Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone

Eric Swalwell’s gubernatorial campaign was a ticking time bomb, and the Democrats knew it. They’ve denied it, but come on, are we really supposed to believe that a story that was kicking around in 2019 and set to break in Politico did not reach the ears of Nancy Pelosi? The question isn’t whether they knew, but why they did nothing about it and essentially let Swalwell loose upon the world with access to Snapchat and hotel rooms.
Swalwell was one of Pelosi’s protoges, a foot soldier for the party bosses who decided Donald Trump should never lead this country, no matter the election outcome. They convicted him on Inauguration Day, then spent the next four years finding the crime. The biggest and most embarrassing of these was Russiagate, where Swalwell played a starring role.
They knew Trump would not be removed from office, but they decided to wait out the clock, waste his time and ours, with a phony scandal that, to this day, has never been adequately addressed by legacy media or the Democrats. They just moved on to the next thing and the next thing and the next thing, and all the while, there was Swalwell doing everything right.
There he was on Impeachment Number 2, saying all the things, drawing all of the conclusions, pushing all of the hysteria.
For his efforts, Swalwell was beloved by celebrities like Robert De Niro, late-night comics like Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert. For a time, he was like Icarus, soaring as one of the Democrats’ shining stars.
No wonder he thought he should be next in line to lead California now that Gavin Newsom is running for president. All that’s required of him is that he be someone who can take on Trump.
But Icarus flamed out. In the past week, we watched a political hit that has to be among the cleanest and most efficient on record. One minute, he was leading in the polls — the next, he was dropping out and resigning from Congress. Swalwell never had a chance.
Powerful forces that will never be known wanted him out because there was a good chance the “open secret” that dogged him for years would drop, handing California to the Republicans. It would be another nightmare on par with Biden’s debate disaster. There was no way the Democrats were going to let that happen.
Swalwell never saw it coming. He assumed he had risen to the level of being a valued member of the “resistance.” But he clearly doesn’t know the Democrats very well. If they could force the President of the United States out of running for a second term for the good of the party, they could do it to anyone.
What Did the Democrats Know and When Did They Know It
Swalwell had survived the Right’s favorite lurid tale of the Chinese Spy Fang Fang, along with the rumor he’d passed gas during a cable news spot.
But in 2019, a woman tipped off a Politico reporter that Swalwell was engaged in inappropriate sexual activity with young women while in Congress. Icarus took flight and attempted to run for president. But for unknown reasons, he dropped out.
And then, inexplicably, the reporter dropped the story.
Why would they drop the story? Maybe because they lost their appetite for taking down Democrats after the Al Franken debacle, where Franken was pushed out by the most prominent Democrats, like Chuck Schumer, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders, with no chance to defend himself against what were flimsy charges at best.
As Matt Taibbi writes in Racket:
Democrats tripped over each other to denounce Franken, with 32 Senators calling for his resignation on Dec. 6, 2017. Digital stones flew from Minnesotan Amy Klobuchar, ex-presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, and future VP Kamala Harris, among others:
The Franken story would sting by 2019, following a redemption piece by Jane Mayer in The New Yorker. No one wanted to do that again, so maybe they figured they’d let the Swalwell story pass.
The bigger reason was that the Democrats had one objective in 2019, and it wasn’t to take out the guy who was key in Trump’s impeachment and Russiagate, but to take out Trump himself. It was an all-hands-on-deck kind of moment, and no reporter would have wanted to be caught dead helping Trump and hurting the Democrats.
That’s also why they ignored the story in 2024 of Kamala Harris’ husband Dougie who allegedly slapped a woman so hard she spun around. Like so many other stories that could hurt Democrats, including Joe Biden’s cognitive decline, they said nothing, lest they hurt the “resistance.”
It was also 2019 when a group of women came forward to accuse Joe Biden of inappropriate touching. No one seemed all that interested in pushing it to the point where Biden would drop out. He denied it, and everyone gave him a pass.
Even when Biden was accused of sexual assault by Tara Reade, most in the press wouldn’t touch it. But one person did. Megyn Kelly.
Kamala Harris was among those who leaned into the accusations, but that would not stop Biden from choosing her as his VP.
Like the good Democrat I was, I tried to discredit Tara Reade, along with the rest of the accusers. I, too, had been burned by the Al Franken story and was disgusted with how the Democrats behaved, and like most people, I was getting exhausted by the Me Too movement and the lack of due process. In our minds, this was too serious a moment. We had to defeat Trump. Everything else would have to be sidelined.
I always thought that the harassment charges against Biden were less about Me Too and more about pushing the old man out of the race so that a more progressive candidate might take his spot. Reade, for instance, was a devout supporter of Bernie Sanders, and just before she accused him of assault, she and everyone else on the progressive Left were hoping for a miracle.
Is that what happened with the Swalwell story, too? Something about it just doesn’t add up. It was too clean, too well planned, too easy. It makes me wonder who was really pulling the strings. For the second time, he tried to fly too close to the sun and run for higher office, and for the second time, dropped out, but this time, there won’t be any coming back.
As Taibbi writes:
Which brings us to Swalwell. The accusations are extremely serious. Another woman came forward alleging he drugged her, lured her to a hotel, raped her, and choked her to unconsciousness. “I thought I died,” Lonna Drewes said. Taken with two accusations of sex with women “too intoxicated to consent,” the stories sound more like a developing serial murderer than someone merely guilty of being raised on Bob Hope jokes. Still, Swalwell’s political demise reads like a repeat of the Franken tale, only with context issues amplified a hundredfold, and Epstein playing the role of Weinstein.
With Franken, it took weeks for Democrats to denounce him. With Swalwell it happened overnight, and accusers are already being called “survivors,” as in the Democratic Women’s Caucus announcing, “We stand with survivors.” The writer in me dislikes the appropriation of a word that means “remaining alive where others have died,” but it is true these women might prove to be “survivors” of something, but what? At this early stage of inquiry, “survivors” functions as a turbocharged version of “Believe all women,” in which the possibility of disbelief is linguistically eliminated.
But time is the point. Time means another candidate can build a campaign and beat the Republican in California. That’s the hangover from 2024, and it’s why I don’t believe any of this happened organically.
Who ordered the hit?
The story goes something like this: two progressive female influencers caught wind of a whisper network, with rumors swirling about Swalwell’s sexual proclivities.
How this information found its way to them is not yet known. Will anyone ask or investigate? Probably not. Some of it came from their friends, and that was more than enough to start an amateur investigation, one that will probably find its way to a TV movie near you.
Think: Woodward and Bernstein or Kantor and Twohey, the women who broke the Harvey Weinstein story that kicked off Me Too. Now, instead of reporters, we have influencers.
To hear them tell it, they believed their best bet was to take the story to CNN, where their staff could fact-check it and, more importantly, make it legal.
One is Cheyenne Hunt, who calls herself the first Gen-Z woman to run for Congress, though she did not win. Assertive and confident, Hunt has the influencer game down. She also carries with her the certainty of the Gen-Z woman who does not believe in due process and thinks every man is a predator until proven innocent. Just asking a woman for her phone number could be a reportable offense.
To her, Swalwell was a dangerous moderate who was pro-Israel and too sympathetic to and supportive of ICE. These are red lines for the new Democratic Party's progressive wing, especially in a big state like California.
The other is Arielle Fodor, also known as Mrs. Frazzled, who is known for talking baby talk to Trump and his supporters to an irritating degree, but that is why she is popular on TikTok.
Fodor seems to be the type who would Vote Blue No Matter Who and probably would not be motivated to take down Swalwell unless she was encouraged to do so. Her story is nearly identical to Hunt’s:
It’s an awfully strange coincidence that they began mobilizing efforts to break the story in March, and by April, they were out on social media with it. If Swalwell were a valued member of the progressive Left, if they thought he would fight for Medicare for All, defunding the police, abandoning Israel, and transing the kids, would they have pulled this off? I doubt it.
What seems more likely to me is that they were egged on by unseen forces that were doing the hard job of pushing the accusers in the right direction and nudging the story ever closer to the surface, you know, like Deep Throat in All the President’s Men?
The same forces on the progressive Left that wanted Biden out in 2020 could also be in play here. He looks a lot like the kind of candidate the Democrats say they want and need - someone who can attract the working-class white men all over the country.
But for these women and the progressive Left, there is one candidate better suited to fight for what they care about most: Katie Porter. Both influencers have been seen in photos with her, and Porter and Hunt are both affiliated with the same law school.
Porter denies any direct involvement, but then again, why would that even need to be said?
There is no doubt that Cheyenne Hunt and Arielle Fodor look to be the party’s future, not just as influencers or as women, but as people who are willing to go this far to steer the ship in the right direction. Hunt, in particular, seems committed to rooting out all of the sex pests in Congress, and what better way to make a name for herself?
All the Congressman’s D*ck Pics
The Swalwell story unfolded straight out of the writers’ room of a Lifetime movie where all women are victims, and all men are predators. How could anyone, much less a white male politician, much less a Democrat, send Snapchats of his Johnson to a Gen-Z staffer post Me Too?
Maybe he did it because no one would believe anyone could be that stupid. Maybe he did it because Snapchat deletes the photos, and it’s his word against theirs. Maybe he did it because the thrill of it outweighed the risk. Was he a predator? Were these consensual? Me Too demands we do not ask.
Most of the victims tell the same story we heard hundreds, if not thousands, of times in the old days of Me Too. How a hungry young woman looking for employment opportunities is lured into a trap, only to have their friendly conversation devolve into a cheap proposition for sex. The woman is always portrayed as a non-consenting partner, someone who didn’t flirt back in any way, and was just suddenly hit with an offensive image.
That’s always been the biggest problem with the Me Too movement. It is held in the court of public opinion, and those accused have no way to defend themselves. Because both sides - Left and Right - are invested in Swalwell taking a fall, no one really bothers with the specifics. He did it, that’s all.
Why, for instance, did one of the victims claim Swalwell assaulted her in 2019, only to go back and get drunk with him in 2024 and claim the same thing happened again? Is that assault, or is that bad choices? Doesn’t matter, don’t ask.
I’m not defending Eric Swalwell. I feel about him the way Matt Taibbi does when he writes:
I can’t stand Eric Swalwell. A leading torchbearer in Russiagate lore, he’s always carried himself with an air of oozy self-satisfaction unusual even in a politician. I remember wondering if Swalwell was Latin for “Stubble Lizard.”
But the Democrats have managed to do the impossible. They’ve made me almost pity the guy. He thought he was doing everything right. He told all the lies they told him to tell. He helped build the very machine that would later devour him. But something about this hit feels too orchestrated and perhaps sets a dangerous precedent. Even guys like Swalwell deserve the benefit of the doubt, even if he never offered it to Trump.
Swalwell almost committed the perfect crime. He painted himself as an advocate for women, all the while allegedly going through them like a box of See’s Candies. If it’s true that he drugged and raped women, lock him up, lock him up. But if all of this was over consensual flirting, regrettable sex, and mutual Spapchats, then he’s the dumbest man on the planet.
Swalwell is finally learning who the Democrats really are and that life comes at you fast. Unfortunately for him, he wasn’t squeaky clean enough, or well-behaved enough, or smart enough to keep it in his pants. He should never have tried to fly that high, at least not with so much baggage weighing him down.

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—Jacob Siegel, the Information State, excerpts from audiobook, which can be found here.
Totalitarianism came to America slowly at first and then all at once. It began as a utopia, one I helped build. It seemed like a perfect new America and gave all of us godless creatures, who’d been chewed up and spit out by the Boomers’ counterculture revolution, a collective sense of purpose. It was all going so great until it wasn’t.
A Virtual Utopia
I got online 30 years ago. I never planned on living half of my life on the internet. It just turned out that way. I had motive, means, and opportunity to kill off my real-life self and be reborn in the virtual world. Why wouldn’t I escape a life that had become a full-spectrum failure at everything I tried to do? A relationship that blew up when the man I thought loved me went back to his wife, the Graduate Film Program at Columbia I’d targeted as my life’s dream ended in one semester as I chased that loser guy back to LA.
There are things about that moment that are too painful to write about, at least for now, but I will someday. The result was me staring at the wall with nothing achieved and nowhere to go. I had just turned 30.
The internet allowed me to remake myself as someone else. I could be strong. I could be confident. I could be beautiful because who knew what you looked like? I could just use words, and I was good at words. So I dove into a life online full of excitement and wonder, a dreamscape of endless possibilities. There was no Amazon, no eBay, no Google. There was barely a web browser.
I fell in love with an Italian I met online and came back from Italy pregnant. He didn’t want to be a father, but I wanted to be a mother, so I had my baby, and then I built a website so I could stay home with her and support us.
I was the success story for every progressive female: a single mom and a business owner. A daughter of feminism en route to helping launch the Great Feminization and the Great Awokening.
I was in Italy when I sent my first Tweet from my Treo. When Barack Obama signed on, I followed him, and he followed me. Then I became part of his army of clicktivists, shaping the new rules and building our desired narratives. We felt omnipotent.
This was the internet, after all, and you could be anything you wanted to be - an activist for moral good? Check. An outspoken exhibitist? Check. West Wing-like politicos acting like experts in politics? Check. Remaking a new America one social media post at a time? Check. Virtue signaling with images blasted out to followers displaying our goodness? Check.
For all the ways we used the internet, it shouldn’t be that surprising that we built a virtual America - a fantasy utopia - that we forgot wasn’t real. We were riding high with our media stars like Jon Stewart and Rachel Maddow. We were the new, the progressive, the forward thinkers, the early adopters. We colonized the internet in our image.
Utopias only have two paths forward. They either collapse or they must become more totalitarian out of necessity, to quote Milan Kundera in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.
Our utopia was opt-in at first, and who wouldn’t want to be a part of it? For a time, it felt like the best thing ever, all of our problems solved. It was everything, everywhere, all at once. A “whole of society” effort. It was # OscarsSoWhite. It was Critical Race Theory. It was every institution, corporation, legacy media outlet, and movie studio.
But it was also dull. Movies became infused with dogma. The rules became stifling. Sooner or later, people like me were going to shake the tree.
Says Siegel:
Maintaining utopia, let alone defining it, meant that there would eventually be people like me who asked too many questions, who would be hurled before the almighty panopticon — an army of puritanical scolds policing thought and speech — and eventually destroyed and purged as the mob cheered.
The Breakdown
I’d been a good liberal, a loyal and devoted Democrat all of my adult life. I’d never thought about conspiracy theories. I didn’t really challenge the system. I never doubted the intent of our government.
I was all in for Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden. I was so loyal a supporter that I was invited to an early Biden fundraiser in May of 2019. I watched him speak with tears in my eyes. He will save us, I thought.
One year later, however, COVID hit. My daughter had to leave her senior year of college and have her graduation on my balcony. We were sewing our own masks and making our own hand sanitizer. It was a whole-of-society effort to deal with this once-in-a-generation pandemic.
But by the end of May, the George Floyd video whipped around the world, and before long, the whole of society's effort had to shift to racial injustice as millions poured into the streets.
What I saw unfold that year, the lies that were told, the gaslighting, the lurching from one narrative to the other, and all of the obedient robots going along with it, in full mass formation, was too much, even for me. We watched them lie - the experts, the journalists, the celebrities, the Democrats.
I kept trying to scream from the rooftops that we would lose the 2020 election if the violent protests didn’t stop. What I didn’t know, what I would find out by the end of the election, was that it didn’t matter. They would bend the media narrative to pretend there were no violent protests. It all worked cleanly and smoothly. No one was even allowed to question it.
Trump was campaigning hard, doing multiple rallies a day, and it seemed to me he was making headway and changing minds. We know this because he won Florida, Ohio, and Iowa. Only once in history has anyone won those three states and still lost: The 1960 election.
The difference in votes between Kennedy and Nixon proves how close the election was. But it never made sense to me that Biden would win by such a large margin and also lose Ohio, Iowa, and Florida. Unless, of course, they’d built a system that was too big to fail and had collected enough ballots long before Election Day.
The FBI, still working under Trump, had helped the Democrats by suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop via social media. COVID gave Biden the excuse to hide in the basement and not campaign. A “whole of society” effort to purge a once-in-a-generation threat seemed to justify everything they did, as we know from the confession in TIME Magazine. Our elections, it seemed, were too risky to leave up to the people.
This system, this utopia we built, believed itself to be more powerful than our democracy, more powerful than our elections. I couldn’t go along with that, just as I couldn’t go along with everything that came after, as our utopia devolved into a totalitarian dystopia.
The Information State
Sometimes, during those dark nights of the soul, I wonder, did I do the right thing? Did what I thought happened really happen? No one in the mainstream media or culture has ever acknowledged any of it. They don’t want to admit it or talk about it. Their war on Trump simply rages on, and they hope all of us will one day get with the program.
But for me, there is still that untold story, a story I need to be told so that everyone on the Left - my friends and family and all of Hollywood and much of our legacy media understands what happened in the last ten years. Why are we living like this, with one half of the country marching by the millions to protest a president who defeated them not once but twice? Their hatred and shunning of half the country is still justified and accepted. Why?
Now, thanks to Jacob Siegel, we don’t have to wonder. He’s written it all down, the whole ugly tale, in this essential text, The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control. There is nothing they can do about it now. It will set the record straight, at long last.
The Information State starts with Woodrow Wilson’s Great War crackdown on speech, and moves through World War II, Harry Truman and the Cold War, up to 9/11 and the expansion of the surveillance state. But it was the Obama administration that took it much further, beyond mere surveillance. He used information to change hearts and minds and to create a utopian society, not unlike those of the Soviet Union or China.
As Siegel writes:
How the protests and riots over the Summer in 2020, versus those on January 6th, were treated so differently by our government remains one of the clearest examples of the kind of two-tiered society we were living under before Elon Musk bought Twitter and Donald Trump won again.
The BLM riots attacked working-class people, so they didn’t matter, but January 6th attacked the powerful, and that, to them, meant war.
Siegel writes:
“Truth Held Forth and Maintained.”
The scandal of how 20 people were hanged as witches in Salem would have been long forgotten, were it not for a cantankerous Quaker named Thomas Maule, who made the brave choice to expose the scandal in a pamphlet he called Truth Held Forth and Maintained.
In cool and cutting sarcasm, he wrote that God would condemn the witch trial judges. He famously stated, “[F]or it were better that one hundred Witches should live, than that one person be put to death for a Witch, which is not a Witch.”
Maule’s pamphlet was banned, and he was thrown in jail for “blasphemy and slander.” He would eventually get a trial, and the jury, exhausted and demoralized by the events of that winter, ruled in his favor, handing him a landmark win that would be among the cases that inspired the First Amendment.
Jacob Siegel won’t be jailed for blasphemy. Those named in the book will either ignore it outright or attempt to discredit it. As of today, there are no reviews in the New York Times or the Washington Post.
As if out of a chapter in his own book, Renée DiResta objected to how she was portrayed and wrote a letter of complaint to the website Baffler, which then pulled the review. Siegel and DiResta publicly debated whether it counted as censorship. But who needs censorship when you have total societal control? At least among the university-educated ruling class.
DiResta’s bio on Twitter reads:
DiResta and the machine she works for have rigged the game in their favor. No major media outlets will ever call them out. Hollywood won’t write any controversial screenplays about them. Late night comediens will never mock them, and they will always be treated gently, with soft cotton gloves, lest anyone leave a mark.
Into the Unknown
Jacob Siegel’s The Information State does not paint an optimistic vision for the future. It ends with a question mark. Who will control this vast leviathan of data and human behavior, that now includes unstoppable AI? And how will we survive it?
What will these same people who took complete control of society, of thought and speech, do if they take back power? I think we can probably guess. If they’ve never admitted it, never atoned for any of it, then we can expect it will come roaring back, and this time, they won’t bother trying to hide it.
My advice? Log off. Migrate back to the real world. Look at the sky at twilight. Dig your toes into the sand. Build a fire in the woods. Look people in the eye. Attend a poetry reading. Go to a coffee shop. Meet people in the real world and leave the internet and the Information State far behind.
It’s probably too late for me. I’m a lifer. I know that. But I’m also a cautionary tale. This is what happens when you spend 30 years of your life in the virtual world. But if I can find my way out, then anyone can.

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Imagine being an Iranian right now, especially an Iranian woman, as hundreds of thousands of American women gather to exercise their freedom in a free country, people like Jane Fonda who have everything and yet are still out there bleating about fascism and oppression.
Imagine protesting something that doesn’t exist: a king in America. Protesting the very same democracy that put said “king” in power. Yes, that’s what democracy looks like. Sometimes it doesn’t go your way.
Imagine being in Iran, knowing how many brave citizens attempted to protest their government, only to be mowed down just for standing there, seeing all of these idiots in America marching in their No Kings parade. It would be like someone dying of hunger watching the line form at the Golden Coral all-you-can-eat buffet.
Even NPR covered the women protesting in Iran back in January:
And now:
They have no shame, these people. They throw their public temper tantrums, holding their dumb signs that say things like “fascism” and “dictators” and “No Kings,” serving only to project to the rest of the world how delusional and cut off from reality they have become. And we’re supposed to put these people — this cult — back in power?
Imagine being anyone in Venezuela and watching this grotesque spectacle play out. Imagine what it must feel like in Iran as they hope and pray that Trump is successful in castrating their dictatorial, oppressive regime, and to see so many Americans rooting for his failure, protesting a war alongside the Houthis. That is how desperate they are now to win their war on Trump.
I mean, you couldn’t make this up if you tried. The headline says it all: “Houthis enter Middle East war | Millions join anti-Trump protests worldwide.”
The Houthis mantra: “God is the Greatest, Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse the Jews, Victory to Islam.”
Please let this be the moment the entire world sees them for what they really are, pampered, entitled, privileged aristocrats who wouldn’t know real problems if they shot them in the face for not wearing a mandatory hijab - oh, I know, hijabs are cool now, so why don’t you, Jane Fonda, put one on and move to Iran?
Their protest might be seen as a “show of force,” and it’s true that they are a united, conformist, obedient cult, and sure, it will help them motivate their base to turn out and vote in the midterms, but all it really is, Jane Fonda, Bruce Springsteen, Robert De Niro, is a well-funded temper tantrum.
We’re MAD because you wouldn’t all just go along with Kamala being installed after we coup’d out Joe Biden!We’re MAD because Barack Obama isn’t in power anymore, and our empire is collapsing.We’re MAD, and we can’t self-improve, yoga, meditate, or buy our way out of it. We’re MAD because our world is not pristine, harmonious, and sustainable because we LOST not once but twice to Trump!
Maybe at any other time, we could laugh at their dumb No Kings protest, but it’s hard when our country is at war with a real dictatorship to watch these spoiled brats show the rest of the world how stupid Americans really are.
At least on the Right, they’re consistent. They’re America First, anti-war, and uncomfortable with the US and its relationship with Israel. They’ve made that clear, even if I think most of them are still useful idiots for Russia, Iran, and China. But on the Left? The side that supposedly cares about human rights and women’s rights, especially? What’s their excuse?
The truth is that they have been conditioned over almost 20 years to repeat the mantras fed to them by the media and social media, handed down by politicians. They don’t even know what is true anymore, much less the meaning of words.
What is a dictator? Trump.What is a fascist? Trump.What is oppression? Trump.
These people have no idea what oppression means. To Robert De Niro, it’s getting a bad seat at a restaurant. To Jane Fonda, it’s the wrinkles on her face that show her age. To Bruce Springsteen, it’s losing his power to influence voters away from Trump one Born in the USA at a time. Boo hoo. Cry me a river.
There was always an easier way to remove Trump from office. All they ever had to do was offer the people something better, and they couldn’t even do that. They’ve never admitted failure. They’ve just decided to make everyone miserable until we finally relent and vote them back into office.
Oh, how I wish we had good writers who could point out the absurdity of a would-be king trying to liberate a country from a dictatorship as his own citizens march in the streets, free as can be, demanding he be removed from power.
Who will shame them? Not I, said the legacy media. Not I, said SNL, John Oliver, Stephen Colbert, or Jimmy Kimmel.
Here are some hard truths from TikTok:
Freedom over Fascism
In my very affluent, very white, very liberal town, they shamelessly virtue signal:
Freedom over fascism as Iranians huddle in their homes begging for our “fascist” to set them free? Freedom over fascism when you shun and destroy anyone who doesn’t vote your way or doesn’t agree with your politics. Freedom over fascism when you try to install a leader without a single vote?
Freedom over fascism when you have the luxury of three No Kings protests, when you have all the freedom in the world, and yet, you’re so intolerable you couldn’t even beat Trump a second time.
And if that weren’t enough, this same person displays this sign:
Everyone except anyone who doesn’t agree with them or go along with their mass delusion that they’re oppressed. I can’t imagine what anyone living in Iran right now would think of these signs as they hope and pray for liberation.
As with Venezuela, it’s hard for me not to root for Trump to defeat these monsters, whether it’s right or wrong. I can’t imagine heading into battle with so many Americans on the other side and wishcasting failure.
I hope for no casualties. No one should have to fight and die in any war, but I won’t go along with the lie that this is not a worthy cause. It is.
Would I understand if Trump did what every other president has done (nothing)? Of course. That’s what his base would want him to do. But Trump is a Gray Champion of the Fourth Turning. He moves to the beat of his own drum.
True, it might go badly for Trump. True, the American people might not want the war. Maybe they want Trump to cut and run and tend to America’s interests. I get all that.
The last thing I would ever do, however, is turn my back on the president or the troops right now. All I can do, and all any American should do, is first do no harm and second, hope for the best.
Godspeed, Team USA.



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I stood in the corner of our tiny shack atop a mountain in Topanga and waited for my brother to come home. He would be there any minute and would see his beloved black lab mix, Cinder, dead under a sheet in the front yard.
We’d been out riding that afternoon. My mom was on our quarterhorse Teddybear. My younger sister and I rode the twin stallion ponies, Pumpkin (mine) and Fireball (hers).
It was summer. We were riding to Topanga Elementary to play in an empty schoolyard. Cinder came along. It was always hot, but that day, it was baking, and we were not prepared. All of a sudden, Cinder collapsed. My mother, in a panic, ordered my sister and me to ride our ponies to the school and bring back water.
Maybe we could save her, we thought. When we finally got to the school, we scoured the trash cans and found empty milk cartons. We rinsed them, filled them, then galloped back, Pony Express-style, to where my mom was waiting. But it was too late. Cinder was gone.
I don’t remember much else about that day, except what happened to my brother later, when he came home. I’d never seen my tough, strong older brother cry. That was my first lesson in the unique grief of losing a dog.
They call them “soul dogs” or “heart dogs” on Reddit. It’s that connection you have with a special dog that will never be matched by any other. I have always hated how the internet flattens things into group ideas, but in this case, they were right. I had to let go of my soul dog, Jack, and I’ll never be the same.
Mind you, I didn’t want to. I rationalized it many times. I even almost took him to the hospital and asked them to cut him open, remove the large cancerous mass inside of him, give him kidney dialysis, and chemo. Something, anything to keep him alive. Needles, hospital room, strangers, bright lights. That would not have been for Jack. That was for me. I couldn’t do that to him.
People have said, “You gave him such a happy life,” and I tried. But how do you measure the happiness of a dog? To me, Jack wanted more than anything to be free. Free of the leash. Free of doing only what I wanted him to do. Free to have maybe found a mate one time instead of having that possibility taken off the table. Free to roam, most of all, through the hills and the fields.
I could not give that to him. The best I could do was make a situation for a dog with the urge to roam slightly less terrible. Oh, I suppose I could have never gotten him in the first place, waited for the ideal owner, like a rancher to pick him up.
I don’t know if I was Jack’s ideal owner or not. I just know that he was my soul dog, for better or worse.
You don’t choose dogs. They choose you.
I’d pulled into a gas station near the Four Corners of Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico en route to the Telluride Film Festival in 2014 when I looked down, and there was a furry little wolfen creature, redheaded, with bright green eyes staring up at me, and was that a smile?
He already knew how to ask for food, and I was happy to oblige. Only I didn’t want to just feed the dog. I wanted to rescue him. I don’t know why, exactly. It felt like a calling. He was redheaded, like my pony Pumpkin. He had green eyes like mine. But it was his sweet disposition that meant it was love at first sight, even if I didn’t know it yet.
I told my daughter and her friend, both named Emma, to go get some dog food because we were taking this dog. When I turned around, he had crawled away and hidden under a trailer, but a woman pulled him out and handed him to me.
That sealed Jack’s fate, to be rescued by city girls. Jack wasn’t going to be my dog at first. My daughter’s friend wanted him, but her parents said no. That night, as the girls hung out in their basement room and I was cooking a roast chicken, I heard little feet tap-tap-tapping up the stairs, and there he was again, smiling up at me, wanting food. Okay, little pup, I thought, I guess I’m a dog person now.
“Don’t take him if you can’t keep him,” my younger sister warned. I knew what she meant. She’d thought I’d abandon Jack if some guy wanted me to, as I’d done once before when I was too stupid to know better. The dog went to my mom, who doted on her, but still. It sent the message that I couldn’t be trusted with a dog.
We had three cats already, but dogs weren’t allowed in our apartment in North Hollywood. When they found out, I was ordered to get rid of Jack. So we split to Burbank. I also broke up with a boyfriend over my dog. Sorry, I made my choice, and there was no going back
Four years later, we finally adopted a friend for him because he hated being alone, and my daughter Emma was leaving for college. We had a hard time choosing and were about to leave the shelter when a volunteer came out, holding a tiny, terrified terrier-poodle mix. She’d been there two weeks, and no one wanted her. How could we say no? It felt like another kind of calling.
Her name was Pippa, but we changed it to Luna, and though she looks desperately sad in that photo, she bloomed, and Jack and Luna became a happy, bonded pair, and the three of us were inseparable until the day Jack died. Thursday, March 19, 2026.
But that’s not to say Jack was easy. He wasn’t. I didn’t train him properly because I never wanted to change his personality. I didn’t want an obedient dog. I wanted this dog. But that meant he could be quite obstinate when he wanted to go in a different direction from me. It got worse as he got older, when he became a grumpy old dog. He would pull just to pull, and much of the time I’d give in, except when I couldn’t, and sometimes I couldn’t.
He also could not eat his food in a bowl like other dogs. It had to be on a flat surface, and he would scatter the kibble all across the floor before lying down to eat it. Yes, I spoiled him, and responsible dog owners would not approve.
It could have been worse. He could be a growler or a biter, but this dog did not have an aggressive bone in his body. He was sweet and gentle, the nicest dog I’ve ever met. He made friends with everyone, dogs, cats, and people.
I don’t think it really occurred to him what his life would be like until he got older. But I think once he figured it out that this was really it, a life on a leash, walking through neighborhoods, occasionally running free, I think he got grumpier, more obstinate, and he pulled on his leash harder, and it became a battle of wills.
Sometimes I was angry and annoyed at him. Now those moments come flooding back with an enormous sense of guilt. How could I have ever thought of being annoyed at him for even one second?
Maybe I’m projecting. Maybe he never figured it out. Maybe he never thought about it. He just knew he was frustrated with how much pain he was in and with how limited his life had become, and there was nothing I could do to change that for him or fix it.
I always wished he could speak. I always wanted to talk to him, “Remember when I found you at the Four Corners? Remember how much you loved running in the sand at the beach? Remember rolling in the snow? Remember the motels and the road trips? Remember how you liked to chase the ball? Remember driving into a blizzard? Remember getting stranded in the sand after I took a wrong turn and how we had to be towed out?
Remember how you would wimper when we drove to the airport to pick up my daughter Emma because you were so happy to see her? Remember how you herded us and we all had to leave the apartment at the same time, or you would keep looking for the one that was missing.
Remember all the friends you made in every neighborhood we lived in? Remember the horse we used to feed that wanted to be friends with you because everyone wanted to be friends with you.
Where would you like to go today? The park? The field? The hills? And I know what his answer would be. He would wag his tail and be ready to go. When he could no longer jump into the car, I got him stairs. When the stairs became too hard, I got him a ramp.
Where does it hurt, Jack? Tell me where the pain is. Tell me where to check. Tell me when you need to go to the vet. Talk to me. But all he could do was signal to me with his body, his behavior, and his eyes, and I was not paying close enough attention. There’s the guilt again. Could I have helped him if we’d caught it sooner? I don’t know.
Our long walks through town and our hikes began to slow down last year, and he could only make it around the block. Then, just this past week, he could barely make it down the street, and then, barely from the car to the front door.
It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do, making the call to end his life. It was time for him to go, and I knew I had to grim up and face the music. He’d gone off his food for two weeks. He threw up even baby food, and then he couldn’t keep down water. He could barely breathe.
I would hear him wretching in the middle of the night and find him stuck under the table, his body completely cold, and I kept thinking any minute he would take his last breath, but he somehow held on.
Jack turned into a different dog in the last moments of his life, and for some reason, this breaks my heart the most. Gone was the willful, obstinate, slightly annoying dog who sometimes made our daily walks frustrating. In his weakened state, he went wherever I wanted him to go. He came when I called him.
Every night, almost, he disappeared into the back yard because he knew he was dying. And every night I went outside with a flashlight to call him back in, and he would come, just like a normal dog. He was doing it for me, I realize now, even at his own expense.
Everywhere I look, there is Jack. The green grass that I know he would want to roll in. The rib bones, I know, he would want to chew. The drives I know he would want to take. The dog beds I bought that still sit untouched in a pile on the patio. And the gravel that he could never pass without lying down in.
This is grief. This is what it means to lose a soul dog. I know I loved him too much. I was prepared for almost everything except saying goodbye. I want to tell you everything about him, to remember everywhere we went and every cute thing he ever did, like how, when he signaled to me that he couldn’t get off the couch to get a drink of water, I would lift the bowl for him. When the droplets hit his paw, he had to gently clean them off. I don’t know why, but that one thing he’s always done crushes my heart.
I can’t possibly tell you of our adventures together, how close we were, and how hard it is now for Luna to walk alone. She lies down near Jack’s spot because she still senses his presence, as do I. I keep smelling his fur, which might sound weird, but I loved how Jack smelled. It was like the smell of a baby. You recognize it.
I did not want to let him go. I wanted to be selfish and keep him around until he died on his own, but my younger sister, who once warned me not to take him if I could not keep him, told me that he’s shown up for me, and now it’s time for me to show up for him.
Holding him, petting him, brushing him because I’d been doing that every day for a week, and then saying goodbye to him as the poison was injected into his beautiful, tiny, spotted paw, then waiting for his heart to stop felt like falling into a deep well - into a world without color, without joy. My soul dog was my constant companion for 12 too-short years. Now I try to see his soul - which was never mine - as finally free.
I still think I hear him, especially at night. I hear his panting or his breathing, how he would sigh, letting out all his air, before he settled in to sleep. I would hear him pacing and circling before he lay down. I always knew where he was. And he was never far.
I pray that he visits me in my dreams. I pray that he’s the first thing I see when I get to Heaven.
Run, my beautiful dog, my precious heart, my Happy Jack, my Buddy. Be obstinate and annoying. Be your perfect, wonderful self because now you are finally free.

//


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I didn’t use to be a Trump voter, much less a Trump supporter. I can’t say I’m hard-core MAGA or what they call a “Triple Trump voter.” But as I’ve watched him over the past six years, my support for him has only grown. I could lie and pretend it hasn’t, maybe save myself the tiny bit of credibility I still have left, but that would not be the truth.
As I watch Trump deflect attacks from both the Left and the Right over the war with Iran and various other things, I still see the Gray Champion of the Fourth Turning — The one guy who has the right stuff to stand in the breach and do the right thing, even if it’s not the popular thing.
Whatever it is in Trump that guides him, some will say God, some will say a gut instinct, it gives him the necessary focus to blur out the distractions and the noise, take aim, and hit the bullseye.
No president has ever faced the kind of opposition Trump has, not just from the world, but from the establishment in the United States, most especially the Democrats. Even now, they have no plan for any of us, no vision for the future. They only have their hatred of and their attacks on Trump and his MAGA base.
What they want is for people like me to disappear, or else decide that all of their attacks on Trump have been justified. I was a fool, they want me to say, and I regret my vote. Except that I don’t.
They want X to reflect real life, with all of these influencers and podcasters studiously dropping their support and regretting their vote, “I’m done with Trump,” they insist.
But X isn’t real. It’s avatar life. Whatever is happening there, it’s the result of algorithms and engagement by people who spend way too much time doomscrolling and getting caught up in mass hysteria. Most people aren’t that plugged in. They’re just living their lives.
I didn’t just vote for Trump to stop the Left from overtaking this country and leading us into their dystopian, 1984-like future, but that would be reason enough.
No, I have come to genuinely admire Trump, flaws and all. I am sickened by the snooty Left and how they turned their noses up at Trump and his supporters when he tried to revamp the Kennedy Center. I vomited a little in my mouth when I saw Ben Stiller demand that Trump remove Tropic Thunder from a meme.
Every time the elite gather and trash Trump, as they did at Jesse Jackson’s funeral, much to the horror of his own son, I see our potential future, which is really our past, a past we desperately need to leave behind.
This is not their country. It never was. This country belongs to all of us.
The Gray Champion
Nine years ago, one of the authors of The Fourth Turning, Neil Howe, was asked if Trump was the Gray Champion. He didn’t know because it was too early to say. This was before 2020 and before January 6th, way before Trump’s second win in 2024.
The key point he makes, though, is that a Gray Champion is full of ego and has an idea that if he breaks it or if he fixes it, he’ll be okay. It’s that combination of self-confidence, certainty, and recklessness to do what almost no one else would do that defines the one man who can stand up to not just the forces that oppose him but his own peers.
It is the willingness to take big risks that, I think, makes a Gray Champion. Who else would even dare try? That makes them hated in their time, but history remembers them well.
Lincoln was the target of assassination plots and was eventually assassinated.
Winston Churchill was blamed for military failures during World War II:
And Roosevelt was a target too:
The bombing and neutralization of Iran is very Gray Champion-like, as is much of what Trump has already done both in the US and abroad in his second term. He is moving fast and perhaps breaking things to make his short time back in office matter.
He also knows that if the US abandoned support for Israel now, Iran got a nuke, they would not hesitate to wipe Israel off the map, and though many on the MAGA Right would cheer that decision, it would be a disaster for the world. The allies would have no choice but to go to war with Iran anyway. Pay now or pay later.
As with other Gray Champions of the past, Trump will have to take the bad with the good. The bombing of a school killing over 100 girls on the first day of the war — probably due to outdated intel — will have to be part of his legacy, no matter the outcome, which is still under investigation, but it looks like the US did it.
This will put Trump in the Democrats' crosshairs should they take back power in 2026 or 2028. They might impeach him again or put him on trial for war crimes. The bombing of the school, along with the killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good, will be amplified by the establishment media, and whatever Trump’s successes will be won’t matter.
I understand this war from a strategic perspective, to end a threat to both America and Israel, one of the three world powers that could be fighting us in a world war, along with Russia and China. That wasn’t the case with the Ukraine war. That, to me, had nothing to do with the United States. But this war does.
But I also can’t cry about obliterating a regime that was that oppressive with its people, not that it’s our job to liberate them. As with Venezuela, it’s hard not to feel some American pride that our president did what no one else had the courage to do.
So yes, those girls died tragically, but hopefully, future daughters of Iran will not have to live under the kind of oppressive tyranny the Democrats pretend they’ve been living under for the last ten years.
This was something all of us on the Left used to understand, which is why Hollywood made Not Without My Daughter in the 1980s, a true story about an American mother fleeing Iran to ensure her daughter lived free in America.
And the end of the movie, the most miraculous sight of all, an American flag:
In case you’re wondering why Trump is in power now and why he’s the Gray Champion, that’s why. There was once an America that looked at the flag and saw freedom and safety. That is now threatened by a massive alignment of power that has decided to change everything about this country and transform it into a fundamentalist cult.
There is no such thing as a moderate Democrat
Okay, maybe John Fetterman counts. But, as we’ve now seen from the unearthed tweets by the Great White Hope in Texas, the crazy is baked in. It is more than just a fad or trend. While it’s true that “dark woke” seeks to break their rules of behavior, it’s also true that their newfound religion is unshakable.
The Democrats are counting on winning elections without changing anything about their party. Trump hate sells, and they can’t pivot away from it even if they wanted to.
To fix a problem, you have to first name it, and in ten years, the Democrats never have. They’ve left people like me with no choice but to walk away. Even though poll after poll tells them how unpopular they are, even though the box office is now a ghost town, and you almost can’t pay people to watch movies or television shows, or cable or network news, they still seem to believe they are superior to the other half of the country and that all of America wants them back. They don’t.
There are plenty on the MAGA Right, at least online, who see this as their moment to pull away from Trump and forge a new path toward an America First utopia of their own making. Count me out. I know what is waiting on the other side if they hand power back to the Left.
In the Melania documentary that just dropped on Amazon, there is a great shot of a massive, gleaming luxury car, The Beast, and on its license plate it reads 45-47. It is as spectacular and hilariously funny as Trump himself. Who else but a Gray Champion would even try to run again, much less actually win?
The critics’ spiteful, negative reviews of Melania, compared to the audience reviews, say it all.
I still remember another quote from a guy in East Palestine, Ohio, who called Trump, “a Man of the people” when he pulled up in his motorcade to visit them. The Democrats should spend every day for the rest of their lives pondering why.
Trump supporters are not in a cult. They see in Trump a flawed hero. They also know he is spending what’s left of his life trying to make America Great Again. His supporters believe in him, and the ride or die ones will stick it out to the bitter end.
They waited in the freezing rain, in the suffocating heat of Summer, through assassinations and celebrations. Always, Trump is there with a smile and a thumbs up, the only guy who saw them at all, let alone represented them in the country they love.
I might not have been there from the beginning, but as a discarded outsider, I have more in common with Donald Trump than just about any Democrat. I wish for his survival and that his last years will be spent playing golf at Mar-a-Lago and that history will remember him well.
So you won’t find me regretting my vote or wishing for a different leader. I’ll take the guy who can get the dirty job done. I don’t want a United States that is like Europe. I’ll take an America that is like its current president, a chaotic work in progress that always lands on its feet.
Godspeed Trump and MAGA. Godspeed.


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