128 episodes

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

sashastone.substack.com

Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone Sasha Stone

    • Arts
    • 4.7 • 92 Ratings

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

sashastone.substack.com

    Joe Biden's Eternal Nightmare

    Joe Biden's Eternal Nightmare

    Don’t let Joe Biden’s creepy grin fool you. He’s not confident. He’s terrified. They all are. Imagine being them right now. Imagine having all of the power, all of the culture, all of the institutions, and most of the administrative and security state; imagine the impeachments, the indictments, the endless attacks against Trump for eight years, and he’s still the frontrunner to be President of the United States in 2024.
    Biden knows the system might help him win in 2024 just as it did in 2020. He has to keep the threat of Trump alive, and he may convince low-information voters to pull the lever for Joe. Nothing makes that easier than calling Trump a convicted felon. Yes, they finally got there.



    This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

    • 34 min
    Trump and The Hero's Journey

    Trump and The Hero's Journey

    As Trump wows the public at rallies, Biden seethes behind the castle walls, demanding that his nemesis be convicted and jailed.
    The next big news day for the regime will be Verdict Day! Oh, how they will celebrate.
    And lest you get carried away with the fantasy that maybe they’ll acquit Trump in the city that made him, think again. There is little chance that the jury will go home to their friends and family and confess they passed on the chance to save Democracy because they had a sudden case of reasonable doubt.
    Corrupt president, corrupt prosecutor, corrupt judge, corrupt jury. And Rachel Maddow will declare justice was served and Joe Biden will pretend that a bookeeping error was a big enough crime to warrant indicting a former president.
    Reasonable Doubt? It’s been eliminated, along with due process and the presumption of innocence. The only thing that matters is whether or not Bette Midler and Stephen King can sleep at night and that Joe Biden gets to sit in the Big Boy chair at the White House and stare back at us with his tiny, angry, squinty eyes and bark about bloodbaths, dictators and “good people on both sides.”
    But nothing Biden has done to Trump has helped move the needle in the polls.
    The Democrats and Never Trumpers probably wonder how it is that Donald Trump can still be this popular after everything they’ve thrown at him. They keep doubling down on the hyperbole and overblown attacks against him, resorting to lying outright to win over a handful of low-information voters.



    This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

    • 41 min
    Nellie Bowles Thoroughly Humiliates the New York Times

    Nellie Bowles Thoroughly Humiliates the New York Times

    In 2024, the most radical act imaginable is telling the truth. Nellie Bowles has done just that with her new book, Morning After the Revolution. She lays out in painful but funny detail the madness we’ve all just lived through that almost no one will talk about.
    Bowles is too nice to humiliate the New York Times outright; she was their “golden girl,” after all, once upon a time. But her book humiliates them all the same, just by doing good reporting and telling the stories they refused to tell.
    In one riveting, tragic, hilarious passage, Bowles describes what happened at the Wi Spa in Los Angeles:
    “Wi Spa billed itself as “a convenient and affordable place to de-stress and be pampered,” but one summer week in 2021 it became a site of great stress because of one (allegedly, partially) erect penis that had manifested in the women’s room.”
    She continues:
    “The spa, in Los Angeles’s Koreatown, has separate men’s and women’s areas where people go naked. The penis went bobbing through the women’s space. The penis had been seen soaking in the women’s communal soak pools. Women enjoying their spa time were upset. One went to the front desk asking for help, saying there were children present and that there was a man in the bathroom. The front desk could not help. The person with the penis had a California driver’s license that listed their gender as “female.” The penis was white, and some of the women who didn’t want to see it were black Hispanic, which in the summer of 2021 might have helped draw knee-jerk public sympathy, but apparently did not.”
    For a movement afraid of harm being done by mere words, they seemed to be perfectly comfortable with real harm being done to young girls, to women in sports, and pre-teens sucked into “gender-affirming care.”
    Bowles doesn’t just describe what happened at the spa; she tracks down the sex offender himself and discovers that, yes, he’d done it deliberately, and, yes, he was erect while doing so. But was there ever any major reckoning in the press? No.
    I quickly searched the New York Times for “Wi Spa,” and of course, there was nothing about this scandal, even though it was such an interesting story. Why didn’t they want to touch it? Because it called into question their absolutism about “trans women” being women.
    The Times should be as thoroughly humiliated by Morning After the Revolution as NPR should be after Uri Berliner’s essay. They no longer care about chasing the story at all costs. They only care about serving the ideology at all costs.
    It shouldn’t be surprising that the Times and other “prestige” outlets would pan Bowles’ book and attempt character assassination on her. What else are they going to do? Admit that they gaslighted Americans and allowed themselves to be manipulated by a “Lord of the Flies” contingent of crybaby brats who felt unsafe around reporters like Donald McNeil? Will they come clean and admit they essentially work for the Biden administration as a slightly more sophisticated version of Joe and Mika? Not a chance.
    The publisher isn’t taking their criticisms seriously, nor should they. Instead, they celebrated their takes:
    The negative reviews read like a chapter in Bowles's book. The Washington Post’s Becca Rothfield disguises her resentment and embarrassment by casting Bowles as the condescending elite. The lady doth protest too much, methinks:
    She writes:
    The real question is not about whether there are “Narrative Enforcers” at the New York Times, as Bowles alleges, but why there is a market for so many books like this, even though they are all so predictably indistinguishable from one another. Bowles’s book appeals for the same reason that other conservative memoirs of political “growth” do: because they reassure their readers that progressivism is not a genuine political philosophy but an almost biological byproduct of youth, like acne. Bowles and her ilk are thereby

    • 25 min
    The Democrats' Stormy Hypocrisy

    The Democrats' Stormy Hypocrisy

    Bill Clinton once said, “Democrats fall in love, and Republicans fall in line.” We had to fall in love with him, that’s for sure, because by 1992, baby, we’d kissed a lot of frogs. Falling in love with him meant overlooking his blatant, unending womanizing. We believed, or we convinced ourselves to believe, that his personal life should be private.
    Our gold standard had been JFK, after all. His womanizing was seen not as a character flaw but as evidence of his superiority among men. He was so handsome, so charismatic, and such a great leader, why wouldn’t Bill Clinton want to follow in his footsteps?
    And he did. If Hillary Clinton didn’t care, why should we? The stoic, ever-stalwart wife took her place alongside other tolerant First Ladies like Eleanor Roosevelt and Jackie Kennedy.
    The two parties have switched places. The Republicans fall in love or have with their once-in-a-generation star, Donald Trump, and it’s the Democrats who fall in line. Unfortunately for them, they’ve spent the last four years consumed with hatred over one man who threatens their power.
    They readied their army for war once they realized America was on the precipice of dramatic change. That would mean blunting Trump’s win in 2016 - and failing. It would mean destroying his one-term presidency - and failing. It would mean raiding Mar-a-Lago, indicting him four times, impeaching him twice, and attempting to throw him off the ballots in several states, and now, a criminal trial in New York, that will very likely fail. Even if they squeeze out a conviction, most voters aren’t going to care.
    For the Democrats, it’s all come full circle. They are now trying to convict a former president on nothing more than a sex scandal. The thing they most feared once upon a time is now their most powerful weapon.



    This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

    • 34 min
    It's the Democrats Turn to Scare America

    It's the Democrats Turn to Scare America

    As college protests sprouted like mushrooms in Joe Biden’s America, the fanaticism of the Left seemed to catch many by surprise. How could it have gotten this bad? How could they seem so crazy, these educated college students? And why isn’t Joe Biden doing anything about it?
    It isn’t that it’s gotten this bad. It’s been this bad for a while. It was just covered up by the mainstream media on the Left, who were invested in only one narrative: MAGA supporters are the violent ones, the dangerous ones.
    Well, what a difference four years makes. Now that we’ve seen protests so violent not even NBC could ignore them, Democrats are scrambling, doing damage control for what looks like a big headache for Joe Biden’s embattled re-election bid.


    This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

    • 37 min
    "Let Joe Be Joe" has been a Disaster

    "Let Joe Be Joe" has been a Disaster

    Joe Biden has been a failure as the leader of the United States. There has never been one moment in the past four years when he has thought of us, the American people. He has only thought of himself and how badly he does not want to lose to Donald Trump, so he stands before the press at the White House Correspondents Dinner, and he lies.
    He lies about January 6th. He lies that Trump said there would be a “bloodbath” if he lost, a false media narrative that should have shamed every so-called “journalist” sitting in that room, and most of all, he lies about what threatens the American people. It is not Trump. This country is facing far more serious problems, and yet no one has apparently told Joe Biden.
    The past couple of weeks have been an unmitigated disaster for the Biden presidency, even if the press, the obedient sycophants that they are, won't admit it. Someone thought it was a good idea to free Biden from his gilded cage and set him loose on regular folks - to let Joe be Joe.
    In March, the New York Times laid it out:
    What could possibly go wrong? Well, everything.
    Everything that could go wrong did go wrong. Biden did not just have a major brain freeze while reading off the teleprompter, it also wasn’t hard to see that most of the “Joe being Joe” events were staged.
    When Biden read the instructions—that he was supposed to pause so the crowd could erupt in rehearsed chants of Four More Years—his face froze, and for a minute, he looked lost and confused. Yes, that’s the President of the United States, in case you were wondering.
    Biden seems increasingly like a fake president, not a real one. And that’s just fine for the people at the top. What does Howard Stern care about real life? They’ve been detached for so long, they can’t see beyond the safety of their own bubble.
    That’s not true for much of America, which is so desperate for real leadership that they’re willing to disregard Trump’s failings as a luxury they can’t afford.



    This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

    • 30 min

Customer Reviews

4.7 out of 5
92 Ratings

92 Ratings

$61@00 ,

My New Favorite Podcast

I am writing this review while enjoying this week’s cool song at the end. Sorry about your string of bad luck and praying for your speedy recovery. Even with a cold your voice is a soothing balm. Listening to you gives me hope because you can’t be the only liberal that loves America more then political ideology. I have binged all the episodes I missed and eagerly wait each new drop. THANK YOU!!!!

P*Clark ,

I approve

Well thought out and very well expressed

ToasterSav7 ,

Sasha Stone - thank you!

Your practical thinking has motivated me ever more in supporting Trump for 2024. Well done and thank you.

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