Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone

When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez laughed off Woke 1.0, she attempted to distance herself from a movement she not only helped build but also led. Because the DSA is ascendant, they’re hoping to pivot to kitchen table issues just long enough to trick otherwise sane people into voting for them.
Hasan Piker started wearing suits. Abdul El-Sayed is attempting to draw in Trump supporters by showcasing his white grandparents.
And out in Texas, James Talarico is making ads with his Paw Paw.
They’re just regular folks, like you and me. Well, except that they want to tear America down to the studs and rebuild it as a woked-up socialist paradise. But shsh. Nothing to see here, move along, move along.
Woke 1.0 wasn’t just some silly thing that happened to them one time. It is a deeply held belief system that has been passed on through the generations and mandates conformity across all institutions and culture. It is not an ideology so much as the biggest cult in American history.
As we’ve watched their power weaken after Trump’s second win, we see them now more clearly than ever trying to cling to it. Calling white people racist gets louder.
Ordering women to obey the rules of language, like the refusal to use the word “cis” or whether or not dating bisexual men, makes you homophobic.
Cults must always control the women, separate them from their children. True for Charles Manson, Jim Jones, or Scientology. It’s so bad on the Left now that the only right women fight for now is the right to kill their own babies.
From White Fragility to protecting women in sports or locker rooms, not to mention children, the once and former feminists are MIA. Many of them are so desperate to be led and dominated by men that they are becoming Muslim reverts:
Back in the 1970s, women were also vulnerable and impressionable because the Counter Culture revolution was all about leaving traditional values, like family and religion, behind to “find yourself.” Women were suddenly free, yet all they seemed to want was to find someone to follow.
All of those white college girls of privilege were either sucked into cults, moving into vans, or shooting up banks.
Meanwhile, the black community was vulnerable, too, and that is how cult leaders like Jim Jones took advantage of them. He was selling things not that different from today’s Left.
The Origins of Woke 1.0
I’ll never forget May 25th of 2016. I decided to splurge for my daughter’s 18th birthday by taking her to see Hamilton on Broadway, with nearly the entire original cast. The tickets, flight, and hotel were too expensive, but we’d never get this moment back, so why not?
It was the same year my daughter would visit the NYU campus, have her prom, and I would be doing everything I could to elect Hillary Clinton as the first female President of the United States, with the doomed hashtag #imwithher.
I was part of a generation of parents who wanted to not just be better but to perfect ourselves, our children, and our world.
I can’t pinpoint exactly when we transformed from anti-establishment Gen-Xers to helicopter parents. But I know it had to do with the therapy culture of the 1990s, capped off by Columbine in 1999, 9/11, and the two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that followed. Something was wrong, not just with all of us, but with our country too.
The person elected to heal us from all of this collective, multi-generational trauma was Barack Obama, who became our spiritual leader and our male role model.
2012 was the moment Obama and the millennial do-gooder establishment that surrounded him sought to make our country better through indoctrination in public schools and universities.
Hillary Clinton was chosen as the torchbearer, but she lacked Obama’s charisma and had nothing to sell the public that they wanted except one thing: identity politics. It wasn’t enough.
Our cult over-reacted to Trump’s win, as though it was the FBI showing up outside the Koresh compound. It was Doomsday and that dark cloud would cover everything we controlled, from Hollywood to the legacy media to book publishing to fashion to influencer culture. We drew a line, and if you wanted in, you could not cross it. If you wanted out, all you had to do was question authority.
But it was what we weren’t watching that would be our biggest problem later. We weren’t watching the kids.
Teenage Wasteland
What happened to the nation’s young people, having been indoctrinated in the oppressor/oppressed mindset, where they saw racism, homophobia, transphobia, and Islamophobia everywhere they looked, even before Trump won, kicked into motion an apocalyptic fantasy that would justify everything they did, from protests to violence to assassinations.
The internet was their fantasy world, which gave many of them absolute power. This was true whether it was social justice warriors who ultimately led the transgender contagion among young girls, or the boys who gravitated to 4-chan and would eventually lead to the rise of the mass shooter influencer, like Tyler Robinson, Matthew David Crooks, or Luigi Mangione.
The first real sign of trouble happened nine years ago at Evergreen College. When I first saw this story, I was already pulling away from the cult, but even then, I was afraid to put it on social media because I knew it would be seen as “racist.” And yet, by burying this story, the Left set itself up for much worse down the road.
Violence showed up as early as 2015 during Woke 1.0, when Trump supporters were often beaten, kicked, and spat on. The protests at Trump’s inauguration seemed to be a natural extension of the mass hysteria that consumed the Left in 2016. It would only get worse.
The violence we’re seeing on the Left only escalated, culminating in a full-blown revolution on the streets in 2020, a mob demanding diners raise their fist for Black Lives Matter, and authoritarianism rising from a generation raised to believe they have the right to tear down what they didn’t build and make the whole country pay because of it.
That put power briefly back in the hands of Joe Biden, who pandered to the mob. They believed the false narratives around January 6th, decided MAGA was the cult, and walked away from this story. They barely even talk about it now.
The entire Democratic Party became the administrators at Evergreen, too crippled by white guilt to provide the necessary leadership and discipline these kids needed before they graduated and joined the workforce.
But even still, the most dangerous legacy Woke 1.0 leaves behind isn’t what it’s done to kids or to culture, to our sense of history or to our unity as a country. No, in dividing us into the oppressed and the oppressor, it opened the door to America’s enemies to exploit the sitting ducks on the Left and name Islam as the most oppressed and thus hand it the most power.
Then the enemy walked through the door we left open.
Woke 2.0
My daughter was three when the planes hit the towers. I remember waking up to the news. Imagine the days before we all had cell phones, or even social media. I had to call my friend and tell her to turn on the news. This was the first time America had been attacked on this level since Pearl Harbor.
But terrorism accomplished very little for Islam. It turned the US and the world against them. They were feared and even hated. Our country would transform into a surveillance state, and there’s an argument to be made that everything we’re living through now is not because of COVID but because of 9/11.
Changing hearts and minds would be the way the Islamic world would rise from the ashes. Before long, there was a new word that controlled our thought and speech: Islamophobia.
I didn’t realize how deep it all went until 2017, the same year as Evergreen. Wonder Woman had come out. My daughter really loved it, but she was afraid to say so online. Why? Because Gal Gadot was an Israeli who trained with the IDF.
I was as shocked by this development as I was when she told me her friend was becoming a “he” and wanted “top surgery.” What on earth were they teaching our kids? Idiot liberals like me had no idea. And by the time many of us figured it out, it was too late.
Palestine joined the wheel of oppression and took its place in the hierarchy long before October 7th. Hamas attacked Israel, and Putin invaded Ukraine with Joe Biden in power. They clearly saw him as a weak and addled president who would not be able to manage these wars, so what better time to test the hearts and minds campaigns and the way our enemies had begun to destroy us from within.
October 7th wasn’t a random attack. It was an act of such extreme violence that Israel would have no choice but to go to war, and in so doing, a worldwide campaign to defend the oppressed in Palestine could turn the entire world against Israel.
But it wasn’t until the rise of Zohran Mamdani, Hasan Piker, and now Abdul El-Sayed and the entire DSA that we could see how fruitful the decades-long hearts-and-minds campaign really was.
The Holocaust, to these young people, barely matters. They have no idea what Stalin did, what Mao did, or even really what Hitler did. And they know better than to criticize Islam because that would make them a racist. There was only one place left to go.
Just like the leap from World War I to World War II, so too would the jump from Woke 1.0 to Woke 2.0 land on the eternal scapegoat: the Jews.
It’s like shooting fish in a barrel. Islam and Socialism. Islam and Black Lives Matter. Islam and Medicare for all. These two movements have so much in common, from controlling thought and speech to controlling women and children. But really, it’s all about their shared enemies, Israel and the US.
Woke 2.0 isn’t just the Left, however. It’s also a large portion of the Right who have named Israel as the ultimate evil as well, so much so that they are following Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson down the rabbit hole to deflate any offense against the rising radicalism — terrorism - on the Left.
Both Nick Fuentes and Hasan Piker have chimed in to declare Candace is helping to defeat the Right and absolve the Left. They can’t believe their luck. What unites all of them is their conclusion that Israel and the Jews are the problem.
China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea know us better than we know ourselves. Who needs bombs when you have white fragility? Who needs censorship when you have cancel culture?
But Islam that wants more. They seek to overtake and convert the United States the way we once feared the Communists might. With the oppressor/oppressed ideology and the rise of Islamo-Marxism, there is no stopping them now.
A TikTok user quoting Sharifa Alkhateeb and an Iranian.
They just needed the right script, and they found it with helpless resistance libs who have run out of options and Gen-Z, raised on convenience culture who are lured in by the promise of free stuff. Who needs suicide vests and box cutters when you have TikTok?
We would start two failed wars after 9/11 called the “War on Terror.” People like me were convinced we were wrong. Now, just as with Joseph McCarthy and the Red Scare, considering how it all turned out, I have to wonder.



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I was caught between worlds in 2020. I began the year as a faithful, loyal Democrat and a true believer in Fauci the Hero vs. Trump the Villain. I was never an anti-masker or anti-vaxxer, at least, not in the beginning. As the year wore on, however, the questions started piling up in my head.
Why, I wondered, was it politics as usual if this pandemic was as serious as CNN said it was?
Why, if the virus was microscopic, did masks suddenly become not only essential but mandatory identifiers in our society?
Why, if it was so serious, did millions flood the street on Memorial Day Weekend to protest the death of George Floyd at the hands of the police, and 1,000 health experts signed a letter saying protesting was more important than a pandemic that was supposedly hitting the black community especially hard?
Every time I’d ask a question, the unified whole would scream back at me, parroting the exact same talking points from the legacy media and the Democrats. No one was allowed to even ask a question, much less question the official party line.
Why? The cult of Dr. Fauci. We hadn’t seen a hero rise like that since Barack Obama in 2008. We believed in him. We trusted him. We loved him. To question him became blasphemy, and even now, if you say his name among liberals, they will scowl at you.
The cult of Fauci and the legacy media became one in 2020. They made him a star and, in turn, he went along with the official narrative that Trump was not competent in a crisis and helped the media convince the public to vote him out.
But the truth was always chasing Dr. Fauci like a shadow, and the questions were not going away. Lucky for all of us, he kept a record of what he thought and did in 2020, and it is one history will never forget and should never forget.
Dr. Fauci showed the half of America that voted for Donald Trump what he thought of them when he declined to answer any questions in Congress and instead pleaded the Fifth 111 times.
Americans required something other than politics as usual when the pandemic arrived on our shores, but taking out a president was already the establishment's primary objective, and Dr. Fauci would prove instrumental in convincing Americans that Trump could not be trusted in a crisis.
As Ann Coulter says on her Substack:
Fauci was the left’s most promising silver bullet to take out Trump. As such, the media would brook no dissent from his COVID edicts. Liberals would not only destroy the economy, but countless lives, in order to slay a pestilence worse than the virus: Donald J. Trump.
Taking down a president
It might sound conspiratorial to say that the Democrats and their allies in the administrative state would crash the economy just to take Trump out of power, but the truth is even darker. Everything had to go wrong under Trump, including the economy.
The more Fauci contradicted Trump, the more the legacy media celebrated him, elevated him, and the more the Cult of Fauci rallied around him. That led to more attacks by Trump.
It’s not a coincidence that cases began to surge as their own kind of October surprise, allowing the Democrats to increase measures ahead of the 2020 election. All the while, what Fauci seemed to care about most was the attention paid to him by high-profile celebrities.
I was one of those people who trusted CNN and watched as they scared us, night after night, with the death count from COVID ticking upward, with no mention of who was getting hit the hardest. It just looked like everyone, everywhere was getting sick and dying.
What sweet relief to hear RFK, Jr. confront Dana Bash on CNN about their willingness to pump fear into the veins of the unsuspecting public:
And yet, as we found out by the Cup Foods surveillance recording, in areas the Democrats supposedly governed, like Minneapolis, the day George Floyd died, no one in that store, including him, who was still recovering from COVID, was wearing a mask. When I saw that, I realized just how small our bubble really was.
Dr. Fauci knew he was a media-made star. He marvels at it throughout his diary, shaking his head at the attention paid to him but hanging on every word. But he had no immunity to this level of adulation and celebrity. This was a lot for a guy almost no one knew until he became a household name.
Fauci and the Bobbleheads
Fauci’s diaries throughout 2020 paint a picture of a seduction. Fauci the Hero was drawn in by those who projected their distrust and hatred of Trump onto him. The more he played that role, the higher his profile would rise.
Of course, Hollywood would cast him that way. That’s what they do. But it wasn’t just Hollywood. It was all the most high-profile figures on CNN, ABC News, MSNBC, NPR, PBS and SNL.
Fauci kept a healthy remove in the beginning. This wasn’t his first rodeo, but he is only human after all. Trump was trying to open the country back up even in late March, instinctively knowing that in an election year, crashing the economy would be the end for him.
And then, the press began to tie him to Trump:
July 13, 2020:
Fauci lapped up the praise with a mixture of astonishment and bemusement. Praise and adoration from Funny Girl and Pretty Woman would have gone to anyone’s head.
Or the painting and growing friendship with folk singer Joan Baez:
A note to actor and chef Stanley Tucci promising to send cookbooks in January of 2021:
Zoom calls with the best and the brightest in April of 2020:
The press detailing just how beloved he was becoming in April of 2020:
And of course, the bobbleheads:
And somehow, Dr. Fauci even became a sex symbol.
When you feel the warm embrace of the cultural elite, and you breathe that rarified air for the first time, it can be intoxicating. I’ve experienced a bit of it myself, but one thing you should never do is believe you are one of them, and by the end, that is what happened to Dr. Fauci.
He was vulnerable because he was uncool.
And of course, being routinely attacked by Trump the Villain, who was desperately trying to win re-election and could see very well what the media was doing by elevating Fauci the hero, only made Fauci more inclined to side with the side that would write his legacy.
Fauci became the most important weapon against Donald Trump, as he redirected better solutions to help save kids from lockdowns, bring the economy back, and allow some common sense with masks and social distancing. Trump had to fail, and that's why Fauci became a superstar.
Mass Formation Psychosis
By the time Biden took power, the entire Left was locked into “Mass Formation Psychosis,” per Mattias Desmet by way of Dr. Robert W. Malone:
Fauci was trotted out to validate all of the bad policy pushed out by the Biden administration once they took power. Through it all, he maintained his tight connection to Joan Baez and Barbra Streisand, having dinner with them, advising them privately. Many were singing songs about him.
Love for Fauci, trust in his word, became interchangeable with taking the vaccine. Fauci was the vaccine just as he was the science. No one would dare doubt him or question his advice. He was the leader of a cult by now and drunk on that power.
But in casting his lot with the Trump “resistance,” he abandoned the other half of the country as most of our ruling elite did. But they are Americans and Fauci worked for them too. He betrayed their trust again and again and could not even be bothered to show them the respect of answering their questions.
The truth would eventually come out. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya was brought back on X after having been shadow-banned for “disinformation” and is now the head of the CDC.
We would finally find out that toddlers didn’t need to be masked and most children did not need to be kept out of school, and Trump’s efforts to open them back up that he was attacked for again and again were the right call.
Why had we done that to them? How had we all gone along with it? This got much worse under Biden. It was as though the campaign to dump Trump turned into the new normal and everyone had to stand by the story.
Here is Jeremy Boreing:
The Fauci myth also propped up the legacy media so much so that even now, they have to link arms with the Democrats to defend him.
For many Americans, the legacy media propped up the official story the Democrats needed to be true to take out a one-term president with a strong economy. But they built a high wall of protection that meant even when we finally knew the truth - that the vaccine did not stop the spread and masks offered minimal support - the legacy media would not tell the public the truth.
My nephew flew in from Thailand to finally see all of us after a year of separation. He’d already contracted and survived COVID, so he was immune, but because he was not vaccinated, members of my family forbade him from visiting.
I kept screaming, “He already got COVID! He doesn’t need the vaccine!” But no. If Fauci didn’t say it, if ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, the New York Times didn’t say it, they would not listen. You had to be vaccinated to enter restaurants, theaters, even family gatherings.
Dr. Fauci knew the truth. He knew the vaccine was from a lab leak. He knew it might cause harm to some. He knew it was untested. He continued to push a one-size-fits-all solution, and anyone who didn’t go along with it was treated like an enemy of the state. But for him, his legacy was already written, and nothing was going to take it from him.
I lost three loved ones during COVID. One overdosed during lockdowns from loneliness. Another dropped dead suddenly of a heart attack in his early 50s. My uncle did not take the vaccine and died from COVID.
It was never a one-size-fits-all solution to force everyone to inject an experimental drug, even if it saved the lives of many. It probably saved my life. But it should have been a choice, not a public pressure campaign that demanded all go along with it or they would be demonized as “anti-vaxxers.”
People should have been told the truth about what it was and what it wasn’t. That was Dr. Fauci’s job, but at some point, he realized he had to push the party line because that is what got him into the club, over that high castle wall and in the presence of greatness.
The two mirror events that depict the Two Americas could not be more stark, as now Dr. Fauci has been held in Contempt of Congress. Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro were not just held in contempt but thrown in jail over January 6th, the first time in over 50 years anyone was put in jail for the offense.
It’s unlikely Dr. Fauci will go to jail. Instead, he will go down in history as a hero because the more powerful side still writes that history, at least for now.
Fauci might have been a real hero if he’d faced the committee and the people and simply answered the questions, no matter how difficult. That is what you do when you have nothing to hide.


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Hollywood is not trying to stop a monopoly by blocking the Paramount Skydance merger with Warner Bros. It’s trying to protect one.
If a monopoly means near-complete control over what gets made, promoted, and rewarded, then much of Hollywood and the cultural institutions around it operate under the ideological consensus of the Left and the Democratic Party.
Why do the Obamas have a long-running production deal at Netflix? Why do the Emmys consistently elevate late-night hosts whose politics align with that consensus? Jimmy Kimmel, John Oliver, Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart?
Do you think they’d ever nominate Greg Gutfeld, whose show often tops them all in ratings? If that isn’t an ideological monopoly, I don’t know what is.
Why did major awards shows stay silent on Charlie Kirk? Why did so many artists cancel Kennedy Center appearances after its Trump-era changes, and why did multiple acts drop out of America 250 events?
David Ellison and Paramount Skydance are attempting something brave and unprecedented: an outside challenge to that consensus. Their roughly $110 billion bid for Warner Bros. Discovery would give them control of a major studio, HBO/Max, CNN, and a large portfolio of cable and streaming assets.
While there has been some resistance to the biggest mergers in recent history, we’ve never seen anything like #blockthemerger. Meet the new resistance, same as the old resistance.
12 state attorneys general, including California, have sued to block the deal. The Writers Guild of America has filed its own antitrust lawsuit. SAG-AFTRA has publicly opposed the merger, though it has not joined the litigation.
Opposition also includes the Future Film Coalition (which leads the #BlockTheMerger campaign), Democracy Defenders Fund, Committee for the First Amendment, Free Press, the International Documentary Association, and the American Economic Liberties Project, among others.
More than 5,600 industry figures have signed an open letter against the deal, including Mark Ruffalo, Jane Fonda, Javier Bardem, Elliot Page, Emma Thompson, Ben Stiller, and Cynthia Nixon.
Paramount Skydance has, for now, delayed closing. Can they hold the line under this unprecedented pressure campaign? Hope springs eternal.
But you won’t read about that point of view in any of the trades. They’re a monopoly, too. Most of them are owned by the same entity, Penske Eldridge. Just today, it was announced that the Hollywood Foreign Press, the former owners of the Golden Globes, are suing Jay Penske for $150 million. They are claiming Penske orchestrated their downfall so he could buy the Golden Globes.

Jay Penske already owns Deadline, The Hollywood Reporter, Variety, Indiewire, Gold Derby predicting site, Rolling Stone, a virtual monopoly on the awards race from soup to nuts. Gold Derby shapes the nominees, the trades take ads from the studios and the Golden Globes hand out the awards.
But wouldn’t you know, when Rebecca Keegan wrote a hit piece on me, she did so in the Hollywood Reporter, owned by Penske Eldridge. I was a vocal and prominent critic of Penske’s growing monopolistic power on the awards race and one of the few willing to speak out.
With one hit piece, the Penske company took out both a competitor for ad money and a pesky nuisance for the brand. That is what you call a monopoly.
A Climate of Fear and A Culture of Silence
I found out firsthand how monopolies work in Hollywood when I was canceled in 2024. The day a Hollywood Reporter story labeled me a “MAGA darling,” one studio pulled its ads from my site that day. The last thing they wanted was to be associated with an accused and condemned witch.
It was shocking how many of them fell in line in robotic fashion, gripped with fear. The response was swift and uniform. Every writer on my site left to protect their reputations. Friends of fifteen years ended the friendship. My Oscars ticket was revoked. Jane Fonda’s Women’s Media Center fired me from their annual Oscars report. Screening and party invitations dried up. I was benched on Gold Derby.
Worst of all, the lucrative studio ad buys for the Oscars and Emmys vanished. As it all collapsed, I remembered in 2012, an advertising strategist telling me I could be making far more money if I sold the site better. “You have no baggage to speak of,” she’d said.
That was true then. I was one of the few independent Oscar sites left, and still am, known around town for being honest to a fault. I stayed independent even as the ad money made life more comfortable for me and my daughter than it had ever been.
There was never any question why my career ended in Hollywood: I had been outed as a Trump voter. I was on the wrong side of Hollywood’s progressive orthodoxy, and that meant I was finished.
How it started…
I started Oscarwatch.com as a single mom with a one-year-old baby living in a studio guest house in Van Nuys, California, in 1999. I was an early web pioneer with a 1200-baud modem and a really good idea.
I was already catching the attention of publicists and rocking the boat, as all of us amateurs did back then. We were moving fast and breaking things. Traditional media was not ready. The studios weren’t either. They were used to having a monopoly on Oscar FYC ads in Variety and the Hollywood Reporter, their bread and butter. Until the blogs came along.
By 2006, I was starting to make money because my little site had birthed a big bang of other Oscar sites, and by then even the New York Times had an Oscar blogger, the late great David Carr, who called himself the Carpetbagger.
David Carr became a mentor of sorts and encouraged me to sell ads for myself, rather than piggyback off bigger sites. I was working three jobs by then: as a horoscope writer under a pseudonym (Laura Wilde), a janitor working my dad’s routes because he was a good guy and knew I needed the money, and a freelance film critic.
Right around then, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences sued me for trademark infringement, and my site was renamed AwardsDaily.com. Now I was cleared to start making real money.
David Carr was horrified that I was working as a janitor while the trades were raking in millions on Oscar ads and encouraged me to start sending out RFPs. But I didn’t have to, because before long the studios were sending them to me.
My site became so influential that I never really had to pitch to them. They all wanted real estate on my site. Who could ever have imagined that? Certainly not me, someone who got online in 1994 back when no one thought you could make money on the internet.
One of the first studios that bought ads was Fox Searchlight, an awards subsidiary of Fox. I called it Big Fox and Little Fox, and both advertised on my site. When I got my first $15,000 just to run ads, I was stunned. That was more money than I had ever seen on a check. I was just kind of faking it, pretending I knew what I was doing, but I really didn’t.
Of course, it was also about promoting films the studio wanted to place in the Oscar race, and that’s still what it’s about. It’s not exactly pay-to-play, but most of the bloggers making money in the Oscar game are grateful and help keep the advertisers’ movies prominent. I did too.
I barely noticed in 2019 when Disney bought Fox for $71 billion. The Writers Guild objected to the merger, just as they have to the Paramount Skydance merger with Warner Bros., but there was nowhere near the same amount of public outcry.
Trump praised the Disney/Fox merger after having attempted to stop the 2018 merger of AT&T and Time Warner, leading to a trial, but the judge ruled against the Trump administration, and the deal went through. Again, no major public outcry.
At some point after 2020, I’d noticed that Disney had stopped advertising on my site. I wrote it off as their shying away from my comments on “gender affirming care” for kids. I’ll never know exactly why, but all I do know is that once the merger went through, Fox and Fox Searchlight also stopped advertising.
The Paramount/Skydance merger with Warner Bros. is significantly higher and covers more territory than any of the major corporate mergers we’ve seen as Hollywood reshuffles the deck amid the shift to streaming.
Warner Bros. was selling. The only question was whether Netflix or Paramount Skydance would buy it. Both deals would have had the blessing of the Trump administration.
But because it’s David Ellison and the team that bought CBS, and because Trump is an ally, the Democrats and the Left have turned #BlockTheMerger into another No Kings protest or battle for the “resistance.”
After the story about me broke in the Hollywood Reporter, Netflix also stopped advertising. No other studio except Focus Features, an adjunct of Universal, had the courage to run ads on my site. I was now officially blacklisted. Emails to the various studio reps went unanswered.
This past year, Paramount bought a modest ad package on my site for the Emmys to celebrate the success of Landman and The Madison. I felt lucky to get it, and it was a sign, at least to me, that Paramount, like Focus Features, was brave enough to take a chance on someone deemed too toxic by the industry.
Landman, Taylor Sheridan’s Billy Bob Thornton drama, had become one of Paramount+’s biggest hits: its first season averaged 15.8 million viewers in Nielsen’s cross-platform ratings and ranked among the top 10 series of the 2024-25 season.
Season 2 opened to a Paramount+ record 9.2 million views in its first few days and continued to dominate the streaming charts, at one point leading all multiplatform viewing with more than 14 million.
The Madison, starring Michelle Pfeiffer, launched as Sheridan’s biggest series debut yet, drawing 8 million views in its first 10 days.
But unfortunately, #blockthemerger had bled into the awards ecosystem, which remains a closed loop.
Sure enough, when the Emmy nominations arrived, the Paramount shows were completely blanked—even Billy Bob Thornton in Landman and Michelle Pfeiffer in The Madison. Kathy Bates was similarly overlooked for Matlock.
If Gold Derby shapes the Emmy nominations, and they do, they have to similarly play ball by blacklisting all Paramount Plus’s most popular shows, proving to American audiences that the industry does not care about what they want or what they watch.
Sheridan has transformed much of the television landscape, thanks to Paramount Plus. If Paramount buys Warner Bros., they won’t be creating a monopoly but breaking one up.
The Death Rattle
I know I should walk away from this industry and give up the site that took me 26 years to build. But I just can’t do that. I can’t let them win.
Now that I’ve walked in the shoes of the other half of the country, I can clearly see why Hollywood’s empire is collapsing. If ratings and box office don’t matter, neither do audiences.
None of this is about artistic freedom or making better movies or television shows. This is the Left flexing its muscle in an attempt to keep all of Hollywood to itself, to push its ideology on the people, to convert them, to indoctrinate them, to “correct them,” everything but entertaining them.
Most of all, though, it is about one man: Donald Trump and their failure to stop him, destroy him, kill him, or exile him and his supporters. This is one of the most exciting times to be living through in American history, but you’d never know it by the movies and TV shows Hollywood pumps out.
Their monoculture, their one-sided point of view, has choked the life out of Hollywood. If they could make fun of themselves, if they could humanize their fellow Americans, they might be able to tell stories that resonate with everyone. Maybe, just maybe, they would breathe new life into a decaying organism.
But they can’t risk it. Like the Democrats who don’t trust the people with elections, Hollywood doesn’t trust them with the culture.
Elon Musk spent $44 billion to take Twitter out of the hands of its previous gatekeepers. Ellison is now trying to pry open a crack in the thick shell of Hollywood’s product and return more of it to market forces and all of those people Hollywood left behind.

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Any time Trump or one of his supporters brings up the 2020 election, insisting he didn’t lose it, we hear the usual chorus of groans: why can’t he get over it? He lost. Move on.
The thing is, I can’t get over it either. 2020 was the year everything changed. My entire world was turned upside down because I could see, for the first time, that I was in a bubble, a feedback loop that had shaped my perception of reality. It’s just that it wasn’t actual reality. It was a curated, hysteria-inducing delusion.
It wasn’t just me. Go on YouTube, and you’ll find hundreds, if not thousands, of people whose lives were fundamentally transformed that year in one way or another. COVID made them quit their job and move into a van. COVID made them decide to divorce. COVID made them learn how to bake sourdough. And a lot of us were red-pilled.
It was as though someone pressed the pause button and all of us froze in place for a time. Like in the movie Weapons where the kids suddenly wake up one day…
Isolated and shut in, we all turned to social media and the internet, which meant more people were connected than ever before at a time when there were more people alive than ever before. We’ve never really fully processed what happened to all of us that year.
It was the year we stopped trusting the science, the schools, Hollywood, the legacy media, and the government. Children were locked down and staring at their screens, with many of the lost boys finding their way into the dark corners of the internet and would emerge years later fumbling their way toward a rifle and a rooftop.
That isn’t all of it, or even half of it. None of us would emerge from that year unscathed. We can’t talk about it as a country or a people because we are still so divided. The big things divide us, like the vaccine, the masks, the lockdowns, and most especially, the 2020 election.
We were stepping into something we did not understand and weren’t prepared for. Things have changed enough now that it will be hard to remember just how bad things got after Trump won in 2016. I remember because I was on the inside. I lived it with the Democrats and what would become a Doomsday Cult.
We called ourselves “the resistance” even though we had all of the power. Trump and MAGA, they were the real resistance, or at least the revolutionaries going up against the most powerful machine in American history, maybe ever.
All I knew was that I had to fight for my side. I woke up every day like a good soldier for the cause and went to battle online, wasting precious time with my daughter, or doing anything else except sitting and staring at a screen and fighting with people I didn’t even know over issues that didn’t matter with arguments that had no end and went nowhere.
Inside the Doomsday Cult, we were awash with mass hysteria because every single day, every time Trump tweeted, the legacy media sent out more waves of hysteria that pulsed through the hive mind and kept reinfecting anyone who scrolled Twitter or Facebook. It was a new emergency every day. We were stuck in an unending state of trauma.
The legacy media desperately wants to forget what happened, how they lied and gaslit the public. The consequences for these moral crimes have been minimal. A slap on the wrist for ignoring Joe Biden’s cognitive decline, but there has never been a reckoning for what they did to all of us, people who trusted them, in 2020.
What Happened to Me
My daughter had to leave her senior year at college to have her graduation on my balcony, but we did it because we were doing our part to help save the country during this once-in-a-generation pandemic.
Mobilizing for the cause meant sewing our own masks, displaying them proudly on Instagram. It meant mixing our own hand sanitizer because it was all out at the drug store. Some people were wearing face shields.
We were living in fear. We were cowed into silence. Half the country fell into Mass Formation Psychosis. We weren’t allowed to attend weddings, churches, or schools, but somehow on Memorial Day, the George Floyd protests became the most important thing in America for months.
Systemic racism, they told us, was more urgent than COVID. Really? Bringing the whole country — the whole world — to its knees was less serious than George Floyd dying at the hands of a police officer in Minneapolis? Yes. That’s what they were telling us, and everyone was mandated to go along with everything that came next.
These were our idols, we were told. It was the new state religion, even if Trump was still the president. This is the ideology we’re allowed to gather for. This is worth tear ing down statues, burning buildings, carving out “autonomous zones” and demanding everyone put a black square on Instagram, capitalize the word Black and raise their fists to Black Lives Matter.
The madness unfolding on the streets meant Democrats could actually lose in November, I believed. So why wasn’t anyone trying to stop them? Why were the Democrats encouraging them? I started wondering what the hell was going on. It felt like unseen hands were manipulating events behind the scenes, and we were all expected to just go along with it.
As I began to speak out and ask questions, I was turned into an enemy. “You’ve changed,” wrote Neera Tanden on Twitter. She was right. I had. By the time Twitter pressured the New York Times to back off their Tom Cotton essay, Send in the Troops, I was done.
Maybe I was naive. I didn’t understand the assignment. I’d seen too many Frank Capra movies. I’d begun to believe politics was like an Aaron Sorkin screenplay. I thought we were the good guys. We are the side with ethics and decency and fairness.
I was like Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2 when Arnold Schwarzenegger shows up, and she thinks he’s a bad guy, but when he says, “Come with me if you want to live, she realizes that everything is backward. The people she thought were the good guys weren’t. The guy she thought was there to kill her was actually there to save her.
By the end of 2020, I was as black-pilled as Jack Nicholson in Chinatown, disillusioned and wide awake. Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.
But what I saw them do - how we were all manipulated, how they rigged the election to be too big to fail - I could see for the first time that my side had too much power. So much power that American democracy was now beside the point.
It didn’t matter how the people voted, because we would decide who was allowed to win and who would become an existential threat to the world we were building, the utopia we were building online.
When I left the party, I knew I couldn’t be fully honest about what I believed happened, though I did say that the election had been rigged. I also couldn’t be honest about what I knew about January 6th, at least not in the beginning. When I saw the riot break out, my first thought was, that’s not MAGA. They don’t do that.
And anyway, even if they did, why couldn’t the Democrats chalk it up to months of lockdowns and highly enraged, radicalized people on the Right just as there were on the Left that Summer. Why couldn’t they? Because it was all still part of the long con, the mass delusion.
These ideas were dangerous to hold for anyone in America but especially someone of the Left, and yet, I could not stop it. The truth began knocking. I ignored it as long as I could, but eventually, the knocking became a banging, and I had no choice but to open the door.
How to Rig An Election
Once you start tugging on the question of why Twitter and Facebook censored the Hunter Biden laptop, you begin to unravel the bigger picture of just how deep the conspiracy went. But you don’t need the whole story. You just need to know this: The FBI and the CIA worked against the sitting president to lie to the public that the laptop was “Russian Disinformation.”
It was just a standard run-of-the-mill October surprise, timed to help ignite a scandal before the election. But it was also information the public had a right to know, as we would find out later. So anyone who shames Trump for calling the election rigged and denying it was legit will have to answer for this.
But if you keep pulling on that string, you’ll find the why of it. They were trying to fix all of the problems they believed caused Hillary Clinton’s loss. This would be payback for the email scandal that hit her campaign, which she called “Russian Disinformation.” That would also turn out to be untrue.
But there were other problems that needed correcting, like lazy voters who assumed Hillary would win because she was so far ahead in the polls and didn’t bother turning out. They would fix this problem using COVID as the pretext to change everything about how people vote and how those votes are collected.
They knew they had Pennsylvania won long before Election Day and it would only be a matter of convincing the public not to get too excited about a “red mirage.” To all of them, that’s the right way to win an election.
Trump won Iowa, Ohio and Florida, not to mention the bellwether counties that have decided our elections.
The only other time anything like this happened was in 1960, when JFK won in a squeaker. Compare that to 2020, and you can see that something was very off about the numbers.
Since the Democrats believed Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook had handed Trump the win in 2016 by using their marketing machine (the Clinton campaign refused their help), it was time for Zuckerberg to undo that damage, which came in the form of a $400 million slush fund used to “fortify” the election but mostly in the heavily blue districts.
Had all of this been shared with the whole country as a way to improve our elections overall, that would have been one thing. But it was all done behind the scenes, in the shadows, far from the reach of anyone who might dissent. It was anything but ethical and anything but fair.
It was all part of a grand scheme to stay one step ahead of Trump. If they already knew he would claim it was rigged, why not just rig it? Who would the people believe? Trump or the “bipartisan cabal” of unelected bureaucrats hiding in the shadows?
The truth is that Trump was pulling ahead because the Left was losing its mind, and Trump picked up on it. He changed his campaign; no matter how many ways they tried to keep him from his rallies, he got the word out anyway. That would explain why he won those key states but lost so much in the popular vote.
Our elections should not be decided months before Election Day. Candidates should have to make their case to the people, not hide in the basement and let the system do the work.
It’s the candidate’s job to inspire the voters to vote for the kind of government they want, and it’s the voters responsibility to be motivated enough to turn out to the polls and cast their vote. But with an easily manipulated hive mind like the Democrats had cultivated for ten years they didn’t need any of it.
The Year That Broke America
I’ve never been able to convince anyone of what I believed happened in 2020. If you were on the Left, chances are, you wouldn’t be able to see it either. You would have trusted the same people I used to trust: CNN, New York Times, MSNBC, your social media feed.
You would have come out of that year thinking Joe Biden won the 2020 election fair and square and that Donald Trump refused to lose, so he led a dangerous assault on the Capitol, putting our democracy under threat.
Yet, after everything they did to Trump that year and for the four years prior, what else could he have done except protest? It was just a little too convenient that there happened to be a riot at the same time, a Reichstag Fire that handed absolute power to Team Blue.
If you were still trapped inside the Doomsday Cult, you’d have been primed and ready to go to war on your fellow Americans because Vice President Kamala Harris would tell you January 6th was like 9/11 and Pearl Harbor. You would have thought Liz Cheney and the Prime Time Show Trial was legit. What an easy mark you’d be.
If you never escaped, as I did, you’d still be trapped inside the Doomsday Cult and never have any idea that none of this is your fault. You were put into a kind of trance in 2020, even before, like the kids in the movie Weapons, frozen in place and used as an army to do the bidding of the Democratic Party.
They made you believe, like they made me believe, that every day really was the end of the world as long as Donald Trump was in power. But it was never true, none of it. All the Democrats ever had to do was offer the people something better.
If everything Molly Ball wrote about the election the “Secret Bi-Partisan Cabal” supposedly saved, how did Trump win again?
In Weapons, the children are put under a spell and aimed at the enemies of the witch. Once the spell is broken, the children wake up and realize the person they should be mad at isn’t the one she made them attack, but instead the witch herself for robbing them of their ability to think for themselves.
And so it goes with the Democrats.

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I will come out of this very surreal moment in American history and in the story of my own life, understanding the basic truth that our goodness is not determined by a political party. It isn’t the politics that make us better than anyone else. We all have our own ideas of what matters. Instead, it is our willingness to preserve our humanity when tested that really counts.
We can blame the internet and the algorithms for what has happened to all of us in the last 20 years, to our politics, to our culture, to our relationships. But that can only take us so far. At some point, we all have to reckon with who we are and what we’ve become.
I always thought we were the good guys. We didn’t mock, degrade, or dehumanize other people. We were decent and were empathetic. That is, until Donald Trump won in 2016 and all of that changed. What I saw happen to my own side was ugly. It was dark. I wanted nothing to do with it.
It’s been almost two years since Donald Trump was nearly shot and killed on live television. The way the Left dealt with that shooting was shocking. They diminished it. They said it was staged or just shrapnel. They did everything but wake up to the radicalization on their own side.
By then, they’d become consumed by hatred, having tried everything they had in their arsenal to take down Trump, and all of it had failed. How could they pivot back to their humanity?
So when Charlie Kirk was assassinated on video, with the clip going viral to millions of views in seconds, they were primed and ready to once again leave behind their humanity and celebrate one more battle against their named evil, a guy who said things they didn’t like.
It became a thing on TikTok:
They all took to X and competed for who could be the ugliest and the cruelest. The more disgusting they were, the more their hate and dehumanization were rewarded. Social media has messed with our perception of what defines love and hate, with those tiny deceptive hearts we press every time someone scratches that sadistic itch.
The reaction to Charlie’s assassination by the Left was unlike anything I’ve ever seen or anything I thought I would ever see from my former side. It might have been the people of Salem celebrating watching their friends and neighbors hang because they refused to confess. But this was America in 2025, not 1692. How could they not have been shaken out of their decade-long mass hysteria stupor?
My mind goes to Charles Manson and his followers, who showed no mercy, slicing up the bodies of the rich in the Hollywood Hills, a pregnant Sharon Tate among them. To hear the Manson family tell it, they deserved it. They were the establishment. They had been dehumanized, and their lives didn’t matter.
I bring up the Manson murders a lot because that was the last time we saw that same glint, the same wild-eyed happiness and glee at something as gruesome as a murder or someone’s death.
I thought that would have been the end of it, back then. It was enough to end the 1960s, keep Richard Nixon in power, and send our society tumbling toward Ronald Reagan and the 1980s.
But now, that same kind of bizarre, cult-like fury has overtaken the Left once again, and nothing can shake them out of it, not the near assassination of Trump, not the brutal murder of Charlie Kirk. Not the celebrating afterward.
The hate bubbled up inside them so profoundly that even when Barack Obama tried to show some grace in the wake of Charlie’s death, his biggest applause lines came after he decided to repeat the cherry-picked, out-of-context lies pushed by the Left that led to the dehumanization of Charlie Kirk in the first place.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took her cue from President Obama and followed the same pattern. She offered a condemnation of political violence, but then launched into the kind of attack that they believe justifies all of what they’ve been doing for the past ten years.
This is a country built on freedom of speech, and yet, the entire Left doesn’t believe in it, or they think it’s Trump that’s doing it. They control the culture, which is why they couldn’t even offer a word about Charlie’s death, not even at the Emmys or anywhere else.
Jamie Lee Curtis had a moment of sorrow for Charlie when she choked up on a podcast. But the activists descended upon her, and of course, she was forced to “clarify” what she meant.
All it took was losing one election for my side to transform into monsters who believed that as long as their fellow Americans stood in their way, they could justify anything that happened to them, yes, even an assassination.
Even now, I still get twitchy when I see the blind, hot hatred coming from the Left aimed at anyone on the Right. I’ve never gotten used to it. I’ve never been able to overlook it. I certainly couldn’t be a part of it.
I was reminded of that this week after Lindsey Graham’s untimely death. I watched the same pattern play out, the same ugliness, the same mocking TikTok videos demanding those inside utopia disconnect from their humanity.
Even if Trump danced on the graves of his enemies, Rob Reiner and Robert Mueller, that doesn’t mean he spends his days wishing any of them would be murdered or dead. Plenty of people on the Right, even journalists in right-leaning outlets, had no problem condemning Trump for it. Why can’t they do that on the Left?
Why are we now seeing them once again celebrating the death of a politician for the crime of disagreeing with them? They will keep doing this and as long as they do, someone out there will think picking up a gun will make them a hero.
Celebrating the death of evil people should be reserved for mass murderers like Stalin or Hitler. That they believe Lindsey Graham, Donald Trump, or Charlie Kirk are on that level is proof enough that they’ve lost their minds, and it has taken us to a very dangerous place.
Something Wicked This Way Comes
When Charlie was assassinated, it was like the leg of a pier giving way and the whole thing crashing into the water. He held the MAGA movement together by his optimistic and inclusive nature, but once he was gone, a full-blown war broke out.
It all started with the JQ group - the “Jewish Question” white nationalists - who instantly blamed Charlie’s death on Israel. This was then picked up and amplified by Candace Owens, who has now become more popular than she’s ever been by positioning herself as the anti-Charlie Kirk. She is now attempting to steal his legacy, bully and harass his widow, and destroy everything he ever built.
Why? Who knows. Maybe because she’s a total zero and her friendship with Charlie was the best it was ever going to get for her. Maybe she was bitter and resentful about being sidelined by Charlie and TPUSA. Either way, she has now done the Left a solid by changing the conversation around Charlie’s death.
It isn’t the rising fanaticism on the Left or their pathological need to control thought and speech. It isn’t that they’ve become so totalitarian that they fantasize about the deaths of their enemies and celebrate when people die?
No, it was actually Israel!
I didn’t think anything or anyone could ever match the level of insanity of the Left, but Candace Owens has done it. For clicks, views, and money, she sold out her so-called friend.
Charlie has been dehumanized, yet again, this time transformed into nothing more than a stepping stone to success by a woman who can never get enough of it, who needs people to be talking about her, looking at her, thinking about her, doing anything but ignoring her.
She’s stolen Charlie’s legacy and has now written herself into this story so everyone will notice she was once part of Charlie’s world. Not an important part. She was useful, for a time. Maybe she was even his friend, for a time. Now, she has shown her true colors, and it is the most evil thing I’ve seen in the 30 years I’ve been online.
How lonely and empty does a person have to be to steal someone else’s life?
That so many have followed her, that there is such a thing as the “woke Right,” that Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones and others have actually indulged this sick fantasy that anyone but Tyler Robinson could have done this, proves that goodness is not about political parties. It is about our humanity, whether we have it or whether we’ve abandoned it.
Charlie’s Angels
Something real and violent happened on September 10, 2025. The algorithmic, hypnotic churn of the internet, our absurd, pointless Civil War, the obsession on the Right with Israel, none of that could stop what really happened that day.
There isn’t a person who was there or who was closest to Charlie that Candace Owens hasn’t consumed for content and blamed for his death.
But she’s underestimated the strength of Charlie’s widow, his most powerful angel, Erika Kirk. Candace has used her too, laid her out like raw flesh to be consumed by sycophants, but somehow, that has only made Erika stronger, and now, Candace is the one who is about to understand what love really means. And what goodness looks like.
Erika is Charlie’s angel, but lucky for him, he has a lot of them. They’re out there fighting every day to keep his memory alive and the movement he built thriving.
And a sculptor is putting a statue of Charlie Kirk in Times Square, New York. We know how that is going to go. We know because we know the Left.
The way the Left responded to Charlie’s assassination should be something none of us ever forgets. It is something they will all have to reckon with one day, and for many of them, wiping away its shame won’t be easy.
It will be up to those angels of Charlie’s to continue his lifelong devotion to open debate, to talking to those you disagree with, and to preserve our freedom of speech and expression. Above all, let his memory be a reminder of how important it is to hold on to our humanity.
The world has changed since Charlie was shot and killed. It’s darker, and it’s meaner. Holding onto hope is harder than it’s ever been. But Charlie Kirk lives on through his widow, his babies, his true friends, and the tens of thousands of young people keeping TPUSA alive.
We have his legacy because we still have his voice, and thanks to the internet, it is everywhere, and he will never be forgotten.

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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