Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone

The Democrats have never been less popular than they are right now. They are suffering from many of the same problems that are causing Hollywood to collapse. They are dominated by white women and the LGBTQIA movement that looks more and more like a cult every day. Only a white woman and a gay man could have come up with the Vanity Fair photo shoot that made Susie Wiles look surprised and confused, as if to say, “What am I doing here?” JD Vance as the villain in a superhero movie, obliterating his glittering aqua eyes because those make him look too good. And depicting Marco Rubio tipping over as though all it would take is a gentle push, and down he goes.But they saved up their best for the woman the Left calls KKKaroline. Shown in extreme closeup in high resolution with every pore and every wrinkle visible, not to mention injection marks on her upper lip, they turned the beautiful and young Leavitt into the cartoon version they see in their mind’s eye. They made something beautiful into something ugly. And on TikTok, they all had a big party. These are the same women who spent many months mocking Karoline Leavitt’s smallish upper lip. On and on it went, the bullying videos on TikTok. When that failed to destroy the Press Secretary, they harassed and destroyed a running influencer named Kate Mac just for talking to Leavitt.These women and probably lots of gay men are the monsters. They’re the wicked stepsisters in Cinderella who seethe with jealousy at the pretty blonde girl who is so confident and articulate at the podium. They’re the evil queen in Snow White who can’t stand that someone out there is prettier than she. So Vanity Fair became the Magic Mirror and the Huntsman. They lie to their readers that they are the fairest of them all while they try to extinguish or destroy the object of their unending obsession. Oh, how they must have laughed and laughed as they chose these photos, knowing their readers would eat it up and lick the plate clean. The women who stab lawn signs into the ground, pretend to stand for something, and portray themselves as the “better side” were celebrating to see Leavitt humiliated in a photo. It was, for them, like winning the lottery. It scratched an itch so deep they couldn’t even tell you where it was. It felt good, that was all.The editor is this guy, seen here as the date for Princess Bea in high heels:Guiducci was present during the photo shoot, which should have been a good indication that this would not go well for them, though I would imagine he was dripping with fake niceness to make them trust him. If you know, you know. Here is Megyn Kelly:The other editor was Jen Pastore, seen here bragging about the photoshoot and now treated like a hero by the Good People of the Left.Back in 2014, the New York Times covered her wedding to Mark Hannah:Pastore was lovingly captured this way: “The bride burst into laughter at least once during the vows, showing off an impossibly wide smile that was half Anne Hathaway, half 1990s Julia Roberts.” You see, even in 2014, they had to stipulate, yeah, you know, back when Julia Roberts had not aged even a day? They couldn’t get away with that now, or maybe they could. They make the rules, after all. It is nice to be among the privileged ruling class in America, among the Good People of the Left who see their mission to spread that goodness. And if you don’t along with it, they will destroy you. Well, at least that was the plan. Trump upended it, and they’ve never figured out exactly why. Even now, they think all of us should want to live inside their puritanical, suffocating bubble of goodness. Newsflash: we don’t. The truth is that they are not a party defined by goodness so much as all-consuming hatred for the “lesser” half of the country. It buzzes behind their fake Anne Hathaway/Julia Roberts’ smile like flies buzzing around rotting meat. Their hatred is everywhere. Usually pooling and coagulating on Blue Sky, but every so often it seeps back to X, where they marshal their forces as a hate army to attack those they deem “toxic,” “dangerous,” or “disgusting.”Why did they lose to Trump a second time is a question they would never ask. Is it them? No, it couldn’t be. Everyone wants to be them. They’re the special people, the good people, the chosen people, the Woketopians that will take America into the future. I know what it feels like to see myself through their eyes, even though I was once one of them. They sent a photographer to take my picture for a New York Times profile of me at a time when they were trying to make it seem like they kind of, sort of cared about the half of the country that voted for Trump.Don’t do it, my friend warned. Send them a selfie. I should have listened to him, but, like the Trump administration, I was far too trusting. How bad could it be?Well, it was nothing less than the worst photos of me ever taken, appearing in the world's most widely read outlet. So there I was, looking fat, ugly, and old, which is the message they wanted to send: don’t be like her, or this is what you will look like. They say it openly and freely now, this is what “hate” does to you, and they define “hate” as disagreeing with their politics. The photographer was nice. She took many photos of me. And maybe it’s true they were all just as bad as the one the editor chose, but I think, as with the Vanity Fair photos, they picked the worst ones because that is who they are, and if they didn’t, they’d have been accused of elevating the wrong people, the bad people, the racists, and the fascists.This way, they signal to their readers - women and gay men - that they’re still on their side, they’re still on board with the real hate campaign, one they’ve waged for ten years now and counting. They have no plan for the other half of the country. All they want to do is take back power again and raise the drawbridge to their Queendom. While it’s true that the Right will mock how women look, especially the Wicked Witch of the Left, Jennifer Welch, you’d never see that at Vanity Fair, or the New York Times, where women on the Left, especially minorities, are depicted as saintly. In refusing to “normalize” the wife of a “fascist,” all magazines boycotted the beautiful Melania Trump. Nothing she could do would ever change their conviction of who they believed she was. They use every magazine, every late-night comedy show, every Hollywood movie, every article in every magazine to push that lie. When they mocked Kellyanne Conway’s age, she did something about it. She took that one thing off the table. They found something else. When they mocked Sarah Huckabee Sanders for her makeup and her weight, she did something about it, but they found something else. And now, when they mocked Karoline Leavitt for her thin upper lip, she didn’t say anything about it, and they punished her for it. The truth doesn’t matter to them. It never has. They can’t even face the truth about themselves, let alone the other half of the country. Ivanka was always to be portrayed as the daughter of a Nazi, as are all the Trump children. There has never been one moment when they were given the credit they deserve, not because they’re American royalty, but because we, the people, voted for them to fight for us. That used to matter in a country not under the control of an elite ruling class that sees itself as better than everyone else. Trump, his administration, and his voters have to be whatever they say they are. If they need them to be kings, so be it. Hitler, sure thing. Let us know what you want, women and gay men who live in a fantasy world, and we’ll give it to you because you have been elevated inside the Woketopia. The funny thing is, all they do is expose what liars they are. We all know what Karoline Leavitt, JD Vance, Marco Rubio, and Susie Wiles really look like. This wasn’t about telling the truth. It was about giving their readers the comfortable lie. See, it’s okay to dehumanize them and treat them like toxic waste because they deserve it. Oh, Vanity Fair, did you have to make it that obvious? They must wonder why so many Americans don’t see them the way they see themselves. Or maybe they don’t wonder at all. Maybe they never ask. Maybe they’ve been united in hate and dehumanization for so long that they don’t know the difference anymore between what is real and what is a manufactured delusion.It isn’t that the Right didn’t mock the Democrats’ press secretaries, Jen Psaki and Karine Jean-Pierre. They did. It’s that the Left is the side that has always pretended to be our moral betters because they aren’t like that, they don’t criticize women, they don’t tear down other women, except that they do. That was Lesson Number One for me almost ten years ago. They are exactly like that, and I remember thinking, we aren’t the good guys anymore.The women on TikTok, those who have helped make our culture intolerable by always portraying women as victims in fiction, in Lifetime movies, in Hollywood, become the very monsters they once pretended to oppose. So all Vanity Fair did was prove not who the Trump administration is, but what the Left has become. They are nothing but a grease stain where a once mighty movement used to be.Karoline Leavitt is not only beautiful, young, smart, and successful, but she’s also confident, and that’s what they really hate about her. If they can’t destroy her, they will try to humiliate her. It has become a ritual in the media by now, but never quite as blatantly as with this Vanity Fair piece. Maybe their readership is declining. Maybe they’re bored. Maybe they don’t know any other way to be anymore. Whatever it is, the stench of failure follows them around every time they signal to the rest of us that they are still this helpless and this desperate to lie to the American public with nothing less than lowly propaganda disguised as journalism. Vanity Fair, Hollywood, the New York Times - they don’t exist for all of us anymore. They don’t view the other half of the country as worthy of their attention or their coverage, even though Trump won the popular vote. They still haven’t figured it out. They haven’t solved the problem. We picked Trump because we can’t stand living in their America anymore. We can’t stand them. They’re the side that demands conformity, one that has cultivated a climate of fear and a culture of silence. Who wants to live like that? It’s boring. It’s predictable. It’s mean. And it’s over. //Tip jar 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

I have angels in my comment section who report when commenters lose their cool and fly off the handle at me. Most of the time, I delete them. Sometimes I don’t. This one sailed through my inbox, and it will finally get this person banned after almost 6,000 comments in three years, and he’s not even a paid subscriber. Please excuse the profanity:I can’t lie and pretend to be excited for Supergirl. It’s not a movie made for me, and I’m not sure I can handle one more girl boss movie, especially one whose tagline is “Truth, justice, and whatever.” Maybe my daughter will like it. But let’s move on to the red meat of this, shall we? What is this “non-stop hate binge” I’ve been on lately? It’s true, I have been out in force on X, fighting the wave of what I would define as “hate” aimed at Erika Kirk and Turning Point. It’s not something I could or ever would ignore. I’m not built that way, which is how I got into this mess in the first place. I’m Gen-X. We tend to say what we really think. We’re not good with the comfortable lies, and we weren’t raised to shrink back from conflict.And, like Trump, I have a bit of an impulse control disorder when it comes to social media. If I didn’t, my life would never have changed the way it has. I began fighting the Left when I saw how they were dehumanizing the Right, Melania and Ivanka Trump, MAGA supporters, and even Trump himself. It cost me almost everything. Smarter people know how to shut up. They know how to keep their heads down and go along to get along. I’ve never been that way. I’ve been online for 30 years of my life, entirely too long. I’ve wasted years arguing pointlessly on X or Facebook. It is spitting in the wind. It does nothing to change anyone’s mind, and it only makes me unlikable and a target. But I can’t help it. I don’t know how any reasonable person could not be thoroughly disgusted and horrified by Candace Owens and how she has exploited the murder of Charlie Kirk. It’s not only dividing the Right, undoing so much of what Charlie did, but it’s exposing ugliness and dehumanization on the side I have always defended.I can’t help but think Candace is jealous, not of Erika, but of Charlie, his reach and popularity, how beloved he was and is, especially in the wake of his death. So she just decided to steal from him - his legacy, his reputation, his movement, his influence. She did this by co-opting his story and spinning a delusional yarn about what is a fairly open and shut assassination case, one that pins the blame on the fanatical Left. She doesn’t need the money. Her husband, George Farmer, is worth between $180 and $200 million, not to mention how much Candace is making by spinning tall tales to feed her audience of mostly bored women who need drama in their lives. Lifetime movies don’t cut it anymore because they, like everything else in Hollywood, went “woke.” Even psychological thrillers and romance novels have gone “woke,” as have true crime podcasts. So instead, they follow the snake oil salesman, the huckster, the Barnam and Bailey lying YouTuber down any rabbit hole she chooses to offer up, anything to make it seem like they’re involved in some gossipy, dirty, evil secret, that they know something no one else does. It’s easier to believe we can control inexplicable horrific tragedies, whether it’s the Democrats always blaming guns or it’s a faction of the Right always blaming Israel.No, Candace is not doing this for money. She’s doing it for that insidious word for the internet age: clout. As long as they’re talking about you, as long as you’re a trending topic, your clicks and views will rise. You will be highly ranked on the podcast charts, and you’ll see that as a success. At least, until it isn’t. Who could resist what it must feel like to have millions of people tuning in to hear what scandalous thing you’ll say next? How could anyone not become addicted to it and constantly feed the beast, hungry for more? The algorithms have ravaged our brains and nervous systems, and in Candace Owens's case, her morality.True, she needs a new narrative to wipe off the sticky scum of humiliation now that her “Brigitte Macron is really a man” conspiracy collapsed. What better way to pivot away from that and redefine CANDACE? The hatred, bullying, and ugliness aimed at Erika Kirk come from both the Left and the Right. Each side has its reasons for wanting to destroy her and Turning Point. On the Left, it’s obvious. Even Barack Obama called Charlie a racist, more or less, in the wake of his death. They can’t abide a movement like his that was attracting so many young people. They couldn’t just accept the death of Charlie. They had to work every day to kill off his legacy, and that meant going after his widow, Erika. If some on the Left have abandoned their decency and humanity to stay in power, some on the Right are doing it out of a deep-seated hatred of Israel and distrust of the Jewish people. There is no other way to say it. That is the stinking rot that lies in the soul of Candace Owens, what drives her popularity on YouTube and social media, because Jew hate is global. And yes, it’s also banal, as Walter Kirn explains here with Matt Taibbi on America This Week. I know what Jewish hate feels like. I am half Jewish on my dad’s side, which meant I was never technically Jewish but Jewish enough for the camps. My sisters and I knew that we felt some hesitation saying we were Jewish around some people. It was just something we grew up knowing. What Candace is doing, what so many of her minions are doing, is in service of what I believe is evil and ugly. I don’t even think the recent massacre on Bondi Beach would pull any of them out of it, Left or Right.Standing up to Candace Owens and her mob of psychos and sociopaths is no easy task. Almost everyone is afraid of her because she brings out the knives, and she goes for the jugular. Her army of minions will do her bidding like the monkeys in the Wizard of Oz. She will destroy you if she can. Lucky for me, I’m so insignificant she wouldn’t bother. But Tim Pool is not insignificant. He has a large platform, and he put it all on the line to stand up and do the right thing. He let her have it in a well-deserved viral rant.He then went on Piers Morgan and explained it even further:Another brave voice is Matt Walsh, who gave, I think, the best and most passionate explanation of why these conspiracy theories are hurtful and damaging to not just Erika Kirk and Turning Point, but to the country, because this madness threatens to destroy the MAGA movement. No one has said it better.I would never have guessed that the two heroes to emerge from this mess would be Tim Pool and Matt Walsh, but here we are. These kinds of moments test all of us. That’s not to say people can’t criticize Israel, or that the United States should fight Israel’s wars or give them money. But this goes deeper, and making this MAGA’s biggest political issue is a losing proposition. Here is Carl Cannon of RealClearPolitics, along with Tom Bevan and Andrew Walworth, on the Megyn Kelly show. The “Woke Mind Virus” destroyed the Left, and the “Woke Right Mind Virus” threatens to destroy MAGA if it keeps heading in this direction, as Walter Kirn and Matt Taibbi discuss on America This Week. As I watched the video on Bondi Beach, I thought about Ana Kasparian saying on X, “I would never step foot in Israel.” I think about how Candace Owens will spin this as some false flag operation, and I worry for what’s coming next.Humans have been at war for over 90% of our existence. It is in our nature. We will go to war whether it’s on social media or in Gaza or Bondi Beach. To fight any war requires dehumanizing the enemy. Once you get there, where even a shot in the neck that kills a husband and a father, makes no difference to you whether you are on the Left or the Right, then you are beyond saving because you have lost your humanity, like the Good Germans in World War II, like the Good White People in the South after the Civil War, like the Puritans in Salem. The Left mocked these Trump supporters for showing empathy and solidarity to Trump after he was shot. They said it was a cult. They laughed at them. But I saw the decent people I’ve come to know over the past decade. That’s the kind of humanity we need. These past ten years have taught me that I will never go along with dehumanizing other people. I’d rather lose everything. The reason I’m here on Substack is the same reason I will lose subscribers for this post. I couldn’t do the other thing. I couldn’t shut up. If that makes me a “bitter old woman,” then so be it.Here is Frank Turek:We must be brave. We must be decent. We must hold the line. ///Tip Jar 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

Route 66 will turn 100 next year. It slithers along I-40 as a road that almost didn’t think it needed to be there. So much of roadside America vanished once they built the interstate, but you can still see signs of it here and there.While glancing over at Route 66, as I drove back from Ohio to California, I couldn’t help but see how America has become so divided between those who exist in the virtual new frontier of the internet and those who still live in the long-forgotten old America, an America Big Tech will soon leave behind. A week or so ago, while driving through Lakewood, Ohio, I saw two police officers helping a ranting and raving woman open her locked car door. They just stood there, with their heads down, doing their job as temperatures sank to 20 degrees and the snow flurries swirled around their heads. They wanted to be home with their families, but there they were, doing their jobs.Cleveland is a symbol of an America in steep decline. Emptied out factories, some areas so crippled by poverty, they look like third-world countries. The businesses have been abandoned, graffiti covers almost every block, and most people know to stay away from these neighborhoods.My daughter was commissioned to paint a mural on the side of an abandoned building near a vacantd lot in a lower-middle-class neighborhood in Cleveland to dress it up a little. It is cities like Cleveland that Trump was elected to help fix. And it is why bringing in millions from poverty-ridden countries only means these Americans are pushed to the back of the line. His methods might be crude and in some cases, reckless, but his intentions have always been the same. Not just to Make America Great Again, but to Make America Safe Again. The Democrats can’t keep America safe because they have become disconnected from real life and exist inside a self-perpetuating feedback loop that tells them only what they want to hear.They can’t keep us safe on the streets. They can’t keep businesses safe. They can’t keep us safe on the roads. They can’t keep families safe in cities ruled by gang warfare. They can’t keep women safe from violent attacks by random lunatics who should not even be roaming the streets at all. They can’t keep women and girls safe in locker rooms. They can’t keep children safe in classrooms where they insist upon rewriting America’s history and foisting an ideological cult upon the young so that they, too, grow up believing they can change their gender if the color of their skin makes them bad people. They can’t keep those strung out on fentanyl safe either, the hundreds of thousands of overdoses every year. If anything, the Democrats are fighting to protect the rights of the drug cartels, like they fight to protect the rights of illegal immigrants, and like they fight to protect the rights of criminals. The Democrats exist in a protective bubble. They never see or hear the stories that come in brief flashes: a woman was punched on the subway, a man was carjacked with his toddler watching, a store was robbed, and a family was shot at a fast-food restaurant. Protesters beat someone up for wearing a MAGA hat, and a woman is kicked out of a gym for accurately calling attention to a naked man in the locker room. They can’t really address any of these problems, so they shapeshift their message to see what works. Once they win, they can’t deliver. Trump is trying to deliver, and all they’re doing is trying to stop him. Democrats RisingTyler Robinson has never looked better. He was smiling as he strode into the courthouse on trial for the murder of Charlie Kirk. And why wouldn’t he be smiling? He knows he’s a hero on the Left, and he knows that a loud faction of the Right is defending him by blaming - wait for it - Israel.Amanda Seyfried has refused to apologize for saying Charlie Kirk was “hateful,” even if her words echoed Robinson’s, who said that Charlie deserved to be killed because he “spread too much hate.” Seyfried, who has a major movie coming out in a couple of weeks, will be celebrated for her comments and will likely earn an Oscar nomination for a different role in which she plays the presumed second coming of Christ in the Shaker movement. Oh, the irony. The Kirk assassination should have rocked America to its core, as previous political assassinations have. Maybe it would have shaken us all awake so that we could ask, How did we ever get here? But if the Trump near-assassination didn’t do it, if so many of the Real Housewives of the Democratic Party celebrated with cold glasses of Chardonnay and an Instagram post, nothing would.The Democrats have the wind at their backs with major wins in elections all over the country, including the first Democrat to win in Miami in almost 30 years. They believe they have the messaging right and are hitting on affordability, healthcare, and a living wage. So by the looks of it now, nothing can stop them from taking the House in 2026 and the presidency in 2028.They haven’t changed a thing. They haven’t tacked to the center. They haven’t confronted “gender affirming care.” In fact, they’re openly bragging about supporting it, at least if the performative meme factory of frontrunner Gavin, the Great White Male Hope for the Democrats in 2028, is any indication.Here is Ben Shapiro.To them, opposing “trans kids” is “hate.” And that is what got Charlie Kirk killed, except that his death was like lifting a fallen tree in the forest. All of the creepy crawlies came out. It isn’t just the Left. Some on the Right are making a play for the giant hole Charlie left behind. “I don’t care about the midterms,” says Candace Owens. “I hate the Republican Party,” says Tucker Carlson. Marjorie Taylor Greene is enjoying her fifteen minutes of fame by being a useful idiot for the Left, telling CNN and 60 Minutes everything they want to hear. MAGA is tearing itself apart. What separated Charlie Kirk from the parasitic vultures who have flown in to peck at the corpse is that he wasn’t in it just for clicks and views or for money. He was in it because he believed in it, and he was dedicated to helping defeat the Left to save this country, especially its youth. Without him, however, the Democrats can use their powerful media machine to manipulate the message, even to deflect from their own craziness long enough to fool the public into trusting them before they once again demand that all must comply or else. That’s our potential future if the Right can’t get it together to mount a proper offense.The problem for the Democrats is that the mass delusions they push onto the American public have almost no practical application in the real America, the one I’ve just seen as I’ve driven across the country.What I saw was an America that needs politicians not just for “affordability,” but to keep things running - buses, grocery stores, schools, and most especially, to keep them and their neighborhoods safe, something the Democrats can’t and won’t do. Trump telling working-class Americans to buy fewer dolls this Christmas is the kind of thing that can sink a presidency and a legacy. True, he isn’t running for re-election, but it’s the kind of thing that will stick. The truth matters less than the perception, and for now, the Democrats control the media and thus, the message. To defeat the Democrats, Trump and MAGA will have to find a way to tell Americans to buy as many dolls as they want because now they can afford them. Sticks and StonesThe greatest crime imaginable to the Good People of the Left is a bad word. I was there when we began curating our soft language. Make the words inoffensive, and the problems will be solved. There is no homelessness; there are the “unhoused” people. There are no drug addicts, but mentally ill people. We don’t give away our pets, we “rehome” them. It isn’t catastrophic, life-altering medications and surgeries that sterilize children and wreck their bodies for life. It’s “gender affirming care.” So, of course, Trump would be their biggest enemy. He got famous for saying anything, even if — especially if — it was shocking. The Left knows this and yet, they can’t help themselves. It’s “dangerous” because bad words are “dangerous” in a Woketopia ruled by soft language.They exist in an ecosystem that turns the story of a Cinnebon employee caught on tape using the N-word into the biggest scandal of the week. That convinces them that every terrible thing they’ve said and done for ten years has been justified. This country is infested, they believe, with “racists,” and they plan to do something about it once they take back power. How will they do that? By mandating thought and speech, just as they did last time. The internet gives them that kind of control to decide who gets to stay and who has to go. They won’t only use it, they’ll expand on it. But words are nothing compared to a bullet in the neck, a punch in the face, or a knife across the throat. But even if the victims are not white, crime remains an elusive concept for them because crime presents as “systemically racist police,” or mass incarceration, or something Trump and MAGA did. They especially ignore crimes by illegal immigrants. Cleveland and other cities like it have been ravaged by crime and drugs. Trump’s answer was to send in National Guard troops to protect ICE agents and clean up the cities. Then he began bombing the cartel boats bringing drugs to the United States. Everything he does is to keep America safe, and yet, to the Democrats, that’s criminal activity. So the citizens languish, overdose, and die, and the only person to ever do anything about it is the guy they still want to impeach, destroy, or even kill. Of Thee I SingI have just spent the past few weeks driving across this big, beautiful, complicated country, and I’ve never seen a greater disconnect between the traumas foisted upon Americans by the Democrats and the reality of life on the ground. In real life, we can still see each other as fellow Americans. The guy in the elevator can pet my dog and talk to me about how much he misses his dog, who died last year. There are no identifiers that pit us against each other, unless someone is wearing a MAGA hat or a No Kings t-shirt.But that is not true online. We are tracked and traced, our likes and our friends are used to put us in a specific category. An America ruled by the Left will take that one step further, all the way to 1984, where those allowed in are only those who love Big Brother.During the last Civil War, one of the greatest concerns was holding the Union together. It mattered that America survive. Here’s hoping we honor their sacrifice, find a better way forward for all of us, and yes, hold onto the dream. 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

The deal is done. Netflix will purchase Warner Bros. Discovery for $82 billion. Yet another corporate monopoly drives a nail through Hollywood’s coffin. It was bad enough when Disney bought Fox, Star Wars, and Marvel. Now, Netflix will be among the most powerful corporate monopolies, replacing what Hollywood used to be.America gave up on Hollywood because Hollywood gave up on America. The result is empty movie theaters all over the country—one bomb after another. Of course, Warner Bros. knew. You’d have to be an idiot not to know. Does anyone think Netflix is sweating the online memes accusing it of being too woke? No, they aren’t. They are making too much money to care. With streaming, there is no free market pressure, no quality control. You don’t have to motivate people to leave their homes. You don’t need big stars to drive box office, and best of all, you can ignore the silent majority that has tuned you out long ago. Hate the trans agenda being shoved down everyone’s throat? Too bad. Your boycotts are a drop in the bucket at Netflix. It’s the perfect solution to Hollywood’s problem. They can have everything they want — a virtue signaling paradise — and never have to worry about big budgets or low box office ever again. That’s the easy way out. The truth is harder to swallow. They destroyed themselves. They wrecked their brand and alienated their audience. Hollywood built a ship of failure when it split into two divergent paths around 2003, after the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings franchises brought in ungodly profits not just here but around the world. The branding was the key, the IPs. For years, they dominated the global box office and brought people to movie theaters across the country.Meanwhile, in the other Hollywood, in the “prestige” niche lane where the Oscars live, things began to get smaller, more isolated, more aligned with politics, especially under Barack Obama. His win influenced almost everything, as he loves to put out his top-ten lists every year and even has a deal with Netflix. These two Hollywoods existed side by side like the First Class section of the airplane vs. Coach, where they “let them eat Marvel.” You can see the rise and fall in one image, from Box Office Mojo:This year might mean that, for the first time since 2020, China will dominate the Worldwide box office rather than Hollywood, unless Jim Cameron can bring Avatar: Fire and Ash over the 2 billion mark.In 2019, Hollywood put out over 900 movies. Last year, just 624, and many of them bombed. So what happened? 2020 happened. The one-two punch of COVID and the Great Awokening brought Hollywood to its knees. The Oscar race this year is loaded with unwatchable movies that swirl around things almost no one outside the bubble of Hollywood cares about, identity mainly. Mothers’ caterwauling their oppression, like Die, My Love, If I had Legs I’d Kick You, and even One Battle After Another feature women who seem to hate their children. The people who run Hollywood are still mostly rich white men, but they must always genuflect, with women or people of color as shields to protect them from accusations of sexism or racism by the mob online. The rise of female directors who get these jobs for no other reason except that they’re female has transformed a once-great industry into a DEI film school. Every couple is interracial. Every movie must have significant actors of color. The GLAAD lobby demands representation everywhere. Why would anyone want to pay money to have them shove their ideology down our throats?Success doesn’t even matter to them. That they project “goodness” is all they care about now, their status inside utopia. The EndAs I drive across this country, I sometimes see a multiplex in a mall. It looks as deserted to me as the old drive-ins once did, and I can’t help but think this really is the end for movie theaters. They’ll go the way of the record store, limited to enthusiasts in the big cities. Everyone else will numbly scroll through Netflix for whatever they can find, but it will never have the same cultural impact as a great movie when we’re all under one roof, sharing a story.It’s yet more separation, more isolation, more internet, more social media, less of what we all need as a society.“The Future is Coming, and You Aren’t In It”After COVID ended for rational Americans, we all wondered whether people would return to the movies. The paranoid mask-wearing Liberals did not. Even Peggy Noonan noticed.In 2022, a miracle arrived in the form of Tom Cruise starring in Top Gun: Maverick. It made so much money that it wiped clean the argument that Hollywood was over and movie theaters were dying. Although it was nominated for Best Picture, it lost to the woke screed, Everything Everywhere All At Once. That was a sign that Hollywood was not ready for the iceberg right ahead.The following year showed promise, with “Barbenheimer,” “Oppenheimer,” and “Barbie” becoming cultural sensations on TikTok. The Oscars did the right thing and gave their awards to Oppenheimer. Though things seem to be moving in the right direction, it’s too little, too late. Audiences don’t trust Hollywood anymore, and I can’t blame them. Of all the Warner Bros. movies that were successful this year, the Oscar will likely go to the anti-ICE, pro-ANTIFA, anti-Trump rallying cry, One Battle After Another. No film in recent memory has better captured the singular worldview of the progressive Left.As Curtis Yarvin wrote for The Spectator:Fundamentally, One Battle is a religious film. It is entirely set in the fantasy landscape of the great American religion, progressivism, the 20th-century evolution of our ancient Puritan tradition. If you are a true believer, imagine watching Battlefield Earth without being a Scientologist. For non-progressives, One Battle may be necessary viewing. It displays the interior landscape of the narcissistic narrative of our world’s dominant cult of power. We seldom get to strap a GoPro to the inside of a lib’s forehead. And he continues:So this film is out there – recruiting damaged people by presenting them as romantic heroes in a propaganda fantasy. Few will kill. But many will clap. When bad movies succeed, as One Battle will, they diagnose something bad in the audiences they entertain. Corrupt art is the pathognomonic mark of a corrupt society. Shitty people will watch this shitty film, and love it. Shitty journalists have already given it a standing ovation – the politics makes them hard, like Lockjaw. This evil is at the very heart of our culture.As Leonard Cohen noted: “I have seen the future, brother. It is murder.” Murder is as old as Cain. The anonymous internet is young. Nobody asked for the combination. But they’ll get it.So, of course, the critics have gone nuts for it. It IS religious for them. It’s already won many awards and is on track to win Best Picture. Trust me, Hollywood has no desire to save itself. One Battle After Another cost upwards of $140 million and only made $70 million in the US, with the bulk of its profits made overseas on Leonardo DiCaprio’s name, which is why it’s assumed he demanded his usual fee of $20 million. Old Hollywood understood that you don’t reward failure with film awards. New Hollywood cares less about the money and more about the message. The public used to matter because the box office did. No wonder WB is selling out after watching one bomb after another this past year. Why wait for bankruptcy? Why not cash out now on a high note?This is the kind of thing Hollywood pumps out now:And therein lies the problem. They forgot it wasn’t about them. They believed their own publicity. They fell in love with their own image, like Narcissus. They began to believe they were important. We loved movies and celebrities for what they gave us, not for who they are. We don’t care. We don’t need them to fix us. Or teach us. Or lecture us. Or scold us. We just need them to entertain us. Well, now the billionaires have arrived to prove to them how little they matter when it comes to the bottom line. And if you think that’s bad, wait until the AI tsunami wipes out half the industry. The audience was always their best hope for survival. As long as we showed up, Hollywood and its stars had power. Now that audiences have vanished, well, the ship is made of iron, and it will sink.Who knows, maybe Congress or Trump can stop the merger. That still won’t fix the fundamental problem of what Hollywood has become and why the public turned away. On the upside, the giant hole Hollywood leaves behind, like the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, might open up movie theaters to a new breed of filmmaker. Maybe they can make movies Hollywood or Netflix never would - trashy comedies, cheap horror, romantic comedies, Dirty Harry movies. Who knows, maybe we can Make Hollywood Great Again. What better way to rebuild a counterculture?Altamont, Illinois, 8:42AM. 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

They might look like ordinary women as they Instacart from Bristol Farms or strengthen their core at morning pilates. You might be standing behind them in line at Starbucks as they order their half-cream, half-caff, no whip, no foam, triple-pump chai latte with oat milk. They seem to be everywhere once you know how to recognize them. They’re the target demographic for Audible’s Bestsellers list. They account for the bulk of spending on sites like Amazon and Skims. Ever wonder how it is that Goop still stays in business? They live in the Hamptons, Brentwood, or Malibu. They’re married to talk show hosts like Jimmy Kimmel. Or they’re married to themselves. They’re having Thanksgiving in a gated community in Montecito. They’re cloning duplicates who parrot the talking points of the coven like abortion is healthcare and no human is illegal, and trans women are women. They’ve taught them to be strident, demanding, and intolerant with standards too high for any man, job, or country to meet. Their world before was idyllic - a utopia that kept them at the top because they ordered this new world in such a way that nothing and no one threatened their power. The future is female. It’s time for women to rule. White Dudes for Harris. They call it the Great Feminization, but really, it’s a coven of witches.Just before Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Jezebel and Etsy cast a dark spell on Charlie. Why? Because they couldn’t shut him up. In their world, they decide what people can and can’t say, think, buy, or do. They’ve taken down the “story,” but it still exists on the Wayback Machine:These days, witches cater to more than just personal grudges. And it’s not uncommon for them to channel their energy toward thwarting Republicans (there’s even a subreddit devoted to casting nightly hexes on Trump). Are you interested in punishing Kirk for the years of regressive rhetoric he’s shouted at America’s youth and anyone within earshot? Here at Jezebel, we’re about to find out if there’s a spell for that.And:After placing my first spell, “MAKE EVERYONE HATE HIM,” I was left with more questions than answers. How long would it take to kick in? Should I have splurged for a pricier spell to make it work faster? Shortly after, the witch messaged me trying to upsell me a $50 “spell booster.” When I asked what it did, she explained it would “amplify the energetic support” of the main spell, or else I could let it unfold “in its natural timing.” I decided to trust the witch’s will.And her closing paragraph:Sunday, August 24, passed. Nothing. Monday, still nothing. Tuesday rolled around, and I began to wonder if I’d been scammed. But then I reminded myself: this is witchcraft, not Amazon. The forces operate on their own schedule.Megyn Kelly reported exclusively on how this affected Erika Kirk after Charlie was assassinated, leaving behind two small children and a widespread movement that touched millions:What bothers them so much about Erika Kirk, other than that she is brave, kind, beautiful, and true, is what I once believed about the Christian Right. I’d never be able to live like that, I always thought. Then I saw what happened to the Left, to all of us, without religion. Now, we are a movement that believes it’s okay to sterilize children and mutilate their bodies without their consent. We treat abortion like it’s an act of empowerment.Erika Kirk put her faith in God and in her husband. These are mortal sins to the Wicked Witches of the Left. Thou shalt have no God before ourselves. We are the power because we are empowered. But unfortunately, it has resulted in a movement ruled by and defined by evil and hatred. Jennifer Welch, a prominent Wicked Witch of the Left who podcasts alongside a Renfield-like puppet whose name no one knows but who nods along numbly as Welch spits out her invective - “I call him Canks,” she says about Trump after her “Cankles McTaco Tits” went viral. These are the same people who pearl clutch over Trump calling a reporter “Piggy.” Bill Madden and Marco Foster are two of the feminized men dominated by the witches. They do nothing but post the ugliest things all day long on social media. They have found their perfect voice now in Jennifer Welch.Here is Walter Kirn and Matt Taibbi on Jennifer Welch:After Charlie Kirk was assassinated, the witches and their compliant male counterparts decided it was more than justified to celebrate his death, to splash around in his blood like the Manson family after they hit the home of Sharon Tate. It didn’t matter to them even a little bit, just as the near-assassination of Trump didn’t matter. Even death didn’t satiate the beast. Charlie’s brutal assassination wasn’t enough. They wanted — NEEDED — more. And so the witches convened once again, with Joy Reid, Jennifer Welch, and her sidekick, whose name no one will ever know or remember, to word-vomit about their perceived enemies. Megyn Kelly was having none of it:Even the Real Clear Politics gang had words (full video here):And here is Erika’s response, the one Tom Bevan references:If the spell on Charlie Kirk was to “make everyone hate him,” then it failed. If it was to shut him up, it also failed. His message will carry on. He is more beloved today than he ever was in life. It turns out that love is harder to kill than even people. Love lives on in the hearts of all of us. It spreads. It unites us. It redeems us. Love was what hundreds of thousands expressed in the wake of Charlie’s death and even now. Charlie’s memory lives on in clips of his tiny daughter running into his arms. In how he told the story of meeting Erika:And how he explained Newton’s laws to his baby.Or money matters:They believe those who do not agree with them must be gotten rid of, and nothing else will satisfy. They will use emotional blackmail, uniform caterwauling, non-stop whining and complaining, and all of the other ways women have learned over the millennia to drive society to the brink of madness, and none of it will work.Unfortunately for the Wicked Witches of the Left, their power is about as useful as their policies and their candidates. Limp, dull, flaccid.Women like I used to be and witches like they are tend to our needs and our fragility. For years, we treated ourselves to therapy, yoga, meditation, Oprah, de-aging, antidepressants, and keto.Eventually, when we fixed ourselves and attempted to raise our perfect children, we overprotected them. In the wake of Columbine and 911, everywhere we looked, we saw danger. We thought every man was a potential child molester. We worried about school shootings, we worried about microplastics and pollution. We thought we could protect our kids to raise them with high self-esteem, but we forgot about strength and resiliency.We abandoned that in ourselves, and we never taught it to our children.What I’ve learned coming out of this era is that you can’t control the world. Even if, as women, as mothers, as wives, as business owners, we’d like to have complete control over everything because we believe we could create a perfect world, I eventually realized you can’t. It’s not possible. Trump came along because we needed to be reminded of what it is to survive things, events, tragedies, wars, and words. The answer is not to control everything and everyone. The answer is to be strong and just to survive.And that’s why these women are now witches, huddled over their cauldron, chanting out that their spells will never succeed and never hold power. Because they can’t survive. If they can’t survive words, and they can’t survive Trump, and they can’t survive open debate and Charlie Kirk, then they most certainly can’t be in charge of this country. All anyone had to do was listen to Charlie and hear what he had to say. If you disagreed, debate him. Yet, you can hear in their messaging who they thought he was, and this was the worst they could say about him, from Jezebel:A cornerstone of Kirk’s nightmare ideology is his insistence that, since gaining more independence, Western women are more miserable than ever. He tells auditoriums full of young women that our freedom is a flaw, not an achievement. He’s obsessed with declining birth rates and idealizes the 1950s, when women’s only “job” was tending to children and husbands. If we all abandoned our careers and returned to motherhood, we’d be happier, according to Kirk. Indeed, he fails to realize that I would be happiest if he would just shut up.She could not offer up a stronger argument to the contrary because look at her. She is proof that he was right. She’s miserable. Jennifer Welch is miserable. All of the witches are miserable. I was miserable too. I know what it is to live the feminist lie, and I know what it is to look back at my life with regret. How can they sell that to young women? The Jezebel writer consoled herself with a petition that was launched on the Utah campus that would become the site of Charlie’s murder. The petition was launched on Friday, August 22, and had already been signed over 3,800 times. Could this be the “MAKE EVERYONE HATE HIM” at work?”But the petition grew to 6,829, all of them in agreement that the university should prevent Charlie from speaking:Sign this petition to send a clear message that we stand united for a university that upholds the tenets of inclusivity, respect, and enlightenment. Let us work together to ensure that Utah State University remains a campus where all students feel safe, valued, and respected.Yeah, shutting him up by any means necessary sure sounds like “inclusivity, respect, and enlightenment” to me. Sounds more like the very definition of fascism, “conform or else.”These wicked witches and so much of the Left’s once-mighty empire invented a version of Charlie Kirk that never existed and transformed him into a monster of their own making. They wanted to send a message to anyone who might think about disagreeing with them, on a college campus, no less. What are they teaching these kids? Not free speech or open debate.They invent monsters, chase those monsters, and then act shocked when loser nobodies pick up a gun and become their heroes. No, they aren’t shocked. They are grateful. They should heed the wise words of Friedrich Nietzsche:Welcome to the abyss, Wicked Witches of the Left.//Tip JarMusic… 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