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Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone

Sasha Stone
Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone
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  • Meet the Socialist Socialites
    I imagine right about now, the group chats between Hillary Clinton, Neera Tanden, and Huma Abedin are lit. Democratic Socialism is at the gates. Once upon a time, that was their worst nightmare. Now, it’s their inevitable reality. If Andrew Cuomo does somehow pull off a miraculous last-minute one-in-a-million win in New York, he will do so without any help from the establishment Democrats. But even a weak endorsement from Hakeem Jeffries for Zohran Mamdani is enough. They know their goose is cooked. Even if they’re not happy about it, they have no choice but to go along with it.We wanted to smash the Patriarchy. They wanted to smash the oligarchy.I am old enough to remember how those of us in the I’m With Her army fought viciously with “Bernie bros” throughout the 2016 primary, calling them racists and misogynists, saying they were “useful idiots” for Trump. We wanted to smash the Patriarchy. They wanted to smash the oligarchy.Most of us Hillarycrats were terrified that Democratic Socialism would pull the party too far to the Left and we’d never win an election again. It was the word “socialism,” and no matter how many times they put “Democratic” in front of it, the song remained the same.Maybe we were the last generation forced to read Animal Farm in high school, but we seemed to remember what so many in the Bernie movement had suddenly forgotten. Not only doesn’t Communism sell, but it doesn’t work. That message never got through, and socialism, Democratic or otherwise, would be like those dinosaur eggs that magically appeared in Jurassic Park. Socialism, like life, finds a way.Look at the Democrats now. They’re all in. Even if they weren’t, they know better than to say so out loud. They also know they’re out of moves. They’ve had their shot, and all it meant was Trump beating them again. But I still wonder what’s going on in those group chats. Does Hillary know that this potentially means the Republicans will rule for much longer? Or does she, like all of the fanatics on the Left, still believe they are just one election away from taking back the country We'd better hope they aren’t. Socialist SocialitesYou’ve heard of Vivek Ramaswamy’s Woke Capitalism. Now, meet Woke Socialism —the hybrid of AOC and Bernie, and their Green New Deal manifesto, merging the two ideologies into one complete organism. Zohran Mamdani is their love child, so perfect for today’s Left that he almost seems like he was created in a lab.You see them everywhere, these socialist socialites. Somehow, it’s become the ultimate pretty girl cred, like “Free Palestine” and “This baby is not yet human.” They like socialism for the same reason they like fat acceptance. As long as homely and otherwise rejected women are allowed in, that gives the pretty girls the freedom to display their beauty without being hated for it. Here are hot girls for Mamdani:We saw this on display at a recent Vogue Hollywood fashion show, populist enough for Gavin Newsom to attend. An array of all designated marginalized and their allies, the virtue signalers, all in one place. It was one big mix of the new Gilded Age and the high-society Woketopians in their finest. Here were two famous transgender models greeted with euphoric cheers.How to reflect social justice while luxuriating in extreme wealth? Just chant Tax the rich! Tax the rich! Tax the rich! That was all AOC needed to abandon her working-class cred to join the high-status Woketopians at the Met Gala.It’s its own kind of evangelical grift. But it is the workaround necessary in the totalitarian America promised if the Democrats return to power. We’ve seen what it looks like. We already know. Obey the rules, or you’re banished forever. AOC’s gleaming face in that photo has been replaced by an angry one. Her speech at the Mamdani rally was very much an “us vs. them” anthem, and by them, she means you, the majority in America that voted for Trump. There is no escaping the fact that the party about to embrace socialism is the party of wealth and the ruling class. It’s an inconvenient detail they all mostly gloss over. Here is Walter Kirn and Matt Taibbi on America This Week:It is no longer Bernie’s dream of smashing the oligarchy — they are the oligarchy. The workaround is to make it no longer about class but about race and gender. Then, there are no limits on wealth. The lawn sign people desperately crave the status that comes with being deemed an oppressed group, the highest status attained inside Woketopia. You can borrow oppression by, say, making illegal immigration your most important cause. You can be out there chattering about racists. Accuse, lest ye be accused. And best of all, wealthy and powerful high-status figures like Michelle Obama or Oprah Winfrey can still be oppressed and maintain their status while helping to fund the revolution. Meanwhile, some working-class white man in Wisconsin, unemployed and strung out on fentanyl, is forever the oppressor because they need a constant supply of them — white men, Christians, Jews, and billionaires. Here is Barstool Sports Dave Portnoy:Mamdani must rely on his identity to make wealthy elites feel the same sense of inner purpose we all felt the first time we heard Barack Obama speak. He made us feel worthy because our support of him, just because of his identity, made the country better. We mattered. We were important. We were changing the world. What else does Mamdani have to sell? Sure, he’s charming and charismatic. He has a great social media game. He is offering a vision for the future rather than only Trump hate. But I also wonder, could his pitch have worked if he were a normie white dude selling it? It only barely worked for Bernie.How many will heed this warning?Or this:What Mamdani has, like every other designated marginalized group, is protective status inside Woketopia. No one can ever criticize you once you are deemed oppressed because then you get to call them racists, homophobes, transphobes, more phobes, more ists, and even ignite a mob to chase, condemn, and purge the offender. When I hear Mamdani speak, or any Democrat besides John Fetterman, I hear them always choosing to see the worst, to see all the complaints against policies the majority of Americans care about, like crime and the border, the answer is always that they are bad people for caring about their own lives. They are a racist, an Islamaphobe, or a transphobe. Here is the Great White Hope, Gavin Newsom, doing just that on a podcast: Their inability to see beyond that, or for voters to snap out of it and return to the real world, has put them in their most precarious position since the Civil War.Gone with the Wind If you are wondering how the Left was lost or why they are in a hell of their own making, or why they can’t snap out of it, or why they seem like every day is the end of the world, look no further than the South during the last Civil War. They did not want to give up their way of life, or their utopia, either. They were happy, and they did not realize the rest of the country wanted to move on. When the North decided slavery would not expand to the states, the South was willing to fight and die to hold onto what once was instead of evolving into what must now be. The Left is so desperate to hold onto their way of life, they are willing to fight to preserve crime in the cities, to open the border and allow all of the migrants to flow freely into America, and for Medicare for all and universal education to pay for them too.It was a fixed hierarchy in the American South, just as there is a fixed hierarchy among today’s Left. Just as the South was a contradiction to America’s foundational principles, that all men are created equal, so too are today’s Democrats a contradiction to America’s promise, that class no longer decides success, certainly not gender or skin color, but hard work, merit, and talent do. Obviously, that hasn’t always been true for everyone. But it is the whole point of an America at all. Mamdani insists he wants all New Yorkers to live a dignified life. It sounds great, doesn’t it? Once you start digging into exactly what he means by that, you realize he’s not just talking about economics. He’s also talking about thought and speech.Woke socialism is, for the Left, the best of all possible worlds. As long as the marginalized living in poverty are lifted up and elevated, the wealthy ruling class, the Socialist Socialites, can justify their absurdly comfortable lives in a country that has afforded them more wealth and privilege than most will see in their lifetimes. They’re hoping that if they keep the government shut down, if they make Americans suffer, then we will have no choice but to abandon the American experiment and lean in to the same failed policies that have so many fleeing from all over the world just for the chance to live here and be free. As Orwell warned in Animal Farm, it is human nature that ultimately upends utopia. Sooner or later, the powerful take control anyway because all animals might be equal, but some animals are more equal than others. Music:Tip Jar 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
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  • Did The Great Feminization Cause The Great Awokening?
    Somehow, I missed this story that appeared in Compact Magazine by Helen Andrews, The Great Feminization.” In it, she writes:Cancel culture is simply what women do whenever there are enough of them in a given organization or field. That is the Great Feminization thesis, which the same author later elaborated upon at book length: Everything you think of as “wokeness” is simply an epiphenomenon of demographic feminization.The explanatory power of this simple thesis was incredible. It really did unlock the secrets of the era we are living in. Wokeness is not a new ideology, an outgrowth of Marxism, or a result of post-Obama disillusionment. It is simply feminine patterns of behavior applied to institutions where women were few in number until recently. How did I not see it before?And:The substance fits, too. Everything you think of as wokeness involves prioritizing the feminine over the masculine: empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition. Other writers who have proposed their own versions of the Great Feminization thesis, such as Noah Carl or Bo Winegard and Cory Clark, who looked at feminization’s effects on academia, offer survey data showing sex differences in political values. One survey, for example, found that 71 percent of men said protecting free speech was more important than preserving a cohesive society, and 59 percent of women said the opposite.And this, which would make a great dystopian sci-fi novel:All of these observations matched my observations of wokeness, but soon the happy thrill of discovering a new theory eventually gave way to a sinking feeling. If wokeness really is the result of the Great Feminization, then the eruption of insanity in 2020 was just a small taste of what the future holds. Imagine what will happen as the remaining men age out of these society-shaping professions and the younger, more feminized generations take full control.Yes to all of this. I would also argue that a feminized society has given more power to the LGBTQIA movement because the one identity group not allowed is masculine, heterosexual men. Feminization has meant, to me, a much more boring and dreary culture—agonizing, if you want the truth. Hollywood has never recovered. Her piece explains much of what I’ve been dancing around in the past five years, and it might explain why hatred toward me, especially by women, is so profound. Why am I not behaving like all the other women by obeying the rules of Woketopia?Cancel culture started on the pages of Tumblr circa 2013 when middle school-aged girls began constructing a totalitarian system of control that punished people for stepping out of line. Here was Liat Kaplan admitting she helped start it all. It also has its roots in the rise of Black Twitter, though largely driven by women. When it was co-opted by the more dominant group - white women - it swallowed society whole, at least on the Left and in the bubble.When you think about it, whole generations of girls have been raised to be empowered, while men have been raised to be exactly the opposite, disempowered. How did we think it would turn out? So much of our common theories about what’s happened to us can be laid at the feet of the matriarchy, and the Left’s ongoing insistence that the system of oppression upon which their movement is based has not been fundamentally altered. They still need a fresh crop of oppressed people because that is how white women find their sense of purpose, their virtue signals — illegal immigration, Free Palestine, in order to justify their authoritarian control of our culture and its institutions. They still pretend we live in a rape culture where women are victims and men are predators. And yet, we know things have dramatically changed. Their movement cannot account for that change.I raised a daughter in the same progressive schools and culture that bred this madness. Part of why I write this site and have risked so much is to help clear a path for her to live a freer life and say what she actually thinks without losing everything. But I also watched how boys raised alongside her came of age in a society that punished them for who they were, and many of them wander around aimlessly, or they become mass shooters, or they suffer lives of quiet desperation. And yet, none of us ever thought about why this may be, or at least we didn’t have adequate solutions. We all know what happened with girls and boys in our schools. I watched it happen. The boys had too much energy, couldn’t be controlled, and were constantly singled out as the problem, while the girls thrived. Yet, the only response was to try to change the boys so they fit, rather than change the system to accommodate their needs. I lived all of this because I am, or was, the typical female Liberal. I remember when mostly white women, the Oprah generation, became the most profitable demographic with the most disposable income. We were mostly unmarried, homeowners, business owners, or the ones who went to work while men stayed home with the babies. All corporations aimed their products at us. When Gen-Z became the more desirable demographic, women took it personally, and that explains why they are in such a state now when it comes to Trump and his defeat of Queen Hillary. A society that had empowered women expected a woman to finally be elected president. Women on the Left believe that in a patriarchy, once women pass the childbearing years, they become worthless. After the age of 40 or 50, invisible. But that’s never been true. Post-menopausal women do have value because they can become leaders and grandmothers to help guide younger women. I could go into a whole thing here about human evolution, but I’ll spare you the extra 500 words. I used my own sexuality as a card to play for decades, and then when it was gone, I was lost in some ways. But I also realized that if you re-order society and “smash the patriarchy,” you never have to absorb that shift. You can pretend there is no reality to any of it. Fat women can be sexy, old women can stay young and desirable. If everyone is equal (Marxism), women never have to face getting old and fading away. Makes sense.It’s just a screeching harpie. Relax. The truth is that once you see the feminization thesis, you can’t unsee it. It’s suddenly everywhere. Now, I will look at personal attacks against me a little differently. It’s just a screeching harpie. Relax. The other half of this story that must be told is the rise of Trump in response to it. I’ve written about that too:There is a reason the man who is an affront to these screeching harpies has taken power and won our Virtual Civil war. He’s an unapologetic, heterosexual, masculine man. Barack Obama was not. He was a sensitive, empathetic man who led our country for eight transformative years. If the end result of that was a feminization of society, then Trump is the response to it.I even jokingly made this political ad last year before the election:In all the ways Trump is the Gray Champion of the Fourth Turning, this might be the most profound. The absence of men and masculinity has set society off-kilter. We’ve all noticed, it’s just that no one has articulated it quite as well as Helen Andrews or J. Stone, who wrote the book. Understanding it as a feminization also removes any discussion of race, which is where many get tripped up when discussing wokeness. They see the word “woke” as a dog whistle. And yet, all this time, it had nothing to do with race except in the way that white women, who dominate the Left, need to virtue signal, and the best way to do that is to use minorities.It also tracks that emotional manipulation drives this. Women are more likely to use emotion as a lever of power, which explains why, for ten years, we’ve seen the rise of mass hysteria. Sure, it’s a cliche to call women hysterical, but how else to explain it? Listen to this woman who is straight out of Central Casting for the kinds of women who control the Left and thus, society.So the question then becomes, how do we stop it? How do we change it? I’m not sure it can be fixed. As I’ve been saying for a while now, there is no saving the Left. There is only saving America from them. We must build anew, build outside of what is in place now. We’re halfway there already. But Helen Andrews believes that once we return to a meritocracy, the problem will take care of itself. It’s hard to argue with that. What a mess we’ve made of things by denying those who are good at what they do to rise in this country of all countries. It had to be Trump. There was no one else with the right set of skills to get the dirty job done. //End song:Link to tip jar. 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
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  • The Democrats Have a Nazi Problem
    The Democrats are involved in their own cover-up. They’re covering up for a Nazi. How could they! All they’ve done for ten years is scream about Nazis! Trump was Hitler, I was told and told and told and told, leading a Brown Shirt army, awakening the White Nationalists, and radicalizing them to rise up and kill Black and Brown people. I was told the Democrats were the side fighting Nazis! It’s okay to punch one, and they’re all Nazis! The Democrats told us! But there is a Nazi in their midst. A genuine bona fide Nazi by their own rules, a Nazi. We don’t give Graham Platner the benefit of the doubt. That’s not how this works. It’s one strike and you’re out.We convict him in the court of public opinion because these are your rules, Democrats. This is the bed you made, and I’m afraid you will have to lie in it. Why are they having a hard time with calling Platner a Nazi and pushing him out like they all pushed out Al Franken after he was called a rapist? For the same reason they aren’t pushing out Jay Jones for his vicious fantasies about killing the children of Republicans. They don’t think they have to, and they are right. They have the legacy media on their side, and to them, only those on the Right can ever be called a Nazi and have it stick. Political violence only matters if someone on the Right does it. Joe Biden told us that. The people we have to fear most are the radical MAGA extremists. Platner will slither on through because that’s how the game is played.Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, and Dan Turrentine on 2way.The problem is, they like him. They want him to stay in their party because they need macho, macho, macho men. He’s a macho Nazi! He sounds like a real man, not like a Democrat.They’ll have to convince the ladies of The View, however, because they are not on board. Somehow, they realize that if they give Platner a pass, it essentially renders all of their accusations against the Right for ten years null and void.These are their rules. They set the no tolerance for Nazis policy. And anyone they deem a Nazi is, in fact, a Nazi. So by their own rules, we must conclude Graham Platner is a Nazi. There is no presumption of innocence allowed. There is no benefit of the doubt. There is certainly no tolerance, redemption, or forgiveness allowed. It’s once accused, forever guilty. That is their most powerful weapon against the Right.Everyone is a Nazi who voted for Trump. Elon is a Nazi for waving to the crowd. The media, far and wide, reported that story as an actual fact, and the utopians inside the Doomsday Cult not only believed it but still do. Just ask them. Trump is a Nazi because Trump is Hitler. Ivanka is a Nazi because she is Hitler’s daughter. Melania is a Nazi because she wore an outfit one time that the Left decided looked like a Nazi outfit. The utopians inside the Doomsday Cult not only believed it about Melania in 2020, but still do. Then again, is there anything they wouldn’t believe? Right now, they are rolling around in agony yet again because Trump is demolishing the East Wing to build a ballroom. It sounds like a great idea, and Trump is a builder —so why not?If Obama were building the ballroom, they would hail it as a profound moment in history where America’s “white supremacist” past was finally confronted. They would be more honest about how they really feel about the Founding Fathers, who built this country on the backs of slaves, and the White House is representative of our colonizing, 1692 white male patriarchal past. Obama would be hailed as a hero and celebrated on the pages of the New York Times for tearing down that past and building anew.But since it’s Trump, it is a desecration. Because he’s a Nazi, racist, fascist, dictator, criminal, felon, rapist, and most recently, pedophile. Everyone has to be a Nazi because, as the ruling class, they are the oppressed side. Their otherwise pristine lives were disrupted when the other half of the country, the less powerful half, decided they wanted to participate in our democracy, but also couldn’t stand living under the suffocating totalitarian GOODNESS of the lawn sign people. You’ve heard of the Good Germans, now meet the Good Liberals.Here is a list of what you can’t say, eat, drive, or wear. Everything you ever did in your past is subject to our judgment. We will decide your character and convict you of whatever we damn well please. We will call you racists, and everyone will go along with it. And your life will be destroyed over it. What did you once wear on Halloween that could now come back to haunt you?Once marked by them, your whole life was ruined, now that American society had been sucked into the utopian cult of the Left. You were marked, and that meant you were to be banished, shunned, disappeared as the BAD THING, a NAZI. Which kind of sounds like actual Nazis, doesn’t it? The word Nazi is, to them, a casual adjective. The sky is blue, that flower is pink, that person in a red hat is a Nazi. They don’t think twice about it and have emboldened themselves to say it all the time. They have also screamed it, chanted it, and even used it to justify violence.Charlie Kirk’s assassin believed he was fighting fascism, which is another word for Nazi, because none of these people really know their history. These words are stand-ins for their own helpless hatred and rage against people who don’t agree with them on their totalitarian worldview. When the Epstein story failed to take down Trump, the Democrats decided pedophile was now their favorite word. And all Republicans were guilty of it. They scream it, wild-eyed with spittle spraying out of their mouths. They say it on TikTok to any Trump supporter because, you know, Nazi was played out. Can you imagine Nazi being played out? Now it’s PEDOPHILE!! This is on billboards, on the No Kings signs. They say it casually and frequently, as they use the only weapons they have in our virtual Civil War, WORDS. Words to them are harm and they are violence, so they fire them at will. Freaky virtue signaling podcast host Jennifer Welch, who has almost single-handedly alienated all heterosexual men from the Left, loves to point her bony finger at her fellow Americans. Accuse lest ye be accused. Here she is calling Stephen Miller and other Trump supporters Nazis. What this whole ugly affair has exposed is that they never meant any of it. It was all politics. They just didn’t want to share this country or hand it over to people they deemed beneath them. It was all lies for ten years. They destroyed people based on those lies, and they never thought twice about it. People have actually died and been viciously assaulted. Most of us were victims of a long con. They never believed it. They just wanted to win.Which is why it’s funny to hear Democrats like Jaime Harrison pretend they aren’t the side that has been throwing their fellow Americans away like human garbage for a decade, all because they couldn’t beat Trump.So yes, the Democrats have a Nazi problem, and it’s high time that the Republicans gave them a taste of their own medicine by saying so at every opportunity. Who knows, maybe it will make the Good People of the Left think twice the next time they point their finger and scream NAZI! // 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
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  • No Kings: The Lunatics Are Running The Asylum
    “If the rule you are following has led you to this, of what use was the rule?””Do you have any idea how crazy you are?””You mean the nature of this conversation?””I mean the nature of you.”So goes an exchange in No Country for Old Men, but it’s a conversation the Democrats might have with themselves as they gather for yet another protest after ten years of them. If the rule you are following has led you to this, of what use was the rule?”Protests are meant to be the voices of the unheard. Yet these protests are the voices of those who never shut up. Not for one minute, not for ten years, and all of us have had to endure them like being trapped inside Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory with hundreds of thousands of Veruca Salts.What are their No Kings protests anyway? What have they been since 2016? What are they trying to say? Is it like the ex who smashes all the dishes in the kitchen when her husband tries to leave? I won’t be ignored, DONALD.What’s the point of it? To what end now? Of what use was the rule? The voices of the unheard? More like the side that had everything. All the media, all the institutions, all the culture, and for a time, all of the government. The people had only Trump. They gathered their small donations and, by some miracle, voted him in, because they had a right to be represented, because this is their country too. It was a revolutionary act that mounted some sort of opposition to a movement that had swallowed up much of American society and demanded that we all go along or be left behind.They managed to have the mother of all protests in the Summer of 2020, smashing windows, burning buildings, beating up cops, and throwing massive fits that said WE’RE MAD! But mad at what? Democracy? Sorry, you lost an election?I try to remember being one of them and feeling the same way. But why did we think we had the right to protest an election just because it didn’t go our way? And not just protest, but protest all of the time over everything. Because we had all the power and we couldn’t stand to compromise with the other half of the country. They had to go, MAGA had to go. We canceled them. They’re racists, we said.Elections only counted if the Democrats won. The other side was not allowed to win, try to make a change, or fight for their right to representation. Not in 2016 and not in 2024. So the protests will not end because the people have to be made to suffer for their vote. So fine, the American people said in 2020. Okay, we’ll vote him out. Donald Trump is an existential threat, and our country is pure chaos. Desperate times call for desperate measures, so that, you know, like rigging an election, becomes necessary. And fine, we’ll vote in Joe Biden, maybe that will calm things down - finally, the protests will end. Cut to: a botched exit from Afghanistan, 13 American soldiers dead, two wars in Russia and the Middle East, one long dark winter, a bad economy, and are we topless at the White House?It was like George Spahn had moved in and ushered in the Manson Family. Things were getting weird, and the culture of silence and climate of fear meant no one would tell them that they were freaking America out. The Democrats became totalitarian while in power, not just censoring speech on social media, not just institutionalized cancel culture, and a transgender contagion that was spiraling out of control, an obsession with race and racism and antiracism, and if that weren’t enough, they weaponized the Justice Department and tried to throw Trump both in jail and off the ballot. Suddenly, the Trump chaos wasn’t looking so bad. But we still lived through the first president to have his home raided by the FBI, the first mug shot, and then watched him almost getting his head blown off on live television. None of that made even the slightest bit of difference. They were still somehow the victims even though they lost both 2016 and 2024 entirely on their own.Whose fault was it that Joe Biden, behaving like a king, elbowed out any challengers even though he was in serious decline? Whose fault was it that the Democrats and the media said nothing? George Clooney said nothing until he was publicly humiliated after the debate.Whose fault was it that they pushed Kamala Harris as the nominee, thinking it would be easy to defeat Trump, after all, he’s a twice-impeached, four-times indicted, convicted felon! Whose fault was it that Kamala Harris was a terrible candidate, and every honest Democrat knew that in 2020. But suddenly everyone just pretended not to remember how she was humiliated and triggered by Tulsi Gabbard, and then dropped out because she was polling so badly?Whose fault was it that the Democrats have given their party over to the lunatics who still insist trans women are women and that they should be able to play in sports against real women? “We just need to change the messaging,” said King Barack. What choice did reasonable people have but to vote the Democrats out and keep them out until such time as they can come back to sanity? They fight against mass deportations and want an open border, while also demanding free healthcare for all. They never see any problem with this. To them, it’s a human right that someone else always has to pay for. They are the victims here, and all of America is expected to address their needs OR ELSE. NO KINGS!They’re like the attention-starved kindergartner who can’t stop crying in the corner, the stalker ex who monitors your every move, and the nagging wife who won’t leave you alone, all rolled in one — what about ME? What about my NEEDS? They are the party of the rich, yet pretend to be the voice of the people. As if. That ship sailed long ago. The Bernie Sanders/AOC/Zohran Mamdani brand of socialism is yet more virtue signaling for graduates of Ivy League colleges and wealthy celebrities. As long as you signal Tax the Rich you can chum around with Anna Wintour and Kim Kardashian.It all sounds good, right? Let the poor people have free stuff, and they’ll leave us rich folks alone. They’re happy to pay a guilt tax as long as they can Instagram by day and sleep at night. Give the poor and the marginalized whatever they need, and join me on my yacht after that climate change fundraiser. I would be more sympathetic if, after ten years, they had something, anything other than more protests. If they could face the truth about how crazy they have become. If they could understand just for one minute that they were only getting one side of the story by a weaponized, biased media machine that seems to delight in keeping them mentally and emotionally unhinged. If any of them had any courage whatsoever to stand up to their own party, but they’re too afraid. Even Gavin Newsom is afraid. Who are they trying to convince by now with these protests? Who would be drawn in and want to vote for them? It’s mostly aging Baby Boomers and Jen Psaki viewers, naked grandpas on bikes, women with septum piercings calling babies parasites, and single women who shop at Erewon and Lululemon after high-priced pilates on Sunday.Why would you want to showcase all of that madness when most Americans are just trying to get through the work week? Have a beer on the weekend, maybe take a walk at sunset, maybe drive their Tesla that isn’t smeared with feces or keyed down the side. And hope that their kid doesn’t have to decide which gender to be in preschool or, god forbid, catch a glimpse of a naked appendage while coming upon a protest in the park or just trying to use the girls’ bathroom. Why, Democrats, why? The only semi-reasonable one of them is John Fetterman, whom I once believed should never have run after suffering a debilitating stroke. They were doing it for a yes vote, I thought. Boy, did that turn out to be wrong, and now, he’s their worst nightmare because he thinks for himself and isn’t afraid of them. Now, according to Axios, they’re trying to push him out. That’s right, the only semi-sane Democrat is now persona non grata with the totalitarians because, of course, he is. They punish dissent. That’s why they’re in this mess. Protests signal to the public that the Democrats are helpless, that they have no ability to win elections or to compromise or have any kind of rational conversations about anything, much less any plan to lead America anywhere. Their messaging for ten years now is all or nothing. Give us what we want or we’ll throw a fit. Listen to how insane they are with these TikTok videos:They shun anyone who votes for Trump. They treat the other half of the country like toxic waste. They have no way to attract new voters. Who would want anything to do with them? Sure, they still have lots of money and enthusiastic psychotic delusional voters, not to mention the legacy media and Hollywood.In their imaginary world, Trump is a king, a dictator, and a fascist when in reality, he’s just the guy they could not destroy or defeat. It’s never been Trump. America is exhausted. Ten years of the 19th nervous breakdowns the Left has been having over Trump, only to lose to him again in 2024, and probably to JD Vance in 2028 and 2032, is enough. The Democrats are doubling down on the very thing that makes them so repellent to voters. Helplessness and temper tantrums are no way to lead anyone anywhere. // 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
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  • Donald The Great
    Heroes are in short supply in America at a time when we need them the most. Hollywood can’t deliver them anymore, that’s for sure. They are too ashamed of themselves and their history to remember how. Heroes seem to be a matter of interpretation, like everything else in our two Americas. But one thing was certain on October 13th: Donald Trump was a hero that day.He was a hero because whatever it is that defines Donald Trump, he was not going to give up on those last remaining hostages. He would bring them home. He found the best people who could get the job done, and with help from leaders all over the world, we watched a miracle.What a difference a president makes. Instead of watching bodies falling off airplanes with 13 soldiers dead in the Afghanistan withdrawal, now we were watching hostages rushing into the waiting arms of their families. We are at war for the narrative of what we all just lived through over the past ten years. It’s like that line in the song from Hamilton, “who lives, who dies, who tells your story.” Who will tell it? How will it be written about in history books? If one half of America tells the story of Donald the Terrible and the other tells the story of Donald the Great, who wins? How will it be preserved on Google, YouTube, and AI? Here is what I know for sure. Trump isn’t Hitler. He isn’t a fascist. He isn’t a dictator. Whatever else he is, the Left has been lying about him. They lie in the legacy media. They lie on social media. They lie to themselves. I know because I lied too. I lied because it was socially acceptable, even encouraged. The bigger the lie, the greater the reward.Over the past five years, I learned something about myself I never knew until Trump. I’m someone who cares about the truth, and that became a problem for me if I wanted to stay inside utopia. The more questions I asked, the louder and stronger the attacks against me became. I was to accept the lies or else. It matters how we tell the story of Donald Trump and the political machine that tried and failed to destroy him. That doesn’t mean Trump is perfect, or that he doesn’t create chaos and push boundaries that can sometimes offend or insult people. However, it does mean telling the truth about him and ensuring his legacy is recorded in history as one of the greatest stories ever told, and the most exciting time any of us will ever live through. Donald The TerribleYou might have had to be like me, someone who has spent 30 years online, to understand how the Left could become so disconnected from reality for so long. They exist inside a perfectly contained bubble that perpetuates confirmation bias through a media/social media feedback loop. Social media, and now AI, are new technologies that we must somehow survive, even though they often deceive us into thinking that what we see and read reflects reality. It doesn’t. AI is a reflection of everything that has already been written. We must work hard to influence it, because it will reflect the lies.Our story begins in 2008, with the election of Barack Obama, as well as the dawn of the iPhone, Twitter, and Facebook, not to mention the Wall Street bailout that gave rise to two populist movements and sparked the crisis that led to the Fourth Turning. We had the opportunity to build a New America, a shining Woketopia on the Hill, with new rules of language and behavior — one big soup of humanity that required us all to find our tribal identifiers. Class went out the window, as did the free market and the silent majority. Identity became a means by which we ranked ourselves and others. Obama was our leader, and as wealth and power shifted leftward and society began migrating online, the Democrats amassed an unprecedented amount of power. If you were living like this, you felt like you were at the cutting edge of something brand new. We were not only leading the country but also the world. The problem was not only that we had abandoned much of America without even realizing it, assuming everyone would be on board with our new direction, but also that we did not build our house of bricks. We cultivated victimhood and fragility, which made us ill-equipped to deal with the rise of Donald Trump.He was our ogre rampaging the quiet countryside while we stayed locked behind the castle walls, terrified that he might storm through the gates. Our comedians became our court jesters, and the legacy media delivered only news that was acceptable to the ruling elite. Hollywood reflected our singular hysteria. We had our magic mirror to tell us, always, who is the fairest of them all. Had there not been a big lie that consumed us that Donald the Terrible was an existential threat, maybe we’d have been okay. But when, at long last, Donald the Terrible was pushed out of office and Joe Biden was installed as a placeholder for our King, Barack Obama, the Democrats couldn’t deliver. They showed the people that they still didn’t care about them, that they would double down on their same toxic policies and force all of us to live under their increasingly strident rules.The border was open. Crime was rampant, thanks to defund the police. Gender ideology was not only a full-blown contagion out of control, but no one was allowed to even talk about it. Somehow, that truth never found its way in. Instead, the lies grew and the delusion took the Democrats all the way to raiding Mar-a-Lago, four separate indictments to put Donald the Terrible in prison. They took his mug shot. They forced him to sit in court so he could not campaign. They slapped him with a nearly $100 million lawsuit for defaming someone who was never defamed. And never, in all of that time, did they once talk about Joe Biden’s failing cognitive abilities. Not once did they turn the camera around to look at themselves and see all the ways they were failing us.History must tell that story. It’s the only way to understand what came next and what made Trump a hero. Donald the GreatWhen I was a Trump deranged lunatic, I was doing what everyone else did every second of every day. I was scouring the world for proof of Trump’s evil nature. So I, too, read Mary Trump’s book on her uncle. I expected to find stories that would serve as the necessary smoking gun, justifying how much of our emotional real estate was now devoted to obsessing over him.Instead, I found myself seeing a different side of Trump than I’d been conditioned to believe, even though that clearly was not Mary Trump’s intention. She wanted me to see her uncle as uniquely dangerous, but how could I after reading the part where Trump was abandoned as a toddler when his mother was sent to the hospital after the difficult birth of his brother Robert? Donald Trump was just two years old, but he was already a fighter. He had to be. He had to survive without his mom at a time when he needed her the most. That was his first lesson in self-reliance. It was also his first lesson in seeing the brighter side of life. He could have spent all these years blaming his childhood and blaming her. But he never did. Why? Because he always paid tribute to his mother and chose the positive, he made his life better, and that is the power of positive thinking.That wasn’t the only lesson in being emotionally tough, but it does explain, at least a little bit, how he was able to keep pushing through attacks that almost no human could survive. He wasn’t babied. He wasn’t coddled. He was thrown right into the deep end.And that is how you get to the guy who did not falter when they used everything in their considerable arsenal to destroy him. Each time they went at him, whether they knew it or not, they were making him stronger and transforming him into Donald the Great. And perhaps that helps explain how Donald the Great came to exist at all. That is what we all saw on October 13th. We saw that guy, the guy who would not stand down and would never allow his enemies to tarnish his good name. Here is Megyn Kelly:The Democrats still have not learned their lesson. If anything, they’ve only gotten worse.They may not like that Trump writes stuff like this:But they always overplay their hand. I don’t happen to think his TIME cover is so bad. To me, it looks like he’s looking to Heaven, and there is a halo around his head. But why should he trust any of them after ten years of attempting to destroy him through imagery? A day before, TIME tweeted this out: Make America Great AgainTrump’s secret weapon has always been his loyal supporters, his MAGA base. He had their backs, so they had his. They showed up on January 6th at great cost to their reputations and their incomes. They were tarnished with lies and propaganda, but they stuck by Trump. It was felt most profoundly in Butler when none of his supporters ran after he was shot. As Trump said so eloquently at the convention just days later, they wanted to make sure he was okay.Then, when he says he isn’t supposed to be here, they chant back to him, “Yes, you are.”This has never been the story of the Fourth Reich and the Second Confederacy. This has always been a love story, a grassroots movement, a basket of deplorables, standing by the only guy who saw them at all, let alone the guy who would fight for the America they want.That was what I witnessed in 2020 when I began watching Trump rallies. I saw happy people who were celebrating. How can they be celebrating? I remember thinking. Why aren’t they miserable like we are? The answer is that, no matter Trump’s many flaws, he has the unique gift of saying what no one else had the courage to say. And through him, they have a voice.Here is Scott Adams:And here is a Trump supporter:Every day, Trump is at war with the truth because there are still so many powerful people who want the lie. But they must know by now that this thing is only moving in one direction. We’re never going back. Best lay down your weapons, Democrats. It’s over. Here is Scott Adams again:The Democrats probably had no idea that in their unending pathology, their TDS, their ten-year temper tantrum that is still ongoing, they would sabotage their own fairy tale, Donald the Terrible, and manifest a better one, Donald the Great.And so we must tell this story over and over again until one day we won’t have to because everyone will already know the truth.// 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
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About Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone

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