Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone

They came out, all of them, like Lady Macbeth, crying, “Out, damn spot,” anything to distance themselves from the words of Tyler Robinson to his lover to justify the killing of Charlie Kirk. What was Charlie’s big crime? He believed in the biological reality of men and women and refused to go along with what he thought was a lie. To Tyler Robinson, that meant he was “spreading too much hate,” and...

If Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez plans to run for president in 2028, she’s just made the biggest mistake of her political career. That speech of hers will be written in ink, and it will haunt her for years to come. Why? Because she didn’t know the first thing about Charlie Kirk, and everyone who watched her give that speech knows she’s either ignorant or lying. We know that on the Left, they do not bel...

It’s funny that they all suddenly care about censorship, free speech, and cancel culture, isn’t it? And the chilling effects that had on open expression? Have they looked at Hollywood lately? Ever hear of a culture of silence and a climate of fear that has all but gutted a once-thriving industry? Do they remember why Elon Musk had to buy Twitter? How many people did we watch unpersoned, disappeare...

The death of Charlie Kirk and the reaction to it have shaken millions of Americans, at least those who have managed to hold on to their humanity in the past ten years. Even if the prominent Democrats in the party tried to project a uniform message of decency, to condemn the violence and offer condolences to the family, it was increasingly evident that they were no longer in control of their own pa...

After a shift at Zepeddie's Pizzeria in Charlotte, North Carolina, Iryna Zarutska boarded the train and quickly made a decision where to sit. Did she think about her safety? Did she fear sitting in front of a Black man with dreadlocks and a face twisted into worried knots? Or did she find a seat far away from him, just on a hunch? The truth is that Iryna had no real choice. If she avoided the seat...

In anticipation of a Fourth Turning series for paid subscribers, my friend Andy just posted our conversation about the Fourth Turning and various other topics. His youtube is The Generation Report and his Substack is Fourth Turning Chronicles . Hope you enjoy! 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/su...

Everything changed for me in early June of 2020, when the Tom Cotton essay appeared in the New York Times and all hell broke loose on Twitter. I was scrolling the app to my detriment, as I always do, and all of a sudden, it was like the night Donald Trump won the election. Big trouble in blue-check city. The New York Times published an op-ed that called for the military to be brought in if the rio...

Part One | Part Two I didn’t just leave the Democratic Party. I ran screaming from them. On Friday night, I was reminded once again why. The news hit X that Trump had died. It wasn’t true, of course, but for some reason, those who think that the only way to gain back power from Trump is “mess with him” or “troll him” seemed to think this was funny. But as usual, the Left can’t meme. It wasn’t funn...

As a lifelong Democrat, I always thought the problem of gun violence was easy to solve. Just get rid of the guns. It was one of the most important issues for us as Bill Clinton rallied voters to the polls in 1992. But back then, it wasn’t mass shootings that we worried about. It was handguns. Just look at this scene in Aaron Sorkin’s The American President, released in 1995, where Michael Douglas...

Before the fascists came, America was finally on the right track. As the saying goes, when you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow. That’s what happened with our violent but mostly peaceful revolution in the Summer of 2020. When Joe Biden took office, we had complete control over the message and could fire anyone at will if they used the wrong pronoun, doubted the election r...

When I was struggling in my 20s, I would receive a $50 check from my dad every week. It would come from Gene Stone’s Janitorial Service. He’s dead now, and he would never want to be remembered that way. He was a jazz drummer, after all, and that is what he wanted people to know about him. But he also had a janitorial service where he would clean office buildings owned by his friend Dave from high...

Nobody would discuss how strange everything became on the Left after Trump won the first time. But here’s the truth: We went stark raving bonkers, especially the women. There was never anyone to pull us back from the abyss. The legacy media profited from our collective hysteria. The Democrats amplified it to scare voters to the polls. It worked for a while, until it didn’t. And most of all, Barack...

I sometimes wonder what it must be like at bedtime for the New York Times’ Peter Baker and his wife, The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser. Do they worry that the Gestapo will kick down their door and haul them off to Alligator Alcatraz for writing negatively about Trump? Do they watch out their window for the bright light of a circling Black Ops helicopter? Do they cling to each other in the dark and wh...

A few years ago, if Sydney Sweeney had appeared in an American Eagle ad talking about her “good jeans/genes,” the uproar would have been just as deafening as it is today. By the end of the day, American Eagle would have pulled the ads. Sweeney would have been forced to issue a pandering, simpering apology. But none of that happened. Instead, Sweeney was celebrated, American Eagle’s stock soared, a...

In their 10-year coup to spy on, discredit, impeach, and unseat the twice-elected President of the United States, Donald Trump, the Democrats have only made him stronger and more resilient. As Chris Matthews explains: By contrast, they’ve emerged from all of this as wild-eyed Doomsday preppers who have finally gone full Pizzagate , scraping the bottom of the barrel to chase a scandal that was neve...

Dear Ms. Maher, You don’t know me, and there is no reason why you should. I am mostly a nobody. If people know me at all, they know me as a former Oscar blogger whose public support for Trump destroyed my so-called “career.” But really, I am not all that different from you. Or at least, I didn’t use to be. I come from your world, more or less. Not that I was ever a tech-savvy, globtrotting millenn...

It was a story that moved like wildfire and showed no signs of slowing down. The more Hillary Clinton denied it, downplayed it, and attempted to pivot away from it, the more it was just too salacious to leave alone. And so it will go with the Epstein Files. The Epstein Files are giving me flashbacks. I find myself, as a former “vote blue no matter who” Democrat, wanting to say, Are you all insane?...

Some say Trump won a second term one year ago today when his head was almost blown off on live television. Maybe that’s true. Maybe it isn’t. Luck was most certainly on his side that bright, beautiful day in Butler, Pennsylvania. I’d been looking forward to the rally because he was returning to a place made almost famous in MAGA lore by Tucker Carlson, who explained Trump’s appeal better than anyo...

Violence is in the air after Luigi Mangione assassinated CEO Brian Thompson and became a hero of the Left. It’s in the air by politicians who now want protesters to get messy, to get bloody. All for a necessary photo op, they believe will finally, at long last, turn the public against Donald Trump. Mangione, as it turns out, was a useful weapon in this war. Back in December, novelist and co-host o...

I remember the exact moment when I realized I loved my country. The year was 1997. The place was Italy. The affliction was love. The guy had a Che Guevara poster on his wall. I had no idea who that was. He was talking about Israel and how terrible they were. I had no idea what he meant, so I just nodded along. But then he started trash-talking America. So I said, “Well, you sure like our Marlboros...

Zohran Mamdani’s primary win marks the end of the Democratic Party as we once knew it. Maybe they realize it, probably they don’t, but it makes no difference. The truth is, it was already dead. They spent ten years going to war on Trump while also using him to scare their voters to the polls, with their endless crisis. Without a combative media to keep them in line, they didn’t have to offer the p...

After the bombs dropped on Iran’s nuclear facilities, there were some rumblings on X that the mission felt eerily familiar. Mike Benz said Operation Midnight Hammer is the same mission that plays out in the grand finale of Joseph Kosinski’s Top Gun: Maverick. His followers quickly pointed out that they’re using fighter jets in Top Gun: Maverick, not the stealth B-2 bomber. The $2 billion plane is...

I once believed that the worst thing that could happen to this country was to have a Conservative Supreme Court. That was supposed to be the end of everything. I would scream those words into the abyss all through 2016 to anyone who didn’t want to vote for Hillary Clinton, “THE SUPREME COURT.” I grew up on the Left, after all, and nothing scared us more than Christianity in our schools, in our cor...

[This is a slightly different kind of podcast, a news summary - and will have its own podcast feed eventually] Every Fourth Turning, at least since the founding of America, has been defined by a great war: the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and World War II. When I began this Substack a few years back, the world war we might be fighting would be Iran, Russia, and China against the United States...

In the Fall of 2021, Donald Trump was selling a hardcover book about his presidency called Our Journey Together. It would be self-published because it had to be. No publisher would touch it, no author would write it, and no critic would be caught dead praising it. January 6th was meant to be the end of the Trump story. He was to slink back to Mar-a-Lago, disgraced and a failure. They all said his...