Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone

I was one of those people who believed Rachel Maddow. I sat glued to her show every night. I even patrolled Trump’s entire Twitter feed to find the exact moment when he was “turned” by the Russians.

I saw it all play out in my head. The hapless Trump in Moscow, the beauty pageant, the room with a hidden camera, the prostitutes, the embarrassing sex acts all designed as “kompromat,” a word middle-aged white women like me suddenly threw around like we were Valerie Plame.

Rachel Maddow sounded so sincere, so intelligent, so concerned for the welfare of the country. She was an integral part of the Obama coalition in the early days. We couldn’t separate them. They stood for the America we helped build and the one Trump threatened.

I read every book on Putin I could find. I had long conversations with my friends about the danger of having a Russian asset in the White House. I believed Adam Schiff, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, and, yes, Rachel Maddow.

Yet, no one stopped to think what all of that whipped-up hysteria, that fear, that rage would do to people who might think voting isn’t enough to save the country. More would have to be done. What if it all landed in the lizard brain of a Gen-X Travis Bickle, who was prepared to lay down his life to save Ukraine?

The media will attempt to paint alleged Trump assassin Ryan Routh as a madman. They might even say he was a Trump supporter or his ideology was unknown. But that isn’t exactly true.

Kamala Harris believes she “won” the debate. It’s hard to argue with that conclusion. But there were unintended consequences her team did not factor in. And that is sympathy for Trump, or as they would tell it on the Left, “sympathy for the Devil.”

Please to meet you. Hope you guessed my name.

I, too, thought Kamala Harris had won the debate. By the end, I was so demoralized, so sad, and so full of despair that I just went to bed and hoped it would be gone by morning.

I knew it wasn’t just a debate. It’s much bigger than that. It’s a TIME magazine cover. It’s Frank Luntz and the Spectator declaring the debate will cost Trump the election. It’s a thousand points of light on Twitter, a once-great coalition undone by ugliness for ten long years.

It’s a Stephen Colbert monologue. It’s a Taylor Swift endorsement. It’s the center of Bill Maher’s entire universe on Friday night. It will be Saturday Night Live. It’s too big. Too insurmountable. It’s everything, everywhere, all at once.

Or is it?

When I woke up, scrolled through TikTok, and read the post-debate polls, I found headline after headline declaring voters' choice for president unmoved. It made no difference whatsoever, and, if anything, sympathy tipped in Trump’s direction, and Harris suddenly became as unlikable or “likable enough” as Hillary Clinton.

Why?

Because the Trump haters have destroyed themselves and any good thing they ever stood for trying to destroy him, and at some point, the worm turned.

They are so close to what they believe is the total destruction of Trump they can taste it. But I watched Trump somehow survive the debate unscathed. Something about his ability to not attack Harris adequately worked in his favor. Call it the Charlie Brown effect.

Harris made the fundamental mistake of leaving her JOY™ and unity hats at the door and putting on her prosecutor’s hat. Had she shown up as a gracious, respectful, serious person ready to answer serious questions, she might have won over some voters. That wasn’t what happened. She showed up as a hybrid between Hillary Clinton and the ladies of The View.

We have a brighter future ahead, she declared. But those words ring hollow since she’s been in power for almost four years. How many more false promises can the Democrats make at the people’s expense? They promised that they were the better side, the optimistic side, the unity side, the ADULTS in the room.

Not only have they failed — in Afghanistan, at the border, at our grocery stores, in our schools, and on our streets — but they have lurched toward corruption unseen and unprecedented in this country’s history, up to and including hiding a cognitively impaired president — who is still in office, by the way — and pulling a fast one on us that Kamala Harris is suddenly something new.

I have just discovered that my very long interview with the great Paul Finn of The Generation Report is finally up on YouTube. He runs a really great channel (CLICK HERE) examining the Fourth Turning. I recommend watching all of his videos. If you are interested in our interview, here it is.

He takes care to edit in images along with the audio so it’s worth a watch, though I am including an MP3 for the podcast feed.

Paul’s work is exceptional, and it’s always bothered me that he doesn’t have a larger following on YouTube. He should. I wish more people would watch his videos.

Hope you enjoy it.

There is nothing more loathsome to the average upper-crust liberal intellectual than an American holding Donald Trump’s book in one arm and the Bible in the other. At least, that’s what the stock image on Matt Bai’s column in the Washington Post tells us.

Matt Bai — political columnist and one-time screenwriter for a DOA film about Gary Hart called The Front Runner — is going to give the Left all the justification it needs to continue their ongoing hate campaign against ordinary Americans.

He writes:

But now? After the violent sacking of the Capitol? After Trump’s promise to behave like a dictator (well, okay, I guess if it’s only for a day)? After eight years of bigotry and baseness and flat-out lies?

To say that Trump’s voters aren’t aware of these things, or don’t fully comprehend them, or are firmly in the grip of misinformation, is to say that they’re simply fools. And I’ve met way too many rural Americans to believe that. If they’re ignorant, then their ignorance, at this point, is willful.

It’s a rebuttal to a column by Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times pleading with the Left to find their humanity when it comes to Trump and MAGA.

It isn’t enough that Kristof writes:

By all means denounce Trump, but don’t stereotype and belittle the nearly half of Americans who have sided with him.

We can’t separate them, argues Bai. If they support Trump then they are the named enemy. They are not worthy of our empathy, at least not until — he hopes — Kamala Harris wins the presidency. Then, they might thaw out and treat them like they belong in the country they love. Don’t bet on it. Bai writes:

These voters don’t support Trump because they labor under some illusion that he’s going to rescue their communities — not anymore. They support him because he’s willing to blow up the country if it means teaching insufferable intellectuals a lesson, and so are they. It’s the same vengeful impulse that leads to autocracy in unequal societies all over the world. It is, at its core, unpatriotic, no matter how many flags you fly, or how many ways you try to rationalize it.

Are you starting to see why The Front Runner flopped?

The Frontrunner is a rescue operation for Gary Hart’s legacy. It was the mean old media, you see, a media that has suddenly grown a conscience because now they don’t do their jobs of chasing stories lest they weaken a weak candidate like Gary Hart or Kamala Harris. Instead, they spread propaganda on why America should hate and fear Trump and his supporters lest they be accused of “normalizing” them.

The Front Runner was bad for the same reason The Washington Post and the New York Times are unreadable: their bias suffocates any practical purpose they might have otherwise had. It’s like spending time with the kid who sits in the front of the class, always raising his hand with the right answer. After a while, you overdose on the sanctimony.

Harris has been tripping the light fantastic on the campaign trail only showing the side her campaign wants people to see. It reminds me of the many years I’ve spent covering the Oscars. The campaigns for Best Actress always follow the same pattern. They get a stylist. They make selective appearances. They show up on the rope line. They shake hands. They look great. The one thing they don’t do is interviews.

Hollywood has its greasy fingerprints all over the Harris campaign. We know that. They see it as their mission to stop Trump. So they’ve taken things into their own hands. It seems like Harris has hired awards consultants rather than politicos.

They have her projecting mostly joy and positivity. Harris has done an excellent job playing the role they’ve given her, somewhere between the blessed virgin and Eva Peron.

But they’re flirting with disaster. That’s not the real Kamala Harris. They’re hiding her from the press because they know that.

They’re gambling on Trump, showing up as obnoxious, abusive, and belligerent. Harris will do everything she can to poke and prod him into a reaction. She will call him too old. She will say we need change. She will call him a racist. She will call him a criminal.

America is being love-bombed by the Kamala Harris campaign. It’s been confusing and disorienting, but so many are going along with it because how can they not? Being love-bombed is hard to resist.

Yes, love-bombed. That is what all of this looks like. And as any dimestore trauma therapist will tell you, those who are the most insecure are the ones who must love-bomb to erase any doubt or critical thinking.

They know Kamala Harris is one bad interview away from losing this election. They know she’s still the same Kamala that turned off so much of the American public. They know that sooner or later, she will get triggered, and that temper will come out. They know they have nothing else but this big lie they’re all going along with.

None of the past four years will mean anything, not amid a storm of love-bombing. Harris can say anything, be anything, pretend anything, and she will get nothing but eyes in the shape of hearts looking back at her.

Yes, much of it is “mass formation psychosis,” coined by Mattias Desmet, as we slouch toward a technocratic totalitarian state.

During 2020, while we were all on lockdown, those online became part of a mass formation. Once they came together as one group that would go along with no masks, then masks, then mostly peaceful protests, then systemic racism, then vaccines, then lockdowns, then “cancel culture,” and finally, a weaponized DOJ against Trump - they were both terrorized and compliant by the end of it.

They had a volunteer army of fanatics who would punish them publicly if they said the wrong thing or stepped out of line. That kind of fear does strange things to a community, and it hasn’t gone away.

The formation is so united and so full of hatred and rage that our government could erect concentration camps or gulags and start throwing Trump and MAGA away, and all of them would celebrate. Bette Midler, Barbra Streisand, Rob Reiner, and Stephen King would cheer.

Congratulations to all of you who supported the Democrats. You won. You should be very proud of yourselves. You won in your singular support of Joe Biden for the presidency.

You won in how you attacked any primary candidate who might challenge him, you know, the one guy who told the truth about Biden’s cognitive decline? Dean Phillips? What a terrible person he was for saying the Emperor had no clothes.

You did it! You won the primary for Joe Biden. You had an entire press corp - and an army of supporters - to deflect from accusations that there was anything wrong with him. Those are deep fakes, they proclaimed. When any outlet would write a column that Joe Biden should step down or that he was not fit to hold power anymore, off with their heads! You would threaten to cancel your subscription and bully those reporters on Twitter.

But you did it!

The new Kamala Harris is a grand illusion. It looks more like an Oscar campaign for Best Actress than an election for President of the United States. But that happens when your political party is in bed with Hollywood. They have all the best writers and executives in the business to sell a more palatable version to the people.

The real Kamala Harris has proven to be not quite ready for prime time, or as she might see it, America is not quite ready for her.

We’re getting the kinder, gentler Kamala instead of the firebrand she’s been throughout her career. We’re getting the JOY™ campaign to trick us all into feeling good in a time of great anxiety and malaise.

We have a media selling this falsehood to the public every day, doing the work of the Harris campaign by depicting the Trump side as “dark.”

She can’t hide herself for much longer. Sooner or later, the firebrand will have to emerge. Harris probably hates how they keep telling her to talk less nasally, smile more, and soften herself for the cameras. The more they try to control her, the more likely she is to rebel against it - you know, maybe a little like Sarah Palin?

The real Harris is someone who had no problem calling Joe Biden a racist in an emotional tirade on the debate stage, then turning around and cackling about it as “just a debate.” She is that competitive. But hey, no one gets into politics to lose. To quote Jack Nicholson in Terms of Endearment, “everybody uses everything they have.”

Some might have been shocked when Harris casually snatched Trump’s big platform of No Tax on Tips. I certainly was. How could she do it so brazenly and without shame? That is the real Kamala Harris. And it’s only the beginning.

How do you solve a problem like Kamala Harris? If you criticize or attack her, you’ll be seen as a “racist” by the powerful people on the Left, which fuels their momentum and reminds them of their collective sense of purpose.

Why is she ahead in the polls now? Because it feels good to vote for her, it’s as simple as that. It’s time for a woman, they proclaim, especially a woman of color.

Kamala Harris has now made history four times as the first woman and first woman of color District Attorney, Attorney General, Senator, and Vice President. She only has one more win for a clean sweep, President of the United States.

They tried so many different ways to recapture the magic of the 2008 Obama coalition only to realize it was there the whole time. All they needed was the “female Obama.” Everything else fell into place.

Their Obama/Trump origin story of the angry white man who tried to destroy the angelic Black man is all coming back in a Proustian rush. Let’s finish the job, they all think. Let’s finally vanquish the bad orange racist man forever with our warrior, Queen Kamala.

So what do you do? How to beat her? For one thing, you don’t allow her to define your campaign. MAGA is not the party of darkness. MAGA is the party of joy. The Democrats have given us one long dark winter since Biden took office. They can’t just suddenly pretend that Harris wasn’t part of that.

Their propaganda machine is astonishing:

Imagine how the Bidens must be feeling right about now. Are they feeling any joy™? Do they like it that George Clooney and Reid Hoffman pushed him out and selected Kamala Harris? Do you think they’re feeling joy™, watching the mania play out with happy smiles, laughter, and awkward dancing from Tim Walz? Yay we got rid of Joe, aren’t we happy?

I want Trump to win not just because of the lawfare that sets a dangerous precedent going forward, especially with Harris as president. But also because I worry that the nation’s schoolchildren will be indoctrinated into the madness of the Left starting as early as preschool. Just imagine the kinds of Executive Orders Harris will sign.

But beating them is not going to be easy. We now see they will do anything, say anything, tell any lie, become anybody, corrupt the system any way they want just to win.

The Trump campaign has their work cut out for them.

Start with this:

They are not the party of JOY™

What Trump did with “fake news,” he can do with the word, “Joy™” Take it back.

Joy™, per the Harris/Walz campaign, translates to: “Let them eat cake.”

Let them eat fentanylLet them eat high crimeLet them eat inflationLet them eat the flood of illegal immigrantsLet them eat high gas prices

Examples:

Attacking Her Directly Will Backfire

The rules on the Left are different from the rules on the right, as we learned from this poll that showed white Liberals dumb down their speech when talking to minorities, and Conservatives don’t.

The press won’t be hard on her for that same reason. They’re deathly afraid of being called racists. They could lose their jobs for that. Independents might feel the same way, protective of her and hostile toward Trump and Vance.

Let the Trump/Vance team now be the party of hope and change, because for millions of Americans, that is exactly what it is.

Barack Obama owns “hope and change,” but the only change they meant was making history. The change that’s needed now is about class, not race. But using these words will put the Harris side on defense and will probably make them angry, making it harder to take the high road.

How to Campaign against Kamala Harris

The first thing you need to know about campaigning against Harris is that she did not come to play. She has been preparing for this moment nearly all of her life.

Harris is no amateur when it comes to winning elections. There is nothing she does better than what she is doing right now: making history by winning an election against a white man.

She already believes this is her ultimate battle against the “evil racists” who stormed the Capitol. Someone on Twitter made a video intercutting her January 6th speech with the riots and the violence in the Summer of 2020. But listen carefully to what she says.

The Good White Liberals see themselves as saviors, so even just mentioning the riots in 2020 is strictly verboten, but everyone should remember how they hid much of that from us and shamed us for caring about the people whose lives and businesses were destroyed.

Harris has been making history all of her life with only wins and no losses, but she also prepared a statement, a quote from her mother, when asked about it.

She said the same thing on the Oprah Show where they called her the “first African-American female District Attorney.”

Her star continued to rise when she was profiled on Lifetime right around that same time:

That led to her being name-checked in the New York Times even before Barack Obama won in 2008.

Harris aligned with Obama early, and their relationship has been essential, not just because she had the golden light of The King upon her, which elevated her profile—she was even called the “female Obama”—but because he likely “saved” her from bombing out in the primary and was likely the main reason she was selected as the candidate (don’t buy the lie that he did not endorse her).

She began her run for Attorney General right after Obama won in 2008.

On her YouTube page is a practice speech from 2008, “If I were president.” She was crafting an early message that America has problems and you don’t have to love your country unconditionally.

Eight years later, she gave more or less the same speech with some changes.

The thing is, if you are running for president you do have to love your country unconditionally because that’s your job. Trump should call her out on that.

Harris first made history when she became the first woman of color in the DA’s office in San Francisco, where she ran what Politico called a “Ruthless” campaign,” and sent out campaign ads to remind voters of the all-male, all-white history:

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A few days ago, a reporter from one of the trades asked me for an interview. I knew there could only be one reason she would want to interview me, and it wasn’t to talk about how I ran a website for 25 years on the Oscar race.

It wouldn’t be that I raised a baby as a single mother and launched my site out of a guest house in Van Nuys, California, or that I’d worked as a sports photographer, a fake horoscope writer, a film reviewer, a janitor, and a teacher’s aide to raise my daughter without sending her to daycare and somehow built a successful business anyway.

No. This had to be about my politics and why they changed.

How did a Barack Obama devotee, an I’m With Her Hillary Clinton supporter, and a Joe Biden faithful from way back find my way into not only voting for Trump but actively trying to help the Republicans defeat the Democrats?

Now that’s a story, “How Did an Oscar Blogger become a far-right radical?”

The pitch wasn’t exactly about that. It was more about how I plan to navigate being a dissident heretic while also running a successful business in an industry that is now the same organism as the government.

I’ve been asked this question many times by people on the Right and have given many interviews to explain “what happened to me.” But this is the first time anyone on the Left, or inside the bubble of the Left, asked me to explain it.

And that’s because one, two, three, all eyes are on me. I did a boo-boo on Twitter that now has me in the crosshairs at long last. It was one thing when I stood up for JK Rowling or Ansel Elgort or when I pushed back on the hysteria that Green Book was “racist.” When Trump is involved, it’s bigger than just your average internet pile-on. This time it could mean the end of whatever it is I’ve built over at AwardsDaily.com.

The story will be about how my politics changed, or more specifically, why I felt like I could get away with a satirical tweet that said “White Power” while mocking the “White Dudes for Harris.”

Is it bad to mock white people? I thought they were fair game. Or is just saying those words bad? Some people decided that it meant something beyond that. I don’t check my mentions anymore, so I had no idea this wave of hysteria was even occurring. But then a friend wrote to “ask me about it.”

It was as though I was secretly joining the white power movement on Twitter and was signaling to all of my friends in the KKK that, look, it’s cool to be white people celebrating our whiteness again! Of course, it’s not. It’s just that they have a habit on the left of memory-holing their insanity and moving the goalposts. We’re all supposed to keep up.

Four years ago, there could have been no “white dudes for Biden” or “white dudes for Barack Obama.” It would be called any number of things, from white saviorism (which this most surely was) and even borderline racism. But not in 2024! Anything goes because they say so.

I could have deleted the tweet and apologized profusely. But I know the game, brother. They once called me a “white supremacist” for saying it wasn’t only white people who committed hate crimes (fact check true). But in my world, no matter how crazy or blatant the hypocrisy gets, you should never say a word about it.

Apologize and beg for forgiveness. Maybe they’ll give you a break. No, they won’t. They will screenshot the tweet and send it around and around. By the end of this madness, it will land in the lap of a reporter who wonders, “What happened to her?”

How did Orwell know enough to write Children's Spies in 1984? How did he know the young would be so susceptible to fanaticism? Because, of course, he knew. That’s why capturing the youth is so important to cults and utopias and why they separate the kids from the parents, as the Democrats are trying to do now.

It’s my own fault. I could have shut up, kept my head down, and complied with all of the demands—think they do, write like they do, believe what they believe, and always apologize for “mistakes made.” I could have done that. But then I think about Winston Smith and 1984. How did Orwell know?

He knew that utopias must become totalitarian dystopias because how else to maintain the purity and the vision? We’re living everything from that book, even a government that has now been weaponized to punish thought crimes.

They have condemned and convicted Trump and his supporters as “racists,” which means anything can be done to them, and no one will say a thing. Steve Bannon is in prison for the crucial months leading up to the election. The last time someone was in jail for that crime was Ring Lardner of the Hollywood Ten.

If Orwell wanted to write a book that would call out to the future to warn us that this isn’t what we want for our country, much less our culture, then loudmouths like Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and me will have to take the hit because no one else will.

Winston Smith is an obedient member of Oceana whose thoughts take him to dangerous places. Big Brother doesn’t like him remembering great books or language deemed useless. Even love is strictly forbidden. That’s how Winston finds himself being forced to admit 2+2=5.

I still feel like a liberal at heart. I still care about climate change. I still believe we should all have access to good healthcare, no matter how rich we are. So many of the issues that used to be standard for Democrats have been warped and distorted beyond the point of recognition.