Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone

What Christmas Meant to Me Then and What it Means Now

Dec 24, 202400:26:54Summary ready

It is my heart-warm and world-embracing Christmas hope and aspiration that all of us, the high, the low, the rich, the poor, the admired, the despised, the loved, the hated, the civilized, the savage, may eventually be gathered together in a heaven of everlasting rest and peace and bliss, except the inventor of the telephone.Mark Twain - Letter to the Editor, New York Evening World, 23 December 1890If you grow up on the Left, you grow up without religion. After the counterculture movement split from conventional religion in the 1960s, we’d done everything we knew how to do to fill up the eternal emptiness that had us chasing everything from sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll, cults in the 1970s, gurus, and ashrams, the self-help movement, the mental health movement, and eventually, we ended up back where we started.We “found religion,” but this time as the politics of identity, where our happiness depended on how we solved the problems of society, like racism, homophobia, transphobia, misogyny, and climate change. It came from needing to feel good about ourselves and our world, but it was followed by anger and resentment when we could not convert the entire country to our way of life.The truth about the Left is that they know no other way of life. This was the problem for the Southerners after the Civil War. They, too, knew no other way of life and could not evolve out of their hatred, fear, and hysteria. All they could do was preserve it by banishing those who threatened it. I wish I could say I’ve come out of these past several years with a renewed faith in humanity. The truth is exactly the opposite. What I saw was what collective hatred, fear, and tribalism can do to otherwise decent people. I saw what we’re all capable of when our power is threatened. I saw how easy it is to go along with the crowd, even when what they’re doing is wrong.I always thought the people I called my heroes were made of tougher stuff. Better stuff. Kinder stuff. I always thought my side was the side of the good guys who would be immune to group dehumanization. I also did I think we would ever be the ruling class aristocracy sneering at the middle and working class, gathering all of our culture, wealth, and institutions, and hogging them for ourselves.Now that the empire is in collapse, those with all of the power are scrambling, not just to explain it but as a way to get back some of what’s been taken. Good luck with that one. Take yet another agonizing, unbearable column by your typical Leftist elite, Jill Filipovic, writing for The Guardian:Worse than what, Jill? Indoctrinating children to choose their genders, then surgically or chemically sterilizing them? Or does it just come down to immigrants and their right to cross the border illegally by the millions, their safety, and our safety be damned? Corruption? You mean like government censorship on a laptop or covering up the mental incapacity of the Commander in Chief for four years? Weaponizing the Department of Justice? Immorality? Like what exactly? Lying to the public via the propaganda press? Calling half the country “garbage” or “White Supremacists” or “Nazis”? And what rights? The right to have an opinion without losing your job, status, or social standing? Your right to play in sports as a biological female without having to compete with biological men? Oh, of course not. She means abortion, as usual. Honey, if you want an abortion, there’s a pop-up clinic down the street. People like Jill examine half the country as insects in a jar, watching how they behave in tightly confined spaces, how they respond to being called racists, or how they are de-banked or canceled off of social media. It’s fun, right? To watch the insects get stressed and claw at the glass for a way out? The disgust drips from every word, even as she tries to make nice-nice, now that her ass has been handed to her in a historic, humiliating defeat.Trump won again, Jill. Eat that for breakfast. It isn’t you people who have to learn to tolerate Trump voters. It’s you who have to apologize to them for what you’ve done not only to them but to this country. You have destroyed every great thing you ever built, and listen to you now, pretending you still have the moral high ground. She then tries to explain why she’s writing this at all:To paraphrase a line from Carrie, “Shut up, Jill. Just shut up.”These are the kinds of people I used to call home. I knew them, mingled with them, read them, RT’d them and was Facebook friends with them. Now, they terrify me. They are the banality of evil. They are the side that would go along with segregation, even if they’ll never admit it. They’re the side that would lock arms as the Jews were carted off to camps, and no, they’ll never see themselves that way. She writes:Oh, poor deluded Jill. She has no idea what just happened, does she? It would do her a world of good to start opening her mind to reality, escape the fear bunker, and start interfacing with the truth. She should read David Samuels’ piece in Tablet, one I’ll be writing about in more depth for my next piece: “Trump’s head turn was a perfect example of an event that has no explanation outside the favor of the gods, or whatever modern equivalent involving wind factors and directional probabilities you might prefer to the word “God.” Trump was fated to win, just as Achilles was fated to overcome Hector, because the gods, or if you prefer the forces of cosmic randomness, were on his side, on that day, at that moment. That move not only saved his life by allowing him to escape an assassin’s bullet; it revitalized his chi and set in motion a series of subsequent events that generated a reordering of the entire world.”“You can’t stop what’s coming. It ain’t all waiting on you. That’s vanity.”A Christmas StoryI was always the first to wake up on Christmas morning. It was almost like a job. I’d scramble into the living room before the sun even came up to gaze upon the abundance of treasures beneath the Christmas tree. I never believed Santa was real, but those presents got there somehow. It was my grandmother who enlisted my older sister to help her wrap all of the presents after the rest of us had gone to sleep. It was a magic trick she performed every Christmas to keep the illusion of Santa alive in our imaginations.She thought she had us fooled. We let her pretend. It didn’t matter because every Christmas morning was a rare moment of pure joy. One after the other, we’d tear through the presents, not waiting for each person to finish before moving on to the next. Pure carnage but oh what fun. I never really thought much about what Christmas really means until recently. If it is only about driving the economy or buying stuff, then it isn’t worth celebrating. But if it is about something much bigger than ourselves, a way to unify us as one people under God, well, then it means something.I began thinking back on my life, on my childhood, and how religion fit into it. Most movies during the Hays Code era (before the 1960s and 1970s) were infused with Christian ideology, especially Christmas movies. And why wouldn’t they be? George Bailey prays in It’s a Wonderful Life, and an angel shows up to answer his prayers. In A Charlie Brown Christmas, they sing about the “Newborn King,” who is, of course, Jesus. We all used to share that as a country. It was a thread that united us, along with being American citizens. We all watched these movies because we understood the foundational principles of what made America. That isn’t true anymore. To even reference religion, as I’m doing now, is practically a revolutionary act. There is a new religion in town, a fundamentalist one that offers no path to redemption or forgiveness and demands total compliance or else.What does any of it mean to us now? Is it really just about the list of things we buy? Is it about the movies we all treasure every year? Is it about what unites us, not what divides us? Is it about something bigger than ourselves? Are we still even allowed to say “Merry Christmas?” I don’t have the answers; I just know that I was raised by a devout atheist who hated religion, and thus, I never thought about Christmas other than as a way to give things and get things. But now, thanks to my four years of getting to know Trump supporters, I see that and many other things differently. I wandered out of darkness and despair toward what looked like a golden light of hope and optimism, surrounded by people our ruling class deemed “dangerous” at best and “human garbage” at worst. I knew every step that brought me closer to them would be one more step that separated me from everyone and everything else.As I’ve written so often here, it was another Christmas movie, maybe the best one, that reminded me of what happened to me. It was The Grinch Who Stole Christmas. The moral of that story is that you can’t steal Christmas. It isn’t something you can buy or attain. It isn’t even something you can give. That’s why the Whos in Whoville are still celebrating and singing even after the Grinch takes away every last symbol of Christmas. He couldn’t take away the one thing that mattered most - what was in the hearts and minds of those celebrating.I can’t call myself a Christian or even a person of faith. I lean in, and that’s farther than I did before. But I also know I have learned the same lesson the Grinch did. I saw people abandoned by our political establishment, institutions, and culture - people who shou...

Summary

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

Dec 22, 202401:15:24Summary ready

I wished I’d edited the OG Hero’s Journey more, but I wanted to finish it as quickly as possible. I kept thinking of things to add, and a professional editor friend of mine gave me some notes. So I tinkered with it a bit, but today, I decided to edit an extended version, a “Director’s Cut,” as a thank you to the premium subscribers.I’ve spent four years now unable to figure out a way to offer extra content as a perk, but I just came up with one. Now, I can add all of those things I wanted to add - like the Trump/Biden Debate, Kamala Harris, a few extra clips like this one from Megyn Kelly:Not to mention the dismissed cases against Trump, the defamation case, etc. I added a few things here and there, and I think it is better than the first one, though it will be longer by about 20 minutes.This is for those who might be interested or enjoyed the first ones. If you sent me money a different way and are still counted as a free subscriber, let me know so I can upgrade you. It isn’t my favorite thing to put things behind a paywall, but I did want to add an additional thank you. In these tough times, I know money is hard to come by. That’s why almost everything I write here is free. But this is a way to appreciate those extra folks who have chipped in. This isn’t the last thing I’ll be posting before Christmas and New Year’s but I wanted to get out anyway.Thanks again to everyone who reads, whether you are premo or not.Sasha This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

Summary

How Trump's Enemies Manifested His Hero's Journey

Dec 19, 202400:59:35Summary ready

[Introduction: I made this as a special gift for Christmas or the holidays because I wanted to do something more than just a regular podcast to say thank you for your support, your friendship, your letters (yes I read them) and just for being great people. I hope that you will get something out of it. I tried to keep it short but it’s too long. Either way, it’s a learning curve! The transcript with most of the video references is below). Every so often, I say out loud, “Trump won.” I repeat it in my head a few times because even now, I barely believe it. Eight long years of conflict, madness, division, corruption - there have been convictions, jail time, even suicides among Jan 6ers whose lives were destroyed because they were faithful enough to Trump to have his back when the chips were down.What our government, our media, and the ruling class wanted was to terrorize Trump supporters out of their loyalty to him. “It’s a cult,” they continue to insist. But even after all of that, Trump won. He won the Electoral College and the popular vote. There has never been a story like this one in all of American history, and even the Good People of the Left know that. But there have been stories like this in all the most beloved films and books. This story is one we all know. It’s called The Hero’s Journey, and any honest person knows that we just watched Trump live out his. By the end of it, he has people like me wandering around saying “Trump won.” His victory meant more than just winning an election. It meant the return of reality and normalcy somehow, I know it sounds crazy to say that but it’s true. Trump refused to stand down, no matter what they threw at him. He refused to cower in the face of an assassin’s bullet. He soldiered on, as the best heroes do, passing every test, humiliating his rivals, and even those who hated Trump can’t help but be impressed. One only needs to look at the two covers of TIME Magazine, which feature Trump as Man of the Year, to see how it started and how it’s going.Trump didn’t write this story; his enemies did, and in so doing, they sealed their fate to become but a footnote in the unforgettable story of the greatest political comeback in American history. Says Victor Davis Hanson:So, how did we get here? What is the Hero’s Journey, and how does Trump’s story fit so well? Trump’s Hero’s JourneyWe could leave it at that, but I’d like to go through the stages one by one. Part One - The Ordinary WorldTo massive ratings success, millions of Americans welcomed Trump into their ordinary world every week. He was already a star. People tuned in to hear him say “You’re fired.” But they also tuned in to hear him say what was true but couldn’t be said out loud. They knew him, and they loved him. Reality TV was about to become actual reality. In 2016, America could be divided into two groups: those who watched The Apprentice and those who did not. If you knew Trump from that ordinary world, nothing he said would shock you. But if you were like me, already insulated in a protective cocoon of extreme political correctness, a utopia where offensive language is not to be tolerated, and a class of people who would not be caught dead watching The Apprentice, his words would be paralyzing, enough to cause fits of mass hysteria that would last for years. Trump has been a fixture in American culture since the 1980s. He mocked himself and was always in on the joke. Just one year before the Left decided he was Hitler, he hosted Saturday Night Live. Despite Trump’s wealth and the Left’s attempts to portray him as an out-of-touch billionaire, he speaks the language of ordinary working-class Americans somehow. Trump is the guy who eats at McDonald’s. He’s the guy who talks to the golfer and the caddy. But to make him into Hitler, it took a village of liars who had no intention of handing over power to Trump or any of the Americans who voted for him. But Trump’s ordinary world was not politics. He was an outsider, the perfect hero to be plucked from one world and thrust into the special world, one he did not fully understand. Part Two - The Call to Adventure (refusing the call)The Hero is always reluctant to answer the call. Trump was asked again and again if he’d consider getting into politics. The answer was always no.Running for president seemed to be the last thing Trump had left to do and he knew that. He was right, in those early days, to say that America wasn’t ready for people who tell it like it is. Part Three - Accepting the CallTrump, like so many others born outside of Manhattan, maintained a chip on his shoulder that drove him to not just become one of the Manhattan elites but to earn their respect. So it stung when Obama called him out and humiliated him in a room full of people who thought they were superior to Trump in every way. Obama was hitting back after the “birther conspiracy” most on the Left deemed “racist.” But really, he was playing his most powerful card — that he was accepted by the ruling class, and Trump was not.This set up the epic battle between the two men for the next decade, one Trump would ultimately win. Obama wasn’t just accepted by the ruling class. He was their symbol of virtue. As wealth concentrated on the Left, what they, we, needed was absolution from our sins of privilege. Obama provided that. He was the closest thing we had to religion.By contrast, Trump represented our collective sins. If we could blot out the Sun, we could somehow deny those bad qualities in ourselves. That guy over there is the bad guy. We’re not like that.But by 2015, Trump was finally ready. The Hero is always unprepared for what this step actually means. They might start the journey almost as a lark. But once they accept that fateful call, there can be no turning back. Trump famously vanquished his primary opponents, picking them off one by one as a country already addicted to reality shows watched this one. That’s what it looked like, anyway. Every great reality show needs a great villain. And there was no more entertaining villain than Donald Trump.Who would dare talk to Jeb Bush like that?And who would dare talk to Hillary Clinton like that? Part Four - The Mentor and the TalismanTrump had several key mentors, including Roy Cohn and his father. But the one who matters most in Trump’s Hero’s Journey is Steve Bannon, who was busy building a populist movement that needed a tough leader like Trump. Here, Bannon talks about their first meeting.Bannon took the long view then and now. He’d read The Fourth Turning by Neil Howe and William Strauss. Ten years after the book was written, he lived through the 2008 financial crisis. Bannon made the movie Generation Zero about what was coming next. He has always had an eye on how America must land after the Fourth Turning - in the direction of populism, not globalism.On October 7, 2016, the infamous Access Hollywood tape dropped as an October surprise. As Bannon tells it, the wolves were at the door. Trump had a decision to make: a mea culpa with David Muir and ABC News or fight, fight, fight. Bannon is the Yoda to Trump’s Luke Skywalker because he helped sculpt and guide the hero toward his ultimate goal. Though Trump pushed him out in his first term, Bannon remained loyal to Trump and even spent four months in Danbury prison. For Bannon, it’s never been about Trump specifically but about guiding the ship in the right direction. He needed Trump then, and he needs him now.Part Five - Crossing the ThresholdFor Trump, the 2016 election was the threshold between the ordinary world and the special world, a win that shocked even him. Winning was supposed to mean that the American people accepted him as their president. He didn’t understand why they were protesting in the streets, as they were saying he was “illegitimate” and #notmypresident. He won, after all, so why weren’t they treating him that way?In 2016, those of us on the Left decided that this country, its culture, its government, and its institutions all belonged to us. If we proclaimed Trump a racist, Nazi, fascist and thus, rendered him ineligible to serve, we had every right to treat him and his supporters as unwanted invaders in our country.Part Six: Tests, Allies and EnemiesBeing a Trump ally is not for the faint of heart. He is no walk in the park, especially not then. He’ll insult even those closest to him and spend much of his time in office antagonizing the press and the swamp creatures. But Trump’s role was not to be liked by any of them. It was to represent the people who voted for him, as is. Nonetheless, the establishment government ate Trump alive in his first term because he wasn’t a lawyer or a politician. He had to hit the ground running, and was met with oppositional forces who sought to sabotage, discredit, and ultimately push him out of power. It was a slow-moving coup, and Trump was no match for the empire. Nancy Pelosi ripped up the State of the Union. The Democrats took the House and impeached him two years into his first term, just as Steve Bannon had predicted. Trump’s agenda to drain the swamp and close the border had to be pushed aside as he fought for his own reputation and his presidency.Part Seven - The ApproachFor Trump, The Approach was the 2020 election. Trump could see what the powerful forces that opposed him were doing to rig the election. Even I could see it as a Biden voter. It was not hard. Nothing made sense. What we would all find out much later is we didn’t imagine it. They bragged about it in TIME Magazine. 2020 was one of the hardest years for Trump. He was i...

Summary

The Audacity of a Counterculture

Dec 10, 202400:25:20Summary ready

I’ll admit that this Thanksgiving road trip wasn’t exactly fun. Oh, don’t get me wrong. The minute I see my daughter, I am over the moon. Thanksgiving was as it should be: warm family, good food, and giving thanks. I never want to say goodbye and I hate that she lives all the way across the country.It was the before and the after when the trouble began. Somehow, last May’s road trip did not bring the darkness, but this one did. It was too much time spent thinking about things I’d been pushing aside for too long. I feel like I’ve been running just ahead of a tidal wave. And no, that doesn’t mean anything like depression but just the plain truth of what has become of me and my life after the past four years of moving from one side of a Civil War to the other.Was it a Civil War, or was it a revolutionary war? I can’t really tell. I just know that it was a war with two sides. You had to pick one. However, no one on the Right punishes anyone on the Left for believing what they believe, not really. They boycott companies that sell their ideology, like Budweiser. But they don’t disinvite you to Thanksgiving.I knew I could not discuss politics with my daughter’s boyfriend’s family, and I didn’t. Whatever they believed, I was willing to put it aside because we were all together for a holiday about appreciating everything we had. And in the big picture, I have much to be thankful for. I feel lucky in that way.Last May I ended up in the ER twice on my road trip, once for slicing open my palm in Lincoln, Nebraska and once while trying to outrun a screaming ambulance with my elderly dog barely able to make it across the street. I tripped and landed on my elbow, breaking my arm. But the dog was fine.Nonetheless, I wasn’t haunted last time like I have been this time. If my life was a novel, those injuries might have been warnings for something much more serious to come. Not serious like the death of a loved one or a terminal illness, but serious in a different way, a life-shattering, unavoidable way.But my life isn’t a novel. Maybe the tidal wave finally caught up with me now that I had so much time to think. At home, I am always online, reading and listening to like-minded people and not feeling so alone. But in a car driving for hours, there was no escaping it.This isn’t some nightmare I’m living through, and one day, I will wake up. I’ve bought a one-way ticket aboard the Counterculture Express, and there’s no turning back now.It wasn’t so much everything I’ve been writing about and saying for the past four years that haunted me. It was what’s just happened to me in the past few months. I’ve spent almost a decade being that one person who stands on the side of those being canceled, using whatever online clout I’d attained from a life lived mostly online to defend them.I have even stood up for those accused of being sex offenders. I’ll never forget spending much of my reputational clout standing up for a writer named Devin Faraci. Long before Hollywood blacklisted me, the worst thing they could say about me was that I was a rapist apologist. And they said it all of the time.Later, when I began drifting away from the Left and writing here on Substack, I was interviewed by Megyn Kelly. Somehow, Devin Faraci saw it. After being a patron on his Patreon, writing columns defending him, and standing up for him at great cost - he threw me under the bus. He called me out on Twitter because he had to let everyone know that he might be a sexual assaulter, but I was now on the other side of the war, and that was worse.But even as horrible as that was, it wasn’t what had occupied my thoughts for the past two weeks while doing something I usually love. Driving. No. It was how I’d wasted so much of my time working a 24/7 job, investing my whole life in an industry that would completely turn its back on me in the way they have. It has always been chilling to live through it, but somehow, I’d avoided really thinking about it, and now, as I drove nearly 3,000 miles to Ohio and back, I couldn’t think of anything else.It’s Oscar season, and I’m doing what I’ve done every year since 1999: reporting on the Oscar race. Even back in May, I had a whole staff working with me to proofread my stories, remind me of breaking news, or run a contest form. Now, it’s a ghost town, and it’s just me. But driving all day means I can’t do the job alone.I was playing with fire, I always knew, and said so many times when people asked me how I was able to get away with writing honestly here on Substack while the climate of fear and the culture of silence crippled so much of Hollywood. How had I remained untouched? This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

Summary

A Democrat's Lonely and Hopeless Thanksgiving

Nov 28, 202400:24:00Summary ready

(If you have not yet listened to Part One, that is here)Janet was dreading Thanksgiving this year. She dreaded it every year. Holidays made her feel a sense of foreboding. What was coming next, she thought, how much worse could it possibly get?It had been a rough few weeks for Janet and countless other women in the country. She barely remembered election night except that at some point, she rooted around in a closet, dug out her ex-boyfriend’s electric razor, and … shaved her head. Did she really shave her head?As she lay in bed, still too depressed to make coffee, she ran a palm over her scalp and felt the stubble. She’d actually done it. She’d shaved it all off. And how could she have forgotten? One morning, she stumbled into the market in her bathrobe and was greeted with sympathetic stares by the cashier. No, it wasn’t the election they were referring to. They all thought she had cancer.“Can I do anything for you, dear?” One of them said, touching Janet’s arm. ”You can get me a new president and a better country,” Janet had snapped back. The woman’s face melted from concern to a shared knowing of the tragedy that had just taken place. Janet could see her working it out in her mind. Janet was one of those women who shaved her head after the election.Well, so what? Janet thought as she clutched her robe tightly around her body before ducking back into her house, slamming the door behind her. The only reason she’d gone out was that she’d emptied every wine bottle in the house, and now, she needed another glass. Yes, it was the morning, no, don’t ask her about it. Janet knew that if there was any time to remain permanently drunk, this was it.What a terrible night that was. November 5th. She figured the election would be close but Rick Wilson had assured her that Trump would lose and lose badly.She’d watched the results come in until she heard the independents flipped to Trump in record numbers. That was when her heart sank. It was like watching the Needle at the New York Times flip from Hillary winning by 95% to Trump winning by 95%. Now, the needles were all pointing Trump’s way again, all of the swing states.How could this be happening? After all the ways the Democrats and the media showed the American people how evil and monstrous Trump was? Now, she had to wait months for her hair to grow out. What had she done? This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

Summary

How the Left Lost its "Cool"

Nov 25, 202400:30:20Summary ready

The Democrats and the Left are still working their way through the seven stages of grief over the election. Many of them continue to be in denial as to how so many people could have voted for Trump and made the popular vote even close at all.In their defense, this wasn’t just an election loss. It was the single most humiliating defeat probably in American history. They spent eight years doing nothing but selling hatred and fear of Trump. They pulled out the stops, from Hollywood to the Justice Department. Headline after headline told the Democrats that all of the evil known to mankind was embodied in this one man, and all they had to do was stop him, and their village could live on peacefully.Trump became the monster, the volcano that required sacrifices so that it didn’t destroy the crops. He was the Devil riding into Salem. He was HITLER. Now, they’re grappling with 77 million people in America who don’t believe their hysteria anymore. It’s been punctured at long last.But those are the rational ones. There are still many of them trapped inside the fear bunker who are now trying to survive in a country they view as full of Nazis and bigots, full of hate and white supremacy. Or else toxic masculinity won the race, and now how to raise their daughters in a country full of rapists?But if they’re honest with themselves, really honest, they will have to face the truth. Sure, they abandoned the working class. Joe Biden got out of the race too late for them to mount a proper campaign. Kamala Harris was a terrible candidate (I threw that last one in there, though it’s a truth they have yet to accept or admit). Elon Musk rigged the election (yes, they are saying that).But they have yet to address one fundamental question about why they lost: Why aren’t they cool anymore? Being cool means thinking critically, but that was abandoned years ago on the Left. It means being a rebel against the system, but they are the system. It means being counterculture, but they are the culture.True, it’s hard to be cool when you are crippled by mass hysteria, and when every tweet by Trump is the end of the world, I know because I felt it too. But it started even before that, even before Trump. One might say the Left losing their cool opened the door for the rise of Trump. Why? Because Trump is and has always been cool.He was cool in the 1980s when being rich was cool, and saying whatever was on your mind that disrupted the status quo was cool. In the 90s, he became an icon in hip-hop culture. Maybe things shifted a little when he starred on a Reality-TV series, those weren’t cool, and especially once he got into politics as Obama’s rival, that most definitely was not cool. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

Summary

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

Nov 17, 202400:24:30Tap to summarize

There’s almost nothing worse than getting dumped. You’ve done everything right. You had all the money in the world — a billion dollars! You had all the celebrities — Harrison Ford, Beyonce, Taylor Swift, Julia Roberts, George Clooney, Meryl Streep and Barbra Streisand! Who could ask for anything more? Well, it turns out 76 million people.This wasn’t just a “don’t call me, I’ll call you” or “we can still be friends” or “maybe someday in the future we could…” No, this was a “get lost, lose my number, forget you ever knew me” kind of break-up. The Democrats aren’t handling it well, to put it mildly.They’re shaving their heads. They’re uninviting family members to Thanksgiving. They’re obsessing over everything Trump is doing and saying, refusing to go quietly. In other words, they’re turning into Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction.It isn’t enough to blame the “woke” and the crazies for the collapse of the empire. It goes much deeper than that. Yes, they’ve lost their minds, and Americans are fleeing faster than rats off a sinking ship, but the truth is the Democrats orchestrated their own demise. Even those who think they get it, don’t really.Bill Maher, for instance, is given pats on the back for kind of, sort of getting it but if you listen really close, you’ll hear the tell-tale TDS worming its way in. Trump is crazy, his voters are dumb.I hate to be the bearer of bad news, Democrats, but this isn’t 2004, as Nate Silver has proclaimed. It isn’t 1988 or 2000, either. No, you must go much further to find a period like the one we’re living through now. You have to go back to 1972.More specifically, the swing between 1968 and 1980, as Ben Shapiro has often discussed in books and on his podcast. His comment was one of the things that drew me to the Right because, finally, someone said something that made sense. He tweeted this in the Summer of 2020, though it would be four more years before 1980 actually arrived.And 1980 has arrived right on time. That makes me think it’s not about just four more years of Trump. This is the long game. This is probably 12 years of Republican rule.Navigating a moment like this depends on confronting the truth, not the preferred truth, not the denial, but the real reason why Trump won such a massive victory after the Democrats spent almost ten years trying to destroy him. The answer isn’t to double down on Trump being a “monster” or a “fascist” or a “sociopath.” All that will do is postpone the inevitable, and it will only make Trump more popular. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

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Nicolle Wallace Wants Gulags

Sep 22, 2023Tap to summarize

“We create the illusion that being informed is a kind of action in itself. So to wash that guilt out—to eliminate the shame and discomfort you feel over doing nothing as the world goes mad—you'll keep tuning in.” - Matt Taibbi, Hate, Inc.The other night on MSNBC, Nicolle Wallace reached her breaking point. Something must be done, or we will all live to regret it.“Something bad is going to happen,” she said. “What will we tell our children and grandchildren when it does”? Then she looked directly into the camera and said, “You good with NOTHING”?Her face flushed. Her expression, resolute.What “something” must be done? She didn’t say. Her guests couldn’t come up with a final solution either.But it’s worth asking Nicolle herself what will finally end her nightmare. Detainment camps for the “cesspool of the MAGA base"? Gulags? How do we dump the dissidents and non-compliant citizens far enough away that they can’t touch the America they once called home?//end This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

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Putin and the Baby Bird

Feb 26, 2022Tap to summarize

A long while back, during the Obama presidency, when my daughter was in elementary school, we were taking a walk with another mother and her daughter. We saw a baby bird that had fallen out of its nest. I urged the other mother to take the bird, as I had cats who would eat it. She was going to take it to the wildlife refuge but instead decided to raise it on her own, thinking it would be a good experience for her daughter.She named the bird after me, Sasha, because I had encouraged her to rescue it from the sidewalk. She kept the bird in a cage, gave it food and water and it grew to full size. At that point, I once again stupidly urged her to give the bird a better life, to not force it to spend its entire existence in a cage. I have never liked looking at birds in cages. There is something so cruel about that. But this was bad advice. The day she decided to set the bird free, she gathered her whole family around, and with a video camera rolling, she set the bird free. Within minutes, a hawk swooped down and killed the bird. This was, to me, a hard lesson on the natural world. But it was also a lesson in my own arrogance and stupidity to think this was all some Disney version of baby birds and freedom of flight. That is not what the natural world is about. It’s life or death. It’s kill or be killed. This isn’t about happiness. That’s a luxury reserved for humans. I often stare into the eyes of animals, both the ones I look after and those in the wild. I look at them looking at me too, knowing I am the most dangerous of all living things. They have all evolved to be afraid of us, and they should be afraid. To me, Joe Biden’s attitude towards Afghanistan, Russia, and China is on par with the thinking that the bird was going to live a free and have happy life, without paying attention to the point of view of the hawk. The hawk is hungry. The hawk has highly attuned skills to capture prey. The prey it seeks has survival instincts of its own that it has evolved over time. But that caged bird had none of it. It was a poor, helpless thing that didn’t know from hawks. It had no protection, no awareness, only vulnerability. Everything that happened since Trump took office happened in a bubble of entitlement, arrogance, and ignorance. Everything we did while Trump was in power, from impeachment to Russiagate, to the Me Too protests, the protests against the “Muslim ban,” and the largest protest in American history, during a global pandemic without a vaccine, the George Floyd protests in 2020 all the way up to January 6th - all of that was being watched by Putin and by Xi Jinping, not to mention other leaders in other countries. It turned out the whole world was watching. We just had no clue or any awareness of that.On his Substack, James Strock wrote way back in February of 2021:The Whole World Is WatchingOur global competitors and adversaries—most notably the Chinese Communist regime—are alert to signs of American decline.How will they interpret the events of 1/6?We cannot know. Nonetheless, the failure of officials entrusted with power to react instinctively, to put themselves on the line against fellow citizens invading the Capitol, might incline some toward unwarranted conclusions about the United States as a whole.This isn’t to get Trump off the hook for the things he said to antagonize the Left or the ways he misled or even outright lied to the public, but there is no doubt that not for one day, not for one hour, not for one minute did the ruling class, the establishment, the media, or the Democrats treat him as the President of the United States. Worse, it was almost a crime to support him, during COVID or at any other time for the four years he was in power. He was not praised for a single thing he did. The media profited off cherry-picking the worst things they could find and then tossing it out for Twitter, MSNBC and CNN to chew on for days. Everything that was encouraged on the Left, from doubting the results of the election, to protesting violently for a cause that was important enough, was condemned when the Right did it. It wasn’t enough that they had spent hundreds of millions to put Biden in power without his having to even campaign with a mandate to win, and bad enough that the election had been won even before Election Day through absentee ballots and early voting, but to then be called “domestic terrorists” and “white supremacists” and racists just for supporting Trump, or protesting mask mandates or vaccines - the message was clear: if you aren’t on board with us, we’re going to treat you like human garbage at best, enemies of the state at worst. When they talk about Democracy and freedom and liberty and human rights, they forget how they have treated half of this country this past year. All of this was going on as though there was no Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping. It was as if America is the whole world and there are no other outside threats we face. The protests of 2020 inspired the Biden administration to take power as though he’d just won the second Civil War against the Confederate Army. He went along with the idea that America was “systemically racist” and corrupt to its core. He has gone along with the condemnation of members of the military over vaccine mandates or “white rage.” He has gone along with the idea that we should divide children in public schools into two groups of oppressors and oppressed, to teach them that their whiteness from birth means they have “opportunity” but if they aren’t born with “whiteness” they don’t. He has gone along with equity replacing meritocracy. He has gone along with every new rule the progressive Left puts in place that Americans must follow or be condemned by their peers or fired from their employment. He went along when they dragged the statue of Thomas Jefferson out of City Hall in New York. Biden has gone along with all of it. That is, at least partly, why his poll numbers are dropping. The America he and the fundamentalist Left are threatening is not the America the majority wants. The blatant hypocrisy on display by the Biden administration goes unnoticed by the high-minded media that controls the mainstream narrative, but it has not gone unnoticed by Putin or Xi. The Biden-led withdrawal from Afghanistan was so horrific that it leaves a catastrophic humanitarian crisis in its wake. With bodies falling off airplanes and mothers handing their babies over the fence at the airport, that probably seemed like the worst of it. But it was only the beginning. Now we hear of young women locked in their homes, forbidden from going to school. We hear of babies dying when they are born because their mothers are starving. There is no way out of what we have done. But Americans once again act as though we’re the only country in the world that matters, that everyone will understand our explanations as to why this was necessary. But that is not what happened.Putin noticed that now there was little chance Biden could justify heading into another war. The exit made Biden look weak. His poll numbers began to plummet. Even if the media barely noticed, and the blue checks on Twitter were pretending it wasn’t happening, Putin noticed. The media has been so focused on Trump that they didn’t even notice when our country - the once mighty United States of America, was mocked by Putin for jailing political prisoners who, according to Putin, came to our Capitol “with a list of political demands.” Putin made the point that we were in no position to criticize him for what he does to journalists and dissenters when we are doing the same thing here. Even if we weren’t, what has happened to the January 6th protesters and rioters is not America most of us have grown up with. Putin noticed. How could he not when all we’ve ever done is take the moral highground against him. Here is Putin nailing the Biden administration on jailing political prisoners:Then, if that weren’t bad enough, the other world power that is about to test Biden’s weakness, China, called Biden out for Black Lives Matter and the racism Biden was announcing defined America. Now, not only had Putin exposed our hypocrisy but so did Xi Jinping. The only people who either didn’t see it or refused to call it out was our own media that kept being Biden’s magic mirror, telling him he was the greatest of them all. The Left existed in their own little bubble as though there simply were no other countries in the world that might be watching or listening.Both of these moments illustrate two major US enemies pushing back, criticizing, and showing a kind of dominance we would not have seen under Trump. Whatever their relationship was, Putin saw Trump more as an equal than he does Biden, whom he clearly sees as no threat whatsoever. Trump also blustered loudly, always saying things like “we’ll hit them with everything we have,” and “it will be a response like the world has never seen.”Here in the US, the press mocked Trump for that one minute, then called him a dangerous madman the next. But whatever that was, it was a stronger response to these two dictators in Russia and China than the Biden administration was ever prepared for. In fact, as Ukrainian Konstantin Kisin says so brilliantly, we were not paying attention. We were focused on our own fantasy utopia and we had no idea what was waiting back in the real world. To Kisin, we must exert our power, or else these countries will start to do things we’re not going to approve of. They have no reason not to. They have no o...

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