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Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone

Podcast Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone
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 an...

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  • The Democrats Try to Un-Crazy Themselves
    Hunter S. Thompson wrote in his book Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail:The "mood of the nation," in 1972, was so overwhelmingly vengeful, greedy, bigoted, and blindly reactionary that no presidential candidate who even faintly reminded "typical voters" of the fear & anxiety they'd felt during the constant "social upheavals" of the 1960s had any chance at all of beating Nixon last year--not even Ted Kennedy--because the pendulum "effect" that began with Nixon's slim victory in '68 was totally irreversible by 1972. After a decade of left-bent chaos, the Silent Majority was so deep in a behavorial sink that their only feeling for politics was a powerful sense of revulsion. All they wanted in the White House was a man who would leave them alone and do anything necessary to bring calmness back into their lives.”It’s hard to believe that the Democrats became so crazy that they made Trump seem like the normal one, the only person who could bring calm back into our lives.I felt happy the other day and thought, what is this strange feeling? It wasn’t so much that I was happy with all of what Trump was doing, but he did the one thing that had been keeping me up at night - his Executive Order to end “gender-affirming care” for minors.I’m not foolish enough to think that these big moves Trump and his team are making will bring about permanent change, but he’s shaking the tree, standing up to the most powerful forces in the country, and doing exactly what we, the voters, asked him to do.Trump isn’t the problem. It’s the crumbling empire that refuses to relinquish power and insists so many of its delusions and narratives must be adhered to, even now. Adam Schiff and Elizabeth Warren reminded us that they don’t really seem to care about how the election turned out. They didn’t even turn the page.They don’t seem to have gotten the message that they’re still considered too crazy to govern. It’s the exact kind of crazy that drove Nixon to a landslide victory and eventually put Reagan in power, keeping Democrats out of the White House for the next 12 years. As things look now, that’s exactly how it will play out.I sometimes peer into the crazy on TikTok. Women wearing red lipstick in silent protest. Young and old alike screeching and caterwauling at Trump supporters, pleading with them, mocking and dehumanizing them, then begging them to see Trump as the embodiment of all of the evil in the world. How frustrating it must be for them to know that the silent majority doesn’t agree.How frustrating it must be that they keep screaming racists, Nazis, fascists! And still be seen as the crazier side.With the election of DNC Chair Ken Martin and Vice Chair David Hogg, they seem to be sending a message to their voters that they’re done with the “woke” thing, and maybe now they can un-crazy themselves with two boring “white dudes.”The last time the Democrats tried to un-crazy themselves, it didn’t go so well. After losing every state except Massachusetts in 1972 and the even worse Jimmy Carter presidency, the Democrats settled on the idea that bland and boring middle manager types were better than chasing the dream.This “bland and boring” reset doesn’t undo the crazy but disguises it. Look to the future, they say. Gun control, they say. Bring the fight to the Republicans, they say. But they still can’t solve the problem because they are the problem.The star, their Great White Hope, their version of the “bro-whisperer” to bring in the young people is David Hogg, mass shooting survivor turned activist influencer.And he’s just Ken:The worst sign is that nothing much has changed except appearances. The party is still leaning into the establishment of old, which means they aren’t sending a message to voters that they are, in any way, prepared to deal with the mess they made over the past four years.What should worry the Democrats, not that they will pay any attention, is that there is no plan to clean house, which is what they’d need to do to have any real pitch to win back the voters they lost. They seem to be doing the bare minimum, admitting nothing, with Barack Obama still guiding the ship.They really do think they can sweep it all under the rug — hiding Joe Biden’s age, the Afghanistan withdrawal, the censorship machine, George Clooney op-ed, how Biden refused to leave, whatever they threatened him with, and the manufactured candidacy of Kamala Harris.How much better would it be for them if they admitted their party had become too corrupt to function? And too crazy to lead? But they won’t because that other America still exists inside the utopian bunker they’ve been hiding in all this time.In choosing David Hogg, the Democrats prove they have no plans to roll back the crazy, which, of course, I already knew. This goes deeper for them than politics. This is who they are. This is how they see the world.With Martin and Hogg (which sounds like a leather boot manufacturer) they’re sending a message to those of us who have defected from the party that nothing has changed. There were no lessons learned, no reckoning to be had.Says Adam B. Coleman:When I was a Democrat, we believed in classically liberal principles, like freedom of speech and fairness for all people, not just some people. They elevated serious and, dare I say, likable individuals within the party. At one point, The Democrats seemed like the "cool" party with aspirational and better ideas.But now, The Democrats are the party of dogma. There is nothing inquisitive or reflective about the party. They are verbal one-trick ponies, twisting their words to validate their end-goal ambition regardless if it works or not.I’ve seen tweets by people who are hoping their ongoing hysteria about Trump’s first ten days will send people like me running back into their arms. But the problem has never been Trump. The problem has always been them, what they did to this country, what they did to the party, what they did to themselves.Just like the silent majority ran from them back in 1972 and 1980, so too are we all still okay with Trump, even with the chaos, because he’s not them.It took me four years to realize that. But once you see it, you can’t unsee it, and there is no going back, at least not until they clean house and un-crazy themselves.So we’ll see bland candidates running for president as they attempt to tack to the center, but the crazy will follow them like toilet paper stuck to the bottom of their shoes.The “Mood of the Nation”The last time the Democrats scared America, I was just a kid. I grew up in Topanga Canyon around the same time as the Manson family lived there, not to mention it being a hotbed for old-time rock n’ rollers, surfers, and cults. Nothing scared me as much as Charles Manson, whose face stared out at us from the cover of magazines. Those crazy eyes, that “X” scar between his brows. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe
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  • A Survival Guide in the Time of The Intolerant Liberal
    The Intolerant Liberal is a new species that has arrived on the scene. They are not like the liberals of old. They would never make an offensive joke, and they are perfectly happy to not only point out those who do but join in on the mob that punishes them.The Intolerant liberals have forgotten much of the great art that used to define them way back in the day. They have forgotten Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, and all of those on-point Twilight Zone episodes, like It’s a Good Life and The Monsters, are Due on Maple Street.They’ve forgotten how funny it was to listen to Sam Kinison make one offensive joke after the next, gifting us with the necessary release of laughter, the very thing we need to stay sane.Richard Pryor would not survive a minute in the time of Intolerant Liberals.Therein lies Survival Tip Number One: They can’t take a joke. Oh, boy, can they not take a joke. If every single day is the end of the world, how can anything be funny? It’s not funny. It’s HARM. Social media has given them a way to dissect every joke and every word said by everyone.Imagine how fast sanity would return if they admitted that Trump was funny.That’s all it would take to open up the door to the Doomsday Bunker so they, too, can break free from the mass delusion that they are the “oppressed resistance.” And yet…they can’t. They’ve never been the resistance. They’ve always been The Empire, an Empire that is now collapsing.The richest Intolerant Liberals in the world seem to need Trump because how else to justify their wealth and privilege while they sell ice cream called “Eat the Rich”?Note how this Intolerant Liberal throws in “book banning,” as though they are the side that has any room to talk. Books aren’t banned because they never make it past the assistant’s desk unless they project the ideals of Utopia.We’ve seen how books by JK Rowling and Dr. Seuss have been left off of reading lists, how warning labels have been affixed to movies because the Intolerant Liberals are so afraid of one person’s mental breakdown and ensuing social media backlash that they play it safe. Here is a screenshot of a trigger warning, posted by Kat Rosenfield: This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe
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  • Finally, a Real Celebration for MAGA
    One Last Ride….=It’s been a long time coming, hasn’t it MAGA? What a ride it’s been for you.As people like me were arguing with Bernie bros about the 2016 nomination for president and were caught up in our unending phantasmagoria about a “reality TV star” who was rising in the ranks on the Right, you were being verbally and physically attacked already, bullied at rallies, spit on, kicked, called racists, Nazis, fascists, bigots. It would only get worse.How far you’ve come from the last inaugural when so many protesters burned cars and smashed windows, screaming, “Not my president.”The beautiful and elegant Melania Trump never graced the cover of any magazine. They mocked her Christmas decorations and called her an uncaring Nazi.But almost no one got it worse than Ivanka Trump, although all the Trump kids were put through the dehumanizer the Left had become. They were called ugly and inbred. There were jokes about Trump sleeping with his own daughter just because he was proud of her and praised her, as he does all of his kids. This was mainstream on the Left, dehumanization on a grand scale.As long as that was the version we told ourselves — that they were the rich, hollow, power-hungry elites like the cast of Succession, we could convince ourselves we were the hard-scrabble people lifting up the minority class and making the world a better place one marginalized group at a time. But what of the majority?It would eventually lead to the government and their media lying about you on January 6th, riding the hysteria to ban the social media app Parler from Amazon’s web server and the then-sitting president of the United States from YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter.It seemed there was no place for you in America anymore. But what did you do in the face of that kind of social and political oppression? You rose up, and you fought back. You didn’t have to do it by smashing windows or protesting. You did it with true grit, organizing, fundraising, and keeping the MAGA spirit high. You never lost your faith because you knew exactly what you were fighting for and what you were up against.And most of all, your unbreakable loyalty to Trump kept hope alive that one day there might be fairness in government, in our culture, and in our major institutions that decided it was perfectly fine to treat you like hostile invaders in your own country.But people like me had no idea that it was happening. What we heard was that Trump’s rallies were violent, that his supporters were beating up Black people, and that his rallies were like Hitler’s. If you scare people enough, they’ll go along with anything.We were the side that had all of the power. We were the empire. We were never the resistance. That we turned our helplessness and fanaticism into dehumanizing half the country is a shame we should never live down.I didn’t realize it until 2020. I was so trusting of people like Rachel Maddow. I listened to NPR without even thinking about their political bias. We were the side that told the truth, I believed. We weren’t fooled by Fox News and Breitbart. How could anyone not trust NBC News? How could I ever think that what they told me on CNN might not be the whole story?I didn’t realize until the Tom Cotton op-ed disaster at the New York Times that my information was being carefully curated. I watched all of my friends and colleagues crucify Bari Weiss on Twitter for allowing the Cotton piece to be published in the New York Times. It was harm, they said. It would get people killed, they said. It terrorized their staff, they said.Tom Cotton was a United States Senator who merely reported what most Americans already believed. The protests were violent and destructive. A majority of Americans wanted the military to be brought in. Bari Weiss was trying to give the majority a voice in the paper of record.But as we’d done with almost every news story since the beginning of the Trump era, we stretched the truth like taffy to suit our needs. Trump was Hitler, and this was fascism— we’d all convinced ourselves to believe, and with the help of the military “experts,” they trotted out to agree.The truth? They needed the protests to be as violent and chaotic as possible. They encouraged them to make Trump look bad.By 2020, I’d already been the target of so much abuse from the Left. I was called a “white supremacist,” a bigot, a racist, and a transphobe. Many on the Left now just assume it’s true —that I “went to the dark side.”Not a day goes by that someone from my former side does not lob me with some kind of hateful insult. Just yesterday, I was told by a long-time follower of my film site that I was a “vile person,” and they regretted ever following me for all of those years. “Enjoy MAGA,” he said. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe
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  • A Farewell Address to a Woketopia Gone Wrong
    Joe Biden said goodbye. He wanted to mirror Eisenhower, who once warned of the Military Industrial Complex, but Biden saw something equally alarming—the Big Tech oligarchy. He sees Zuckerberg and Bezos attending Trump’s inaugural. He greatly fears the power of Elon Musk. He realizes that his side lost control of it and now, he wants all of us to be afraid.Well, I’m sorry, Joe. I can’t play that game anymore. It’s time to say goodbye. Farewell, Joe Biden, farewell, Democrats. Farewell, hysteria. Farewell to mandated preferred pronouns in everyone’s bio. Farewell to being forced to lie about whether or not masks work. Farewell to not being allowed to give people the benefit of the doubt. Farewell to being too afraid to ask questions about an experimental vaccine. Farewell to Critical Race and gender theory in elementary schools.Farewell to the ruling oligarchy — yes, Joe. You were the frontman for it. You can’t fool me. I was part of it, too. It was like a daisy chain of paper dolls—Hollywood, all major corporate and cultural institutions, Big Pharma, and all of the ads they pumped into the veins of Americans that showcased the American utopia in all of its splendor. Just take this pill, and you, too, can be with us, in the happy place. Farewell to a government censoring speech via social media. Farewell to the absence of masculinity. Farewell to worrying about every word that comes out of our mouths, what we drive, what we wear on Halloween, what we buy, what we eat, what we watch, what we desire.Farewell to being made to hate ourselves and everything we know to be true but can’t say out loud. Farewell to being the oppressors or the oppressed defined only by the color of our skin. Farewell to hating our history, hating our country, hating our heroes. Farewell to virtue signaling our goodness. Farewell to always being told that it’s better to keep your head down and say nothing about any of it.Farewell to never being able to take a joke. Farewell to seeing problematic content in every movie and farewell to the warning labels now affixed to all of them. Farewell to seeing all men as predators and all women as victims. Farewell to a country ruled by fear because our leaders can’t see it any other way. Farewell to a president who called half the country “ultra fascists,” “ultra MAGA,” and “extreme MAGA Republicans.” Farewell to a government that believes its biggest threat comes from the people of the United States.Farewell to life inside the doomsday cult, where every single day is the end of the world. Farewell to every word taken literally and seen as another chapter of Mein Kampf. Farewell to repression and sanctimony. Farewell to the long, dark winter. Farewell to lawn signs. Farewell to pretending Kamala Harris wasn’t a terrible candidate installed by the deep state. Farewell to ever having to worry about speaking the truth. Farewell to the unshakable hopelessness, the unending sadness, the mourning of the long-forgotten Old Left. It’s never coming back. Everything has to be rebuilt. Welcome to the beginning of the rest of your life. At least now, you can have a life. Bringing it all Back HomeWatching the confirmation hearings was bringing it all back. Adam Schiff was still out of his mind, braying like he’s Cotton Mather in the Oyer in Terminer in Salem, demanding Pam Bondi say Joe Biden “won the election.” Why did it matter so much to him? Are there really that many Americans out there who need to hear those words said out loud?The nominees’ worth depended on whether or not they would stand up to the tyrant fascist racist rapist dictator that they impeached twice, indicted four times convicted on a bogus felony charge, all of which eventually landed in the fevered dreams of a washed-up surfer hippie from Hawaii who got himself a gun and tried to kill the president to SAVE DEMOCRACY. And they still lost. They lost the Electoral College and they lost the popular vote. I never get tired of saying that. Talk about owning the libs. What can we do except quote Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire. HA. HA HA HA.That’s how much America hates them. After all, how hard could it possibly be to beat Hitler? The problem with utopias is that they can’t last. They either must become more authoritarian and thus, less utopian, or they collapse. By the end of our utopia, anyone we knew could be one of those things. A bad person. A sexist. A racist. A homophobe. A bigot. A transphobe. Toxic masculinity. White feminism. Everyone was either an abuser or a victim. The weaker we were, the more we were celebrated. We’d snuffed out all independent thought. We were under constant surveillance by the government, advertisers, AI, algorithms, and each other. We began to wonder what real life even was anymore. It was like Winston and Julia in 1984 trying to carve out some love and lust from the dystopia under Big Brother’s ever-watchful gaze, with children spies at the ready to tattle—and cancel—those who broke the rules. So if you say Joe Biden won the 2020 election, like you say 2+2=5, then democracy might have a chance. But if you dare think for yourself and start looking behind closed doors and see things you aren’t supposed to see, well, now you threaten democracy.When I pushed open the door of the doomsday bunker and escaped, I knew there was no going back. I also knew I couldn’t save anyone, much less the once-great culture I used to love. There is no saving whatever it was we used to call the Left. There is only saving America from what it had become so that all of us at least have a fighting chance.No, it won’t be perfect. Yes, it might be chaos — entertaining chaos — but chaos all the same. We’ll have to learn how to tolerate each other again, live together somehow, and learn this new way of life suddenly foisted upon us with the internet. Now, we know what it looks like to shut ourselves off from people and ideas we cannot control.If the Democrats on Blue Sky and in the Senate Confirmation hearings are any indication, nothing much has changed on the inside. They’re still transfixed by the one guy they couldn’t cancel, the one guy they couldn’t destroy. 1984 Part TwoAnd maybe now we’re about to find out what happens in the sequel. Does Big Brother find a way to regain power by destroying Elon Musk to retake X and make it Twitter again? Do those of us exiled and canceled remain on the outside? Does the New York Times beg Bari Weiss to come back, or The Atlantic to throw themselves at the feet of Walter Kirn, or Rolling Stone magazine, the crap rag it has become, offer Matt Taibbi millions to write for them again?Can those on the inside who have speciated with a whole new language and belief system learn to live with the unwashed masses again? Can they tolerate offensive speech? Can it all be one big, happy, dysfunctional family?On the inside, the news that Carrie Underwood and the Village People were playing at the inaugural birthed a fresh new crop of mass hysteria and rage. So I’m guessing Saturday Night Live won’t have Trump back any time soon. The Oscars won’t ask him to attend, and those who still believe they control this country will hold onto their collapsing empire until ashes, ashes, it all falls down.I don’t know. But it doesn’t matter. Because today we say farewell. And oh, how sweet it is. // This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe
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  • Dear Democrats: This Time, You Can't Blame the Republicans
    Six years ago on Medium, I wrote the following:The Republicans have systematically turned climate change into a partisan issue, you know, like abortion, and have done so to manipulate their gullible electorate into believing the lie that there is no such thing as man-made climate change. They spew the dumbo rhetoric any time they can, that “oh the weather changes all the time.” Or “I don’t believe climate change is real — even if the planet is warming, it isn’t our fault.”Yeah, it is. You dig up fossil fuels and you burn them, that warms the planet. They were buried for millions of years which, in turn, cooled the planet, making it an ideal atmosphere for all kinds of different forms of life, including us. What’s coming next is uncharted territory for humanity. We have no idea how bad it’s going to get. We just know it WILL be bad.I was not only furious with rage, but I was quick to blame the other side for deliberately sabotaging our noble efforts to stop the warming of the planet, as though we ourselves were not contributing to it. We acted like we could buy a hybrid here, go vegan there, recycle our plastic, and be absolved from contributing to this existential crisis we all now must face.It isn’t that I don’t believe the planet is warming, or that sea level won’t rise, or that it is directly the fault of so many people on the planet. What has changed is that I no longer blame the other side, and I no longer see my former side as the good guys in the fight. No, I see them as hypocrites. I was a hypocrite too.I’d been in a bubble for much of my adult life because I lived online, in virtual spaces. Yes, I was raising my daughter in public schools, but those were a bubble too. We all belonged inside the same utopia. We read the same articles. We watched the same news. Our worries were the same worries. We spoke the same language, and all of us shared the belief that the biggest threat we faced was climate change and that the biggest obstacle we faced was the Republicans.And then, my daughter moved across the country, and I got a couple of dogs. Rather than fly and leave my dogs at home, I began driving across the country. Those drives changed everything for me, not just how I saw climate change but how I saw my fellow Americans. This was how people actually lived, not how we did, inside our haze of paper straws and cotton diapers.I saw the trucks driving on the interstates to deliver food and goods, the many hotels that require air conditioning and heating, the slaughterhouse trucks providing food for so many in this country, and the tiny houses in the middle of the desert with one embattled air conditioner sticking out of the window.Looking at all of this, all of these places, and all of these businesses, it was easy to see that there was no turning this thing around. There is no way to convince every state and citizen to hop aboard what is an existential crisis for the upper class. Life just isn’t like that.Everyone wants things that work, cars that run, planes that fly. They want washing machines, dishwashers, flat-screen TVs, office buildings, emergency rooms, and new computers and tech support lines, to buy groceries they can afford, to get fruit in the middle of winter, to watch movies and doom scroll social media — and “every Tweet warms the planet,” as Roy Scranton once wrote.Even if we could convince every single American to accept our fixes, what would we do about Russia, India, or China? We seemed to have gone all in on fantasy but we’re disconnected from reality.What we believe on the Left, or at least we used to, was climate change was Armageddon, doomsday, the end of everything. Therefore, what mattered to us isn’t so much that we solve the problems to survive climate change, but that we convert everyone else to our way of thinking. If we could do that, we believed, we could start making the big changes to our country and world.The Left is still haunted by the ghosts of the past, back when we really did have the power and the opportunity to make real change. We squandered that power, and then we blamed the other side. In so doing, we could wash our hands of real solutions, whether it was gun violence, poverty, failing schools, floods, fires, or hurricanes.And now, in the perfect cocktail of high Santa Ana winds, no rain for months, and a city caught off guard, the fires rampaged through the beaches of the Pacific Palisades and Malibu and the mountains of Alta Dena and continue to burn.There were rumors of not enough water, not enough firefighters, and no way to control the speed of the flames as they ripped through the dry brush, burning one house after another as we watched the tragedy unfold on live television or YouTube.This time, the narrative swirled around California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, and the Los Angeles Mayor, Karen Bass, newly elected in 2022 as the first female and second Black person to serve. Bass had left the country in January, known as the last month of the Santa Ana cycle that comes every Fall.From the University of California:The region sees about 10 Santa Ana wind events a year on average, typically occurring from fall into January. When conditions are dry, as they are right now, these winds can become a severe fire hazard.//end This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.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 sashastone.substack.com
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