Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone

Imagine being an Iranian right now, especially an Iranian woman, as hundreds of thousands of American women gather to exercise their freedom in a free country, people like Jane Fonda who have everything and yet are still out there bleating about fascism and oppression. Imagine protesting something that doesn’t exist: a king in America. Protesting the very same democracy that put said “king” in power. Yes, that’s what democracy looks like. Sometimes it doesn’t go your way.Imagine being in Iran, knowing how many brave citizens attempted to protest their government, only to be mowed down just for standing there, seeing all of these idiots in America marching in their No Kings parade. It would be like someone dying of hunger watching the line form at the Golden Coral all-you-can-eat buffet. Even NPR covered the women protesting in Iran back in January:And now:They have no shame, these people. They throw their public temper tantrums, holding their dumb signs that say things like “fascism” and “dictators” and “No Kings,” serving only to project to the rest of the world how delusional and cut off from reality they have become. And we’re supposed to put these people — this cult — back in power? Imagine being anyone in Venezuela and watching this grotesque spectacle play out. Imagine what it must feel like in Iran as they hope and pray that Trump is successful in castrating their dictatorial, oppressive regime, and to see so many Americans rooting for his failure, protesting a war alongside the Houthis. That is how desperate they are now to win their war on Trump.I mean, you couldn’t make this up if you tried. The headline says it all: “Houthis enter Middle East war | Millions join anti-Trump protests worldwide.”The Houthis mantra: “God is the Greatest, Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse the Jews, Victory to Islam.”Please let this be the moment the entire world sees them for what they really are, pampered, entitled, privileged aristocrats who wouldn’t know real problems if they shot them in the face for not wearing a mandatory hijab - oh, I know, hijabs are cool now, so why don’t you, Jane Fonda, put one on and move to Iran? Their protest might be seen as a “show of force,” and it’s true that they are a united, conformist, obedient cult, and sure, it will help them motivate their base to turn out and vote in the midterms, but all it really is, Jane Fonda, Bruce Springsteen, Robert De Niro, is a well-funded temper tantrum. We’re MAD because you wouldn’t all just go along with Kamala being installed after we coup’d out Joe Biden!We’re MAD because Barack Obama isn’t in power anymore, and our empire is collapsing.We’re MAD, and we can’t self-improve, yoga, meditate, or buy our way out of it. We’re MAD because our world is not pristine, harmonious, and sustainable because we LOST not once but twice to Trump!Maybe at any other time, we could laugh at their dumb No Kings protest, but it’s hard when our country is at war with a real dictatorship to watch these spoiled brats show the rest of the world how stupid Americans really are.At least on the Right, they’re consistent. They’re America First, anti-war, and uncomfortable with the US and its relationship with Israel. They’ve made that clear, even if I think most of them are still useful idiots for Russia, Iran, and China. But on the Left? The side that supposedly cares about human rights and women’s rights, especially? What’s their excuse? The truth is that they have been conditioned over almost 20 years to repeat the mantras fed to them by the media and social media, handed down by politicians. They don’t even know what is true anymore, much less the meaning of words. What is a dictator? Trump.What is a fascist? Trump.What is oppression? Trump. These people have no idea what oppression means. To Robert De Niro, it’s getting a bad seat at a restaurant. To Jane Fonda, it’s the wrinkles on her face that show her age. To Bruce Springsteen, it’s losing his power to influence voters away from Trump one Born in the USA at a time. Boo hoo. Cry me a river. There was always an easier way to remove Trump from office. All they ever had to do was offer the people something better, and they couldn’t even do that. They’ve never admitted failure. They’ve just decided to make everyone miserable until we finally relent and vote them back into office. Oh, how I wish we had good writers who could point out the absurdity of a would-be king trying to liberate a country from a dictatorship as his own citizens march in the streets, free as can be, demanding he be removed from power. Who will shame them? Not I, said the legacy media. Not I, said SNL, John Oliver, Stephen Colbert, or Jimmy Kimmel.Here are some hard truths from TikTok:Freedom over FascismIn my very affluent, very white, very liberal town, they shamelessly virtue signal: Freedom over fascism as Iranians huddle in their homes begging for our “fascist” to set them free? Freedom over fascism when you shun and destroy anyone who

I stood in the corner of our tiny shack atop a mountain in Topanga and waited for my brother to come home. He would be there any minute and would see his beloved black lab mix, Cinder, dead under a sheet in the front yard. We’d been out riding that afternoon. My mom was on our quarterhorse Teddybear. My younger sister and I rode the twin stallion ponies, Pumpkin (mine) and Fireball (hers). It was summer. We were riding to Topanga Elementary to play in an empty schoolyard. Cinder came along. It was always hot, but that day, it was baking, and we were not prepared. All of a sudden, Cinder collapsed. My mother, in a panic, ordered my sister and me to ride our ponies to the school and bring back water. Maybe we could save her, we thought. When we finally got to the school, we scoured the trash cans and found empty milk cartons. We rinsed them, filled them, then galloped back, Pony Express-style, to where my mom was waiting. But it was too late. Cinder was gone.I don’t remember much else about that day, except what happened to my brother later, when he came home. I’d never seen my tough, strong older brother cry. That was my first lesson in the unique grief of losing a dog. They call them “soul dogs” or “heart dogs” on Reddit. It’s that connection you have with a special dog that will never be matched by any other. I have always hated how the internet flattens things into group ideas, but in this case, they were right. I had to let go of my soul dog, Jack, and I’ll never be the same.Mind you, I didn’t want to. I rationalized it many times. I even almost took him to the hospital and asked them to cut him open, remove the large cancerous mass inside of him, give him kidney dialysis, and chemo. Something, anything to keep him alive. Needles, hospital room, strangers, bright lights. That would not have been for Jack. That was for me. I couldn’t do that to him.People have said, “You gave him such a happy life,” and I tried. But how do you measure the happiness of a dog? To me, Jack wanted more than anything to be free. Free of the leash. Free of doing only what I wanted him to do. Free to have maybe found a mate one time instead of having that possibility taken off the table. Free to roam, most of all, through the hills and the fields.I could not give that to him. The best I could do was make a situation for a dog with the urge to roam slightly less terrible. Oh, I suppose I could have never gotten him in the first place, waited for the ideal owner, like a rancher to pick him up. I don’t know if I was Jack’s ideal owner or not. I just know that he was my soul dog, for better or worse.You don’t choose dogs. They choose you. I’d pulled into a gas station near the Four Corners of Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico en route to the Telluride Film Festival in 2014 when I looked down, and there was a furry little wolfen creature, redheaded, with bright green eyes staring up at me, and was that a smile? He already knew how to ask for food, and I was happy to oblige. Only I didn’t want to just feed the dog. I wanted to rescue him. I don’t know why, exactly. It felt like a calling. He was redheaded, like my pony Pumpkin. He had green eyes like mine. But it was his sweet disposition that meant it was love at first sight, even if I didn’t know it yet.I told my daughter and her friend, both named Emma, to go get some dog food because we were taking this dog. When I turned around, he had crawled away and hidden under a trailer, but a woman pulled him out and handed him to me. That sealed Jack’s fate, to be rescued by city girls. Jack wasn’t going to be my dog at first. My daughter’s friend wanted him, but her parents said no. That night, as the girls hung out in their basement room and I was cooking a roast chicken, I heard little feet tap-tap-tapping up the stairs, and there he was again, smiling up at me, wanting food. Okay, little pup, I thought, I guess I’m a dog person now.“Don’t take him if you can’t keep him,” my younger sister warned. I knew what she meant. She’d thought I’d abandon Jack if some guy wanted me to, as I’d done once before when I was too stupid to know better. The dog went to my mom, who doted on her, but still. It sent the message that I couldn’t be trusted with a dog. We had three cats already, but dogs weren’t allowed in our apartment in North Hollywood. When they found out, I was ordered to get rid of Jack. So we split to Burbank. I also broke up with a boyfriend over my dog. Sorry, I made my choice, and there was no going backFour years later, we finally adopted a friend for him because he hated being alone, and my daughter Emma was leaving for college. We had a hard time choosing and were about to leave the shelter when a volunteer came out, holding a tiny, terrified terrier-poodle mix. She’d been there two weeks, and no one wanted her. How could we say no? It felt like another kind of calling.Her name was Pippa, but we changed it to Luna, and though she looks desperately sad in that photo, she blo

I didn’t use to be a Trump voter, much less a Trump supporter. I can’t say I’m hard-core MAGA or what they call a “Triple Trump voter.” But as I’ve watched him over the past six years, my support for him has only grown. I could lie and pretend it hasn’t, maybe save myself the tiny bit of credibility I still have left, but that would not be the truth.As I watch Trump deflect attacks from both the Left and the Right over the war with Iran and various other things, I still see the Gray Champion of the Fourth Turning — The one guy who has the right stuff to stand in the breach and do the right thing, even if it’s not the popular thing. Whatever it is in Trump that guides him, some will say God, some will say a gut instinct, it gives him the necessary focus to blur out the distractions and the noise, take aim, and hit the bullseye.No president has ever faced the kind of opposition Trump has, not just from the world, but from the establishment in the United States, most especially the Democrats. Even now, they have no plan for any of us, no vision for the future. They only have their hatred of and their attacks on Trump and his MAGA base. What they want is for people like me to disappear, or else decide that all of their attacks on Trump have been justified. I was a fool, they want me to say, and I regret my vote. Except that I don’t. They want X to reflect real life, with all of these influencers and podcasters studiously dropping their support and regretting their vote, “I’m done with Trump,” they insist.But X isn’t real. It’s avatar life. Whatever is happening there, it’s the result of algorithms and engagement by people who spend way too much time doomscrolling and getting caught up in mass hysteria. Most people aren’t that plugged in. They’re just living their lives.I didn’t just vote for Trump to stop the Left from overtaking this country and leading us into their dystopian, 1984-like future, but that would be reason enough.No, I have come to genuinely admire Trump, flaws and all. I am sickened by the snooty Left and how they turned their noses up at Trump and his supporters when he tried to revamp the Kennedy Center. I vomited a little in my mouth when I saw Ben Stiller demand that Trump remove Tropic Thunder from a meme. Every time the elite gather and trash Trump, as they did at Jesse Jackson’s funeral, much to the horror of his own son, I see our potential future, which is really our past, a past we desperately need to leave behind. This is not their country. It never was. This country belongs to all of us.The Gray ChampionNine years ago, one of the authors of The Fourth Turning, Neil Howe, was asked if Trump was the Gray Champion. He didn’t know because it was too early to say. This was before 2020 and before January 6th, way before Trump’s second win in 2024.The key point he makes, though, is that a Gray Champion is full of ego and has an idea that if he breaks it or if he fixes it, he’ll be okay. It’s that combination of self-confidence, certainty, and recklessness to do what almost no one else would do that defines the one man who can stand up to not just the forces that oppose him but his own peers.It is the willingness to take big risks that, I think, makes a Gray Champion. Who else would even dare try? That makes them hated in their time, but history remembers them well.Lincoln was the target of assassination plots and was eventually assassinated.Winston Churchill was blamed for military failures during World War II:And Roosevelt was a target too:The bombing and neutralization of Iran is very Gray Champion-like, as is much of what Trump has already done both in the US and abroad in his second term. He is moving fast and perhaps breaking things to make his short time back in office matter.He also knows that if the US abandoned support for Israel now, Iran got a nuke, they would not hesitate to wipe Israel off the map, and though many on the MAGA Right would cheer that decision, it would be a disaster for the world. The allies would have no choice but to go to war with Iran anyway. Pay now or pay later.As with other Gray Champions of the past, Trump will have to take the bad with the good. The bombing of a school killing over 100 girls on the first day of the war — probably due to outdated intel — will have to be part of his legacy, no matter the outcome, which is still under investigation, but it looks like the US did it. This will put Trump in the Democrats' crosshairs should they take back power in 2026 or 2028. They might impeach him again or put him on trial for war crimes. The bombing of the school, along with the killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good, will be amplified by the establishment media, and whatever Trump’s successes will be won’t matter.I understand this war from a strategic perspective, to end a threat to both America and Israel, one of the three world powers that could be fighting us in a world war, along with Russia and China. That wasn’t the case with the Ukraine war. That, t

The Disney movies I grew up with made it easy for a kid like me to recognize good vs. evil. We knew, walking in the door, that goodness would prevail, because it must. The alternative is nothing less than the end of civilization as we know it. Goodness was personified by the beautiful princess, whose purity of heart drew the forest creatures and eventually, a handsome prince. Their union was a symbol of harmony, stability, and happy endings.Evil was embodied in the wicked queen, who was jealous of the princess's purity, so much so that she couldn’t rest until the princess was obliterated. Somehow, the villains never know their demise is a certainty because goodness must prevail. Some might say that is what happened to the MAGA movement, one bright sunny day in Utah, when a psycho killer avenging the crippling despair of his transgender furry lover took aim and shot the handsome prince, killing him within minutes. Since then, MAGA has struggled to hold onto the coalition Charlie built, the support for the president he helped elect, and to protect the beautiful princess from the evil forces that threaten to destroy her, Turning Point, and MAGA.Candace Owens might think she’s the hero of this story. She’s written herself in after she was left on the cutting room floor. She’s amassed an audience of dimwitted women and a weaponized army of international bad actors hoping to infiltrate the US and use Candace to shape public opinion. A growing portion of her audience, as with many influencers on the Right now, is comprised of people convinced that Jews are behind every evil thing that ever happens, has ever happened or will ever happen, and in Candace Owens, they’ve found their princess. Candace is the only one who sees the truth!Candace is an instrument of God!Candace will make sure justice is served!How good it must feel for someone who's always been a whole lotta charisma with no real place to land. She tried out many different masks over time, moving through political parties and various ideologies until finally landing the role of a lifetime: mean girl with a microphone. After being booted out of the Daily Wire, her gossipy YouTube channel would take her into the wet, slimy corners of culture and politics, and her audience would lap it up. But she would hit paydirt when she decided to run with the idea that Brigitte Macron was really a man.Cruelty sells online, and Becoming Brigitte was a huge hit. Getting slapped with a massive lawsuit by the Macrons only seemed to make her more popular. By the end of that mess, everyone knew her name.So then what? Back to Blake Lively and Diddy’s Freak-Offs? Not for our Disney villain. She needed something as big, if not bigger. What could really dig into the tender spots and manifest itself as emotional terrorism in the same way? Who is as protected a target? Social media amplifies the ugliness inside of us all. The algorithms do the rest. The Left has been unleashing levels of dehumanization and bullying at Erika Kirk since the day Charlie died. Why her? Who knows. They hated him and were happy he was dead. They wanted to see his widow suffer, especially because she’s a pretty blonde. All the while, Candace, who’d been sidelined from Charlie’s life, didn’t attend his wedding to Erika, so the story goes, and was pushed out of TPUSA and not present at the memorial, saw that Erika was suddenly a subject both too hot to touch and impossible to ignore. And yeah, a pretty blonde.And so, just as the evil Queen in Snow White can’t stand it any longer and sends a huntsman to kill what torments her, Candace finally pulled the lever, especially after Erika Kirk told her to stop, in an interview with the very Jewish Bari Weiss, no less.So many women, and even some men, wanted to see our princess fall, and Candace was more than happy to serve it up fresh and hot. The Disney PrincessCharlie Kirk’s marriage to Erika was always met with the refrain, “she’s out of his league.” Charlie got lucky and found himself a true beauty. Half Syrian/Lebanese and half Swedish. Erika Kirk looks like no one else. With cascading platinum locks and sparkling blue eyes, she was Charlie’s dream girl. How did he ever get so lucky? He saw her, knew he wanted her, and he said to her, “I don’t want to hire you. I want to date you,” so goes the famous story of how they met.Candace is pretty, but she’s not that pretty. Few women are. Candace had to develop other skills that pretty girls usually don’t have to worry about. Candace is better on camera than Erika. She is better at performing and at storytelling. Erika is still slightly awkward and hasn’t yet found her voice. She’s trying under enormous pressure and undeserved scrutiny to keep Turning Point alive and make Charlie’s dreams come true. Not to mention caring for two small children and an ailing mother. But it’s Erika’s beauty, especially her leaning into her half-Swedish identity, that seems to drive Candace into fits of despair and jealousy. What else c

For the last five years, since I left the Democratic Party, I’ve been waiting for any sign that they’ve emerged from the Doomsday Bunker at long last, regained their perspective, come back to the real world, and are finally prepared to build a future for all of America because a house divided against itself cannot stand. The Democrats were booted out, not once but twice. In between, they had the chance to show us all that they were on the better side. If Trump were so terrible, what could they offer in return? The problem is that they’re still the party of Barack Obama, and to criticize any of it, to change course on anything is an affront to him and all that he built. To confront their failures, they must confront his. And they won’t do that. They failed to protect the border, the children, the workers, the families, and the businesses. They failed to keep us safe and failed to include us all in the American dream, choosing to focus instead on their wheel of oppression, which has now landed on illegal immigrants. True, no political party has amassed as much power as they still have. It was power they did not want to lose. I know. I was there. I didn’t even realize there was another America outside the one we built, with the help of the internet. It was a brand new world that felt like the future. But it was a world that left at least half the country, the working-class half, behind. When we emerged in 2016, shocked that they did not want to live in our utopia, it sent us cascading into mass delusion that Trump was an existential crisis instead of a duly elected leader for Americans who wanted to change. Rather than understand that, rather than work to fix the problem, rather than reach out to those abandoned, discarded masses, it’s been this. Petulance, temper tantrums, narcissism, self-pity, unending hysteria, like spoiled children who don’t get what they want on Christmas morning.Senator Adam Schiff has announced he will boycott Trump’s State of the Union, joining a growing list of, it must be said, weak and unappealing Democrats no one feels inspired by or wants to vote for. According to Newsweek, these are the Democrats who plan on playing hooky. * Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon* Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut* Senator Tina Smith of Minnesota* Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland* Representative Yassamin Ansari of Arizona* Representative Becca Balint of Vermont* Representative Greg Casar of Texas* Representative Veronica Escobar of Texas* Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington* Representative Delia Ramirez of Illinois* Representative Bonnie Watson Coleman of New JerseyAfter mocking Turning Point USA’s half-time, these Democrats are now doing the same thing, planning an alternative rally to boycott the State of the Union.According to Reuters:About a dozen Democrats in the Senate and House of Representatives have announced their participation in a “People’s State of the Union” event on the National Mall, near the Capitol, to highlight their opposition to the Republican administration’s policies, organizers said on Wednesday.Yeah, it will probably play like Kamala Harris’s closing argument to the “people” on October 29, just before Donald Trump cleaned her clock. Now, it’s deja vu all over again. Remember eight years ago when they boycotted the State of the Union? Yeah, good times. Do you think they had any idea Trump would come back and win in 2024?Nothing ever feels authentic. It always feels performative. They simply swap out whatever the current thing is and then fall in line like obedient robots. Harris was installed after they pushed Joe Biden out, and he pushed out any potential candidates who might defeat Trump. Now, instead of the screeching Me Too fanatics, it will be the screeching No Kings/ICE OUT fanatics. Sounds charming!They are running in place, getting nowhere, because they have nowhere to go. They’ve never confronted their failures, or the America under Obama that many voters did not want. Kamala Harris, like every Democrat, had nothing to sell but fear - fear of Trump, fear of the future, fear of change.Their platform is built on elevating the weak and the marginalized, so they need a constant supply. They need a sick America. Not a successful, healthy America. Trump projects exactly the opposite, and it drives them insane. So all they’re left with are their violent fits, their temper tantrums, their protests, and their boycotts. Yes, they have all of the cultural power. They have most of the wealth. What they don’t have are the people. If they did, they would not have lost to the guy they tried to impeach, throw in jail, remove from ballots, and even assassinate. You can’t be the side with all of that power and still treat the other half of the country like human garbage. They know that, at least some of them do. They just don’t know any way out by now. Their party has been hijacked by a cult. All the people have is a vote, and since they voted against the Democrats, they’re

When Karoline Leavitt was asked about whether Trump believes he’s been falsely called a racist, she quipped, “You’re kidding, right?” I thought I would dig up some oldies but goodies and take a trip down memory lane. I am working on a much longer video examing the moral panic of the past 20 years around racism (and other ists and phobes) but I thought you might enjoy taking a look at this montage. Just click the video above. 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 1984, George Orwell wrote, “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”The New York Times is no longer free to say what is true. They are compelled to lie either by their newfound fundamentalism, fear of their readers and subscribers, or pressure from the strident activists who police thought and speech in our New Woke Order. We can’t let them get away with it. Not this time. The SuspectIt looks like a real headline - a search for the truth. So far, so good. But a few paragraphs in, and it’s clear that the New York Times has crossed the Rubicon:On Tuesday afternoon, Jesse Van Rootselaar, 18, grabbed two firearms from her home and, the authorities in British Columbia said, killed her mother and 11-year-old brother. Then she traveled a mile to the Tumbler Ridge Secondary School and killed five students and one educator before turning her weapon on herself.The mass shooting, which also left two children injured with gunshot wounds, has sent shock waves across Canada, where such violence is rare, and has devastated the small rural community of 2,400 people.Her home? She traveled? Before turning her weapon on herself? Was the shooter a woman? If so, wouldn’t that be the lead? After all, it’s rare for any woman to be pulled into violence online, let alone go on a shooting spree. Sure, there was Audrey Hale out in Tennessee, but according to the Times, she wasn’t even a SHE. Back in 2023, they awkwardly opted out of using any pronoun to describe Hale, adding this to their story:But by 2025, when Hale was no longer the only one, they made the decision to use preferred pronouns, yes, even in the wake of a horrific shooting like the one in Minneapolis that, as with Audrey Hale, massacred children.Using that logic, we’d have no choice but to conclude that two women had committed these acts of violence in Minneapolis and now, in Canada, while one male went on a shooting spree in Tennessee. Make it make sense, New York Times. What we’re really talking about here is three transgender shooters who targeted children. Robin Westman himself was obsessed with them:If the latest school shooter in Tumblr Ridge targeted and killed children and was also transgender, you’d think that there might be something, anything that the Times could offer its readers instead of lying that the shooter was female. No, the shooter was male. And it matters. The truth matters. Biological reality matters especially when we’re talking about criminal profiling.It wasn’t just the New York Times, either, though they set the standard. It was CNN, too. The suspect in Canada’s Tumbler Ridge mass shooting posted about guns and hunting on her YouTube channel and appeared to have written about her struggles with mental health online, according to social media posts.And the AP:“Cis White Men” No MoreThese white male shooters are given an extra layer of protection just by declaring themselves trans. The formerly hated “cis white males” are magically transformed into women and become the center of attention, treated with sympathy, and are, above all, forgiven almost everything.Look no further than the New York Times to see how they’ve decided that the only demographic to fear is white men.If any shooter who hailed from the Right went on a rampage and killed kids, it would be the biggest story in the world for weeks, if not months. Everyone would have a convenient receptacle for their rage. Ah, but here, with their most protected, elevated, marginalized group responsible, they must divert that empathy and call a mass murderer a “she.”Then bend over backwards to ensure no one demonizes this specific group, even if an obvious pattern is emerging, as the Times writes:In the aftermath of the shooting, there has also been a focus on Ms. Van Rootselaar’s gender identity, at a time when transgender issues have become a socially polarizing force.In a handful of high-profile shootings in the United States in recent years, the perpetrator has been wrongly identified as transgender on message boards and social media, including in the assassination last year of Charlie Kirk.Fewer than 1 in 1,000 mass shooters over the past decade have been identified as transgender, according to the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit research group that tracks gun violence in the United States using police reports. The group defines a mass shooting as one in which four or more victims were shot or killed.Tyler Robinson might not have been transgender himself, but he fits the pattern regardless. He was, by all accounts, avenging the pain and suffering of his “trans-furry lover” and wanted to silence Charlie Kirk, who, he said, “spread too much hate,” and it could “not be negotiated down.” Even if this odd new type of killer does not represent real transgender people overall, it represents a new kind of influencer—a hybrid of social justice extremism, self-pity, and fringe losers who want Columbine-level fame. And online, they’re gettin

The novel for the week was Brave New World. Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn were preparing to lead us through it. It was more disturbing and more timely than 1984, another novel in the outsider book club that many of us had become part of over the last few years with two of the greatest teachers alive. How lucky we were, I always thought, every time they dug into a new book. Culture has dramatically changed. It has become exclusive rather than inclusive, despite how they would describe themselves. Matt and Walter, on America This Week, filled a deep, dark, and dry well for thirsty people in need of the kind of observations of human behavior, fearlessness, and wit we used to get from great writers of the past. You can partake of the culture now, but you have to be a true believer if you want in. You have to love Big Brother, or at least have learned how to keep silent enough that no one ever notices. Matt and Walter, two dissidents from the decaying dystopia our culture has become, were never going to play that game. They gave us so much just by taking us back to a time when writing was brilliant, and thinking was essential. I start with the books because that is what really made America This Week something unique and valuable, not just to people like me who found it so pleasurable just to listen to them talk about books, but to the broader culture, so in need of not just education but enlightenment. Two great writers, two great readers, two great thinkers - how did we ever have it so good? Both Walter and Matt had already been “canceled” by lesser beings who had no idea what kind of genius they’d given up. Or maybe they did know. Maybe they burned with jealousy that these two hadn’t sold themselves out for conformity or acceptance. Maybe they burned with jealousy because they were now trapped and silenced. Or maybe they just envied their talent.Either way, their loss was our gain, we outsiders who help build a “little gulag” on the other side of Eden, to quote Milan Kundera. Our little gulag was disrupted on Monday when Matt Taibbi appeared alone and, it must be said in the spirit of the truth, a little shaken. He made his way through the video to explain both why Racket Staff was now changing and why Walter suddenly vanished. We still don’t know all of the reasons. Maybe we never will. If there is one thing I know about Walter and Matt, despite their own protestations to the contrary, they are gentlemen. Neither would ever throw the other under the bus.Here is how Walter explained it:And of course, fans of the show were heartbroken:And angry:Still here we are, bereft in the middle of Brave New World. I waited before writing anything. I thought maybe this would fix itself. The Beatles will get back together, or the parents who are headed for divorce will reconcile. I thought maybe it’s like that scene in Spinal Tap after the dramatic breakup with Nigel Tufnel, where they perform their freeform jazz exploration, “We hope you like our new direction!” but that Nigel would be back before the movie was over.But I also know that it’s not easy being cast as a leader of a large audience that starts to feel like a movement. Maybe Matt felt confined or frustrated, and he stuck it out longer than he wanted to for his readers’ sake, until he finally had to do what he thought was right: become a news site again. They call it “audience capture,” and in a way, that’s right. Candace Owens is probably one of the best examples of how not being honest with your readers can take you down a dark road. If you want to keep the clicks and views coming, you must give your audience what they want. If you decide you can’t anymore, you risk what I did. Losing everything.If I suddenly decided that I loved the Democrats again and I hated Trump and MAGA, that would mean breaking an agreement with many of my readers and subscribers here, and that’s especially tricky if they’re paying subscribers. But if I felt that way, I would still take the leap and jump rather than lie to them. Some of us just can’t do the other thing, and I suspect both Walter and Matt are like that, too.But I also know life is change. People change. We evolve. I could feel Matt’s growing pains for a while now because his audience was built not just on his own reputation but on ours, the abandoned outsiders, many of them MAGA, looking for deeper understanding or validation from the unrelenting, biased legacy media. No, we’re not crazy because look, Matt Taibbi is writing something that makes it make sense, and suddenly, we can feel our feet on the ground.I felt so validated when Matt took up my story and wrote about how Hollywood discarded me for a joke on X and then decided I should be kicked out of utopia. It mattered that it was Matt Taibbi. They couldn’t ignore it. Because even though they’d canceled him in a way, they still paid attention to what he wrote about, and for whatever reason, it made a huge difference for me. They never leave him alone, in fact. They all f

After Memegate went viral on Friday, the usual battle in our virtual Civil War raged on. I had this exchange on X and was answered by Conor Friedersdorf:To Trump’s enemies, this was yet another crisis not to go to waste. It was the perfect way to reel back some of those Nicki Minaj supporters who might be thinking about flipping to Trump. The midterms are coming up, and they’re desperately worried about losing votes of yet another necessary demographic. That’s all it’s been for ten years now, emotional blackmail to convince us that Trump really is that bad while offering nothing in return. They have addressed nothing. They have fixed nothing. They have offered only a fanatical cult and a rigid ideology of an oppressor/oppressed mindset, and then demanded everyone go along with it, or they’re racists, homophobes, bigots, Nazis. Here is a TikTocker:The Democrats and the ruling class that props up their collapsing empire are in a hell of their own making. They never addressed the people's needs after their 2016 loss because that would mean acknowledging their own failures. Instead, they made Trump the enemy and went to war, a war they’re losing.All they ever had to do was offer the people something better, but they couldn’t even do that because what they want is their utopia back, the one I helped build, and the one I escaped once it became a Doomsday Cult. Had they left him alone, just allowed his four years to play out like a normal president, as opposed to Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden attempting to frame him as a Russian asset, the Demcorats impeaching him, the legacy media and all of culture taking a side against him and his supporters, maybe he would have been a one-term president and gone back to a life of golfing at Mar-a-Lago.But instead, they whipped up a World War II fantasy in which they were “brave resistance” fighting an existential crisis that threatened to topple America and the world, with very little evidence to show for it, then or now. That made it oh so easy to blame Trump and not themselves.I look now at those still trapped inside the Doomsday Cult that I escaped, and I can’t believe the level of delusion. Look at this post by musician Jack White, which is liked by Jimmy Kimmel. So let me make it perfectly clear for those who might be wondering after the scandal du jour: I don’t regret my vote for Trump and I never will, because even now, the Left is worse. Their reaction is worse. They are never telling the truth, not to us, not to themselves. All they have to sell is hate and fear. They aren’t getting less crazy and more sane. They are not becoming kinder, more tolerant, and more forgiving. They still have no idea what democracy means - spoiler alert: you can’t always get what you want. They have never learned the lesson in ten years. They still believe that winning their war is forcing all of us to go along with their distorted version of reality. And add that to these crazy people on TikTok, and you start to see that the reason Trump won is that he’s closer to normal than they are. They just don’t realize that they’re the problem. Their totalitarian tendencies left over from 2020 never fully died because there was never any accountability in the mainstream. Remember that crowd that swarmed that woman and demanded she raise her fist for Black Lives Matter:Here are a bunch of crazy women at a Core Power Yoga studio in Minneapolis doing the same thing: go along with us or else.That same autonomous zone that was erected in 2020:Well, that’s back too, only this time the police got rid of it much quicker, knowing Tom Homan and Trump won’t stand for it.Do they really expect us to vote for these psychopaths? Put them back in power? And why, because Trump accidentally shared a meme with a racist image of the Obamas at the end of it? Sorry, they have to deal with the fanatics who have swallowed up their party first because they are still too erratic and unhinged to lead this country. What are they going to do with all of us? With Trump? Throw us into re-education camps? Gulags? Shoot us outright?GET TRUMPThe Left’s 10-year campaign to get Trump is like watching Yosemite Sam go after Bugs Bunny. They always think they’re just seconds away from catching him at long last.They believe deeply in their mission to destroy Trump, just as Yosemite Sam does. It’s just that we see Bugs Bunny a little differently. Whatever else Trump is, he’s not the guy they say he is, and for that, they will always be one step behind, swinging and missing. I didn’t get that until I found my way out. As someone who got online 30 years ago, I wasn’t ready for the effects of the feedback loop on my brain, and I don’t think most people on the Left even realized they were living inside a reality-distorting machine. I had to watch Trump videos on my own, get to know him and his supporters, and humanize them. I found that I unexpectedly empathized with Trump. It wasn’t just that I could finally see the real human being,

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

Dear Hillary,Imagine my shock when I saw you wrote an op-ed in The Atlantic. Before I even read a line, I knew what the point of the article would be because I know you.You write:This crisis also reveals a deeper moral rot at the heart of Trump’s MAGA movement. Whatever you think about immigration policy, how can a person of conscience justify the lack of compassion and empathy for the victims in Minnesota, and for the families torn apart or hiding in fear, for the children separated from their parents or afraid to go to school?That compassion is weak and cruelty is strong has become an article of MAGA faith. Trump and his allies believe that the more inhumane the treatment, the more likely it is to spread fear. That’s the goal of surging heavily armed federal forces into blue states such as Minnesota and Maine—street theater of the most dangerous kind. Other recent presidents, including Joe Biden, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton, managed to deport millions of undocumented immigrants without turning American cities into battlegrounds or making a show of keeping children in cagesI see the game. You know selling open borders is an election killer, so you think selling “empathy,” or compassion, will help bridge the gap and maybe win back independents who don’t want an open border but are troubled by what they see on the “news.” As with everything else, it’s a manufactured delusion you too must sell, which explains why the Democrats are in this position now, resorting to the first violent attacks on the government since the 1970s, and no, January 6th doesn’t count. These are coordinated, orchestrated, well-funded attacks - not protests as much as flirting with terrorism. And you know that too, don’t you, Hillary? And you’re worried. You should be. You also know that no president, not Obama or Bush or Clinton, ever had to deal with a cell phone brigade who are screaming, spitting, body slamming ICE agents everywhere they go, stalking them, blocking their paths, building makeshift networks online to find them, harass them, and stop them from doing their jobs. You know this is a first, and you know exactly why.But that won’t stop you from lying, Hillary. What else is new? You are setting up the argument to slime your way out of this moment, where the Democrats are too crazy to lead and are looking more like the Manson family every day.I had to laugh, though, at the misappropriation of yet another word, empathy. As if any of you ever had any empathy for anyone other than those who will be voting blue, no matter who. No, you can’t call the other half of the country “racists” for ten years and then pretend to have any empathy. Just look at Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway on a recent podcast talking about how we’ll have the Nuremberg trials, should all of you crazy people ever get back in power, “and we will,” Galloway says. This obsession with calling Trump Hitler and a Nazi began in 2016 because you could not stand the sting of humiliation when you lost to Trump. So you and the most powerful people in the world decided it was your right to disenfranchise the millions of Americans who voted for Trump and had every right to representation. I used to think you were a person of integrity, I did. I supported you. I fought for you. I was proud to be a Democrat. I made this video to humanize you for independents who did not want to vote for you. I thought I could help them see you the way I did. At least, back then.I was a good Liberal. I repeated the lie that Trump’s win was an existential threat and it required a “hearts and minds” campaign to RESIST everything he tried to do. Oh, the lies, Hillary. The lies. I can barely live with myself; I don’t know how you manage it.After ten years of those lies, there is not much to show for it. Trump is back in power because all of you failed so spectacularly. The people said yeah, we’ll take the twice impeached, four times indicted, convicted felon. That’s how badly you failed. Because you don’t see them, you don’t see them as people, you don’t care about what they need. In other words, you’re lacking in empathy.So now you think you finally have Trump on the ropes, and all it took was throwing federal agents under the bus, demonizing them as hateful, Nazi-like thugs, lying about the “rot” at the heart of MAGA. Here is Tom Homan:The empire is collapsing. A once-thriving culture has been sucked into a cult. Everything I used to love is gone. Movies, books, great journalism, science, and history. Vanished. Replaced with dogma and fanaticism. Because all of you walled yourselves off from the rest of the country, you lost touch with reality, which is why it’s so easy for you now to slip into the fantasy world and blame ICE agents for their lack of empathy. Shame on you.Where is your empathy for the victims of Biden’s border policies? Do you remember the rape van? Yeah, there was a van where an illegal immigrant locked women away in it and raped them for hours. How about

Part One | Part Two | Part Three“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”― Sun Tzu, The Art of WarBecause Donald Trump understands this fundamental rule of The Art of War, he reached a compromise in Minneapolis. It was an easy shift for him because he knows himself and he knows the enemy.He knows all they wanted was months of warfare and chaos between ICE agents and the citizen army on the ground, who are now becoming an organized militia, some of them even arming themselves, all in hopes of producing viral content for the churn to keep the hearts and minds of their voters activated and mobilized ahead of the midterms.They wanted him to show up as the dictator, to crack down on protests like the United States had suddenly become Iran. But Trump is too smart for that. He knows once he becomes the version of him they invented, the war is over. He also knows they will ignore the important news of his presidency. The economy is strengthening, crime is declining, and Trump continues to make big moves on the global stage.By contrast, the left is losing but thinks it’s winning because they don’t know themselves. If they did, they would understand that the clever game they’re playing only takes them so far. Creating chaos throughout 2020 meant they scared Americans into voting Trump out and putting the Obama coalition back in power. But they were the dog that caught the car. They had no idea what to do once Joe Biden took office.It was worse than that. Biden failed in his first major move as president with the botched exit from Afghanistan that left 13 soldiers dead and sparked two wars, as world leaders laughed in our faces at the man in the White House.As Biden’s numbers began to fall, and America woke up from the haze of fear from 2020, they wondered why they ever voted out the guy with the strong economy to begin with, and why they were now stuck with a whole new set of rules we were all meant to follow.In truth? Biden was the face of normalcy for the fanatical cult that has now consumed the Democratic Party. They are the socialist socialites who are both the ruling class and the oppressor/oppressed fundamentalists who have no place for America’s silent majority anymore. When the story of this moment is told by their ever-reliable unreliable narrators, they will cast themselves as the Underground Railroad to free the slaves or the Kindertransport to save Jewish children from the Nazis.So we have to ask them and make them answer: who is it they’re liberating now? What are they fighting for? Mass migration? Open borders? True, they want to keep the 10-20 million who crossed over under Biden and will vote blue no matter who, but what is the endgame here? Do they even know?Trump’s greatest blessing and his tragic flaw is that he cannot lose. That’s what makes him a great leader; whether he’s leading a family, a business, or a country, he wants to win. When you’re standing behind him, you get to be a winner too.Some in his base want him to step on the gas, to crack down on protesters and not back off from Minneapolis, but as with so many hard calls Trump has had to make in his second term, he has to somehow find his way through the storm as a guy who, in the end, trusts only himself because he knows himself. If he became the dictator now just to please those in his base, he’d be eaten alive by the empire.They Don’t Understand ThemselvesThe chaos in Minneapolis was designed for the legacy media. It was resistance theater that played well on the Nightly News and on social media. The objective, as we now know from the Signal chats and the ongoing soldier training for activists, was to push ICE agents into acting out, to capture those viral moments to paint a picture in the minds of social media users—ICE are violent thugs, they will conclude.If you see enough video of ICE agents pushing women to the ground and detaining children, well, what is a normal person to think? How could the polls not result in the Left’s favor? What you don’t see is everything that led up to it. You don’t see how many times ICE agents are assaulted, obstructed, body slammed, screamed at, spat on, with whistles blaring in their ears, stalked, harassed, and doxxed.But on the Left, they don’t see that side of the story, just like they didn’t see that side of the story in 2020. The mob terrorizes citizens, and law enforcement and the media call it mostly peaceful protests. I was on the Left. I know that no one was allowed to talk about the violence lest they’d be called a racist. But not being able to say the truth, let alone know the truth, meant we were all walking around in a constant state of confusion. We all knew that Derek Chauvin did not murder George Floyd, but we had to say he did. We knew Trump wasn’t bragging abou