, keep him in court, unalive him, talk about all of his supporters and treat us like trash and kick us out of our families. And if y' all hadn't have kept us in the spotlight and kept Trump in the spotlight, we wouldn't be as strong as we are today. We wouldn't be as focused as we are today if you hadn't have chased our children and tried to make our boys sending the girls and our girls, turning the boys and trying to put men in our daughter's bathrooms and try to get our teenagers stuck on trans drugs, we would not be the MAGA that we are today. It is because your hate, your hate kept Trump in the spotlight. Your hate kept us focused on what we needed to be focused on. So thank you, because you essentially created maga and all we have to do is fight for common sense. And we'll all stay on the same page because you guys have lost the meaning of common sense. Thank you for your help in creative maga. God bless.
- [06:18]
Sacha Stone
In 2020, I was in a very dark place. I was caught up in the so called resistance. I believed Putin had kompromat on Trump. I believed it all. I read all the books. I hung on every word Rachel Maddow said. But things would change in those four years. It would become dystopian on the left. I would feel the wrath of the mob one too many times just for speaking out and pushing back about things I knew to be true. I also had no other social life except Twitter and Facebook during lockdowns, where the daily ritual of hate aimed at Trump, his staff, his family and his supporters began to feel like poison. Like the scene in 1984. Two minutes of hate.
- [07:06]
Former Liberal
There's a cancer, an evil, two growing.
- [07:10]
Sacha Stone
Spreading in our midst. Shout propaganda, shout your own, shout out his name. I didn't want to be part of it, if for no other reason. I'd been the target of hate for so long and I empathized with them. Worse, I knew I was wrong to dehumanize a whole group of people, no matter what the excuse was. Dehumanizing them had already led to violence on the streets before, during, and after Trump's first term. I knew enough history to have asked myself the question more than once. What would you do? What would you do in Salem in 1692? What would you do in Germany in the 1930s? What would you do in the Jim Crow South? I'm not comparing them. I'm just saying the mechanism is the same. And the person I wanted to be and believe I am is someone who would not go along with it, especially since my life wasn't in danger. And thus began my journey over to Trump's side of things. I wanted to know whether our version of Trump was true. Was he a threat to democracy? Was he a virulent racist and white supremacist? If I watched enough of his rallies, I might find the smoking gun. Maybe I would have enough proof to justify everything we did to try to destroy him. But that never happened in 2020. He had survived Covid and was out doing five rallies a day, flying in on a helicopter, circling the crowd overhead, then greeting them with a handful of red hats, tossing them into the crowd. And I watched every single one of his rallies. And as time went on, something happened to me. I guess you could say I was like the Grinch.
- [09:04]
Narrator
What happened then? Well, in Whoville. They say that the Grinch's small heart grew three sizes that day. And then the true meaning of Christmas came through, and the Grinch found the strength of 10 grinches.
- [09:25]
Sacha Stone
My heart grew because I saw people who had every reason to be miserable, full of hate and resentful, as the media describes them, but who were none of those things. They were happy. They were joyful. Trump made them laugh. They danced. It was one big party, a glowing oasis of fun amid an endless dark winter on the left. I'll never forget hearing Trump at a rally in Miami and the pouring rain. I remember thinking, this is amazing. The press will never cover this. They could never. They could never write about people who love Trump that much to stay out there as the rain pounded down.
- [10:10]
Trump Supporter
And we are a nation that no longer has a free and fair press. Fake news is all you get. And we are a nation that loves to be rained upon. Let's stay out here and come. Let's stay out here, right? I'm not leaving. We're a brave nation. We are a nation where free speech is no longer allowed, where crime is rampant and out of control like never before, and where more people died of COVID in 2021 than in 2020. And we are a nation that is allowing Iran to build a massive nuclear weapon in China to use the trillions of dollars that has taken from us to build a military problem. And they weren't going to do a thing against us.
- [11:28]
Former Liberal
Not a thing. This is the greatest.
- [11:53]
Trump Supporter
This might be the greatest rally we've ever had.
- [11:59]
Former Liberal
Wow.
- [12:09]
Trump Supporter
Is everybody having a good time?
- [12:13]
Sacha Stone
But of course, that was the story. That was the real story. That was the truth. And what I saw in Trump and MAGA is what Tucker Carlson saw in this often played video summarizing the Trump movement just before the 2020 election.
- [12:30]
Tucker Carlson
The picture is from a town called Butler, Pennsylvania. It's 35 miles north of Pittsburgh. The President held a rally there over the weekend. Butler's like a lot of places you'll find in this country once you head inland from the coasts. It's a former industrial town. They made Pullman rail cars there for many years, but it's been losing population for decades. There's still a lot of nice people in Butler. For 60 grand, you can buy a decent house there. It's a place you might be happy in. But our professional class is not impressed by Butler. They don't consider Butler, Pennsylvania, or places like it the future. To them, places like Butler are embarrassing relics of a past best forgotten. The men of Butler may have built this country, and they did, but they mean nothing to our leaders. Now, you can be certain of that, because when large numbers of people in Butler started killing themselves with narcotics, no one in Washington or New York or Los Angeles said a word about it. And so it continued. There have now been so many opioid deaths in Butler that a few years ago, residents built an overdose memorial in the middle of town. MSNBC didn't cover that. So given all of that, it was interesting how the people around Butler feel about Donald Trump. Here are the pictures of the President's rally there on Saturday night. Tens of thousands of people came. So many people that the crowd obscured the horizon. It looked like a visit from the Pope. When was the last time a political speech drew that many people? Well, the media didn't ask. Instead, they attacked the rally as a super spreader event. Trump endangers thousands in Pennsylvania. Ok, we'll leave the epidemiology to cnn. But the question still hung in the air. Why did all those people come? Why? They must have known that Donald Trump is the most evil man who's ever lived. They've heard that every day for five years. They know that people who support Donald Trump are also evil. They're bigots, they're morons, they're racist cult members. They know that Americans have been fired from their jobs for supporting Donald Trump, not to mention kicked off social media, belittled by their kids, teachers, shunned by decent society. Only losers and freaks support Donald Trump. People in Butler knew all of that. But on Saturday, they went to the Donald Trump rally anyway. Why exactly did they do that? We should be pondering that question deeply as we watch tomorrow's returns and as we live through the aftermath of them. Millions of Americans sincerely love Donald Trump. They love him in spite of everything they've heard. They love him often in spite of himself. They're not deluded. They know exactly who Trump is. They love him anyway. They love Donald Trump because no one else loves them. The country they built, the country their ancestors fought for over hundreds of years, has left them to die in their unfashionable little towns, mocked and despised by the sneering half wits with finance degrees but no actual skills who seem to run everything all of a sudden. Whatever Donald Trump's faults, he is better than the rest of the people in charge. At least he doesn't hate them for their weakness. Donald Trump, in other words, is and has always been a living indictment of the people who run this country. That was true four years ago when Trump came out of nowhere to win the presidency. And it's every bit as true right now, maybe even more true than it's ever been. And it will remain true regardless of whether Donald Trump wins re election. Trump rose because they failed. It's as simple as that. If the people in charge had done a halfway decent job with the country they inherited, if they'd cared about anything other than themselves, even for just a moment, Donald Trump would still be hosting Celebrity Apprentice. But they didn't. Instead, they were incompetent and narcissistic and cruel and relentlessly dishonest. They wrecked what they didn't build. They lied about it. They hurt anyone who told the truth about what they were doing. That's true. We watched. America is still a great country, the best in the world. But our ruling class is disgusting. A vote for Trump is a vote against them. That's what's going on in that picture. That's what's going on in this country.
- [16:55]
Sacha Stone
Trump speaks a language called normal American. It's one we on the left abandoned long ago. After years of curating our language to be pristine, inoffensive, soft and kind, we became too fragile to speak normal American. But Trump can talk to anyone, especially normal Americans. That's why he could fly to so many different states, land anywhere, a McDonald's, a pizza joint, or even East Palestine, Ohio, and fit right in.
- [17:29]
Tucker Carlson
Arriving in East Palestine, Ohio, as the town continues to reel from the massive crowd derailment.
- [17:43]
Trump Supporter
To the people of East Palestine and to the nearby communities in Ohio and Pennsylvania, we have told you loud and clear. Thank you, sir. What do you make about Biden not showing up, you showing up before he did.
- [18:04]
Former Liberal
Thank you so much for coming.
- [18:06]
Sacha Stone
Normal American can sometimes be offensive. Some of us still speak it when we think no one is watching or listening to the left, that means we use all of the slurs that prove we are an ist or a phobe. But no, it just means the occasional dirty joke or talking like we all used to, without fear and at ease. What I love so much about Trump is his persistent, unshakable optimism. He refused to accept the left's rewrite of him. They could never destroy Trump because they weren't fighting the real guy. They still aren't. Their ridiculous no kings protest on his birthday is a fantasy about someone they invented who doesn't exist in real life. They don't see the Trump. We all see the guy who faced them down for a decade and triumphed. Four years of attacks framed as a Russian asset impeached Twice indicted, four times convicted of a felony, called a racist, a rapist, a fascist, a dictator, a criminal, a felon, Hitler and now a king. A guy who was almost assassinated twice, took a bullet, survived it, then got on stage just days later to give a 90 minute speech. You bet. That's the better story. In all of that time, the Democrats never did the one thing they would have to do to defeat offer the people something better. The reason they don't is that they can't. They want America back the way it was before Trump, but it's never coming back because we the people, voted for it never to come back. If they think they can somehow force those who speak normal American to ever listen to them over Trump, they're fooling themselves. They can throw as many tantrums as they want, but that won't fix who they are. That's why they lost the election. It's never been about Trump. It's always been about them. If anything, Trump was the guy who spelunked into our doomsday bunker like Seal Team 6 to get us the hell out of there. You can throw all the lawn signs at us you want. We're not going back. Podcast listeners, a montage of lawn signs. We welcome all genders, all colors, all cultures, all beliefs, all sizes, all abilities, all people. Over a million men and women have died defending our democracy. Are we going to let one man destroy it? Democracy dies in silence. Resist fascism. No human is illegal on stolen land. What watching Trump for five years has taught me is just how weak so many of those I once saw as heroes really are. They've never looked so small as they do right now. Never so petty as all of them cosplaying oppression just because they lost an election and can face the humiliation. They got the story wrong because they got Trump wrong. They misjudged and underestimated him. So they can keep protesting if they want, but all it will do is remind the public of that saying. When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging, podcast listeners. A picture of a Make America Great Again hat Trump's inability to allow himself to fail, to always see himself as a winner, no matter what. Whether it's self publishing his own version of his first term in the White House, or it's having the chutzpah to dare to run again. Who else would do that? But he was always fighting to clear his name, to write his own story, and to leave a legacy for the Trump family. Make America great again. It's easy to see how our country falters how imperfect our system is and how corrupt our politicians can sometimes be. The one thing that has kept us going for the short time we've been a country is that uplifting myth about the American dream. That's a good story, too. It's a really good story. It's been a story we all shared until it was decided to be too problematic. But many of us still believe it. We have to believe it, because otherwise the whole idea of America collapses into itself like a dying star. Call it American exceptionalism or a beautiful illusion. Whatever it is, Trump embodies it. He gives us that dream and refuses to allow anyone else to ruin the story. There will be a time when Trump seems like just a man again. But as long as he has screeching banshees nipping at his heels, we'll be rooting for the superhero to prevail. A happiest of Happy birthdays to 45, 47. Still one of the greatest comebacks and greatest stories in American political history. Thank you for listening to my podcast sashastone.substack.com and remember to thine own self be true.
- [23:57]
Natasha Owens
Natasha Owens Nick Natoli Trump won.
- [24:03]
Former Liberal
Trump won and you know it Trump won and you know it America voted it's true Trump won and you know it.
- [24:19]
Natasha Owens
Yeah we all know Trump won baby and we know Kamala crazy everybody knows that I'm a patriot like my name was Brady Red hat baby it's a red wave Democrats want Trump off stage but we know that they can't aim and he won in every state Trump won you know we know Too big to rig this vote Someone wake up sleepy Joe Cuz Trump won and.
- [24:40]
Former Liberal
You know it TRUMP 1 and you know it America has voted cause it's true Trump one.
- [24:54]
Natasha Owens
You know you can't stop Trump he's got a swamp to drain so go ahead and grab your ticket let's ride that Trump train He won in 2020 and he just did it again Go and throw your hands up let's celebrate this win it's time to get it started Come on now everybody everyone's invited to this weed of people party.
- [25:18]
Former Liberal
Come on and you know it yeah ye America has fallen cause it's true someone and you know it I know it, you know it we know it they know it everybody knows Strong one I know it, you know it we know it they know it Everybody knows Strong blind everybody knows I know it, you know it we know it, they know it Everybody know Yo.
- [25:55]
Natasha Owens
Yo yo yo Trump one and you.
- [25:58]
Former Liberal
Know you know it, you know it's true. TRUMP 1 and you know.
- [26:09]
Natasha Owens
Let's go, let's go.
- [26:12]
Former Liberal
I know it, you know it, we know it, everybody know Trump one. I know it, you know it, we know it, they know it, everybody know. I know it, you know it, we know it, they know it, everybody knows.