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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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  • Podcast: Mamdani, Obama's Legacy, and Where This Fourth Turning is Going
    In anticipation of a Fourth Turning series for paid subscribers, my friend Andy just posted our conversation about the Fourth Turning and various other topics. His youtube is The Generation Report and his Substack is Fourth Turning Chronicles. Hope you enjoy! 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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  • Bari Weiss and The Substack Revolution
    Everything changed for me in early June of 2020, when the Tom Cotton essay appeared in the New York Times and all hell broke loose on Twitter. I was scrolling the app to my detriment, as I always do, and all of a sudden, it was like the night Donald Trump won the election. Big trouble in blue-check city. The New York Times published an op-ed that called for the military to be brought in if the riots could not be controlled. Even typing that sentence, calling them “riots” instead of protests, was a thought crime and could not be said out loud, so you can only imagine how horrifying it was for the reality deniers on Team Fragility to hear Cotton’s thesis statement, “This week, rioters have plunged many American cities into anarchy, recalling the widespread violence of the 1960s.”It was dangerous because it was the truth. Like this scene in The Insider, where Jeffrey Wigand’s story has to be buried because it might disrupt a corporate merger at CBS News, except this time it might upset the Times staffers and the Twitter hive mind.The point was, Cotton was not only telling the truth — a truth all of us could see with our own eyes — but he was reflecting the majority opinion of Americans. That’s why Bari Weiss and James Bennett asked Tom Cotton in the first place to represent the other half of America that the New York Times and everything under the Left’s control abandoned. I sat in my apartment, gobsmacked that all of this was playing out. Here we’d spent months on lockdown, making our own hand sanitizers and masks. My daughter was sent home from her senior year of college to have her graduation on my balcony. And all of a sudden, none of that mattered because “systemic racism” mattered more. Yeah, that’s what the experts told us.All of these years later, after everything we’ve seen and learned about that time in our history, we know the Democrats needed it to be bad — bad enough to pressure Americans into voting out a one-term president with a strong economy. It’s just that I didn’t know that then. All I knew was that no one would talk about it. If you did, your career would be over.The Tom Cotton op-ed would change the course of my life forever because that was the moment I could suddenly see that I wasn’t getting the truth. I was getting the negotiated truth, the narrative, what they wanted me to know. I began to wonder, what else wasn’t true?It was also the moment everything changed for Bari Weiss, who’d been hired to shake up the media bias at the New York Times. Everyone I knew on Twitter swarmed her, attacked her, and attacked the Times the day the op-ed was published. They were dragging out the history of James Bennett. They were accusing the Times of “putting Black bodies in danger.” The staff felt unsafe, and before long, Bari Weiss became the problem.They kept the piece up but affixed an embarrassing disclaimer at the top, which is still there:After that, Bari Weiss didn’t just resign. She took a flamethrower to the Times in a fiery resignation letter that was the shot heard round the world, or at least the internet. She wrote:But the lessons that ought to have followed the election—lessons about the importance of understanding other Americans, the necessity of resisting tribalism, and the centrality of the free exchange of ideas to a democratic society—have not been learned. Instead, a new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor. As the ethics and mores of that platform have become those of the paper, the paper itself has increasingly become a kind of performance space. Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions. I was always taught that journalists were charged with writing the first rough draft of history. Now, history itself is one more ephemeral thing molded to fit the needs of a predetermined narrative.They thought that was the end of Bari Weiss. They’d chewed her up and spit her out. Boy, were they wrong. It is now one of the greatest success stories ever told, almost on par with Donald Trump defeating the machine and winning again. According to Puck News, Bari Weiss and the Free Press have now been offered a deal upwards of $200 million to sell the site to Paramount/Skydance and put Bari Weiss in charge of guiding CBS News back to some kind of credibility. Even if Weiss doesn’t take the deal, it’s still a victory lap for her. There will be rumblings that this deal only took effect because of Weiss’s overt pro-Israel stance after October 7th. No doubt, she will be hit from both sides over that one. What happened to MeBecause of Weiss, I started a Substack too, five years ago, in July of 2020. By then, I was already a pariah on my side. I could not use Facebook because of the ongoing attacks, which would still exist should I make my return, which I never will. I’d been swarmed and harassed on Twitter/X more times than I could count. On July 11th, I wrote my first Substack post:On the one hand, I am worried that if I start writing what I’ve been thinking it will be met with harsh reprimands. At the same time, there are not enough people on the left willing to speak up to talk about what is happening for fear of being called out, shamed, and put out of work. I run my own business, but in this climate, the fear is real. A few angry phone calls can put anyone’s source of employment in jeopardy. I’m having a hard time keeping my mouth shut, is the only problem. I see a disaster looming and I feel like joining those brave voices that are trying to shift the course of the Titanic which is about to slam into the iceberg.Nobody read it. No one knew it even existed, but it made me feel better that I didn’t have to suffer in silence. Keeping it confined here meant I could still earn an income at my other site, AwardsDaily.com, one I’d been running for 26 years and earning a decent income from for almost as long. In ordinary times, my own website would be where I wrote what I thought and felt, but I knew even the most subtle dissent offered up would be the end of everything. I’d made a name for myself on Medium writing from the other side of the aisle, and I couldn’t return there either. In both cases, the readership did not want to hear what I had to say.I kept thinking I had to be that person with the machete, clearing away the sticks and weeds, snakes and spiders, so others could safely travel after me, especially my daughter, who deserved to grow up in a free country where she did not have to be afraid to say what she thought and believed, that she could write any book she wanted to write. I couldn’t know that the more people read this Substack, the closer I’d dance to the flame. It didn’t really take off until Real Clear Politics began linking to my column and Megyn Kelly interviewed me on her show. So did Glenn Beck. Now, somehow, miraculously, people were paying to subscribe and wanted to hear what I had to say.But this world is kept far, far away from the other world, the Doomsday Cult, the bubble of the Left. Most of them had no idea what I was up to because they would never even think to look. To them, all of those bad people on the outside are to be shunned and ignored.At some point, though, considering how many people there were out there gunning for my destruction, I knew I had to come clean and come out and let all of them know what I thought and where I stood. I also wanted to use whatever voice I had to help Trump win, to defeat them. I was too loud and too obnoxious on Twitter. I was careless. I was doing what I have always done in the 30 years I’ve been online. I didn’t change. Everything around me did. I made a joke mocking “White Dudes for Harris,” and that tweet went viral, with people whispering that I was a “white supremacist” and a “racist.” That caught the attention of the Hollywood Reporter, and they thought a story on my political shift would be interesting. They called me a “Maga Darling,” and that was the end of that. That ended any hope of making money on my website. Even though I defended those who were getting canceled many times, I was still taken aback by how it felt to have all those doors slam shut and all those people turn away. It was isolating and, in some ways, terrifying.The crime I committed was crossing the Trump line. Most heterodox voices refuse to cross it. They’ll mingle with Trump supporters, but they will hold that one card back, knowing that when the ship rights itself, they might want to play it. So I don’t have the same happy ending Bari Weiss does. I can’t take a victory lap, at least not yet. She has her whole life ahead of her. I have my whole life mostly behind me. I’m eternally grateful that there are so many readers out there who get something out of what I write. In some ways, this has been the summation of my life online, tapping out words on the screen, hoping that those words land in the hearts and minds of readers. Hoping that I can be heard. I don’t know what I would have done with that. I will never stop saying thank you for saving my life.I don’t know if Weiss will take the deal. $100 million or even $200 million means she’ll be set up for life. She will never have to struggle. It will also mean she is less free. It means they can “cancel” her again, and believe me, they will try. If she is the head of CBS News, everything will be her fault. The bad ratings no one on the Left talks about now will suddenly be the headline in every mainstream media outlet. Every story will be heavily scrutinized in a way it never was before. They manifest failure where no such failure exists, and they’ll never give her any credit. She should heed the wise words of Megyn Kelly, who has been there and done that:Either way, if she’s sitting on $100 million, maybe it won’t matter. Then again, who knows, maybe she can lead a revolution in the legacy media too./// 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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  • Trump Derangement Syndrome: The Movie
    Part One | Part TwoI didn’t just leave the Democratic Party. I ran screaming from them. On Friday night, I was reminded once again why.The news hit X that Trump had died. It wasn’t true, of course, but for some reason, those who think that the only way to gain back power from Trump is “mess with him” or “troll him” seemed to think this was funny.But as usual, the Left can’t meme. It wasn’t funny. It was chilling because of how obsessed with Trump they’ve been and how their hatred has boiled over into madness.It became a frenzy, a wild-eyed bacchanalia on TikTok. They were smiling and cackling at the mere thought of “it finally happening.”After all, the TikTok trend of “when it happens” has been flourishing on the app, along with “somebody just do it,” for quite some time. They’re strung-out junkies by now, hunting for that dopamine hit that comes from blurting out what shouldn’t be said.Looking at their eyes, their crazy, crazy eyes, always makes me think of the Manson followers who had that same look, especially as they skipped through the courthouse while on trial for having slaughtered innocent people who were enjoying a hot August night in 1969 before the creepy crawlers came.The conclusion at the time was that they’d been brainwashed by Charlie. But how he brainwashed them wasn’t that different from how the Left has brainwashed their followers. He surfed the wave of the anti-establishment counterculture, finding easy targets to dehumanize and blame. Are you angry? He seemed to say, take it out on them. They deserve it.The evil was at the top - cops were “pigs,” the rich “deserved” to die, which is why when Susan Atkins, aka Sadie, plunged the knife into the pregnant stomach of Sharon Tate, she only felt relief and a kind of euphoria:The Left of today reminds me so much of my childhood growing up as a hippie kid in Topanga during that time. I was too young to really remember the Manson murders, but I could sense the vibe shift in the wake of them. It was their inability to hold power, how the silent majority rejected them, that transformed the “make love not war” hippies into violent radicals.I also knew that we all believed religion was too oppressive, which is partly what birthed the counterculture movement in the first place. Sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll only took us so far, I remember that, too. I was a child of the narcissistic “me” generation, where kids were sidelined as adults chased their bliss and “found themselves.”The rise of feminism also meant women adopted a false sense of security, and serial killers and rapists began sprouting up like mushrooms all through the 1970s. I remember the gas lines and the malaise. I remember the pendulum shift, and how welcome it was when our culture finally became too exhausted of the hippies, especially after the violence, and opted for a different kind of life.Money and success were the fix in the 1980s - mortgages, marriages, kids, jobs. But even that failed to do the trick. We were still broken and empty inside. By the 1990s, just as the self-help revolution and therapy culture arose in the wake of the FCC allowing Pharma to market to consumers, we turned to the brave new world of psychologists and psychiatrists who would “fix” us, heal us from our trauma and abuse.After a while, though, how we were abused, what made us victims, would eventually become our identity. For years, every time I met a man or anyone, I would tell my story of abuse to put it all into context: see me as a victim, feel sorry for me.In 2008, the Wall Street bailout of $700 billion was the crisis that sparked the Fourth Turning, according to Neil Howe, who co-authored the book with the late William H. Strauss. But it was an important year for another reason. It was the rise of Barack Obama, the iPhone, Twitter, and Facebook.While the bailout would awaken the public and eventually birth two populist movements — Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party — the rise of Obama would be the religion we didn’t even know we needed. It was a collective sense of purpose where everyone had a seat at the table, but mostly focused on marginalized groups, everyone but the majority.We colonized the internet as Obama built his coalition on Twitter, as civilization began to migrate into virtual spaces. Because we were all connected, we could decide the rules of behavior, of language, of status. We remade a new America online to address our collective trauma and abuse and build a better America, a shining Woketopia on the Hill.As wealth and power shifted Leftward under Obama’s rule, much of America’s rust belt was abandoned. We didn’t realize this as we tinkered with our perfect little world, our insulated bubble. We were so cut off that we almost speciated, with an entirely different language from the rest of America.The ruling elites could find absolution by borrowing oppression. They could elevate the marginalized and use them as a protective layer as the populists began rising up against the government.The Democrats, as the party of the wealthy, didn’t have to address their needs or even acknowledge them. Turning the public against them by convicting them as “racists” in the media and in the court of public opinion served the Democrats well. Now, they had an existential crisis because Trump was leading the populists, and they were about to shock the world by winning.Mass PsychosisTrump’s win would kick off Trump Derangement Syndrome, otherwise known as mass psychosis. Maybe it wouldn’t have afflicted so many and gone on for so long if the people at the top - the Democrats and the ruling class - cared enough to calm things down. But they didn’t. Having a public crippled by mass psychosis served their needs.Trump Derangement Syndrome: The Movie begins there. It was never about Trump. He was what Alfred Hitchcock would call “The MacGuffin.” It’s the thing people in the movie care about, but the audience knows doesn’t matter.As they chased their Macguffin for ten years, they had no idea that the real story unfolding was what happened to all of them. What happened during COVID, during lockdowns? What happened to a group of people who were fed the Russiagate lie, and even now, it has never been corrected or debunked.What happened to people who were told by the New Yorker, the New York Times, and the Washington Post that fascism was coming to America? What happened to the young people who absorbed and internalized the unending and relentless focus on the evils of Trump as the media cherry-picked the worst things he said and dumped them into the churn?And all for what? To turn out voters when the candidates don’t drive enthusiasm? They never once thought using fear for that long would ultimately cause a mental health crisis in this country, especially among the young?By 2020, I could no longer endure the daily ritual, the two minutes of hate for one more minute.It felt like poison. I had to know whether it was true or not. Was Trump really all of these things we believed him to be, or was he the guy we all remembered from the 1980s, the guy in Home Alone? Or, in the worst-case scenario, was he the Goldstein-like figure from Orwell’s 1984, used only to keep their voters in compliance and full of hate?So I did the hard thing and I decided to find out for myself. I watched Trump’s rallies heading into the election, all five a day. I saw his supporters for the first time. They were nothing like as described. They were intersectional, for one thing, all different races, gay people, and even trans people.The one thing they had in common was that they did not belong to the ruling class and were not part of the Doomsday Cult. They were sick of Trump Derangement Syndrome: The Movie. They were exhausted by it. They wanted to move on. So did I.For me, finally seeing that none of it was real, that Trump wasn’t who I was led to believe he was, that he was the Macguffin, and his supporters were not mouth-frothing brown shirts fueled by racism. And that meant, for me, there was no going back. It took all the courage I could muster — my Soylent Green is People moment, my To Serve Man is a Cookbook plea to say to them, “It’s not about race. It’s about class!”But class had been eliminated out of necessity. If America is a systemically racist country, then Barack and Michelle Obama are still oppressed, which gives them status. But some white guy strung out on fentanyl dying on the streets in Wisconsin is still an oppressor and has no status.Are they surprised the revolution happened to them?The Trump They Invented Never ExistedThe story the Left has been telling itself is how Shakespeare once described life in the play Macbeth: A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.Focusing solely on Trump for ten long years has meant they have never made any progress in solving the problems that put Trump in power in the first place.They’ve only hurt themselves because there is no version of this movie that comes to anything good. Should they take back power, what is their plan for the rest of the country that voted for Trump? Gulags? Mass deportation? Firing squads?Trump Derangement Syndrome has all but collapsed the empire, with Hollywood barely clinging to life, network television hemorrhaging viewers, and a rising counterculture movement they can’t keep up with. Their jokes aren’t funny. Their movies are unwatchable. Their moral superiority is unbearable.Voters are fleeing like rats off a sinking ship.The Democrats themselves have been recorded now as having no faith in the direction of the country, down to zero for the first time in history.Unfortunately, there is no snapping out of it any time soon. They are trapped in a hell of their own making and have arrived at the abyss. Their Great White Hopes, such as Gavin Newsom and JB Pritzker, seem to think that “fighting back” must also mean reflecting the mass psychosis that has distorted their perception of reality.But a great leader would be the one to help them out of it, offering rationality and critical thinking. A good leader would welcome Trump’s help with crime to save mothers from having to worry about their children, but this is not a party that cares about them. This is a party that only cares about the ruling elite, still stuck in the Doomsday cult.It should not be about Donald Trump 10 years laterWhat has destroyed the Democrats and the Left was never Trump. They could have easily beaten him. They just had to be a little less crazy. But they couldn’t even do that. The voters had in Trump someone who could see the working class at all, let alone help address their problems. But really, most of us voted for Trump as a way outThe Democrats have become so disconnected from reality that they believe it’s acceptable to sterilize children and amputate their body parts, among other horrors.There is no such thing as a sane Democrat. Even those who seem semi-sane, like Rahm Emanuel, will buckle under the question of “gender affirming care.”That made voting for Trump in 2024 one of the easiest things I’ve ever done. I will spend the rest of my life reminding every single Democrat that they not only went along with it, but they also fought to preserve it. They own this and every terrible thing that will happen in the next ten years as children wake up and become adults and realize what has been done to them.That’s just one of the reasons I think Trump is the Gray Champion of this Fourth Turning, the one we’re living through now. 8 years ago, Neil Howe was asked this question. He wasn’t prepared to answer it because Trump’s presidency had not yet been tested.All of these years later, it’s hard to see Trump as anything else:And maybe that’s why a death fantasy was their last best hope. Maybe deep down, they know this is the end. Trump Derangement Syndrome: The Movie is nothing less than the rise and fall of a once-mighty empire and a disastrous campaign that has all but destroyed the minds of a generation.What the Democrats don’t realize or won’t accept is that the pendulum wants to swing. So let it. But until they find their way out of mass psychosis, we should do everything we can to keep them as far away from our schools and our government as possible.It brings me no pleasure to watch the empire fall, but I always knew it would. We built an empire of lies. I also knew that sooner or later, the truth would bring the whole thing crashing down.You can’t stop what’s coming. It ain’t all waiting on you. That’s vanity. 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 Gun Control Lie I Once Believed In
    As a lifelong Democrat, I always thought the problem of gun violence was easy to solve. Just get rid of the guns. It was one of the most important issues for us as Bill Clinton rallied voters to the polls in 1992. But back then, it wasn’t mass shootings that we worried about. It was handguns. Just look at this scene in Aaron Sorkin’s The American President, released in 1995, where Michael Douglas has to bury protecting the climate to pass a weapons bill, but by the end, he realizes he doesn’t have to sacrifice anything. He can and will get both.Four years later, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold would become famous by shooting up Columbine High School with illegally purchased weapons. That led to the renewal of the now-expired 1994 Assault Weapons Ban originally implemented after Patrick Edward Purdy killed five children at an elementary school in Stockton, California, in 1989. We had a joke back then called “going postal,” referring to the same kind of person who would open fire on post offices or other office buildings. It seemed like men reacted violently to being rejected, either by a job or a woman. School shootings were rare. But Columbine hit differently than any tragedy that came before it.It wasn’t just the crime itself; it was the pleasure the shooters took in carrying it out, performing for the security cameras, the casual cruelty, and later, how they became subversive icons. All of these years later, many of our early theories about them turned out to be wrong. They weren’t really bullied. For them, it was more about the thrill of killing and gaining fame for it. By 1999, two significant changes had occurred in American society. The 24-hour news cycle, thanks to the O.J. Simpson trial, and the rise of the internet, which could give us our news even faster. However, it did something else as well. It allowed ordinary people to become famous overnight. That’s still true. Anyone can get famous for anything. Mass shooters also have their influencers and platforms. But even more importantly, like the Columbine shooters, they are all caught up in the romance of building a mythology behind their planned shootings, their grand statements against society as they carry out their evil acts. They seem to have empathy for other shooters. They want to be like them. They want to be feared and remembered. The more evil the deed, the greater the myth. The endgame always seems to be suicide, go out with a bang. Solving that problem, understanding it, trying to get ahead of it, proved too difficult, so we pivoted to the guns. Always the guns. Just get rid of the guns, and the problem will be solved.Like these TikTokers: I used to believe that. I also demonized people who carried them, and it was an easy excuse to blame the other side. What else is new? At least we want to do something about it, I would say. For this reason, I began studying mass shooters. I thought that if I could identify the one thing they had in common, maybe we could find a way to reach them before they decide to pick up a gun.Every time I brought it up to anyone I knew on the Left, I would always get the same answer: it’s the guns. Take away the guns, solve the problem. They didn’t want to talk about anything else. If you lived through the Oklahoma City bombing and 9/11, it seemed obvious that if people want to kill, there are other ways. Just look at suicide bombers, or people who drive trucks through crowds, or go on stabbing sprees. No, guns just made it easier, but taking them away is not only impossible, it doesn’t solve the problem. In my research, I came across a site called GunViolence.org. They lay out just how rare mass shootings are compared to the rest of the shootings in America. I was shocked when I actually looked at the numbers. Here is their ten-year review:Gun deaths are part of the everyday reality for many working-class families living in high-crime cities, and yet, in the post-George Floyd America, even talking about “Black on Black” crime is strictly verboten. It has to be the guns. On August 27, the same day as the most recent shooting in Minneapolis at a Catholic school, several other people lost their lives to gun violence. Like this:And this:And this - a man shot in his home in Mississippi. Two more:How about this shooting, captured on Facebook Live and viewed by millions in Chicago: The same party that thinks guns are the problem have not only refused Trump’s help to bring in the National Guard to clean up crime, but have also attempted to “defund the police,” called all police “racists” all through 2020, and continue to ignore crime in cities like Los Angeles where all of the products have to be locked away and criminals aren’t even prosecuted for theft under $1000.There is no question that the Democrat brand lately stands for defending and protecting criminals and crime rather than protecting citizens. They won’t talk about how residents in DC are relieved to be able to walk on the streets and feel safe at night. This latest shooter, Robert/Robin Westman, bought his guns legally. Giffords.org gives Minnesota a grade of “B.” Yet, here are their suggestions to improve that grade:None of these improvements would have stopped Westman from shooting his gun through the window while Catholic students were praying on the second day of school. He did it because he knew that they were too trusting and that there would be few barriers in his way. For a guy like Westman, or any of the latest trend of trans and nonbinary perpetrators of violence, wearing a mask of a woman offers an extra layer of protection, but it also reveals someone who doesn’t want to be who he is in a society that no longer has any use for men. Not only won’t they look into it, but their greatest fear coming out of the event was whether they would offend the transgender community.You see how easy it is to blame the guns? Then, you never have to look at anything else, uncomfortable things, things no one can even talk about.And for those complaining that the Republicans are “politicizing a tragedy,” know this: all the Democrats have done for the last 30 years is politicize tragedies. Never let a crisis go to waste. And the answer is always the guns. Because “it’s the guns,” we never had to face what we’d done to contribute to making this country worse. We never had to confront what the feminist movement had done to men. Listen to how these women talk on TikTok. It isn’t just that men have fled the Democratic Party. It’s that they’ve been abandoned by them and, worse, they’ve been demonized.I am not excusing violence, certainly not mass murder, certainly not of children. But how can we not even talk about what has happened to men over the past 20 years that has brought them to the point where so many of them feel like there is no place for them in society, that they are loathed at best, invisible at worst? And if we don’t understand them, if we don’t see them, if we don’t know how to reach them, how can we possibly stop them? Oh, don’t worry, we’ll just take away the gun. That will solve the problem.We never had to confront what psych meds might have done to potential mass shooters. We weren’t even allowed to bring it up lest we offend those afflicted with mental illness. At least now, under Trump, we have RFK, Jr. to take a look, finally, at whether or not these drugs had any impact on mass shootings. After the massacre at Sandy Hook, I realized we lost the gun debate. Adam Lanza’s guns were locked up. But he stole them, shot his mother in the face, and went on a rampage, where he would later end his life.I knew that wasn’t about the guns. It couldn’t be. So what else was going on? How can we prevent this problem from happening again? The guns? Seriously? That’s all you got? Yes, that’s all they got. Even now. But what I know now is that we have to do the other thing. We have to pivot to protecting children — schools, churches, parks, restaurants. We must ensure our buildings are shooter-proof, just as we make sure they are earthquake-proof. Debating about guns for 30 more years isn’t going to do anything. And then, we have to have a serious conversation about the deeper issues at play, not just with the most recent shooting, but with all mass shootings. How is it that they become celebrities? Why do men feel left behind? Why do they think they need something like this to be valued? Why did this shooter and so many others of late feel they had to transition or identify as something other than a man to be seen and valued? What can we do as a society to help them?We live in a take-no-prisoners new world of algorithms and isolation. It will likely disrupt our species in ways we can’t even fathom. But one thing I know for sure is that to make the conversation only about guns is to be unprepared for everything that’s coming next. // 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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  • First, They Came for The Smithsonian...
    Before the fascists came, America was finally on the right track. As the saying goes, when you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow. That’s what happened with our violent but mostly peaceful revolution in the Summer of 2020. When Joe Biden took office, we had complete control over the message and could fire anyone at will if they used the wrong pronoun, doubted the election results, or dared to defy mask mandates or lockdowns. Or even wore a red hat. We erected a high fence around the Capitol. We shunned, destroyed, de-banked, fired, bullied, harassed, and abused anyone who ever supported Trump. The hearts and minds did follow, they had to. We’d laid the groundwork for our revolution decades before. Most Americans were unaware of it. So were most parents until lockdowns. Then, unfortunately, they saw, but by then it was too late. A whole army had come of age and now, had taken to the streets. Conform or else.That’s how culture changed, and it changed dramatically, almost overnight — all were in compliance. Movies, fashion, books, the arts, comedy, and yes, museums finally did what they were supposed to do - tell us how to think, what to think, and whose side to be on. America wasn’t ready for that back in the 1950s when Communist hunters in government and Hollywood punished those seeking to use culture as a conduit for dogma. It’s the Conservatives once again attempting to purge American culture of an infectious mind virus. When Trump gave a speech at Mount Rushmore, it was a warning, like Mein Kampf. America knew where we were headed, but they put him in power anyway four years later. Then again, how do we really know he was elected? Like they say on TikTok, “he wasn’t shot, he didn’t win, he is on the list.”We know how close the election was. Just as when Hitler won in Germany, Trump’s win was close enough to rob him of his mandate to decide America wants change. America doesn’t. America is “woke” and likes it that way, and if they don’t, too bad.Now, the fascists want the Old America back. They want people to feel proud of their country and be inspired to make the most of themselves, regardless of skin color or class. As if that’s even possible in a White Supremacist empire founded by colonizers on stolen land on the backs of oppressed and enslaved people. But we’re going to fight them, just like we will fight them, trying to close the border or clean up crime or end the crisis of unhoused persons. Fortunately, we have complete control of the BBC, NBC, CBS, ABC, The New York Times, and the Washington Post. They will project our message - they have to. They know that and have since 2020. And that message will have to be that Trump wants to eradicate all mentions of slavery, pretend it never existed at all. When Jillian Michaels tried to explain to the Good People at CNN that purging the “woke” from the Smithsonian wasn’t about erasing slavery, it didn’t go so well:But she’s a fascist-apologist, which means we must do what we can to exclude her, purge her, and silence her. There is only one point of view allowed in our America. Anyone who tries to criticize us or dismantle what we built over the past 20 years must be destroyed. That is anti-fascism.So that meant she had to go on News Nation to try to further explain what she really meant.It doesn’t really matter what Jillian Michaels thinks. What matters is what we tell her to think, and if she doesn’t go along with it, she must be punished. We want every child or teenager forced to visit the Smithsonian with their school or their parents to know they should be ashamed of not just the color of their skin (if they are white) but of their country, its history, and its so-called heroes. We want every Black child or teenager who is forced to visit the museum to also know that they are forever and eternal victims; we need them to be. We need an endless supply of oppressed people to continue demonizing the oppressors and preserve our power. Not to mention, raise money from wealthy, guilty white people who need absolution for their sins of wealth and privilege. Otherwise, what’s the point?Yes, it’s to make everyone feel welcome, but they must know their place as symbols of oppression and never be allowed to rise beyond the menial jobs white people won’t take. That keeps them in their lane. It’s better than life in the third world. And it helps justify our movement. One exhibit depicts what looks like the Baby Jesus and family caught by border agents while trying to cross over the wall. Art must tell us what to think. This image conveys the migrants as martyrs under an oppressive system. It’s a message that we project across all facets of culture under our control. We guide viewers on how to interpret this image and draw a conclusion about America. The message must be that all people who cross the border do so seeking democracy and a decent life. They are good. If you see them as terrorists or rapists or gang members, you are bad. You are a racist. If there is a Sydney Sweeney ad that celebrates “good genes,” well, the Gap will answer it with how we’re all supposed to reflect female beauty as every color of the rainbow, because the Sydney Sweeney ad was racist. Here is another exhibit which reflects how we see our protected groups — it’s never about achievement. It’s only about identity. Identity is achievement. From the White House: I mean, of course, we know that Irish and Italian immigrants were attacked and prevented from voting and working in the US. They were white. But we can’t tell that story because it muddies the message. All children need to know is that Benjamin Franklin was a racist. Art should depict any person who is marginalized as saintly and god-like. Here is an example of one of our children who is probably the last generation to know the truth before the fascists came.All school children should learn, as early as possible, about the various identity groups in case they might belong to one — surely they are aware of this even as toddlers. What we used to call a fetish is also now identity:The American History Museum’s “LGBTQ+ History” exhibit seeks to “understand evolving and overlapping identities such as lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, transgender, queer, transsexual, transvestite, mahu, homosexual, fluid, invert, urning, third sex, two sex, gender-bender, sapphist, hijra, friend of Dorothy, drag queen/king, and many other experiences.” If this were actual art, there would be an exhibit labeled “The Woke Eye view” and offer some critical thinking of Critical Theory. But that would be blasphemy. Artists have always spoken truth to power, and we have all of the cultural power, so we decide the message. Because identity matters, the transgender fight is on par with Jim Crow in our ideology, so if you remove any of it, it is like you are erasing Black history, too.Illegal immigration is identity. Crime is identity. Theft, carjacking, murder, and rape are identity, unless you’re white. Then you drive the news cycle for several weeks as we lament the harms of “white supremacy” on our society.If you try to stop any of it, then you will be screamed at, “F— you! You f—ing fascists! Why are you here? I don’t want you in my city!” So said one brave resistance fighter who then, in a fit of pure rage, hurled a footlong sub at the Gestapo then fled the scene. We turned that into art, too. Ordinarily, we might care that the sandwich would make for a pretty good meal for an unhoused person, or that it costs carbon emissions to grow the animal, slaughter it, then drive the meat to Subway, and finally put the sandwich together, probably all labor by people of color or other marginalized groups. We might protest him or cancel him on social media for his carbon footprint. But that would be in ordinary times. These are not ordinary times. Anti-fascism is preventing crime in the cities because policing crime is another form of oppression. Anyone who supports making the streets safer is a fascist. All of the Good White Liberals agree: Fascism is here. Even Bill Maher says so. Sure, he kind of has to because if he doesn’t, he might not get invited to the parties anymore. Or his show might be canceled outright. Or maybe he believes it. We get to say what kind of lawfare amounts to fascism. Terry Moran gets to say. Sure, we raided Trump’s home and indicted him, took his mug shot. Threw Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro in jail for Contempt of Congress, tried to throw Trump in jail, tried to throw him off the ballot, probably tried to shoot him; we might have de-banked a few and kicked people off social media. Fired them for offensive words, ideas, or headlines. But you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.It all works together. Keep teaching that America is an empire of “white supremacy” and Black and Brown people must turn to crime and drug addiction just to survive it, well, then, we don’t want the National Guard in our cities, because what would happen if they cleaned up crime? No crime, no democracy. We need the museum to explain why we need DEI, why we have crime, and why we need to accept crime and homelessness as a part of normal life in a sick and broken country like ours. As long as our country is sick and broken, then our movement is justified. We must eradicate fascism and restore democracy. 2020 was only the beginning. We just need to ensure we have complete control over the young. We want them as early as infancy. We want them in preschool. We want everything they see and everything they learn to be our message. Our America. Was it Orwell who said, “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.” That is our fight now. Who controls the present? We need to protect our message that not all are created equal. Our history must remind us every day that we should feel shame about our past, because how else to justify our survival? // 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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