Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone

Sasha Stone
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Essays on politics and culture from Sasha Stone's Substack. A former Democrat and Leftist who escaped the bubble to get to know the other side of the country and to take a more critical look at the left. Sashastone.substack.com www.sashastone.com

  1. 1D AGO

    NYT's Big Lie: A "Woman" Did Not Commit Mass Murder in Canada

    In 1984, George Orwell wrote, “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.” The New York Times is no longer free to say what is true. They are compelled to lie either by their newfound fundamentalism, fear of their readers and subscribers, or pressure from the strident activists who police thought and speech in our New Woke Order. We can’t let them get away with it. Not this time. The Suspect It looks like a real headline - a search for the truth. So far, so good. But a few paragraphs in, and it’s clear that the New York Times has crossed the Rubicon: On Tuesday afternoon, Jesse Van Rootselaar, 18, grabbed two firearms from her home and, the authorities in British Columbia said, killed her mother and 11-year-old brother. Then she traveled a mile to the Tumbler Ridge Secondary School and killed five students and one educator before turning her weapon on herself. The mass shooting, which also left two children injured with gunshot wounds, has sent shock waves across Canada, where such violence is rare, and has devastated the small rural community of 2,400 people. Her home? She traveled? Before turning her weapon on herself? Was the shooter a woman? If so, wouldn’t that be the lead? After all, it’s rare for any woman to be pulled into violence online, let alone go on a shooting spree. Sure, there was Audrey Hale out in Tennessee, but according to the Times, she wasn’t even a SHE. Back in 2023, they awkwardly opted out of using any pronoun to describe Hale, adding this to their story: But by 2025, when Hale was no longer the only one, they made the decision to use preferred pronouns, yes, even in the wake of a horrific shooting like the one in Minneapolis that, as with Audrey Hale, massacred children. Using that logic, we’d have no choice but to conclude that two women had committed these acts of violence in Minneapolis and now, in Canada, while one male went on a shooting spree in Tennessee. Make it make sense, New York Times. What we’re really talking about here is three transgender shooters who targeted children. Robin Westman himself was obsessed with them: If the latest school shooter in Tumblr Ridge targeted and killed children and was also transgender, you’d think that there might be something, anything that the Times could offer its readers instead of lying that the shooter was female. No, the shooter was male. And it matters. The truth matters. Biological reality matters especially when we’re talking about criminal profiling. It wasn’t just the New York Times, either, though they set the standard. It was CNN, too. The suspect in Canada’s Tumbler Ridge mass shooting posted about guns and hunting on her YouTube channel and appeared to have written about her struggles with mental health online, according to social media posts. And the AP: “Cis White Men” No More These white male shooters are given an extra layer of protection just by declaring themselves trans. The formerly hated “cis white males” are magically transformed into women and become the center of attention, treated with sympathy, and are, above all, forgiven almost everything. Look no further than the New York Times to see how they’ve decided that the only demographic to fear is white men. If any shooter who hailed from the Right went on a rampage and killed kids, it would be the biggest story in the world for weeks, if not months. Everyone would have a convenient receptacle for their rage. Ah, but here, with their most protected, elevated, marginalized group responsible, they must divert that empathy and call a mass murderer a “she.” Then bend over backwards to ensure no one demonizes this specific group, even if an obvious pattern is emerging, as the Times writes: In the aftermath of the shooting, there has also been a focus on Ms. Van Rootselaar’s gender identity, at a time when transgender issues have become a socially polarizing force. In a handful of high-profile shootings in the United States in recent years, the perpetrator has been wrongly identified as transgender on message boards and social media, including in the assassination last year of Charlie Kirk. Fewer than 1 in 1,000 mass shooters over the past decade have been identified as transgender, according to the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit research group that tracks gun violence in the United States using police reports. The group defines a mass shooting as one in which four or more victims were shot or killed. Tyler Robinson might not have been transgender himself, but he fits the pattern regardless. He was, by all accounts, avenging the pain and suffering of his “trans-furry lover” and wanted to silence Charlie Kirk, who, he said, “spread too much hate,” and it could “not be negotiated down.” Even if this odd new type of killer does not represent real transgender people overall, it represents a new kind of influencer—a hybrid of social justice extremism, self-pity, and fringe losers who want Columbine-level fame. And online, they’re getting it. It’s not the job of the New York Times to police the Right. It’s not their job to do the bidding of Left-wing activists either. It’s their job to tell the truth, and in this story, they did not tell the truth about any of these three prominent cases of transgender shooters slaughtering children, choosing instead to use their preferred pronouns. Telling the truth is a dirty job, and it takes someone bold to get that job done. It takes someone like Bridget Phetasy, who does not hold back (full video here): Girl, Boy, Son, Daughter Imagine your child has just been shot by a psychotic madman, and in the wake of that murder, as you hold the limp body of your precious son or daughter, you have to then grapple with whether or not to misgender the shooter. That is the absurd reality of the times we’re now living through at the hands of the Left. When bodies are identified, we identify them by their biological sex and don’t ask anyone how they prefer to be addressed. So why would the New York Times and other outlets play this ugly game? Why? Using preferred pronouns out of politeness in certain situations is one thing. But using them to refer to extreme acts of violence? No. Say what is true. A man raped a woman. A man assaulted a woman. A man massacred children. Do not lie to us about something so important. If a woman did it, as with Audrey Hale, tell us that. We don’t care how she identifies. We care that her victims were children and that it was extremely rare for a woman to commit these crimes, unless, of course, you understand she was pretending to be a man, which itself is a story. Only a movement rooted deeply in narcissistic tendencies would divert empathy away from the murdered children to protect the sensitive feelings of transgender people. It is perhaps the height of irony that the Left has abandoned its protection of children entirely while chasing this fast-moving contagion. What has been done to children on their watch is horrific. They’ve had their breasts amputated. They’ve been castrated. They’ve been rendered broken and infertile, dealing with health complications for life. And all for what? Utopia? Does utopia also include covering up the crimes of vicious psychopaths on shooting sprees? Softening them with preferred pronouns to garner sympathy? Oh, New York Times, how the mighty have fallen. Your Lying Eyes Almost nothing we read or see online can be trusted. This image, for instance, has made the rounds but is not the Tumbler Ridge Shooter. And yet, when you head to Snopes to read up on it, this is the correction: On Feb. 10 2026, an 18-year-old Canadian woman shot and killed her mother and stepbrother at their home before heading to Tumbler Ridge Secondary School and killing at least six more as of Feb. 12, 2026, and injuring dozens of others. Of course, it’s wrong that this false image was splashed all over the internet and that this person, according to Snopes, is now afraid to go outside. But now we need a Snopes to correct Snopes and tell us the truth about the shooter’s gender. And besides, any child knows that’s not a woman in the photo, and any reasonable person knows the man who shot those kids in Canada is also not a woman, including the victims who survived and the parents. How long are we going to play this game? Is there any middle ground here? Is there any way to accept that there are transgender people and they should be treated with respect, while also understanding that there is no such thing as transgender people, not really, and that everyone is just kind of pretending? What divides America now, the war we seem to be fighting, is for reality itself. One side is devoted to the oppressor/oppressed mindset, which tells them that ICE is the Gestapo, Trump is Hitler, no humans are illegal on stolen land, and trans women are women. The other side believes in mass deportations, voter ID, and that there are only two sexes. Should we be that surprised that the Republicans took all three branches in 2024? There is such a thing as the truth. And the truth is most definitely not that a woman “traveled a mile to the Tumbler Ridge Secondary School and killed five students and one educator before turning her weapon on herself.” That is the side that is lying. Meet the new influencer: the violent warrior for social justice. To understand this phenomenon of the rise of the trans mass shooter who seeks to do maximum damage by killing children, we have to first travel back to 1999, after Columbine. It wasn’t just the shooting itself, but how it was covered. The 24-hour news cycle became popular after the OJ Simpson case, just before the rise of the internet and, with it, instant notoriety that could travel across the world in minutes. Mass shooters feel victimized by society and want to do maximum damage as a form of revenge. The worst of the worst was Ad

    32 min

  2. 5D AGO

    A Requiem for America This Week

    The novel for the week was Brave New World. Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn were preparing to lead us through it. It was more disturbing and more timely than 1984, another novel in the outsider book club that many of us had become part of over the last few years with two of the greatest teachers alive. How lucky we were, I always thought, every time they dug into a new book. Culture has dramatically changed. It has become exclusive rather than inclusive, despite how they would describe themselves. Matt and Walter, on America This Week, filled a deep, dark, and dry well for thirsty people in need of the kind of observations of human behavior, fearlessness, and wit we used to get from great writers of the past. You can partake of the culture now, but you have to be a true believer if you want in. You have to love Big Brother, or at least have learned how to keep silent enough that no one ever notices. Matt and Walter, two dissidents from the decaying dystopia our culture has become, were never going to play that game. They gave us so much just by taking us back to a time when writing was brilliant, and thinking was essential. I start with the books because that is what really made America This Week something unique and valuable, not just to people like me who found it so pleasurable just to listen to them talk about books, but to the broader culture, so in need of not just education but enlightenment. Two great writers, two great readers, two great thinkers - how did we ever have it so good? Both Walter and Matt had already been “canceled” by lesser beings who had no idea what kind of genius they’d given up. Or maybe they did know. Maybe they burned with jealousy that these two hadn’t sold themselves out for conformity or acceptance. Maybe they burned with jealousy because they were now trapped and silenced. Or maybe they just envied their talent. Either way, their loss was our gain, we outsiders who help build a “little gulag” on the other side of Eden, to quote Milan Kundera. Our little gulag was disrupted on Monday when Matt Taibbi appeared alone and, it must be said in the spirit of the truth, a little shaken. He made his way through the video to explain both why Racket Staff was now changing and why Walter suddenly vanished. We still don’t know all of the reasons. Maybe we never will. If there is one thing I know about Walter and Matt, despite their own protestations to the contrary, they are gentlemen. Neither would ever throw the other under the bus. Here is how Walter explained it: And of course, fans of the show were heartbroken: And angry: Still here we are, bereft in the middle of Brave New World. I waited before writing anything. I thought maybe this would fix itself. The Beatles will get back together, or the parents who are headed for divorce will reconcile. I thought maybe it’s like that scene in Spinal Tap after the dramatic breakup with Nigel Tufnel, where they perform their freeform jazz exploration, “We hope you like our new direction!” but that Nigel would be back before the movie was over. But I also know that it’s not easy being cast as a leader of a large audience that starts to feel like a movement. Maybe Matt felt confined or frustrated, and he stuck it out longer than he wanted to for his readers’ sake, until he finally had to do what he thought was right: become a news site again. They call it “audience capture,” and in a way, that’s right. Candace Owens is probably one of the best examples of how not being honest with your readers can take you down a dark road. If you want to keep the clicks and views coming, you must give your audience what they want. If you decide you can’t anymore, you risk what I did. Losing everything. If I suddenly decided that I loved the Democrats again and I hated Trump and MAGA, that would mean breaking an agreement with many of my readers and subscribers here, and that’s especially tricky if they’re paying subscribers. But if I felt that way, I would still take the leap and jump rather than lie to them. Some of us just can’t do the other thing, and I suspect both Walter and Matt are like that, too. But I also know life is change. People change. We evolve. I could feel Matt’s growing pains for a while now because his audience was built not just on his own reputation but on ours, the abandoned outsiders, many of them MAGA, looking for deeper understanding or validation from the unrelenting, biased legacy media. No, we’re not crazy because look, Matt Taibbi is writing something that makes it make sense, and suddenly, we can feel our feet on the ground. I felt so validated when Matt took up my story and wrote about how Hollywood discarded me for a joke on X and then decided I should be kicked out of utopia. It mattered that it was Matt Taibbi. They couldn’t ignore it. Because even though they’d canceled him in a way, they still paid attention to what he wrote about, and for whatever reason, it made a huge difference for me. They never leave him alone, in fact. They all feel so personally betrayed by him. He routinely beats back critics and trolls on the Left and Right on X, feeling betrayed for one reason or another, trying make him take a definitive side. Some in the comments of his last video for America This Week said they were “glad he was back” and “things were getting weird” with Walter. Those people make me sick. No offense, but you have to be dumb as a rock not to get the greatness of Walter Kirn. That alone explains why our culture collapsed. Too many stupid people are writing books and making movies. America This Week was the cure. It was reality. It was original thought. Walter has a deep empathy for the forgotten men and women in this country, whom the establishment discarded and then demonized. Not just on America This Week but throughout all of his work. He sees humanity in the macro-view. He also isn’t afraid to wonder, ask questions, and let his mind take him where it wants to go. I can’t imagine choosing to do without that. And for what, MS-Now? The New Yorker? No thanks. Without America This Week, our world just got a little smaller and a little darker. I used to say to myself, just hold a little longer. It’s almost Thursday, and that’s when they record their podcast, and it drops on Friday. And then it’s only the weekend, and they’re back on Monday. They weren’t the only great podcast out there. There are plenty of others. What made theirs different is that they’re novelists. They’re absurdist thinkers who see the times we’re living through as material, and thus, they are always just outside of it, not getting emotionally invested in any of it but trying to see how everything fits together and what it means. That is what we don’t get anywhere else. We also don’t get acceptance from the podcasts that call themselves heterodox but detest people who voted for Trump and thus, keep themselves within arm’s reach of paradise. I will continue to follow Matt and Walter wherever they land. Matt will still be writing at Racket, and he says he’ll be doing even more of it. Walter will be on X and on Walter Kirn, and he is still writing books and screenplays. I’m sure both will be doing interviews, and who knows, maybe podcasts. But America This Week, at least as of right now, is done. I will miss them. I hate saying goodbye. We all have things we hold onto, our touchstones, and America This Week was mine. All I can say to both of them is a line they will know: “So long, and thanks for all the fish.” You can find their wonderful podcasts over at Racket on the archive, but also on YouTube. Their live shows are on the “live” tab. // This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

    27 min

  3. FEB 8

    Why I Will Never Regret My Vote for Trump

    After Memegate went viral on Friday, the usual battle in our virtual Civil War raged on. I had this exchange on X and was answered by Conor Friedersdorf: To Trump’s enemies, this was yet another crisis not to go to waste. It was the perfect way to reel back some of those Nicki Minaj supporters who might be thinking about flipping to Trump. The midterms are coming up, and they’re desperately worried about losing votes of yet another necessary demographic. That’s all it’s been for ten years now, emotional blackmail to convince us that Trump really is that bad while offering nothing in return. They have addressed nothing. They have fixed nothing. They have offered only a fanatical cult and a rigid ideology of an oppressor/oppressed mindset, and then demanded everyone go along with it, or they’re racists, homophobes, bigots, Nazis. Here is a TikTocker: The Democrats and the ruling class that props up their collapsing empire are in a hell of their own making. They never addressed the people's needs after their 2016 loss because that would mean acknowledging their own failures. Instead, they made Trump the enemy and went to war, a war they’re losing. All they ever had to do was offer the people something better, but they couldn’t even do that because what they want is their utopia back, the one I helped build, and the one I escaped once it became a Doomsday Cult. Had they left him alone, just allowed his four years to play out like a normal president, as opposed to Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden attempting to frame him as a Russian asset, the Demcorats impeaching him, the legacy media and all of culture taking a side against him and his supporters, maybe he would have been a one-term president and gone back to a life of golfing at Mar-a-Lago. But instead, they whipped up a World War II fantasy in which they were “brave resistance” fighting an existential crisis that threatened to topple America and the world, with very little evidence to show for it, then or now. That made it oh so easy to blame Trump and not themselves. I look now at those still trapped inside the Doomsday Cult that I escaped, and I can’t believe the level of delusion. Look at this post by musician Jack White, which is liked by Jimmy Kimmel. So let me make it perfectly clear for those who might be wondering after the scandal du jour: I don’t regret my vote for Trump and I never will, because even now, the Left is worse. Their reaction is worse. They are never telling the truth, not to us, not to themselves. All they have to sell is hate and fear. They aren’t getting less crazy and more sane. They are not becoming kinder, more tolerant, and more forgiving. They still have no idea what democracy means - spoiler alert: you can’t always get what you want. They have never learned the lesson in ten years. They still believe that winning their war is forcing all of us to go along with their distorted version of reality. And add that to these crazy people on TikTok, and you start to see that the reason Trump won is that he’s closer to normal than they are. They just don’t realize that they’re the problem. Their totalitarian tendencies left over from 2020 never fully died because there was never any accountability in the mainstream. Remember that crowd that swarmed that woman and demanded she raise her fist for Black Lives Matter: Here are a bunch of crazy women at a Core Power Yoga studio in Minneapolis doing the same thing: go along with us or else. That same autonomous zone that was erected in 2020: Well, that’s back too, only this time the police got rid of it much quicker, knowing Tom Homan and Trump won’t stand for it. Do they really expect us to vote for these psychopaths? Put them back in power? And why, because Trump accidentally shared a meme with a racist image of the Obamas at the end of it? Sorry, they have to deal with the fanatics who have swallowed up their party first because they are still too erratic and unhinged to lead this country. What are they going to do with all of us? With Trump? Throw us into re-education camps? Gulags? Shoot us outright? GET TRUMP The Left’s 10-year campaign to get Trump is like watching Yosemite Sam go after Bugs Bunny. They always think they’re just seconds away from catching him at long last. They believe deeply in their mission to destroy Trump, just as Yosemite Sam does. It’s just that we see Bugs Bunny a little differently. Whatever else Trump is, he’s not the guy they say he is, and for that, they will always be one step behind, swinging and missing. I didn’t get that until I found my way out. As someone who got online 30 years ago, I wasn’t ready for the effects of the feedback loop on my brain, and I don’t think most people on the Left even realized they were living inside a reality-distorting machine. I had to watch Trump videos on my own, get to know him and his supporters, and humanize them. I found that I unexpectedly empathized with Trump. It wasn’t just that I could finally see the real human being, but because I, too, had been demonized and attacked for being a person I knew I wasn’t. All I had to do was walk in the shoes of his supporters to see what monsters they really are on the Left. The more they attack Trump, the more his supporters rally to protect him, not just because they have been thrown away like human garbage by these people, but also because they look at Trump and they see a flawed hero, someone who doesn’t always get it right, who makes big mistakes, who is anything but perfect. But he’s also someone who fights for them. Our culture used to understand flawed heroes because they were in so many movies and books. Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark: Humphrey Bogart Casablanca. Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven. What counts isn’t their past or their goodness or their purity, but their actions. We all treated Obama like a religious figure, and still do, which partly explains the over-reaction by the Left. It’s blasphemy to mock Obama, whereas it's an American pastime to mock Trump. Today’s Left seems to desire perfection from cradle to grave and is unforgiving of flawed heroes, especially white men. But Trump is a great character of history, a living legend. They just got the story wrong. Here is Dominic Sandbrook on Triggernometry: Trump is a hero to so many of us, not because he’s perfect or “good” but because he is a fighter who got the dirty job done and saved the day. Crimes against humanity I asked Conor Friedersdorf the same question I would put to any Democrat. Can you name something — one thing — Trump has done that is worse than sterilizing children who can’t consent? Destroying their bodies with medical experiments? Never having the courage to stand up to the cult? Now that the lawsuits are coming, and prominent groups like the AMA are openly opposing gender transition treatments for minors, the Democrats will pretend they were always against it. But we can’t let them do that. The Democrats have not just supported it every step of the way; they have actively blocked any action taken to safeguard children. It took the Republicans standing on the right history yet again, as they did during the Civil War, to push this thing through, and it took the election of Donald Trump to finally bring the hammer down. Only Trump, in his plain-spoken, flawed hero kind of way, had the guts to say it out loud, without fear, and that gave others more courage to fight back. But Trump wasn’t only saying things. He was doing things. And before long, the dominoes began to fall. What could Trump have done that even comes close to what has happened to kids at the hands of 15 years of Democrat rule? What’s worse? Saying “Quiet, Piggy” to a reporter? Tearing down the East Wing to build a ballroom? The Kennedy Center? An offensive meme? Their climate of fear and culture of silence made it too dangerous to take a brave stand, which is why it was left to the brave men and women who risked their lives and careers to put a stop to the madness once and for all. And along with their ever-increasing authoritarianism, we’d be the UK if Elon Musk had not bought Twitter and turned it into X, and if Trump hadn’t won. Here is Graham Linehan speaking in Congress: So when people say, “You could have picked a different Republican, but you picked Trump,” I flip it back onto them. Tell me what Trump has done, just one thing, that comes close to this, and be prepared to answer it 20 years from now, because I promise to hang it around your necks like a dead cat for as long as I live. Here is a TikToker: On this alone, I would have voted for any Republican. I’d always say, “I am not a Trump supporter but…” Then, they raided Mar-a-Lago, and when they indicted him, when they tried to throw him in jail, that made me a Trump supporter. That made me the Braveheart meme. There won’t be any Sister Souljah moments in this Democratic Party. I have been waiting for six years for the Democrats to snap out of it and come back to reality. That day never came. If anything, they’re crazier now than they’ve ever been. Anyone who wants their votes has no choice but to go along with it. The Democrats can’t snap out of it even if they wanted to. Gavin Newsom can’t sell anything but hate and hysteria. Even Jon Ossoff, a guy I once supported and fought for, must sell the same thing because they have nothing else. They have given people like me no path back because the only option is going back to the Doomsday Cult that insists I call Trump and the other half of America racists when I know that it isn’t true. A cult that demands I buy into the oppressor/oppressed mandate, and demands I look the other way as they indoctrinate our kids and destroy every great thing this country ever built. I could have been one of those who hovered reluctantly in the middle and held my nose and voted for Trump

    48 min

  4. FEB 2

    The Fourth Turning Podcast

    In this episode, I talk to my friend Andy Schaalman, who has Substack, Fourth Turning Chronicles but whose work can be found mostly on his YouTube page, where all of his great videos are. We talked for almost three hours, so it’s a real Joe Rogan-type deal. Both of us have been interested in the Fourth Turning for many years. He is a millennial, and I am Gen-X. We get pretty deep into it, so it probably might not be interesting to anyone who isn’t interested in the concept. But if you are, have a listen. Referenced in our podcast is this episode: But many of his videos are worth a watch. You can find them here. Meanwhile, here is some Fourth Turning info referenced in the podcast. Here are some quotes from The Fourth Turning, a link to the book, and videos. “At each of these great gates of history, eighty to a hundred years apart, a similar generational drama unfolded. Four archetypes, aligned in the same order—elder Prophet, midlife Nomad, young adult Hero, child Artist—together produced the most enduring legends in our history. Each time the Gray Champion appeared marked the arrival of a moment of “darkness, and adversity, and peril,” the climax of the Fourth Turning of the saeculum.” “What will America be like as it exits the Fourth Turning? History offers no guarantees. Obviously, things could go horribly wrong—the possibilities ranging from a nuclear exchange to incurable plagues, from terrorist anarchy to high-tech dictatorship. We should not assume that Providence will always exempt our nation from the irreversible “tragedies that have overtaken so many others: not just temporary hardship, but debasement and total ruin. Since Vietnam, many Americans suppose they know what it means to lose a war. Losing in the next Fourth Turning, however, could mean something incomparably worse. It could mean a lasting defeat from which our national innocence—and perhaps even our nation—might never recover. As many Americans know from their own ancestral backgrounds, history provides numerous examples of societies that have been wiped off the map, ground into submission, or beaten so badly they revert to barbarism. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

    2h 54m

  5. JAN 30

    Oh Hillary, Empathy? Really? Please.

    Dear Hillary, Imagine my shock when I saw you wrote an op-ed in The Atlantic. Before I even read a line, I knew what the point of the article would be because I know you. You write: This crisis also reveals a deeper moral rot at the heart of Trump’s MAGA movement. Whatever you think about immigration policy, how can a person of conscience justify the lack of compassion and empathy for the victims in Minnesota, and for the families torn apart or hiding in fear, for the children separated from their parents or afraid to go to school? That compassion is weak and cruelty is strong has become an article of MAGA faith. Trump and his allies believe that the more inhumane the treatment, the more likely it is to spread fear. That’s the goal of surging heavily armed federal forces into blue states such as Minnesota and Maine—street theater of the most dangerous kind. Other recent presidents, including Joe Biden, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton, managed to deport millions of undocumented immigrants without turning American cities into battlegrounds or making a show of keeping children in cages I see the game. You know selling open borders is an election killer, so you think selling “empathy,” or compassion, will help bridge the gap and maybe win back independents who don’t want an open border but are troubled by what they see on the “news.” As with everything else, it’s a manufactured delusion you too must sell, which explains why the Democrats are in this position now, resorting to the first violent attacks on the government since the 1970s, and no, January 6th doesn’t count. These are coordinated, orchestrated, well-funded attacks - not protests as much as flirting with terrorism. And you know that too, don’t you, Hillary? And you’re worried. You should be. You also know that no president, not Obama or Bush or Clinton, ever had to deal with a cell phone brigade who are screaming, spitting, body slamming ICE agents everywhere they go, stalking them, blocking their paths, building makeshift networks online to find them, harass them, and stop them from doing their jobs. You know this is a first, and you know exactly why. But that won’t stop you from lying, Hillary. What else is new? You are setting up the argument to slime your way out of this moment, where the Democrats are too crazy to lead and are looking more like the Manson family every day. I had to laugh, though, at the misappropriation of yet another word, empathy. As if any of you ever had any empathy for anyone other than those who will be voting blue, no matter who. No, you can’t call the other half of the country “racists” for ten years and then pretend to have any empathy. Just look at Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway on a recent podcast talking about how we’ll have the Nuremberg trials, should all of you crazy people ever get back in power, “and we will,” Galloway says. This obsession with calling Trump Hitler and a Nazi began in 2016 because you could not stand the sting of humiliation when you lost to Trump. So you and the most powerful people in the world decided it was your right to disenfranchise the millions of Americans who voted for Trump and had every right to representation. I used to think you were a person of integrity, I did. I supported you. I fought for you. I was proud to be a Democrat. I made this video to humanize you for independents who did not want to vote for you. I thought I could help them see you the way I did. At least, back then. I was a good Liberal. I repeated the lie that Trump’s win was an existential threat and it required a “hearts and minds” campaign to RESIST everything he tried to do. Oh, the lies, Hillary. The lies. I can barely live with myself; I don’t know how you manage it. After ten years of those lies, there is not much to show for it. Trump is back in power because all of you failed so spectacularly. The people said yeah, we’ll take the twice impeached, four times indicted, convicted felon. That’s how badly you failed. Because you don’t see them, you don’t see them as people, you don’t care about what they need. In other words, you’re lacking in empathy. So now you think you finally have Trump on the ropes, and all it took was throwing federal agents under the bus, demonizing them as hateful, Nazi-like thugs, lying about the “rot” at the heart of MAGA. Here is Tom Homan: The empire is collapsing. A once-thriving culture has been sucked into a cult. Everything I used to love is gone. Movies, books, great journalism, science, and history. Vanished. Replaced with dogma and fanaticism. Because all of you walled yourselves off from the rest of the country, you lost touch with reality, which is why it’s so easy for you now to slip into the fantasy world and blame ICE agents for their lack of empathy. Shame on you. Where is your empathy for the victims of Biden’s border policies? Do you remember the rape van? Yeah, there was a van where an illegal immigrant locked women away in it and raped them for hours. How about the Venezuelan gang that overtook an apartment building? Here is one illegal immigrant living on public assistance after multiple rapes, assaults and crimes — and was still out raping women. Not enough for you, Hillary? How about this story? And that’s all before we get to the young people who were lured into the Left’s fantasy world and told that if they take drugs and get surgery, they can become the opposite sex. So you can fool those who read The Atlantic, Hillary. But you can’t fool me. I know you too well. Empathy? Yours is conditional. In fact, empathy was strictly forbidden on the Left lest you empathize with the wrong people. Not the victims of rapes or terrorism by illegal immigrants, not the victims of crime if the criminal is the wrong color, not victims of the crazy gender cult. And you most certainly can’t empathize with Trump or his supporters. If you do, you’ll lose everything. Some Democrats gave the standard statement condemning violence after Charlie Kirk was murdered, but then we watched everyone on the Left celebrate, some even losing their jobs. No one on your side wrote any op-ed in The Atlantic about empathy. Ezra Klein tried to empathize with Charlie and was viciously attacked for days, with calls for him to be fired. We watched Jimmy Kimmel play the free speech martyr because his inhumanity in the wake of the murder was so horrific that millions of Americans flooded the station with calls to remove him. I watched them dig the knife in deeper on X and on TikTok. I watched them mock Erika Kirk. Then I watched Barack Obama and all of the celebrities call Charlie a racist when he wasn’t here to defend himself. No, empathy vanished on the Left long ago. You were all resentful, you see, because you could not win the election. America broke up with you twice, and you haven’t taken it well. You should see some of the videos on TikTok. The hate is so deep and thick you could cut it with a knife. Empathy. I don’t think so. It is now your last best resort for emotional blackmail to try to slither out of yet another moment where all of you are defending the wrong people, demonizing law enforcement, and spinning wild fantasies in hopes of tricking beleaguered voters to the polls. Maybe your op-ed was a way to try to find some middle ground - deportations, but with empathy. Yeah, we tried that. We know how it ended up. So you’ll have to sell open borders like you sell no genders because none of you has the courage to stand up to the psychos, not even to protect women and girls, Hillary. Not even that. Maybe if you still had empathy, you would not be here now, defending unhinged mobs who think it is their moral right and their duty to go to war on the federal government. Maybe you would understand why Americans voted for Trump a second time. Maybe you all could stop your decade-long campaign of dehumanization against half the country. But since I know empathy vanished on the Left long ago, I know there is no saving the Left. There is only saving America from all of you. // This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

    34 min

  6. JAN 28

    Why the Democrats Fail in the Art of War

    Part One | Part Two | Part Three “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”― Sun Tzu, The Art of War Because Donald Trump understands this fundamental rule of The Art of War, he reached a compromise in Minneapolis. It was an easy shift for him because he knows himself and he knows the enemy. He knows all they wanted was months of warfare and chaos between ICE agents and the citizen army on the ground, who are now becoming an organized militia, some of them even arming themselves, all in hopes of producing viral content for the churn to keep the hearts and minds of their voters activated and mobilized ahead of the midterms. They wanted him to show up as the dictator, to crack down on protests like the United States had suddenly become Iran. But Trump is too smart for that. He knows once he becomes the version of him they invented, the war is over. He also knows they will ignore the important news of his presidency. The economy is strengthening, crime is declining, and Trump continues to make big moves on the global stage. By contrast, the left is losing but thinks it’s winning because they don’t know themselves. If they did, they would understand that the clever game they’re playing only takes them so far. Creating chaos throughout 2020 meant they scared Americans into voting Trump out and putting the Obama coalition back in power. But they were the dog that caught the car. They had no idea what to do once Joe Biden took office. It was worse than that. Biden failed in his first major move as president with the botched exit from Afghanistan that left 13 soldiers dead and sparked two wars, as world leaders laughed in our faces at the man in the White House. As Biden’s numbers began to fall, and America woke up from the haze of fear from 2020, they wondered why they ever voted out the guy with the strong economy to begin with, and why they were now stuck with a whole new set of rules we were all meant to follow. In truth? Biden was the face of normalcy for the fanatical cult that has now consumed the Democratic Party. They are the socialist socialites who are both the ruling class and the oppressor/oppressed fundamentalists who have no place for America’s silent majority anymore. When the story of this moment is told by their ever-reliable unreliable narrators, they will cast themselves as the Underground Railroad to free the slaves or the Kindertransport to save Jewish children from the Nazis. So we have to ask them and make them answer: who is it they’re liberating now? What are they fighting for? Mass migration? Open borders? True, they want to keep the 10-20 million who crossed over under Biden and will vote blue no matter who, but what is the endgame here? Do they even know? Trump’s greatest blessing and his tragic flaw is that he cannot lose. That’s what makes him a great leader; whether he’s leading a family, a business, or a country, he wants to win. When you’re standing behind him, you get to be a winner too. Some in his base want him to step on the gas, to crack down on protesters and not back off from Minneapolis, but as with so many hard calls Trump has had to make in his second term, he has to somehow find his way through the storm as a guy who, in the end, trusts only himself because he knows himself. If he became the dictator now just to please those in his base, he’d be eaten alive by the empire. They Don’t Understand Themselves The chaos in Minneapolis was designed for the legacy media. It was resistance theater that played well on the Nightly News and on social media. The objective, as we now know from the Signal chats and the ongoing soldier training for activists, was to push ICE agents into acting out, to capture those viral moments to paint a picture in the minds of social media users—ICE are violent thugs, they will conclude. If you see enough video of ICE agents pushing women to the ground and detaining children, well, what is a normal person to think? How could the polls not result in the Left’s favor? What you don’t see is everything that led up to it. You don’t see how many times ICE agents are assaulted, obstructed, body slammed, screamed at, spat on, with whistles blaring in their ears, stalked, harassed, and doxxed. But on the Left, they don’t see that side of the story, just like they didn’t see that side of the story in 2020. The mob terrorizes citizens, and law enforcement and the media call it mostly peaceful protests. I was on the Left. I know that no one was allowed to talk about the violence lest they’d be called a racist. But not being able to say the truth, let alone know the truth, meant we were all walking around in a constant state of confusion. We all knew that Derek Chauvin did not murder George Floyd, but we had to say he did. We knew Trump wasn’t bragging about sexual assault on the Access Hollywood tape, but we had to say we did. We knew that many of the Me Too cases were either made up or greatly exagerrated but we would be punished if we questioned any of it. Each side gets its own version of events, but these were never two equal sides. The Left still has most of the media power, says Megyn Kelly: But they have become too comfortable with confirmation bias and their ability to control the narrative that they no longer even know what is true. Important words have lost all meaning: Fascist, racist, dictator, resistance, democracy, racist, rapist, pedophile, man, woman, boy, girl, abortion is healthcare, trans women are women. Every time someone blurts out “regime,” or “occupation,” “insurrectionist,” “election denier,” “anti-vaxxer,” or “anti-masker” we are conditioned to snap to attention. Once the words are gone, and the Newspeak implemented, it’s easy to lie in headlines for the same reasons. An image is even more powerful than words. Those lies meant we could not know ourselves or the enemy. We were led around by hyperbole and caught up in a dreamscape where nothing is entirely real. That meant comedians, Hollywood, and politicians couldn’t really read the room, but they had to mirror that delusion, lest they get booted out of utopia too. Recently, Scott Bessent gifted Gavin Newsom with a nickname that will stick. “Sparkle Beach, Ken.” It’s funny because it’s true. When Newsom then tried to play on Trump’s level with the knee-pads joke, it fell flat because it isn’t true. Trump isn’t that guy. If they knew themselves, they would understand that they are not the working-class poor who have any business marching around with No Kings posters. If they knew themselves, they would shut up about the Epstein Files because they know it’s way worse on the Democrat side. If they knew themselves, they would not shout “fascist” because they would know that they are, at heart, the real fascists. If they knew themselves, they would understand why, even now, they are still the crazier side, and no matter the smoke and mirrors, the chaos, the viral videos, the mass hysteria, they can’t do the one thing they would need to do to win this war: offer the people something better. If they knew themselves, they would understand that the Boy Who Cried Wolf was not just a children’s story. It is a deeply profound statement about people who scream about everything until their screams fall on indifferent ears. The only reason they’ve gotten this far with their madness is that Trump isn’t a fascist or a dictator, because if he wanted to, he could crush all of these folks like bugs as the Commander in Chief of the most powerful military in the world. They also don’t seem to realize that a handful of granola crunchers arming themselves is no match for MAGA, either, should it ever come to that. The only reason the Right hasn’t yet taken up arms reminds me of that scene in Grizzly Man where the bears think there might be something wrong with Timothy Treadwell, so they leave him alone, at least for a little while. But when one bear gets frustrated and hungry enough, we see just how easy it was for the bear to eat Timothy and his girlfriend in the Grizzly Maze. They don’t know Trump The Democrats have been fighting a villain they created, but who never existed. I was one of those who sobbed on my couch after 2016, donated to Jill Stein, marched in protest, and felt myself part of the resistance. I would take to the treadmill at the gym to the Styx song Come Sail Away and I would imagine making a video to rally the troops on the Left. I would think those MAGA “racists” are not prepared for the strength of our battlestation. We have all of this power, and they have none of it. And yet, even as I imagined this, I didn’t realize what I was saying because I didn’t know myself, or my side, and I most certainly didn’t know Trump and MAGA. What would snap me out of it was seeing what we eventually did with our power. It wasn’t a grassroots uprising. It was one political party becoming more powerful than any other and then using that power to demonize, dehumanize, and marginalize half the country. When we decided we had the right to take over the 2020 election to “save Democracy” that was when I began to pull back. I was like Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2, who sees the guy she thinks is there to kill her, but instead, he’s the guy who has come to save her. Because we didn’t know ourselves back in 2016, we had to cover up our failures with lies about Trump. We concocted a false World War II fantasy where we were the “resistance.” Once we started that big lie, we were doomed because there was no way out of it, and there still isn’t. I would find out in 2020 that all I got from the legacy media was the worst things Trump said, extracted

    40 min

  7. JAN 17

    An Open Letter to Peter Baker of the New York Times

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

    27 min

  8. JAN 5

    January 6th and The Real Insurrection

    Part One | Part Two January 6th was terrifying for many Americans. After all, they saw it on television. But what did they really see? Did they know what actually unfolded that day? Did they even ask? Trump is the Jan. 6 President, proclaims the New York Times’ Editorial Board. And the text: What I learned, living through these events as a former Democrat, is that the New York Times Editorial Board is lying through its teeth. Or maybe they aren’t lying. Maybe they really do believe it. They exist inside the Doomsday Cult of the Left, after all, along with all of those high-minded “journalists” at the New Yorker and the Atlantic. But to make the bold proclamation that any protest, or even riot, against oppressive forces, whether you believe them to be oppressive or not, is un-American proves they don’t know this country or its history very well. There were two sides to this story. If I’d never left the Left, I would have believed their version of the event. I would have been just as horrified. I would have thought it was an attack on democracy. But protests are the voices of the unheard and a healthy sign of any democracy, and for a grassroots movement, and millions of Americans who had been disenfranchised by the four years Trump was in power? This was the best way for them to be heard. The only way for them to be heard. They just didn’t know they were walking into an ambush by forces far greater than them, and more powerful than any political party in American history and what they wanted to do was use that protest - a moment of desperation for desperate Americans abandoned by the government, the culture and most institutions - and demonize them further by calling them extremists, terrorists, Nazis, insurrectionists. January 6th was played on a loop by the Democrats and their propaganda machine, once known as the legacy media. And why wouldn’t it be? It was everything they needed at just the right time. See, there’s a Confederate flag. See, there’s a hangman’s rope. See, there’s some guy in horns howling inside the Capitol. Zip ties, hanging Mike Pence, Trump watching the mob, and hoping they wouldn’t stop. It all painted a picture in our minds of an angry president amidst a violent coup. In our age of algorithm-driven mass hysteria, we’re no different from the Puritans in Salem who believed in “spectral evidence,” what you can’t see but can only imagine. January 6th finally provided them with the proof they needed of their campaign against MAGA. It’s just that none of it was true. Why would Trump have wanted a riot? He’d gone to great effort to convince Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz to debate the election in the Senate. All the riot did was hand absolute power to the Democrats, Reichstag Fire style. Not only did the media sell that lie, but you’d be severely punished if you asked any questions, especially about the 2020 election. Yes, we lived through that and more. Just because the Democrats have memory-holed everything they’ve done in the last ten years to cling to power doesn’t mean it didn’t happen or that we shouldn’t talk about it. There was nothing wrong with talking about an election that was anything but free and fair. I naively went into it as a major Biden advocate, believing he could win the old-fashioned way. I didn’t know they’d hide him and Kamala Harris in the basement and let the legacy media do all of the heavy lifting. I didn’t know they’d planned it—everything that happened throughout 2020 to ensure Trump was taken out of power, like they were meddling in some third-world country’s elections. It’s all written down in TIME Magazine. They planned on saving an election that was not theirs to save. Who gave them that right? The American people decide, and if one political party believes itself to be above the people, then that is an insurrection, not against the government but against all of us and a fair process we depend on. They justified everything they did by the lies they told themselves about who Trump really was and how dangerous he was supposed to be. They rigged the election by manipulating the media, changing any law that got in their way, using COVID as an excuse to push ballot harvesting, funded by a $400 million cash infusion, and all the while pretending they were “saving democracy.” By all accounts, I should have been cheering them on. Yes, get Trump! Anything and everything should be allowed as long as we were saving the country from Hitler! I believed that at first. Why wouldn’t I? I was straight out of Central Casting as a Resistance Lib. This was the back of my car in 2012. This is who I was. Before that, I was just a lowly Oscar blogger spending my time writing about superficial things, but suddenly, in 2015, everything changed. I was in a panic about the Greenhouse Effect and the sea level rise. I threw myself into politics to help the Democrats win. Overnight, I became someone who mattered online, with a growing following, adoration, and kindness from strangers. The warm embrace of the elite Left felt intoxicating: invitations to exclusive parties, friendships with high-status blue-checks on Twitter like Steve Schmidt, Rick Wilson, and Oprah, so much love and support online - after all, I was helping to save democracy and the planet! I was even invited to an early fundraiser for Joe Biden in May of 2019. It was necessary. I was important. I mattered. You can imagine, then, how surreal it would have been for anyone who knew me that way to see me starting to question the official narratives. For me, it began with what I believed was mass hysteria that had overtaken my side. Just as the Southerners had whipped themselves up into a frenzy, believing that if the slaves were freed, there would be chaos and violence, so too did we believe that if Trump won, that was the end of everything. But, looking back, all it really was was a populist revolt against a ruling class that just decided what America would be now. Class no longer mattered, only skin color and gender identity did. Little by little, I began to pull away as things got weird. The more I tried to speak out, the worse it got for me. They went after me hard on social media for years. But none of that would have driven me away from the Democrats. As with so many others, 2020 was the turning point for me. I suddenly could see the strings, and I wondered who was pulling them. Trotting out experts to say “systemic racism” was more important than a global pandemic, and trotting them out again to discourage Trump from sending in the National Guard. And again, to say the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation. How stupid did they think we were? We lurched from COVID to racism back to COVID to lockdowns, and all the while, as I would come to realize, the aim was only to GET TRUMP. Imagine completely taking over an election to take out a one-term president with a strong economy. Why? I asked the same question then as I wonder today. Why did it have to be an existential crisis? Why drive half the country to the brink of insanity? Why cosplay Trump as Hitler and pretend this was World War II? Couldn’t they win the old-fashioned way with better candidates and better policies? Russiagate, spying on his campaign, two impeachments, four indictments, convicting him of a felony, taking his mug shot, two assassination attempts, trying to throw him off the ballots, and needing the Supreme Court to shut it down, and the American people still chose Trump. Shouldn’t that have been the wakeup call? Shouldn’t that have been the moment their stupid, futile, destructive war ended? No. It wasn’t about politics for the Left. It was deeper than that. It was as deep as preserving the South before, during, and after the Civil War. January 6th allowed them a way out of what they’d become, not what MAGA had become. They were the violent ones and had been going all the way back to 2015, when a mob descended upon Trump supporters. They rioted at Trump’s inaugural. They believed themselves justified in attacking Trump supporters because they were convinced they were “fascists.” But their words meant nothing because they distorted them beyond comprehension. What does it mean to call someone Hitler, a fascist, a dictator, a rapist, a pedophile, a racist, a white supremacist? These words mean nothing now. And then came 2020, the point of no return. For me, it was the recognition that my side didn’t care about democracy or the truth. They only cared about defeating an imaginary enemy they invented but never existed. And were prepared to bring this country to its knees to achieve that goal. When I saw this video of Sue’s 100-year-old mattress store, I posted it on social media, and the response was, “How can you care more about property than people”? By then, they had already called me a racist many times, and they were pushing me out of utopia and farther and farther away. Was I a racist because I cared about Sue and the older man who defended her with a fire extinguisher? Trump’s speech at Mt. Rushmore was the first time I’d heard anyone in public life talk about what we could all see but almost no one would say out loud. The media called it dark and divisive because, of course, they did. Are you getting it yet? This only goes one way. That was for me yet another layer of the onion being pulled back to reveal what the legacy media had become. They were not reporting the news. They were telling us what to think, and they still are. After I started watching Trump’s rallies for myself, I kept waiting for the version of Trump we were sold to emerge. He never did. Instead, a guy who would stand in the pouring rain to speak to his supporters showed me what MAGA was really about. It was a love story. Trump had their backs, and they had his. Just listen to them as he visits East Palestine, Ohio after the train derailed and

    40 min
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Essays on politics and culture from Sasha Stone's Substack. A former Democrat and Leftist who escaped the bubble to get to know the other side of the country and to take a more critical look at the left. Sashastone.substack.com www.sashastone.com

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