← Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone
Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone
Podcast: Mamdani, Obama's Legacy, and Where This Fourth Turning is Going
01:18:47
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- [00:00]
A
Welcome to Free Thinking through the Fourth Turning. My name is Sacha Stone. The following is an interview with the Generation Report, aka Andy Shalman. This appears in video form on his YouTube the Generation Report. You can find him on YouTube and you can find him on substack. He just started a substack called the Fourth Turning Chronicles. You can find him there. Hope you enjoy.
- [00:31]
B
Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Generation Report. My name is Andy Shalman, and I'm back here with a former guest and what I hope will be a recurring guest in the future, Sasha Stone, who I think it's safe to say can now be called a friend of the program.
- [00:47]
A
Thank you for having me. You know, as you know, I'm a big fan, and we're both sort of like those characters in Close Encounters of the Third Kind who keep seeing the same shape and head toward Devil's Tower because they all have this one thing in common. And with me and you, it's like this Fourth Turning. We're gonna be here, we're gonna record it, we're gonna observe it, you know, and hopefully try to understand it.
- [01:10]
B
Yes, that's. We think that we're filling a void of some kind, and there are others out there who are diving into these ideas. We think we're a little ahead of the game on most of them, if we may be so bold to say so, but we hope we'll prove it today. And at any rate, that's what this conversation will help to do. So I wanted to reconvene with you because basically, there are two things happening in the world, one of which you already touched on, which is that America is in a fourth turning and the world is on fire.
- [01:39]
A
Yeah, I like the headline.
- [01:41]
B
If that could suffice, we could really go home right now. But to start with the most current news, what was your reaction when you found out about what went on in New York City?
- [01:51]
A
Well, it's been milling around in my head because I've been trying to write about it and trying to process it, and I've come to several conclusions that I think work. But every time I find another conclusion, it takes me down another rabbit hole. And I'm like, oh, yeah. And then there's that, and then there's that. Okay, that's why. But I will say, just in general, about the Fourth Turning, is that the one thing I didn't know when I first started my sort of studying on it, which was in 2020. I know you started a lot earlier, was I would say that you cannot know A fourth turning, until you actually live through one. Because it's so weird and it's so hard to make sense of the changes, but you feel the generations. So I know where you're going because I know exactly what you're about to say about Mom Diamond, Mom Donnie, which is we're feeling that generation. We're feeling that new generation rising up, and the old generation, I mean, it's the fourth, fourth turning playing out literally in New York. But, you know, it's because it's a fourth turning and because we're at war and because everything feels like it's about to start a massive war, either a great war or civil war. It's not like Mom Donnie is coming along and is the great savior and rescuer. No, it's just another battle that just started another battle that's going to take our fight even to a more intense level, I would say, because basically what he did was he saw what Trump was doing. He saw bold action works. Freaking people out is okay. We have to take the fight to the government. And that's what he did. And he did it as a jet, either zillennial or millennial or Gen Z or whatever he is, and speaking in their language. Right. Giving them exactly what they want to hear. And I think to them it's with these do nothing Democrats. It's magic to their ears to hear that. What do you think?
- [03:41]
B
Well, you're absolutely right that it's a response in so many ways to the prevailing political currents that have been going on for about 10 years. It's fascinating to me that this has happened on the heels of Bernie and AOC's rallies around the country earlier this year, which really, from a distance to me seemed like pep rallies. But you could see the enthusiasm on the Democrat side was with the young, the progressive, the young and the staunchly progressive. And the fact that he was able to essentially come from nowhere and win. I saw numbers earlier today that apparently he was pulling at 1% at the very beginning of the primary season last year. To go from that to where he is, it's a testament to his political talent. But as so many people were saying before I even did any kind of read up on him, he has a megalomaniacal side. He's a radical, he's smooth and he. And yet he doesn't always, you know, Barack Obama was so smooth that I think only the most astute at the time saw through him. But people right now seem to be seeing through Mamdani if they're not completely in his camp. But he's got a lot of momentum behind him and obviously the 40ish and younger base turned out for him in droves. Which is why I said that, you know, this is probably a bellwether of things to come. Because now that my generation, the millennials, is ranging from our 20s through age 42, 43, we're the dominant block of voters. We've had enormous influence over the direction of national politics and progressive politics for a long time. This is just another step in that direction. And the fact that he's 33 years old is proof to me, sure seems like sure fire proof to me that this is going to be a model a lot of people follow to get into office themselves.
- [05:38]
A
Oh, 100%. And when you think about it, you know, nature abhors a vacuum. And the Democrats and the Republicans both left open this one major force in American life, which is Free Palestine. It was just sitting there. It was on TikTok and it was everywhere. I, I saw it all the time when I, you know, would, would study these young, the young and middle aged and old liberal women on Tik Tok, which is where I love to watch them because they put out their videos and they're. The older ones are helpless and insane and hysterical. They all have the crazy Manson girl look in their eyes. And the younger ones just want something done with free, mostly free Palestine. There aren't a lot of moderates out there. But, you know, Trump isn't Free Palestine. The Democrats aren't. Everybody's afraid of Israel. Everybody's afraid to go there and touch that. But he is not. That's where I think. And not only that, but he's drawing a lot of support from the hard right as well, which is really strange, but it is true. The enemy of Israel is my friend kind of thing. And I look at, just to sort of take a side sidetracked us here for a minute. It's, it's a little bit off subject, but I wanted to bring it to you and this is a good time to do it. Would you say that the last Fourth Turning was the end of World War II? Yes, the formation of Israel came on the heels of World War II. It was 1948, I think, when they. So it was like the war ended in 45.
- [07:08]
B
Yes. The, the Balfour Declaration was signed in, I believe, 1917, but the actual completion of that process and the birth of the Israeli state was 1948. Yes.
- [07:19]
A
Yeah. And so they've been at war since then. So it's kind of extenuation of World War II. In a way, it was never really settled, that whole thing. And the fact that so many Americans now are caught up in the other side is remarkable and very noteworthy. And it is to do with, I believe, the indoctrination in our schools of the last 10, 15 years of critical race theory. My daughter started talking about. And now I'm saying all this without telling people. They have to take a side. You know, I don't want to make it sound like I am, like, pro Israel or whatever. I'm just. I'm just talking about it in terms of the fourth turning, which is that my daughter knew about the free Palestine thing, like, all the way back when Wonder Woman first got released. So this thing's been simmering and growing in younger generations for a long time. And it's all about oppressor, oppressed, and it's. It's their religion. Well, Mandani speaks to that 100%. You find these old tweets of him saying things like, who's gonna win all the Oscars? White people. Who's gonna win all the writing Oscars? White people. Who's gonna win all the visual effects? White people. And he's got like, one, like, maybe like nobody knew who he was. He's the son of a. Of a semi famous Indian film director named Mira Nair who is beloved in the industry. But what I see with him is a guy who has a lot of charisma who just wanted to do something with that charisma. He had it. He didn't know what he wanted to be. He didn't know how he wanted to manifest it. And he stepped into this thing, and it works for him because there is a hole. There's nobody taking it up, you know.
- [08:53]
B
So that actually dovetails to something that I just found out this morning about his parental lineage. His mother, of course, being in the documentary filmmaking space. His father apparently was a professor of post colonial studies at Columbia. I saw that and I went, oh, my gosh. Because. And I can't believe I didn't put this pattern together sooner. But Barack Obama, Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, I'm sure there are others who have been leading lights in the Democrat party and in federal leadership positions. More and more of these people are coming from families of college professors and artistic types. As somebody who has spent much of your life around these kind of people, how does that ring true for you about, like, what formed his personality and why he's in politics? Or why he.
- [09:43]
A
Mumdani, you mean? Yeah, well, he is. He's he's put in my opinion, My. My next column is called the the Democratic Party has fallen. I think it's over for them. He ended it. It came from friendly fire. It wasn't Trump. They wasted 10 years fighting Trump, which was the. Their biggest mistake. He isn't doing that. He's saying Trump is a fascist, blah, blah, blah. But he' people something concrete, which is what always had to happen in this last 10 years. Just give people something, a plan. Anything other than Trump is bad, you know, but yeah, he's a drama kid. He's a. He was. He grew up around movie sets. He knows show business. He's incredibly savvy when it comes to making TikTok videos. I've never seen a politician so good at that. Not one. Trump is only by default because he's surrounded by so many of these meme makers and social media people that put him in those. And he fits because he's funny and he's weird. He fits in the TikTok culture really well. But mom, Donnie does it absolutely on his own. And he speaks right to them. In some ways, he's a snake oil salesman. In some ways, he's. He's a magic man because he's just telling them what they want to hear. And when you grow up as an outsider in a culture, you know, he's an immigrant. He wasn't born here. A lot of times you want to look like Steven Spielberg. When Steven Spielberg was growing up as a Jew in America, he always felt like an outsider. So his movies worked so well because he was telling a story as an outsider. And to be a good storyteller in that way, you have to be a good observer. And obviously Mamdani is a very good observer who observes American culture and is able to mirror back to this generation what they want to hear, exactly what they want to hear. Even if it's, I would arrest Benjamin Netanyahu and put him in jail as a war criminal. Especially that. That's what they want to hear. You know, they want to hear put Trump in jail. They would love gulags. Look, they would be fine with gulags. They'd be fine with 1984, like totalitarianism, as long as it gave them what they craved. So in terms of him in show business, Barack Obama is the one who married culture and politics in a way that we hadn't seen since the 40s when the conservatives had both because of the fight against communism. The last fourth turning the rise of Obama. We've never seen anything like that in American culture. Ever someone who. And it helped because he was at the beginning of the Internet. And that's really, I think, what helped shape this monoculture, because everybody got online, Everybody was being surveilled online. There was a way to humiliate them and control them through public shaming. But Obama became a God to the left, to Hollywood. And once that marriage happened, it wasn't just Hollywood. It was institutions. It was book publishing, it was comedy, it was rock music, it was film awards. It's everything. When Trump won, that power refused to let go. So Mamdani fits right into that. He was born right into it. He's a mini Obama. He will give. Well, it's a little bit different because Mamdani is exactly what they acc. A lot of people accused Barack Obama of being, like, a socialist, a Muslim. Barack Obama. Obama isn't actually a Muslim, and he's a radical. He's a radical in a way that we start to see in the younger generations out of, like, Evergreen College. And what we saw in the summer of 2020 on the streets, that fanaticism, put a black square on Instagram, raise your fist to Black Lives Matter. That sort of China, Chinese cultural revolution. Power taking over the youth is what Mom Donnie comes from is. Is what he's mirroring back, whether he believes that or not. When I looked at his social media posts about the Oscars, I thought, wow, that's weird. He's really deep in it, isn't he? He's watching the Oscars. He's paying attention. He's. He's looking at this injustice that everybody saw back in 2015. Though, to be fair, everybody was talking that way. He's not the only one. That's why we got Oscars so white. That's why the Academy went woke. That's why all that stuff happened. But it's weird to see a leader emerge from such, like, a fringe. You know, the establishment Democrats held them at bay for so long. And a lot of these Hollywood types, Julia, Louis Dreyfus, Jane Fonda, Rosie o', Donnell, Barbra Streisand, these are centrist Democrats, establishment. They're not this new force. So we'll see. I mean, I don't know that that'll. That'll work out for him so well.
- [14:20]
B
Yeah, that's a good point, because I saw, when I was getting a fancy degree that I did not need in hindsight, 50 years ago, what you were mentioning before about the ideological indoctrination, to me just perfectly resonates with what I saw and experienced, because When I was in Washington, D.C. i saw firsthand how debates over situations like the Israelis and the Palestinians would proceed in a way where the argument always favored the Palestinians position in the end, and it was always painted as the rational one, as the rational and neutral one. And even then, when I considered myself, I wouldn't say I was a progressive liberal, but I was definitely left of center even then. I used to think, huh, that's funny. They're sort of playing with the language here in a way to make themselves seem more humane, but it's not really impartial. But this is what people who have passed through the meritocracy and the education system and who have gotten used to absorbing the ideas that move through these cosmopolitan and urban enclaves, this is what they're used to, is this kind of sensibility that if we just adhere to all the tenets of progressive ideology and pass domestic and foreign policy that conforms to that set of ideas, the world will therefore be perfect. That's never the case. And that's what makes people like Mamdani really dangerous, is because it's a little bit like what I heard Thomas Sowell say about Obama once, which is that Obama had an absolute talent for saying things that made no sense, but that sounded not only plausible, but inspiring. Mamdani has that exact same gift. So for people who think that New Yorkers banding behind Eric Adams and people who would have been strands voting for other candidates will be enough to defeat this guy, I'm just not sure that it will. I think he's going to be their next mayor. Do you?
- [16:18]
A
I'm still predicting Eric Adams, and I'll tell you why. Because he's running as an independent. Trump will campaign for him. The MAGA people will turn out. And more than that, the primary didn't have people coming out to vote against anybody. Everybody underestimated him. And as I've seen from watching politics for all these years, if you. If you coming into an election and people aren't energized, if Trump, for instance. That's why the Democrats relied on Trump for so long, for 10 years, because he was their golden goose. In a way. He could just keep scaring voters to the poll. This is to the polls. You know, this is an emergency. This is an existential crisis. Get out and vote. And they did it over and over till the voters were numb to it. Well, this. Nobody was afraid of Mamdani. Nobody thought he would win. Everybody thought it would be Cuomo or Eric Adams. So they didn't turn out to vote against. But now that he's the threat, I think a lot of New York will rise up and say no. Union guys, the longshoremen and all those guys, they'll vote this guy out. So. And there's going to be a lot of billionaires and millionaires trying to get him out. So there'll be a money pack. I don't see his vote dominating in a general personally, but maybe I'll be wrong about that. We'll see.
- [17:32]
B
The one thing I, I, I wish that I had retained a little bit more of an understanding of was the constituency that came out for AOC seven years ago when she turned over, I think it was a 10 term incumbent to win. She of course has completely reconstructed her identity since she first threw her hat into politics. She grew up in Westchester county and has yet always very cleverly and kind of deviously painted herself as a girl from Queens. But similar to Mamdani, nobody saw that result coming when she won that primary. It's not clear to me just how much of a true demographic diversity, not only race and ethnicity, but also income status came out for her. This Mamdani result though is overwhelmingly the young, the progressive, the college educated and white. Which tells you that this is sort of a self indulgent exercise for many of them because they don't have any sense of how incredibly destructive so many of these policies will work if implemented. I mean my gosh, an 800% increase in hate crime prevention programs.
- [18:43]
A
Yeah, that's manifest as censorship is what that is.
- [18:46]
B
How's, how is that going to be warehoused? Who's going to pay for it?
- [18:50]
A
It just, it's cancel culture institutionalized is.
- [18:54]
B
What that is, 100%.
- [18:55]
A
But the thing that to remember is Bernie Sanders and aoc. Can anybody point to a single accomplishment of either of them? Major accomplishment. Bernie Sanders, his whole career, nothing. Aoc, nothing. What has she done for her people? Nothing. She didn't do anything. She just talks a good game and he's the same way. But you have to remember how Eric Adams got into power. Eric Adams was, was elected because of the terrible, terrible crime in New York City and the awful mayor that came before him that was too light on cr. He was part of the defund the police and so they think they're actually going to bring in a guy who's, who's wants to let everybody out of jail. I guess that's electoral suicide.
- [19:40]
B
De Blasio, he was, he was busy handing out free fries to the vaccinated.
- [19:44]
A
Oh yeah. So that's why Eric Adams was the mayor. Now he has. Obviously has a lot of problems, but he's a cop. He can just get out there and go, you want these criminals on the streets? You're going to vote for this guy? Like, that's why I think that he has. He'll win. Personally, it's. It's really hard for me to see New Yorkers with people getting stabbed on the subway, pushed in. That's why the poor people voted, because they don't have the protection of bodyguards and security guards. And they don't, you know, if you live in an. In a bad neighborhood. I begged my daughter to get out of New York. I was like, there's no police. You've got to get out. And then when Eric Adams got in, they brought back to a degree, but the crime is still terrible in New York. So that on that alone, I think Eric Adams can win because they are so afraid of Mamdani more than anybody. It's the Democrats that are afraid of him.
- [20:37]
B
And one last point I'll make on Mamdani that I learned just today. He is an alumnus of Bowdoin College in Maine, which if anybody listening or watching is from the sort of New England liberal arts college circuit has that in their background. For those of us who went to a school like that but did not go to Bowdoin, that's a feather in our cap that I think we'll keep with us.
- [20:59]
A
Oh, no. What is it, like Oberlin or something like that? Is it one of these, like, really squishy.
- [21:05]
B
Incidentally, I hear. Cause I have people in my extended family, one in particular, who actually went to Bowdoin. It's supposed to have the best food of any school in the country. It's had that reputation for a long time. It's in a very, very nice part of Maine. But that's where he went. And I hope that the more he portrays himself as a man of the working class in the Bronx and Queens, that people wake up to that.
- [21:30]
A
So, yeah, well, he. And he's very, very, very talented and very charismatic. He's a superstar. I mean, even if he loses the election, he's still going to have. I don't know where he goes from here. Like, he's not a natural born citizen. So he can't run for president unless they change that law, which they might, just so he can run. I don't get that. My former side, the Democrats, are eager to embrace socialism at this point. I think that they don't. They fear it. That's why they Shut down the Bernie thing. So the question then becomes, can the Bernie movement be big enough to draw them in? Do they hate the Republicans enough that they're just willing to win and they'll go down this road?
- [22:08]
B
Yeah. I think the biggest difference between sort of the old line, what might be called the pre Bernie Democrats, including Obama, is they thought they could just win through their veneer of expertise and superior moral persuasion, that no matter what legislation they passed, no matter what they stood for, no matter how they may have even changed their positions, they were just superior. So they were gonna get it done on that basis alone.
- [22:35]
A
Yes, that's so right.
- [22:36]
B
But Bernie, when Bernie came along, and to his lasting credit, whatever you wanna say about Bernie Sanders, he's the first one who made student debt a political issue.
- [22:46]
A
Yeah.
- [22:47]
B
And that resonated with a lot of people around my age and younger when he really exploded onto the scene around 2015 or so.
- [22:55]
A
Absolutely.
- [22:55]
B
But it's just sometimes the people who launch the political revolutions, they're sometimes the people you least expect. And Bernie's gonna get. He's gonna get lasting credit for that one way or the other, wherever this Maubani train is.
- [23:10]
A
And honestly, like, as a former person on the left, a lot of these things would be great if they'd work, you know, forgive student debt. I'm sure everybody would vote for that if it was on the table. It's just a number. It comes down to a numbers game. You know, how many of these voters are out there that would. Would push this? How strong are the Republicans to block it? I will say that Trump's. Trump's bold moves, pulling the country to the right will inevitably lead to a equal and opposite reaction on the left. And that they will want that kind of bold stuff, and they will want the kind of Supreme Court busting rulings that Trump is getting. They'll want it all and they'll go for it all. And you know what? They should. That's politics. You know, go for it. See what the people, let the people decide. That's totally democracy. I guess what worries me most about them is just how terrorizing they are and how totalitarian they are. Like you say that moral high ground is really dangerous and damaging to this country. I think it's the reason I left the party, actually, because I couldn't stand it. This moral superiority against the other side, you know, it made me sick. I didn't want to be part of that. And that's not a political platform. And to his credit, Mom, Dani doesn't really carry that snobbery, I don't think, as much as Obama did.
- [24:28]
B
Well, when Obama lets his guard down, it's right there in the surface. The thing that he. The thing that he was very skillful of when he first became a national figure was he was so calculating about not letting that side of himself out. There were certain people, very astute, mostly on the conservative side, of course, who did pick that up, but he. He just was able to couch it or deflect it whenever that charge kind of came up against him. Maybe the one exception that I can remember was the Joe the Plumber exchange in. I can't remember if it was Ohio or Pennsylvania, but that was just a moment in time. And, you know, of course, you know, the Obama train was just going too fast to stop at that point. But let's hope Mondani's not another one.
- [25:10]
A
Well, yeah, his charisma alone will take him very far in politics. That's all you really need, honestly. They'll forgive you almost everything else if you have that. That's the weird thing about charisma is Trump has like a once in a generation charisma that has allowed him to get away with stuff nobody else would ever, ever be able to get away with. He just has it. He's lucky if you have it. You know you have it. It's power over people, and it's an intoxicating thing to have. But just quickly, on the Fourth Turning, you remember we talked about Neil Howe and the financial crisis of 2008 being the crisis that sparked the Fourth Turning. Well, that led to, like, the Occupy Wall street to Bernie movement. Right. So that's part of the Fourth Turning, this uprising of these young people who don't think they have a future in this country, that they can't buy a house, that they don't want to have kids because of climate change. They see a very grim. They believe all the media tells them about Trump being a fascist and they're giving up on their country. So they need this guy to give them something to look forward to, an America that they can shape. And then the other populist movement is obviously the Tea Party and the Trump side, all of it springing from that crisis. So how right were they, Neil Howe and William H. Strauss, about that?
- [26:26]
B
Well, they were absolutely 100% right about the mood shift in the country and what would spring forth once the mood changed. I was in College from 2004 through 2008, and I can honestly say that for as much conversation about politics went on on campus, it was Muted considerably. With what I saw when I was a graduate student and what has been going on ever since, the conversation was basically limited to do you want to be with the campus Democrats? Do you want to be with the campus Republicans? I repeatedly refused requests. It seemed like every month or two from the person I knew who was in charge of the campus Democrats. I was too busy. Well, going to class, yes, but my big major, track and field, if I'm being totally honest. But the main thing that people did back then was just tune into Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, get a sense of moral and intellectual superiority over the Dimwitz leading the country. There was such a. And I'm sure you can remember.
- [27:30]
A
Yeah.
- [27:31]
B
Testify to this even more. The hatred toward the Bush administration and toward Dick Cheney in particular, was so extreme by the middle of the 2000s that, you know, I had friends who I, in retrospect, consider kind of brave for being open about their political beliefs when they would talk about them. That's the circumstance in which Barack Obama.
- [27:53]
A
Yeah, right.
- [27:54]
B
You know, rose like a rocket to where he ultimately got. And there really was a feeling at the time, this is when I was graduating college, that, you know, this was the future and there was no going back.
- [28:07]
A
And he, as to your point, he spoke the language of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, just like Mamdani is speaking the language of the influencers of our.
- [28:16]
B
Time in 2008, the media. I'm not sure we'll ever see the media get behind a candidate the way that they got behind him. And the other thing that's important too, that I want to stress this about Barack Obama, is he is an Xer, not a boomer. You look at his life story, you look at who his parents were, you look at where he lived in the United States and around the world and how dislocating his whole growing up experience was. And also, just like some of the personality markers, I mean, he can stoop to being preachy at times, but people who are as smooth as he is, he slides right into what Strauss and Howe said about Generation X as far back as the early 90s, that the people who were born 61, 2, 3 and 4, when they first appeared on college campuses in the. At the very end of the 70s, the early 80s, they were noticed almost right away for introducing themselves to professors, introducing themselves to administrators, saying, sort of, here I am, I'm in this game to advance myself, go as far as I can on my own efforts, but I'm not here to complain and be preachy. And that was a big break. From the people who were on college campuses in the later 70s, boomers were kind of notorious for being complaining, preachy, you know, what we think of as boomers being now. But, but he was, he was part of the first wave of Xers who were a break from that personality.
- [29:35]
A
I'll tell you something, if you look at the last fourth turning, which was the Wall street crash was the crisis and then you had the Great Depression in World War II. And I would, I would count the Cold War as part of the fourth turning myself. I mean, not the whole Cold War, but at least McCarthyism and all that. But we were united as a country in World War II. And after we came together to fight that war, we weren't so polarized as left right. But after the counterculture revolution of the 60s, we really did see a major split between the hippies and the radicals and the Nixonian Republicans, conservatives. So I grew up in that era on the left and I grew up in a way that we just didn't associate with Republicans, wasn't that we hated them, we didn't spend our time teasing them or mocking them. We just existed in two different, not the kind of two different realities of now, which are completely different. But you know, it was just kind of a thing where like you wouldn't date a Republican if you were on the left. They kind of. But we didn't pay much attention to each other. I certainly wasn't pay. I just knew that, oh, I don't, I'm not, I don't really associate with Republicans. That's all I knew. But you know, these two tracks found their voice in the John Stewart people, just like you know, because they, the conservatives and the Republicans were in power for so long and the Democrats had all these terrible candidates and could never get back power after they got taken out of office. After Jimmy Carter failed and Ronald Reagan took power and he was in his administration ruled for the next 12 years. Most of my formative years were living in the Reagan era and then Bill Clinton came along and. But he was fine. He wasn't quite Obama. He wasn't really speaking for a generation, but it was that Jon Stewart hybrid of Chris Hayes, Rachel Maddow, the Internet, Twitter, the iPhone, big tech forward thinking early adopters all coming together in this sort of singularity that happened right around that time of 2008, 2009, 2010. I was there for all of it because I've been online for 30 years, it's a long time. So I was one of those people. I was an Obama cult member, 100%. I was all of it. I was a woke person. I was critical race theory all the way, you know, and so Trump became that person that spoke for the people who were left behind from all that. So it just keeps going in cycles. Right. So now Mamdani comes along and he speaks for those people that have been left out of what bizarre thing the Democrats have been doing, this madness that they've been engaged in for 10 years. And they're not MAGA, they're not conservatives, they're not Trump. So they didn't have a voice. And now they do. They have a woke leader. The leader of the woke movement.
- [32:19]
B
Yeah. The interesting thing that I've been diving into more and more recently, because it dovetails to exactly what you just said about the divide that America that really breached apart wide in the 60s and just continued, was that what we call the meritocracy, which really has the practical reality of what the meritocracy has become is different than what people think its idealized meaning is. But at some point in the past 20 to 25 years especially, I think it's just undeniable that the people who have attained the most upward mobility in American society through the conventional pursuit of professional managerial jobs, starting with higher education, especially through the elite schools, they almost all went to the Democratic Party.
- [33:03]
A
Yeah.
- [33:03]
B
Exactly when that started is hard to say. I do think that there was an infusion of ideas because of the lowercase C, lowercase R cultural revolution of the 60s. There was such an embrace, and I think it was. It was subtle at first, and then it became more and more open with time of the universities adopting critical theory. And James Lindsay and some others have talked at great lengths about this.
- [33:25]
A
Yes, absolutely.
- [33:27]
B
That critical theory, as an offshoot of postmodernism and cultural Marxism, became sort of the dominant mode of breaking down reality into all this minutiae to sort of arrive at a conclusion that it was flawed in some way that the enlightened could fix if they just applied themselves in the right way. That, among other things, has created a situation where a generation that aspires to conventional high achievement, they want to be change agents, because everything that they've invested in their education and who their friends are and where they live, it's been corrupted in a certain sense by progressive ideas that stem from critical theory, which has its roots in the cultural revolution of the years when the. The boomers were coming of age. And this is something that Neil Howe does not account for at all.
- [34:18]
A
He. I don't think he saw it coming. I certainly didn't. I mean, I was part of it, but it was a direct result of the rise of Barack Obama because he was the first black president. And we got such a high from that that we all were like, why isn't it. Why is America so racist? Why is it so sexist? Why, you know, why can't we make change? I was one of those people. And my poor daughter was in a public high school when critical race theory hit, which was right around 2013. And she took this class where she was told she had to stand outside of the circle because she was white and she wasn't allowed to talk about it. Now, my daughter grew up with Barack Obama as her only president, and her best friend was black. She never knew anything about racism before this point. They taught it to her. They taught her that she should be ashamed of herself. And. And I think that's when the trans thing started too, because it was a way out of being a normal person. So what they did was they took. If you take the Cultural Revolution in China, you take Russia, you take Cuba, you take any of these places where they can't divide on race and sex, it has to be class, right? Because that's the only way that they can identify through tribal affiliation, where a person belongs. But in our country, because the left had all the money and power, it couldn't be about class. And the Bernie thing was to a degree, but identity politics swallowed it up. And Mamdani is the hybrid of the two. He talks about class and he talks about race. But in on the left for all those years, race, and still is, by the way, a way of categorizing people and deciding who gets power and who doesn't. I had no idea back then that it would lead to the complete and total destruction of everything I love. Movies, books, comedy, science. I just never saw it coming. I didn't think people would be that stupid. I didn't think they would go along with it so easily. I never ever in a million years thought Hollywood would give up on making money, you know, like. But they did. They traded it for ideological purity and status.
- [36:20]
B
So when you. When you think back to the. The movies that were made in the 1990s, I mean, it's obvious that the best era.
- [36:27]
A
Well, it's one of them.
- [36:28]
B
Yeah, it's. It certainly is. And. And that actually is something that really stands out to me. Not only the understanding that the movies made in the 90s absolutely could not be made now for the reasons you mentioned, but I wonder when movies will Be made like that again.
- [36:45]
A
Never.
- [36:47]
B
I completely took it for granted that they would just continue like that. And it's not to say that there aren't occasional exceptions, as I think we talked about the last time we spoke. I went to see A Complete Unknown twice. But it was because I had heard great things about Chalamet's performance and that the movie was just a terrific, albeit very condensed version of events and stories and people that, you know, I'm a big fan of. But one of my other favorite movies that sort of fits into sort of that whole aesthetic is Inside Llewyn Davis. Have you seen that?
- [37:17]
A
Oh, yeah, it's great.
- [37:19]
B
There's something about that movie that just hit me at a time. I saw it when I was 28. It hit in the theaters when I was 28, and there was just something about what the character go. What the lead charact character goes through in that movie that just spoke to me in a way that's really hard to explain. But the Coen brothers are among the, like, genuinely a dying breed of people who will even dare to make movies like that. Tarantino, obviously, is going to be making whatever movie he wants until he's in the ground.
- [37:45]
A
Tarantino refuses to be woke, thank God. But, yeah, you know, I'll tell you a little story, is I was on the Oscar beat for Inside Llewyn Davis, and I love the movie so much, I got to go to a little party in Santa Monica where they had a band, and it was T Bone Burnett playing the band, and the Cohen's were there. And like, I mean, it was amazing. I was like, this can't be really happening, you know, and they were singing the songs from the movie. It was so great. It was really spectacular. That was what, 2011, 2015, something like that? I can't remember. But the Oscars, like the Democratic Party have fallen. They've fallen just like Hollywood has fallen. Because every time you turn on a movie and you see the woke casting, the story's already told for you. The filmmakers look like they have a gun to their head. It feels artificial. And you know that the only characters that will be allowed to be negative are usually white men. They're demonized and. And. Or maybe white women. But beyond that, every person of color is gonna have to turn out to be aspirational by the end. The woman is gonna have to be the hero, fight for herself. No man is allowed to rescue her. And it's boring. It's boring. And so all the element of surprise and reality. What was I just writing About? Oh, I was, I was blathering about this on my awards site, which is Awards Daily. I was writing about that because the New York Times put out their list of the hundred best films of the 21st century and Alexander Payne Sideways isn't even on the list. And that's like one of the greatest films in my opinion ever made. But their list was so elitist. It was so like international and woke. It wasn't at all reflective of the best films since 2000. No way.
- [39:33]
B
So the first Star wars reboot was, was one of the films on the list? No, that's what I thought of right away.
- [39:38]
A
No, no, we were talking like any movie you haven't seen that was made in another country is, is usually what, what tops this list. The number one movie was Parasite, which is a great movie, but it's South Korea and, and the last 20 years, 500 people who supposedly work in Hollywood and critics are saying the best film in all that time was a film made in South Korea. And it's like, do you hate your industry? Do you hate all your filmmakers? Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a great movie that's worthy of being number one. The Social Network, no Country for Old Men. I mean, these are incredible films. And no they're not because they're not Parasite. Parasite is a non white movie, so we're gonna go with that one. And that's how they think and there's no breaking them free of that. So I don't see Hollywood unless they had a doge and they brought in, you know, a crew to fire everybody and then hire back people who only they won't do that because they have streaming now as a fallback, so they don't even have to worry about box office anymore. They hate half the country so they're not going to make movies for them. And they've lost their ability to connect with regular people and tell regular stories, which is a first in all of Hollywood history. All the best movies from Frank Capra to Steven Spielberg told stories of regular people and they don't do that anymore because at best they don't know them and at worst they hate them.
- [41:05]
B
How much of the seeds of that do you see in things that preceded the full on arrival of the woke movement around 10, 11, 12 years ago? In other words, can we look back to the movies that were made say 50 years ago and see signs that the emergence of the new Hollywood after the studio system ended became such a self referential and self enclosed community of like minded people that yeah, one day they would, having remained self enclosed and self referential for a long period of time, that one day they would completely give in to ideas like Woke.
- [41:40]
A
Well, because they built. We built. We built a utopia with Obama in 2008. We have, with the help of the Internet, as civilization migrated online, we built a utopia. So that included the media, all institutions, universities, television and film. So I was there for all that. And what ended up happening was right around 2003 it started, which was a split in Hollywood between what I call the coach section of the airplane and the first class section. The first class was my beat. It was the Oscar beat. It was aimed at the high minded elites that go to art houses. The other side was Marvel and Star wars and all the things that the public went to go see and these two trajectories. Hollywood was making money like you wouldn't believe in. The big Hollywood side, the little side wasn't making any money and they didn't care. It was just a quality stamp. A movie could make no money. $12 million. The Hurt Locker, made in 2009 when it won best Picture, Avatar was the highest grossing film of all time and it didn't win best Picture. Told you everything right there. So as these two worlds diverged, it became like the interstate and Bates Motel. Hollywood became Oscar Hollywood. The elite. Hollywood became so insulated and isolated, it became like a royal court. It was a panopticon of people who all believed exactly the same thing. But I didn't realize it would become a totalitarian hellhole until Cancel Culture arrived. And that didn't happen until Trump arrived in 2016 because that we were. Our utopia was threatened, an invader was here and it was time to go to war on him and everybody like him. And it just, the first thing that happened was, well, I mean the Woke thing happened really slowly. I was a woke blogger advocating for, for black artists and women for most of my career. And then when the OscarsSoWhite hashtag hit, which was around 2014, which coincided with Black Lives Matter, you know, the Internet, social media allowed us to build these, these little armies to make noise and give a voice to people who didn't have a voice before that. Black Lives Matter is a great example. So when she came out with her Oscars so white hashtag, I was already known as like a really irritating woke blogger by then. I didn't get any credit for it because I'm a white woman. It had to go to her. She's black. But I had been really trying, you know, moving the needle very Loudly up until that point. But when that happened, the Academy was embarrassed and they didn't want to be seen as racists. Remember, it's if Obama is God, everybody wants to be closer to God, right? Like they want to be as close to God as possible. So if they're seen as a racist, they're very, very bad. The worst thing you can be. The worst thing you can be. And so we watched Hollywood in 2016. We watched the film La La Land win every single award leading into the Oscars. And then people started talking after Trump won this movie. I was one of them. This movie shouldn't win. It's too white. It's too superficial. This is a dumb movie. Ryan Gosling's trying to tell black people about jazz. This movie should win moonlight, the one about a. It's a gay coming of age story about a black man, you know, and it won. Shockingly. I predicted it to win on a. On a total chance, and it paid off at 1. But that's because they called La La Land racist. And that was the beginning of the destruction of Hollywood. The next year, the same thing happened with three billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri, that was called racist. And then a film called Green book hit in 2018 and that started a massive freak out revolution in Hollywood that would forever change the Oscars because the Academy would then say, okay, we're done with being called racist. We're going to invite 3,000 new members in with the only criteria being that they're not white and they're and. Or female and mostly international. Completely changed the Academy. And they did. They're. They're still doing it. This year they invited 500 and they said with, with a commitment to representation for women and underrepresented groups. And so that's their aim. So you tell me, how could art survive that? It can't. There's no such thing. Because nobody can tell the truth. Nobody can even tell good stories. Right. It all has to be this bizarre sort of. I mean, if you imagine what kind of a film industry could you have inside of Scientology kind of stories could you tell? Who can be your enemies, who can be your heroes? They would tell you who. It's the same in Hollywood now with no and in sight.
- [46:29]
B
Yeah. When the creative impulse is predetermined to be directed towards certain stories about social progress or social trials or injustices committed against particular people for different reasons, that actually defeats the purpose of the creative impulse in the first place.
- [46:46]
A
And what's funny is during the last fourth turning, the communist hunters had Blacklists and was like their version of cancel culture. And they went into Hollywood and they said, you're not going to preach this to the public. And it was scandalous to all of us. We thought, wow, they actually tried to do that. They controlled us. They had blacklists. But after what's happened in Hollywood now I can see why, like this is Senator McCarthy's worst nightmare. It's coming. This has it happened, right? They're using film like they use comedy, like they use science, everything to push them. Singular message of equity. Basically Marxism. If you look at, I listened to this incredible Cold War podcast called American History Tellers. It was one of the first times that I heard anybody talk about what it was like to live in America during that time. Because what they did this was by design using the FBI. They called it a whole of society approach to eradicate communism. And what that meant was neighbors telling on neighbors, people being hired to spy on neighbors, children telling on parents. All that stuff you fear that happened in Russia and in China and everywhere else, Cuba, anywhere communism goes, that usually follows. But these were the communist hunters. And it, but it was the same sort of thing playing out. And that's, that's the danger of what happened in our country, which was right around 2012 because of how Obama was obstructed by the Tea Party and the Freedom Caucus, because Obama is God. Obama's the first black president. The forces against him must be racist and white supremacist. So now we have to a whole of society approach to eradicate racism. And it's everywhere. It's in our schools, it's in our movies, it's in our building, it's in our statues, it's in our music. That's where woke really came from. That's where it. Because it was this desire to make us all these not racist white people I guess is how you could put it. Because white people still dominate, right? And it was power to. Oh, oh. I wanted to bring this back because you mentioned something about this earlier, right around the time when studios and, and Hollywood decided that they needed to be more representative and they needed shields, people of color that they had to start hiring so they didn't look racist. Everybody was afraid like being a communist of being seen as racist. And at that point a lot of people that I know who, who had no power before that, like bloggers that I know who are in the same beat as me and who were maybe were black or not white, but weren't really judged that way or seen that way or given any favors because of that suddenly rose to the top of the pile almost overnight, which was, you know, I was like, wow, that's great. So they're, they're, they understood that this is a moment in history, a window in time where they can surf this wave and rise to power and they'll have the actually powerful people opening doors and elevating them and paying them lots of money. So why wouldn't they take advantage of that? Right.
- [49:50]
B
You see a lot of people like that on MSNBC now.
- [49:53]
A
Yes, on MSNBC and movies everywhere you look. Now, I think personally that that robs people of their right to achieve on their own and to be respected for their own talent. Because once you're used like that, then no one is ever really going to look at you and say that you got there because you deserve to be there. And I think that's unfair personally. But I think if you're making that kind of money and, you know, you convince yourself that this is great, that I, you know, why not, why not finally get some rewards for being a part of the underclass or a minority? Why not rise to. The ones that bother me are the ones who are white people who want that kind of power so they become trans or non binary or whatever it is so that they can rise and start fighting for their rights in the same way. I'm like, get out of the back of the line.
- [50:43]
B
Well, they just give a sense a lot of the time that they are certain that the world has done them wrong in a way, that those wrongs must be rectified right now. And that as an ennobled victim, they have persevered through it all, and now they're here to tell everybody else, come along with me because I'm a good person. But it's a slippery slope before their certainty that their ennobled victimhood should make them powerful at your expense goes.
- [51:18]
A
That's where it's starting to go. Yeah. Like, a friend of mine who's an Oscar blogger just called me out on Twitter. I've known him for 20 years and he's half black, half Latino, and he got a job as the head writer at Variety. So he, he, you know, he got good for him, right? Promoted. But the power has kind of gone to his head. And now he's being sort of. And he called me out because I accidentally called somebody of color, who wasn't actually of color, who was from Spain and was actually white. But I just looked at that and I thought, wow, wow, okay, so that's, that's what you're gonna do with the power that you've been given that, okay, well that's low hanging fruit, man. Do something else. Write a novel, make a movie.
- [52:01]
B
And I've now hit the point in my life where I pick up on anecdotes about people that I knew in high school, and I'm sure maybe some in college too, who have risen to the top of DEI bureaucracies.
- [52:14]
A
Yes, yes.
- [52:15]
B
When you hear the names, I think maybe the shock value of this resonates a little bit more if it's people you knew in high school because you haven't seen them in gosh only knows how many years. But there's one particular person I know who will remain nameless is now the DEI head of one of the most prestigious universities in greater Boston. And I'm like, I couldn't believe it when I heard it.
- [52:39]
A
You've got to read a book. You've got to read this book called Mania by Lionel Shriver. Promise me you'll read that. We'll discuss it the next time we talk. I'm not going to tell you anything about it. Just pick it up and read it and tell me what you think Mania it's called. And I think you'll get a big kick out of it. You know, Mamdani, I was thinking as I was writing this that there's nobody else who could take the place of him who was a white man like Gavin Newsom. If even if he started selling socialism, I don't think he could resonate in the same way. I think that these generations have been raised to see people of color as sort of religious symbols in a way. Trans people too, of like they feel something when they elevate them or they pay attention. And I think that he is able to really tap into that. And I said I don't think Obama did so much because it kind of happened in reverse with him. He rose, he won, and then all of a sudden this thing was born, this religion, you know.
- [53:37]
B
Well, the interesting thing about Obama is because he has the unique background he does, he could be presented by the media, he could be presented by his campaign, and he could present himself as the person whose rise to the peak of political power would heal 200 plus years of wounds on America's original sin, that his candidacy alone could right that wrong. And I certainly, even though I was in my early 20s at the time, I should have been more aware of just how, how incredibly effective his campaign was and the media was. It seems like he actually didn't really dive into those waters Too much during the campaign when he did some of the stuff he said was scary.
- [54:25]
A
Yeah.
- [54:25]
B
But so much was done on his behalf to make him the savior. The diversity stuff exploded after he came into office. There was no, no diversity, equity and inclusion mandate in Corporate America in 2008.
- [54:39]
A
That came out in Hollywood. Yeah, certainly not. They. People attacked me, in fact, for talking even about that. All the same people who are now woke used to say, you know, it can't. You can't elevate people just because they're black. You can't. And, you know, I never argued for that. I said they should be good. But, you know, we can't have an industry that is 100 white people for 90 years and not do something about it. Like, you know, that's how I saw it at the time. But I never in a million years imagined it would go all the way to mandates, you know, which it has in Hollywood. They're mandated now.
- [55:11]
B
And I'll. And I'll follow that with just this that I've mostly kept silent on the podcast anyway, about my experiences dealing with people in the professional space who have made a living as generational consultants. And I won't name names here. However, I have at some point or another in the last several years, personally reached out to a number of the biggest people in that field. When you deal with them, they certainly leave something wanting. Most of them are hollow shells. They're used car salesmen. And I could tell when I was dealing with them that these are people who had made the decision to deal only with clients who wanted to hear about diversity, equity and inclusion mandates. And they would weave their generational insights into this whole. This whole new set of ideas, this new set of initiatives that corporations were adopting and enfranchising. And when they picked up from me, not that I was constantly betraying my politics, they could just tell by the language that I would use and the way that I would kind of pitch myself as somebody who could help them and help their clients. They wanted nothing to do with me. And I don't by any means think it's just because of, you know, the obvious things that make me who I am. It's just that I wasn't speaking their in language. And because I wasn't speaking their in language, I couldn't help them get more clients.
- [56:31]
A
Absolutely. That's why all the movie. Movie studios pulled their ads from my site, why they don't invite me to screenings or anything like that, because I am a threat to them. Just in that I don't believe Their stupid delusion. And I remember reading up on Salem, Massachusetts one time when there was this one guy who didn't believe any of it, thought it was all junk and that the girls were faking it. And he made some joke to somebody once and that joke got him accused of a witch. And I think he went to trial and I think he actually was executed.
- [57:02]
B
That sounds about right. I should know more about the history of Salem because actually, oh, it's so fascinating. My brother used to live there.
- [57:09]
A
No way. Yeah, I've been obsessed.
- [57:12]
B
Greater Boston's a small universe, but.
- [57:16]
A
Yeah, no, Salem as well. It's actually Salem is where they celebrate Salem, but it's actually all took place in Danvers because that was Salem Village at the time.
- [57:23]
B
Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Danvers, Mass. Is two towns from where I grew up.
- [57:27]
A
Yeah, that's where I want to go. I'm going to go there sometime to research because I'm so. I have two major fascinations and they're both in Massachusetts. One is the Lizzie Borden case, 1892. And one is Salem, 1692. And I keep thinking that between these two, Fall River, Massachusetts is. I drove there this last on my last road trip.
- [57:47]
B
Okay.
- [57:48]
A
But both of them are fascinating rabbit hole stories, especially Salem. Depressing. Salem is more depressed. Lizzie Borden's is more fascinating. The Salem one is like, you know, four year olds rotting in jail, dogs being accused of witches and being killed and all that. Like people not the brightest back then, but we, you know, I would think that all these years later we wouldn't be capable of that, but we are. We're not quite capable of execution. But these fanatics, these mom dummy fanatics, I don't know, man. I think they might be down with firing squads.
- [58:23]
B
The, the, the, the means change, but the human nature behind it never does.
- [58:28]
A
Yeah, just gotta justify it. If you can make people mad enough and you can justify why these people need to be put in gulags and kept away from all of us pure people, you know, you can go get away with it. And I'll tell you this, the one thing I really like about Trump and appreciate about him is that if you're born in America, you have one thing, one thing that you have, and that is you are an American citizen and that has value. If you have a leader who teaches you how to love your country, to put a big giant flag on the front of the White House and say, we love our country and this is who we are, we're Americans. I think that resonates with so Many people in every part of the country, the left wants to teach them that they're perpetual victims and that because they're born black or they're not white, that they can't rise in this country unless someone hands them a favor and elevates them. And what a terrible thing to teach people who are born into this country. Why not teach them instead? You are born as an American. You have a blank check that you can cash. You know, get out there and do it and you can do it. Like maybe you can't do it, but you should try. And it's that optimism that he brings, I think, that has meant that he draws people from all of these different groups because I think that even if they have nothing, the fact that they're Americans is something, it's value, it's money in the bank, just to be in a free country where you can build a business, write a book, be anything you want. You know, I don't want any leaders in power who don't believe that.
- [60:05]
B
Yeah, yeah. And which, which makes me think right away of Gavin Newsom because he checks all those boxes. We know. Just a little bit of a preview of things to come on the Generation Report. Following the point about analogizing with the Nazis, I'm not as well read on this as I might be, but I think to a reasonable degree of certainty. I've uncovered that a lot of the presumptions on the left that their opponents are essentially or effectively fascists by dint of just believing something different, started with a study that was published in 1950 called the Authoritarian Personality by one of the kingpins of critical theory who came over from Nazi occupied Europe named Theodore Adorno. And he had a team of researchers at UC Berkeley, they created a personality scale that they called the F scale. F4 fascist, of course, that tested all of these people across the political spectrum, but which mostly focused on people who were in the center and slightly right leaning to further right. And if they had anything resembling traditional beliefs, if they didn't believe that decisions on government and foreign policy should be best left to experts and diplomats, if they had any whiff of being apart from the hard left worldview of lofty intellectuals like themselves, they were essentially labeled fascists, or at least latent fascists. And this, from what I understand, is considered by most people to be the most influential study, certainly the most influential personality study produced and published in the American social sciences since World War II. And it came out in 1950. Fast forward 75 years. There has been a 75 year incursion. Of this belief through so many of our institutions that Donald Trump really was the tripwire that finally sent them into this alarm of, oh, my God, fascism is at our doorstep. It can happen here. But the idea was planted a very long time ago.
- [62:17]
A
Which is funny because, you know, if you think about it, 2016, and they were already calling him a racist on the border issue, which he was very loud and, you know, right up front about. He didn't hide it. He didn't pretend to be anything else. He said, they're coming here. A lot of them are criminals and rapists, and we're gonna deport them. We're gonna secure the border, we're gonna deport them. So they knew that all the way back in 2016. And that's not the reason. I don't think that they lost their minds when he won. I think it's because we had such a carefully constructed reality that said you can't talk a certain way, you can't joke a certain way, you can't be a masculine man, you can't make sex jokes, you can't call things what they are. Trump speaks the old language of what America used to be like, but that's not what we spoke when he won. The Hillary's and the Obamas and all that. We had this very carefully constructed soft language language. And, and I think that's more than anything what threatened people is that they heard him say things that they know in their mind you're not allowed to say, and that just flipped them out and they could never get out of it. They can never get back to normal and just say, you know what? Sticks and stones, man. Okay, Say whatever you want. I don't care. I'm strong enough to survive it. Imagine if you were a society so fragile you needed trigger warnings on movies or art or paintings like, or jokes. Like, if you're that fragile, imagine trying to get through World War II like that, or World War I, or.
- [63:49]
B
There's a whole lot of memes about that, you know, men, what happened kind of thing.
- [63:55]
A
Can you imagine? Yeah, a trigger warning on Gone with the Wind. You know, it's gonna send you into some frenzy with an anxiety attack. Just get over it. It's a stupid. The words, fine, whatever, you're stronger than that. You can survive it. You know, that's what you teach your kids. But I, I feel very nervous right now about what's about to happen because I see, I see a big stack of dried out weeds and I see Mamdani's win as a Lit match. And I feel like that's about to take it to the streets, to take it to war, because he is, he is a revolutionary who can lead. And he's, he's intelligent in some ways, he's stupid in other ways, in my opinion. And he's careless. And he, he will, as I've seen from his videos, where he's fighting those ICE agents and he's calling for Netanyahu to be put in prison. Terrifies me because it sounds like Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, you know, that's what he sounds like, Fidel Castro. And you know, Fidel Castro was really charming, too.
- [64:58]
B
Oh, all the, all these guys have a. Have a chip that just allows them to get where they are, that includes a charm that other people are simply not capable of projecting.
- [65:07]
A
Yeah.
- [65:07]
B
Yeah.
- [65:09]
A
So this is a fourth turning, without a doubt. It's, it's, it could be, can't possibly be any more of a fourth turning in every possible way. Everywhere you look. So what do you think is going to happen, do you think, And I know from every fourth turning, Americans, you know, they come out of it having chosen a certain path. And that's what we're deciding right now is what our path will be. And I don't want it to be the left. I can deal with the right. It's sort of in the realm of normal. The left.
- [65:37]
B
No, obviously you and I hope for the same path to prevail in the end. The thing that I've increasingly come to the conclusion about with respect to the left, is they are so assured of their own moral superiority, moral superiority especially, but intellectual superiority, too, that they will not build anything which does not serve their own ideological purposes. And I think that's something that I'm going to try in my own way to get across to people my own age and younger, as I speak with people in my other life, my non podcast life, is the sense of urgency, of where we are because we're in a fourth turning. Because the left has proven itself more than ever, I think, in the last few months to be just filled with this nihilistic rage that anything they can't control, they're going to destroy. The pivot then becomes okay within those of us who would like something different. We all have disagreements about different things. The values we think are important, the lifestyles maybe that we lead where we want to live. We all come from different backgrounds, but do you want to live in a country where nothing that serves the whole country and that lasts is built for anything other than purely Ideological purposes. Well, if your answer is no, that's what the left is planning, and that's where the left is taking us.
- [67:05]
A
If they're not stopped, well, I hope we stop them. I mean, I was always wondering, years ago, when I thought about this fourth turning, and I knew that there was going to be a war. There had to be. And so I would think, well, what would be enough to start a civil war? What would be enough to start a great war? A world war? It looks like Trump has stopped the world war, but now it's going to focus on more of a civil war. And you think, what is an issue people are willing to die for? I think some of these fanatics are willing to die for mass deportations, certainly transgender stuff. Probably those two, to me, are the two points where I could see these guys forming a much bigger violent army than we saw in 2020. I'm worried about what they're going to do because of what they did. Now, a lot of the people that were protesting over the summer of 2020 were angry about racism, and so. And a lot of the black men have. Have kind of gone to Trump, so they don't have that same energy. So it's mostly going to be these. These college kids, you know, but it still could still be really bad. I think that the crazier the left is, the more people are going to want to move to the right, because the Trump side is going to seem like the more normal side. But I think you should write a book.
- [68:21]
B
I. I've got. I've got plans to do that. That. The angle that I would like to take, and I leave this to anybody listening, if they've got ways they would like me to modify this, I'm receptive to that, is how history became so distorted that people believe that right now, the ultimate problem that America has is that we're losing our moral superiority. I mean, most of these people who go out to, like the no Kings protests, maybe the greatest trick that the mainstream and the establishment and the greatest sleight of hand they convinced these people of was that we are now living in an America that is directly handed down from the founding in every meaningful respect, and that's just not true. So many things in the country have changed so much that to actually stick with that as a talking point to me is just incredibly dishonest. But it's an article of faith to them, and they'll never walk away from it. They'll never believe anything else. And what I'd like to do is try to offer A sense of how the establishment came to see history the way Ken Burns and Jon Meacham see it. Because, I mean, Ken Burns, for what it's worth, I think he's made a lot of great documentary films. He's a weird guy. He's made some great films. He's not a historian.
- [69:47]
A
No, he's a NPR liberal. I'm sorry. I hate to say that, but it's true.
- [69:53]
B
And Jon Meacham is. I mean, he's like my Lex Luthor.
- [69:57]
A
Is he really John Meacham? He just put out that Twain book.
- [70:02]
B
Oh, he made it.
- [70:03]
A
Is he the one that. The Twain biography? Because I just bought a Twain biography, and I think it's some famous guy that wrote it.
- [70:09]
B
I don't know. I could see him writing about Twain. He picks all the usual suspects. It's sort of like Doris Kearns Goodwin. She actually disappoints me a little bit because I consider her a serious historian, even though she's tackled kind of elite subjects her whole career. Like, she's terrifically bright and a great writer and has, I think, earned her place, even though I don't agree with her politics at all. Meacham is just slick. And I first discovered him on about the time that Biden was becoming president, and it was becoming clear that all of his pet phrases about the soul of America, this. And, oh, yeah, I remember you telling me. And, you know, we. We just need to get things right 51% of the time. You know, the battle is perennial. That was another one of Biden's lines that Meacham gave him. I mean, the media was so totally dishonest of all, you know, to state the obvious. The media was so totally in the dark about what their collaborative relationship had been and for how long. It just allowed all of those pet phrases that Biden was using to seem organic, but none of it was organic. And I consider Meacham.
- [71:18]
A
He doesn't absolutely. Biden is not exactly an original thinker, man. The guy's been in government for what he was in government for what, 70 years or something like that. It was insane. But, you know, if we had gone with the Democrats, I mean, I just. I. I am so grateful that Kamala Harris did not win, because I could see our future laid out. What they want on the left is what Hollywood is now, which is aligned on ideological grounds with other countries, an international hive mind like 1984, that leaves out everybody else. There isn't a future for everybody else. So as chaotic as Trump's presidency is and whatever Mess. The maga, you know, they're not a cohesive coalition maga. They're very infighting, constantly chaotic. Everybody has their own idea of where they want. It's, it's, it's like the Republicans before the Civil War, actually, because that's how they were too. And, you know, obviously everybody knows, as you know, Lincoln wasn't exactly Mr. Popular.
- [72:16]
B
You really see that when you go to, you go to the historic sites for him, by the way, some of the stuff that people were saying about him, you almost can't even believe it.
- [72:23]
A
Yeah. And it's amazing that it worked out for him the way. Well, it didn't actually work out for him. Shot him in the head. But, but I, I just think that to your point, like, it's our country, so young and ours, democracy. Democrats are so stupid in their definition of democracy. They don't even understand what the word means. How could we get to a place where they don't know what the word means? And it's like I always say to them, we just had an election. People voted, Trump won. That's democracy. Perfectly put. And they're like, no, our cause. And they're saying that it's the Constitution. The Constitution. My side has been trying to overturn the Second Amendment for my entire life. They don't care about the Constitution. They think it's written by old white guys.
- [73:06]
B
And to follow that point about the Constitution, I think what I'm about to say will be independently backed up by most people who have observed this, that the vast majority of people who rise to some level of prominence, public or otherwise, as constitutional scholars, they overwhelmingly lean left. Now, I know I can give one example. I won't name the person, but people who know me or have listened to this podcast probably already know who it is. The woman who was the opponent last year of the woman whose congressional campaign I supported is a millennial, for what it's worth. And among her career accomplishments to this point is a time teaching constitutional law at some well known schools. But when you listen to her speak publicly, you can tell this is a person whose views of the Constitution are not exactly the way the Constitution has been presented and interpreted and spoken about in the past. It's all slanted through this elite lens that in my estimation has come from not just the education system in general, but the elite law schools.
- [74:10]
A
Right. And three of them are on the Supreme Court. And it's interesting that the lawfare, that's the fruits of the labor you're talking about, because they're all in the judiciary. They played the long game. They got into the schools, they got into the institutions, they got into Hollywood, they got into the. The judiciary. They got everywhere. And then one man, one man was able to undo the whole thing, which is pretty impressive. I mean, he hasn't undone it. It's still going on, but they're pretty powerful force. All right. We've talked a long time. I think we have to. I'm sorry. We could talk for like five hours.
- [74:50]
B
Absolutely. So for your podcast, for your sub stack for Awards Daily, for anything else that you have coming up, what would you like to plug?
- [75:03]
A
I think for your listeners, if you, if you're interested in listening to reading a person who is taking Hollywood to task and telling the truth in ways nobody else does and get attacked in the comments for constantly. You can go to awards daily.com if you want to hear podcasts that I produce that people seem to like about this subject that we're talking about. That's sashastone. Substack.com. that's pretty much it. That's all I got. I don't have a book or anything. I should. We both should have books. We should have our books on our back shelf that say by us that people can buy and we don't because we're lame.
- [75:38]
B
And, and I. I should point this out too, is that I actually got a request just the other day from someone who's one of my regular listeners about starting a sub stack, which for a variety of reasons, I've been telling you that mostly just because I've been overburdened with a lot of other stuff that's not podcast related. I know I've been dragging my heels on it, but I have plans to start that up soon.
- [76:02]
A
Wonderful. I've been telling you that do that.
- [76:04]
B
For a long time. I've been producing the video stuff for a while, and I do feel like it's kind of coming to the end. There's a couple of more topics I want to make sure that I hit.
- [76:15]
A
You can do both. You can do both. Your substack can be the Generation Report.
- [76:21]
B
Absolutely. Yeah. There's one episode, as I sort of alluded to before, on the meanings of words that have been changed. Democracy being number one. There's a little giveaway, but there's some others, too. And the other episode that I committed to making is one that I've been planning for a long time on the hero archetype, because I consider myself as having gone way too deep into these ideas for way too long and being a millennial I consider that to be a subject that I can produce something about that nobody else could touch. I know exactly how I plan to start it and how I plan to finish it.
- [77:01]
A
Very good.
- [77:02]
B
The stuff in the middle is just what I've got to work out, but those are two things that I've got planned and no time like the present. No time like the present. Right.
- [77:13]
A
All right. Well, it was really nice talking with you. Thank you for having me on your show. I'll have you next time. Okay.
- [77:20]
B
We should pick up a matter of working out schedules, but it's always great to chat, and we hope this will start to reach a bigger audience so that if you don't know what the fourth turning is, please look it up. Read Strauss and Howe's books, but the original, I implore you people, make independent assessments of them on your own. Listen to Sasha's podcast, Free thinking through the fourth turning. That's on iTunes. YouTube and Spotify, probably.
- [77:49]
A
Yeah, I think so.
- [77:50]
B
And my podcast, the Generation report on YouTube, iTunes and Spotify. If you enjoy these kinds of conversations or just want to take a little bit of a deep dive into some independent ideas of how things got to be the way they are, please check out our stuff. We encourage a whole range of feedback, but we're sort of in the same headspace of trying to move a conversation along about a lot of issues, and that's kind of why we've got this collaboration going now. But thank you so much again for coming on. You've been a great help to me. It's been great to know that other people in this space appreciate the work that I've been doing. I really appreciate what you're doing.
- [78:29]
A
Absolutely.
- [78:30]
B
And we'll hope to talk again soon.
- [78:33]
A
All right, man. You have a. What is it? Weekend. Yes. Have a great weekend. And, boy, let's hope that America survives the next couple of days.
- [78:42]
B
Fingers crossed.
- [78:44]
A
Yes.
- [78:44]
B
Thanks again.
- [78:45]
A
Bye. Bye.