Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone

In 1984, George Orwell wrote, “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.” The New York Times is no longer free to say what is true. They are compelled to lie either by their newfound fundamentalism, fear of their readers and subscribers, or pressure from the strident activists who police thought and speech in our New Woke Order. We can’t let t...

The novel for the week was Brave New World. Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn were preparing to lead us through it. It was more disturbing and more timely than 1984, another novel in the outsider book club that many of us had become part of over the last few years with two of the greatest teachers alive. How lucky we were, I always thought, every time they dug into a new book. Culture has dramatically c...

After Memegate went viral on Friday, the usual battle in our virtual Civil War raged on. I had this exchange on X and was answered by Conor Friedersdorf: To Trump’s enemies, this was yet another crisis not to go to waste. It was the perfect way to reel back some of those Nicki Minaj supporters who might be thinking about flipping to Trump. The midterms are coming up, and they’re desperately worrie...

In this episode, I talk to my friend Andy Schaalman, who has Substack, Fourth Turning Chronicles but whose work can be found mostly on his YouTube page, where all of his great videos are. We talked for almost three hours, so it’s a real Joe Rogan-type deal. Both of us have been interested in the Fourth Turning for many years. He is a millennial, and I am Gen-X. We get pretty deep into it, so it pr...

Dear Hillary, Imagine my shock when I saw you wrote an op-ed in The Atlantic. Before I even read a line, I knew what the point of the article would be because I know you. You write: This crisis also reveals a deeper moral rot at the heart of Trump’s MAGA movement. Whatever you think about immigration policy, how can a person of conscience justify the lack of compassion and empathy for the victims...

Part One | Part Two | Part Three “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”― Sun Tzu, The Art of War Because Donald Trump understands this fundamental rule of The Art of War,...

Dear Mr. Baker, I am but one in a sea of many Americans viewed as a threat to the established order. I was once a part of that order. I helped build it. It would turn out I couldn’t survive because I couldn’t follow the rules of thought and speech that are mandated by everyone on the Left, especially those at the New York Times. It’s personal, you see. I used to believe that if all I did was read...

Part One | Part Two January 6th was terrifying for many Americans. After all, they saw it on television. But what did they really see? Did they know what actually unfolded that day? Did they even ask? Trump is the Jan. 6 President, proclaims the New York Times’ Editorial Board. And the text: What I learned, living through these events as a former Democrat, is that the New York Times Editorial Boar...

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,...

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....

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 vir...

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...

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. T...

I remember when Generation Woke decided to take Thanksgiving. The narrative fit right into the oppressed/oppressor mindset. America was a rotten, fetid empire of colonizers who marauded through the pristine countryside and then forced the Native Americans to eat with them for Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving was now “problematic.” Celebrating it, even more so. High-status influencers who made a great li...

When I look around at the crumbling empire I helped build, I wonder how it all went so wrong. How did so many people lose their minds, the legacy media lose its objectivity, and so many so-called “educated” people lose their grip on reality? What is Trump Derangement Syndrome anyway? I think, as someone who lived it and has been online for the last 30 years, that the people with all of the power c...

For a brief moment in time, the Democrats were humiliated in defeat. November of 2024 was the body blow necessary to end the war on Trump. They lost. Trump won, and that was that. They never absorbed that loss, however, except in the way that it made them meaner, angrier, and more willing to blow through norms and abandon what remained of their humanity to chase victory by any means necessary. Tha...

[I meant to get this out before Halloween, but life got in the way — previous Janet stories — Part One | Part Two ] Janet left Two Moons Yoga Studio, where a gaggle of concerned American citizens — the true patriots — held an emergency “No Kings, Cancel Halloween” meeting to save democracy. The attendees were Janet’s age. They were her neighbors, but she didn’t know most of them. They were all dir...

When the hilarious clips of Katie Porter losing her temper went viral, I thought What a great skit that would make on Saturday Night Live. Would they dare? The answer came the following Saturday. Of course not. Why not? Because on the Left, they protect their own. The alignment of culture, media, and the Democrats has been a deadly one for them in all ways. It has caused a mass exodus of people li...

I imagine right about now, the group chats between Hillary Clinton, Neera Tanden, and Huma Abedin are lit. Democratic Socialism is at the gates. Once upon a time, that was their worst nightmare. Now, it’s their inevitable reality. If Andrew Cuomo does somehow pull off a miraculous last-minute one-in-a-million win in New York, he will do so without any help from the establishment Democrats. But eve...

Somehow, I missed this story that appeared in Compact Magazine by Helen Andrews, The Great Feminization .” In it, she writes: Cancel culture is simply what women do whenever there are enough of them in a given organization or field. That is the Great Feminization thesis, which the same author later elaborated upon at book length : Everything you think of as “wokeness” is simply an epiphenomenon of...

The Democrats are involved in their own cover-up. They’re covering up for a Nazi. How could they! All they’ve done for ten years is scream about Nazis! Trump was Hitler, I was told and told and told and told, leading a Brown Shirt army, awakening the White Nationalists, and radicalizing them to rise up and kill Black and Brown people. I was told the Democrats were the side fighting Nazis! It’s oka...

“If the rule you are following has led you to this, of what use was the rule?””Do you have any idea how crazy you are?””You mean the nature of this conversation?””I mean the nature of you.” So goes an exchange in No Country for Old Men, but it’s a conversation the Democrats might have with themselves as they gather for yet another protest after ten years of them. If the rule you are following has...

Heroes are in short supply in America at a time when we need them the most. Hollywood can’t deliver them anymore, that’s for sure. They are too ashamed of themselves and their history to remember how. Heroes seem to be a matter of interpretation, like everything else in our two Americas. But one thing was certain on October 13th: Donald Trump was a hero that day. He was a hero because whatever it...

I’ve been hated by the Party of Hate for five years and counting, maybe longer. For a while, I tricked myself into thinking it was people who didn’t really know me. They judged me on my tweets or my opinions. But then, after I came out as a Trump voter, I felt hate even from the people who did know me. I’ve seen sons disown their mothers, wives disown their husbands. I’ve felt the hatred from the...

George Floyd was born on October 14th, 1973. Charlie Kirk was born twenty years later, on October 14th, 1993. That is an odd coincidence, a cosmic joke upon us: we have two paths forward for America. How we honor these men in death will decide our country’s fate. We all remember what happened on Memorial Day weekend of 2020. We all saw the video. It was horrific to watch a man die while begging to...