Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone

America lived through a political assassination one year ago today, and millions of people either barely noticed, shrugged it off, or openly celebrated. That was one of the darkest days in American history, a day I never thought I’d live through, watching people I used to know lose their humanity. One famous example was the actress Amanda Seyfried, who posted this: Charlie Kirk did not incite violence, and he was not “hateful.” Tyler Robinson shot Charlie Kirk to please people like Amanda Seyfried. She doesn’t regret her words. She stands by them, like the good little cult member she is. She complained about having to hire a bodyguard. She should feel lucky she wasn’t shot in the neck, lucky her kids don’t have to grow up without her. The Left felt emboldened by his death, even going so far as to celebrate it then and even now. When people lost their jobs for it - because who wants to employ a sociopathic monster - they whined about free speech. Jimmy Kimmel's cold heart could only make a bad situation worse. And then the videos. They tweeted and were rewarded for their ugliness. There was no bottom. I watched in horror as they went at Charlie’s memory; so scared were they that his legacy would expand and grow like a mushroom cloud. They thought their true hatred could extinguish everything Charlie left behind, but they were wrong. They were attacking a cartoon they invented, not the real Charlie Kirk. Charlie was right in the text he wrote the day before he died that Andrew Wilson read: the Left was trying to kill him. Tyler Robinson said the reason he killed Charlie Kirk was that “Some hate can’t be negotiated out.” Amanda Seyfried said “hate,” so did Tyler Robinson, and so did his defense attorney at the hearing where Robinson pled Not Guilty. The Left killed Charlie Kirk. Tyler Robinson just pulled the trigger. Their conviction in the Court of Public Opinion was that dissent was hate and Charlie Kirk would not stop spreading it; therefore, he should be silenced one way or another. Assassinations don’t happen every day, not in my lifetime anyway, especially not from a rooftop at a public event. A year prior to Charlie’s murder, on July 13, 2024, another killer climbed onto a rooftop and almost shot Trump to death. He missed. Just barely. There would be two more assassination attempts on Trump’s life, and plenty more that might have been. Why is it so important to the Left that their enemies die? Because that’s where all of this totalitarianism has to go. Charlie stood for exactly the opposite. He didn’t incite violence. He stood up for robust debate. But to the Left, they don’t believe that, which is why they’ve begun to resort to violence, excusing violence, celebrating violence. To them, that’s their solution to their biggest problem - what to do with all of these people who don’t agree with them? Hate to the Left is described as being anti-abortion, against “transing the kids,” and holding traditional beliefs about family and faith. That’s the first layer. It goes deeper. If you are against illegal immigration, you’re a fascist; if you support lower taxes, you’re killing Americans. “You’re a racist, a bigot, a homophobe, a transphobe. ” They don’t even know what defines their hate anymore. They just know they’re consumed by it, which is all the more ironic given that they tagged Charlie with that word: hate. There was nothing hateful about Charlie Kirk, and he leaves behind a deep, dark hole that won’t be filled any time soon. The Left has become not unlike the jihadists who kill those who mock Allah. Even if they aren’t condoning violence, they’re condoning punishing people just for the crime of criticizing them. That no one shamed those who celebrated tells you everything about their values, and we’re supposed to put these people back in power? No, Charlie wanted to talk to them, to change their minds, to put himself in danger every time he faced them. They hit him with everything they had to shut him up, and nothing worked. And Charlie Kirk got through to them just by stating his opinion and making his case. Imagine that. He was about the best the Right had to offer. He was a lighthouse. The Left had to kill Charlie again because they had to kill his ideas, his thoughts, his speech, lest they somehow find a way out and reach the minds of the indoctrinated and maybe introduce critical thinking. We can’t have that. Are there enough voices to counter the lies by the Left as they attempt to write Charlie’s history? I don’t know. But just for the record, here is how Charlie Kirk spoke about gay people or the LGBT community. Here is how he spoke when confronted about his opinion on affirmative action. He never backed off of what he believed, but he made indoctrinated college kids defend what they’d been taught, and many of them might have left those conversations asking questions too, like how it was that they spent so much of their education being told what to think, not how to think. That is the gift Charlie Kirk gave them. He taught them what college should have - how to think. How to reason. How to question. And for that, he was “spreading too much hate.” No one on the Left had any curiosity about Charlie Kirk because to question the official narrative is too dangerous. But one person did and made this viral TikTok. Shabooki_Sunshine puts into words how I feel, too. I wish more people on the Left would think this way. It wasn’t only the Left. A faction of the Right also rose up in an attempt to kill what Charlie built and what he stood for, attempting to steal his legacy, destroy his widow, and undo everything he worked his entire life to build. The worst of them is the ugly, rotten heart of Candace Owens, bitter that Charlie distanced himself from her, who was exiled from Turning Point because she, like so many of them, had gone full Hitler in deciding the Jews were responsible for all of the evils in the world. That was never Charlie Kirk. Owens flew in like a hungry vulture to pick at Charlie’s corpse and steal his legacy, as she has no legacy of her own. Even now, on the one-year anniversary of her death, she’s harassing his widow, making it all about her. Has there ever been such a loathsome creature? She has done nothing good for humanity or tried to change minds in any positive way. Her entire platform is built on taking advantage of very stupid people, women mostly, who are transfixed by her gobbledegook. Charlie deserved better, but Candace stole him and now pretends he belongs to her. Most disappointing of all are those whom Charlie trusted, bowing in silent deference to Candace, either because they don’t want to alienate her large audience or they’re afraid of her, so they stay silent. They say nothing as she drags Erika Kirk into the arena again and again, blaming her for Charlie’s murder, blaming the Jews, and blaming Erika for being manipulated by the Jews. It is a black hole of delusion and bitterness. Candace Owens had to kill Charlie a second time because she didn’t like the guy who saw her for who she really was, because, of course, he did. Any bright light could figure that one out, even if he was too trusting for too long. She needed him to die a different way so she could rob the grave and get rich. It shouldn’t be that Candace wrote herself into his story so that everyone talking about Charlie Kirk or Erika will have to talk about her, too. But for an empty-eyed sociopath like Candace, even negative attention is better than none at all. The truth is that even in death, Charlie still outclasses all of them, on the Left and the Right, who are trying to kill him twice. The more they lie about him, the less power they have. They could not build what he built. They could not reach the lost boys cast aside by an indifferent cult that had no place for the majority of Americans who don’t have an identity category to elevate themselves and are just trying to live decent lives. They failed to kill Charlie’s memory because his goodness shines through. It’s there in all of the many videos he’s left behind, like a trail of breadcrumbs. It’s there in the beautiful faces of his wife and children. It’s there in how he built a movement and helped elect a president. I hear you, Charlie. I hear your voice, and I know how much you want to be in the fight now, helping stave off a blue wave, helping guide the young, helping to protect your wife and kids. What Charlie Kirk taught me America lost something when Charlie was killed. We saw who we were in how the Left celebrated his death. We saw who we were when the insane conspiracy theories were unstoppable. We saw who we were when few people stood up for Erika Kirk, who was bullied and demonized for months. But we lost something even bigger, too. We lost a bridge back to each other, a guy who would go anywhere and talk to anyone. We don’t have anyone like that now. We don’t have someone who cared that much about bringing back faith and family to the young who are the mercy of the Left’s fundamentalist cult or the increasingly extreme forces rising on the Right. We needed Charlie, and we still need him. But since we don’t have him, we have to keep his memory alive. We have to make sure they don’t kill him twice. The day before Charlie was murdered, he posted this on X: The next day, everyone realized how right he was. I wish I could say what I learned from Charlie was the kindness he showed to people who called him a racist to his face. I wish I could say I was that good. But I am not. The hatred that fills my heart when I see how people lie about Charlie Kirk, especially on the Left, feels like water on a sinking boat. The more I try to bail it out, the more futile it is. I didn’t know Charlie Kirk or think much of him before September 10, 2025. I felt like a phony when he was murdered because I had not been paying attention to what an irreplaceable voice he was. It’s quite a thing to discover who someone is after they’re gone. As I began watching his videos and listening closely to what he said, not what they said he said, I found his voice more necessary than ever. Every time I hear it while scrolling TikTok, I stop and listen. Be more like Charlie Kirk, I think to myself. Listen, debate, persuade. Humanize. I saw young students take the microphone to face him down, hoping to own him, but every time I saw them thaw out and find their humanity because Charlie treated them with respect and always told the crowd to do the same. We need to keep what Charlie left behind alive. We need to protect it. We need to amplify it. We need to make sure the wavering flame is never fully snuffed out. His friends and colleagues, not to mention his wife, shouldn’t have to fight every day to keep what Charlie built alive. But he can rest in peace because we can take it from here. But no, we will never be the same. 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

In the good old days, before the Great Feminization, social media tribalism, and the instant fame of TikTok, most people felt disgust and horror at the thought of a mother killing her kids, let alone methodically leading each one down in the basement, then strangling them with an exercise band. This is the stuff of nightmares. Imagine your mother, the person you trust most in the world, telling you to “go to God, baby” as you felt your throat close and your life wither away. We’ve seen their faces, and we know their names. Everyone should be horrified, and yet, three years after the murders, Lindsay Clancy is not seen as a monster by hundreds of thousands of women all over the world but rather as their hero and a martyr for the agony and pain of motherhood. We are Lindsay! We stand with you, Lindsay! A triple homicide suspect whose fate was upended by one juror who withstood the pressure of 11 others to insist she was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt has become, for women, another Me Too moment. Me too, Lindsay. Me Too. Why are so many women losing their minds over this case, insisting Lindsay isn’t guilty because either she was afflicted with postpartum psychosis and had no control over these acts or Patrick did it because Patrick “said it” and he wanted out of the marriage to go have an affair with the woman he’s now married to. I wish it wasn’t mostly women who are vulnerable to this level of group psychosis. But it is. Women are communal. They tend to form groups or tribes, out of necessity and human evolution. Every time I scroll TikTok, I see them. There they are, staring back at me, those crazy, crazy women, performing for total strangers, united only by one singular idea: Lindsay Clancy is not guilty. Welcome to Rock Bottom Lindsay Clancy has been cast as a typical heroine in a Lifetime movie, or the protagonist in one of the psychological thrillers so popular on Audible. I know this world all too well. I watch these movies as a guilty pleasure, and I consume so many of these books that I forget which ones I’ve already read. It looks something like this: This might explain why the less camera-ready child killers like Andrea Yates or Susan Smith never became a worldwide sensation. The plots play out almost the exact same way. The ambitious, successful, beautiful woman has a seemingly ordinary life until it is disrupted by a dark force. Almost always, this is an abusive, manipulative, lying, cheating man. But not always. Sometimes it’s a woman. Whatever it is, the protag is never to be rescued. She must always rescue herself. Men who are “good” are allowed to admire them from afar and serve them but never save them. Lindsay Clancy has fit neatly into this role, especially if you are one of the truly insane women who believe she didn’t do it, and there are a lot of those. How perfect for a Lifetime movie or a psychological thriller if we found out in the last act that Patrick really did do it and Lindsay emerges as the true victim. Their theory is that Lindsay only thinks she killed the kids when, in reality, Patrick did it. It’s just that Lindsay did do it. She admitted it. She told the Chaplain first. Then, she told her husband and a psychologist that a voice told her to do it. The voice never appeared before or since because the voice was actually the mother who wanted to kill her kids. If Patrick Clancy is guilty of anything, it’s being too kind and trusting of his wife. Their text message exchange the day of the murders: And a recent appearance at his church. Patrick Clancy and their entire family have forgiven Lindsay and believe this was the result of postpartum psychosis, which is why Patrick and Lindsay are both suing the healthcare providers who treated her. And it also explains why they stonewalled, testified for the defense, and refused to give any insight into what else might have driven Lindsay to murder that day. These are not the cries of someone who lost her children but the cries of a woman who remembers that moment she caused them so much fear, so much pain, and their deaths. If a voice ordered her to do it, why didn’t she just say no? Why didn’t she scream for her babies when she snapped out of it? Believe Women I always thought it would be funny to put out a bumper sticker amid the Me Too movement that said: “Believe Children, Salem, 1692.” I’m not sure anyone would have gotten the joke. There aren’t many people out there like me who have read every book, listened to every podcast, and know everything there is to know about the Salem Witch Trials. One thing I know for sure, however, is that it wasn’t about “burning witches” nor was it about the patriarchy punishing women. These are lies that have never been corrected. The truth is that it was adolescent girls, not men, who had the power to decide who could live and who would die. So many people were convicted and hanged in Salem because of “spectral evidence,” what you could not see but could only imagine. There is a reason so much power was handed to those adolescent girls. Spectral evidence is why it’s so hard for so many to see the Lindsay Clancy case clearly. It was postpartum psychosis! It was bad therapy! It was the drugs! It couldn’t have been Lindsay. How else to explain how a seemingly normal “perfect” mother, high-achieving student, biology major, competitive cheerleader, could have killed her kids and then tried to kill herself? And for those girls in Salem, no one would have ever believed they could lie like that for so long. What Cotton Mather would call the Wonders of the Invisible World is the stormy darkness of the female mind. We can see from the Clancy case that so many are unwilling to see it for what it is: a mother who wanted to murder her children and took meds to stop those thoughts from coming, but they came anyway. All she wanted was for the problem to go away. But it’s that mysterious world men don’t dare even try to understand and usually avoid the endless emotional needs of women, which is why women need other women and why so many are now wrapping their arms around Lindsay Clancy. Me too, Lindsay. But what about the kids? Why isn’t there a bigger movement for them? Why is everything and everyone else blamed for their deaths except the woman who planned it? Thought it through. Knew exactly where the bands were and how to kill her children one by one. Spectral evidence is that no one dares question a woman who claims she was in postpartum psychosis and gets away with murder. Lizzie Borden got away with murder, it’s been theorized, because she hid the murder weapon and the bloody clothes in her menstrual pail, and none of the male detectives or any of the lawyers wanted to get anywhere near that subject. How does any society survive when this kind of murder is not only glossed over but excused because it’s the woman who matters, not the kids? Why not the kids? And why are things so much different now from when the case first broke in 2023? It’s easy if you know your Salem history. If Donald Trump was an existential threat to our utopia like the Devil was to Salem, then his second win in 2024 kicked into motion a Me Too on steroids. Now, it isn’t just about who assaulted, harassed, or raped women. It's about all men. Lindsay Clancy became their avatar because she tried to do everything right. She was the best woman, wife, and mother she could be, and it still wasn’t enough. Not even her Beach Body, Attachment Parenting, water parks, or birthday parties were enough. The same woman who left the hospital before she was ready so as not to miss her daughter’s birthday is the same woman who, a short time later, killed her daughter. That mirrors the psychology of what happened to so many women who thought they had enough power to win the presidency with Hillary and then with Kamala. Their collective rage projected onto Lindsay Clancy has exploded in a way it probably never would have otherwise. Trump’s second win, along with a hungry social media churn that wants more stories that will ignite our culture wars, turned a grotesque triple murder into a spectacle of narcissism and look-at-me trauma porn. “Me Too Lindsay” I spent so much of my adult life serving myself, chasing my own happiness because that was the blank check written for me as the first generation to come of age after Rose v. Wade and the Feminist movement. I couldn’t just have kids and get married. My life had to amount to more than that. Women became successful homeowners and business owners, and were elevated to positions of power thanks to a concerted effort to reorder our society and achieve gender parity across all industries and spheres of power. But chasing our happiness would eventually lead us back to where it started. How could we have everything and still not be enough? The world was changing. Now, it wouldn’t just be white men in charge. We would teach the young about the oppressors and the oppressed, and they would grow up to seek social justice, to fight against the colonizing white supremacist empire America had become. We just had no idea what we were building, what kind of madness we would unleash, and how it would all go so wrong for us that we’d end up abandoning women athletes, vulnerable women in prisons - we’d even accept that a transgender woman winning at Chess or Jeopardy was a win for women. We did it! Except that we didn’t. Little by little, the rights of the mostly white feminist women who dominated the Left were eroded. They just weren’t oppressed enough. It was “white feminism” - it was “TERFS.” Women were expected to take two steps back, to de-center themselves if they weren’t “of color” or “trans.” Abortion was all they had left. This baby is not yet human. And should we be that surprised that we’ve arrived here? If a baby is already disposable and if abortions have become almost an act of empowerment, why wouldn’t the killing of children be the next thing women force themselves not to care about? Mass hysteria gripped Salem Village for one long dark winter. But how long will ours last? How far will all of this go? If rock bottom isn’t turning a mother who murdered her children into an internet sensation, I don’t know what is. I am suddenly afraid for babies and children in this country and the mothers who see them as their oppressors. I am afraid of what those mothers might do, and I am even more afraid of a society of women that doesn’t even seem to care. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

The Psychopath Lindsay Clancy, in my opinion, did not want to kill herself. She wanted to kill her children. It was all becoming too much for her, and she felt like she was drowning in it. Drowning in trying to be the perfect wife and the perfect mother. Her thoughts of suicide came as she tried to stop her thoughts of wanting to kill her children because what mother would ever think of doing such a thing? That voice? That was her. That was her hatred bubbling up, especially for Dawson, the middle child. Her hatred at herself for not being the perfect mother, and the loud voice of her inner psychopath who gave her advice on how to end her misery. Kill them. That’s what you really want to do. Then, you can kill yourself. Except that she didn’t really want to kill herself. She is a nurse, after all, and everyone knows how to commit suicide by slitting your wrists. She would know exactly where the carotid artery was, oh, but that voice would tell her just make it look like that was what you were trying to do. Get enough blood to make it convincing, then crawl out the window and into the snow and wait for your husband Patrick to find you and save you. What wasn’t in the plan? The way she fell, paralyzing herself, which is why these, along with whether she had a lawyer or not, were her primary concern once in the hospital. Do my legs work, she asked. The voice guided her through all of this and probably even through the trial now, careful never to disclose that it’s still with her. The camera is on you now, Lindsay. Put on a good show. Maybe a part of her was sad to hear what the voice made her do, but she knew the voice was her own. It was the psychopath within that did not want to do the job of motherhood anymore. She wanted her old life back. She wanted to be who she was before. She wanted control. Her inner voice was herself. She tried every medication she could. She tried aspirations. But the dark thoughts kept seeping through, no matter how much she tried to suppress them. She disclosed these thoughts to her husband and mother and hinted at them to her best friend. What she never did was turn herself in for them as a danger to her own children. If the husband bears any responsibility for these deaths, it is that he did not turn her in himself and keep those precious babies far, far away from her. On the day of the killings, Lindsey Clancy meticulously planned her actions, not as an irrational act but as a coldly rational one. Separating the children one by one and leading them down into the basement would have been scary for them, since it had never happened before. That was where Daddy worked. That was where Mommy worked out. That was where guests slept. It was not where kids belonged. And that ominous walk down those stairs with Mommy must have been terrifying, but their little brains could not comprehend what would happen next. Here is a clip from Chicks on the Right highlighting the prosecutor’s powerful closing. The hope and the reflex is to blame the drugs. We’re a country of people on too many drugs, whether they’re dying on the streets of San Francisco of Fentanyl or they’re murdering their children in Massachusetts. One thing is for sure: lots of people are making lots of money selling the illusion that there is such a thing as being perfect. I noticed this back in the 1990s when suddenly everyone had something wrong with their brains. We’d gone through therapy and healed the trauma and abuse in our past, but it didn’t make us “right” or “correct.” We needed drugs for that. We needed, wanted to be “healthy.” We were the victims of our hard lives, of our society, of our government, of the environment, of our diet, of our education, our culture, our marriages, and yes, even our children. Our children have paid the price, too, because if they weren’t perfect, something had to be wrong with them; we had done something bad or failed at motherhood. The mythical “post-partum” depression came on like one of these ailments in our brains we could do nothing about. We were all supposed to respect women who undergo this affliction and forgive them everything. Over the many decades, especially on the Left, we’ve become separated from ourselves in nearly every way. Whether it’s mothers aborting their children now as a rite of passage and an act of empowerment, or it’s mothers resenting their children and unable to mother them with post-partum. Be afraid, they say, be very afraid. And then, all the way down to our precious babies whose genders we now view as potentially “something wrong with their brains.” Mothers allow gender clinics, teachers, and influencers to tell them they don’t know their own babies. Drugs will fix them. Surgery, intervention, turn them into something else, someone else, someone more perfect. Women did not evolve to do it all alone. We evolved to be hovered over by our own mothers, our aunts, our sisters. Since women had babies so young in every era except the modern one, they needed the help and guidance of older women, which is why humans are among the tiny handful of species that undergo menopause, like Killer Whales. Older women have a role: to guide, to lead, and to help raise the younger generations. Lindsay Clancy wanted to do it all alone. Or at least, she wanted it to look like she did. An athlete, a nurse, and a mom, she wanted that Instagram fantasy all women believe they deserve. It all looked so good outwardly, from photos to testimonies of family and friends. But Lindsay was good at hiding. She was not a good mother at all, it turns out. She was a psychopath. It isn’t that mothers don’t kill their babies. They do. They dump them in trash cans, leave them in toilets, beat them until they can no longer breathe. Andrea Yates believed her children were demons and that they needed to be killed. That is what true psychosis looks like, and it’s more common than it should be. Women should not be doing motherhood alone, at least not those who are fragile enough to crack under pressure. It’s not easy. It's shocking how difficult it can be just to try to live your life after you’ve had a baby, but it is especially so for the modern woman who is used to centering herself. I was one such woman. By the time I had my baby at 32, I wanted her. She was a way for me to heal from my own childhood because I would do everything right. My own mother got so angry at times she flew into violent rages. She had four babies before the age of 25, and that must have been hard. We were untamed, wild children, and she needed control. Even now, I sometimes feel nervous when I spend time with her because we never knew when the fury would arrive or why. Like Lindsay, I was into the “attachment parenting” method, which is just the natural way women raised children before they invented things like cribs and formula. I didn’t want drugs during childbirth and wanted to do it all naturally. This is the kind of pressure women put on themselves to be perfect. If one thing goes wrong, they feel like a failure. And things will always go wrong. Breastfeeding them, co-sleeping with them, hugging them when they cry. Lindsay felt guilt for not being the perfect attachment parent and leaving her baby to cry it out with sleep training. She couldn’t sleep, and this was supposedly the solution. But leaving babies to cry it out is another way to separate mothers from their natural instincts, and Lindsay knew that too. But if the baby went away, then the problems went away too. After 18 hours of agonizing labor, I begged for the epidural. They’d already given me morphine, which did nothing. My labor was induced, and the contractions were unlike anything I’d ever felt in my life. The only thing I could do was scream. And when she finally came out of me, and I saw her face, I knew her already. I recognized her. My baby. I kept yelling for the nurse, “Just give me my baby!” They wanted to clean her up and check her vitals, but I just wanted to hold her in my arms to keep her safe. When they finally gave her to me and when I was complaining that I had wanted to do it naturally, without drugs, the nurse looked at me and said, “Healthy mom, healthy baby.” She was right. That’s all that mattered. That’s also the kind of thing labor and delivery nurses see all the time. They see the perfect and the imperfect. They see the joys and the tragedies. They see the struggles and failures. Lindsay Clancy knew all of them. I didn’t let go of my baby for a full two weeks. She stayed in my arms and close to me at all times. I had nightmares of something happening to her — what would I do? If there was a fire, or an intruder, or an earthquake, or a mass shooter. I was raising her without a father, which made me both the father and the mother, and yes, that was hard. It meant my life would no longer be the most important thing. Of course, I lost my temper on occasion. But I knew I would never be like my mom. I might have been if I’d had more than one. Children are their own people. They don’t do exactly what you want them to do at all times. One of my jobs was writing movie reviews, and if my daughter didn’t go down for a nap, I couldn’t make the showtime, so I’d drive around until she did, and sometimes she didn’t, and I felt the pressure of that, and I would think and sometimes say, “time for sleep!” The few times I lost my temper stay with me. They haunt me. I wish I could go back and scrub them from my memory and my life because I was, I think, all things considered, a pretty good mom otherwise. Perfect? No. And we all want to be perfect because if something is wrong with our kids, it means we weren’t perfect mothers. I would hear the complaints of other mothers and their difficult children. Why couldn’t they behave? I saw them punish them with time-outs, and I always thought I was so lucky to have such a good kid. It was never bad for me. It was the best thing that’s ever happened in my life. So I can’t get there. I can’t imagine wanting a life without my daughter. My life is my daughter. And this is what I think haunted Lindsay Clancy the most. She wasn’t a perfect mother because one of her kids was driving her crazy with his obstinacy. He was the middle child, Dawson. She loved the daughter and the baby, but Dawson did not do as he was told and made everything a battle. When your life runs like clockwork and that life depends on everyone and everything doing things perfectly, one piece of the puzzle that keeps flying out of our hands is the one that will drive you to anger and, in her case, hopelessness. What was it all for anyway? Of course she was depressed. Lots of people struggle with feeling lost and hopeless, but in Lindsay’s case, she believed she was disappearing because everyone’s needs had to come before hers. Unless, of course, she could get rid of the child, the one making the picture not perfect. But how could she just kill him? No, she’d have to kill them all and then kill herself, or at least make it look like she tried. She wanted to terrorize her husband. And terrorize she did. The screams haven’t been heard by the watchers, all of those paying close attention to the trial at home. Only those in the room and the jury heard the husband’s anguished cries upon coming home and seeing his dead babies. I studiously avoided the Lindsay Clancy trial. It was like those animal abuse videos you scroll quickly by or at least fast-forward to the inevitable happy ending, if there is one. I did not want to get inside this story or put the images of those poor, sweet children strangled one by one in my head. But eventually, like everyone else, I had to pay attention to it. There were so many crazy women — mostly on the Left but some on the Right — who have stood alongside Lindsay, sympathized with her, celebrated her, attempted to say she wasn’t guilty, that her husband did it, the drugs did it, the doctors did it, everyone but Lindsay herself. There is such a thing as post-partum depression, which can often lead to feelings of sadness and helplessness after the birth of the child. No one can or should tell a woman she isn’t suffering from it, but it’s also taken on a new meaning in our modern age, a thing that happens to women that they can’t control, separating us from our natural selves. A tragedy waiting for them on the other end of the line. We don’t live in a society that wants us to care about the little life conceived. We live in a society that wants mothers to be victims and martyrs - not only their babies, but their husbands or men in general- are doing something bad to them. The baby grows and changes everything. The man injects the sperm. The woman must be the helpless, passive participant who takes care of everything. That might not have been Lindsay Clancy, but her careful planning of how her husband would find his children and his wife by the time he came home required pre-meditation. She knew what those exercise bands could do, because, of course, she did. She worked out every day. Did she think of what those bands would do every time she picked one up and felt the tension in her hands? What could this do to a child’s neck? How long would it take? The Long Day It was an ordinary day like any other. She’d taken her daughter to the doctor and texted Patrick, her husband, a photo of their daughter on the day she would murder her. He texted her back a photo of Dawson, who had dressed himself for the first time. Did she think and wonder how Dawson could be so much better behaved with Daddy? Lindsay came home with Cora, who was having stomach problems. She probably was picking up the stress of her mother’s bizarre flatness for some time before the murders. She was the oldest. She would know something was wrong. Patrick went to work in his basement office as their smallest baby, Callan, went down for a nap. Lindsay built a snowman with Dawson and Cora. Did Dawson give her his usual trouble? Did he say something bad to her? Or was she planning this day all along? By the time she got inside, she put her plan in motion. She texted her husband at 4:53 pm, “Any chance you want to do takeout from ThreeV … I didn’t cook anything … It’s been a long day.” She checked the map to see how long it would take him, and it wasn’t long enough, so she asked him to go to the drug store to pick up medicine for Cora. At 5:15 Patrick left, after kissing his daughter Cora and rocking his baby Callan, and said, “I’ll be right back.” That would be the last time he saw them alive. He’d be home by 6:09 pm and arrive to an absolutely quiet house. Lindsey wanted him to call out for her and his children. She probably knew he’d go upstairs next. Maybe she thought he would just go to the basement and find his dead babies, with Dawson lying dead in his office. cBut he didn’t. He tried to find Lindsay. And when he saw the blood and the window and ran down to her where she was still alive, because of course she was, and asked her, “What did you do?” She said, “I tried to kill myself.” All Lindsay said when he asked where the children were was, “They’re in the basement.” She wanted him to see that horror. Why? Who does that? A psychopath does that. Not a woman suffering from post-partum depression. Not a woman in a state of confusion. No, a cold-blooded killer makes these choices to stage an event that would leave her children dead and herself barely alive but alive. A nurse who didn’t know how to properly cut her wrists or her throat? She wanted to punish her husband. She wanted to punish everyone. She wanted to be free. She just didn’t think that would mean being in a wheelchair for the rest of her life. That was the unintended consequence of her plan. The jury was excused for the weekend. I don’t expect this jury in Massachusetts, comprised mostly of women, will convict Lindsay Clancy of murder. That’s what she deserved. No, she’ll get off easier as some version of Not Guilty by reason of insanity. And that will be a lie. Coming up, Part Two: The Sycophants // This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

The Democrats are just now waking up to a viral video of Hasan Piker singing We Are Charlie Kirk to a cacophony of cheers from the clapping seals in the sociopathic dehumanization factory known as the New Left. Why do they believe they are morally superior to the working-class Trump voters? Because the legacy media props them up and never calls them out. Well, now, they have a bad case of Hasan Piker, and as long as they stand with him, they will have to excuse the idiotic things he says and does, like wearing a Mao costume and mocking the grief of the Right after Charlie’s brutal murder. Not many Democrats will take that moral stand against Piker. They’re too afraid to look uncool, un-manly, and lose all of his millions of followers. And besides, they will say, Trump is “just as bad.” Trump mocked the deaths of his enemies, but Charlie Kirk was not Hasan Piker’s enemy. Maybe he’s jealous of the love millions had for Charlie - real love, not the kind Hasan Piker has, his sycophants begging him to be more sadistic, not just to his dog. These are dark and disturbed people. We are now approaching the one-year anniversary of the brutal, bloody, premeditated, calculated murder of Charlie Kirk by a guy whose desire to become a somebody drove him to become a hero for a day. Maybe he did it for his confused and anguished lover who could not decide on his gender identity. Maybe he did it for the pathologically insane furry community on Discord. Maybe he was whipped into a frenzy and aimed at Charlie by, oh, I don’t know, the CIA or the FBI. They’ve done worse. Israel, however, it was not. That didn’t stop craven psychopath Candace Owens - whom Piker calls his “Queen” - from plundering the grave of her “friend” Charlie. The truth is that he kept her at a distance, needed her to help build Blexit, and then, when she got too crazy, he slowly, carefully backed away. She blamed Erika for that. She blamed Turning Point. One thing is for sure: she is too much of a narcissist to put the blame where it really belongs, on herself. Chicks on the Right had an illuminating interview with Andrew Kolvet of Turning Point to clarify just what kind of relationship Charlie really had with Candace and why she’s become a woman scorned. But if Candace’s exploitation of Charlie’s death dwarfed the Left’s celebrating, Hasan Piker somehow manages to top them all. What most people who are just waking up to the true evil that is Hasan Piker singing We Are Charlie Kirk don’t know is that just over a month after Charlie’s murder, one of Piker’s putrid streams brought him a tiny bit of internet fame for mocking the song. Why did he think it was funny? Because he’s a dehumanizing, repulsive shitheel who uses his dog as a prop when he’s not shocking her to keep her in place. He’s mocking MAGA for listening to and celebrating an AI-generated song that, to date, has over 6 million views. There were lots of AI songs about Charlie. I even fell for it for a brief moment because I wanted to believe there were people on the Left kind enough, empathetic enough, and generous enough to sing about Charlie. But of course not. It was an empty void, one that AI filled. And Hasan Piker, puny little cockroach that he is, found it “funny.” You see, he’s trying to outdo 4chan all in the name of selling Communism and Islam. Hey, it’s worth it to sell your soul to take control of America. He kept dipping back into that bowl because that’s what you do if you are an influencer. You give the people more of what they want, and in his case, it’s sitting on his dog-torturing basement throne, while mocking the working class. He couldn’t get enough of it. He was like an uncut bull let loose in a field of fertile cows. On and on it went. He made his name on it. Most of this was done just over a month after the shooting, but he’s continued to use it for the lols, even two months ago. So it was natural that when he took the stage, he would sing it live, like he was the Rolling Stones, dragging out “Jumping Jack Flash,” or Elvis Costello, singing “Pump It Up” one more time. Yes, he was mocking MAGA, people he deems lower class and beneath his sorry ass, and making fun of how deeply the murder of Charlie Kirk dug into their morale. Most people don’t exist in the dank, slimy corners of the internet, so they might not know how long Piker has been dragging this story out. What else is he going to do? Talk about healthcare? No, everyone wants to see human suffering, and he’s more than willing to give it. He loves Candace Owens too because water seeks its own level. But it was a serious thing. Even Megyn Kelly once talked about why it mattered that we were saying “We are Charlie Kirk.” We are people the Left wants to see unpersoned at best and dead at worst. But most of all, just to shut up, and that’s what Tyler Robinson did to Charlie Kirk. He silenced him. The AI song was a way to make something happen that our culture would never have allowed because almost no musician would ever risk their careers like that. Remember when Jamie Lee Curtis offered him some sympathy and was raked over the coals and had to apologize? Yeah, that. Yes, if you are a sociopath who has bought into the decade-long, systematic campaign against the working class, you would think the AI song was funny, and maybe, a year later, it is kind of. But there was nothing funny about it in November of 2025 when Hasan Piker made his name on it. Hasan Piker fancies himself a fighter for the poor. He is anything but. He’s a pampered little rich kid who is absolutely a high-status influencer among the ruling class, just like Zohran Mamdani is. Bernie Sanders never worked a day in his life and was even kicked off a commune for not doing enough work, and by the looks of it, AOC will follow in his footsteps with a lifetime on the people’s dime. They can’t imagine a culture that doesn’t represent them, or that would punish artists for daring to play at the Kennedy Center or to celebrate America’s 250th birthday. Sorry, Democrats. You’re stuck with a guy who isn’t worthy of even being in the same room with Charlie Kirk, but who once was in the room with Charlie Kirk. That is how emptied out his soul really is. So no wonder it was so easy for Hasan Piker to mock Charlie Kirk even in death. He must have felt diminished in those debates. Who wouldn’t have? Charlie was smarter, quicker on his feet, and taller. Hasan Piker shines just a little bit brighter now that the brightest light has fallen. But he’ll never be like Charlie. He’ll never build a movement built on hope and faith. He’ll never change the world. He’ll always be on the outside, with his face pressed up against the glass, enjoying his one brief moment in the spotlight. And now he’s your problem, Democrats. You can’t wipe off the stain even if you used bleach. Good luck with that. ____ Leave a tip Manage subscription 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

Today, after staying on Jon Ossoff’s email list for eight years, I finally hit unsubscribe. This is my Dear Jon letter, and in some ways, the moment I will really be saying goodbye to the Democratic Party once and for all. I will admit I held on too long with Ossoff. Try as I might over the past six years since leaving the party to extricate myself from their relentless email machine, I didn’t mind when Ossoff’s emails flew into my mailbox. In 2017, I saw in Ossoff what the Democrats needed as they tried to find their next Obama stand-in. He fit the bill perfectly. I also liked how he didn’t seem to buy into the party's increasingly crazy extremes but was comfortably moderate, at least for a time. My record with Federal political donations tells the tale. If anyone looks at my record, they’ll see I continued donating to ActBlue through 2025. Except that I didn’t. I just didn’t realize they were charging me all that time. That’s how relentless they are and how stupid I am. The Glow-Up Before the expensive makeup, strategic lighting and tight shirts, Ossoff looked like what Steve Bannon would call a “pencil-necked geek.” He was too skinny, even if he was an Obama clone. He seemed too good, too clean for dirty politics back then. I fell for the lie that Ossoff really was a self-made man, a “filmmaker who turned to politics,” per this Wall Street Journal video. He is hardly self-made. More like a hot house flower. Ossoff grew up in a political household. Both parents were heavily involved in politics. At just 19, he began working on Capitol Hill for Rep. Hank Johnson while attending Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service and continued working for him until 2012. His email list was mostly the kind of thing you’d get in the old days of the Democratic Party, the kind of thing you’d expect from the Obama clone factory. But that isn’t really where Ossoff is now in his political career. He is determined not to go down as a squeaky-clean beta male. No, Ossoff has gotten SWOLE. He appears to have brought in a team to fix the look to be camera-ready. The makeup, the hair, the dimples. Ossoff finally looks the part. He can do alpha. All of a sudden, he’s the guy everyone is talking about. He’s the guy who is suddenly the hottie on tap. True, he’s Jewish, and that’s a problem for the Democrats, but no one really talks about that. Instead, they’re selling the matinee idol on TikTok. The truth is, I didn’t think about Jon Ossoff much until he went viral for channeling his inner sexist in a desperate bid to get attention and rise to the top of the pile. And it worked. He went viral! He’s in the headlines now, and everyone knows his name. But this version of Jon Ossoff will never be president. He’s abandoned what made him exceptional in the first place, his decency and his goodness. The sharks demanded flesh and blood, and he gave it to them, but it will come at a cost. One of the main reasons Democrats have failed for the past ten years to gain any purchase in this country has been their obsessive fixation on Trump, which is pretty much all Ossoff is doing. It’s a race to the bottom to see who can out-Trump Trump, to be more confrontational, more bullying, more vulgar, and tougher. They believe this will solve their “man problem,” and who knows, maybe it will. I look at Ossoff now, and I don’t see someone tough or brave. I see a coward. Ossoff, like James Talarico and almost every Democrat, is now leaning into the party's extremes. Because of course he is. He has to. In his viral speech in Atlanta, he referenced his daughters and said they will ask him one day how he let things get so bad, and, in the same sentence, dismiss the concerns of little girls and women in sports. Guess what, Jon: thousands of little girls will one day ask you why you let it happen, why you allowed so many of them to believe they should amputate their breasts when they could not consent. They will look to you, Jon. You will have to tell them why you pretended biological males had no advantage in sports because you were too cowardly to stand up to your own party. I once thought Ossoff was a good man. Now I see him as a desperate man, no different from any other Democrat, so much so that he’s given himself over to what has become an uncontrollable fetish on the Left to dehumanize Donald Trump and his supporters. They slut-shamed Melania’s modeling photos, splashing them all over social media. They suggested Trump was having an affair with his own daughter. They took a bath in Karoline Leavitt’s Vanity Fair photos, which splashed all over TikTok and led to her being called KKKaroline. They mocked Kellyanne Conway’s age and her face, and Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ makeup. It’s grotesque and repulsive, but it is typical and ongoing. Even now, Rosie O’Donnell is out there on primetime television calling Trump a “serial pedophile and rapist.” It doesn’t matter if it’s true. It only matters if it happened in their imagination. They spent whole seasons giggling about the particulars of the Stormy Daniels affair, and they were willing to forgive lusty E. Jean Carroll’s sexy talk at Anderson Cooper and envision instead a ridiculous, implausible, violent rape incident that most likely never happened. They call Trump a rapist so they can kill him. They call him a racist so they can kill him. They call him a fascist so they can kill him. They call him a pedophile so they can kill him. They just want to kill him, and every day the hungry beast must be fed. Before you say “But Trump says…” there’s a difference. No one on the Right, least of all Trump, pretends to be morally superior to the other half of the country as they have on the Left. There are no death fantasies. They don’t go “no contact.” They don’t destroy your career if you even so much as like a post by the other side. The price of admission in their world is that you have to want Trump dead too. You must forsake him, and then they will welcome you with open arms. That’s who they are and what they’ve become and why I could not and will never be a part of that world anymore. Now, Ossoff has become one of them. The party of women knows destroying a woman like Natalie Harp isn’t a good look, because she is sympathetic. She’s a homeschooled bone cancer survivor whose father committed suicide. And Ossoff, to paraphrase Aaron Sorkin, gets on television and calls her a w***e. And that, more than anything, defines the men of the Left, too. They can’t stand up to those crazy, crazy women. They have no real courage to stand up to the extremists either. They know they are muzzled and must do as they’re told. Cowardly beta males like musician Bill Madden, a keyboard warrior whose fingers tingle every day when he has the chance to say the worst things he can as long as it’s aimed at women on the Right. It kind of helps to see what he really looks like, just a fading nobody clinging to his youth. This quote is on his Wikipedia: “… when it comes to inequality, historically, no group of people has been discriminated against more than women. Men have been f*****g up the world for thousands of years. It’s time we give more women a chance to lead.” Oh really? I guess you have to say which women, eh Bill? Not all of them. It’s possible the Democrats overplayed their hand and have realized the Natalie Harp story is not a win for them. You can see them now reeling it in, trying to say Trump amplified it as a distraction because it makes the Democrats look bad. Oh no, my friends, you did that all on your own. The problem is that where there is chum in the water, there are hungry sharks. The lower the Democrats go, like Jennifer Welch and Hasan Piker, the more the candidates seeking office must feed the hungry beasts. The Party of Crazy, Crazy Women They might think the Great Feminization has made society better, but it has left them like a women’s prison, or stranded on a desert island with the only men in sight being the weak, flaccid, pandering, ineffectual men of the Left. And that has left the women, shall we say, a bit unhinged. Can you blame the women stuck on that island for losing their minds when they saw Zohran Mamdani’s TikToks? Most of what he does now seems directly related to how much women on TikTok will swoon over him. Parents’ night out? Free helmets? Doxing millionaires? Free groceries? Rent freeze! Abdul El-Sayed is following the same sales pitch of aiming his TikTok videos at the young ladies, flexing his muscles and waving his backside at the camera in a way no white man could ever get away with, certainly not while positioning themselves as a sexy “Daddy” figure. They don’t just want sexy back; they also want to be the party of fun and are working on a TikTok rebrand. The problem is that the base of the Democratic Party, mostly white women, are nuttier than a five-pound fruitcake. We found out just how nutty this past week as a movement began to form in support of child murderer Lindsay Clancy. There they were again, those crazy, crazy women showcasing their pathology on TikTok. They weren’t shaving their heads this time or wearing blue bracelets. They were elevating Lindsay Clancy as the victim, even after she confessed to strangling the life out of her three kids. These are the kinds of lunatics whose votes Jon Ossoff needs. And that is why he has finally given them exactly what they want. The irony of all of this is Natalie Harp was hurled into the arena for unending mockery, slut-shaming, and fantasies. Doesn’t she count as a woman, too? Isn’t she worthy of support? A Feeding Frenzy The media was all too ready to devour the bloody chum Ossoff threw into the water. It’s just that, as with everything they do, it’s not real. It’s fake news. There is no bottom when it comes to how they report on Donald Trump and especially the women who surround him. But some of the lows have been extraordinary, like dragging out Harp’s wayward, socialist hippie brother to exploit the tragedy of their falling out after the death of their father. It doesn’t get much darker than that. Or more desperate. Here is Larry O’Connor on Townhall: O’Connor again with Mark Halperin and Kevin Walling on Next Up: Scott Jennings had no trouble setting the record straight. Ossoff’s sleazy attack on Harp reveals his biggest weakness. He wants it too bad, and he sold himself out. And maybe that makes him ready to be the democratic nominee. Want those big donations? Trash women, trash working-class voters, dehumanize your fellow Americans. Sell women and girls down the river. Pander to the extremists. Smear the character of a young woman like Natalie Harp just to go viral, just to please the unhinged women on the Left who don’t even know what a woman is. For his part, Trump flicked Ossoff away like a speck of dust on his suit, calling him Pee Wee Herman. And if we know one thing about Donald Trump, once you get hit with a nickname, it sticks. // Become a paid subscriber or leave a tip. Manage subscription 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

When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez laughed off Woke 1.0, she attempted to distance herself from a movement she not only helped build but also led. Because the DSA is ascendant, they’re hoping to pivot to kitchen table issues just long enough to trick otherwise sane people into voting for them. Hasan Piker started wearing suits. Abdul El-Sayed is attempting to draw in Trump supporters by showcasing his white grandparents. And out in Texas, James Talarico is making ads with his Paw Paw. They’re just regular folks, like you and me. Well, except that they want to tear America down to the studs and rebuild it as a woked-up socialist paradise. But shsh. Nothing to see here, move along, move along. Woke 1.0 wasn’t just some silly thing that happened to them one time. It is a deeply held belief system that has been passed on through the generations and mandates conformity across all institutions and culture. It is not an ideology so much as the biggest cult in American history. As we’ve watched their power weaken after Trump’s second win, we see them now more clearly than ever trying to cling to it. Calling white people racist gets louder. Ordering women to obey the rules of language, like the refusal to use the word “cis” or whether or not dating bisexual men, makes you homophobic. Cults must always control the women, separate them from their children. True for Charles Manson, Jim Jones, or Scientology. It’s so bad on the Left now that the only right women fight for now is the right to kill their own babies. From White Fragility to protecting women in sports or locker rooms, not to mention children, the once and former feminists are MIA. Many of them are so desperate to be led and dominated by men that they are becoming Muslim reverts: Back in the 1970s, women were also vulnerable and impressionable because the Counter Culture revolution was all about leaving traditional values, like family and religion, behind to “find yourself.” Women were suddenly free, yet all they seemed to want was to find someone to follow. All of those white college girls of privilege were either sucked into cults, moving into vans, or shooting up banks. Meanwhile, the black community was vulnerable, too, and that is how cult leaders like Jim Jones took advantage of them. He was selling things not that different from today’s Left. The Origins of Woke 1.0 I’ll never forget May 25th of 2016. I decided to splurge for my daughter’s 18th birthday by taking her to see Hamilton on Broadway, with nearly the entire original cast. The tickets, flight, and hotel were too expensive, but we’d never get this moment back, so why not? It was the same year my daughter would visit the NYU campus, have her prom, and I would be doing everything I could to elect Hillary Clinton as the first female President of the United States, with the doomed hashtag #imwithher. I was part of a generation of parents who wanted to not just be better but to perfect ourselves, our children, and our world. I can’t pinpoint exactly when we transformed from anti-establishment Gen-Xers to helicopter parents. But I know it had to do with the therapy culture of the 1990s, capped off by Columbine in 1999, 9/11, and the two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that followed. Something was wrong, not just with all of us, but with our country too. The person elected to heal us from all of this collective, multi-generational trauma was Barack Obama, who became our spiritual leader and our male role model. 2012 was the moment Obama and the millennial do-gooder establishment that surrounded him sought to make our country better through indoctrination in public schools and universities. Hillary Clinton was chosen as the torchbearer, but she lacked Obama’s charisma and had nothing to sell the public that they wanted except one thing: identity politics. It wasn’t enough. Our cult over-reacted to Trump’s win, as though it was the FBI showing up outside the Koresh compound. It was Doomsday and that dark cloud would cover everything we controlled, from Hollywood to the legacy media to book publishing to fashion to influencer culture. We drew a line, and if you wanted in, you could not cross it. If you wanted out, all you had to do was question authority. But it was what we weren’t watching that would be our biggest problem later. We weren’t watching the kids. Teenage Wasteland What happened to the nation’s young people, having been indoctrinated in the oppressor/oppressed mindset, where they saw racism, homophobia, transphobia, and Islamophobia everywhere they looked, even before Trump won, kicked into motion an apocalyptic fantasy that would justify everything they did, from protests to violence to assassinations. The internet was their fantasy world, which gave many of them absolute power. This was true whether it was social justice warriors who ultimately led the transgender contagion among young girls, or the boys who gravitated to 4-chan and would eventually lead to the rise of the mass shooter influencer, like Tyler Robinson, Matthew David Crooks, or Luigi Mangione. The first real sign of trouble happened nine years ago at Evergreen College. When I first saw this story, I was already pulling away from the cult, but even then, I was afraid to put it on social media because I knew it would be seen as “racist.” And yet, by burying this story, the Left set itself up for much worse down the road. Violence showed up as early as 2015 during Woke 1.0, when Trump supporters were often beaten, kicked, and spat on. The protests at Trump’s inauguration seemed to be a natural extension of the mass hysteria that consumed the Left in 2016. It would only get worse. The violence we’re seeing on the Left only escalated, culminating in a full-blown revolution on the streets in 2020, a mob demanding diners raise their fist for Black Lives Matter, and authoritarianism rising from a generation raised to believe they have the right to tear down what they didn’t build and make the whole country pay because of it. That put power briefly back in the hands of Joe Biden, who pandered to the mob. They believed the false narratives around January 6th, decided MAGA was the cult, and walked away from this story. They barely even talk about it now. The entire Democratic Party became the administrators at Evergreen, too crippled by white guilt to provide the necessary leadership and discipline these kids needed before they graduated and joined the workforce. But even still, the most dangerous legacy Woke 1.0 leaves behind isn’t what it’s done to kids or to culture, to our sense of history or to our unity as a country. No, in dividing us into the oppressed and the oppressor, it opened the door to America’s enemies to exploit the sitting ducks on the Left and name Islam as the most oppressed and thus hand it the most power. Then the enemy walked through the door we left open. Woke 2.0 My daughter was three when the planes hit the towers. I remember waking up to the news. Imagine the days before we all had cell phones, or even social media. I had to call my friend and tell her to turn on the news. This was the first time America had been attacked on this level since Pearl Harbor. But terrorism accomplished very little for Islam. It turned the US and the world against them. They were feared and even hated. Our country would transform into a surveillance state, and there’s an argument to be made that everything we’re living through now is not because of COVID but because of 9/11. Changing hearts and minds would be the way the Islamic world would rise from the ashes. Before long, there was a new word that controlled our thought and speech: Islamophobia. I didn’t realize how deep it all went until 2017, the same year as Evergreen. Wonder Woman had come out. My daughter really loved it, but she was afraid to say so online. Why? Because Gal Gadot was an Israeli who trained with the IDF. I was as shocked by this development as I was when she told me her friend was becoming a “he” and wanted “top surgery.” What on earth were they teaching our kids? Idiot liberals like me had no idea. And by the time many of us figured it out, it was too late. Palestine joined the wheel of oppression and took its place in the hierarchy long before October 7th. Hamas attacked Israel, and Putin invaded Ukraine with Joe Biden in power. They clearly saw him as a weak and addled president who would not be able to manage these wars, so what better time to test the hearts and minds campaigns and the way our enemies had begun to destroy us from within. October 7th wasn’t a random attack. It was an act of such extreme violence that Israel would have no choice but to go to war, and in so doing, a worldwide campaign to defend the oppressed in Palestine could turn the entire world against Israel. But it wasn’t until the rise of Zohran Mamdani, Hasan Piker, and now Abdul El-Sayed and the entire DSA that we could see how fruitful the decades-long hearts-and-minds campaign really was. The Holocaust, to these young people, barely matters. They have no idea what Stalin did, what Mao did, or even really what Hitler did. And they know better than to criticize Islam because that would make them a racist. There was only one place left to go. Just like the leap from World War I to World War II, so too would the jump from Woke 1.0 to Woke 2.0 land on the eternal scapegoat: the Jews. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel. Islam and Socialism. Islam and Black Lives Matter. Islam and Medicare for all. These two movements have so much in common, from controlling thought and speech to controlling women and children. But really, it’s all about their shared enemies, Israel and the US. Woke 2.0 isn’t just the Left, however. It’s also a large portion of the Right who have named Israel as the ultimate evil as well, so much so that they are following Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson down the rabbit hole to deflate any offense against the rising radicalism — terrorism - on the Left. Both Nick Fuentes and Hasan Piker have chimed in to declare Candace is helping to defeat the Right and absolve the Left. They can’t believe their luck. What unites all of them is their conclusion that Israel and the Jews are the problem. China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea know us better than we know ourselves. Who needs bombs when you have white fragility? Who needs censorship when you have cancel culture? But Islam that wants more. They seek to overtake and convert the United States the way we once feared the Communists might. With the oppressor/oppressed ideology and the rise of Islamo-Marxism, there is no stopping them now. A TikTok user quoting Sharifa Alkhateeb and an Iranian. They just needed the right script, and they found it with helpless resistance libs who have run out of options and Gen-Z, raised on convenience culture who are lured in by the promise of free stuff. Who needs suicide vests and box cutters when you have TikTok? We would start two failed wars after 9/11 called the “War on Terror.” People like me were convinced we were wrong. Now, just as with Joseph McCarthy and the Red Scare, considering how it all turned out, I have to wonder. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

I was caught between worlds in 2020. I began the year as a faithful, loyal Democrat and a true believer in Fauci the Hero vs. Trump the Villain. I was never an anti-masker or anti-vaxxer, at least, not in the beginning. As the year wore on, however, the questions started piling up in my head. Why, I wondered, was it politics as usual if this pandemic was as serious as CNN said it was? Why, if the virus was microscopic, did masks suddenly become not only essential but mandatory identifiers in our society? Why, if it was so serious, did millions flood the street on Memorial Day Weekend to protest the death of George Floyd at the hands of the police, and 1,000 health experts signed a letter saying protesting was more important than a pandemic that was supposedly hitting the black community especially hard? Every time I’d ask a question, the unified whole would scream back at me, parroting the exact same talking points from the legacy media and the Democrats. No one was allowed to even ask a question, much less question the official party line. Why? The cult of Dr. Fauci. We hadn’t seen a hero rise like that since Barack Obama in 2008. We believed in him. We trusted him. We loved him. To question him became blasphemy, and even now, if you say his name among liberals, they will scowl at you. The cult of Fauci and the legacy media became one in 2020. They made him a star and, in turn, he went along with the official narrative that Trump was not competent in a crisis and helped the media convince the public to vote him out. But the truth was always chasing Dr. Fauci like a shadow, and the questions were not going away. Lucky for all of us, he kept a record of what he thought and did in 2020, and it is one history will never forget and should never forget. Dr. Fauci showed the half of America that voted for Donald Trump what he thought of them when he declined to answer any questions in Congress and instead pleaded the Fifth 111 times. Americans required something other than politics as usual when the pandemic arrived on our shores, but taking out a president was already the establishment's primary objective, and Dr. Fauci would prove instrumental in convincing Americans that Trump could not be trusted in a crisis. As Ann Coulter says on her Substack : Fauci was the left’s most promising silver bullet to take out Trump. As such, the media would brook no dissent from his COVID edicts. Liberals would not only destroy the economy, but countless lives, in order to slay a pestilence worse than the virus: Donald J. Trump. Taking down a president It might sound conspiratorial to say that the Democrats and their allies in the administrative state would crash the economy just to take Trump out of power, but the truth is even darker. Everything had to go wrong under Trump, including the economy. The more Fauci contradicted Trump, the more the legacy media celebrated him, elevated him, and the more the Cult of Fauci rallied around him. That led to more attacks by Trump. It’s not a coincidence that cases began to surge as their own kind of October surprise, allowing the Democrats to increase measures ahead of the 2020 election. All the while, what Fauci seemed to care about most was the attention paid to him by high-profile celebrities. I was one of those people who trusted CNN and watched as they scared us, night after night, with the death count from COVID ticking upward, with no mention of who was getting hit the hardest. It just looked like everyone, everywhere was getting sick and dying. What sweet relief to hear RFK, Jr. confront Dana Bash on CNN about their willingness to pump fear into the veins of the unsuspecting public: And yet, as we found out by the Cup Foods surveillance recording, in areas the Democrats supposedly governed, like Minneapolis, the day George Floyd died, no one in that store, including him, who was still recovering from COVID, was wearing a mask. When I saw that, I realized just how small our bubble really was. Dr. Fauci knew he was a media-made star. He marvels at it throughout his diary, shaking his head at the attention paid to him but hanging on every word. But he had no immunity to this level of adulation and celebrity. This was a lot for a guy almost no one knew until he became a household name. Fauci and the Bobbleheads Fauci’s diaries throughout 2020 paint a picture of a seduction. Fauci the Hero was drawn in by those who projected their distrust and hatred of Trump onto him. The more he played that role, the higher his profile would rise. Of course, Hollywood would cast him that way. That’s what they do. But it wasn’t just Hollywood. It was all the most high-profile figures on CNN, ABC News, MSNBC, NPR, PBS and SNL. Fauci kept a healthy remove in the beginning. This wasn’t his first rodeo, but he is only human after all. Trump was trying to open the country back up even in late March, instinctively knowing that in an election year, crashing the economy would be the end for him. And then, the press began to tie him to Trump: July 13, 2020: Fauci lapped up the praise with a mixture of astonishment and bemusement. Praise and adoration from Funny Girl and Pretty Woman would have gone to anyone’s head. Or the painting and growing friendship with folk singer Joan Baez: A note to actor and chef Stanley Tucci promising to send cookbooks in January of 2021: Zoom calls with the best and the brightest in April of 2020: The press detailing just how beloved he was becoming in April of 2020: And of course, the bobbleheads: And somehow, Dr. Fauci even became a sex symbol. When you feel the warm embrace of the cultural elite, and you breathe that rarified air for the first time, it can be intoxicating. I’ve experienced a bit of it myself, but one thing you should never do is believe you are one of them, and by the end, that is what happened to Dr. Fauci. He was vulnerable because he was uncool. And of course, being routinely attacked by Trump the Villain, who was desperately trying to win re-election and could see very well what the media was doing by elevating Fauci the hero, only made Fauci more inclined to side with the side that would write his legacy. Fauci became the most important weapon against Donald Trump, as he redirected better solutions to help save kids from lockdowns, bring the economy back, and allow some common sense with masks and social distancing. Trump had to fail, and that's why Fauci became a superstar. Mass Formation Psychosis By the time Biden took power, the entire Left was locked into “Mass Formation Psychosis,” per Mattias Desmet by way of Dr. Robert W. Malone : Fauci was trotted out to validate all of the bad policy pushed out by the Biden administration once they took power. Through it all, he maintained his tight connection to Joan Baez and Barbra Streisand, having dinner with them, advising them privately. Many were singing songs about him. Love for Fauci, trust in his word, became interchangeable with taking the vaccine. Fauci was the vaccine just as he was the science. No one would dare doubt him or question his advice. He was the leader of a cult by now and drunk on that power. But in casting his lot with the Trump “resistance,” he abandoned the other half of the country as most of our ruling elite did. But they are Americans and Fauci worked for them too. He betrayed their trust again and again and could not even be bothered to show them the respect of answering their questions. The truth would eventually come out. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya was brought back on X after having been shadow-banned for “disinformation” and is now the head of the CDC. We would finally find out that toddlers didn’t need to be masked and most children did not need to be kept out of school, and Trump’s efforts to open them back up that he was attacked for again and again were the right call. Why had we done that to them? How had we all gone along with it? This got much worse under Biden. It was as though the campaign to dump Trump turned into the new normal and everyone had to stand by the story. Here is Jeremy Boreing: The Fauci myth also propped up the legacy media so much so that even now, they have to link arms with the Democrats to defend him. For many Americans, the legacy media propped up the official story the Democrats needed to be true to take out a one-term president with a strong economy. But they built a high wall of protection that meant even when we finally knew the truth - that the vaccine did not stop the spread and masks offered minimal support - the legacy media would not tell the public the truth. My nephew flew in from Thailand to finally see all of us after a year of separation. He’d already contracted and survived COVID, so he was immune, but because he was not vaccinated, members of my family forbade him from visiting. I kept screaming, “He already got COVID! He doesn’t need the vaccine!” But no. If Fauci didn’t say it, if ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, the New York Times didn’t say it, they would not listen. You had to be vaccinated to enter restaurants, theaters, even family gatherings. Dr. Fauci knew the truth. He knew the vaccine was from a lab leak. He knew it might cause harm to some. He knew it was untested. He continued to push a one-size-fits-all solution, and anyone who didn’t go along with it was treated like an enemy of the state. But for him, his legacy was already written, and nothing was going to take it from him. I lost three loved ones during COVID. One overdosed during lockdowns from loneliness. Another dropped dead suddenly of a heart attack in his early 50s. My uncle did not take the vaccine and died from COVID. It was never a one-size-fits-all solution to force everyone to inject an experimental drug, even if it saved the lives of many. It probably saved my life. But it should have been a choice, not a public pressure campaign that demanded all go along with it or they would be demonized as “anti-vaxxers.” People should have been told the truth about what it was and what it wasn’t. That was Dr. Fauci’s job, but at some point, he realized he had to push the party line because that is what got him into the club, over that high castle wall and in the presence of greatness. The two mirror events that depict the Two Americas could not be more stark, as now Dr. Fauci has been held in Contempt of Congress. Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro were not just held in contempt but thrown in jail over January 6th, the first time in over 50 years anyone was put in jail for the offense. It’s unlikely Dr. Fauci will go to jail. Instead, he will go down in history as a hero because the more powerful side still writes that history, at least for now. Fauci might have been a real hero if he’d faced the committee and the people and simply answered the questions, no matter how difficult. That is what you do when you have nothing to hide. 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

Hollywood is not trying to stop a monopoly by blocking the Paramount Skydance merger with Warner Bros. It’s trying to protect one. If a monopoly means near-complete control over what gets made, promoted, and rewarded, then much of Hollywood and the cultural institutions around it operate under the ideological consensus of the Left and the Democratic Party. Why do the Obamas have a long-running production deal at Netflix? Why do the Emmys consistently elevate late-night hosts whose politics align with that consensus? Jimmy Kimmel, John Oliver, Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart? Do you think they’d ever nominate Greg Gutfeld, whose show often tops them all in ratings? If that isn’t an ideological monopoly, I don’t know what is. Why did major awards shows stay silent on Charlie Kirk? Why did so many artists cancel Kennedy Center appearances after its Trump-era changes, and why did multiple acts drop out of America 250 events? David Ellison and Paramount Skydance are attempting something brave and unprecedented: an outside challenge to that consensus. Their roughly $110 billion bid for Warner Bros. Discovery would give them control of a major studio, HBO/Max, CNN, and a large portfolio of cable and streaming assets. While there has been some resistance to the biggest mergers in recent history, we’ve never seen anything like #blockthemerger. Meet the new resistance, same as the old resistance. 12 state attorneys general, including California, have sued to block the deal. The Writers Guild of America has filed its own antitrust lawsuit. SAG-AFTRA has publicly opposed the merger, though it has not joined the litigation. Opposition also includes the Future Film Coalition (which leads the #BlockTheMerger campaign), Democracy Defenders Fund, Committee for the First Amendment, Free Press, the International Documentary Association, and the American Economic Liberties Project, among others. More than 5,600 industry figures have signed an open letter against the deal, including Mark Ruffalo, Jane Fonda, Javier Bardem, Elliot Page, Emma Thompson, Ben Stiller, and Cynthia Nixon. Paramount Skydance has, for now, delayed closing. Can they hold the line under this unprecedented pressure campaign? Hope springs eternal. But you won’t read about that point of view in any of the trades. They’re a monopoly, too. Most of them are owned by the same entity, Penske Eldridge. Just today, it was announced that the Hollywood Foreign Press, the former owners of the Golden Globes, are suing Jay Penske for $150 million . They are claiming Penske orchestrated their downfall so he could buy the Golden Globes. Jay Penske already owns Deadline, The Hollywood Reporter, Variety, Indiewire, Gold Derby predicting site, Rolling Stone, a virtual monopoly on the awards race from soup to nuts. Gold Derby shapes the nominees, the trades take ads from the studios and the Golden Globes hand out the awards. But wouldn’t you know, when Rebecca Keegan wrote a hit piece on me, she did so in the Hollywood Reporter, owned by Penske Eldridge. I was a vocal and prominent critic of Penske’s growing monopolistic power on the awards race and one of the few willing to speak out. With one hit piece, the Penske company took out both a competitor for ad money and a pesky nuisance for the brand. That is what you call a monopoly. A Climate of Fear and A Culture of Silence I found out firsthand how monopolies work in Hollywood when I was canceled in 2024. The day a Hollywood Reporter story labeled me a “MAGA darling,” one studio pulled its ads from my site that day. The last thing they wanted was to be associated with an accused and condemned witch. It was shocking how many of them fell in line in robotic fashion, gripped with fear. The response was swift and uniform. Every writer on my site left to protect their reputations. Friends of fifteen years ended the friendship. My Oscars ticket was revoked. Jane Fonda’s Women’s Media Center fired me from their annual Oscars report. Screening and party invitations dried up. I was benched on Gold Derby. Worst of all, the lucrative studio ad buys for the Oscars and Emmys vanished. As it all collapsed, I remembered in 2012, an advertising strategist telling me I could be making far more money if I sold the site better. “You have no baggage to speak of,” she’d said. That was true then. I was one of the few independent Oscar sites left, and still am, known around town for being honest to a fault. I stayed independent even as the ad money made life more comfortable for me and my daughter than it had ever been. There was never any question why my career ended in Hollywood: I had been outed as a Trump voter. I was on the wrong side of Hollywood’s progressive orthodoxy, and that meant I was finished. How it started… I started Oscarwatch.com as a single mom with a one-year-old baby living in a studio guest house in Van Nuys, California, in 1999. I was an early web pioneer with a 1200-baud modem and a really good idea. I was already catching the attention of publicists and rocking the boat, as all of us amateurs did back then. We were moving fast and breaking things. Traditional media was not ready. The studios weren’t either. They were used to having a monopoly on Oscar FYC ads in Variety and the Hollywood Reporter, their bread and butter. Until the blogs came along. By 2006, I was starting to make money because my little site had birthed a big bang of other Oscar sites, and by then even the New York Times had an Oscar blogger, the late great David Carr, who called himself the Carpetbagger. David Carr became a mentor of sorts and encouraged me to sell ads for myself, rather than piggyback off bigger sites. I was working three jobs by then: as a horoscope writer under a pseudonym (Laura Wilde), a janitor working my dad’s routes because he was a good guy and knew I needed the money, and a freelance film critic. Right around then, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences sued me for trademark infringement , and my site was renamed AwardsDaily.com . Now I was cleared to start making real money. David Carr was horrified that I was working as a janitor while the trades were raking in millions on Oscar ads and encouraged me to start sending out RFPs. But I didn’t have to, because before long the studios were sending them to me. My site became so influential that I never really had to pitch to them. They all wanted real estate on my site. Who could ever have imagined that? Certainly not me, someone who got online in 1994 back when no one thought you could make money on the internet. One of the first studios that bought ads was Fox Searchlight, an awards subsidiary of Fox. I called it Big Fox and Little Fox, and both advertised on my site. When I got my first $15,000 just to run ads, I was stunned. That was more money than I had ever seen on a check. I was just kind of faking it, pretending I knew what I was doing, but I really didn’t. Of course, it was also about promoting films the studio wanted to place in the Oscar race, and that’s still what it’s about. It’s not exactly pay-to-play, but most of the bloggers making money in the Oscar game are grateful and help keep the advertisers’ movies prominent. I did too. I barely noticed in 2019 when Disney bought Fox for $71 billion. The Writers Guild objected to the merger, just as they have to the Paramount Skydance merger with Warner Bros., but there was nowhere near the same amount of public outcry. Trump praised the Disney/Fox merger after having attempted to stop the 2018 merger of AT&T and Time Warner, leading to a trial, but the judge ruled against the Trump administration, and the deal went through. Again, no major public outcry. At some point after 2020, I’d noticed that Disney had stopped advertising on my site. I wrote it off as their shying away from my comments on “gender affirming care” for kids. I’ll never know exactly why, but all I do know is that once the merger went through, Fox and Fox Searchlight also stopped advertising. The Paramount/Skydance merger with Warner Bros. is significantly higher and covers more territory than any of the major corporate mergers we’ve seen as Hollywood reshuffles the deck amid the shift to streaming. Warner Bros. was selling. The only question was whether Netflix or Paramount Skydance would buy it. Both deals would have had the blessing of the Trump administration. But because it’s David Ellison and the team that bought CBS, and because Trump is an ally, the Democrats and the Left have turned #BlockTheMerger into another No Kings protest or battle for the “resistance.” After the story about me broke in the Hollywood Reporter, Netflix also stopped advertising. No other studio except Focus Features, an adjunct of Universal, had the courage to run ads on my site. I was now officially blacklisted. Emails to the various studio reps went unanswered. This past year, Paramount bought a modest ad package on my site for the Emmys to celebrate the success of Landman and The Madison. I felt lucky to get it, and it was a sign, at least to me, that Paramount, like Focus Features, was brave enough to take a chance on someone deemed too toxic by the industry. Landman, Taylor Sheridan’s Billy Bob Thornton drama, had become one of Paramount+’s biggest hits: its first season averaged 15.8 million viewers in Nielsen’s cross-platform ratings and ranked among the top 10 series of the 2024-25 season. Season 2 opened to a Paramount+ record 9.2 million views in its first few days and continued to dominate the streaming charts, at one point leading all multiplatform viewing with more than 14 million. The Madison, starring Michelle Pfeiffer, launched as Sheridan’s biggest series debut yet, drawing 8 million views in its first 10 days. But unfortunately, #blockthemerger had bled into the awards ecosystem, which remains a closed loop. Sure enough, when the Emmy nominations arrived, the Paramount shows were completely blanked—even Billy Bob Thornton in Landman and Michelle Pfeiffer in The Madison. Kathy Bates was similarly overlooked for Matlock. If Gold Derby shapes the Emmy nominations, and they do, they have to similarly play ball by blacklisting all Paramount Plus’s most popular shows, proving to American audiences that the industry does not care about what they want or what they watch. Sheridan has transformed much of the television landscape, thanks to Paramount Plus. If Paramount buys Warner Bros., they won’t be creating a monopoly but breaking one up. The Death Rattle I know I should walk away from this industry and give up the site that took me 26 years to build. But I just can’t do that. I can’t let them win. Now that I’ve walked in the shoes of the other half of the country, I can clearly see why Hollywood’s empire is collapsing. If ratings and box office don’t matter, neither do audiences. None of this is about artistic freedom or making better movies or television shows. This is the Left flexing its muscle in an attempt to keep all of Hollywood to itself, to push its ideology on the people, to convert them, to indoctrinate them, to “correct them,” everything but entertaining them. Most of all, though, it is about one man: Donald Trump and their failure to stop him, destroy him, kill him, or exile him and his supporters. This is one of the most exciting times to be living through in American history, but you’d never know it by the movies and TV shows Hollywood pumps out. Their monoculture, their one-sided point of view, has choked the life out of Hollywood. If they could make fun of themselves, if they could humanize their fellow Americans, they might be able to tell stories that resonate with everyone. Maybe, just maybe, they would breathe new life into a decaying organism. But they can’t risk it. Like the Democrats who don’t trust the people with elections, Hollywood doesn’t trust them with the culture. Elon Musk spent $44 billion to take Twitter out of the hands of its previous gatekeepers. Ellison is now trying to pry open a crack in the thick shell of Hollywood’s product and return more of it to market forces and all of those people Hollywood left behind. // 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

Any time Trump or one of his supporters brings up the 2020 election, insisting he didn’t lose it, we hear the usual chorus of groans: why can’t he get over it? He lost. Move on. The thing is, I can’t get over it either. 2020 was the year everything changed. My entire world was turned upside down because I could see, for the first time, that I was in a bubble, a feedback loop that had shaped my perception of reality. It’s just that it wasn’t actual reality. It was a curated, hysteria-inducing delusion. It wasn’t just me. Go on YouTube, and you’ll find hundreds, if not thousands, of people whose lives were fundamentally transformed that year in one way or another. COVID made them quit their job and move into a van. COVID made them decide to divorce. COVID made them learn how to bake sourdough. And a lot of us were red-pilled. It was as though someone pressed the pause button and all of us froze in place for a time. Like in the movie Weapons where the kids suddenly wake up one day… Isolated and shut in, we all turned to social media and the internet, which meant more people were connected than ever before at a time when there were more people alive than ever before. We’ve never really fully processed what happened to all of us that year. It was the year we stopped trusting the science, the schools, Hollywood, the legacy media, and the government. Children were locked down and staring at their screens, with many of the lost boys finding their way into the dark corners of the internet and would emerge years later fumbling their way toward a rifle and a rooftop. That isn’t all of it, or even half of it. None of us would emerge from that year unscathed. We can’t talk about it as a country or a people because we are still so divided. The big things divide us, like the vaccine, the masks, the lockdowns, and most especially, the 2020 election. We were stepping into something we did not understand and weren’t prepared for. Things have changed enough now that it will be hard to remember just how bad things got after Trump won in 2016. I remember because I was on the inside. I lived it with the Democrats and what would become a Doomsday Cult. We called ourselves “the resistance” even though we had all of the power. Trump and MAGA, they were the real resistance, or at least the revolutionaries going up against the most powerful machine in American history, maybe ever. All I knew was that I had to fight for my side. I woke up every day like a good soldier for the cause and went to battle online, wasting precious time with my daughter, or doing anything else except sitting and staring at a screen and fighting with people I didn’t even know over issues that didn’t matter with arguments that had no end and went nowhere. Inside the Doomsday Cult, we were awash with mass hysteria because every single day, every time Trump tweeted, the legacy media sent out more waves of hysteria that pulsed through the hive mind and kept reinfecting anyone who scrolled Twitter or Facebook. It was a new emergency every day. We were stuck in an unending state of trauma. The legacy media desperately wants to forget what happened, how they lied and gaslit the public. The consequences for these moral crimes have been minimal. A slap on the wrist for ignoring Joe Biden’s cognitive decline, but there has never been a reckoning for what they did to all of us, people who trusted them, in 2020. What Happened to Me My daughter had to leave her senior year at college to have her graduation on my balcony, but we did it because we were doing our part to help save the country during this once-in-a-generation pandemic. Mobilizing for the cause meant sewing our own masks, displaying them proudly on Instagram. It meant mixing our own hand sanitizer because it was all out at the drug store. Some people were wearing face shields. We were living in fear. We were cowed into silence. Half the country fell into Mass Formation Psychosis. We weren’t allowed to attend weddings, churches, or schools, but somehow on Memorial Day, the George Floyd protests became the most important thing in America for months. Systemic racism, they told us, was more urgent than COVID. Really? Bringing the whole country — the whole world — to its knees was less serious than George Floyd dying at the hands of a police officer in Minneapolis? Yes. That’s what they were telling us, and everyone was mandated to go along with everything that came next. These were our idols, we were told. It was the new state religion, even if Trump was still the president. This is the ideology we’re allowed to gather for. This is worth tear ing down statues, burning buildings, carving out “autonomous zones” and demanding everyone put a black square on Instagram, capitalize the word Black and raise their fists to Black Lives Matter. The madness unfolding on the streets meant Democrats could actually lose in November, I believed. So why wasn’t anyone trying to stop them? Why were the Democrats encouraging them? I started wondering what the hell was going on. It felt like unseen hands were manipulating events behind the scenes, and we were all expected to just go along with it. As I began to speak out and ask questions, I was turned into an enemy. “You’ve changed,” wrote Neera Tanden on Twitter. She was right. I had. By the time Twitter pressured the New York Times to back off their Tom Cotton essay, Send in the Troops , I was done. Maybe I was naive. I didn’t understand the assignment. I’d seen too many Frank Capra movies. I’d begun to believe politics was like an Aaron Sorkin screenplay. I thought we were the good guys. We are the side with ethics and decency and fairness. I was like Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2 when Arnold Schwarzenegger shows up, and she thinks he’s a bad guy, but when he says, “Come with me if you want to live, she realizes that everything is backward. The people she thought were the good guys weren’t. The guy she thought was there to kill her was actually there to save her. By the end of 2020, I was as black-pilled as Jack Nicholson in Chinatown, disillusioned and wide awake. Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown. But what I saw them do - how we were all manipulated, how they rigged the election to be too big to fail - I could see for the first time that my side had too much power. So much power that American democracy was now beside the point. It didn’t matter how the people voted, because we would decide who was allowed to win and who would become an existential threat to the world we were building, the utopia we were building online. When I left the party, I knew I couldn’t be fully honest about what I believed happened, though I did say that the election had been rigged. I also couldn’t be honest about what I knew about January 6th, at least not in the beginning. When I saw the riot break out, my first thought was, that’s not MAGA. They don’t do that. And anyway, even if they did, why couldn’t the Democrats chalk it up to months of lockdowns and highly enraged, radicalized people on the Right just as there were on the Left that Summer. Why couldn’t they? Because it was all still part of the long con, the mass delusion. These ideas were dangerous to hold for anyone in America but especially someone of the Left, and yet, I could not stop it. The truth began knocking. I ignored it as long as I could, but eventually, the knocking became a banging, and I had no choice but to open the door. How to Rig An Election Once you start tugging on the question of why Twitter and Facebook censored the Hunter Biden laptop, you begin to unravel the bigger picture of just how deep the conspiracy went. But you don’t need the whole story. You just need to know this: The FBI and the CIA worked against the sitting president to lie to the public that the laptop was “Russian Disinformation.” It was just a standard run-of-the-mill October surprise, timed to help ignite a scandal before the election. But it was also information the public had a right to know, as we would find out later. So anyone who shames Trump for calling the election rigged and denying it was legit will have to answer for this. But if you keep pulling on that string, you’ll find the why of it. They were trying to fix all of the problems they believed caused Hillary Clinton’s loss. This would be payback for the email scandal that hit her campaign, which she called “Russian Disinformation.” That would also turn out to be untrue. But there were other problems that needed correcting, like lazy voters who assumed Hillary would win because she was so far ahead in the polls and didn’t bother turning out. They would fix this problem using COVID as the pretext to change everything about how people vote and how those votes are collected. They knew they had Pennsylvania won long before Election Day and it would only be a matter of convincing the public not to get too excited about a “red mirage.” To all of them, that’s the right way to win an election. Trump won Iowa, Ohio and Florida, not to mention the bellwether counties that have decided our elections. The only other time anything like this happened was in 1960, when JFK won in a squeaker. Compare that to 2020, and you can see that something was very off about the numbers. Since the Democrats believed Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook had handed Trump the win in 2016 by using their marketing machine (the Clinton campaign refused their help), it was time for Zuckerberg to undo that damage, which came in the form of a $400 million slush fund used to “fortify” the election but mostly in the heavily blue districts. Had all of this been shared with the whole country as a way to improve our elections overall, that would have been one thing. But it was all done behind the scenes, in the shadows, far from the reach of anyone who might dissent. It was anything but ethical and anything but fair. It was all part of a grand scheme to stay one step ahead of Trump. If they already knew he would claim it was rigged, why not just rig it? Who would the people believe? Trump or the “bipartisan cabal” of unelected bureaucrats hiding in the shadows? The truth is that Trump was pulling ahead because the Left was losing its mind, and Trump picked up on it. He changed his campaign; no matter how many ways they tried to keep him from his rallies, he got the word out anyway. That would explain why he won those key states but lost so much in the popular vote. Our elections should not be decided months before Election Day. Candidates should have to make their case to the people, not hide in the basement and let the system do the work. It’s the candidate’s job to inspire the voters to vote for the kind of government they want, and it’s the voters responsibility to be motivated enough to turn out to the polls and cast their vote. But with an easily manipulated hive mind like the Democrats had cultivated for ten years they didn’t need any of it. The Year That Broke America I’ve never been able to convince anyone of what I believed happened in 2020. If you were on the Left, chances are, you wouldn’t be able to see it either. You would have trusted the same people I used to trust: CNN, New York Times, MSNBC, your social media feed. You would have come out of that year thinking Joe Biden won the 2020 election fair and square and that Donald Trump refused to lose, so he led a dangerous assault on the Capitol, putting our democracy under threat. Yet, after everything they did to Trump that year and for the four years prior, what else could he have done except protest? It was just a little too convenient that there happened to be a riot at the same time, a Reichstag Fire that handed absolute power to Team Blue. If you were still trapped inside the Doomsday Cult, you’d have been primed and ready to go to war on your fellow Americans because Vice President Kamala Harris would tell you January 6th was like 9/11 and Pearl Harbor. You would have thought Liz Cheney and the Prime Time Show Trial was legit. What an easy mark you’d be. If you never escaped, as I did, you’d still be trapped inside the Doomsday Cult and never have any idea that none of this is your fault. You were put into a kind of trance in 2020, even before, like the kids in the movie Weapons, frozen in place and used as an army to do the bidding of the Democratic Party. They made you believe, like they made me believe, that every day really was the end of the world as long as Donald Trump was in power. But it was never true, none of it. All the Democrats ever had to do was offer the people something better. If everything Molly Ball wrote about the election the “Secret Bi-Partisan Cabal” supposedly saved, how did Trump win again? In Weapons, the children are put under a spell and aimed at the enemies of the witch. Once the spell is broken, the children wake up and realize the person they should be mad at isn’t the one she made them attack, but instead the witch herself for robbing them of their ability to think for themselves. And so it goes with the Democrats. // This is a public episode. 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I will come out of this very surreal moment in American history and in the story of my own life, understanding the basic truth that our goodness is not determined by a political party. It isn’t the politics that make us better than anyone else. We all have our own ideas of what matters. Instead, it is our willingness to preserve our humanity when tested that really counts. We can blame the internet and the algorithms for what has happened to all of us in the last 20 years, to our politics, to our culture, to our relationships. But that can only take us so far. At some point, we all have to reckon with who we are and what we’ve become. I always thought we were the good guys. We didn’t mock, degrade, or dehumanize other people. We were decent and were empathetic. That is, until Donald Trump won in 2016 and all of that changed. What I saw happen to my own side was ugly. It was dark. I wanted nothing to do with it. It’s been almost two years since Donald Trump was nearly shot and killed on live television. The way the Left dealt with that shooting was shocking. They diminished it. They said it was staged or just shrapnel. They did everything but wake up to the radicalization on their own side. By then, they’d become consumed by hatred, having tried everything they had in their arsenal to take down Trump, and all of it had failed. How could they pivot back to their humanity? So when Charlie Kirk was assassinated on video, with the clip going viral to millions of views in seconds, they were primed and ready to once again leave behind their humanity and celebrate one more battle against their named evil, a guy who said things they didn’t like. It became a thing on TikTok: They all took to X and competed for who could be the ugliest and the cruelest. The more disgusting they were, the more their hate and dehumanization were rewarded. Social media has messed with our perception of what defines love and hate, with those tiny deceptive hearts we press every time someone scratches that sadistic itch. The reaction to Charlie’s assassination by the Left was unlike anything I’ve ever seen or anything I thought I would ever see from my former side. It might have been the people of Salem celebrating watching their friends and neighbors hang because they refused to confess. But this was America in 2025, not 1692. How could they not have been shaken out of their decade-long mass hysteria stupor? My mind goes to Charles Manson and his followers, who showed no mercy, slicing up the bodies of the rich in the Hollywood Hills, a pregnant Sharon Tate among them. To hear the Manson family tell it, they deserved it. They were the establishment. They had been dehumanized, and their lives didn’t matter. I bring up the Manson murders a lot because that was the last time we saw that same glint, the same wild-eyed happiness and glee at something as gruesome as a murder or someone’s death. I thought that would have been the end of it, back then. It was enough to end the 1960s, keep Richard Nixon in power, and send our society tumbling toward Ronald Reagan and the 1980s. But now, that same kind of bizarre, cult-like fury has overtaken the Left once again, and nothing can shake them out of it, not the near assassination of Trump, not the brutal murder of Charlie Kirk. Not the celebrating afterward. The hate bubbled up inside them so profoundly that even when Barack Obama tried to show some grace in the wake of Charlie’s death, his biggest applause lines came after he decided to repeat the cherry-picked, out-of-context lies pushed by the Left that led to the dehumanization of Charlie Kirk in the first place. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took her cue from President Obama and followed the same pattern. She offered a condemnation of political violence, but then launched into the kind of attack that they believe justifies all of what they’ve been doing for the past ten years. This is a country built on freedom of speech, and yet, the entire Left doesn’t believe in it, or they think it’s Trump that’s doing it. They control the culture, which is why they couldn’t even offer a word about Charlie’s death, not even at the Emmys or anywhere else. Jamie Lee Curtis had a moment of sorrow for Charlie when she choked up on a podcast. But the activists descended upon her, and of course, she was forced to “clarify” what she meant. All it took was losing one election for my side to transform into monsters who believed that as long as their fellow Americans stood in their way, they could justify anything that happened to them, yes, even an assassination. Even now, I still get twitchy when I see the blind, hot hatred coming from the Left aimed at anyone on the Right. I’ve never gotten used to it. I’ve never been able to overlook it. I certainly couldn’t be a part of it. I was reminded of that this week after Lindsey Graham’s untimely death. I watched the same pattern play out, the same ugliness, the same mocking TikTok videos demanding those inside utopia disconnect from their humanity. Even if Trump danced on the graves of his enemies, Rob Reiner and Robert Mueller, that doesn’t mean he spends his days wishing any of them would be murdered or dead. Plenty of people on the Right, even journalists in right-leaning outlets, had no problem condemning Trump for it. Why can’t they do that on the Left? Why are we now seeing them once again celebrating the death of a politician for the crime of disagreeing with them? They will keep doing this and as long as they do, someone out there will think picking up a gun will make them a hero. Celebrating the death of evil people should be reserved for mass murderers like Stalin or Hitler. That they believe Lindsey Graham, Donald Trump, or Charlie Kirk are on that level is proof enough that they’ve lost their minds, and it has taken us to a very dangerous place. Something Wicked This Way Comes When Charlie was assassinated, it was like the leg of a pier giving way and the whole thing crashing into the water. He held the MAGA movement together by his optimistic and inclusive nature, but once he was gone, a full-blown war broke out. It all started with the JQ group - the “Jewish Question” white nationalists - who instantly blamed Charlie’s death on Israel. This was then picked up and amplified by Candace Owens, who has now become more popular than she’s ever been by positioning herself as the anti-Charlie Kirk. She is now attempting to steal his legacy, bully and harass his widow, and destroy everything he ever built. Why? Who knows. Maybe because she’s a total zero and her friendship with Charlie was the best it was ever going to get for her. Maybe she was bitter and resentful about being sidelined by Charlie and TPUSA. Either way, she has now done the Left a solid by changing the conversation around Charlie’s death. It isn’t the rising fanaticism on the Left or their pathological need to control thought and speech. It isn’t that they’ve become so totalitarian that they fantasize about the deaths of their enemies and celebrate when people die? No, it was actually Israel! I didn’t think anything or anyone could ever match the level of insanity of the Left, but Candace Owens has done it. For clicks, views, and money, she sold out her so-called friend. Charlie has been dehumanized, yet again, this time transformed into nothing more than a stepping stone to success by a woman who can never get enough of it, who needs people to be talking about her, looking at her, thinking about her, doing anything but ignoring her. She’s stolen Charlie’s legacy and has now written herself into this story so everyone will notice she was once part of Charlie’s world. Not an important part. She was useful, for a time. Maybe she was even his friend, for a time. Now, she has shown her true colors, and it is the most evil thing I’ve seen in the 30 years I’ve been online. How lonely and empty does a person have to be to steal someone else’s life? That so many have followed her, that there is such a thing as the “woke Right,” that Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones and others have actually indulged this sick fantasy that anyone but Tyler Robinson could have done this, proves that goodness is not about political parties. It is about our humanity, whether we have it or whether we’ve abandoned it. Charlie’s Angels Something real and violent happened on September 10, 2025. The algorithmic, hypnotic churn of the internet, our absurd, pointless Civil War, the obsession on the Right with Israel, none of that could stop what really happened that day. There isn’t a person who was there or who was closest to Charlie that Candace Owens hasn’t consumed for content and blamed for his death. But she’s underestimated the strength of Charlie’s widow, his most powerful angel, Erika Kirk. Candace has used her too, laid her out like raw flesh to be consumed by sycophants, but somehow, that has only made Erika stronger, and now, Candace is the one who is about to understand what love really means. And what goodness looks like. Erika is Charlie’s angel, but lucky for him, he has a lot of them. They’re out there fighting every day to keep his memory alive and the movement he built thriving. And a sculptor is putting a statue of Charlie Kirk in Times Square, New York. We know how that is going to go. We know because we know the Left. The way the Left responded to Charlie’s assassination should be something none of us ever forgets. It is something they will all have to reckon with one day, and for many of them, wiping away its shame won’t be easy. It will be up to those angels of Charlie’s to continue his lifelong devotion to open debate, to talking to those you disagree with, and to preserve our freedom of speech and expression. Above all, let his memory be a reminder of how important it is to hold on to our humanity. The world has changed since Charlie was shot and killed. It’s darker, and it’s meaner. Holding onto hope is harder than it’s ever been. But Charlie Kirk lives on through his widow, his babies, his true friends, and the tens of thousands of young people keeping TPUSA alive. We have his legacy because we still have his voice, and thanks to the internet, it is everywhere, and he will never be forgotten. /// This is a public episode. 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It’s been said that you can spot an American from a mile away. Travelers to Europe are advised to adjust their attire to blend in with locals and avoid looking so … casual. The French think Americans are loud and rude, and Europe has a long tradition of sneering at how classless we all are, even before Trump. I spent a month in Italy, and it’s a beautiful place. The slow living, the long naps when all the stores shut down for hours during the day, the tiny cars, the laundry drying on the balconies, the fresh food at the Farmer’s Market. I feel lucky that when I came back from Italy, I was pregnant and having my baby is the single greatest thing that has ever happened to me. But I’m also glad she grew up in America. I used to travel to France to cover the Cannes Film Festival, and again, I admired their way of life, the food especially. But every time I stayed too long, I began to miss my home in America. There is something thrilling about living in a free country that I’ve never felt anywhere else. It seems to me that if you are born here, you make up your life as it goes along. It is not planned out for you, necessarily, although in some cases, I guess it probably is. In my case, it wasn’t. I knew I could invent myself any way I wanted. And if I didn’t like that version, I could reinvent myself. We’re like our country, a work in progress. It’s always there for the taking, that promise of opportunity. Donald Trump is all of America’s freedoms wrapped up in one imperfect man. He broke through the thick layer of oppressive thought and speech and showed the world that here, you really can say anything you want - as long as some crazed totalitarian doesn’t try to shoot you. That’s the country I want to live in. It isn’t that the greatest writing or art has come from a place like America. Plenty of great works have come from places that don’t center freedom as their main objective. But once you’ve tasted it, you can’t give it up. In his speech last night, Trump said : The American founding represents the best ideas and traditions in history by the best people, like you. You can be loyal to Karl Marx or you can be loyal to America. You can be a communist or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both. As for those who peddle Marxist lies about our heritage, tell our children that we live on stolen land or that our heroes were oppressors, they’re doing something much worse than slandering our past. They are slandering and attacking our future. Not going to let that happen. They’re trying to tear down the great American character to destroy the people who declared independence, who crossed the Delaware, who settled the West and conquered the skies. You know who those people are. But we will never let that happen. In America now, two stories are competing to claim the right to rule the future. Trump is telling the better story, the one America was founded on and the one we’ve all believed, at least up until recently, when a new wave of progressives decided that the better story paints America as a corrupt, rotten, white supremacist empire that has to be torn down to the studs and rebuilt. They must be terrified about the 2030 Census because they’ve decided to die on the hill of illegal immigration, which is fast becoming their most important issue. That, alongside Democratic Socialism, is a recipe for disaster. This was Bill Clinton’s bummer message on the Fourth: I always thought Bill Clinton was a good president, but reading that just now makes me think he wasn’t. All he’s ever been able to do is point the finger at the other side and never offer any real solutions. He’s not the man in the arena. He’s the man on the sidelines. What I love about Trump and his supporters is how much they love America. They love it so much that they plant flags all over their homes. They admire the Founding Fathers. They call themselves Patriots. We didn’t have that kind of pride on the Left when I was growing up. And even now, so many see the American flag and the love of country as dangerous, racist, bigoted, fascist. Whoever told those people that is what MAGA is about lied. They’re protective of America’s laws and its border. That is out of love for the country. The Left has taken almost everything from them. They’ve locked them out of culture, forbidden them from participating in any of their major events, dehumanized, demonized, and disenfranchised them. But the one thing they couldn’t take was their citizenship. They hit the jackpot just by being born in America. To think it would be so easy for people all over the world to come here illegally and claim that prize or to come here and attempt to remake America into something it was never meant to be devalues the one thing they treasure most of all. I’ve always been a proud American. I’ve always preferred this country over any other, but only in the last few years have I understood what it means to be a Patriot, to be ready to fight for the country I love. And that is because of the people I’ve gotten to know on the Right. This country is worth fighting for. I might not agree with all of the policies on the Right, or even Trump himself, all of the time, but I’d rather have the future of this country in the hands of people who love it the way Trump does than people who hate it, the way so many on the Left do, just because their candidates are weak and their policies are toxic. I wanted to write 250 things I love about America, but it got too long, so this will have to do. Here are just some of the things I love: I love the interstates as part of the great legacy of Dwight D. Eisenhower. I love the Pacific Ocean because it stretches along the state. I love Catalina Island off the California Coast, where I spent many a summer with my best friend. I love seeing our history in the many cultures that came here, like Chinatown, Little Italy, Mexican food in LA, soul food in the South, Irish bars and pubs in the middle of nowhere. And yes, you can appreciate a nation of immigrants while still policing our borders now. I love how nice people are in some places, like California, Ohio, and Iowa, where they smile at you on the street. I love the weather extremes, from the dusty plains to the snowy mountains to hurricanes by the sea. I love the historic monuments from the Civil War and the Revolutionary War. I love the town squares that you can still see if you drive through the middle of America. Even though many are abandoned, they still look like hope to me. I love how each town square has a church, a post office, and a school. I love the many farmlands that blanket the Midwest. I love the small mom-and-pop coffee drive-throughs, and even the convenience of a Starbucks in nearly every town. I love Route 66 and how people still drive it and visit the forgotten places. I love the absurdity of Las Vegas, how it sprouts up impossibly in the middle of the desert. I love the American writers who helped shape our country’s sense of itself - Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Flannery O’Connor, Richard Ford, Maya Angelou. I love the musical traditions that started here: Jazz and the Blues. And became Rock n’ Roll. I love the Legend of Sleepy Hollow and the town that still remembers it. I love diners and dive bars. I love Gone with the Wind and how it’s still the highest-grossing film of all time when adjusted for inflation. I love The Twilight Zone and find it timeless, as relevant today as it was in the 1950s. I love the footprints at the (Grauman’s) Chinese Theater in Hollywood. I love the US military and its devotion to the country. I love the wildflowers that bloom in California every year. I love soft-serve ice cream at the DQ. I love Levi’s. I love New York pizza. I love Solvang in California. I love driving up the Oregon coast. I love the songs of Bob Dylan. I love the tap dancing of Fred Astaire. I love how anyone can be a star on YouTube, no matter where they come from, but YouTube couldn’t have been invented anywhere but America. I love how I could build a business as a single mom in a one-room guesthouse in Van Nuys, and that business would, five years later, become profitable because I worked hard and had a good idea. And then, when my career went up in flames in 2024 because I voted for Trump, I could build another career on Substack because that is what America is all about - inventing and reinventing yourself. I love the innovative spirit that built America in real life and online. I love reading about the early settlers, the Puritans, and the homesteaders, how much they sacrificed to help make America a home. And I love the history of the Native Americans, too, even if so much of it remains a tragedy now. I love high-speed internet and Wi-Fi that are available almost everywhere, and if they're not, I have a hotspot. I love the old American cars that were not just exceptional but beautiful. I love the tradition of baseball. I love that people faithfully watch football, even if I don’t. I love the tradition of sourdough bread all over social media. I love that the best basketball players in the world are from here. I love that every state is different from one to the next. I love Harper’s Ferry, how it’s frozen in time. I love that we found a way to move on from the trauma of our past with slavery and how we fought a bloody Civil War to end it. I love that we were the good guys in World War II. We did the right thing in entering the war and helping the Allies win. I love that you can be anything here. The door is always open. It’s up to you to walk through it. I love that America is a Christian nation, and you can see that if you drive across it. But it’s also a country that stands for freedom of religion, too. I love the American comedians: Groucho Marx, George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Steve Martin, and Johnny Carson. I love that the best films from the 1970s were American movies, like The Godfather, The French Connection, Taxi Driver, and Network. But I also love more modern masterpieces by American filmmakers, like No Country for Old Men and Sideways. I love that people play the lottery, thinking one day they will hit the jackpot. They never will, but they can still dream. I love Thanksgiving and the way we celebrate it in America, which is to say, all together as one big dysfunctional family. I love the tradition of Halloween and how every October, the pumpkins and costumes come out. I love the way the weather changes. I love the Declaration of Independence and those who dared to build this wild, untamed, optimistic work in progress. I love that America is always looking to the future to find a better version of itself and its people. I love that so many Americans still believe in the American Dream. I love watching the movie Jaws on the 4th of July. I love that people watch fireworks, even if I never do, because they traumatize my dogs. I love that we have a holiday just to celebrate the day we became a country, a ragtag group of deplorable revolutionaries who set out to build a brand new country. Oh, the audacity of it. I love living here and would not want to live anywhere else. Happy 250th Birthday, my beloved country. Happy 4th to you, dear readers. Thanks for everything. I hope you are having a wonderful weekend. 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

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

“In our schools, our newsrooms, even our corporate boardrooms, there is a new far-left fascism that demands absolute allegiance. If you do not speak its language, perform its rituals, recite its mantras, and follow its commandments, then you will be censored, banished, blacklisted, persecuted, and punished. It’s not going to happen to us. Make no mistake: this left-wing cultural revolution is designed to overthrow the American Revolution. In so doing, they would destroy the very civilization that rescued billions from poverty, disease, violence, and hunger, and that lifted humanity to new heights of achievement, discovery, and progress. Donald J. Trump, July 4th, 2020 It’s been ten years since the purges began, and I still have a hard time believing it actually happened. Did so many of my friends really go along with it? Did institutions, corporations, and all of Hollywood allow themselves to be shamefully cowed by the fanatical mob? Yes. Not only did it happen, but it’s become the new normal on the establishment Left — in Hollywood, in culture, in government. Everyone is still too afraid to say what they really think. Just appearing at the America 250 or the Kennedy Center will still ruin your career. The only difference now is that the wheel of oppression keeps spinning. Now it’s illegal immigrants. Now it’s “Free Palestine.” I don’t know why I didn’t see it sooner: this direct line from cancel culture to Communism. I thought it was mass hysteria after Trump’s shocking win in 2016, and that eventually, as with other episodes of mass hysteria in the past, it would burst, and we could all go back to the way things used to be, where we weren’t fighting a virtual Civil War. But now that three Democratic Socialists won their primaries in New York against one of the party’s shining stars, Dan Goldman, all because of Israel, what we’re seeing is Communism, but merged with Woke tyranny and radical Islam. It is essentially the perfect storm to destroy America. Now, we can clearly see what ten years of Cancel Culture have done to the Left. It has given them enormous power to force compliance, not just to those of us who dissented, but to members of their own party. In other words, the mob is about to come for them, too. What do they want? What the millionaires and billionaires have. They want what’s coming to them after years of indoctrination that told them that they are oppressed because of the color of their skin, their gender ideology, or their ethnicity. America, they were told, was founded on White Supremacy and colonization, and they’re owed something for it. They seem to have no place for the working class that Mamdani is always talking about, not if they’re white. Bernie Sanders might have cared about the “white working class,” but not these folks. Some animals are more equal than others, and with this new fundamentalism, it is meant only to redistribute wealth, not from the rich to the poor, but from the white majority to the marginalized minorities. It isn’t their fault exactly. They’ve been indoctrinated. None of us noticed this was happening right around Obama’s second term, 2012. Racism, they believed, had infected the majority in America, and it had to be rooted out. They had to be re-educated on “correct” history. They were not taught the American dream. They were taught the American nightmare. Here is a video from Katharine Birbalsingh: And now, they’ve finally found their magic man in Zohran Mamdani, who is everything they need wrapped up in one charismatic leader. He’s TikTok-friendly. He goes viral. He is pop-culture literate, and, most importantly, he’s the Wokest of the Woke. He speaks their language. He wants what they want. He goes to the Pride Parade but not the Israel Parade, becoming the first Mayor of the city in 60 years not to attend. He doesn’t just want to be the Mayor of New York. He wants to be a worldwide inspirational leader, which fits the new Left well since they don’t really want to unite with the other half of America so much as with those other countries that are ideologically aligned, you know, like 1984? It might seem like one big party, but this is a disaster for the Democrats. Everyone knows that any Democrat who goes against them will be stalked, swarmed, and harassed before getting primaried out. All the Republicans have to be is the more normal side, and they can win. Some Democrats are now sounding the alarm that Democratic Socialists are overtaking the party and will alienate people, even James Carville: No Democrat is safe from the mob, not even one of their most progressive politicians, Scott Weiner, in San Francisco, who was just harassed in public for not being sufficiently pro-Palestine. And obviously, for being Jewish. Dan Goldman was banned from a coffee shop for the same reason just before getting voted out. Mamdani and his acolytes shield their true selves behind a warm smile and a viral video, but there can be no mistaking the language of the Cancel Culture Left. The Democrats know what this means. Even the Ladies of The View know. The DSA wins in New York were driven by a small group of mostly white, pampered college kids who are very online. It is the fault of the Democrats for not seeing the accident before it happened. They might have fought harder for Goldman if they had any idea just how bad it would be for them if these candidates actually won. And it’s bad. David Sacks from the All in Podcast: What people went through in Stalin’s Soviet Union or China’s Cultural Revolution is worse than anything any American has ever or will ever suffer, but let’s not kid ourselves. We’ve already seen what the Left will do, from three assassination attempts on Trump’s life, to the assassination of Charlie Kirk, to their violent riots for the past ten years. Burning Teslas, trying to throw Trump off the ballot, the impeachments, the indictments. Now, they’re threatening Nuremberg-like trials and another impeachment should they take back power in Congress, and the Right should do everything they can to make sure they don’t. We know there are no limits on what they will do. We know because history tells us. George Orwell told us. We’ve seen this movie many times before. Utopias have only two paths forward: they collapse, or they become more authoritarian. These folks don’t even know what words mean anymore, much less the point of 1984. No one ever taught them why Communism or tyrannical mobs are bad, so why wouldn’t they behave this way? I noticed it for the first time when a small group of fanatics at Evergreen College chased Bret Weinstein off campus, calling him a racist and holding the administrators hostage until they gave them what they wanted. All of those pampered, spoiled, overeducated-yet-still-uneducated brats made their way into the workforce, boosted by using their identity categories to secure high-profile slots at newspapers and corporations. The threat was implicit: hire us or you’re an “ist” or a “phobe” and we’ll get loud about it. Only the Republicans have taken a consistent and principled stand against this madness and done so since it began. The Democrats, however, have stuck their head in the sand and denied it even exists. That’s why they can’t address crime in the major cities, or the rapes by illegal immigrants, and why their wheel of oppression has amounted to the party standing for only three things: Socialism, illegal immigration, and Palestine. No one seemed to take it seriously on the Left because they never took Cancel Culture seriously. No, we weren’t being slaughtered by the millions or thrown into gulags, but we built this new civilization online and with it, the power to decide who can participate, who is accepted, and who must be hurled into the public square for character assassination and career ruination. No matter what the consequences were, it was wrong, and no one had the guts to stop it, and now, those chickens have come home to roost, and it’s the Democrats’ problem. They'd better get used to selling Democratic Socialism or else. This is what happened the last time the Centrists went up against the Socialists. Two years later, Al Franken would be chased out of the Senate by all of the top Democrats caught up in Cancel Culture and unable to stop the mass hysteria that drove it. And now, we have yet more insurrectionary behavior with Zohran Mamdani and some governors refusing to comply with the Supreme Court’s ruling on sending back Haitian migrants, and many states aligning to protest the Great American State Fair. It looks like we have a Democratic Party that wants to secede from the Union, again. In the old days of Bernie Sanders’ Democratic Socialism, they understood that taking care of American citizens required secure border programs like Medicare for All. Well, not now. The new kids want it all and believe they’re entitled to it all. Borders? Who needs those? They are oppressed and therefore deserving of our tax dollars to absolve us of our white colonizer guilt. The big picture here should be frightening for all Americans. Unchecked migration with the oppressor/oppressed mindset, while also demanding the government and the “billionaires” pay for all of them - that is what the Democrats will have to sell to the American public because the Cancel Culture machine that they helped build and did nothing about will demand it. The Gray Champion Rides Again The Republicans have a unique opportunity now to change the course of history. They have been given a gift by the Left, whether they choose to take it or not. They are experiencing their own brand of crazy right now. It’s starting to look a lot like Communists to the Left of me, Nazis to the Right, here I am, stuck in the middle with you. But if the sane Republicans can pull it together, they can bring in reasonable people, like Bill Maher: At the moment, the Democrats have the bigger headache on their hands. No one who seeks the nomination in 2028 will survive if they don’t have Zohran Mamdani on their side. But honestly, the Republicans could be here too, depending on how their current war plays out. But if they want to win, they will have to open their doors to more moderate Democrats, perhaps giving up the old dream of outsider populism. They’ll have to decide which they believe is the greater threat. Here is Larry O’Connor with Mark Halperin on 2-Way. America, the Beautiful In 2020, I was hopeless and lost. No one on my side would talk about what all of us could see happening to our party, to our young people, with this unprecedented climate of fear and culture of silence. But then I heard Donald Trump’s speech at Mount Rushmore on July 4th, and even though I’d been told he was a dangerous fascist and racist, I heard the words that anchor me to my own patriotic pride, words that describe the country I know and love. These were and are subversive words, but necessary. This is the America I believed in. Ever since then, I’ve trusted Trump because he did not bend, did not break, and never, ever, ever surrendered. I’m sorry he’ll be leaving office in two years. I can’t imagine the fight without him, but he’s carved a path and lit the way. Now, it’s our turn to finish the job. The race to normal begins right now. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

The emergence of America’s ruling class in Chicago to celebrate the Obama Presidential Center Museum hit like a gust of hot, wet wind. Just days before, tornadoes tore through Illinois and Iowa, upending homes and wreaking havoc on the landscape. By the time Barack Obama and his Royal Court were ready to roll out the red carpet, the skies had cleared. The building perfectly reflects how Obama might see himself, but certainly how he’s ruled over the past 15 years. He still can’t let go of his position as God and King of the once-mighty utopia, one I devoted most of my life to building, protecting, and defending. I was a true believer and a good soldier. Obtuse, mysterious, and opaque, the building, like its inspiration, towers over the indistinguishable figures below, the swirling paths and gardens, not blending into the landscape but rather projecting outward, with a kind of bulk you could even see from space. Not even a tornado could make a dent. The quote on the side of the mighty beast reads: You are America. Unconstrained by habit and convention. Unencumbered by what is, ready to seize what ought to be. For everywhere in this country, there are first steps to be taken, there is new ground to cover, there are more bridges to be crossed. America is not the project of any one person. The single most powerful word in our democracy is the word ‘We.’ ‘We The People.’ ‘We Shall Overcome.’ ‘Yes We Can.’ That word is owned by no one. It belongs to everyone. Oh, what a glorious task we are given to continually try to improve this great nation of ours.” The quote comes from Obama’s speech, not in Chicago, but at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. Most of the rest of it has been trimmed away to make the statement appear more inclusive, shall we say. But note the use of the word “We.” His speech was full of flowery language about how we have to come together as a country. The sitting president of the United States and the majority of Americans who voted for him were not invited to the party. Not only weren’t they invited, but they’re also not allowed anywhere at any time in a society largely controlled by the Left. No, Trump would not be allowed in, and he never really was, which goes a long way toward explaining why he won the second time. Trump feels like one of us, who have taken the shape of Obama’s sworn enemies. We are rejected outsiders because this America, their America, depends on and is built around race and gender identity. Both Barack and Michelle Obama made a point of elevating the illegal immigrants who crossed over under Joe Biden and celebrated the citizen army that went to war on Federal officers, even after condemning such actions on January 6th. They prioritize the illegal immigrants because they are mostly non-white and thus have special protective status, as long as they vote blue no matter who, of course. And yet, for most Americans, they still don’t understand why they’ve been sidelined like this. Once you understand the rules of utopia, where an endless supply of oppressed people, along with an endless supply of racists, is what powers their engine. It’s an ideology that comes from Western countries overtaken by global elites, who need this form of virtue signaling to justify their power and their worldwide alliance, but it doesn’t do much for ordinary Americans, who don’t have the luxury of putting themselves last. It is a kind of class system that pretends to be about equality, about inclusion, and diversity, but really, it’s a way of categorizing us and deciding our worth. If you can participate in this game, you can go far. But if you don’t, out you go. Nate Bargatze dared to show up alongside RFK, Jr., and his wife, Cheryl. The internet found out about it, and things got so bad his publicist had to issue a statement that he wasn’t a Trump supporter. What kind of America is this? If they want to talk about unity, they have to call off their attack dogs. It didn’t used to be this way. Those of us who have been alive a long time remember when what mattered was the majority of Americans, the free market, democracy, and all that. Box office, ratings, and elections all decided the direction of our country and our culture. Not anymore. They want our country to look a lot like Obama’s kingdom, epitomized by his Brutalist monument - he’s way up there, and we’re all way down here. If you worship that way, we’ll all get along fine, they say, but don’t you dare vote in a way we don’t like, or we will go to war. So is that the plan from here on out? Must all elections be sanctioned and approved by the Democrats, or else? From Utopia to Dystopia Obama was not born in Chicago, but his monument will reside there as a showcase of his preferred legacy. He’s the Chicago guy, not the Hawaii guy. The fortress will be a place for travelers driving across this country to stop and admire, along with other historic landmarks in Illinois, like the birthplace of Abe Lincoln and Ronald Reagan, two of Obama’s strongest influences, or so he has said. The Obama museum event was a reminder of how we all shaped this story, the bad guys and the good guys of Obama’s Camelot - Obamalot - the height of the glory days, where everyone had a seat at the table and we’d mostly eradicated the “ists” and the “phobes.” I think Obama thought that making history as the first Black president meant more than just winning an election, and that the influence he had and the power he attained made him more than just a two-term public servant. He was, after all, living history, and everywhere we look, we can see his fingerprints. It was the play, Hamilton. It was Bruce Springsteen before he shrank into a bitter old prune. It was Tom Hanks when he could still open movies. It was when Oprah still had influence. They think that showcasing their high status while locking out so many Americans is enviable. It’s U2 and Oprah. It’s Julia Roberts and George Clooney. It’s Jennifer Hudson and Steven Spielberg. It’s all four former presidents and their First Ladies. Obama made a point of saying that they are all of like minds except one president, the one who defeated them again after their ten-year war. Who do these people think they are? They don’t have the right to tell the American people who they can and can’t vote for. It is their job to make their best case to us to earn our votes, and either they do, or they don’t, but they work for us, not the other way around. Are we all supposed to cheer seeing them standing there as a united front against the sitting president? They have absolutely no self-awareness about how tone-deaf this appears to most people. Do they think we’ve forgotten? Do they think we don’t remember Michael Moore calling George W. Bush a war criminal at the Oscars? Their terrible, blatant propaganda films like Oliver Stone’s W. And Adam McKay’s truly awful film about Dick Cheney, Vice, one of the worst films ever made, with the sole exception of his next movie, Don’t Look Up. They’re not finished. They expect the other half of the country to choke down more of it, unending amounts of it, in hopes of forcing all of us into compliance through the worst art the film industry has ever seen because it is under the complete control of a totalitarian movement. Next year, we’ll be tortured with a sure-to-be-terrible Sean Penn film on January 6th. They still see themselves as fighting the oppressive forces against them when the truth is that they are the oppressive force. Trump was the way out. The clocks were striking thirteen If any of us had been paying attention, we’d have known what we built mirrored Orwell’s 1984 and where it would ultimately take us. Every word of 1984 was a cautionary tale. Co-opting and distorting language, check. A Goldstein-like figure to sell two minutes of hate, check. A mandate to love Big Brother or else, check. An inside of accepted citizens ruled by the party elites and policed by the children spies, check, the abandoned working class, the Proles, outside of it, check. Trump’s win, to me, was like Winston Smith’s hope for the future, should the Proles rise up. That Obama and the rest of the establishment did worse than refuse to step aside but went to war on the duly elected president in an attempt to impeach, indict, discredit, and destroy him is the smoking gun that they no longer believe in American democracy. It’s their way or nothing. Americans have no way out. All the people ever had was Trump, and indeed, he was and remains a mighty force. He is the troll to Obama’s virtue signal, the two internet presidents who led whole armies online, facing off against each other for 15 years. Obama’s ten-year plea to the American people to choose him feels desperate by now. Choose me, love me, follow me, worship me. It doesn’t mean America is racist because they didn’t. That has been the Left’s method of policing all of us for far too long, and this country can unify the minute they snap out of it. They want us to see them as the better side, the special people, our gods and goddesses. But I look at them and see people who have long since cut themselves off from the rest of the country and have no plans to ever change. The museum reflects that better than anything ever has. What is inside? It doesn’t matter. It looms large. // 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

Jane Fonda, like so many on the Left, is the worst kind of hypocrite. She plays the part of a free speech warrior while participating in the most totalitarian movement this country has ever seen. There she was, yet again, yapping into a microphone to protest Trump’s UFC 250. The signs behind her are ablaze with pure lies - Civil Rights! The First Amendment! You can’t silence us! But Jane Fonda and the company she founded, Women’s Media Center, do not practice what they preach. They fired me for the crime of voting for Donald Trump. I had been regularly hired for almost ten years to write their Women in Oscars report until a story broke in the Hollywood Reporter calling me a “MAGA darling.” And just like that, my 25-year career as a “woman-owned” Oscar website went up in flames, as did my freelance gig for WMC. It’s true, I did vote for Donald Trump. Not only did I vote for him, but I also made my support for him known on social media, which is what caught the reporter’s attention in the first place. I was supposed to cower in fear. Support the Democrats or else. I could have done what a lot of people did and kept my vote for Trump secret, but I didn’t think I should have to. Weren’t we the side that stood up for free speech and free expression? No. We weren’t then, and aren’t now. There is a long trail of writers, thinkers, actors, artists, musicians, and ordinary citizens who have been destroyed by the Left’s machine for the crime of dissent. And thousands more who suffer in silence, knowing there are so many things they can’t say. Only one side regularly censored users on social media, and that was the Biden administration working with the FBI. Only one side used the FBI and the CIA to censor the Hunter Biden laptop to thwart the re-election of the sitting president. That wasn’t the Right. Because Jimmy Kimmel got a slap on the wrist and Trump sued CBS News, and there’s a merger with Paramount and Warner Bros., to people like Jane Fonda, that means the First Amendment is under threat. My message to her: clean your own house, Jane. Jane Fonda obviously wasn’t directly involved in firing me. She has no idea who I even am. It was someone else, someone I trusted, maybe someone who seemed like a decent person, but, like everyone else, from writers to publicists to friends, once I crossed that bright red line, I was no longer someone they would associate with at parties, let alone hire. It certainly wasn’t because I did not do good work. I did. I even asked Grok to fact-check my memory, and here is what came back: Nobody knows the Oscars like I do, and I did the best work for them on the cheap because I liked doing it. I tried to make my case as clearly as possible to the Hollywood Reporter that I could not go along with the unprecedented lawfare against Trump, and especially not “gender affirming care” on minor children. These things motivated me to do more than just vote. I had to go public. I thought my support would help others come out from the shadows. I knew as I was talking to that reporter that nothing I said would make a difference. I wouldn’t have even talked to her except she said she’d write the story anyway. She was reporting on what I thought and what I was tweeting, which was verboten inside utopia. And boy, did the hammer come down. After the story broke and I felt every door that had once been open to me slam in my face, I kept hearing yet another piece of bad news. The studios were pulling their ads. Yet another writer was leaving the site. I was not invited to screenings, parties, and premieres. The publicists all ghosted me. It was as though I had been arrested for committing mass murder. One of the last of the gut punches was losing that freelance gig at Women’s Media Center. I kind of knew it was coming because, of course, it would be. They all went along with it, and almost no one had the courage to push back or resist any of it. I wrote to them anyway because I wanted to hear it from them. And I got the expected answer. Jane Fonda founded the Women’s Media Center in 2005, along with Robin Morgan and Gloria Steinem. They describe themselves as “a progressive, nonpartisan nonprofit focused on increasing the visibility, influence, and decision-making power of women and girls in media.” They were perfectly happy to drop a woman writer for the sole crime of not agreeing with their politics. I’d say they don’t really support women in media so much as they support those who go along with them. I never played the woman card, but I could have. I built my site just to build it, and it became successful. I was a single mom in 1999 and raised my baby and my website at the same time. It is quite the story, especially for those who pretend to care about women in media. Why would it matter if I voted for Trump? Why would that mean I could no longer write the report? Why have they decided that all of this is okay, to treat half the country like toxic waste? How have they gotten away with it, and what will be their plans should they take back absolute power? They have painted themselves into a trauma corner with nowhere else to go, and in so doing, alienated themselves from much of this country. Where can you go when you’ve already gone as far as humanity ever has? Hitler, the Nazis, fascism. They’ve now gone to the only place they can go, wishing for and hoping for Trump’s death and vowing never to forgive anyone who voted for Trump. A Royal Court There was a time when I believed in all of it, too. The miracle of the first Black President and First Family. How one leader could bring together so much of American society, all of us reaching for the same goal because we all believed in a New America. We projected our fantasies of goodness onto them as they built what looked like a Royal Court of the most impressive and important people in the country, including rock stars like Bruce Springsteen and Katy Perry, actors like Robert De Niro and Julia Roberts. They were the party, and we were the adoring crowd. But all of that came with a price. If you want to be in the Royal Court, you’d best play ball because if you don’t, they can and will crush you. I had no idea that everything I built could be destroyed just because I dissented, and yet that is exactly what happened. Jane Fonda’s Women’s Media Center dropping me was the most disappointing because I believed in her, too. Now I know the truth. I am just one example. There are hundreds of people who are not welcome to work in the film industry if they are not ideologically compliant. We’ve been living with this for ten years now, and it’s become our new normal. Very few people are brave enough to stand up to them. Deep down, they all know it because they are too afraid to say the wrong thing, too. It’s easier to point their finger at Trump than confront what they have become - the blacklists, the shunning, the destroying of people’s careers. If they could do it to me, they can do it to anyone. What they don’t see, what they can’t see, is what they’ve done to the other half of the country for ten years. They want us all to think it’s perfectly normal that our late-night talk show hosts are purely partisan, or that it’s perfectly fine for Hollywood to continue to tell the story from inside their Doomsday Cult rather than the reality of all Americans. They don’t see themselves as the ones who can’t tolerate dissent or free speech and who fire people just for voting for Donald Trump. They believe themselves to be the chosen ones, the righteous few who have staked their claim on the New America, and those who aren’t on board must be purged. They’ve convinced themselves that it was perfectly fine that Jimmy Kimmel made an inhumane joke about Charlie Kirk moments after his brutal assassination, but when millions of upset viewers flooded the station with angry calls to have him removed, they called that a threat to free speech. They don’t seem to care that Biden imported millions of illegal immigrants into the country, and when many of them turned out to be murderers, rapists, and child molesters, they left a trail of victims, but those victims are invisible to the Left. They never even hear about them because in their minds, those illegal immigrants are to be protected above American citizens. So Julia Roberts and Bruce Springsteen continue to use the deaths of Renee Goode and Alex Pretti as examples of authoritarianism and to make American citizens feel shame for caring about their country and wanting a secure border and to be protected from harm. They never spent one minute comforting the mothers whose children were harmed by policies they supported. It wasn’t Trump who shot Pretti and Goode. They put themselves in a dangerous position to go to war against Federal agents who were doing their jobs. In the Left’s fever dream, they were battling Nazis. But they never notice or care or even try to understand why so many Americans wanted Trump to follow through on his promise to mass deport illegal immigrants, something every president has done. These mothers, like a lot of Trump supporters, had no other choice because this country, at the hands of the Left, means denying reality to serve utopia. You can’t talk about crime if the perp is an illegal immigrant or a person of color, just as you can’t discuss the harms of “gender affirming care.” I know, I’ve tried. They melt down like the housewife in The Stepford Wives who glitches at any confrontation of reality. That’s how it’s felt to me all these years, like I’m trying to talk to preprogrammed robots who know what you can and can’t say. I kept wondering what happened to everyone and why they were all acting exactly the same way. They were insulated from the rest of the country, and their imaginations got the better of them. What really happened to the ruling aristocracy, especially, is that they fell in love with their own reflection. They began to believe their own publicity, and so they couldn’t imagine the fault could ever possibly lie with them. It would have just been so much easier and so much better for everyone if they had just tried to understand why they lost. They never will, and so, they are doomed to repeat the same mistakes. And we have to suffer through it every time one of them finds a microphone. // 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

Charles Manson famously said, “You can’t kill me. I’m already dead.” I thought about that quote as the 60 Minutes scandal erupted, with a conversation between reporter Scott Pelley and newly hired producer Nick Bilton. From the NYT : “She is murdering ‘60 Minutes,’” [Scott Pelley] said. “She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it, and she’s been doing exactly that.” Mr. Pelley added: “She has no qualifications for her job; you have slender qualifications for this job. The changes that she’s made at the ‘Evening News’ have been catastrophic, so why should we expect that any of this is going to be any better?” Mr. Bilton responded: “Well, I will show you. That’s what I have to say. That is my plan over the next two weeks. I’ll be meeting with everyone. I’m very excited to meet with everyone, yourself included.” Needless to say, it didn’t exactly go as planned. Several sanctimonious “don’t you know who I am” statements later, Pelley was out. 60 Minutes isn’t quite dead, but it is a relic of the past. In the 1990s, it was pulling in 20-30 million viewers. That dropped to 14-16 million in the 2000s. By the 2010s, it was down to 10-12 million. Now, just 9 million people tune in every week in a country of 340 million. Much of that is due to the changes in technology, but still. There is no doubt that 60 Minutes, like all of legacy media, is trapped inside the same bubble that thinks Jimmy Kimmel’s nightly monologue is still relevant, believes the Oscars still represent the majority of moviegoers, and that the New York Times has its finger on the pulse of everyday America. Like so much of what we might call “resistance era culture,” there doesn’t seem to be a place for 60 Minutes in our culture now, beyond being a propaganda tool for the Democrats, which explains why so many of them feel a profound sense of loss now that Bari Weiss was brought in to give them a refresh. Pelley’s statement to call out the new management at 60 Minutes was the hissy fit heard round the world. The irony is that his statement is itself bad journalism. He throws around serious allegations without offering any concrete examples: Pelley has since talked to the New York Times to explain what he means by some of this, but even still, these are all examples of his own bias, one he can’t see and refuses to admit even exists. Instead, he insists that 60 Minutes is now showing bias simply by representing the other point of view. In the interview, he explains how Bari Weiss wanted him to portray the other side of the story in the killing of Alex Pretti and Renee Good. He says he did not think she drove her car into the officer or that Pretti was in any way violent. While that doesn’t mean they should have lost their lives, there is no question that they were at war with federal officers in a way we’ve never seen since the last Civil War. His bias was front and center at a speech in 2025, where his mass delusions about what this country has become were laid bare. This guy was willing to give Bari Weiss a chance, come on. Already a legend in his own mind, Pelley is writing his own legacy now as a self-made hero who stood up to the fascist regime. Here is Michael Moynihan: A Woketopia, if You Can Keep It Some say 60 Minutes never recovered from its biggest scandal, when CBS Corporate forced the show to censor an interview with Big Tobacco whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand, as depicted in Michael Mann’s brilliant film The Insider. The Hollywood of today would never make a movie like that unless it somehow blamed Trump and the Republicans. Not only wouldn’t they make it, but they couldn’t make it, no one inside the empire would allow it because, contrary to their own mass delusions, the fascism was always coming from inside the house — all sticks of wood bound together as one, where no dissent is allowed. I look around now, and I see relics of the old empire. They’re frantic and wild-eyed. They’re terrified that it all came crashing down. They don’t know why America turned away. But I do. We never set out to build an empire. For us, it was riding the wave of new technology, new social media, a new computer in our pockets, and a brand new president to bring us into the promised land. It was not Donald Trump's fault that our empire collapsed. It was the old cliche about how power corrupts. We acquired too much of it. Every company, institution, celebrity, movie studio, publishing house, and ordinary person has a social media platform. If you controlled social media, you could control them. Our public humiliation factory kept everyone in line, lest they be “it” on social media. That was true even before Trump won, but the tweak to the algorithm in 2017, Donald Trump becoming president and ruling over Twitter at the same time, sent those of us inside the empire into waves of uncontrollable mass hysteria. Many of them would never come out of it and are still locked in the spell of the mass delusion that a “fascist dictator, racist, rapist, criminal, pedophile” won the election in America not once, but twice. Somebody had to be lying. Pelley simply can’t tell the story the other way because he can’t see it. He’s still inside of it. I see them now, those who bought the dream like I did, befuddled as to what to do next. They just want their power back, their empire, their utopia. Use fear, that always works to drive lazy voters to the polls. Fear of what? Tax cuts for the rich? Fox News? No, fear of the big things, the existential things, like “fascism” and “democracy.” How do you even come back from that and make a pitch to the people that you should be put back in power to rule over a country you believe is under a Nazi occupation? How does Bruce Springsteen, Robert De Niro, Barbra Streisand, Katie Couric, Ellen DeGeneres, not to mention every single Democrat politician, come back from that? Maybe it’s the effect of the internet on our brains, but the so-called “resistance” seems to have lost touch with the tangible reality of history, of what it looks like to fight real fascism. What Nazis really were. When you can make any reality you want, why wouldn’t you? They are fine with the guy who has a Nazi tattoo because to them, that isn’t real. Of course, leave it to Salena Zito to do the job of a real journalist and remind us: 70-80 million people died in World War II fighting to save the world from a fascist dictator, a real one. How can these people live with themselves by spreading the lie that we are living through anything like that now? And that, more than anything, is why the empire collapsed. It was built on a foundation of delusions and lies. Bari Weiss and the Fourth Turning I have Bari Weiss to thank for starting this Substack. Very few people had the courage or the moxie to stand up to the Twitter mob back in 2020, but she did. I was on Twitter the night the mob came for her. The screeching scolds had already been nipping at her heels at the New York Times after she was brought in to shake up the ideological chokehold the Left had on the paper (and still does). They hated her, gossiped about her, shunned her, and yet, there she was, showing up anyway. She is built of stronger stuff than the kind of person who would ever crumple under the weight of the mob. Tom Cotton's essay, Send in the Troops , reflected the views of most Americans, that if the riots over the Summer could not be controlled, the military should be brought in. Their opinions did not matter to the mob or, apparently, to the New York Times. While 60 Minutes spent many stories on January 6th, they barely touched the riots in the Summer of 2020. They didn’t talk about the false narrative of Jacob Blake in Kenosha. That was left to local reporters. They never told the other side of the story because no one did until Bari Weiss tried and was smacked down in a way that woke me up. It was like the lantern dropping out of the sky in The Truman Show. It punctured the delusion at long last, and I realized that I was not getting the truth from the legacy media. They were lying to us and gaslighting us because Trump had to lose the election, and nothing else could matter. But the truth still mattered to me. And it mattered to Bari Weiss. Eventually, she would launch a Substack revolution with The Free Press and urge others to follow her. And so I did. Weiss is a millennial, the generation that’s to take the baton from the Baby Boomers, per the book, The Fourth Turning . You can see this unfolding everywhere, but perhaps nowhere as profoundly as with what happened at the Times and now at 60 Minutes. Here is how the Times’ Lulu Garcia-Navarro’s interview with Pelley went on how he came to know Bari Weiss: Um, yeah, sure pal. That sounds like padding for an upcoming lawsuit, not the truth. There is no way the Scott Pelley, who gave that speech at Wake Forest, is going to give someone hired by David Ellison “the benefit of the doubt.” That he had never even heard of Bari Weiss or had no idea any scandal had erupted at the Times over the Tom Cotton op-ed says it all. The Fourth Turning is like winter. The old must die to make way for the new. Trump didn’t collapse the empire on his own, but he’s a “Gray Champion” all the same. The one Baby Boomer who could tear it all down to make way for the millennials, like Bari Weiss, to reshape the future for the generations to come. MAGA In 2020, I escaped the Doomsday Cult our empire had become and was searching for signs of life, for truth, for something that felt real. I began driving across the country and saw an America that people like me had forgotten even existed. It wasn’t a virtual world where we make our own reality. It was a tangible place, with things people built with their own hands. It was farms, churches, town squares, neighborhoods, highways, and factories. What we built online had no place for this America. If you never understand that, you’ll never understand MAGA. From the hills, the backyards, and the fields, one name called out from this forgotten America: Trump. Even now, in 2026, these signs still stand. Not just in one state, in nearly every state. Trump is not in power because he’s a fascist. He’s in power because we, the people, put him there to fight for us against the mighty empire that was like a black hole, sucking all of American society into it. Anyone who thinks Bari Weiss would do Donald Trump's bidding at CBS News is living in a fantasy. They don’t know her, they don’t know him, and they most certainly do not know this country anymore. It doesn’t seem like it’s asking too much for guys like Scott Pelley to snap out of it at long last and to realize this is a big country with lots of different kinds of people in it. And all of them have the same right to representation. If the culture stopped speaking to them and the government stopped representing them, well, it’s all over but the shouting. // 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

Dear Paul Krugman, You used to be the kind of journalist I thought was telling the truth. I looked up to you, as I did so many writers at the New York Times. I was a different person then. That was before everything changed. The year was 2020, a summer of riots and a breakthrough moment when many of us realized for the first time that the Gray Lady was not telling us the truth. I have been on the internet for 30 years. I watched the collapse of traditional media and the rise of opinion-based journalism, the kind you do, Paul. Do you mind if I call you Paul? Mr. Krugman sounds so formal, and really, I’d like for you to see me as a human being, someone worthy of your attention and respect. Now that I have confirmation of what I’ve assumed all along, that people like you, Kara Swisher, Peter Baker, and Susan Glasser would like people like me thrown into re-education camps or gulags, I feel it’s worth the extra effort to get you to see real people again. To the horror of many, you went viral last week for your comments on what all of you will do with Trump supporters and the system that elected him. It was ugly, Paul. As ugly as anything I’ve seen written by a high-minded journalist and certainly closer to what the Nazis believed about the Jews than anything I’ve seen in my lifetime: “Purging of the United States, we need a de-MAGAfication. I’m not going over the top by using a word that’s very similar to the de-Nazification that we pursued successfully after World War Two in Germany. It’s not just the MAGA ideology, but the whole structure of hugely unequal power, hugely unequal wealth that made this horrific moment possible. It’s not going to be easy, but, and maybe it’s not going to be doable, but we have to try, because this is an absolute, this is a nightmare, this is the nightmare beyond, I think, even the worst fantasies of progressives, beyond the worst fantasies of conservatives, who still have a conscience, there still are plenty of those, but they’re no longer MAGA. This has to be turned around, and we should not, above all, whitewash or forget this moment. This is where a lot of forces in America have been leading, and if we don’t do something beyond just getting rid of Trump, it’s going to happen again.” It can’t have been easy, watching Trump win a second time and this time the popular vote, or to admit you are no longer relevant and that the only value you have is in giving the base of the Democratic Party their daily dose of hate and fear. Why didn’t Americans listen to your constant bleating about the end of the world? That’s an important question to ask, Paul. After all, they’re your most popular videos. Your Substack, with over 500K subscribers, is no less alarmist: It looks like your Substack is paying you more than you made at the Times, that’s for sure. So why not keep pumping it out, day after day, like a broken record — fear, hysteria, hatred, more fear, more hatred. What could possibly go wrong? You all seem certain you’re about to take back power and put things back where they belong. The only question you seem to have on your lips is not how we can better address the needs of the people, but what you will do with all of those MAGAts. You don’t even pretend there is a whole country or even half of a country that voted all of you out, not once but twice. You have no shame in admitting you see yourselves as better than the working-class half of America. You fully admit it. You bask in it. You know your power, Paul, and that’s maybe the only true thing you know about yourself. So let me set you straight on a few things. You are not the Allied Forces after World War II, and Trump is not now, nor has he ever been, Hitler. The closest thing to Fascism this country has ever seen is with all of you in power. It became “all sticks of wood bound together as one,” a “fasci,” with all elements of our society mandating conformity or else. Your side ruled through fear and violence, and still does. You violently beat Trump supporters and feel emboldened to do so, just like Hitler’s Brown Shirts. You probably never even knew that in 2015, Trump supporters were beaten and harassed and called Nazis. On the Left, there is no such thing as free thought and speech, which is why cancel culture collapsed the empire and why Tyler Robinson had to silence Charlie Kirk. So who are the real fascists, Paul? On your side, thought and speech are heavily policed throughout our culture. Everyone is tracked, monitored, and under constant surveillance lest they like the wrong tweet, follow the wrong person on social media, or read the wrong news outlet. Just because people like you cosplay that ICE is the Gestapo doesn’t make it so. It took 80 years for the world to forget about the Holocaust. But no one should ever forget what that looked like, and it wasn’t mass deportations or even detaining a five-year-old or shooting Alex Pretti and Renee Good. Shame on you. Shame on all of you for even suggesting that what we’ve just lived through is on any level the same as what happened during World War II. 70-80 million people were killed. 600,000 in America alone. Even the war in Gaza can’t compare, and shame on anyone who suggests it’s the same. None of this should have to be said to a man who enjoys high status inside utopia, a well-educated elite who lives on the Upper West Side and enjoys a decent retirement while he’s discarding half of America like human garbage. You tell me who the real Nazis are. You don’t have to tell me. I already know. I escaped the suffocating dystopia that you live in. I escaped the world that no longer knows the meaning of important words like fascist, Nazi, dictator, king, and pedophile, never mind man or woman. I escaped that world because the truth always mattered to me more than being liked, making money, or having status. I can’t say the same for you, Paul, or any one of your former colleagues at the Times. We’re watching the destruction of legacy media in real time, just one of the pillars of your now collapsing empire. Trump won because ordinary Americans can’t stand living under the oppressive thumb of the high and mighty, like yourself. I didn’t see what kind of power we all had until 2020. We had built a Shining Woketopia on the Internet that gave us complete control of all institutions of power - educational, cultural, corporations, and institutions. We thought we could shape the America we dreamed of. The problem was that there was a whole other America outside our bubble, and it took Donald Trump to ignite a populist revolt. The idea that this was about racism and bigotry was a lie. It was never Hitler invading. You were never the resistance. You’ve been living in a dream world of your own making. You destroyed yourselves trying to destroy Trump. The real story of the last ten years will never be told by any of you, much less seen or understood. I still see signs of the MAGA I know. I just saw one near the memorial site for the deadly battle of Antietam. From the middle of America, on the side of a store just living out their ordinary days near the ghosts of profound history, this: I am no longer welcome in your world, Paul. Some days, that hurts more than others. But when I see what you have become, calling for a “purge” and “de-MAGAfication, I know you don’t know this country anymore. You’ve been isolated for too long, and you’ve been participating in a decade-long deception. I also know I have the truth on my side, and that makes me the lucky one. // 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

Ashley St. Clair is all of us. Well, she might not be you. She might not even be me. Although I see some of myself in her. But she is this mess we’ve built. Like all of us, she has played a role in this ongoing virtual Civil War between Left and Right, played out amid tangled algorithms, giant egos, hurt feelings, and cash flow. She is the same age as my daughter, just 28 years old, but it feels like she’s lived five lifetimes. She has shapeshifted from MAGA to having Elon Musk’s baby, to a public fight over said baby, to throwing herself at the feet of the Left, branding herself as a one-woman confessional who will dangle all of the dirty details of “the MAGA cult” like bloody chum to hungry sharks. She is smart enough to know two things. First, the Left still controls most of our culture. If you want book deals, successful podcasts with the top-tier advertisers, or stories about you in the New York Times, or even movie deals about your life, you have to be accepted by them. And second, they won’t accept you unless you bring the goods. And boy does she ever. What do you want to know, she says on her TikTok as she applies gobs of makeup she doesn’t need - contour, foundation, concealer, blush, more concealer, more contour, powder. Do you want to know MAGA is a cult? Here you go. Are they racists? Oh yeah, she says, as she dabs her eyes with a powder puff. She might not realize it, but her makeup is a metaphor for the role she’s playing now, a real person hiding under layers and layers of disguise. Who is she this time? She’s the one talking to Jennifer Welch, the Wicked Witch of the Left: She was on with the chipper lunatic Suzanne Lambert: And Haley on the Go: And the most cringey of all was a giggly appearance with our favorite Cartier Communist, Hasan Piker. Baby Mama Blues Ashley has not gone full Monica Lewinsky and claimed victimhood to excuse her role in becoming yet another baby mama for the Henry VIII of Silicon Valley, Elon Musk. She does seem to take some responsibility for agreeing to go to bed with him upon first meeting. He even asked her what name she liked. Elon was upfront about what he wanted from her, and she seemed fully on board. As a hot conservative female who already had one kid in her early 20s, her ovaries were calling Elon’s name. He slid into her DMs before sliding into other places - yes, says Ashley, she joined the Mile High Club, courtesy of Elon’s private jet. But one thing an influencer, however fluid in politics, must preserve is their platform. What good is having the richest man in the world’s baby if you can’t brag about it? Be known for it? Have instant status because of it? Not to mention the child having to wander around the planet, not being Elon’s son, while everyone knows he is, like that b*****d son of Henry VIII. St. Clair is throwing around the figure of $40 million to buy her off, but she doesn’t say exactly who is offering it. Musk had originally offered a deal with $15 million up front and then $100,000 per month to raise the child, money most people couldn’t imagine in an entire lifetime. But that came with an NDA. She refused. Musk has said he gave her $2.5 million up front, then $500,000 per year. She has said he slashed her child support payments, causing her to sell her Tesla to cover expenses. Either way, whatever she’s gotten is not enough, not in 2026 when the platform is everything. Ashley St. Clair wants more. And in that way, too, she is all of us and this grotesque online machine we’ve all helped build, where a person can become a star overnight, then the object of scorn, with an angry mob attempting to destroy them as the entire internet watches. She was viciously attacked as a gold digger by MAGA, then they made AI porn of her, she says, even depicting her as an underage sex object, which is why she’s suing Musk. How it started, how it’s going Ashley St. Clair started her career as a blonde, appearing on Fox News pushing the MAGA line: And at the Babylon Bee, making content like this: Her past warring against the transgender community means it’s iffy whether or not she’ll ultimately get a pass, no matter the mea culpas she’s handed out like candy. This TikTok user says forget it. After all, Ashley St. Clair wrote a children’s book in hopes of saving some of the young from destroying their bodies. It kind of seemed like she believed it, right? Since then, however, she has found ways to get out of it. She’s thrown herself at the mercy of prominent Democrats like podcaster David Pakman: She’s talked about how ignorant she was, how she fell into a cult and didn’t know what she was doing. She talks about her past of being locked away and home schooled, where she was isolated from other people, before going to college and hitting the party scene, and eventually, to hear her tell it, she ended up in a cult. I know what it feels like to believe in a movement, then get chewed up and spit out, and find myself in a place where I’m telling all of the secrets of my former side, trashing them to the delight of the opposition. I know what motivates her and why she so badly needs affirmation and acceptance. But confessing her sins wouldn’t be enough for people whose ultimate goal is to end Trump and MAGA forever and retake power. They need a lot more than just confirmation of their mass delusions about Trump (he’s Hitler!) and MAGA (it’s a cult!). No, they needed a way to deny reality yet again and cast themselves as the real winners. How could they, the most perfect people in the world, have lost to Trump? Why did half the country reject them again? It’s a truth they still can’t face. Lucky for them, Ashley St. Clair has gifted them with the perfect way to explain the 2024 election. It was rigged by Elon Musk. The Democrats have done everything they know how to do to destroy Donald Trump and his MAGA army. They have framed him as a Russian spy, called him a racist, a rapist, a bigot, a dictator, a fascist, Hitler, a king, and a felon. They impeached him twice, indicted him four times, and attempted to throw him off the ballot in several states. He has survived three assassination attempts so far. They’ve obstructed everything he has tried to do, from cleaning up the streets to closing the border to bringing manufacturing back to stopping Iran from getting a nuke. He’s stood up for women who are forced to deny reality by competing against biological boys. He’s stood against “gender affirming care” that destroys the bodies of children who can’t consent. If Trump is for it, they are against it. They have pressured all artists to take a side against half the country, in Hollywood, in music, at the Kennedy Center. They insist that supporting him is like supporting Hitler, even if he’s beating back his own right flank by standing up for Israel. And yet, for the Left, he is the only thing standing in their way and for all of us the only bulwark against total societal control. It all sounds great because it absolves the Democrats of any blame. See, they did everything right. It wasn’t a coup against a sitting president running for re-election or the installation of his Vice-President without a single vote. Or that she was a terrible candidate. No, it wasn’t their fault they lost. It was Elon’s space lasers. Now that she has their attention, the warnings are getting more urgent, just in time to prepare for the midterms. And that is the real gift Ashley St. Clair has laid at the feet of the side she hopes will embrace her, value her, accept her, and elevate her. If she can help them win elections, whether the midterms or 2028, she can destroy both Elon Musk and MAGA. Well, how could a $40 million payout even compare? I would just offer her one word of caution as someone who came from the Left. Don’t tell them what they want to hear. Tell them what you know to be true because that’s what they need to hear. Confirming their mass delusion only sinks them in deeper. They don’t realize it yet, but their empire is in a state of collapse, and not a moment too soon. The counterculture is rising to take its place. When that happens, Ashley St. Clair will want to be more than just a footnote hitching a ride on a sinking ship. // This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

The 2024 election was a disaster for the Democrats. They have never been held to account for any of it. That would ordinarily be the job of the legacy media, but they’ve long since abandoned any pretense of objectivity. They are part of the “resistance,” and friendly fire is not in the job description. Do I sound bitter? I suppose I am. I once believed in not just the Democratic Party but the Obama coalition. I was a loyal, devoted soldier who believed we were all fighting the good fight, even before Trump won. We were the side that cared about climate change, women’s rights, the poor, and the marginalized. It took me decades to go from being a cynical 18-year-old in the 1980s who didn’t think there was any point to voting to a person who believed my vote could change the world. That cynicism would be polished off over time, as we headed into the 1990s with political correctness and therapy culture on the rise. We wanted to fix ourselves. We wanted — needed — to fill the void left by the doom spiral in the aftermath of the “Me Generation” and their counterculture revolution. It was Bill Clinton, by way of Aaron Sorkin, who ultimately pulled us out of it and primed us for a spiritual revival under the euphoric, history-making win of Barack Obama. I believed in hope and change. I believed in a new America. I believed my friends on Facebook who treated me with respect and love every time I fired off an impassioned plea for votes. I believed all of the women who made those signs for the Women’s March, the Climate March, and the Gun Control March. I, too, thought Trump’s win meant America couldn’t handle the first black president and the Confederacy was back for another round. What I know now is that none of it was real. We were not the New Puritans leading the country into the promised land. We were like every other political party, seeking absolute power and total control. Any truthful autopsy would have to start there. The Democrats have been lying to themselves and lying to their voters about what these last ten years have really been about: the refusal to relinquish power after losing an election. Democracy becomes a problem for a party that no longer believes in it if the wrong people win. From Real Clear Politics podcast Andrew Walworth, Tom Bevan and Carl Cannon: Any honest autopsy of the 2024 election would have to start back in 2016, when Hillary Clinton was anointed by Obama, who leapfrogged Biden, meaning Biden would finally get his shot in 2020. They should have thought that one through because it would come back to bite them four years later when they pushed him out of office. They practice top-down democracy, in which party leaders attempt to steer voters in the right direction rather than allowing candidates to make the case to the people. The problem with the Democrats is that they needed someone like Donald Trump to blow through their carefully laid plans. The shame of what the Democrats did in 2024 is almost as bad as what they did in 2020 to orchestrate Joe Biden’s win. Both of these elections were rooted in the mass delusion that Donald Trump wasn’t just a political opponent but an existential threat, so anything goes - even censoring the Hunter Biden laptop, or pushing out a duly elected president. That delusion gave them unlimited power in their minds, which made them the most corrupt political party in my lifetime, taking what never belonged to them, pushing “resistance theater” throughout American society, and coming up mostly empty anyway. A real autopsy would require cleaning house on all of it, admitting everything. It would require admitting to their voters that they knew they were lying about Trump to cover up their own failures. After all, wouldn’t it have been easier just to offer the people something better rather than treating Trump like a supervillain that could not be destroyed by ordinary means? No, because their biggest problem is that their only vision for the future is to reach back into the past. They still want to undo the Trump presidency rather than learn from it. They are fighting to bring back the utopia we all built under Barack Obama, and that has been the Democrats’ fatal mistake. Barack Obama’s grip on the party means they can’t move forward. A real autopsy would have to talk about Obama’s ongoing influence and control of the party. Why do you think he’s making appearances with Zohran Mamdani and James Talarico? He sees them as the party’s future because they are Obama clones, more or less. You don’t see him out there boosting Gavin Newsom, just as you don’t see many leaders on the Left rising to take Obama’s place. They must all be shadows of him, which is why it was Kamala Harris in 2024, Joe Biden in 2020, and Hillary Clinton in 2016. Obama couldn’t lose. He was treated like a god and king. He was never going to let Trump win this ten-year war. He couldn’t hand the country over to the guy who dared question his birth certificate, the guy they called a “racist” and a “rapist,” but more than that, he represented the undoing of the Obama Coalition and the worldwide movement it inspired. There was no way the Democrats were ever going to let that happen. By 2016, they had control of almost everything, from institutions to universities to culture, so why not use it? Exiling and disenfranchising Trump voters was all done in the name of Barack Obama. You see, it had to be racism that gave rise to Trump because Obama couldn’t fail. Isn’t it so much easier to blame America? To blame it on sexism and racism? Isn’t that what they tell themselves now about 2024? America wasn’t ready for any woman, especially a woman of color? Isn’t it easier to see it that way rather than address the real problem with the utopia we all built: it shuts too many people out? The Culture of Silence and the Climate of Fear The Vanity Fair story about how Democrats fear Kamala Harris running again is telling. Or rather, not telling. They are too afraid to use their real names. It is still considered blasphemy inside the Democratic Party to criticize her, as she has attained Obama-level status. She campaigned for Obama back in 2008 and was once called the “female Obama.” Harris rode the coattails of making history. Winning was easy for her. She was pretty and tough. She made the Democrats look good and won every single race as her star began to rise: District Attorney, Attorney General, Senator, and Vice President, next in line behind a very old Joe Biden. Probably, he would have stepped aside and handed her the presidency had he won a second term. Either way, Harris was not the best choice for Vice President, and the Democrats knew that at the time. The 100 people who signed a letter urging Biden not to choose Harris for “cosmetic reasons” were then shamed back into silence lest they be called racists and misogynists. The so-called autopsy vindicates Harris, which is all part of the same game. She is too big to fail and too popular to be cast aside, especially now after the redistricting fight has put Democrats back in “Jim Crow 2.0” mode. A real autopsy would have to confront this: how they continue to fall back on the same blame game: it’s those racists over there. It’s not our fault. We haven’t failed our voters. We have to stop them. We have to keep fighting this war against them, our fellow Americans. How can they even begin to confront who they are and what they’ve become? How can they reckon with all of the madness they’ve put the American people through for ten long years? The January 6th show trials, the lies about Kenosha being a “Civil Rights” protest, the mocking and celebrating of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the raiding of Mar-a-Lago, the censoring of dissent via the FBI on social media, Russiagate, the collapse of a once-thriving culture, impeachments, indictments, and the unending No Kings protests. If they want a real autopsy, they should talk to people like me, once loyal supporters who were chewed up and spit out by a political party that could not tolerate even simple questions about “cancel culture” mass hysteria, or the rising intolerance in the Left writ large, or why someone’s career would go up in flames just for voting for Trump. And forget about asking whether toddlers should wear masks or pre-teens should take medication that sterilizes them for life. I walked away from the party in 2020. I couldn’t believe what I watched them do, what I helped them do, to drag Joe Biden over the finish line. I knew he was too old. I knew Kamala Harris was a ticking time bomb. I knew it would all blow up in our faces eventually. But lying was so much easier, especially with a full-court press serving as a propaganda front. They have been lying for so long that they don’t even know how to stop. The biggest lie was that Trump was a “fascist.” They’re still telling that lie. They’re still scaring Americans into manic desperation every day. The lies are what drove me away. I couldn’t live with them. The truth matters, especially if you’re cutting up the body to find out what killed it. The lies began in 2016 when Hillary Clinton, the Democrats, and loyalists like me couldn’t face the truth about why she lost. It was one lie piled on top of another, and no one had the courage to face down the social media mobs to set the record straight. Any dissent was met with strict reprisals. Before long, everyone settled into a climate of fear and a culture of silence as the new normal. Their problem goes back to the Art of War. If you don’t know yourself or your enemy, you will succumb in every battle. They should first try to understand themselves. If they could just see who and what they are, and why America would choose Trump a second time, they’d be halfway there. Then, if they could understand Trump, who he really is, rather than the character they invented, they’d finally come back to the real world with the rest of us. The Democrats are in love with the dream Obama sold, not the reality of what America became with the Democrats in power. There are too many truths left to face. There are too many ghosts haunting them. There is no point in performing an autopsy on a body with nothing inside but smoke mirrors. // 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

[A crosspost with Hollywood Woketopia , my other Substack] Every so often, a moment in culture arrives, a Sydney Sweeney ad, or Project Hail Mary. Every time, we hear that the Woke fever has finally broken. Hollywood cares about the people again. Right? The same reason Kamala Harris is likely to be the nominee in 2028, the same reason the Democrats are still selling the lie that any kind of attempt by Republicans to even out the redistricting is “Jim Crow 2.0,” is proof enough that on the Left, Woke is not going anywhere. It is who they are now. Not all of them, but the most powerful among them. Early on, when Mark Halperin and others were insisting Gavin Newsom would be the nominee in 2028, I said there was no way the Democrats would get behind a white guy, no matter how passionately he genuflects to the Woke (“Anti-woke is anti-black!”). I know the Democrats. I was one. I helped build the modern-day party of the Great Feminization and the Great Awokening. I know what fires them up every day, and it isn’t just taking back power; it’s foisting their religion upon the rest of us. They think it’s the opposite, that it’s the Right that is foisting their “Christian Nationalism” upon them. While it’s true that a faction of the Right has unmasked to become the very thing Rob Reiner warned about in his movie, God and Country, they aren’t the majority. Perhaps that’s true on the Left. But look around. Their religion is the dominant culture in America. When news got out that Christopher Nolan had cast Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, the “most beautiful woman in the world,” whose face launched a thousand ships, it ignited yet another culture war. How you reacted was like whether or not you wore a mask outside in 2020. It was a test. You’re on one side, or you’re on the other. Notice it, comment on it, object to it, criticize it, and you’re one of the bad people to be purged. And if that weren’t enough, Nolan brought back Ellen Page from Inception, now recast as Elliot Page, the male, as an act of affirmation and yet another test. These are Orwellian 2+2=5 and force people to choose between ignoring it and going to see a big-effects movie in IMAX, or not buying a ticket and boycotting the film. Elon Musk took the bait, becoming the villain Hollywood needed to turn seeing The Odyssey into a righteous and political act. You can see them now: the bearded male feminists buying tickets ten times in a row. “Take that, Elon Musk!” The ladies of Blue Sky will go in groups, then fawn over how beautiful Lupita Nyong’o is and overuse the male pronoun for Ellen/Elliot Page. “Wasn’t he great?” The game is becoming exhausting by now, as Hollywood demands the hard-working American public be impressed by them, lectured by them, and corrected by them. All audiences really want is the one thing Hollywood seems unable to accomplish: entertain them. It isn’t that Nyong’o isn’t pretty. She is. It’s that Helen of Troy was white, famously so, even if Greek. Nyong’o is a unique beauty, not a universal one, a reality the Left wants to force, because Hollywood doesn’t care about its audience. They want to look good. Probably the worst thing about the game Hollywood plays with the movie fans they helped raise is that Lupita Nyong’o is held out as a sacrificial lamb. She isn’t pushing any ideology, unlike Ellen/Elliot Page. They are putting her out there and expecting her to absorb criticism about herself, including whether she is pretty enough. I met her once, back in 2013 in Telluride, before her career took off. She was too young to know how to act like a celebrity. She was so nice, I was won over. She would win an Oscar that year and become a big star in Hollywood. Is it fair to put her in this position just so they can feel good about themselves? No. Does it change anything? No. There is still such a thing as truth and reality, even if that is the thing that is unfair. The Woke Code and the Hays Code The Hays Code (1930-1968) represented an era wherein decency and morality were mandated in all Hollywood films. The Christian conservatism/morality mandated by the Hays Code reflected less a separation between art and governance and more a united effort toward a utopian society of goodness, especially as we moved through the last Fourth Turning, the Great Depression, and World War II, a time where the world saw true evil in Hitler and Stalin, not to mention the nuclear bomb. That isn’t all that different from what the Woke Code is now. It’s roughly the same kind of thing: rigid rules to depict an ideal society. The difference is that Christian advocates have been replaced by progressive activists, and the villain is the white male patriarchy. What is different now, amid our current Fourth Turning, is that the Woke Code includes only half of America. To the Left, they would rewrite this narrative to say that Hollywood depicted mostly White America, and that is what has changed. But really, if you respond to the box office, as Hollywood doesn’t anymore, you will always default to the majority. It isn’t rocket science — beautiful, sexy women and masculine men and a great story. The end of the Hays Code was entirely due to economics. Television became so popular in the 1950s that there wasn’t much of a need to go to the movies if all you saw was the same kind of buttoned-up themes you could see on TV. That’s true now, too. Movies, then, had to break out of the Hays Code and become much more subversive, leading into the 1970s, which saw some of the best films ever made. While it’s true that The Odyssey will be eligible to win Oscars under the new rules, it’s also true that the criteria could have been met in a way that didn’t make audiences play this same exhausting game that has alienated them from everything Hollywood puts out. The casting of Nyong’o and Page is less about Oscars and more about status. Perhaps Nolan was under pressure to cast a non-white woman as Helen, or maybe he wants to be seen as a good person using his wealth and fame to make change, as the most famous white male directors reach for things money can’t buy, like Martin Scorsese making Killers of the Flower Moon, Steven Spielberg making West Side Story with a real Latina, and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Peak Woke Best Picture winner, One Battle After Another. No film has better exemplified Hollywood in the Trump era than this one. It says it all. ICE as the Gestapo, check. America is run by a cabal of wealthy white Nazis, check. A woman of color must save herself, check. All of it is held together by a hapless white man, Leonardo DiCaprio, who represents the film’s beating heart. He’s the only good white guy, which is how those in Hollywood who make these kinds of choices would like to be seen. One Battle is actually a movie about them. Had Nolan cast a blue-eyed blonde woman as Helen of Troy, all hell would have broken loose. When you go against the rules of the Woketopia, you aren’t just getting hit on X with lots of angry tweets by loyal fans who continually feel betrayed; they bring out the big guns - agonizing op-eds in the New Yorker, for instance. If you obey the rules, then you are praised. The problem is that it all feels so artificial, so pre-planned, so inorganic. I used to write the Oscars report for Jane Fonda’s Women’s Media Center (who fired me after they found out I voted for Trump), counting the number of female nominees and winners. The statistics were always grim. Every year, it was bad news. As things began to change for women after the Academy announced its DEI mandate in 2020, that change was forced. If before merit had made too many white men winners, now we were seeing something a little closer to gender parity. So then the line moved back, and it became not just about women but women of color and trans women. Now, it’s all about Marxism disguised as art. If life isn’t fair, movies will make it fair. It isn’t just because the Oscars have it written into their new rules, and it isn’t just because activist groups like GLAAD breathe down the neck of every Hollywood studio, counting heads and making reports. It’s that this is a deeply felt belief system that isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. I have no doubt The Odyssey will make money. It’s a Christopher Nolan film, after all. Who doesn’t want to go see a giant visual effects epic filmed entirely on IMAX? If you can ignore the elephant in the room, the performative casting, you might have a great time. But if you were hoping that Woke is over, well, I think that was its own Hollywood fairy tale. It’s why Kamala Harris was the nominee in 2024 and why she will once again be the nominee in 2028. This is how the ruling class in America wants to be represented. They want to force change, and they do that by elevating minority groups to high-status positions as symbols for the mostly white people who run things. Culture, like the Democratic Party, will have to be built anew. That, more than anything, explains why AI is about to completely consume the business, becoming the subversive counterculture revolution Hollywood never saw coming. They can do it all and more without the millions of dollars necessary to mount a production. AI artists don’t have to be held to the same rigid standards. They can be purely about bringing in eyeballs by showing what people most want to see, rather than what Hollywood wants them to want to see. In other words, they can make the women as beautiful as they want, and no one can cancel them for it. I spent my life in movie theaters gazing up at the big screen and watching some of the best films ever made. The only way that makes sense is if you are escaping real life and finding your way into a fantasy world, and maybe for the Woke, seeing Lupita Nyong’o cast as the most beautiful woman in the world is its own kind of fantasy fulfillment. After the movie comes out, we’ll have to see whether it works or not. At the moment, it feels like just another test to decide who gets to stay and who has to go. 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