Couverture de Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone

Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone

Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone

De : Sasha Stone
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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

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  • Obama’s War on Trump Reaches Its Penultimate Battle

    Obama’s War on Trump Reaches Its Penultimate Battle
    Oct 18 2026
    This November might mark the end of the Virtual Civil War we’ve been fighting for ten years. Or rather, Barack Obama and the establishment government’s war on half the country. The Democrats could take both the House and the Senate, effectively ending the Trump presidency and the MAGA movement.On the Right, they’re calling me a “Debbie Downer” or a catastrophist, just as they did on the Left when I tried to tell them Trump would win in 2016. But I worried a year ago, when the Trump administration cut Medicaid, millions lost their health insurance, and many saw their monthly premiums rise.When I spoke up about this, no one wanted to hear it. It wasn’t my job to tell the Right what to do with their power, but from where I sat, as a former Democrat, it felt like the beginning of the end. We don’t talk much about how that COVID era gave Americans financial relief and, for a time, free healthcare; some didn’t even have to pay rent. We got fat unemployment checks through the CARES Act, and under Biden, the spending went through the roof.No matter the Trump administration's intentions to cut spending, clean up fraud, and attempt to fix our broken system, once everyone felt the pinch of inflation, gas prices, the war in Iran, and healthcare costs, they'd finally be ready, I believed, to vote blue. I know I’m not the only person who feels like I’m living in the Twilight Zone. None of us understands what has happened to us in the age of the internet and social media, Obama and Trump. How can I have thought Trump was the ultimate evil in 2016, only to turn around and vote for him in 2024? And now spend my time warning about my former side?I was hoping that after the indictments, the impeachments, the assassination attempts, and the felony conviction, Trump’s second win would be the moment the delusional bubble burst on the Left and we could all go back to the way things were before the war.But that didn’t happen. They just got meaner and more radicalized, all the while learning how to hide that side of themselves, to lie to voters that they really aren’t as extreme as they were in the past. Even as some candidates have learned to lie better about “gender affirming care” or radical Islam to tamp down the widespread, mainstream radicalization that has overtaken the party, all one has to do is look at what’s happening in France to see that, in the midst of a Communist-like takeover, moderate liberalism won’t cut it.They don’t just want some of it. They want it all. And if France was the model the DSA in America pointed to as a socialist utopia, how do you explain a violent revolution unfolding on the streets? That won’t just happen here. It already has happened here. It wasn’t Islam; it was Black Lives Matter, but the forces of social-justice revolutionaries and the oppressed/oppressor doctrine rage on. I wake up every day confronting the cruelty of the Totalitarian Left as, even now, they try not just to destroy me and my business, but to wipe me out, erase me, unperson me. I feel it everywhere, not just online. I live in a town that would turn on me in an instant if they saw me in a MAGA hat. I know them. I live among them. They smile and chat with me on the street, and I hope they don’t get close enough to figure out who I am, that I’m scorched earth among their kind online. As of now, in the real world of my very small, very liberal town, I am a complete unknown. But if real life mirrored the internet, there would be wild-eyed fanatics putting up posters of me all over town that say TRUMP SUPPORTER. Because they were never held to account, nothing has really changed. They’re better liars, but no one has any plans to change how they treat the other half of the country they’ve thrown away like human garbage. They still see the evil in this country as racism, Islamophobia, sexism, misogyny, bigotry, transphobia. And now, they’ve married it to socialism, but even in France, that’s not enough, so Communism it will have to be.Barack Obama still leads the army on the Left. In many ways, his presidency of the ruling class half of the country never ended. He couldn’t walk away, not from the party, not from the country, because he could not stand to leave it in the hands of Donald Trump and to allow him and his movement to redirect the future of America, out of the hands of the totalitarian cult the Left has become.Today, he tweeted the most astonishing thing about Ilhan Omar:This, after they used the FBI and the CIA to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop while Trump was the sitting president, weaponized the government to frame Trump as a Russian asset, raided the home of a former president, indicted him four times, and convicted him of a felony on a ticky-tack charge. Tried to throw him off the ballot in several states - tied him up in court to keep him off the campaign trail.And all of that before you get to the debanking scandal, where ordinary Americans were cut off ...
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    30 min
  • The Word “Genocide” Has Lost All Meaning

    The Word “Genocide” Has Lost All Meaning
    Oct 7 2026
    I always knew growing up half-Jewish meant hiding. I figured out early on that it wasn’t something you were supposed to be. My mother isn’t Jewish and, if anything, has never been a fan of Jews — especially now. It’s just the kind of thing you know growing up, even if you don’t talk much about it.Hollywood rarely presented Jewish people to American audiences, even if Hollywood was run by Jews. That left me wondering why not. Did I look Jewish? Was that bad? As a young woman, I knew it meant I didn’t fit either place. I didn’t fit in the Jewish community, and I didn’t fit outside of it.But somehow I just knew the shame that came with being born half-Jewish, or Jewish enough for the camps. A boyfriend once said, “They have to have done something…” Meaning: why were they so hated and persecuted? I can’t say I ever knew the answer, because I never knew the history.I didn’t think about it much because my heroes, many of whom were Jewish, also didn’t talk much about it — Bob Dylan, Woody Allen, Leonard Cohen, or the Coen brothers. Steven Spielberg would finally address it in Schindler’s List, and that movie would help keep the memory of the Holocaust alive. But that was 1993. A lifetime ago.How is it that it could be 2026 and we’d be living through a moment in history where they have turned “Zionist” into a slur? Was it always? And how easy it is now to see the word “Jew” hurled on social media as an insult so casually.How could it be that Tucker Carlson, like so many others, could be so soft on Hitler now? He assumed, wrongly, that it was not Hitler’s fault we went to war.With Jacob Reese-Mogg:Here is Victor Davis Hanson:Whole thing here.It was so ignorant and dangerous of Tucker to spread these lies about Hitler that even Poland’s embassy in Washington had to issue a statement. And every time I post about this, I know I will lose subscribers, especially paid ones, because Tucker Carlson has about 5.8 million subscribers on YouTube, not quite 6 million but getting there. And me, well, let’s just say I don’t have that many.Undeniable tension is building within the MAGA movement as we head into the midterms. There are so many angry people on the Right, resentful that we bombed Iran “for Israel.” Foreign wars quickly became Israel’s war. Then it became about the money sent to Israel. But now, it’s anger at Trump for siding with the Jews.I tried to stay neutral on the war in Gaza and have not talked much about what is happening on the Left and the Right. But it is getting too big to ignore. We are at a dramatic inflection point where the word “genocide” is hurled as both a weapon and a struggle session. SAY THE WORD, say it! Say it’s genocide!It’s the last worst word. The rest of the words have been tossed on the scrap heap: fascism, Nazi, dictator, racist, rapist, bigot, sexist, homophobe, transphobe. What do words even mean anymore? They’ve been twisted, co-opted, and reshaped to control how we think about ourselves in the world and how we define what we believe.If you say “it’s a genocide,” then you are in. If you deny it, you’re one of the bad people. They say it on the Left as emotional blackmail. They say it on the Right to imply intent. Those evil Jews just want to kill Palestinians when everyone knows the opposite is true. GenocideEvery day, images flood social media of what Gaza looks like now after it was bombed by Israel. That’s proof of genocide, they said. How can it not be genocide? But the word they are looking for is war. That is what losing a war looks like. It is also what winning a war looks like.World War II was beyond anything most people alive today could ever imagine. They can’t remember, and no one will tell them what war looks like. But here is what it looks like.The Allies bombing Berlin into rubble. Hiroshima and Nagasaki after getting nuked:Is that “genocide”? No, that’s war. Genocide is the attempt to kill a whole people based on their ethnicity or their religion. That’s not what the Allies did in World War II, and it’s not what Israel has done now. If anything, the opposite is true. Hamas, like much of the Islamic world, wants not just to kill Jews but to wipe them off the map. That’s genocide. They just don’t have the wealth or the weaponry to carry it out.Here is Bill Maher:Trump hit Iran to castrate a genocidal regime before it could nuke Israel, yes, but also other countries too. Death is nothing to jihadists. They have no problem using children as tools of propaganda and weapons of war as long as it serves a higher purpose.October 7th was meant to be so bad that Israel had to respond, and then they would have their holy war to turn hearts and minds against Israel all over the world.The footage from the war is their proof to the world that Jews are the bad ones, the Nazis, and Israel therefore must be destroyed. From the River to the Sea… Antisemitism is nothing compared to ...
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    35 min
  • The Cornell 7 and The “Consent” Trap

    The Cornell 7 and The “Consent” Trap
    Oct 2 2026
    I’m probably the last person who should write about morality. I grew up on the Left, after all: a hippie childhood in Topanga Canyon, then coming of age as the first generation after Roe v. Wade as a liberated woman who did whatever I wanted, dressed however I wanted, and always felt free in my mind and heart. I was never someone who would have demanded morality. I didn’t even know what that was.I watched the counterculture revolution of the 1960s and 1970s break free of norms and traditions. Where we’ve ended up is at the Empire’s end: a Caligula-like culture that strictly polices thought, speech, racism, sexism, homophobia, bigotry of any kind, but one that also treats morality and decency as oppressive relics from a patriarchal past.So when a 20-year-old Jane Doe walked into the Chi Phi fraternity at Cornell on October 24, 2024, her only armor was the rule of “consent.” As long as it was okay with her and she said so, anything goes. She agreed to a threesome with two 20-year-olds, but then, when more men flocked to her body like seagulls chasing a bag of chips left on the beach, she was too high or drunk to even know how to get herself out of it.No one knew how to just say this is wrong, this is bad behavior because they don’t live in a culture that believes that — not unless it’s rape. But this wasn’t rape by any legal definition. She consented, then she consented again. Then, she was drowning in a sea of consent, and so were they. In the days, weeks, and months that followed, Jane Doe would absorb the truth about what really happened that night. Shame would follow when she saw her classmates pointing and laughing at her, calling her a slut, saying it was a “gang bang.” If the boys said nothing, she said nothing; no one would know what they did that night, but the boys bragged about it. They betrayed her trust, and she ended up looking bad.The real kicker was being disinvited to that same frat with those same guys. In her mind, she was the one being punished and not the boys.From the New York Times:At Chi Phi, the fraternity was preparing for a Halloween party, and Jane Doe was eager to attend. Text messages included in the investigation show Mr. Ingalls assuring Jane Doe that he and other fraternity members wanted her to be there.“chi phi is your house and you are welcome here,” he wrote, relaying the views of the fraternity’s president, who was not among those accused of sexual assault.“thank u i really appreciate that,” Jane Doe responded. “<3 i’ll bring my cigs tomorrow”But then Jane Doe received a phone call from the fraternity’s president, according to the text messages.She was disinvited from the party. It was for her own good, he said.Jane Doe sent a biting text to Mr. Ingalls.“I knew this was going to happen,” she wrote. “The woman will always get the short end of the stick. Yall aren’t my friends. Yall are covering your asses.”That’s when the anger and resentment set in, and eventually, it would fester until she decided she needed to get something back, something she lost in her efforts to protect the boys and not herself. Whether she knew it or not, she was walking around with a loaded gun and a trigger she could pull at any time. Two years later, she did just that, and the righteous, delusional, fanatical mob ignited into a frenzy. Even AOC got into the mix, condemning and convicting the boys, putting an image in everyone’s head about what happened that night.Everything that came next has been a horror show. The Cornell newspaper released the boys' names, knowing that in modern-day America there can be no such thing as due process. If she was accusing them of rape, gang rape, then they were guilty. The University newspaper, the Cornell Sun, wrote an op-ed naming the boys:We refuse for this victim to be reduced to just another story. Cornell has failed to protect its students. Cornell has failed to address the growing issue of sexual assault on campus with its pathetic task force. Cornell has failed the student allegedly raped by those seven men at Chi Phi in October 2024. Cornell has failed her. Cornell has failed us.To Matthew Ingalls, Jonathan Newell, Winston Lee, Gillio Lopes, Diego Sarabia, Scott Norris and Scott Kretzschmar: We know who you are and we refuse to let you benefit from this University’s concealment.Two websites cropped up to name and shame the boys. One is Cornellseven.com, run and operated by activist Aaron B:And the other, The Cornell 7, run by a former South Park writer, Toby Morton.Some guy was mistakenly identified as one of them and began receiving death threats:They had their villains. They just needed their innocent victim. Jane Doe is such a perfect name for the kind of victim our culture seems to so desperately need. A helpless baby deer caught in the headlights just before she’s run over.In their mind’s eye, she had been passed out as men did a train on her. In reality, that was never true. In ...
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    33 min
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