Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone

Dear Mr. Baker,I am, but one in a sea of many Americans viewed as a threat to the established order. I was once a part of that order. I helped build it. It would turn out I couldn’t survive because I couldn’t follow the rules of thought and speech that are mandated by everyone on the Left, especially those at the New York Times.It’s personal, you see. I used to believe that if all I did was read Page One of the New York Times, I’d be well-informed. Brainwashed is more like it.It’s easy to spot the bias now where it wasn’t before. For instance, this was the New York Times on January 12th, and one of the strongest activists for the Democrats pretending they’re pushing some sort of objective conclusion on X.But that’s just another day at the New York Times. I know you didn’t write this piece, Michelle Goldberg did, but it is worth mentioning as an aside that no, the “resistance libs” were not right. They were never right. I was one of them until I wasn’t. It’s been an ugly road out of the Doomsday Cult of the Left, but now, I live free as an exile.We were never the “resistance.” We were always the empire. We colonized the internet, after all, and, together with Barack Obama, the rise of Silicon Valley, social media, and the iPhone, as society migrated online, we were in control of all of it.But that’s a story for a different time, Mr. Baker. This letter is much more urgent regarding the matters at hand. Your “analysis” and observation about Trump and protests is so wildly off base, a complete distortion of reality, that I felt compelled to write you this letter. You wrote:You write:President Trump had a ringing message of solidarity on Tuesday for demonstrators in the streets. “KEEP PROTESTING - TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!!” he wrote on social media. He decried “the senseless killing of protesters,” and added that those pulling the triggers “will pay a big price.”He meant the protesters in Tehran, not Minneapolis. By contrast, the people in the streets of Minnesota, he wrote just 63 minutes earlier, were “anarchists and professional agitators” trying to cover up a fraud scandal. He vowed that “THE DAY OF RECKONING & RETRIBUTION IS COMING!”The eruption of protests on opposite sides of the planet at this moment in history has brought Mr. Trump’s views of democracy and popular dissent into stark relief. The situations in Iran and Minnesota, of course, are different and complicated, but the president’s rule of thumb seems simple enough: Those who take to the streets supporting a cause he favors are laudable heroes. Those who take to the streets to oppose him are illegitimate radicals.I read this, and my jaw dropped open, Mr. Baker. Where have you been for the past five years as we watched a split screen of protests in the Summer of 2020 and then on January 6th? Are you actually saying that you at the New York Times and anyone on the Left saw these things as comparable? Democracy and popular dissent in stark relief, boy, I couldn’t have said it better myself.Tell me this is satire. Tell me you do not live in such an isolated bubble that you can’t possibly see the blatant hypocrisy here? The treatment of these two events was very different and will be written about in opposite ways in history books forever. One will be seen as heroic and democracy in action, and the other, as dangerous. An insurrection in action. People like me were pulling our hair out, not because we would justify the riot at the Capitol, but because all of you said nothing about what happened in the Summer of 2020, a year that broke America and broke me.It wasn’t only your paper that lied that Trump “incited” a mob to storm the Capitol and that it was a threat to “democracy.” That was the narrative pushed by every legacy media outlet, with no kind words for the protesters who were also doing what protesters do - getting angry and having their voices heard by a government and a culture that had demonized them, dehumanized them, and abandoned them. Trump included.The Democrats put up a Green-Zone-like fence around the Capitol. Ordinary Americans had their doors kicked in as the FBI hauled them off to jail. Anyone who even attended the “mostly peaceful” protest on January 6th was called an “insurrectionist” and “election denier,” and anyone who dared to question the 2020 election or who voted for Trump was inspected under a microscope by you all as some kind of insect or insurgent terrorist. Vice President Kamala Harris likened it to 9/11 and the attack on Pearl Harbor. These were American citizens, many of whom had been on lockdown, their businesses destroyed after COVID, and had watched the absurd events of 2020 play out. Masks, no masks, “systemic racism was more urgent than COVID,” then the pivot back to COVID, changing election rules, preventing people from gathering and thus, preventing campaigning, a surge of mail-in voting that won the election all before Election Day, a revolution in the streets that almost no one in the mainstream was even talking about once they got really bad, lest they hurt the Democrats.Oh, I know the game. I know we’re all supposed to see the Trump supporters as racists, angry that Black and Brown people were in government, a second Confederacy flying their Dixie flags on January 6th, and that the protests over the Summer were about racial inequality and therefore justified. But here’s the thing about democracy. You don’t get to decide. We either all have the same rights or we don’t have a democracy.There was nothing in your coverage, or the Liz Cheney show trial, that was, in any way, fair to the Americans who protested that day, and even to Donald Trump, who had a right to have their voices heard. No, they didn’t have the right to riot. Ashli Babbitt lost her life over it, and then her memory was dragged through the mud by all of you.Here is how the Times covered Ashli Babbitt:And here is how they covered Renee Good:You see, one is treated like human garbage, and the other is treated like a hero. So just say it. Just admit that this has become a two-tiered society, you are among the ruling class, and the underclass has none of the same rights. You will decide they are “racists” and thus have no real stake in what happens in this country, even when they win the popular vote. Now that the protests in Minneapolis are violent, as violent as, if not more so than, January 6th, still you say nothing and pretend they are fighting the good fight. What has changed in ten years? Nothing except the Democrats failing to address the problem, allowing millions to flood over the border, and shaming Americans for caring about it. It’s a sickness on the Left by now, a reality distortion that spilled out into real-world violence. Just look at what happened at Evergreen College. These students believed they were protesting “racism” at one of the most liberal colleges in America. Why? Because Bret Weinstein did not think it was right that white people should be asked to leave the campus on a “day of absence.”This kind of strange, new, justified violence by people who don’t live in the same reality as the rest of us has become the new normal on the Left, backed up by all of you. How dare you compare them to the protesters in Iran? Complicated, you say? Oh, it’s way beyond that. Pampered, privileged, bored white women and bratty college kids attacking ICE are, in no way, risking their lives. Yes, if you attack a police officer or an ICE officer, you are risking your life. Every American knows that if they live in the real world. In Iran, you are risking your life just for standing there and protesting peacefully, or speaking out of turn, or anything they decide is a crime punishable by death, which include adultry, dissent against the government, and blasphemy. At the New York Times, you want the tragic death of Renee Good to be the symbol for protesters dying at the hands of the regime, but, as usual, it is not the truth. That won’t stop you from perpetuating the mass delusion and injecting it into the veins of your already unhinged readership.Here is Page One of the New York Times today. Every headline is about Renee Good. That is still the most important news of the day, even as hundreds, maybe thousands of Iranians are slaughtered.Followed by non-stop negative Trump coverage:The protests in Minneapolis are not against ICE. They are against democracy. The wrong people won the election, and that means the Left throws a fit. They’ve been throwing fits for ten years, starting in 2015 when they attacked a group of Trump supporters in California, calling them “racists,” because all of you sold them that lie. The violence continued on through Trump’s inaugural and protests all through his first term. The Summer of 2020 was the biggest by far in modern American history, yet the legacy media, your paper, Mr. Baker, did not capture the truth of what happened. The baby tyrants who run your newsroom insisted the one op-ed by Tom Cotton, Send in the Troops, was itself violence and that caused the resignation of Bari Weiss and James Bennett, a shamefulprotst moment that should live on in infamy if people tell the truth. The Left’s protesting now says one thing: Do what we want, or else. That is, Mr. Baker, closer to fascism than Trump will ever be. // 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

You’ve heard of the Great Awokening and the Great Feminization. Now meet the Great Crack-Up of 2026. Grown women, Liberal white women, losing their minds and going to war on Federal officers. People are starting to notice.We haven’t seen a Great Crack-Up like this since my childhood. When those hippie chicks sat on the sidewalk - even crawled on the sidewalk - with X’s carved into their foreheads, their hair shaved off, prattling on about “the revolution.”It all seemed like a harmless fad until they found dead bodies and blood soaked walls in the Hollywood Hills and the shocking case unraveled to reveal a cult, with a leader who seemed to have hypnotized young white college girls into violence as they decoupled from society and believed the laws no longer applied to them. “I have X’d myself out of your world,” said Charlie. Then came “Four Dead in Ohio,” a shooting at Kent State a year after the Manson murders and by then, ordinary Americans had had enough. They wanted a safe country, one free from the unpredictable wildness of the revolutionaries, their cults, their uncontrollable violence — bombings, riots, murders. When would it end? With a landslide victory for Richard Nixon in 1972, followed eventually by Ronald Reagan in 1980. From Ronald to DonaldNow, like then, it’s a race to see which side is less crazy, and so far, it’s the Left by a mile because it is dominated by these crazy Liberal white women like I used to be. But they never snapped out of it like I did. To them, Trump destroyed everything - their country, their culture, their sanity, even, to some of them, their ability to parent their children.In their minds, there was no other option. Elections don’t work. They tried, they failed. This country, they believe, belongs to them and if they want to end mass deportations they have every right to do so. Who needs borders anyway? For that matter, who needs law and order? Who even needs elections?After ten years of cycling mass hysteria through their nervous systems, they’ve reached the breaking point. The Great Crack-Up of 2026.There they are, on display for all to see, once empowered women living the dream, now radicalized online, in Facebook groups, on TikTok, main-lining Rachel Maddow and are now combat ready, wild-eyed and preparing for war. It doesn’t seem to occur to them that mass deportations have been carried out by every president in the modern era. They’re going back to their own countries, not concentration camps. But does it even matter? When was the last time you heard any Democrat tell the truth? About anything? They make up their own reality and that’s why they’re losing their minds now. Nothing feels real anymore.They believe their one true purpose, because every other purpose has been taken from them, is to protect illegal immigrants from the evil white supremacists in America. It’s Patty Hearst only this time with the legacy media and an entire political party backing her up.Meanwhile, in the real world, anyone not indoctrinated by MS-Now, the New York Times and the algorithms can hear what sounds like common sense policies by the Trump administration, even though Liberal white women believe it’s nothing but lies.Here is Tricia McLaughlin, DHS Assistant Secretary, talking with Ben Shapiro (full video here)I can’t help but feel badly for these crazy women trying in vain to outrun all of that crippling self-hatred and white guilt. They’re ready now to put their lives on the line because this thing goes much deeper than politics. Trust me, I know. I was one of them. I wasn’t quite this crazy but I do know what it felt like to believe “our” country had been invaded and that a “whole of society” effort was necessary to bring down the Trump presidency and the MAGA movement. But all we were really doing was defending our status as the ruling class beating back a populist revolt. There But For The Grace of God Go I…I was the first generation to come of age after Roe V. Wade and in the wake of the 1970s feminist movement. I felt like I had an obligation to put myself first because that was now my right. Abortions would be like biological bulimia - pleasure now, get rid of the problem later. I was supposed to chase my dreams, to become something, to be someone, because being a wife and mother wasn’t enough.That was the first lie and the most damaging. The idea that babies shouldn’t matter as much as our own happiness, that they are a burden and a thing to get rid of, was in direct contradiction to who we were as women. It is to deny biological reality. Sound familiar? One lie piled atop more lies for decades. How did we ever think that would work out well for us? Instead, it has driven us slowly insane.We teach our young women to disconnect, to not care, to almost want to get pregnant just so they can have an abortion and post about it on social media. They celebrate it. They flaunt it. It wasn’t until I had a child and held her in my arms, raised her, and watched her grow that I realized what a lie it all was and what a huge mistake I’d made living so carelessly and killing what would have been, could have been a life. It haunts me even now. You can’t outrun it. My body somehow still remembers and asks, Where did they go? The answer is one I have to live with now: what I did and why I did it, and why I can’t forgive myself for it, and why I will live with regret for the rest of my life. I bought into the feminist lie because I thought I was doing the right thing, serving my own needs. What I realized over time is that progressivism is like an invasive species. It can’t stop on its own. The Wheel of Oppression must keep spinning and for feminists, they would come to realize sooner or later, it was bound to spin away from them.The Great FeminizationThe downfall of the women’s movement is evident in the late 70s movies like Network, where career-hungry Faye Dunaway is seen as a childless cipher who will never find true happiness. In Kramer vs. Kramer, Meryl Streep leaves her husband and son to “find herself” in California.By the 1990s, I was among the women who were more than ready for a spiritual infusion. Nothing else had worked. Not sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll, not chasing my own happiness, not even a fulfilling career. We were depressed, and no one could explain why. It’s chemical, they said. So we found the answer in therapy culture, self-help, and ways to become ideal human beings. All we had to do was change the language and we could remake society into a place where everyone felt safe.Before long, we had a real leader in Barack Obama who had a mission to put women and girls first. We were building what we thought was not just a better America, but our better selves, better children, better schools, better movies, better corporations, and industries. Women can do it. We can organize. We can raise money. We can mobilize. We can change the world. Here is Helen Andrews:Before we were “Karens” or “Woke Libs” or “Resistance Warriors,” we were the center of the universe. Corporations catered to us as a powerful spending demographic. Our every need was met with ways to improve ourselves because we were worth it. And at some point over the past twenty years, we became more powerful than we’d ever been at any time in history. We were the leaders. We were in charge, and all that was left was our first female president in Hillary Clinton. Needless to say, 2016 was our Apocalypse Now. We had just been assaulted by the Electoral College, and what choice did we have but to say ME TOO. And just like that, our power was peeled back, layer by layer. The more we clung to it, the worse it got for us. Now, we were sobbing, hysterical women and saw ourselves as victims of men, of racists, of oppression. Then, Black Lives Matter called us “white feminists” with “white privilege,” and “white fragility,” and now we had to feel guilt and shame for our whiteness and our micro-aggressions. So we de-centered ourselves. Then came the transgender women who demanded they were women too, and we had to further shrink back because now, trans women had a higher status inside our Doomsday Cult.We had to be not women anymore but chest-feeders whose body parts were interchangeable, whose history of sexual violence never happened. We couldn’t even say “women” anymore without being called TERFs. Now that women were effectively silenced, who had been made to feel guilt just for standing up for any right that wasn’t the right to kill our own babies, it wasn’t hard to sacrifice the children, too. Sooner or later, the Wheel of Oppression would spin toward illegal immigrants or “undocumented workers” who were now the ones in need of protection so that became the new cause of the day for all of these forgotten, ignored, purposeless Liberal white women. The Doomsday Cult the Left has become meant all of the children had to be indoctrinated too. But no, I don’t expect any of those out there screaming about fascism to see the connection between the cult and putting their lives in danger. 54 years after Title IX passed, it is now up to the Supreme Court to protect women and girls in sports. It took the election of Donald Trump to even start rolling back the delusions that children can change their sex with powerful drugs and surgery. That’s why this former Liberal white woman didn’t just vote for Trump, I put everything on the line to support him loudly, to help other silenced women find their voice and stand up for the kids, to protect them from the cult, to give them a chance at a normal life.It might have cost me everything but it was worth it. All I have to is log on to social media and I see the self I was once to realize I made the right choice.Drive Baby Drive.Hearing those words by Renee Good’s wife just before disaster hit and the bullets killed her instantly, I thought of Ridley Scott’s Thelma and Louise.Back then, the controversial ending where they drive off a cliff and we assume crash to their deaths seemed like a twisted form of empowerment, but all it really meant was that they had to give up on a world that had given up on them. Liberal white women in the past 20 years have lived the most privileged lives of almost anyone on the planet. But even having everything somehow wasn’t enough. They needed to still feel like Thelma and Louise, like they had no other choice but to scream in the faces of the ICE agents, no other choice but to resist, no other choice but to step on the gas. 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

Part One | Part Two January 6th was terrifying for many Americans. After all, they saw it on television. But what did they really see? Did they know what actually unfolded that day? Did they even ask? Trump is the Jan. 6 President, proclaims the New York Times’ Editorial Board.And the text:What I learned, living through these events as a former Democrat, is that the New York Times Editorial Board is lying through its teeth. Or maybe they aren’t lying. Maybe they really do believe it. They exist inside the Doomsday Cult of the Left, after all, along with all of those high-minded “journalists” at the New Yorker and the Atlantic.But to make the bold proclamation that any protest, or even riot, against oppressive forces, whether you believe them to be oppressive or not, is un-American proves they don’t know this country or its history very well.There were two sides to this story. If I’d never left the Left, I would have believed their version of the event. I would have been just as horrified. I would have thought it was an attack on democracy. But protests are the voices of the unheard and a healthy sign of any democracy, and for a grassroots movement, and millions of Americans who had been disenfranchised by the four years Trump was in power? This was the best way for them to be heard. The only way for them to be heard.They just didn’t know they were walking into an ambush by forces far greater than them, and more powerful than any political party in American history and what they wanted to do was use that protest - a moment of desperation for desperate Americans abandoned by the government, the culture and most institutions - and demonize them further by calling them extremists, terrorists, Nazis, insurrectionists. January 6th was played on a loop by the Democrats and their propaganda machine, once known as the legacy media. And why wouldn’t it be? It was everything they needed at just the right time. See, there’s a Confederate flag. See, there’s a hangman’s rope. See, there’s some guy in horns howling inside the Capitol. Zip ties, hanging Mike Pence, Trump watching the mob, and hoping they wouldn’t stop. It all painted a picture in our minds of an angry president amidst a violent coup. In our age of algorithm-driven mass hysteria, we’re no different from the Puritans in Salem who believed in “spectral evidence,” what you can’t see but can only imagine. January 6th finally provided them with the proof they needed of their campaign against MAGA.It’s just that none of it was true. Why would Trump have wanted a riot? He’d gone to great effort to convince Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz to debate the election in the Senate. All the riot did was hand absolute power to the Democrats, Reichstag Fire style. Not only did the media sell that lie, but you’d be severely punished if you asked any questions, especially about the 2020 election. Yes, we lived through that and more. Just because the Democrats have memory-holed everything they’ve done in the last ten years to cling to power doesn’t mean it didn’t happen or that we shouldn’t talk about it. There was nothing wrong with talking about an election that was anything but free and fair. I naively went into it as a major Biden advocate, believing he could win the old-fashioned way. I didn’t know they’d hide him and Kamala Harris in the basement and let the legacy media do all of the heavy lifting. I didn’t know they’d planned it—everything that happened throughout 2020 to ensure Trump was taken out of power, like they were meddling in some third-world country’s elections. It’s all written down in TIME Magazine. They planned on saving an election that was not theirs to save. Who gave them that right? The American people decide, and if one political party believes itself to be above the people, then that is an insurrection, not against the government but against all of us and a fair process we depend on. They justified everything they did by the lies they told themselves about who Trump really was and how dangerous he was supposed to be. They rigged the election by manipulating the media, changing any law that got in their way, using COVID as an excuse to push ballot harvesting, funded by a $400 million cash infusion, and all the while pretending they were “saving democracy.”By all accounts, I should have been cheering them on. Yes, get Trump! Anything and everything should be allowed as long as we were saving the country from Hitler! I believed that at first. Why wouldn’t I? I was straight out of Central Casting as a Resistance Lib. This was the back of my car in 2012.This is who I was.Before that, I was just a lowly Oscar blogger spending my time writing about superficial things, but suddenly, in 2015, everything changed. I was in a panic about the Greenhouse Effect and the sea level rise. I threw myself into politics to help the Democrats win. Overnight, I became someone who mattered online, with a growing following, adoration, and kindness from strangers. The warm embrace of the elite Left felt intoxicating: invitations to exclusive parties, friendships with high-status blue-checks on Twitter like Steve Schmidt, Rick Wilson, and Oprah, so much love and support online - after all, I was helping to save democracy and the planet! I was even invited to an early fundraiser for Joe Biden in May of 2019. It was necessary. I was important. I mattered.You can imagine, then, how surreal it would have been for anyone who knew me that way to see me starting to question the official narratives. For me, it began with what I believed was mass hysteria that had overtaken my side. Just as the Southerners had whipped themselves up into a frenzy, believing that if the slaves were freed, there would be chaos and violence, so too did we believe that if Trump won, that was the end of everything. But, looking back, all it really was was a populist revolt against a ruling class that just decided what America would be now. Class no longer mattered, only skin color and gender identity did.Little by little, I began to pull away as things got weird. The more I tried to speak out, the worse it got for me. They went after me hard on social media for years. But none of that would have driven me away from the Democrats. As with so many others, 2020 was the turning point for me. I suddenly could see the strings, and I wondered who was pulling them. Trotting out experts to say “systemic racism” was more important than a global pandemic, and trotting them out again to discourage Trump from sending in the National Guard. And again, to say the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation. How stupid did they think we were?We lurched from COVID to racism back to COVID to lockdowns, and all the while, as I would come to realize, the aim was only to GET TRUMP. Imagine completely taking over an election to take out a one-term president with a strong economy. Why?I asked the same question then as I wonder today. Why did it have to be an existential crisis? Why drive half the country to the brink of insanity? Why cosplay Trump as Hitler and pretend this was World War II? Couldn’t they win the old-fashioned way with better candidates and better policies? Russiagate, spying on his campaign, two impeachments, four indictments, convicting him of a felony, taking his mug shot, two assassination attempts, trying to throw him off the ballots, and needing the Supreme Court to shut it down, and the American people still chose Trump. Shouldn’t that have been the wakeup call? Shouldn’t that have been the moment their stupid, futile, destructive war ended?No. It wasn’t about politics for the Left. It was deeper than that. It was as deep as preserving the South before, during, and after the Civil War. January 6th allowed them a way out of what they’d become, not what MAGA had become. They were the violent ones and had been going all the way back to 2015, when a mob descended upon Trump supporters.They rioted at Trump’s inaugural. They believed themselves justified in attacking Trump supporters because they were convinced they were “fascists.” But their words meant nothing because they distorted them beyond comprehension. What does it mean to call someone Hitler, a fascist, a dictator, a rapist, a pedophile, a racist, a white supremacist? These words mean nothing now. And then came 2020, the point of no return. For me, it was the recognition that my side didn’t care about democracy or the truth. They only cared about defeating an imaginary enemy they invented but never existed. And were prepared to bring this country to its knees to achieve that goal.When I saw this video of Sue’s 100-year-old mattress store, I posted it on social media, and the response was, “How can you care more about property than people”? By then, they had already called me a racist many times, and they were pushing me out of utopia and farther and farther away. Was I a racist because I cared about Sue and the older man who defended her with a fire extinguisher? Trump’s speech at Mt. Rushmore was the first time I’d heard anyone in public life talk about what we could all see but almost no one would say out loud. The media called it dark and divisive because, of course, they did. Are you getting it yet? This only goes one way. That was for me yet another layer of the onion being pulled back to reveal what the legacy media had become. They were not reporting the news. They were telling us what to think, and they still are. After I started watching Trump’s rallies for myself, I kept waiting for the version of Trump we were sold to emerge. He never did. Instead, a guy who would stand in the pouring rain to speak to his supporters showed me what MAGA was really about. It was a love story. Trump had their backs, and they had his.Just listen to them as he visits East Palestine, Ohio after the train derailed and spilled toxic waste in their tiny forgotten town.That’s why they showed up in DC on January 6th. Not to storm the Capitol. Not to hang Mike Pence. Not to overthrow the United States government, as if. If you know them, you know there are no people in this country who love it more. You know they would never damage the Capitol. They are the side that prides itself on not being violent like the Left. The narrative after January 6th was and remains a lie.Why is it that the Left was given full and free rein to rampage anywhere they pleased all throughout that Summer, and the Trump supporters were treated like terrorists who flew planes into the World Trade Center, and the Japanese who bombed Pearl Harbor? Because the Left had, and still has, most of the power to shape the media narrative and thus, reality.I had to ask these questions of myself, someone who had gone along with so much of it, not because I was a conformist but because I genuinely believed it. The more questions I asked, the worse it got for me. That was when I knew there was no talking to them, no shaking them out of it, no hoping for sanity to return. And there was no saving the Left. They were no longer the party I once knew.What Democrats want is their utopia, or Woketopia, back. They have always believed Trump was an insect who needed to be crushed, and his place in American life was temporary, and once he’s gone, “things will go back to normal.”To them, it’s all Trump. One last cancel. He’s the only person they couldn’t destroy and the only thing standing in their way.Whatever he is for, they are against. They are even rooting against America, rooting for America to falter before the eyes of the world. Imagine being that petty. If we entered World War III, does anyone doubt they’d all be out there trying to ensure Trump fails? The irony of the Madouro capture is that it exposes the Left as liars yet again. Here is what it is like to be under the rule of a dictator. Everything the Left has been LARPing (Live Action RolePlay) for the last ten years is what Madouro actually was. The juxtaposition between the Venezuelans celebrating and the liberals complaining is illuminating.John Brown Two WaysJohn Brown was an abolitionist who was executed for treason by the federal government for a slave insurrection before the Civil War. He was hailed as a hero by the North and became an inspiration for those willing to fight and die for a cause.If the American Revolution was about liberating the colonies from the British and the Civil War was about liberating the slaves from bondage, what is our Virtual Civil War really about? Who is to be liberated at the end of it? More importantly, what are the causes worth fighting and dying for?In the film One Battle After Another, sure to win Best Picture this year at the Oscars, the film’s ANTIFA-like revolutionary Perfidia Beverly Hills lays it out:Our Virtual Civil War already has a body count. Charlie Kirk’s assassination by a transgender-supporting terrorist, Luigi Mangione’s assassination of a healthcare CEO, the attempted assassinations of Trump, and the ongoing attacks on ICE agents seem to lock in what the Left is fighting for.Are they fighting for a border-free America because borders themselves are oppressive white supremacy? It sure looks that way. Are they prepared to fight and die to preserve Woketopia? Some of them are. Maybe more of them will be.Does our future look like 1984, where geography takes a backseat to ideology, and we’ll be aligned with Germany, the UK, Canada, and France, with migrants flowing freely into our countries, and where you will be okay as long as you agree that 2+2=5 and you love Big Brother?Abraham Lincoln, like Winston Churchill, was what Neil Howe and William H. Strauss called a Gray Champion of the Fourth Turning. When I look at what Trump is doing now, the bold moves, the attacks he’s survived, there is no doubt he is our Fourth Turning’s Gray Champion. When I see videos like this, I am reminded of why. Who else but Trump would do this? He shows them every day that he is not afraid of them, not even a little bit, even after being shot in the head, impeached, and convicted.Will Tyler Robinson, Matthew David Crooks and whatever that surfer dude out in Florida’s name was be seen by the Left as the John Browns of their time? Martyrs willing to fight and die to save “democracy,” or to avenge transgender people, or immigrants? Do those on the Right see the Jan 6ers as the John Browns of their fight, beating corruption and the deep state?Lincoln sought, above all, to preserve the Union and saw the war as a test of “whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure.” Once you fracture the Union, then there is no America at all, and it might as well be 1984.As for me, it’s like Bob Dylan once said, How does it feel? To be on your own? With no direction home? Like a complete unknown? How does it feel? It feels like freedom. // 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

The Democrats have never been less popular than they are right now. They are suffering from many of the same problems that are causing Hollywood to collapse. They are dominated by white women and the LGBTQIA movement that looks more and more like a cult every day. Only a white woman and a gay man could have come up with the Vanity Fair photo shoot that made Susie Wiles look surprised and confused, as if to say, “What am I doing here?” JD Vance as the villain in a superhero movie, obliterating his glittering aqua eyes because those make him look too good. And depicting Marco Rubio tipping over as though all it would take is a gentle push, and down he goes.But they saved up their best for the woman the Left calls KKKaroline. Shown in extreme closeup in high resolution with every pore and every wrinkle visible, not to mention injection marks on her upper lip, they turned the beautiful and young Leavitt into the cartoon version they see in their mind’s eye. They made something beautiful into something ugly. And on TikTok, they all had a big party. These are the same women who spent many months mocking Karoline Leavitt’s smallish upper lip. On and on it went, the bullying videos on TikTok. When that failed to destroy the Press Secretary, they harassed and destroyed a running influencer named Kate Mac just for talking to Leavitt.These women and probably lots of gay men are the monsters. They’re the wicked stepsisters in Cinderella who seethe with jealousy at the pretty blonde girl who is so confident and articulate at the podium. They’re the evil queen in Snow White who can’t stand that someone out there is prettier than she. So Vanity Fair became the Magic Mirror and the Huntsman. They lie to their readers that they are the fairest of them all while they try to extinguish or destroy the object of their unending obsession. Oh, how they must have laughed and laughed as they chose these photos, knowing their readers would eat it up and lick the plate clean. The women who stab lawn signs into the ground, pretend to stand for something, and portray themselves as the “better side” were celebrating to see Leavitt humiliated in a photo. It was, for them, like winning the lottery. It scratched an itch so deep they couldn’t even tell you where it was. It felt good, that was all.The editor is this guy, seen here as the date for Princess Bea in high heels:Guiducci was present during the photo shoot, which should have been a good indication that this would not go well for them, though I would imagine he was dripping with fake niceness to make them trust him. If you know, you know. Here is Megyn Kelly:The other editor was Jen Pastore, seen here bragging about the photoshoot and now treated like a hero by the Good People of the Left.Back in 2014, the New York Times covered her wedding to Mark Hannah:Pastore was lovingly captured this way: “The bride burst into laughter at least once during the vows, showing off an impossibly wide smile that was half Anne Hathaway, half 1990s Julia Roberts.” You see, even in 2014, they had to stipulate, yeah, you know, back when Julia Roberts had not aged even a day? They couldn’t get away with that now, or maybe they could. They make the rules, after all. It is nice to be among the privileged ruling class in America, among the Good People of the Left who see their mission to spread that goodness. And if you don’t along with it, they will destroy you. Well, at least that was the plan. Trump upended it, and they’ve never figured out exactly why. Even now, they think all of us should want to live inside their puritanical, suffocating bubble of goodness. Newsflash: we don’t. The truth is that they are not a party defined by goodness so much as all-consuming hatred for the “lesser” half of the country. It buzzes behind their fake Anne Hathaway/Julia Roberts’ smile like flies buzzing around rotting meat. Their hatred is everywhere. Usually pooling and coagulating on Blue Sky, but every so often it seeps back to X, where they marshal their forces as a hate army to attack those they deem “toxic,” “dangerous,” or “disgusting.”Why did they lose to Trump a second time is a question they would never ask. Is it them? No, it couldn’t be. Everyone wants to be them. They’re the special people, the good people, the chosen people, the Woketopians that will take America into the future. I know what it feels like to see myself through their eyes, even though I was once one of them. They sent a photographer to take my picture for a New York Times profile of me at a time when they were trying to make it seem like they kind of, sort of cared about the half of the country that voted for Trump.Don’t do it, my friend warned. Send them a selfie. I should have listened to him, but, like the Trump administration, I was far too trusting. How bad could it be?Well, it was nothing less than the worst photos of me ever taken, appearing in the world's most widely read outlet. So there I was, looking fat, ugly, and old, which is the message they wanted to send: don’t be like her, or this is what you will look like. They say it openly and freely now, this is what “hate” does to you, and they define “hate” as disagreeing with their politics. The photographer was nice. She took many photos of me. And maybe it’s true they were all just as bad as the one the editor chose, but I think, as with the Vanity Fair photos, they picked the worst ones because that is who they are, and if they didn’t, they’d have been accused of elevating the wrong people, the bad people, the racists, and the fascists.This way, they signal to their readers - women and gay men - that they’re still on their side, they’re still on board with the real hate campaign, one they’ve waged for ten years now and counting. They have no plan for the other half of the country. All they want to do is take back power again and raise the drawbridge to their Queendom. While it’s true that the Right will mock how women look, especially the Wicked Witch of the Left, Jennifer Welch, you’d never see that at Vanity Fair, or the New York Times, where women on the Left, especially minorities, are depicted as saintly. In refusing to “normalize” the wife of a “fascist,” all magazines boycotted the beautiful Melania Trump. Nothing she could do would ever change their conviction of who they believed she was. They use every magazine, every late-night comedy show, every Hollywood movie, every article in every magazine to push that lie. When they mocked Kellyanne Conway’s age, she did something about it. She took that one thing off the table. They found something else. When they mocked Sarah Huckabee Sanders for her makeup and her weight, she did something about it, but they found something else. And now, when they mocked Karoline Leavitt for her thin upper lip, she didn’t say anything about it, and they punished her for it. The truth doesn’t matter to them. It never has. They can’t even face the truth about themselves, let alone the other half of the country. Ivanka was always to be portrayed as the daughter of a Nazi, as are all the Trump children. There has never been one moment when they were given the credit they deserve, not because they’re American royalty, but because we, the people, voted for them to fight for us. That used to matter in a country not under the control of an elite ruling class that sees itself as better than everyone else. Trump, his administration, and his voters have to be whatever they say they are. If they need them to be kings, so be it. Hitler, sure thing. Let us know what you want, women and gay men who live in a fantasy world, and we’ll give it to you because you have been elevated inside the Woketopia. The funny thing is, all they do is expose what liars they are. We all know what Karoline Leavitt, JD Vance, Marco Rubio, and Susie Wiles really look like. This wasn’t about telling the truth. It was about giving their readers the comfortable lie. See, it’s okay to dehumanize them and treat them like toxic waste because they deserve it. Oh, Vanity Fair, did you have to make it that obvious? They must wonder why so many Americans don’t see them the way they see themselves. Or maybe they don’t wonder at all. Maybe they never ask. Maybe they’ve been united in hate and dehumanization for so long that they don’t know the difference anymore between what is real and what is a manufactured delusion.It isn’t that the Right didn’t mock the Democrats’ press secretaries, Jen Psaki and Karine Jean-Pierre. They did. It’s that the Left is the side that has always pretended to be our moral betters because they aren’t like that, they don’t criticize women, they don’t tear down other women, except that they do. That was Lesson Number One for me almost ten years ago. They are exactly like that, and I remember thinking, we aren’t the good guys anymore.The women on TikTok, those who have helped make our culture intolerable by always portraying women as victims in fiction, in Lifetime movies, in Hollywood, become the very monsters they once pretended to oppose. So all Vanity Fair did was prove not who the Trump administration is, but what the Left has become. They are nothing but a grease stain where a once mighty movement used to be.Karoline Leavitt is not only beautiful, young, smart, and successful, but she’s also confident, and that’s what they really hate about her. If they can’t destroy her, they will try to humiliate her. It has become a ritual in the media by now, but never quite as blatantly as with this Vanity Fair piece. Maybe their readership is declining. Maybe they’re bored. Maybe they don’t know any other way to be anymore. Whatever it is, the stench of failure follows them around every time they signal to the rest of us that they are still this helpless and this desperate to lie to the American public with nothing less than lowly propaganda disguised as journalism. Vanity Fair, Hollywood, the New York Times - they don’t exist for all of us anymore. They don’t view the other half of the country as worthy of their attention or their coverage, even though Trump won the popular vote. They still haven’t figured it out. They haven’t solved the problem. We picked Trump because we can’t stand living in their America anymore. We can’t stand them. They’re the side that demands conformity, one that has cultivated a climate of fear and a culture of silence. Who wants to live like that? It’s boring. It’s predictable. It’s mean. And it’s over. //Tip jar 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

I have angels in my comment section who report when commenters lose their cool and fly off the handle at me. Most of the time, I delete them. Sometimes I don’t. This one sailed through my inbox, and it will finally get this person banned after almost 6,000 comments in three years, and he’s not even a paid subscriber. Please excuse the profanity:I can’t lie and pretend to be excited for Supergirl. It’s not a movie made for me, and I’m not sure I can handle one more girl boss movie, especially one whose tagline is “Truth, justice, and whatever.” Maybe my daughter will like it. But let’s move on to the red meat of this, shall we? What is this “non-stop hate binge” I’ve been on lately? It’s true, I have been out in force on X, fighting the wave of what I would define as “hate” aimed at Erika Kirk and Turning Point. It’s not something I could or ever would ignore. I’m not built that way, which is how I got into this mess in the first place. I’m Gen-X. We tend to say what we really think. We’re not good with the comfortable lies, and we weren’t raised to shrink back from conflict.And, like Trump, I have a bit of an impulse control disorder when it comes to social media. If I didn’t, my life would never have changed the way it has. I began fighting the Left when I saw how they were dehumanizing the Right, Melania and Ivanka Trump, MAGA supporters, and even Trump himself. It cost me almost everything. Smarter people know how to shut up. They know how to keep their heads down and go along to get along. I’ve never been that way. I’ve been online for 30 years of my life, entirely too long. I’ve wasted years arguing pointlessly on X or Facebook. It is spitting in the wind. It does nothing to change anyone’s mind, and it only makes me unlikable and a target. But I can’t help it. I don’t know how any reasonable person could not be thoroughly disgusted and horrified by Candace Owens and how she has exploited the murder of Charlie Kirk. It’s not only dividing the Right, undoing so much of what Charlie did, but it’s exposing ugliness and dehumanization on the side I have always defended.I can’t help but think Candace is jealous, not of Erika, but of Charlie, his reach and popularity, how beloved he was and is, especially in the wake of his death. So she just decided to steal from him - his legacy, his reputation, his movement, his influence. She did this by co-opting his story and spinning a delusional yarn about what is a fairly open and shut assassination case, one that pins the blame on the fanatical Left. She doesn’t need the money. Her husband, George Farmer, is worth between $180 and $200 million, not to mention how much Candace is making by spinning tall tales to feed her audience of mostly bored women who need drama in their lives. Lifetime movies don’t cut it anymore because they, like everything else in Hollywood, went “woke.” Even psychological thrillers and romance novels have gone “woke,” as have true crime podcasts. So instead, they follow the snake oil salesman, the huckster, the Barnam and Bailey lying YouTuber down any rabbit hole she chooses to offer up, anything to make it seem like they’re involved in some gossipy, dirty, evil secret, that they know something no one else does. It’s easier to believe we can control inexplicable horrific tragedies, whether it’s the Democrats always blaming guns or it’s a faction of the Right always blaming Israel.No, Candace is not doing this for money. She’s doing it for that insidious word for the internet age: clout. As long as they’re talking about you, as long as you’re a trending topic, your clicks and views will rise. You will be highly ranked on the podcast charts, and you’ll see that as a success. At least, until it isn’t. Who could resist what it must feel like to have millions of people tuning in to hear what scandalous thing you’ll say next? How could anyone not become addicted to it and constantly feed the beast, hungry for more? The algorithms have ravaged our brains and nervous systems, and in Candace Owens's case, her morality.True, she needs a new narrative to wipe off the sticky scum of humiliation now that her “Brigitte Macron is really a man” conspiracy collapsed. What better way to pivot away from that and redefine CANDACE? The hatred, bullying, and ugliness aimed at Erika Kirk come from both the Left and the Right. Each side has its reasons for wanting to destroy her and Turning Point. On the Left, it’s obvious. Even Barack Obama called Charlie a racist, more or less, in the wake of his death. They can’t abide a movement like his that was attracting so many young people. They couldn’t just accept the death of Charlie. They had to work every day to kill off his legacy, and that meant going after his widow, Erika. If some on the Left have abandoned their decency and humanity to stay in power, some on the Right are doing it out of a deep-seated hatred of Israel and distrust of the Jewish people. There is no other way to say it. That is the stinking rot that lies in the soul of Candace Owens, what drives her popularity on YouTube and social media, because Jew hate is global. And yes, it’s also banal, as Walter Kirn explains here with Matt Taibbi on America This Week. I know what Jewish hate feels like. I am half Jewish on my dad’s side, which meant I was never technically Jewish but Jewish enough for the camps. My sisters and I knew that we felt some hesitation saying we were Jewish around some people. It was just something we grew up knowing. What Candace is doing, what so many of her minions are doing, is in service of what I believe is evil and ugly. I don’t even think the recent massacre on Bondi Beach would pull any of them out of it, Left or Right.Standing up to Candace Owens and her mob of psychos and sociopaths is no easy task. Almost everyone is afraid of her because she brings out the knives, and she goes for the jugular. Her army of minions will do her bidding like the monkeys in the Wizard of Oz. She will destroy you if she can. Lucky for me, I’m so insignificant she wouldn’t bother. But Tim Pool is not insignificant. He has a large platform, and he put it all on the line to stand up and do the right thing. He let her have it in a well-deserved viral rant.He then went on Piers Morgan and explained it even further:Another brave voice is Matt Walsh, who gave, I think, the best and most passionate explanation of why these conspiracy theories are hurtful and damaging to not just Erika Kirk and Turning Point, but to the country, because this madness threatens to destroy the MAGA movement. No one has said it better.I would never have guessed that the two heroes to emerge from this mess would be Tim Pool and Matt Walsh, but here we are. These kinds of moments test all of us. That’s not to say people can’t criticize Israel, or that the United States should fight Israel’s wars or give them money. But this goes deeper, and making this MAGA’s biggest political issue is a losing proposition. Here is Carl Cannon of RealClearPolitics, along with Tom Bevan and Andrew Walworth, on the Megyn Kelly show. The “Woke Mind Virus” destroyed the Left, and the “Woke Right Mind Virus” threatens to destroy MAGA if it keeps heading in this direction, as Walter Kirn and Matt Taibbi discuss on America This Week. As I watched the video on Bondi Beach, I thought about Ana Kasparian saying on X, “I would never step foot in Israel.” I think about how Candace Owens will spin this as some false flag operation, and I worry for what’s coming next.Humans have been at war for over 90% of our existence. It is in our nature. We will go to war whether it’s on social media or in Gaza or Bondi Beach. To fight any war requires dehumanizing the enemy. Once you get there, where even a shot in the neck that kills a husband and a father, makes no difference to you whether you are on the Left or the Right, then you are beyond saving because you have lost your humanity, like the Good Germans in World War II, like the Good White People in the South after the Civil War, like the Puritans in Salem. The Left mocked these Trump supporters for showing empathy and solidarity to Trump after he was shot. They said it was a cult. They laughed at them. But I saw the decent people I’ve come to know over the past decade. That’s the kind of humanity we need. These past ten years have taught me that I will never go along with dehumanizing other people. I’d rather lose everything. The reason I’m here on Substack is the same reason I will lose subscribers for this post. I couldn’t do the other thing. I couldn’t shut up. If that makes me a “bitter old woman,” then so be it.Here is Frank Turek:We must be brave. We must be decent. We must hold the line. ///Tip Jar 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