Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone

Hollywood is not trying to stop a monopoly by blocking the Paramount Skydance merger with Warner Bros. It’s trying to protect one.
If a monopoly means near-complete control over what gets made, promoted, and rewarded, then much of Hollywood and the cultural institutions around it operate under the ideological consensus of the Left and the Democratic Party.
Why do the Obamas have a long-running production deal at Netflix? Why do the Emmys consistently elevate late-night hosts whose politics align with that consensus? Jimmy Kimmel, John Oliver, Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart?
Do you think they’d ever nominate Greg Gutfeld, whose show often tops them all in ratings? If that isn’t an ideological monopoly, I don’t know what is.
Why did major awards shows stay silent on Charlie Kirk? Why did so many artists cancel Kennedy Center appearances after its Trump-era changes, and why did multiple acts drop out of America 250 events?
David Ellison and Paramount Skydance are attempting something brave and unprecedented: an outside challenge to that consensus. Their roughly $110 billion bid for Warner Bros. Discovery would give them control of a major studio, HBO/Max, CNN, and a large portfolio of cable and streaming assets.
While there has been some resistance to the biggest mergers in recent history, we’ve never seen anything like #blockthemerger. Meet the new resistance, same as the old resistance.
12 state attorneys general, including California, have sued to block the deal. The Writers Guild of America has filed its own antitrust lawsuit. SAG-AFTRA has publicly opposed the merger, though it has not joined the litigation.
Opposition also includes the Future Film Coalition (which leads the #BlockTheMerger campaign), Democracy Defenders Fund, Committee for the First Amendment, Free Press, the International Documentary Association, and the American Economic Liberties Project, among others.
More than 5,600 industry figures have signed an open letter against the deal, including Mark Ruffalo, Jane Fonda, Javier Bardem, Elliot Page, Emma Thompson, Ben Stiller, and Cynthia Nixon.
Paramount Skydance has, for now, delayed closing. Can they hold the line under this unprecedented pressure campaign? Hope springs eternal.
But you won’t read about that point of view in any of the trades. They’re a monopoly, too. Most of them are owned by the same entity, Penske Eldridge. Just today, it was announced that the Hollywood Foreign Press, the former owners of the Golden Globes, are suing Jay Penske for $150 million. They are claiming Penske orchestrated their downfall so he could buy the Golden Globes.

Jay Penske already owns Deadline, The Hollywood Reporter, Variety, Indiewire, Gold Derby predicting site, Rolling Stone, a virtual monopoly on the awards race from soup to nuts. Gold Derby shapes the nominees, the trades take ads from the studios and the Golden Globes hand out the awards.
But wouldn’t you know, when Rebecca Keegan wrote a hit piece on me, she did so in the Hollywood Reporter, owned by Penske Eldridge. I was a vocal and prominent critic of Penske’s growing monopolistic power on the awards race and one of the few willing to speak out.
With one hit piece, the Penske company took out both a competitor for ad money and a pesky nuisance for the brand. That is what you call a monopoly.
A Climate of Fear and A Culture of Silence
I found out firsthand how monopolies work in Hollywood when I was canceled in 2024. The day a Hollywood Reporter story labeled me a “MAGA darling,” one studio pulled its ads from my site that day. The last thing they wanted was to be associated with an accused and condemned witch.
It was shocking how many of them fell in line in robotic fashion, gripped with fear. The response was swift and uniform. Every writer on my site left to protect their reputations. Friends of fifteen years ended the friendship. My Oscars ticket was revoked. Jane Fonda’s Women’s Media Center fired me from their annual Oscars report. Screening and party invitations dried up. I was benched on Gold Derby.
Worst of all, the lucrative studio ad buys for the Oscars and Emmys vanished. As it all collapsed, I remembered in 2012, an advertising strategist telling me I could be making far more money if I sold the site better. “You have no baggage to speak of,” she’d said.
That was true then. I was one of the few independent Oscar sites left, and still am, known around town for being honest to a fault. I stayed independent even as the ad money made life more comfortable for me and my daughter than it had ever been.
There was never any question why my career ended in Hollywood: I had been outed as a Trump voter. I was on the wrong side of Hollywood’s progressive orthodoxy, and that meant I was finished.
How it started…
I started Oscarwatch.com as a single mom with a one-year-old baby living in a studio guest house in Van Nuys, California, in 1999. I was an early web pioneer with a 1200-baud modem and a really good idea.
I was already catching the attention of publicists and rocking the boat, as all of us amateurs did back then. We were moving fast and breaking things. Traditional media was not ready. The studios weren’t either. They were used to having a monopoly on Oscar FYC ads in Variety and the Hollywood Reporter, their bread and butter. Until the blogs came along.
By 2006, I was starting to make money because my little site had birthed a big bang of other Oscar sites, and by then even the New York Times had an Oscar blogger, the late great David Carr, who called himself the Carpetbagger.
David Carr became a mentor of sorts and encouraged me to sell ads for myself, rather than piggyback off bigger sites. I was working three jobs by then: as a horoscope writer under a pseudonym (Laura Wilde), a janitor working my dad’s routes because he was a good guy and knew I needed the money, and a freelance film critic.
Right around then, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences sued me for trademark infringement, and my site was renamed AwardsDaily.com. Now I was cleared to start making real money.
David Carr was horrified that I was working as a janitor while the trades were raking in millions on Oscar ads and encouraged me to start sending out RFPs. But I didn’t have to, because before long the studios were sending them to me.
My site became so influential that I never really had to pitch to them. They all wanted real estate on my site. Who could ever have imagined that? Certainly not me, someone who got online in 1994 back when no one thought you could make money on the internet.
One of the first studios that bought ads was Fox Searchlight, an awards subsidiary of Fox. I called it Big Fox and Little Fox, and both advertised on my site. When I got my first $15,000 just to run ads, I was stunned. That was more money than I had ever seen on a check. I was just kind of faking it, pretending I knew what I was doing, but I really didn’t.
Of course, it was also about promoting films the studio wanted to place in the Oscar race, and that’s still what it’s about. It’s not exactly pay-to-play, but most of the bloggers making money in the Oscar game are grateful and help keep the advertisers’ movies prominent. I did too.
I barely noticed in 2019 when Disney bought Fox for $71 billion. The Writers Guild objected to the merger, just as they have to the Paramount Skydance merger with Warner Bros., but there was nowhere near the same amount of public outcry.
Trump praised the Disney/Fox merger after having attempted to stop the 2018 merger of AT&T and Time Warner, leading to a trial, but the judge ruled against the Trump administration, and the deal went through. Again, no major public outcry.
At some point after 2020, I’d noticed that Disney had stopped advertising on my site. I wrote it off as their shying away from my comments on “gender affirming care” for kids. I’ll never know exactly why, but all I do know is that once the merger went through, Fox and Fox Searchlight also stopped advertising.
The Paramount/Skydance merger with Warner Bros. is significantly higher and covers more territory than any of the major corporate mergers we’ve seen as Hollywood reshuffles the deck amid the shift to streaming.
Warner Bros. was selling. The only question was whether Netflix or Paramount Skydance would buy it. Both deals would have had the blessing of the Trump administration.
But because it’s David Ellison and the team that bought CBS, and because Trump is an ally, the Democrats and the Left have turned #BlockTheMerger into another No Kings protest or battle for the “resistance.”
After the story about me broke in the Hollywood Reporter, Netflix also stopped advertising. No other studio except Focus Features, an adjunct of Universal, had the courage to run ads on my site. I was now officially blacklisted. Emails to the various studio reps went unanswered.
This past year, Paramount bought a modest ad package on my site for the Emmys to celebrate the success of Landman and The Madison. I felt lucky to get it, and it was a sign, at least to me, that Paramount, like Focus Features, was brave enough to take a chance on someone deemed too toxic by the industry.
Landman, Taylor Sheridan’s Billy Bob Thornton drama, had become one of Paramount+’s biggest hits: its first season averaged 15.8 million viewers in Nielsen’s cross-platform ratings and ranked among the top 10 series of the 2024-25 season.
Season 2 opened to a Paramount+ record 9.2 million views in its first few days and continued to dominate the streaming charts, at one point leading all multiplatform viewing with more than 14 million.
The Madison, starring Michelle Pfeiffer, launched as Sheridan’s biggest series debut yet, drawing 8 million views in its first 10 days.
But unfortunately, #blockthemerger had bled into the awards ecosystem, which remains a closed loop.
Sure enough, when the Emmy nominations arrived, the Paramount shows were completely blanked—even Billy Bob Thornton in Landman and Michelle Pfeiffer in The Madison. Kathy Bates was similarly overlooked for Matlock.
If Gold Derby shapes the Emmy nominations, and they do, they have to similarly play ball by blacklisting all Paramount Plus’s most popular shows, proving to American audiences that the industry does not care about what they want or what they watch.
Sheridan has transformed much of the television landscape, thanks to Paramount Plus. If Paramount buys Warner Bros., they won’t be creating a monopoly but breaking one up.
The Death Rattle
I know I should walk away from this industry and give up the site that took me 26 years to build. But I just can’t do that. I can’t let them win.
Now that I’ve walked in the shoes of the other half of the country, I can clearly see why Hollywood’s empire is collapsing. If ratings and box office don’t matter, neither do audiences.
None of this is about artistic freedom or making better movies or television shows. This is the Left flexing its muscle in an attempt to keep all of Hollywood to itself, to push its ideology on the people, to convert them, to indoctrinate them, to “correct them,” everything but entertaining them.
Most of all, though, it is about one man: Donald Trump and their failure to stop him, destroy him, kill him, or exile him and his supporters. This is one of the most exciting times to be living through in American history, but you’d never know it by the movies and TV shows Hollywood pumps out.
Their monoculture, their one-sided point of view, has choked the life out of Hollywood. If they could make fun of themselves, if they could humanize their fellow Americans, they might be able to tell stories that resonate with everyone. Maybe, just maybe, they would breathe new life into a decaying organism.
But they can’t risk it. Like the Democrats who don’t trust the people with elections, Hollywood doesn’t trust them with the culture.
Elon Musk spent $44 billion to take Twitter out of the hands of its previous gatekeepers. Ellison is now trying to pry open a crack in the thick shell of Hollywood’s product and return more of it to market forces and all of those people Hollywood left behind.

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Any time Trump or one of his supporters brings up the 2020 election, insisting he didn’t lose it, we hear the usual chorus of groans: why can’t he get over it? He lost. Move on.
The thing is, I can’t get over it either. 2020 was the year everything changed. My entire world was turned upside down because I could see, for the first time, that I was in a bubble, a feedback loop that had shaped my perception of reality. It’s just that it wasn’t actual reality. It was a curated, hysteria-inducing delusion.
It wasn’t just me. Go on YouTube, and you’ll find hundreds, if not thousands, of people whose lives were fundamentally transformed that year in one way or another. COVID made them quit their job and move into a van. COVID made them decide to divorce. COVID made them learn how to bake sourdough. And a lot of us were red-pilled.
It was as though someone pressed the pause button and all of us froze in place for a time. Like in the movie Weapons where the kids suddenly wake up one day…
Isolated and shut in, we all turned to social media and the internet, which meant more people were connected than ever before at a time when there were more people alive than ever before. We’ve never really fully processed what happened to all of us that year.
It was the year we stopped trusting the science, the schools, Hollywood, the legacy media, and the government. Children were locked down and staring at their screens, with many of the lost boys finding their way into the dark corners of the internet and would emerge years later fumbling their way toward a rifle and a rooftop.
That isn’t all of it, or even half of it. None of us would emerge from that year unscathed. We can’t talk about it as a country or a people because we are still so divided. The big things divide us, like the vaccine, the masks, the lockdowns, and most especially, the 2020 election.
We were stepping into something we did not understand and weren’t prepared for. Things have changed enough now that it will be hard to remember just how bad things got after Trump won in 2016. I remember because I was on the inside. I lived it with the Democrats and what would become a Doomsday Cult.
We called ourselves “the resistance” even though we had all of the power. Trump and MAGA, they were the real resistance, or at least the revolutionaries going up against the most powerful machine in American history, maybe ever.
All I knew was that I had to fight for my side. I woke up every day like a good soldier for the cause and went to battle online, wasting precious time with my daughter, or doing anything else except sitting and staring at a screen and fighting with people I didn’t even know over issues that didn’t matter with arguments that had no end and went nowhere.
Inside the Doomsday Cult, we were awash with mass hysteria because every single day, every time Trump tweeted, the legacy media sent out more waves of hysteria that pulsed through the hive mind and kept reinfecting anyone who scrolled Twitter or Facebook. It was a new emergency every day. We were stuck in an unending state of trauma.
The legacy media desperately wants to forget what happened, how they lied and gaslit the public. The consequences for these moral crimes have been minimal. A slap on the wrist for ignoring Joe Biden’s cognitive decline, but there has never been a reckoning for what they did to all of us, people who trusted them, in 2020.
What Happened to Me
My daughter had to leave her senior year at college to have her graduation on my balcony, but we did it because we were doing our part to help save the country during this once-in-a-generation pandemic.
Mobilizing for the cause meant sewing our own masks, displaying them proudly on Instagram. It meant mixing our own hand sanitizer because it was all out at the drug store. Some people were wearing face shields.
We were living in fear. We were cowed into silence. Half the country fell into Mass Formation Psychosis. We weren’t allowed to attend weddings, churches, or schools, but somehow on Memorial Day, the George Floyd protests became the most important thing in America for months.
Systemic racism, they told us, was more urgent than COVID. Really? Bringing the whole country — the whole world — to its knees was less serious than George Floyd dying at the hands of a police officer in Minneapolis? Yes. That’s what they were telling us, and everyone was mandated to go along with everything that came next.
These were our idols, we were told. It was the new state religion, even if Trump was still the president. This is the ideology we’re allowed to gather for. This is worth tear ing down statues, burning buildings, carving out “autonomous zones” and demanding everyone put a black square on Instagram, capitalize the word Black and raise their fists to Black Lives Matter.
The madness unfolding on the streets meant Democrats could actually lose in November, I believed. So why wasn’t anyone trying to stop them? Why were the Democrats encouraging them? I started wondering what the hell was going on. It felt like unseen hands were manipulating events behind the scenes, and we were all expected to just go along with it.
As I began to speak out and ask questions, I was turned into an enemy. “You’ve changed,” wrote Neera Tanden on Twitter. She was right. I had. By the time Twitter pressured the New York Times to back off their Tom Cotton essay, Send in the Troops, I was done.
Maybe I was naive. I didn’t understand the assignment. I’d seen too many Frank Capra movies. I’d begun to believe politics was like an Aaron Sorkin screenplay. I thought we were the good guys. We are the side with ethics and decency and fairness.
I was like Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2 when Arnold Schwarzenegger shows up, and she thinks he’s a bad guy, but when he says, “Come with me if you want to live, she realizes that everything is backward. The people she thought were the good guys weren’t. The guy she thought was there to kill her was actually there to save her.
By the end of 2020, I was as black-pilled as Jack Nicholson in Chinatown, disillusioned and wide awake. Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.
But what I saw them do - how we were all manipulated, how they rigged the election to be too big to fail - I could see for the first time that my side had too much power. So much power that American democracy was now beside the point.
It didn’t matter how the people voted, because we would decide who was allowed to win and who would become an existential threat to the world we were building, the utopia we were building online.
When I left the party, I knew I couldn’t be fully honest about what I believed happened, though I did say that the election had been rigged. I also couldn’t be honest about what I knew about January 6th, at least not in the beginning. When I saw the riot break out, my first thought was, that’s not MAGA. They don’t do that.
And anyway, even if they did, why couldn’t the Democrats chalk it up to months of lockdowns and highly enraged, radicalized people on the Right just as there were on the Left that Summer. Why couldn’t they? Because it was all still part of the long con, the mass delusion.
These ideas were dangerous to hold for anyone in America but especially someone of the Left, and yet, I could not stop it. The truth began knocking. I ignored it as long as I could, but eventually, the knocking became a banging, and I had no choice but to open the door.
How to Rig An Election
Once you start tugging on the question of why Twitter and Facebook censored the Hunter Biden laptop, you begin to unravel the bigger picture of just how deep the conspiracy went. But you don’t need the whole story. You just need to know this: The FBI and the CIA worked against the sitting president to lie to the public that the laptop was “Russian Disinformation.”
It was just a standard run-of-the-mill October surprise, timed to help ignite a scandal before the election. But it was also information the public had a right to know, as we would find out later. So anyone who shames Trump for calling the election rigged and denying it was legit will have to answer for this.
But if you keep pulling on that string, you’ll find the why of it. They were trying to fix all of the problems they believed caused Hillary Clinton’s loss. This would be payback for the email scandal that hit her campaign, which she called “Russian Disinformation.” That would also turn out to be untrue.
But there were other problems that needed correcting, like lazy voters who assumed Hillary would win because she was so far ahead in the polls and didn’t bother turning out. They would fix this problem using COVID as the pretext to change everything about how people vote and how those votes are collected.
They knew they had Pennsylvania won long before Election Day and it would only be a matter of convincing the public not to get too excited about a “red mirage.” To all of them, that’s the right way to win an election.
Trump won Iowa, Ohio and Florida, not to mention the bellwether counties that have decided our elections.
The only other time anything like this happened was in 1960, when JFK won in a squeaker. Compare that to 2020, and you can see that something was very off about the numbers.
Since the Democrats believed Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook had handed Trump the win in 2016 by using their marketing machine (the Clinton campaign refused their help), it was time for Zuckerberg to undo that damage, which came in the form of a $400 million slush fund used to “fortify” the election but mostly in the heavily blue districts.
Had all of this been shared with the whole country as a way to improve our elections overall, that would have been one thing. But it was all done behind the scenes, in the shadows, far from the reach of anyone who might dissent. It was anything but ethical and anything but fair.
It was all part of a grand scheme to stay one step ahead of Trump. If they already knew he would claim it was rigged, why not just rig it? Who would the people believe? Trump or the “bipartisan cabal” of unelected bureaucrats hiding in the shadows?
The truth is that Trump was pulling ahead because the Left was losing its mind, and Trump picked up on it. He changed his campaign; no matter how many ways they tried to keep him from his rallies, he got the word out anyway. That would explain why he won those key states but lost so much in the popular vote.
Our elections should not be decided months before Election Day. Candidates should have to make their case to the people, not hide in the basement and let the system do the work.
It’s the candidate’s job to inspire the voters to vote for the kind of government they want, and it’s the voters responsibility to be motivated enough to turn out to the polls and cast their vote. But with an easily manipulated hive mind like the Democrats had cultivated for ten years they didn’t need any of it.
The Year That Broke America
I’ve never been able to convince anyone of what I believed happened in 2020. If you were on the Left, chances are, you wouldn’t be able to see it either. You would have trusted the same people I used to trust: CNN, New York Times, MSNBC, your social media feed.
You would have come out of that year thinking Joe Biden won the 2020 election fair and square and that Donald Trump refused to lose, so he led a dangerous assault on the Capitol, putting our democracy under threat.
Yet, after everything they did to Trump that year and for the four years prior, what else could he have done except protest? It was just a little too convenient that there happened to be a riot at the same time, a Reichstag Fire that handed absolute power to Team Blue.
If you were still trapped inside the Doomsday Cult, you’d have been primed and ready to go to war on your fellow Americans because Vice President Kamala Harris would tell you January 6th was like 9/11 and Pearl Harbor. You would have thought Liz Cheney and the Prime Time Show Trial was legit. What an easy mark you’d be.
If you never escaped, as I did, you’d still be trapped inside the Doomsday Cult and never have any idea that none of this is your fault. You were put into a kind of trance in 2020, even before, like the kids in the movie Weapons, frozen in place and used as an army to do the bidding of the Democratic Party.
They made you believe, like they made me believe, that every day really was the end of the world as long as Donald Trump was in power. But it was never true, none of it. All the Democrats ever had to do was offer the people something better.
If everything Molly Ball wrote about the election the “Secret Bi-Partisan Cabal” supposedly saved, how did Trump win again?
In Weapons, the children are put under a spell and aimed at the enemies of the witch. Once the spell is broken, the children wake up and realize the person they should be mad at isn’t the one she made them attack, but instead the witch herself for robbing them of their ability to think for themselves.
And so it goes with the Democrats.

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I will come out of this very surreal moment in American history and in the story of my own life, understanding the basic truth that our goodness is not determined by a political party. It isn’t the politics that make us better than anyone else. We all have our own ideas of what matters. Instead, it is our willingness to preserve our humanity when tested that really counts.
We can blame the internet and the algorithms for what has happened to all of us in the last 20 years, to our politics, to our culture, to our relationships. But that can only take us so far. At some point, we all have to reckon with who we are and what we’ve become.
I always thought we were the good guys. We didn’t mock, degrade, or dehumanize other people. We were decent and were empathetic. That is, until Donald Trump won in 2016 and all of that changed. What I saw happen to my own side was ugly. It was dark. I wanted nothing to do with it.
It’s been almost two years since Donald Trump was nearly shot and killed on live television. The way the Left dealt with that shooting was shocking. They diminished it. They said it was staged or just shrapnel. They did everything but wake up to the radicalization on their own side.
By then, they’d become consumed by hatred, having tried everything they had in their arsenal to take down Trump, and all of it had failed. How could they pivot back to their humanity?
So when Charlie Kirk was assassinated on video, with the clip going viral to millions of views in seconds, they were primed and ready to once again leave behind their humanity and celebrate one more battle against their named evil, a guy who said things they didn’t like.
It became a thing on TikTok:
They all took to X and competed for who could be the ugliest and the cruelest. The more disgusting they were, the more their hate and dehumanization were rewarded. Social media has messed with our perception of what defines love and hate, with those tiny deceptive hearts we press every time someone scratches that sadistic itch.
The reaction to Charlie’s assassination by the Left was unlike anything I’ve ever seen or anything I thought I would ever see from my former side. It might have been the people of Salem celebrating watching their friends and neighbors hang because they refused to confess. But this was America in 2025, not 1692. How could they not have been shaken out of their decade-long mass hysteria stupor?
My mind goes to Charles Manson and his followers, who showed no mercy, slicing up the bodies of the rich in the Hollywood Hills, a pregnant Sharon Tate among them. To hear the Manson family tell it, they deserved it. They were the establishment. They had been dehumanized, and their lives didn’t matter.
I bring up the Manson murders a lot because that was the last time we saw that same glint, the same wild-eyed happiness and glee at something as gruesome as a murder or someone’s death.
I thought that would have been the end of it, back then. It was enough to end the 1960s, keep Richard Nixon in power, and send our society tumbling toward Ronald Reagan and the 1980s.
But now, that same kind of bizarre, cult-like fury has overtaken the Left once again, and nothing can shake them out of it, not the near assassination of Trump, not the brutal murder of Charlie Kirk. Not the celebrating afterward.
The hate bubbled up inside them so profoundly that even when Barack Obama tried to show some grace in the wake of Charlie’s death, his biggest applause lines came after he decided to repeat the cherry-picked, out-of-context lies pushed by the Left that led to the dehumanization of Charlie Kirk in the first place.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took her cue from President Obama and followed the same pattern. She offered a condemnation of political violence, but then launched into the kind of attack that they believe justifies all of what they’ve been doing for the past ten years.
This is a country built on freedom of speech, and yet, the entire Left doesn’t believe in it, or they think it’s Trump that’s doing it. They control the culture, which is why they couldn’t even offer a word about Charlie’s death, not even at the Emmys or anywhere else.
Jamie Lee Curtis had a moment of sorrow for Charlie when she choked up on a podcast. But the activists descended upon her, and of course, she was forced to “clarify” what she meant.
All it took was losing one election for my side to transform into monsters who believed that as long as their fellow Americans stood in their way, they could justify anything that happened to them, yes, even an assassination.
Even now, I still get twitchy when I see the blind, hot hatred coming from the Left aimed at anyone on the Right. I’ve never gotten used to it. I’ve never been able to overlook it. I certainly couldn’t be a part of it.
I was reminded of that this week after Lindsey Graham’s untimely death. I watched the same pattern play out, the same ugliness, the same mocking TikTok videos demanding those inside utopia disconnect from their humanity.
Even if Trump danced on the graves of his enemies, Rob Reiner and Robert Mueller, that doesn’t mean he spends his days wishing any of them would be murdered or dead. Plenty of people on the Right, even journalists in right-leaning outlets, had no problem condemning Trump for it. Why can’t they do that on the Left?
Why are we now seeing them once again celebrating the death of a politician for the crime of disagreeing with them? They will keep doing this and as long as they do, someone out there will think picking up a gun will make them a hero.
Celebrating the death of evil people should be reserved for mass murderers like Stalin or Hitler. That they believe Lindsey Graham, Donald Trump, or Charlie Kirk are on that level is proof enough that they’ve lost their minds, and it has taken us to a very dangerous place.
Something Wicked This Way Comes
When Charlie was assassinated, it was like the leg of a pier giving way and the whole thing crashing into the water. He held the MAGA movement together by his optimistic and inclusive nature, but once he was gone, a full-blown war broke out.
It all started with the JQ group - the “Jewish Question” white nationalists - who instantly blamed Charlie’s death on Israel. This was then picked up and amplified by Candace Owens, who has now become more popular than she’s ever been by positioning herself as the anti-Charlie Kirk. She is now attempting to steal his legacy, bully and harass his widow, and destroy everything he ever built.
Why? Who knows. Maybe because she’s a total zero and her friendship with Charlie was the best it was ever going to get for her. Maybe she was bitter and resentful about being sidelined by Charlie and TPUSA. Either way, she has now done the Left a solid by changing the conversation around Charlie’s death.
It isn’t the rising fanaticism on the Left or their pathological need to control thought and speech. It isn’t that they’ve become so totalitarian that they fantasize about the deaths of their enemies and celebrate when people die?
No, it was actually Israel!
I didn’t think anything or anyone could ever match the level of insanity of the Left, but Candace Owens has done it. For clicks, views, and money, she sold out her so-called friend.
Charlie has been dehumanized, yet again, this time transformed into nothing more than a stepping stone to success by a woman who can never get enough of it, who needs people to be talking about her, looking at her, thinking about her, doing anything but ignoring her.
She’s stolen Charlie’s legacy and has now written herself into this story so everyone will notice she was once part of Charlie’s world. Not an important part. She was useful, for a time. Maybe she was even his friend, for a time. Now, she has shown her true colors, and it is the most evil thing I’ve seen in the 30 years I’ve been online.
How lonely and empty does a person have to be to steal someone else’s life?
That so many have followed her, that there is such a thing as the “woke Right,” that Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones and others have actually indulged this sick fantasy that anyone but Tyler Robinson could have done this, proves that goodness is not about political parties. It is about our humanity, whether we have it or whether we’ve abandoned it.
Charlie’s Angels
Something real and violent happened on September 10, 2025. The algorithmic, hypnotic churn of the internet, our absurd, pointless Civil War, the obsession on the Right with Israel, none of that could stop what really happened that day.
There isn’t a person who was there or who was closest to Charlie that Candace Owens hasn’t consumed for content and blamed for his death.
But she’s underestimated the strength of Charlie’s widow, his most powerful angel, Erika Kirk. Candace has used her too, laid her out like raw flesh to be consumed by sycophants, but somehow, that has only made Erika stronger, and now, Candace is the one who is about to understand what love really means. And what goodness looks like.
Erika is Charlie’s angel, but lucky for him, he has a lot of them. They’re out there fighting every day to keep his memory alive and the movement he built thriving.
And a sculptor is putting a statue of Charlie Kirk in Times Square, New York. We know how that is going to go. We know because we know the Left.
The way the Left responded to Charlie’s assassination should be something none of us ever forgets. It is something they will all have to reckon with one day, and for many of them, wiping away its shame won’t be easy.
It will be up to those angels of Charlie’s to continue his lifelong devotion to open debate, to talking to those you disagree with, and to preserve our freedom of speech and expression. Above all, let his memory be a reminder of how important it is to hold on to our humanity.
The world has changed since Charlie was shot and killed. It’s darker, and it’s meaner. Holding onto hope is harder than it’s ever been. But Charlie Kirk lives on through his widow, his babies, his true friends, and the tens of thousands of young people keeping TPUSA alive.
We have his legacy because we still have his voice, and thanks to the internet, it is everywhere, and he will never be forgotten.

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It’s been said that you can spot an American from a mile away. Travelers to Europe are advised to adjust their attire to blend in with locals and avoid looking so … casual. The French think Americans are loud and rude, and Europe has a long tradition of sneering at how classless we all are, even before Trump.
I spent a month in Italy, and it’s a beautiful place. The slow living, the long naps when all the stores shut down for hours during the day, the tiny cars, the laundry drying on the balconies, the fresh food at the Farmer’s Market. I feel lucky that when I came back from Italy, I was pregnant and having my baby is the single greatest thing that has ever happened to me. But I’m also glad she grew up in America.
I used to travel to France to cover the Cannes Film Festival, and again, I admired their way of life, the food especially. But every time I stayed too long, I began to miss my home in America. There is something thrilling about living in a free country that I’ve never felt anywhere else.
It seems to me that if you are born here, you make up your life as it goes along. It is not planned out for you, necessarily, although in some cases, I guess it probably is. In my case, it wasn’t. I knew I could invent myself any way I wanted. And if I didn’t like that version, I could reinvent myself. We’re like our country, a work in progress. It’s always there for the taking, that promise of opportunity.
Donald Trump is all of America’s freedoms wrapped up in one imperfect man. He broke through the thick layer of oppressive thought and speech and showed the world that here, you really can say anything you want - as long as some crazed totalitarian doesn’t try to shoot you.
That’s the country I want to live in. It isn’t that the greatest writing or art has come from a place like America. Plenty of great works have come from places that don’t center freedom as their main objective. But once you’ve tasted it, you can’t give it up.
In his speech last night, Trump said:
The American founding represents the best ideas and traditions in history by the best people, like you. You can be loyal to Karl Marx or you can be loyal to America. You can be a communist or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both. As for those who peddle Marxist lies about our heritage, tell our children that we live on stolen land or that our heroes were oppressors, they’re doing something much worse than slandering our past. They are slandering and attacking our future. Not going to let that happen.
They’re trying to tear down the great American character to destroy the people who declared independence, who crossed the Delaware, who settled the West and conquered the skies. You know who those people are. But we will never let that happen.
In America now, two stories are competing to claim the right to rule the future. Trump is telling the better story, the one America was founded on and the one we’ve all believed, at least up until recently, when a new wave of progressives decided that the better story paints America as a corrupt, rotten, white supremacist empire that has to be torn down to the studs and rebuilt.
They must be terrified about the 2030 Census because they’ve decided to die on the hill of illegal immigration, which is fast becoming their most important issue. That, alongside Democratic Socialism, is a recipe for disaster.
This was Bill Clinton’s bummer message on the Fourth:
I always thought Bill Clinton was a good president, but reading that just now makes me think he wasn’t. All he’s ever been able to do is point the finger at the other side and never offer any real solutions. He’s not the man in the arena. He’s the man on the sidelines.
What I love about Trump and his supporters is how much they love America. They love it so much that they plant flags all over their homes. They admire the Founding Fathers. They call themselves Patriots. We didn’t have that kind of pride on the Left when I was growing up.
And even now, so many see the American flag and the love of country as dangerous, racist, bigoted, fascist. Whoever told those people that is what MAGA is about lied. They’re protective of America’s laws and its border. That is out of love for the country.
The Left has taken almost everything from them. They’ve locked them out of culture, forbidden them from participating in any of their major events, dehumanized, demonized, and disenfranchised them.
But the one thing they couldn’t take was their citizenship. They hit the jackpot just by being born in America. To think it would be so easy for people all over the world to come here illegally and claim that prize or to come here and attempt to remake America into something it was never meant to be devalues the one thing they treasure most of all.
I’ve always been a proud American. I’ve always preferred this country over any other, but only in the last few years have I understood what it means to be a Patriot, to be ready to fight for the country I love. And that is because of the people I’ve gotten to know on the Right.
This country is worth fighting for. I might not agree with all of the policies on the Right, or even Trump himself, all of the time, but I’d rather have the future of this country in the hands of people who love it the way Trump does than people who hate it, the way so many on the Left do, just because their candidates are weak and their policies are toxic.
I wanted to write 250 things I love about America, but it got too long, so this will have to do. Here are just some of the things I love:
I love the interstates as part of the great legacy of Dwight D. Eisenhower.
I love the Pacific Ocean because it stretches along the state.
I love Catalina Island off the California Coast, where I spent many a summer with my best friend.
I love seeing our history in the many cultures that came here, like Chinatown, Little Italy, Mexican food in LA, soul food in the South, Irish bars and pubs in the middle of nowhere. And yes, you can appreciate a nation of immigrants while still policing our borders now.
I love how nice people are in some places, like California, Ohio, and Iowa, where they smile at you on the street.
I love the weather extremes, from the dusty plains to the snowy mountains to hurricanes by the sea.
I love the historic monuments from the Civil War and the Revolutionary War.
I love the town squares that you can still see if you drive through the middle of America. Even though many are abandoned, they still look like hope to me.
I love how each town square has a church, a post office, and a school.
I love the many farmlands that blanket the Midwest.
I love the small mom-and-pop coffee drive-throughs, and even the convenience of a Starbucks in nearly every town.
I love Route 66 and how people still drive it and visit the forgotten places.
I love the absurdity of Las Vegas, how it sprouts up impossibly in the middle of the desert.
I love the American writers who helped shape our country’s sense of itself - Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Flannery O’Connor, Richard Ford, Maya Angelou.
I love the musical traditions that started here: Jazz and the Blues. And became Rock n’ Roll.
I love the Legend of Sleepy Hollow and the town that still remembers it.
I love diners and dive bars.
I love Gone with the Wind and how it’s still the highest-grossing film of all time when adjusted for inflation.
I love The Twilight Zone and find it timeless, as relevant today as it was in the 1950s.
I love the footprints at the (Grauman’s) Chinese Theater in Hollywood.
I love the US military and its devotion to the country.
I love the wildflowers that bloom in California every year.
I love soft-serve ice cream at the DQ.
I love Levi’s.
I love New York pizza.
I love Solvang in California.
I love driving up the Oregon coast.
I love the songs of Bob Dylan.
I love the tap dancing of Fred Astaire.
I love how anyone can be a star on YouTube, no matter where they come from, but YouTube couldn’t have been invented anywhere but America.
I love how I could build a business as a single mom in a one-room guesthouse in Van Nuys, and that business would, five years later, become profitable because I worked hard and had a good idea.
And then, when my career went up in flames in 2024 because I voted for Trump, I could build another career on Substack because that is what America is all about - inventing and reinventing yourself.
I love the innovative spirit that built America in real life and online.
I love reading about the early settlers, the Puritans, and the homesteaders, how much they sacrificed to help make America a home. And I love the history of the Native Americans, too, even if so much of it remains a tragedy now.
I love high-speed internet and Wi-Fi that are available almost everywhere, and if they're not, I have a hotspot.
I love the old American cars that were not just exceptional but beautiful.
I love the tradition of baseball.
I love that people faithfully watch football, even if I don’t.
I love the tradition of sourdough bread all over social media.
I love that the best basketball players in the world are from here.
I love that every state is different from one to the next.
I love Harper’s Ferry, how it’s frozen in time.
I love that we found a way to move on from the trauma of our past with slavery and how we fought a bloody Civil War to end it.
I love that we were the good guys in World War II. We did the right thing in entering the war and helping the Allies win.
I love that you can be anything here. The door is always open. It’s up to you to walk through it.
I love that America is a Christian nation, and you can see that if you drive across it. But it’s also a country that stands for freedom of religion, too.
I love the American comedians: Groucho Marx, George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Steve Martin, and Johnny Carson.
I love that the best films from the 1970s were American movies, like The Godfather, The French Connection, Taxi Driver, and Network.
But I also love more modern masterpieces by American filmmakers, like No Country for Old Men and Sideways.
I love that people play the lottery, thinking one day they will hit the jackpot. They never will, but they can still dream.
I love Thanksgiving and the way we celebrate it in America, which is to say, all together as one big dysfunctional family.
I love the tradition of Halloween and how every October, the pumpkins and costumes come out. I love the way the weather changes.
I love the Declaration of Independence and those who dared to build this wild, untamed, optimistic work in progress.
I love that America is always looking to the future to find a better version of itself and its people. I love that so many Americans still believe in the American Dream.
I love watching the movie Jaws on the 4th of July.
I love that people watch fireworks, even if I never do, because they traumatize my dogs.
I love that we have a holiday just to celebrate the day we became a country, a ragtag group of deplorable revolutionaries who set out to build a brand new country. Oh, the audacity of it.
I love living here and would not want to live anywhere else.
Happy 250th Birthday, my beloved country.
Happy 4th to you, dear readers. Thanks for everything. I hope you are having a wonderful weekend.



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It took 65 years for that message to completely reverse itself in the Democratic Party and on the Left. Out is personal achievement. In is victimhood. Out is reaching for the stars. In is ushering in oppressed people from all over the world to ensure a steady supply. Out is the right of American citizens with their vote. In are people who don’t respect that vote.
As Trump gives his speech at Mount Rushmore later this evening, Zohran Mamdani, who is supposedly just the Mayor of New York City, has positioned himself as Trump’s equal, the Mirror President for the other America.
Thirsty as ever, in love with his own image, thinking who the hell he is, he has the audacity to sit in George Washington’s chair to make a speech about a new America he hopes to invent, one without borders, without Capitalism, without billionaires.
His speech paints the American government as oppressive, while demonizing them for policing immigration:
"We see it just as clearly in every American who still believes this country belongs to we, the people. We see America each time neighbors link arms with neighbors without asking how long they've lived here or what papers they have as ICE invades our neighborhoods. We see America each time working people demand more, not just for themselves, but for their fellow Americans."
The irony is that he demonizes the rich, the very people who pad his risks in New York City and help him present a fake-pretend utopian fantasy that only works because of the rich people in the city, because they won’t let it fail. It’s absolution, after all, and there is no price high enough for that.
It took America 250 years to arrive at a place where the country might finally, at long last, “be like Europe.” How many times did I hear that throughout my life? Why can’t we be like Europe?
We were raised to hate our country, to see it as a Capitalist hellhole of the haves and the have-nots, a lesser nation than France or the UK or Italy. No wonder Mamdani thinks he speaks for everyone. But we didn’t have a bloody revolution just to copy England.
Mamdani is like a cult leader who can now exploit whole generations who have been indoctrinated to believe that there is something rotting at the core of America’s heart, a disease of “white supremacy” and a history of exploitation, colonization, slavery, trauma, abuse, and poverty. Their only answer for this is to “be more like Europe.” At best, that is where they land. Really, it’s probably closer to “be more like China.”
They’re already halfway there. Cancel culture has silenced all dissent. The DSA is rising, and the Democrats have kissed Mamdani’s ring.
Not because it is easy…
It’s not easy making it in America. It’s not easy making enough money for a decent home, to raise a family, and to take a vacation once in a while. No one ever said it would be easy, least of all, JFK:
We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we're willing to accept.”
JFK was assassinated before I was born. The Democrats were haunted by him for my entire life, until Barack Obama came along and was the first to erase the ghosts of the past and redefine what it meant to be both a Democrat and a person of the Left. That meant fundamental things would change. One of the biggest changes was going from believing in personal achievement to believing in victimhood.
Obama took the obstruction of his policies personally. It was those racist Republicans. So they set about changing the hearts and minds of the young and teaching them that the only reason they couldn’t succeed was their victim status, and before long, that became the only thing that mattered about them. But for that movement to succeed, it required a sick country, not a healthy one.
The Democrats were split in 2016 between the “white working class” in Bernie’s Democratic Socialism and the identity politics of Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. Now, what we’re seeing is a marriage between the two. Now, it’s not what Vivek Ramaswamy called Woke Capitalism, but rather, Woke Socialism. Isn’t it just another way to sell to Gen-Z?
They are the most privileged generation ever to walk the face of the earth. Capitalism gave them social media, email, a computer in the palm of their hand, DoorDash, Google, Uber, TikTok, YouTube, streaming music, television shows, fast food, fast fashion, Instacart, Airbnb, influencer culture, and movies.
And it’s not enough.
Why can’t they be a Kardashian and have birthday parties with ten thousand balloons? Why can’t they travel to Europe? Why can’t they own a house? Why can’t they live on Manhattan’s Upper West Side? Why is Elon Musk a trillionaire with so many homeless people on the streets? Why are they so miserable, so full of anxiety, so full of hate? How can a life of convenience be so hard?
They want an easy life as they have in Sweden, Italy, or France. They want to Free Palestine. They want their happy ending for all oppressed people all over the world, especially those crossing the border. They were told this was America's problem, so why can’t they change America to fix it?
And if they can’t have it, well…
They were raised to believe it should all be easy. If you have anxiety, take a pill. If movies and books trigger you, they’ll have trigger warnings. Bullies at school will be eradicated. Self-esteem is what matters most. Words are violence. If masculinity is too toxic, we’ll feminize society to make it easier.
Mothers of my generation coddled the American mind. We helicoptered our children. We kept them from every imaginable harm, and we tried to clear a path to success. We taught them that you should only do things if they’re easy, not if they are hard. Because if they are too hard, that might lead to failure, and our kids could never fail.
But we forgot to teach them the value of hard work and failure because we never wanted them to feel any discomfort. If their lives were easy, we felt like we’d accomplished something because they’d be happy. But happiness comes from service, from building something, achieving something, doing something hard.
This country has always been “move fast and break things” but also “move fast and build things.” Invent things, envision things, start a business. I could never have started a business as a single mother in Italy as I did in America in 1999. America is the only country where anyone can build anything. The downside of that is that it’s hard. There is a price to pay for freedom.
Unless you’ve felt freedom, real freedom, in your mind and heart, you’ll never love this country the way I do. I love feeling free and always have. I had to escape the Left and the Democratic Party because I no longer felt free, as they no longer believe in freedom. They believe in forced compliance and conformity.
But freedom also means this:
And this:
They’re just too dumb by now to realize that they live in a free country where they can say and do anything they please without being shot on the spot or thrown in jail. They’re free to call Trump a fascist dictator because he isn’t one. They’re free to protest “No Kings” because Trump isn’t one.
Mamdani wants to fundamentally transform America and turn it into a Communist utopia, and the Democrats are letting him. That is not the way to lead America 250 years in. No, we have to fight for what America is. It is not a failure, not yet. It is worth fighting for.
Younger generations should be taught that they can do anything with their lives, no matter their skin color, and that they can make money right now on YouTube, Substack, and TikTok. They can start a business. They can go to trade school. They can use AI to get them where they need to go because it can make any ordinary person well-skilled and productive. And it’s free. It’s all there for the taking, but it will never be enough for a movement fueled by victimhood.
A Nation built on strength
Obviously, Donald Trump is not perfect. Every day, someone throws out another immoral or unethical thing they believe disqualifies him from leading. Ya, we got that. Your job was to beat him by making a better case to the American people, and you never did.
Trump was called to this moment in history to hold fast and true to America’s founding principles. I’ve never seen a more patriotic American, let alone a president, in my entire life. He’s celebrating every part of it. He’s reviving our history. He’s making us proud of our country.
Trump’s White House YouTube channel has videos like this:
Endless amounts of them, trying to fill the cup back up to halfway full for future generations.
Later tonight, Trump will once again be at Mount Rushmore to give a speech for America at 250. I already know what he will say because I know him, and I know no president in my lifetime has loved this country more. He’ll remind us what America is and what threatens us now.
And seething in the background will be bitter, angry, jealous people who have to root for America’s failure, not because they hate him that much, but because they refuse to relinquish their power back to the people. They could have won the election, but instead, they went to war.
They will have to hold on to that hate for years to come so they can pass it on to their children and make them understand why they could not celebrate a country that, to paraphrase U2, gave them everything they ever wanted … it wasn’t what they wanted.
I live in a town that is full of wealthy white liberals, and almost no one has a flag out front. I put two up by my fence to show my gratitude and my love for this glorious, young, imperfect, beautiful country. I can only hope no one steals it in a rage.
On the other hand, people in my town have a long tradition of putting out chairs for the 4th of July parade a month in advance. The chairs stretch out for miles, and no one ever takes them.
To be an American means self-governance, but it also means being part of that fragile, invisible thread that ties us together, like chairs that line the main highway, all different but somehow the same because we’re all in it together and celebrating the nation’s birthday, not because it is easy — but because it is hard.
This isn’t my love letter to America. That will come tomorrow. But it is my way of saying that no one should lead this country who wants it to be anything other than what it was born to be: free.

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