← Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone
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- [00:00]
Sacha Stone
Hi, this is Free Thinking through the Fourth Turning. My name is Sacha Stone. The audacity of a counterculture. So if you care to find me, look to the Western sky. I'll admit that this Thanksgiving road trip wasn't exactly fun. Oh, don't get me wrong. The minute I see my daughter, I am over the moon. Thanksgiving was as it should be. Warm family, good food and giving thanks. I never wanted to say goodbye and I hate that she lives all the way across the country. It was the before and the after when the trouble began. Somehow last May's road trip did not bring the darkness, but this one did. It was too much time spent thinking about things I'd been pushing aside for too long. I feel like I've been running just ahead of a tidal wave. And no, that doesn't mean anything like depression, but just the plain truth of what has become of me and my life after the past four years of moving from one side of a civil war to the other. Was it a civil war or was it a revolutionary war? I really can't tell. I just know that it was a war with two sides. You had to pick one. However, no one on the right punishes anyone on the left for believing what they believe. Not really. They boycott companies that sell their ideology like Budweiser, but they don't disinvite you to Thanksgiving. I knew I could not discuss politics with my daughter's boyfriend's family and I didn't. Whatever they believed, I was willing to put it aside because we were all together for a holiday about appreciating everything we had. And in the big picture, I have much to be thankful for. I feel lucky in that way. Last May I ended up in the ER twice on my road trip. Once for slicing open my palm in Lincoln, Nebraska and once while trying to outrun a screaming ambulance with my elderly dog barely able to make it across the street, I tripped and landed on my elbow, breaking my arm. But the dog was fine nonetheless. I wasn't haunted last time like I have been this time. If my life was a novel, those injuries might have been warnings for something much more serious to come. Not like the death of a loved one or a terminal illness, but serious in a different way. A life shattering, unavoidable way. But my life isn't a novel. Maybe the tidal wave finally caught up with me now that I had so much time to think at home, I'm always online reading and listening to like minded people and not feeling so alone. But in a car, driving for hours, there was no escaping it. This isn't some nightmare I'm living through and one day I will wake up. I've bought a one way ticket aboard the Counterculture Express and there's no turning back now. It wasn't so much everything I've been writing about and saying for the past four years that haunted me. It's what's just happened to me in the past few months. I've spent almost a decade being that one person who stands on the side of those being canceled, using whatever online clout I'd attained from a life lived mostly online to defend them. I have even stood up for those accused of being sex offenders. I'll never forget spending much of my reputational clout standing up for a writer named Devin Farace. Long before Hollywood blacklisted me, the worst thing they could say about me was that I was a rapist apologist. And they said it all the time. Later, when I began drifting away from the left and writing here on Substack, I was interviewed by Megyn Kelly. Somehow Devin Farace saw it. After being a patron on his Patreon, writing columns defending him and standing up for him at great cost, he threw me under the bus. He called me out on Twitter because he had to let everyone know that he might be a sexual assaulter. But I was on the other side of the war, and that was worse. But even as horrible as that was, it wasn't what occupied my thoughts for the past two weeks while doing something I usually love, driving. No, it was how I'd wasted so much of my time working a 247 job, investing my whole life in an industry that would completely turn its back on me in the way they have. It has always been chilling to live through it, but somehow I'd avoided really thinking about it. And now, as I drove nearly 3,000 miles to Ohio and back, I couldn't think of anything else. It's Oscar season, and I'm doing what I've done every year since 1999 reporting on the Oscar race. And even back in May, I had a whole staff working with me to proofread my stories, remind me of breaking news, or run a contest for them. Now it's a ghost town and it's just me, but driving all day means I can't do the job alone. I was playing with fire. I always knew and said so many times when people asked me how I was able to get away with writing honestly here on Substack, while the climate of fear and the culture of silence crippled so much of Hollywood, how had I remained untouched because I kept what I really thought confined to substack and on a private Twitter account. But in the months leading up to the election, I thought I had an obligation just to tell the truth, to come clean and be out about who I was and what I was fighting for. But I danced too close to the flame. I made a joke mocking white dudes for Harris, joking that finally white power was back in fashion. And I championed Trump on Twitter on my official account. And that was the red line that meant I was a traitor in our war. And that caught the attention of a journalist named Rebecca Keegan, who interviewed many publicists and an academy member and said my joke wasn't funny and that I was now toxic. No blurbs on movie ads for me, but worse, no advertising either. No staff. A 25 year career was wiped out overnight. For weeks, the gossip around town was that Keegan was talking to people who knew me and worked for me, looking for dirt, trying to uncover yet more information to expose me as a bad person. But I've done nothing except try to live an honest life and speak the truth. And in so doing, I felt compelled to support and vote for Donald Trump. And probably the worst part of Keegan's investigative report, which I still have not read, was that she ended it by suggesting that I was pushing this far just to prove how intolerant the left had become. As if that was even necessary. During our interview, she explained why she was so shocked by my tweets and what I said. But Sasha is smart, she would say to herself. Finishing that sentence for her would be something like, so how can she be writing alt right talking points and disinformation? What she would never do, however, is consider anything I've said to have any merit in her world. When you only read the New York Times, listen to NPR, and end the night with msnbc, how can your mind crack open even a little bit to consider there is another way to see things? It would never occur to her to do what I did to get to know the half the country she feels comfortable shunning, to humanize them, to walk in their shoes. Now that I've done that, how can I see her or any of them as decent people anymore? I can't. And that is what haunted me the most. Peering into the dark side of human nature, the ugly side, the unavoidable truth about what we're all capable of. I try to remember what it was like to be one of them when I saw my old high school boyfriend in prom date coming out On Facebook as a MAGA guy, how I thought what happened to him. But even if I thought he'd lost his mind or been radicalized, I would never do to him what they're doing to me. I could never. So how can they? Why is it like this? How can so many people go along with it? How can so many people be this weak, this cowardly? That's the thing I can't seem to reconcile in my mind. And yes, a part of me did do it as a kind of test. What if I just told the truth? Sooner or later, someone would write a story like Rebecca Keegan did. Anyway, it was only a matter of time. When you have the power to destroy people overnight, it's hard not to pull the trigger. And they've been trying to destroy me and my business for years anyway. They just didn't have the trump card. You might wonder why I'm wasting your time whining about my own life yet again. Get over it. You might think. Turn the page. Snap out of it. We've been dealing with this a lot longer than you have. Stop being so fragile. This is who they are. This is what they are. Accept it. In one sense, that's true. It's time for me to walk away from writing about Hollywood, especially the Oscars. They're dead anyway. No one cares. It's become, as my friend says, best picture from a film festival. But in another sense, I've never been one to back away from a fight. And a part of me refuses to abandon what I've built. That's what they want. They want me to not exist anymore. I will walk away. But I'll do so when I decide. Not them. And if I'm flying solo, at least I'm flying free. As I came to the end of my long road trip, I could see the light at the end of the tunnel. The answer, I discovered was in the wizard of Oz, or rather the update the movie musical Wicked. I finally watched it with my daughter, and I saw for the first time that this movie is about what we've all just lived through. It's about all of us, the outcasts and the condemned witches. And yes, this is a distortion of the film the wizard of Oz, which is perfect in every way. And one I think about a lot. I think about how Oz is a delusion, or how we must have the brains, the heart and the nerve. I think about how there's no place like home. And yes, I think about the wicked witch as Mrs. Gulch, a Karen who wanted to destroy toto and how those of us watching would have done anything to save him. Gail.
- [10:51]
Dorothy
Howdy, mister. I want to see you and your wife right away about Dorothy. Dorothy? Well, what has Dorothy done? What's she done? I'm all but lame for the bite on my leg. Me? She bitchy? No, her dog. Oh, she bit her dog, eh? No, that dog's a menace to the community. I'm taking him to the sheriff and make sure he's destroyed. Destroyed? Toto. Oh, you can't. You mustn't. Auntie M. Uncle Henry, you won't let her, will you? Of course we won't. Where we. Em. Please, Aunt Em. Toto didn't mean to. He didn't know he was doing anything wrong. I'm the one that ought to be punished. I let him go in her garden. You can send me to bed without supper if you don't hand over that dog. I'll bring a damn soup. It'll take your whole farm. There's a law protecting folks against dogs that. How would it be if she keeps him tied up? He's really gentle. With gentle people, that is. Well, that's for the sheriff to decide. Here's his order allowing me to take it. If you want to go against the law. We can't go against the law, Dorothy. I'm afraid poor Toto will have to go. Now you're seeing reason. Here's what I'm taking him in so he can't attack me again.
- [12:05]
Elphaba
No.
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Dorothy
No, I won't let you take him.
- [12:07]
Elphaba
You go away or I'll fight you.
- [12:09]
Dorothy
Myself, you wicked old witch. Uncle Henry. And don't let it take, too. Don't let her take it.
- [12:16]
Elphaba
Please. Stop her. Put him in the basket, Hendrick.
- [12:20]
Dorothy
No. Elmira Gulch. Just because you own half the county doesn't mean you have the power to run the rest of us. For 23 years, I've been dying to tell you what I thought of you. And now, well, being a Christian woman.
- [12:48]
Sacha Stone
I can't say it, But Wicked in 2024 is the film that needed to be made. Even if no one involved in it realizes that this, it is a retelling that somehow tells the truth about this moment, even if those telling it will never see what they've manifested. Just like those in my very liberal town putting on a production of the Crucible without having any idea just how ironic that was. Cynthia Erivo brilliantly plays Elphaba, an outsider who is told to conform and be like everyone else. She's also worried about the animals because the establishment the wizard of Oz, played by Jeff Goldblum, plans to put them in cages and remove their ability to talk. True, the left can distort this and somehow pretend that Oz is Trump and the animals are migrants, or the animals are transgender people. They can twist it around that way and no doubt have. They can pretend because Erivo is black that this is a story about racism in marginalized people. But the truth of the story is that it's anti establishment. It's about speaking up and speaking out and becoming an exile as a result. Podcast Listener is a picture of the Lyrics of Defying Gravity so if you care to find me look to the western sky as someone told me lately Everyone deserves a chance to fly and if I'm flying solo at least I'm flying free to those who'd ground me Take a message back from me Tell them how I'm defying gravity I'm flying high defying gravity and soon I'll match them in renown I watched Wicked with my daughter and at the moment Elphaba becomes a witch and takes to the sky for the first time we hear this wonderful part of the song. That was when I realized that in a world of Glinda's, it's more important to be an Elphaba friend.
- [14:55]
Elphaba
No, leave her alone. She hasn't done anything wrong. I'm the one you want, I'm the one you want it's me, it's me so if you care to find me down to the western sky has someone told me lately Everyone deserves a chance to fly and if I'm flying so low at least I'm flying free to those who ground me Take a message back from me Tell them how I'm defying gravity I'm flying high defying gravity and soon I lost no memory. Now.
- [16:01]
Sacha Stone
It wasn't just that movie. It's also a movie about Bob Dylan called A Complete Unknown. No one who has gone along with this cancel culture madness and this extreme polarization can possibly understand what it meant to be Bob Dylan. When he went electric, that was the counterculture, that was a musician refusing to follow what everyone around him expected him to be, think and and say. Back then, America was shedding old skin, just like it is now, and on the way to a rebirth, a revolution of culture that defied the established order and in so doing, defied gravity. Those who make these movies, love them, sell them, and attempt to win Oscars for them, or even those who vote on them, will never understand their role. Now, as we watch the Birth of a new counterculture, one that will leave them behind. They have convinced themselves that they're still the good guys because they use identity politics to absolve themselves of their sins of wealth and privilege. But that isn't the truth about who they are. They're part of the old world, the one a growing number of us are choosing to escape. The only thing more powerful in Hollywood than money is the truth. Being able to tell it is the kind of power I suddenly felt that helped change how I saw things. And I was no longer haunted by what had happened to me. There it is. The audacity of the counterculture, the audacity of hope. Almost no one on the left sees me as a good person. That's been true for almost 10 years. They see me as a witch hiding in the shadows, a dangerous force threatening their utopia. But what a beautiful thing it is to be that first free. Free in the mind and in the heart to see the future that promises the new. The thing born after the dead skin falls away. You see, sometimes it's the witch who will be remembered well, while those who persecute and condemn them will become the villains of history. And so it will go with Hollywood. Thanks for listening to my podcast. Sashastone.substack.com I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving. I'll be home soon, so hopefully the schedule will return to normal. And remember to thine own self be true.
- [19:18]
Elphaba
Something has changed within me Something is not the same I'm through with playing by the rules of someone else's game Too late for second guessing Too late to go back to sleep Sleep it's time to trust my instincts Close my eyes and leave it's time to try defying gravity I think I try defying gravity and you can.
- [20:15]
Sacha Stone
Can'T I make.
- [20:16]
Elphaba
You understand you're having delusions of grandeur I'm through accepting limits Cause someone says they're so Some things I cannot change but till I try I'll never know Too long I've been afraid of losing love I guess I've lost well if that's long for here comes at much too high I call it I'd sooner be defying gravity Kiss me good I'm defying gravity and you can pull me down Come with me thinking Think of what we could do together Unlimited together We're unlimited together we'll be the greatest team there's ever been Gleams the way we planned them if we work in tandem there's no no fight we cannot win Just you and I Defying gravity they'll never bring us down. Are you coming? I hope you're happy now that you're choosing this.
- [22:21]
Dorothy
You too.
- [22:23]
Elphaba
I hope it brings you police. I really hope you get it and you don't live to regret it. I hope you're happy in the end. I hope you're happy, my friend. No. Leave her alone. She hasn't done anything wrong. I'm the one you want. I'm the one you want. It's me. It's me. So if you care to fight me down to the western sky has someone told me lately Everyone deserves a chance to fly? And if I'm flying so low at least I'm flying free to those who ground me. A message back from me telling her Defying gravity. Gravity. And soon I lost no memory. Now nobody in all of us, no wizard that there is or was is ever gonna bring her ham.