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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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  • Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone

    Happy Birthday America - There's No Place Like Home

    05/07/2026 | 26 min
    It’s been said that you can spot an American from a mile away. Travelers to Europe are advised to adjust their attire to blend in with locals and avoid looking so … casual. The French think Americans are loud and rude, and Europe has a long tradition of sneering at how classless we all are, even before Trump.
    I spent a month in Italy, and it’s a beautiful place. The slow living, the long naps when all the stores shut down for hours during the day, the tiny cars, the laundry drying on the balconies, the fresh food at the Farmer’s Market. I feel lucky that when I came back from Italy, I was pregnant and having my baby is the single greatest thing that has ever happened to me. But I’m also glad she grew up in America.
    I used to travel to France to cover the Cannes Film Festival, and again, I admired their way of life, the food especially. But every time I stayed too long, I began to miss my home in America. There is something thrilling about living in a free country that I’ve never felt anywhere else.
    It seems to me that if you are born here, you make up your life as it goes along. It is not planned out for you, necessarily, although in some cases, I guess it probably is. In my case, it wasn’t. I knew I could invent myself any way I wanted. And if I didn’t like that version, I could reinvent myself. We’re like our country, a work in progress. It’s always there for the taking, that promise of opportunity.
    Donald Trump is all of America’s freedoms wrapped up in one imperfect man. He broke through the thick layer of oppressive thought and speech and showed the world that here, you really can say anything you want - as long as some crazed totalitarian doesn’t try to shoot you.
    That’s the country I want to live in. It isn’t that the greatest writing or art has come from a place like America. Plenty of great works have come from places that don’t center freedom as their main objective. But once you’ve tasted it, you can’t give it up.
    In his speech last night, Trump said:
    The American founding represents the best ideas and traditions in history by the best people, like you. You can be loyal to Karl Marx or you can be loyal to America. You can be a communist or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both. As for those who peddle Marxist lies about our heritage, tell our children that we live on stolen land or that our heroes were oppressors, they’re doing something much worse than slandering our past. They are slandering and attacking our future. Not going to let that happen.
    They’re trying to tear down the great American character to destroy the people who declared independence, who crossed the Delaware, who settled the West and conquered the skies. You know who those people are. But we will never let that happen.
    In America now, two stories are competing to claim the right to rule the future. Trump is telling the better story, the one America was founded on and the one we’ve all believed, at least up until recently, when a new wave of progressives decided that the better story paints America as a corrupt, rotten, white supremacist empire that has to be torn down to the studs and rebuilt.
    They must be terrified about the 2030 Census because they’ve decided to die on the hill of illegal immigration, which is fast becoming their most important issue. That, alongside Democratic Socialism, is a recipe for disaster.
    This was Bill Clinton’s bummer message on the Fourth:
    I always thought Bill Clinton was a good president, but reading that just now makes me think he wasn’t. All he’s ever been able to do is point the finger at the other side and never offer any real solutions. He’s not the man in the arena. He’s the man on the sidelines.
    What I love about Trump and his supporters is how much they love America. They love it so much that they plant flags all over their homes. They admire the Founding Fathers. They call themselves Patriots. We didn’t have that kind of pride on the Left when I was growing up.
    And even now, so many see the American flag and the love of country as dangerous, racist, bigoted, fascist. Whoever told those people that is what MAGA is about lied. They’re protective of America’s laws and its border. That is out of love for the country.
    The Left has taken almost everything from them. They’ve locked them out of culture, forbidden them from participating in any of their major events, dehumanized, demonized, and disenfranchised them.
    But the one thing they couldn’t take was their citizenship. They hit the jackpot just by being born in America. To think it would be so easy for people all over the world to come here illegally and claim that prize or to come here and attempt to remake America into something it was never meant to be devalues the one thing they treasure most of all.
    I’ve always been a proud American. I’ve always preferred this country over any other, but only in the last few years have I understood what it means to be a Patriot, to be ready to fight for the country I love. And that is because of the people I’ve gotten to know on the Right.
    This country is worth fighting for. I might not agree with all of the policies on the Right, or even Trump himself, all of the time, but I’d rather have the future of this country in the hands of people who love it the way Trump does than people who hate it, the way so many on the Left do, just because their candidates are weak and their policies are toxic.
    I wanted to write 250 things I love about America, but it got too long, so this will have to do. Here are just some of the things I love:
    I love the interstates as part of the great legacy of Dwight D. Eisenhower.
    I love the Pacific Ocean because it stretches along the state.
    I love Catalina Island off the California Coast, where I spent many a summer with my best friend.
    I love seeing our history in the many cultures that came here, like Chinatown, Little Italy, Mexican food in LA, soul food in the South, Irish bars and pubs in the middle of nowhere. And yes, you can appreciate a nation of immigrants while still policing our borders now.
    I love how nice people are in some places, like California, Ohio, and Iowa, where they smile at you on the street.
    I love the weather extremes, from the dusty plains to the snowy mountains to hurricanes by the sea.
    I love the historic monuments from the Civil War and the Revolutionary War.
    I love the town squares that you can still see if you drive through the middle of America. Even though many are abandoned, they still look like hope to me.
    I love how each town square has a church, a post office, and a school.
    I love the many farmlands that blanket the Midwest.
    I love the small mom-and-pop coffee drive-throughs, and even the convenience of a Starbucks in nearly every town.
    I love Route 66 and how people still drive it and visit the forgotten places.
    I love the absurdity of Las Vegas, how it sprouts up impossibly in the middle of the desert.
    I love the American writers who helped shape our country’s sense of itself - Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Flannery O’Connor, Richard Ford, Maya Angelou.
    I love the musical traditions that started here: Jazz and the Blues. And became Rock n’ Roll.
    I love the Legend of Sleepy Hollow and the town that still remembers it.
    I love diners and dive bars.
    I love Gone with the Wind and how it’s still the highest-grossing film of all time when adjusted for inflation.
    I love The Twilight Zone and find it timeless, as relevant today as it was in the 1950s.
    I love the footprints at the (Grauman’s) Chinese Theater in Hollywood.
    I love the US military and its devotion to the country.
    I love the wildflowers that bloom in California every year.
    I love soft-serve ice cream at the DQ.
    I love Levi’s.
    I love New York pizza.
    I love Solvang in California.
    I love driving up the Oregon coast.
    I love the songs of Bob Dylan.
    I love the tap dancing of Fred Astaire.
    I love how anyone can be a star on YouTube, no matter where they come from, but YouTube couldn’t have been invented anywhere but America.
    I love how I could build a business as a single mom in a one-room guesthouse in Van Nuys, and that business would, five years later, become profitable because I worked hard and had a good idea.
    And then, when my career went up in flames in 2024 because I voted for Trump, I could build another career on Substack because that is what America is all about - inventing and reinventing yourself.
    I love the innovative spirit that built America in real life and online.
    I love reading about the early settlers, the Puritans, and the homesteaders, how much they sacrificed to help make America a home. And I love the history of the Native Americans, too, even if so much of it remains a tragedy now.
    I love high-speed internet and Wi-Fi that are available almost everywhere, and if they're not, I have a hotspot.
    I love the old American cars that were not just exceptional but beautiful.
    I love the tradition of baseball.
    I love that people faithfully watch football, even if I don’t.
    I love the tradition of sourdough bread all over social media.
    I love that the best basketball players in the world are from here.
    I love that every state is different from one to the next.
    I love Harper’s Ferry, how it’s frozen in time.
    I love that we found a way to move on from the trauma of our past with slavery and how we fought a bloody Civil War to end it.
    I love that we were the good guys in World War II. We did the right thing in entering the war and helping the Allies win.
    I love that you can be anything here. The door is always open. It’s up to you to walk through it.
    I love that America is a Christian nation, and you can see that if you drive across it. But it’s also a country that stands for freedom of religion, too.
    I love the American comedians: Groucho Marx, George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Steve Martin, and Johnny Carson.
    I love that the best films from the 1970s were American movies, like The Godfather, The French Connection, Taxi Driver, and Network.
    But I also love more modern masterpieces by American filmmakers, like No Country for Old Men and Sideways.
    I love that people play the lottery, thinking one day they will hit the jackpot. They never will, but they can still dream.
    I love Thanksgiving and the way we celebrate it in America, which is to say, all together as one big dysfunctional family.
    I love the tradition of Halloween and how every October, the pumpkins and costumes come out. I love the way the weather changes.
    I love the Declaration of Independence and those who dared to build this wild, untamed, optimistic work in progress.
    I love that America is always looking to the future to find a better version of itself and its people. I love that so many Americans still believe in the American Dream.
    I love watching the movie Jaws on the 4th of July.
    I love that people watch fireworks, even if I never do, because they traumatize my dogs.
    I love that we have a holiday just to celebrate the day we became a country, a ragtag group of deplorable revolutionaries who set out to build a brand new country. Oh, the audacity of it.
    I love living here and would not want to live anywhere else.
    Happy 250th Birthday, my beloved country.
    Happy 4th to you, dear readers. Thanks for everything. I hope you are having a wonderful weekend.



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  • Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone

    The Left at 250: Ask Not What You Can Do For Your Country...

    03/07/2026 | 26 min
    It took 65 years for that message to completely reverse itself in the Democratic Party and on the Left. Out is personal achievement. In is victimhood. Out is reaching for the stars. In is ushering in oppressed people from all over the world to ensure a steady supply. Out is the right of American citizens with their vote. In are people who don’t respect that vote.
    As Trump gives his speech at Mount Rushmore later this evening, Zohran Mamdani, who is supposedly just the Mayor of New York City, has positioned himself as Trump’s equal, the Mirror President for the other America.
    Thirsty as ever, in love with his own image, thinking who the hell he is, he has the audacity to sit in George Washington’s chair to make a speech about a new America he hopes to invent, one without borders, without Capitalism, without billionaires.
    His speech paints the American government as oppressive, while demonizing them for policing immigration:
    "We see it just as clearly in every American who still believes this country belongs to we, the people. We see America each time neighbors link arms with neighbors without asking how long they've lived here or what papers they have as ICE invades our neighborhoods. We see America each time working people demand more, not just for themselves, but for their fellow Americans."
    The irony is that he demonizes the rich, the very people who pad his risks in New York City and help him present a fake-pretend utopian fantasy that only works because of the rich people in the city, because they won’t let it fail. It’s absolution, after all, and there is no price high enough for that.
    It took America 250 years to arrive at a place where the country might finally, at long last, “be like Europe.” How many times did I hear that throughout my life? Why can’t we be like Europe?
    We were raised to hate our country, to see it as a Capitalist hellhole of the haves and the have-nots, a lesser nation than France or the UK or Italy. No wonder Mamdani thinks he speaks for everyone. But we didn’t have a bloody revolution just to copy England.
    Mamdani is like a cult leader who can now exploit whole generations who have been indoctrinated to believe that there is something rotting at the core of America’s heart, a disease of “white supremacy” and a history of exploitation, colonization, slavery, trauma, abuse, and poverty. Their only answer for this is to “be more like Europe.” At best, that is where they land. Really, it’s probably closer to “be more like China.”
    They’re already halfway there. Cancel culture has silenced all dissent. The DSA is rising, and the Democrats have kissed Mamdani’s ring.
    Not because it is easy…
    It’s not easy making it in America. It’s not easy making enough money for a decent home, to raise a family, and to take a vacation once in a while. No one ever said it would be easy, least of all, JFK:
    We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we're willing to accept.”
    JFK was assassinated before I was born. The Democrats were haunted by him for my entire life, until Barack Obama came along and was the first to erase the ghosts of the past and redefine what it meant to be both a Democrat and a person of the Left. That meant fundamental things would change. One of the biggest changes was going from believing in personal achievement to believing in victimhood.
    Obama took the obstruction of his policies personally. It was those racist Republicans. So they set about changing the hearts and minds of the young and teaching them that the only reason they couldn’t succeed was their victim status, and before long, that became the only thing that mattered about them. But for that movement to succeed, it required a sick country, not a healthy one.
    The Democrats were split in 2016 between the “white working class” in Bernie’s Democratic Socialism and the identity politics of Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. Now, what we’re seeing is a marriage between the two. Now, it’s not what Vivek Ramaswamy called Woke Capitalism, but rather, Woke Socialism. Isn’t it just another way to sell to Gen-Z?
    They are the most privileged generation ever to walk the face of the earth. Capitalism gave them social media, email, a computer in the palm of their hand, DoorDash, Google, Uber, TikTok, YouTube, streaming music, television shows, fast food, fast fashion, Instacart, Airbnb, influencer culture, and movies.
    And it’s not enough.
    Why can’t they be a Kardashian and have birthday parties with ten thousand balloons? Why can’t they travel to Europe? Why can’t they own a house? Why can’t they live on Manhattan’s Upper West Side? Why is Elon Musk a trillionaire with so many homeless people on the streets? Why are they so miserable, so full of anxiety, so full of hate? How can a life of convenience be so hard?
    They want an easy life as they have in Sweden, Italy, or France. They want to Free Palestine. They want their happy ending for all oppressed people all over the world, especially those crossing the border. They were told this was America's problem, so why can’t they change America to fix it?
    And if they can’t have it, well…
    They were raised to believe it should all be easy. If you have anxiety, take a pill. If movies and books trigger you, they’ll have trigger warnings. Bullies at school will be eradicated. Self-esteem is what matters most. Words are violence. If masculinity is too toxic, we’ll feminize society to make it easier.
    Mothers of my generation coddled the American mind. We helicoptered our children. We kept them from every imaginable harm, and we tried to clear a path to success. We taught them that you should only do things if they’re easy, not if they are hard. Because if they are too hard, that might lead to failure, and our kids could never fail.
    But we forgot to teach them the value of hard work and failure because we never wanted them to feel any discomfort. If their lives were easy, we felt like we’d accomplished something because they’d be happy. But happiness comes from service, from building something, achieving something, doing something hard.
    This country has always been “move fast and break things” but also “move fast and build things.” Invent things, envision things, start a business. I could never have started a business as a single mother in Italy as I did in America in 1999. America is the only country where anyone can build anything. The downside of that is that it’s hard. There is a price to pay for freedom.
    Unless you’ve felt freedom, real freedom, in your mind and heart, you’ll never love this country the way I do. I love feeling free and always have. I had to escape the Left and the Democratic Party because I no longer felt free, as they no longer believe in freedom. They believe in forced compliance and conformity.
    But freedom also means this:
    And this:
    They’re just too dumb by now to realize that they live in a free country where they can say and do anything they please without being shot on the spot or thrown in jail. They’re free to call Trump a fascist dictator because he isn’t one. They’re free to protest “No Kings” because Trump isn’t one.
    Mamdani wants to fundamentally transform America and turn it into a Communist utopia, and the Democrats are letting him. That is not the way to lead America 250 years in. No, we have to fight for what America is. It is not a failure, not yet. It is worth fighting for.
    Younger generations should be taught that they can do anything with their lives, no matter their skin color, and that they can make money right now on YouTube, Substack, and TikTok. They can start a business. They can go to trade school. They can use AI to get them where they need to go because it can make any ordinary person well-skilled and productive. And it’s free. It’s all there for the taking, but it will never be enough for a movement fueled by victimhood.
    A Nation built on strength
    Obviously, Donald Trump is not perfect. Every day, someone throws out another immoral or unethical thing they believe disqualifies him from leading. Ya, we got that. Your job was to beat him by making a better case to the American people, and you never did.
    Trump was called to this moment in history to hold fast and true to America’s founding principles. I’ve never seen a more patriotic American, let alone a president, in my entire life. He’s celebrating every part of it. He’s reviving our history. He’s making us proud of our country.
    Trump’s White House YouTube channel has videos like this:
    Endless amounts of them, trying to fill the cup back up to halfway full for future generations.
    Later tonight, Trump will once again be at Mount Rushmore to give a speech for America at 250. I already know what he will say because I know him, and I know no president in my lifetime has loved this country more. He’ll remind us what America is and what threatens us now.
    And seething in the background will be bitter, angry, jealous people who have to root for America’s failure, not because they hate him that much, but because they refuse to relinquish their power back to the people. They could have won the election, but instead, they went to war.
    They will have to hold on to that hate for years to come so they can pass it on to their children and make them understand why they could not celebrate a country that, to paraphrase U2, gave them everything they ever wanted … it wasn’t what they wanted.
    I live in a town that is full of wealthy white liberals, and almost no one has a flag out front. I put two up by my fence to show my gratitude and my love for this glorious, young, imperfect, beautiful country. I can only hope no one steals it in a rage.
    On the other hand, people in my town have a long tradition of putting out chairs for the 4th of July parade a month in advance. The chairs stretch out for miles, and no one ever takes them.
    To be an American means self-governance, but it also means being part of that fragile, invisible thread that ties us together, like chairs that line the main highway, all different but somehow the same because we’re all in it together and celebrating the nation’s birthday, not because it is easy — but because it is hard.
    This isn’t my love letter to America. That will come tomorrow. But it is my way of saying that no one should lead this country who wants it to be anything other than what it was born to be: free.

    ///


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  • Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone

    From Cancel Culture to Communism

    29/06/2026 | 49 min
    “In our schools, our newsrooms, even our corporate boardrooms, there is a new far-left fascism that demands absolute allegiance. If you do not speak its language, perform its rituals, recite its mantras, and follow its commandments, then you will be censored, banished, blacklisted, persecuted, and punished. It’s not going to happen to us.
    Make no mistake: this left-wing cultural revolution is designed to overthrow the American Revolution. In so doing, they would destroy the very civilization that rescued billions from poverty, disease, violence, and hunger, and that lifted humanity to new heights of achievement, discovery, and progress.
    Donald J. Trump, July 4th, 2020
    It’s been ten years since the purges began, and I still have a hard time believing it actually happened. Did so many of my friends really go along with it? Did institutions, corporations, and all of Hollywood allow themselves to be shamefully cowed by the fanatical mob? Yes.
    Not only did it happen, but it’s become the new normal on the establishment Left — in Hollywood, in culture, in government. Everyone is still too afraid to say what they really think. Just appearing at the America 250 or the Kennedy Center will still ruin your career. The only difference now is that the wheel of oppression keeps spinning. Now it’s illegal immigrants. Now it’s “Free Palestine.”
    I don’t know why I didn’t see it sooner: this direct line from cancel culture to Communism. I thought it was mass hysteria after Trump’s shocking win in 2016, and that eventually, as with other episodes of mass hysteria in the past, it would burst, and we could all go back to the way things used to be, where we weren’t fighting a virtual Civil War.
    But now that three Democratic Socialists won their primaries in New York against one of the party’s shining stars, Dan Goldman, all because of Israel, what we’re seeing is Communism, but merged with Woke tyranny and radical Islam. It is essentially the perfect storm to destroy America.
    Now, we can clearly see what ten years of Cancel Culture have done to the Left. It has given them enormous power to force compliance, not just to those of us who dissented, but to members of their own party. In other words, the mob is about to come for them, too.
    What do they want? What the millionaires and billionaires have. They want what’s coming to them after years of indoctrination that told them that they are oppressed because of the color of their skin, their gender ideology, or their ethnicity. America, they were told, was founded on White Supremacy and colonization, and they’re owed something for it.
    They seem to have no place for the working class that Mamdani is always talking about, not if they’re white. Bernie Sanders might have cared about the “white working class,” but not these folks. Some animals are more equal than others, and with this new fundamentalism, it is meant only to redistribute wealth, not from the rich to the poor, but from the white majority to the marginalized minorities.
    It isn’t their fault exactly. They’ve been indoctrinated. None of us noticed this was happening right around Obama’s second term, 2012. Racism, they believed, had infected the majority in America, and it had to be rooted out. They had to be re-educated on “correct” history.
    They were not taught the American dream. They were taught the American nightmare. Here is a video from Katharine Birbalsingh:
    And now, they’ve finally found their magic man in Zohran Mamdani, who is everything they need wrapped up in one charismatic leader. He’s TikTok-friendly. He goes viral. He is pop-culture literate, and, most importantly, he’s the Wokest of the Woke. He speaks their language. He wants what they want. He goes to the Pride Parade but not the Israel Parade, becoming the first Mayor of the city in 60 years not to attend.
    He doesn’t just want to be the Mayor of New York. He wants to be a worldwide inspirational leader, which fits the new Left well since they don’t really want to unite with the other half of America so much as with those other countries that are ideologically aligned, you know, like 1984?
    It might seem like one big party, but this is a disaster for the Democrats. Everyone knows that any Democrat who goes against them will be stalked, swarmed, and harassed before getting primaried out. All the Republicans have to be is the more normal side, and they can win.
    Some Democrats are now sounding the alarm that Democratic Socialists are overtaking the party and will alienate people, even James Carville:
    No Democrat is safe from the mob, not even one of their most progressive politicians, Scott Weiner, in San Francisco, who was just harassed in public for not being sufficiently pro-Palestine. And obviously, for being Jewish.
    Dan Goldman was banned from a coffee shop for the same reason just before getting voted out. Mamdani and his acolytes shield their true selves behind a warm smile and a viral video, but there can be no mistaking the language of the Cancel Culture Left.
    The Democrats know what this means. Even the Ladies of The View know.
    The DSA wins in New York were driven by a small group of mostly white, pampered college kids who are very online. It is the fault of the Democrats for not seeing the accident before it happened. They might have fought harder for Goldman if they had any idea just how bad it would be for them if these candidates actually won.
    And it’s bad.
    David Sacks from the All in Podcast:
    What people went through in Stalin’s Soviet Union or China’s Cultural Revolution is worse than anything any American has ever or will ever suffer, but let’s not kid ourselves.
    We’ve already seen what the Left will do, from three assassination attempts on Trump’s life, to the assassination of Charlie Kirk, to their violent riots for the past ten years. Burning Teslas, trying to throw Trump off the ballot, the impeachments, the indictments.
    Now, they’re threatening Nuremberg-like trials and another impeachment should they take back power in Congress, and the Right should do everything they can to make sure they don’t.
    We know there are no limits on what they will do. We know because history tells us. George Orwell told us. We’ve seen this movie many times before. Utopias have only two paths forward: they collapse, or they become more authoritarian.
    These folks don’t even know what words mean anymore, much less the point of 1984. No one ever taught them why Communism or tyrannical mobs are bad, so why wouldn’t they behave this way?
    I noticed it for the first time when a small group of fanatics at Evergreen College chased Bret Weinstein off campus, calling him a racist and holding the administrators hostage until they gave them what they wanted.
    All of those pampered, spoiled, overeducated-yet-still-uneducated brats made their way into the workforce, boosted by using their identity categories to secure high-profile slots at newspapers and corporations. The threat was implicit: hire us or you’re an “ist” or a “phobe” and we’ll get loud about it.
    Only the Republicans have taken a consistent and principled stand against this madness and done so since it began. The Democrats, however, have stuck their head in the sand and denied it even exists.
    That’s why they can’t address crime in the major cities, or the rapes by illegal immigrants, and why their wheel of oppression has amounted to the party standing for only three things: Socialism, illegal immigration, and Palestine.
    No one seemed to take it seriously on the Left because they never took Cancel Culture seriously. No, we weren’t being slaughtered by the millions or thrown into gulags, but we built this new civilization online and with it, the power to decide who can participate, who is accepted, and who must be hurled into the public square for character assassination and career ruination.
    No matter what the consequences were, it was wrong, and no one had the guts to stop it, and now, those chickens have come home to roost, and it’s the Democrats’ problem. They'd better get used to selling Democratic Socialism or else. This is what happened the last time the Centrists went up against the Socialists.
    Two years later, Al Franken would be chased out of the Senate by all of the top Democrats caught up in Cancel Culture and unable to stop the mass hysteria that drove it.
    And now, we have yet more insurrectionary behavior with Zohran Mamdani and some governors refusing to comply with the Supreme Court’s ruling on sending back Haitian migrants, and many states aligning to protest the Great American State Fair. It looks like we have a Democratic Party that wants to secede from the Union, again.
    In the old days of Bernie Sanders’ Democratic Socialism, they understood that taking care of American citizens required secure border programs like Medicare for All. Well, not now. The new kids want it all and believe they’re entitled to it all. Borders? Who needs those? They are oppressed and therefore deserving of our tax dollars to absolve us of our white colonizer guilt.
    The big picture here should be frightening for all Americans. Unchecked migration with the oppressor/oppressed mindset, while also demanding the government and the “billionaires” pay for all of them - that is what the Democrats will have to sell to the American public because the Cancel Culture machine that they helped build and did nothing about will demand it.
    The Gray Champion Rides Again
    The Republicans have a unique opportunity now to change the course of history. They have been given a gift by the Left, whether they choose to take it or not. They are experiencing their own brand of crazy right now. It’s starting to look a lot like Communists to the Left of me, Nazis to the Right, here I am, stuck in the middle with you.
    But if the sane Republicans can pull it together, they can bring in reasonable people, like Bill Maher:
    At the moment, the Democrats have the bigger headache on their hands. No one who seeks the nomination in 2028 will survive if they don’t have Zohran Mamdani on their side.
    But honestly, the Republicans could be here too, depending on how their current war plays out. But if they want to win, they will have to open their doors to more moderate Democrats, perhaps giving up the old dream of outsider populism. They’ll have to decide which they believe is the greater threat.
    Here is Larry O’Connor with Mark Halperin on 2-Way.
    America, the Beautiful
    In 2020, I was hopeless and lost. No one on my side would talk about what all of us could see happening to our party, to our young people, with this unprecedented climate of fear and culture of silence.
    But then I heard Donald Trump’s speech at Mount Rushmore on July 4th, and even though I’d been told he was a dangerous fascist and racist, I heard the words that anchor me to my own patriotic pride, words that describe the country I know and love. These were and are subversive words, but necessary. This is the America I believed in.
    Ever since then, I’ve trusted Trump because he did not bend, did not break, and never, ever, ever surrendered. I’m sorry he’ll be leaving office in two years. I can’t imagine the fight without him, but he’s carved a path and lit the way. Now, it’s our turn to finish the job.
    The race to normal begins right now.



    This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe
  • Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone

    Obama's Museum: An Ivory Tower Made of Granite

    20/06/2026 | 38 min
    The emergence of America’s ruling class in Chicago to celebrate the Obama Presidential Center Museum hit like a gust of hot, wet wind. Just days before, tornadoes tore through Illinois and Iowa, upending homes and wreaking havoc on the landscape. By the time Barack Obama and his Royal Court were ready to roll out the red carpet, the skies had cleared.
    The building perfectly reflects how Obama might see himself, but certainly how he’s ruled over the past 15 years. He still can’t let go of his position as God and King of the once-mighty utopia, one I devoted most of my life to building, protecting, and defending. I was a true believer and a good soldier.
    Obtuse, mysterious, and opaque, the building, like its inspiration, towers over the indistinguishable figures below, the swirling paths and gardens, not blending into the landscape but rather projecting outward, with a kind of bulk you could even see from space. Not even a tornado could make a dent.
    The quote on the side of the mighty beast reads:
    You are America. Unconstrained by habit and convention. Unencumbered by what is, ready to seize what ought to be. For everywhere in this country, there are first steps to be taken, there is new ground to cover, there are more bridges to be crossed. America is not the project of any one person. The single most powerful word in our democracy is the word ‘We.’ ‘We The People.’ ‘We Shall Overcome.’ ‘Yes We Can.’ That word is owned by no one. It belongs to everyone. Oh, what a glorious task we are given to continually try to improve this great nation of ours.”
    The quote comes from Obama’s speech, not in Chicago, but at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. Most of the rest of it has been trimmed away to make the statement appear more inclusive, shall we say.
    But note the use of the word “We.” His speech was full of flowery language about how we have to come together as a country.
    The sitting president of the United States and the majority of Americans who voted for him were not invited to the party. Not only weren’t they invited, but they’re also not allowed anywhere at any time in a society largely controlled by the Left.
    No, Trump would not be allowed in, and he never really was, which goes a long way toward explaining why he won the second time. Trump feels like one of us, who have taken the shape of Obama’s sworn enemies. We are rejected outsiders because this America, their America, depends on and is built around race and gender identity.
    Both Barack and Michelle Obama made a point of elevating the illegal immigrants who crossed over under Joe Biden and celebrated the citizen army that went to war on Federal officers, even after condemning such actions on January 6th.
    They prioritize the illegal immigrants because they are mostly non-white and thus have special protective status, as long as they vote blue no matter who, of course. And yet, for most Americans, they still don’t understand why they’ve been sidelined like this. Once you understand the rules of utopia, where an endless supply of oppressed people, along with an endless supply of racists, is what powers their engine.
    It’s an ideology that comes from Western countries overtaken by global elites, who need this form of virtue signaling to justify their power and their worldwide alliance, but it doesn’t do much for ordinary Americans, who don’t have the luxury of putting themselves last.
    It is a kind of class system that pretends to be about equality, about inclusion, and diversity, but really, it’s a way of categorizing us and deciding our worth. If you can participate in this game, you can go far. But if you don’t, out you go.
    Nate Bargatze dared to show up alongside RFK, Jr., and his wife, Cheryl. The internet found out about it, and things got so bad his publicist had to issue a statement that he wasn’t a Trump supporter. What kind of America is this? If they want to talk about unity, they have to call off their attack dogs.
    It didn’t used to be this way. Those of us who have been alive a long time remember when what mattered was the majority of Americans, the free market, democracy, and all that. Box office, ratings, and elections all decided the direction of our country and our culture. Not anymore.
    They want our country to look a lot like Obama’s kingdom, epitomized by his Brutalist monument - he’s way up there, and we’re all way down here. If you worship that way, we’ll all get along fine, they say, but don’t you dare vote in a way we don’t like, or we will go to war.
    So is that the plan from here on out? Must all elections be sanctioned and approved by the Democrats, or else?
    From Utopia to Dystopia
    Obama was not born in Chicago, but his monument will reside there as a showcase of his preferred legacy. He’s the Chicago guy, not the Hawaii guy.
    The fortress will be a place for travelers driving across this country to stop and admire, along with other historic landmarks in Illinois, like the birthplace of Abe Lincoln and Ronald Reagan, two of Obama’s strongest influences, or so he has said.
    The Obama museum event was a reminder of how we all shaped this story, the bad guys and the good guys of Obama’s Camelot - Obamalot - the height of the glory days, where everyone had a seat at the table and we’d mostly eradicated the “ists” and the “phobes.”
    I think Obama thought that making history as the first Black president meant more than just winning an election, and that the influence he had and the power he attained made him more than just a two-term public servant. He was, after all, living history, and everywhere we look, we can see his fingerprints.
    It was the play, Hamilton. It was Bruce Springsteen before he shrank into a bitter old prune. It was Tom Hanks when he could still open movies. It was when Oprah still had influence.
    They think that showcasing their high status while locking out so many Americans is enviable. It’s U2 and Oprah. It’s Julia Roberts and George Clooney. It’s Jennifer Hudson and Steven Spielberg. It’s all four former presidents and their First Ladies. Obama made a point of saying that they are all of like minds except one president, the one who defeated them again after their ten-year war.
    Who do these people think they are? They don’t have the right to tell the American people who they can and can’t vote for. It is their job to make their best case to us to earn our votes, and either they do, or they don’t, but they work for us, not the other way around.
    Are we all supposed to cheer seeing them standing there as a united front against the sitting president? They have absolutely no self-awareness about how tone-deaf this appears to most people.
    Do they think we’ve forgotten? Do they think we don’t remember Michael Moore calling George W. Bush a war criminal at the Oscars?
    Their terrible, blatant propaganda films like Oliver Stone’s W.
    And Adam McKay’s truly awful film about Dick Cheney, Vice, one of the worst films ever made, with the sole exception of his next movie, Don’t Look Up.
    They’re not finished. They expect the other half of the country to choke down more of it, unending amounts of it, in hopes of forcing all of us into compliance through the worst art the film industry has ever seen because it is under the complete control of a totalitarian movement.
    Next year, we’ll be tortured with a sure-to-be-terrible Sean Penn film on January 6th.
    They still see themselves as fighting the oppressive forces against them when the truth is that they are the oppressive force. Trump was the way out.
    The clocks were striking thirteen
    If any of us had been paying attention, we’d have known what we built mirrored Orwell’s 1984 and where it would ultimately take us.
    Every word of 1984 was a cautionary tale. Co-opting and distorting language, check. A Goldstein-like figure to sell two minutes of hate, check. A mandate to love Big Brother or else, check. An inside of accepted citizens ruled by the party elites and policed by the children spies, check, the abandoned working class, the Proles, outside of it, check.
    Trump’s win, to me, was like Winston Smith’s hope for the future, should the Proles rise up.
    That Obama and the rest of the establishment did worse than refuse to step aside but went to war on the duly elected president in an attempt to impeach, indict, discredit, and destroy him is the smoking gun that they no longer believe in American democracy. It’s their way or nothing. Americans have no way out.
    All the people ever had was Trump, and indeed, he was and remains a mighty force. He is the troll to Obama’s virtue signal, the two internet presidents who led whole armies online, facing off against each other for 15 years.
    Obama’s ten-year plea to the American people to choose him feels desperate by now. Choose me, love me, follow me, worship me. It doesn’t mean America is racist because they didn’t. That has been the Left’s method of policing all of us for far too long, and this country can unify the minute they snap out of it.
    They want us to see them as the better side, the special people, our gods and goddesses. But I look at them and see people who have long since cut themselves off from the rest of the country and have no plans to ever change. The museum reflects that better than anything ever has. What is inside? It doesn’t matter. It looms large.

    //


    This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe
  • Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone

    Jane Fonda's Women's Media Center Fired Me Because I Voted for Trump

    16/06/2026 | 28 min
    Jane Fonda, like so many on the Left, is the worst kind of hypocrite. She plays the part of a free speech warrior while participating in the most totalitarian movement this country has ever seen.
    There she was, yet again, yapping into a microphone to protest Trump’s UFC 250. The signs behind her are ablaze with pure lies - Civil Rights! The First Amendment! You can’t silence us!
    But Jane Fonda and the company she founded, Women’s Media Center, do not practice what they preach. They fired me for the crime of voting for Donald Trump.
    I had been regularly hired for almost ten years to write their Women in Oscars report until a story broke in the Hollywood Reporter calling me a “MAGA darling.” And just like that, my 25-year career as a “woman-owned” Oscar website went up in flames, as did my freelance gig for WMC.
    It’s true, I did vote for Donald Trump. Not only did I vote for him, but I also made my support for him known on social media, which is what caught the reporter’s attention in the first place.
    I was supposed to cower in fear. Support the Democrats or else. I could have done what a lot of people did and kept my vote for Trump secret, but I didn’t think I should have to. Weren’t we the side that stood up for free speech and free expression?
    No. We weren’t then, and aren’t now. There is a long trail of writers, thinkers, actors, artists, musicians, and ordinary citizens who have been destroyed by the Left’s machine for the crime of dissent. And thousands more who suffer in silence, knowing there are so many things they can’t say.
    Only one side regularly censored users on social media, and that was the Biden administration working with the FBI. Only one side used the FBI and the CIA to censor the Hunter Biden laptop to thwart the re-election of the sitting president. That wasn’t the Right.
    Because Jimmy Kimmel got a slap on the wrist and Trump sued CBS News, and there’s a merger with Paramount and Warner Bros., to people like Jane Fonda, that means the First Amendment is under threat. My message to her: clean your own house, Jane.
    Jane Fonda obviously wasn’t directly involved in firing me. She has no idea who I even am. It was someone else, someone I trusted, maybe someone who seemed like a decent person, but, like everyone else, from writers to publicists to friends, once I crossed that bright red line, I was no longer someone they would associate with at parties, let alone hire.
    It certainly wasn’t because I did not do good work. I did. I even asked Grok to fact-check my memory, and here is what came back:
    Nobody knows the Oscars like I do, and I did the best work for them on the cheap because I liked doing it.
    I tried to make my case as clearly as possible to the Hollywood Reporter that I could not go along with the unprecedented lawfare against Trump, and especially not “gender affirming care” on minor children. These things motivated me to do more than just vote. I had to go public. I thought my support would help others come out from the shadows.
    I knew as I was talking to that reporter that nothing I said would make a difference. I wouldn’t have even talked to her except she said she’d write the story anyway. She was reporting on what I thought and what I was tweeting, which was verboten inside utopia. And boy, did the hammer come down.
    After the story broke and I felt every door that had once been open to me slam in my face, I kept hearing yet another piece of bad news. The studios were pulling their ads. Yet another writer was leaving the site. I was not invited to screenings, parties, and premieres. The publicists all ghosted me. It was as though I had been arrested for committing mass murder.
    One of the last of the gut punches was losing that freelance gig at Women’s Media Center. I kind of knew it was coming because, of course, it would be. They all went along with it, and almost no one had the courage to push back or resist any of it. I wrote to them anyway because I wanted to hear it from them. And I got the expected answer.
    Jane Fonda founded the Women’s Media Center in 2005, along with Robin Morgan and Gloria Steinem. They describe themselves as “a progressive, nonpartisan nonprofit focused on increasing the visibility, influence, and decision-making power of women and girls in media.”
    They were perfectly happy to drop a woman writer for the sole crime of not agreeing with their politics. I’d say they don’t really support women in media so much as they support those who go along with them.
    I never played the woman card, but I could have. I built my site just to build it, and it became successful. I was a single mom in 1999 and raised my baby and my website at the same time. It is quite the story, especially for those who pretend to care about women in media.
    Why would it matter if I voted for Trump? Why would that mean I could no longer write the report? Why have they decided that all of this is okay, to treat half the country like toxic waste? How have they gotten away with it, and what will be their plans should they take back absolute power?
    They have painted themselves into a trauma corner with nowhere else to go, and in so doing, alienated themselves from much of this country. Where can you go when you’ve already gone as far as humanity ever has? Hitler, the Nazis, fascism. They’ve now gone to the only place they can go, wishing for and hoping for Trump’s death and vowing never to forgive anyone who voted for Trump.
    A Royal Court
    There was a time when I believed in all of it, too. The miracle of the first Black President and First Family. How one leader could bring together so much of American society, all of us reaching for the same goal because we all believed in a New America.
    We projected our fantasies of goodness onto them as they built what looked like a Royal Court of the most impressive and important people in the country, including rock stars like Bruce Springsteen and Katy Perry, actors like Robert De Niro and Julia Roberts. They were the party, and we were the adoring crowd.
    But all of that came with a price. If you want to be in the Royal Court, you’d best play ball because if you don’t, they can and will crush you. I had no idea that everything I built could be destroyed just because I dissented, and yet that is exactly what happened. Jane Fonda’s Women’s Media Center dropping me was the most disappointing because I believed in her, too. Now I know the truth.
    I am just one example. There are hundreds of people who are not welcome to work in the film industry if they are not ideologically compliant. We’ve been living with this for ten years now, and it’s become our new normal. Very few people are brave enough to stand up to them.
    Deep down, they all know it because they are too afraid to say the wrong thing, too. It’s easier to point their finger at Trump than confront what they have become - the blacklists, the shunning, the destroying of people’s careers. If they could do it to me, they can do it to anyone.
    What they don’t see, what they can’t see, is what they’ve done to the other half of the country for ten years. They want us all to think it’s perfectly normal that our late-night talk show hosts are purely partisan, or that it’s perfectly fine for Hollywood to continue to tell the story from inside their Doomsday Cult rather than the reality of all Americans.
    They don’t see themselves as the ones who can’t tolerate dissent or free speech and who fire people just for voting for Donald Trump. They believe themselves to be the chosen ones, the righteous few who have staked their claim on the New America, and those who aren’t on board must be purged.
    They’ve convinced themselves that it was perfectly fine that Jimmy Kimmel made an inhumane joke about Charlie Kirk moments after his brutal assassination, but when millions of upset viewers flooded the station with angry calls to have him removed, they called that a threat to free speech.
    They don’t seem to care that Biden imported millions of illegal immigrants into the country, and when many of them turned out to be murderers, rapists, and child molesters, they left a trail of victims, but those victims are invisible to the Left. They never even hear about them because in their minds, those illegal immigrants are to be protected above American citizens.
    So Julia Roberts and Bruce Springsteen continue to use the deaths of Renee Goode and Alex Pretti as examples of authoritarianism and to make American citizens feel shame for caring about their country and wanting a secure border and to be protected from harm. They never spent one minute comforting the mothers whose children were harmed by policies they supported.
    It wasn’t Trump who shot Pretti and Goode. They put themselves in a dangerous position to go to war against Federal agents who were doing their jobs. In the Left’s fever dream, they were battling Nazis.
    But they never notice or care or even try to understand why so many Americans wanted Trump to follow through on his promise to mass deport illegal immigrants, something every president has done.
    These mothers, like a lot of Trump supporters, had no other choice because this country, at the hands of the Left, means denying reality to serve utopia. You can’t talk about crime if the perp is an illegal immigrant or a person of color, just as you can’t discuss the harms of “gender affirming care.” I know, I’ve tried. They melt down like the housewife in The Stepford Wives who glitches at any confrontation of reality.
    That’s how it’s felt to me all these years, like I’m trying to talk to preprogrammed robots who know what you can and can’t say. I kept wondering what happened to everyone and why they were all acting exactly the same way. They were insulated from the rest of the country, and their imaginations got the better of them.
    What really happened to the ruling aristocracy, especially, is that they fell in love with their own reflection. They began to believe their own publicity, and so they couldn’t imagine the fault could ever possibly lie with them.
    It would have just been so much easier and so much better for everyone if they had just tried to understand why they lost. They never will, and so, they are doomed to repeat the same mistakes. And we have to suffer through it every time one of them finds a microphone.

    //


    This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe
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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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