Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone

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 Princess
Charlie 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 could explain it?
Candace admits she wasn’t the kind of kid that people sought out to be in beauty pageants. “I was funny looking,” she says. “I had an underbite.”
And therein lies the tragedy of Candace Owens. She has an abundance of charisma and is a gifted storyteller. But none of that gave her the happy ending she wanted because it was never about the handsome prince. She wanted power, influence, all eyes on her. And that has taken her down a dark path.
A Disney Villain
Her slice and dice this time would be called The Bride of Charlie, like the Bride of Frankenstein (get it, FrankenSTEIN?), with Charlie as the hapless creature, and Erika built just for him and used as bait to lure him into a trap that would eventually get him killed.
The views were up in the millions as Candace’s audience spread the lies and rumors far and wide on social media.
Her idiot followers pretended like there was something to the story when it was obvious they just needed another woman to hurl into the public arena, our modern-day Colosseum. Why? Because they’re bored, they’re stupid, and they don’t know what else to do with their time.
Her “investigative series” is a whole lotta nothing. It is petty and dumb, revealing that Candace just wants to be back in the movie and keeps writing herself back into the script.
“He was like a little brother to me,” she has said. No one would treat their little brother this way. She brags about encouraging Charlie to date women and pushing him toward Erika. All the while suggesting she was more important to Charlie, to Turning Point, to the entire world than Erika ever could be.
Pick MELook at METalk about MENot her.
But not even Charlie is as important as the bigger conspiracy that Israel killed him. Candace repurposed Charlie’s corpse as proof of her delusional fantasies that Israel would even bother. She has invented a version of Charlie that never existed and used him as a prop to push insane levels of Jew hate not seen for a long time in media, if ever, not counting Nazi Germany.
It wouldn’t be until the US and Israel bombed Iran that it would all come together for her in a nice, neat package. They needed Charlie out of the way so they could start this war.
Whatever is happening now, courtesy of algorithms and anonymous users driving influencers farther to the Right, Robert Malone warns that we’re seeing the kind of hate we haven’t seen since World War II, the last Fourth Turning.
And So Shines a Good Deed in a Weary World
Calling out Candace Owens is dangerous. Once she makes you a target, her minions will attack like the flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz. Some people on the Right do have the courage not so much to attack Candace, although plenty have, but to stand up for Erika.
One such person is the Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh, who dedicated an entire show to exposing just how ridiculous The Bride of Charlie actually is, and none of it is evidence of any crime. It’s not true, Matt says, and so it’s wrong. But for someone like him, who mostly exists in the Tucker Carlson lane, to do so was brave.
The whole video is worth watching, and you can find it here. Here is how he opens it:
Candace might be playing with fire like Alex Jones did when he was hit with a billion-dollar lawsuit after Sandy Hook. Candace is slippery in the things she says, always careful to add “in my imagination” or “this is speculation.” But she has done visible harm to Erika Kirk’s reputation, the very definition of defamation.
She’s also made the children of Charlie Kirk have to grow up with these lies, this unfair albatross that will haunt them forever. How could anyone who calls themselves a friend of Charlie do that?
So that’s all the more reason I was moved by Matt Walsh’s willingness to go there. He didn’t attack her, and he could have. He didn’t destroy her, and he could have. He tried to appeal to the better angels of her nature, but the thing is, I don’t think she has any.
Matt was a very good friend of Charlie Kirk, and this is what friends do. They don’t pillage the corpse for clicks and views. They don’t bully, harass, and smear the widow and endanger the lives of their children. They don’t try to dismantle the movement Charlie built. Candace was no friend to Charlie Kirk.
But Matt was. If I had to guess, I’d say he made a silent promise to his good friend that he would step up and provide support and be a kind of guardian angel for Erika and their two kids. His monologue is so good, so well written, so moving it should have been more of a reason for others to do the same. But the content churn won’t allow it. It’s onto the next thing.
Matt’s monologue makes me think Charlie Kirk was right in how he chose his closest friends. If it’s true that he had parted ways with Candace Owens before his death, that speaks volumes. If his legacy is to be handed over to anyone, let it be to those who cared about him, so they care about Erika. Those seeking to destroy the ones Charlie loved the most should be kept far, far away.
But all you have to do is listen to Charlie’s voice, to his children, and to Erika to find solid ground. This is real. That other stuff isn’t.
Charlie Kirk is missed because, like Scott Adams and even the podcast America This Week, he had a calming effect on the spiraling craziness. His words echo from beyond the grave to shame the pretenders like Candace, who can never be like Charlie.
In the end, it would turn out that Candace’s object of scorn wasn’t Erika at all. It was Charlie. She could never be him. She would never be loved like that. She will never lead a movement like he did. She will never change the world. She will always be on the outside, her face pressed against the glass, screaming into the void.
Candace cast herself as the villain in our Disney movie. And if her rise has been fascinating to watch, her fall will be spectacular. If, for no other reason, goodness must prevail.

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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 Jersey
After 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 invisible. No American raped, assaulted, abused, or murdered by an illegal immigrant on their watch has any value whatsoever to them.
Only Jon Fetterman seems able to exist in any kind of reality that makes sense to the rest of us, maybe because he has Trump supporters in his life and doesn’t get his reality only from MS-Now and the New York Times:
In ten years, they’ve never figured out that it wasn’t about Trump at all. It’s always been about them, about freeing America from the clutches of their increasingly insane and out-of-touch policies. The Democrats gave people like me no other options but to vote against them. Trump is in power now only because he survived, and no one else could.
In Lionel Shriver’s excellent new novel, A Better Life (review forthcoming), she points out that the dominant culture on the Left isn’t raising Americans to fight for their place in this country anymore, but to be among the elite who don’t have to work and don’t have to leave behind their offspring to build on what they have. That’s the spirit America was founded on. Watch the full video here.
And that’s where Donald Trump comes in. That is what MAGA is about, and it’s why he’s built a strong movement that demands a secure border. He wants to fight for a better America and to inspire generations to rise up and fill those shoes.
Trump is making big moves, generational moves, and the Democrats and their ruling class don’t know how to match it or deal with it. Trump was able to do the hard things like ending “gender affirming care,” securing the border, and trying to make peace in the Middle East and elsewhere. He’s set up Trump accounts for young people to start building their finances early. No tax on tips or overtime or social security - these are some of the bold ideas he’s pushed forth that the Democrats pretend don’t exist.
That’s why he’s the Gray Champion of the Fourth Turning. There is no one else of his generation who could or would even try to do what he has done, to fight for a strong America, to fight for a better life for all of us.
Maybe he fails more than he succeeds, but the point is, he’s trying. He wants the fighting spirit that founded this nation back. He’s not giving up on those discarded, forgotten Americans the Democrats seek to jetison and replace.
The state of the Democratic Party now seems to be fighting for a sicker, more helpless America that can’t leave anything for the next generation. They have found a kind of religion in identity, and that matters more than their identity as Americans. All they have to sell is fear, insisting everyone go along with their mass delusion, yes, even ten years later.
They should not be surprised if Americans say, “Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.”

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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.


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In 1984, George Orwell wrote, “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”
The New York Times is no longer free to say what is true. They are compelled to lie either by their newfound fundamentalism, fear of their readers and subscribers, or pressure from the strident activists who police thought and speech in our New Woke Order.
We can’t let them get away with it. Not this time.
The Suspect
It looks like a real headline - a search for the truth.
So far, so good. But a few paragraphs in, and it’s clear that the New York Times has crossed the Rubicon:
On Tuesday afternoon, Jesse Van Rootselaar, 18, grabbed two firearms from her home and, the authorities in British Columbia said, killed her mother and 11-year-old brother. Then she traveled a mile to the Tumbler Ridge Secondary School and killed five students and one educator before turning her weapon on herself.
The mass shooting, which also left two children injured with gunshot wounds, has sent shock waves across Canada, where such violence is rare, and has devastated the small rural community of 2,400 people.
Her home? She traveled? Before turning her weapon on herself? Was the shooter a woman? If so, wouldn’t that be the lead? After all, it’s rare for any woman to be pulled into violence online, let alone go on a shooting spree. Sure, there was Audrey Hale out in Tennessee, but according to the Times, she wasn’t even a SHE. Back in 2023, they awkwardly opted out of using any pronoun to describe Hale, adding this to their story:
But by 2025, when Hale was no longer the only one, they made the decision to use preferred pronouns, yes, even in the wake of a horrific shooting like the one in Minneapolis that, as with Audrey Hale, massacred children.
Using that logic, we’d have no choice but to conclude that two women had committed these acts of violence in Minneapolis and now, in Canada, while one male went on a shooting spree in Tennessee. Make it make sense, New York Times.
What we’re really talking about here is three transgender shooters who targeted children. Robin Westman himself was obsessed with them:
If the latest school shooter in Tumblr Ridge targeted and killed children and was also transgender, you’d think that there might be something, anything that the Times could offer its readers instead of lying that the shooter was female.
No, the shooter was male. And it matters. The truth matters. Biological reality matters especially when we’re talking about criminal profiling.
It wasn’t just the New York Times, either, though they set the standard. It was CNN, too.
The suspect in Canada’s Tumbler Ridge mass shooting posted about guns and hunting on her YouTube channel and appeared to have written about her struggles with mental health online, according to social media posts.
And the AP:
“Cis White Men” No More
These white male shooters are given an extra layer of protection just by declaring themselves trans. The formerly hated “cis white males” are magically transformed into women and become the center of attention, treated with sympathy, and are, above all, forgiven almost everything.
Look no further than the New York Times to see how they’ve decided that the only demographic to fear is white men.
If any shooter who hailed from the Right went on a rampage and killed kids, it would be the biggest story in the world for weeks, if not months. Everyone would have a convenient receptacle for their rage. Ah, but here, with their most protected, elevated, marginalized group responsible, they must divert that empathy and call a mass murderer a “she.”
Then bend over backwards to ensure no one demonizes this specific group, even if an obvious pattern is emerging, as the Times writes:
In the aftermath of the shooting, there has also been a focus on Ms. Van Rootselaar’s gender identity, at a time when transgender issues have become a socially polarizing force.
In a handful of high-profile shootings in the United States in recent years, the perpetrator has been wrongly identified as transgender on message boards and social media, including in the assassination last year of Charlie Kirk.
Fewer than 1 in 1,000 mass shooters over the past decade have been identified as transgender, according to the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit research group that tracks gun violence in the United States using police reports. The group defines a mass shooting as one in which four or more victims were shot or killed.
Tyler Robinson might not have been transgender himself, but he fits the pattern regardless. He was, by all accounts, avenging the pain and suffering of his “trans-furry lover” and wanted to silence Charlie Kirk, who, he said, “spread too much hate,” and it could “not be negotiated down.”
Even if this odd new type of killer does not represent real transgender people overall, it represents a new kind of influencer—a hybrid of social justice extremism, self-pity, and fringe losers who want Columbine-level fame. And online, they’re getting it.
It’s not the job of the New York Times to police the Right. It’s not their job to do the bidding of Left-wing activists either. It’s their job to tell the truth, and in this story, they did not tell the truth about any of these three prominent cases of transgender shooters slaughtering children, choosing instead to use their preferred pronouns.
Telling the truth is a dirty job, and it takes someone bold to get that job done. It takes someone like Bridget Phetasy, who does not hold back (full video here):
Girl, Boy, Son, Daughter
Imagine your child has just been shot by a psychotic madman, and in the wake of that murder, as you hold the limp body of your precious son or daughter, you have to then grapple with whether or not to misgender the shooter. That is the absurd reality of the times we’re now living through at the hands of the Left.
When bodies are identified, we identify them by their biological sex and don’t ask anyone how they prefer to be addressed. So why would the New York Times and other outlets play this ugly game? Why?
Using preferred pronouns out of politeness in certain situations is one thing. But using them to refer to extreme acts of violence? No. Say what is true. A man raped a woman. A man assaulted a woman. A man massacred children.
Do not lie to us about something so important. If a woman did it, as with Audrey Hale, tell us that. We don’t care how she identifies. We care that her victims were children and that it was extremely rare for a woman to commit these crimes, unless, of course, you understand she was pretending to be a man, which itself is a story.
Only a movement rooted deeply in narcissistic tendencies would divert empathy away from the murdered children to protect the sensitive feelings of transgender people.
It is perhaps the height of irony that the Left has abandoned its protection of children entirely while chasing this fast-moving contagion. What has been done to children on their watch is horrific. They’ve had their breasts amputated. They’ve been castrated. They’ve been rendered broken and infertile, dealing with health complications for life.
And all for what? Utopia? Does utopia also include covering up the crimes of vicious psychopaths on shooting sprees? Softening them with preferred pronouns to garner sympathy? Oh, New York Times, how the mighty have fallen.
Your Lying Eyes
Almost nothing we read or see online can be trusted. This image, for instance, has made the rounds but is not the Tumbler Ridge Shooter.
And yet, when you head to Snopes to read up on it, this is the correction:
On Feb. 10 2026, an 18-year-old Canadian woman shot and killed her mother and stepbrother at their home before heading to Tumbler Ridge Secondary School and killing at least six more as of Feb. 12, 2026, and injuring dozens of others.
Of course, it’s wrong that this false image was splashed all over the internet and that this person, according to Snopes, is now afraid to go outside. But now we need a Snopes to correct Snopes and tell us the truth about the shooter’s gender.
And besides, any child knows that’s not a woman in the photo, and any reasonable person knows the man who shot those kids in Canada is also not a woman, including the victims who survived and the parents. How long are we going to play this game?
Is there any middle ground here? Is there any way to accept that there are transgender people and they should be treated with respect, while also understanding that there is no such thing as transgender people, not really, and that everyone is just kind of pretending?
What divides America now, the war we seem to be fighting, is for reality itself. One side is devoted to the oppressor/oppressed mindset, which tells them that ICE is the Gestapo, Trump is Hitler, no humans are illegal on stolen land, and trans women are women. The other side believes in mass deportations, voter ID, and that there are only two sexes. Should we be that surprised that the Republicans took all three branches in 2024?
There is such a thing as the truth. And the truth is most definitely not that a woman “traveled a mile to the Tumbler Ridge Secondary School and killed five students and one educator before turning her weapon on herself.” That is the side that is lying.
Meet the new influencer: the violent warrior for social justice.
To understand this phenomenon of the rise of the trans mass shooter who seeks to do maximum damage by killing children, we have to first travel back to 1999, after Columbine. It wasn’t just the shooting itself, but how it was covered. The 24-hour news cycle became popular after the OJ Simpson case, just before the rise of the internet and, with it, instant notoriety that could travel across the world in minutes.
Mass shooters feel victimized by society and want to do maximum damage as a form of revenge. The worst of the worst was Adam Lanza, whom many of the subsequent shooters see as a star because he inflicted maximum damage by killing the most children. That is the thrill they’re seeking.
But we must also look at the effects of the internet —especially social media —on the teenage brain—specifically, the male brain — as whole generations come of age online. It can’t be a coincidence that so many of the mass shooters and assassins, from Mathew David Crooks and Tyler Robinson to Robin Westman and Jesse Van Rootselaar, were radicalized right around 2020, during lockdowns.
Van Rootselaar began to believe he was trans around that time. It wasn’t long after that that his head was filled with violent fantasies, as it is with almost all of these shooters.
The rise of transgender ideology can also be tracked alongside social media, not coming into prominence until right around 2012, as Critical Race Theory began to hit schools and universities, and the oppressor/oppressed mindset took hold, and internet users began living double lives - their real lives and their avatar lives. Many white girls sought refuge in becoming trans as a way out, but also as a way to have a protective status for their online avatars.
For young men who already felt disconnected and abandoned amid the Great Feminization and Great Awokening, with increasing isolation and lots of attention directed at anyone who chooses to transition, we begin to see a new hybrid - a violent shooter with transgender leanings, merged with anime, furries, and other online fetishized genres.
Violence is on the rise on the Left. We can see it everywhere. But this particular brand of violence, killing kids for notoriety, is specific to this odd new hybrid emerging online.
Like this video posted five years ago, "Trans Girls Need Guns," an extreme reaction to what they believe is the transphobic Right and MAGA, that there is a “trans genocide” in progress, and they need to arm themselves and seek revenge.
Little Pig, Little Pig let me inI’m gonna make a rug out of your skinI’m hunting you down like you’ve done our worldI’m hunting you down like you’ve done our girlsThis ain’t another witch hunt, ain’t another lieWe’re gonna burn down every last pig styYou heard it right here and you heard it here firstEvery dead queer leaves behind a curseTrans Girls Need Guns!Bigger than the ones we were assigned toTrans Girls Need Guns!Keep a knife to the thigh in case you gotta slice throughTrans Girls Need Guns!Burn the cis at the stake if they try and stab a stake through youTake them to the gallows, unveil the guillotineIt’s the only accountability they’ve ever seenThey kill us in the streets, desecrated by their lawsNow we have the numbers and we have the clawsLittle pig, Little Pig so full of sinMy boot’s gonna kick your face right inYou weren’t so sweet & you didn’t play niceWe are the cats and now you’re the miceTrans Girls Need Guns!Burn the cis at the stake if they try and stab a stake through youGet an extra piece for an enby & a trans boy too!

Understanding, let alone stopping, mass shooters has plagued our society since Columbine. It isn’t getting any better. It seems that almost every day, someone is opening fire somewhere. What makes these cases unique is not so much that they’re transgender but that, because they are transgender, the legacy media will offer a layer of protection to prioritize their fragile feelings over the deaths of even children.
We must speak the truth about who they are, what they are, and where they are. Otherwise, there will be more of them. More psychopaths looking for infamy and more dead children.
By now, we can’t deny what is happening anymore. We need responsible journalists to dig into it and help the public better understand what’s going on.
Unfortunately, that’s not the AP, Reuters, the BBC, CNN, and certainly not the New York Times.

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

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