Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone

I’ll never forget the moment when I realized what being a mother meant. It wasn’t the 18 hours of labor or crying out for the nurse to hand me my newborn daughter or that I held her to my chest for a full two weeks after I brought her home. No, it was the day she walked behind me, and I dipped my toe in the pool. When she copied me, she fell in. I didn’t realize it at first, but then I didn’t hear...

Hollywood used to give us the chance to sit under one roof and enjoy a universal story. The magic of the movies was always something we could share. We all remembered lines from famous movies like “I’ll be back,” “I’m going to make him an offer he can’t refuse,” “Here’s looking at you, kid,” “We’re gonna need a bigger boat,” and “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.” We got along better as a country w...

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-a...

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 o...

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 fo...

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...

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...

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...

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 cl...

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,...

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 H...

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...

[This is the podcast version of an already posted story] It’s too late for me. I followed the feminist lie through most of my life, only to wake up much too late to have lived it a better way. You see, it takes a while to realize that it really is about the warm body next to you. It is about the laughing children and grandchildren. It is about the stories, the recipes, the memories, the picnics, t...

[This was already posted as a story, here is the podcast version] Trump is under no obligation to debate Kamala Harris, who was hand-picked for the nomination without so much as a single vote. They can’t just change the rules and expect everyone else to comply. On the other hand, it might not be a bad idea. Trump can do the job the media will not. A debate might be the only time Harris will be mad...

Just when you thought America was No Country for White Men, the Democrats have once again rewritten their own rules. White people, even white men, are in. And all to show up for the coronation of the first woman of color to win an election without ever having won a primary. It was never losing democracy. They were worried that the wrong people would have a say in this democracy. And in their minds...

Republicans have a problem: a fast-moving narrative that will dominate the news cycle for the next few months if they allow it to. This comes courtesy of some eager beaver operative who dug up this clip of JD Vance from 2021 that has now gone viral. The old me would have joined the outrage train on X, distorting what he said into an opportunity to wax sanctimonious and proclaim that it’s great to...

It began with the nation’s first Black President, but it would become much bigger. It would become a movement that captured every major institution in this country, including public schools, universities, corporations, and nearly all of culture. This could not last only two terms. No, this had to last forever. When Donald Trump won in 2016, the power concentrated in the Obama coalition refused to...

"Courage is not having the strength to go on; it is going on when you don't have the strength."— Theodore Roosevelt In 1912, Teddy Roosevelt was on his way to deliver a speech when he was shot in the chest with an assassin’s bullet. James Strock writes : The history of 1912 leaves breadcrumbs if we summon the humility to look. In the moment Roosevelt was, to put it mildly, controversial. Seeking a...

“President Trump represents America’s last best hope to restore what — if lost — may never be found again. A country where a working-class boy born far from the halls of power can stand on this stage as the next vice president of the United States of America.” - JD Vance Tulsi Gabbard’s voice is greatly missed from the Republican National Convention. However, it still resonates profoundly in our c...

Beautiful, elegant, strong—when Sarah Huckabee Sanders glided out on stage on Night 2 of the Republican National Convention, I could not help but think of the film Carrie. In it, the shy wallflower emerges as the beautiful prom queen moments before she’s sabotaged by two mean and bitter people who want nothing but her total humiliation. But of course, they don’t realize what they just stepped in a...

“Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.” ― George Bernard Shaw Last night, at the RNC Convention, Make America Wealthy Once Again, Donald J. Trump walked into the room like the Gray Champion he is, battle-scarred but standing tall. Teddy Roosevelt would be proud. His supporters gave him the hero’s welcome he deserved. There was not a dry eye in the house. It was apparent to an...

When I found my way to Trump’s rallies in the Summer of 2020, I felt like I had crawled out of a desert searching for signs of life. No one could know my discovery. I had to keep it a secret. If anyone found me out, I would be MAGA. I would be a Trump supporter , and that would be the end of my career and most of my relationships. Despite how often I’d become the target of the fanatical mobs that...

Dear New York Times Editorial Board, In your haste to make nice with your paying subscribers—I am one, too, by the way—you decided to swap out journalistic ethics for fear and hyperbole once again. Trump, you declare, is “dangerous” and unfit to lead. Now, I know it’s been hard on you folks lately, with your otherwise reliable audience turning on you once you spoke the truth about Joe Biden. You h...

“Schadenfreude can’t get much better than watching the Republican Party self-humiliate with an abject inability to win while controlling the House, Senate and White House.” - Daniel Henninger, WSJ Oh, I beg to differ, Mr. Henninger. It most certainly can get better. How about a political party that rigged the game in its favor and had nearly all of the legacy press in its pocket suddenly in the sp...

Team Joe wasn’t a popular place to be back in May of 2019 when I was invited to a fundraiser in Hancock Park at the home of wealthy donor Cynthia Telles. The Democratic Primary had only just begun, but it was wide open then and almost no one wanted Joe, an old white guy. For four years, the party had lost its mind and lost its way over Trump. They seemed to believe he was such a bad president they...