Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone

The emergence of America’s ruling class in Chicago to celebrate the Obama Presidential Center Museum hit like a gust of hot, wet wind. Just days before, tornadoes tore through Illinois and Iowa, upending homes and wreaking havoc on the landscape. By the time Barack Obama and his Royal Court were ready to roll out the red carpet, the skies had cleared.
The building perfectly reflects how Obama might see himself, but certainly how he’s ruled over the past 15 years. He still can’t let go of his position as God and King of the once-mighty utopia, one I devoted most of my life to building, protecting, and defending. I was a true believer and a good soldier.
Obtuse, mysterious, and opaque, the building, like its inspiration, towers over the indistinguishable figures below, the swirling paths and gardens, not blending into the landscape but rather projecting outward, with a kind of bulk you could even see from space. Not even a tornado could make a dent.
The quote on the side of the mighty beast reads:
You are America. Unconstrained by habit and convention. Unencumbered by what is, ready to seize what ought to be. For everywhere in this country, there are first steps to be taken, there is new ground to cover, there are more bridges to be crossed. America is not the project of any one person. The single most powerful word in our democracy is the word ‘We.’ ‘We The People.’ ‘We Shall Overcome.’ ‘Yes We Can.’ That word is owned by no one. It belongs to everyone. Oh, what a glorious task we are given to continually try to improve this great nation of ours.”
The quote comes from Obama’s speech, not in Chicago, but at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. Most of the rest of it has been trimmed away to make the statement appear more inclusive, shall we say.
But note the use of the word “We.” His speech was full of flowery language about how we have to come together as a country.
The sitting president of the United States and the majority of Americans who voted for him were not invited to the party. Not only weren’t they invited, but they’re also not allowed anywhere at any time in a society largely controlled by the Left.
No, Trump would not be allowed in, and he never really was, which goes a long way toward explaining why he won the second time. Trump feels like one of us, who have taken the shape of Obama’s sworn enemies. We are rejected outsiders because this America, their America, depends on and is built around race and gender identity.
Both Barack and Michelle Obama made a point of elevating the illegal immigrants who crossed over under Joe Biden and celebrated the citizen army that went to war on Federal officers, even after condemning such actions on January 6th.
They prioritize the illegal immigrants because they are mostly non-white and thus have special protective status, as long as they vote blue no matter who, of course. And yet, for most Americans, they still don’t understand why they’ve been sidelined like this. Once you understand the rules of utopia, where an endless supply of oppressed people, along with an endless supply of racists, is what powers their engine.
It’s an ideology that comes from Western countries overtaken by global elites, who need this form of virtue signaling to justify their power and their worldwide alliance, but it doesn’t do much for ordinary Americans, who don’t have the luxury of putting themselves last.
It is a kind of class system that pretends to be about equality, about inclusion, and diversity, but really, it’s a way of categorizing us and deciding our worth. If you can participate in this game, you can go far. But if you don’t, out you go.
Nate Bargatze dared to show up alongside RFK, Jr., and his wife, Cheryl. The internet found out about it, and things got so bad his publicist had to issue a statement that he wasn’t a Trump supporter. What kind of America is this? If they want to talk about unity, they have to call off their attack dogs.
It didn’t used to be this way. Those of us who have been alive a long time remember when what mattered was the majority of Americans, the free market, democracy, and all that. Box office, ratings, and elections all decided the direction of our country and our culture. Not anymore.
They want our country to look a lot like Obama’s kingdom, epitomized by his Brutalist monument - he’s way up there, and we’re all way down here. If you worship that way, we’ll all get along fine, they say, but don’t you dare vote in a way we don’t like, or we will go to war.
So is that the plan from here on out? Must all elections be sanctioned and approved by the Democrats, or else?
From Utopia to Dystopia
Obama was not born in Chicago, but his monument will reside there as a showcase of his preferred legacy. He’s the Chicago guy, not the Hawaii guy.
The fortress will be a place for travelers driving across this country to stop and admire, along with other historic landmarks in Illinois, like the birthplace of Abe Lincoln and Ronald Reagan, two of Obama’s strongest influences, or so he has said.
The Obama museum event was a reminder of how we all shaped this story, the bad guys and the good guys of Obama’s Camelot - Obamalot - the height of the glory days, where everyone had a seat at the table and we’d mostly eradicated the “ists” and the “phobes.”
I think Obama thought that making history as the first Black president meant more than just winning an election, and that the influence he had and the power he attained made him more than just a two-term public servant. He was, after all, living history, and everywhere we look, we can see his fingerprints.
It was the play, Hamilton. It was Bruce Springsteen before he shrank into a bitter old prune. It was Tom Hanks when he could still open movies. It was when Oprah still had influence.
They think that showcasing their high status while locking out so many Americans is enviable. It’s U2 and Oprah. It’s Julia Roberts and George Clooney. It’s Jennifer Hudson and Steven Spielberg. It’s all four former presidents and their First Ladies. Obama made a point of saying that they are all of like minds except one president, the one who defeated them again after their ten-year war.
Who do these people think they are? They don’t have the right to tell the American people who they can and can’t vote for. It is their job to make their best case to us to earn our votes, and either they do, or they don’t, but they work for us, not the other way around.
Are we all supposed to cheer seeing them standing there as a united front against the sitting president? They have absolutely no self-awareness about how tone-deaf this appears to most people.
Do they think we’ve forgotten? Do they think we don’t remember Michael Moore calling George W. Bush a war criminal at the Oscars?
Their terrible, blatant propaganda films like Oliver Stone’s W.
And Adam McKay’s truly awful film about Dick Cheney, Vice, one of the worst films ever made, with the sole exception of his next movie, Don’t Look Up.
They’re not finished. They expect the other half of the country to choke down more of it, unending amounts of it, in hopes of forcing all of us into compliance through the worst art the film industry has ever seen because it is under the complete control of a totalitarian movement.
Next year, we’ll be tortured with a sure-to-be-terrible Sean Penn film on January 6th.
They still see themselves as fighting the oppressive forces against them when the truth is that they are the oppressive force. Trump was the way out.
The clocks were striking thirteen
If any of us had been paying attention, we’d have known what we built mirrored Orwell’s 1984 and where it would ultimately take us.
Every word of 1984 was a cautionary tale. Co-opting and distorting language, check. A Goldstein-like figure to sell two minutes of hate, check. A mandate to love Big Brother or else, check. An inside of accepted citizens ruled by the party elites and policed by the children spies, check, the abandoned working class, the Proles, outside of it, check.
Trump’s win, to me, was like Winston Smith’s hope for the future, should the Proles rise up.
That Obama and the rest of the establishment did worse than refuse to step aside but went to war on the duly elected president in an attempt to impeach, indict, discredit, and destroy him is the smoking gun that they no longer believe in American democracy. It’s their way or nothing. Americans have no way out.
All the people ever had was Trump, and indeed, he was and remains a mighty force. He is the troll to Obama’s virtue signal, the two internet presidents who led whole armies online, facing off against each other for 15 years.
Obama’s ten-year plea to the American people to choose him feels desperate by now. Choose me, love me, follow me, worship me. It doesn’t mean America is racist because they didn’t. That has been the Left’s method of policing all of us for far too long, and this country can unify the minute they snap out of it.
They want us to see them as the better side, the special people, our gods and goddesses. But I look at them and see people who have long since cut themselves off from the rest of the country and have no plans to ever change. The museum reflects that better than anything ever has. What is inside? It doesn’t matter. It looms large.

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Jane Fonda, like so many on the Left, is the worst kind of hypocrite. She plays the part of a free speech warrior while participating in the most totalitarian movement this country has ever seen.
There she was, yet again, yapping into a microphone to protest Trump’s UFC 250. The signs behind her are ablaze with pure lies - Civil Rights! The First Amendment! You can’t silence us!
But Jane Fonda and the company she founded, Women’s Media Center, do not practice what they preach. They fired me for the crime of voting for Donald Trump.
I had been regularly hired for almost ten years to write their Women in Oscars report until a story broke in the Hollywood Reporter calling me a “MAGA darling.” And just like that, my 25-year career as a “woman-owned” Oscar website went up in flames, as did my freelance gig for WMC.
It’s true, I did vote for Donald Trump. Not only did I vote for him, but I also made my support for him known on social media, which is what caught the reporter’s attention in the first place.
I was supposed to cower in fear. Support the Democrats or else. I could have done what a lot of people did and kept my vote for Trump secret, but I didn’t think I should have to. Weren’t we the side that stood up for free speech and free expression?
No. We weren’t then, and aren’t now. There is a long trail of writers, thinkers, actors, artists, musicians, and ordinary citizens who have been destroyed by the Left’s machine for the crime of dissent. And thousands more who suffer in silence, knowing there are so many things they can’t say.
Only one side regularly censored users on social media, and that was the Biden administration working with the FBI. Only one side used the FBI and the CIA to censor the Hunter Biden laptop to thwart the re-election of the sitting president. That wasn’t the Right.
Because Jimmy Kimmel got a slap on the wrist and Trump sued CBS News, and there’s a merger with Paramount and Warner Bros., to people like Jane Fonda, that means the First Amendment is under threat. My message to her: clean your own house, Jane.
Jane Fonda obviously wasn’t directly involved in firing me. She has no idea who I even am. It was someone else, someone I trusted, maybe someone who seemed like a decent person, but, like everyone else, from writers to publicists to friends, once I crossed that bright red line, I was no longer someone they would associate with at parties, let alone hire.
It certainly wasn’t because I did not do good work. I did. I even asked Grok to fact-check my memory, and here is what came back:
Nobody knows the Oscars like I do, and I did the best work for them on the cheap because I liked doing it.
I tried to make my case as clearly as possible to the Hollywood Reporter that I could not go along with the unprecedented lawfare against Trump, and especially not “gender affirming care” on minor children. These things motivated me to do more than just vote. I had to go public. I thought my support would help others come out from the shadows.
I knew as I was talking to that reporter that nothing I said would make a difference. I wouldn’t have even talked to her except she said she’d write the story anyway. She was reporting on what I thought and what I was tweeting, which was verboten inside utopia. And boy, did the hammer come down.
After the story broke and I felt every door that had once been open to me slam in my face, I kept hearing yet another piece of bad news. The studios were pulling their ads. Yet another writer was leaving the site. I was not invited to screenings, parties, and premieres. The publicists all ghosted me. It was as though I had been arrested for committing mass murder.
One of the last of the gut punches was losing that freelance gig at Women’s Media Center. I kind of knew it was coming because, of course, it would be. They all went along with it, and almost no one had the courage to push back or resist any of it. I wrote to them anyway because I wanted to hear it from them. And I got the expected answer.
Jane Fonda founded the Women’s Media Center in 2005, along with Robin Morgan and Gloria Steinem. They describe themselves as “a progressive, nonpartisan nonprofit focused on increasing the visibility, influence, and decision-making power of women and girls in media.”
They were perfectly happy to drop a woman writer for the sole crime of not agreeing with their politics. I’d say they don’t really support women in media so much as they support those who go along with them.
I never played the woman card, but I could have. I built my site just to build it, and it became successful. I was a single mom in 1999 and raised my baby and my website at the same time. It is quite the story, especially for those who pretend to care about women in media.
Why would it matter if I voted for Trump? Why would that mean I could no longer write the report? Why have they decided that all of this is okay, to treat half the country like toxic waste? How have they gotten away with it, and what will be their plans should they take back absolute power?
They have painted themselves into a trauma corner with nowhere else to go, and in so doing, alienated themselves from much of this country. Where can you go when you’ve already gone as far as humanity ever has? Hitler, the Nazis, fascism. They’ve now gone to the only place they can go, wishing for and hoping for Trump’s death and vowing never to forgive anyone who voted for Trump.
A Royal Court
There was a time when I believed in all of it, too. The miracle of the first Black President and First Family. How one leader could bring together so much of American society, all of us reaching for the same goal because we all believed in a New America.
We projected our fantasies of goodness onto them as they built what looked like a Royal Court of the most impressive and important people in the country, including rock stars like Bruce Springsteen and Katy Perry, actors like Robert De Niro and Julia Roberts. They were the party, and we were the adoring crowd.
But all of that came with a price. If you want to be in the Royal Court, you’d best play ball because if you don’t, they can and will crush you. I had no idea that everything I built could be destroyed just because I dissented, and yet that is exactly what happened. Jane Fonda’s Women’s Media Center dropping me was the most disappointing because I believed in her, too. Now I know the truth.
I am just one example. There are hundreds of people who are not welcome to work in the film industry if they are not ideologically compliant. We’ve been living with this for ten years now, and it’s become our new normal. Very few people are brave enough to stand up to them.
Deep down, they all know it because they are too afraid to say the wrong thing, too. It’s easier to point their finger at Trump than confront what they have become - the blacklists, the shunning, the destroying of people’s careers. If they could do it to me, they can do it to anyone.
What they don’t see, what they can’t see, is what they’ve done to the other half of the country for ten years. They want us all to think it’s perfectly normal that our late-night talk show hosts are purely partisan, or that it’s perfectly fine for Hollywood to continue to tell the story from inside their Doomsday Cult rather than the reality of all Americans.
They don’t see themselves as the ones who can’t tolerate dissent or free speech and who fire people just for voting for Donald Trump. They believe themselves to be the chosen ones, the righteous few who have staked their claim on the New America, and those who aren’t on board must be purged.
They’ve convinced themselves that it was perfectly fine that Jimmy Kimmel made an inhumane joke about Charlie Kirk moments after his brutal assassination, but when millions of upset viewers flooded the station with angry calls to have him removed, they called that a threat to free speech.
They don’t seem to care that Biden imported millions of illegal immigrants into the country, and when many of them turned out to be murderers, rapists, and child molesters, they left a trail of victims, but those victims are invisible to the Left. They never even hear about them because in their minds, those illegal immigrants are to be protected above American citizens.
So Julia Roberts and Bruce Springsteen continue to use the deaths of Renee Goode and Alex Pretti as examples of authoritarianism and to make American citizens feel shame for caring about their country and wanting a secure border and to be protected from harm. They never spent one minute comforting the mothers whose children were harmed by policies they supported.
It wasn’t Trump who shot Pretti and Goode. They put themselves in a dangerous position to go to war against Federal agents who were doing their jobs. In the Left’s fever dream, they were battling Nazis.
But they never notice or care or even try to understand why so many Americans wanted Trump to follow through on his promise to mass deport illegal immigrants, something every president has done.
These mothers, like a lot of Trump supporters, had no other choice because this country, at the hands of the Left, means denying reality to serve utopia. You can’t talk about crime if the perp is an illegal immigrant or a person of color, just as you can’t discuss the harms of “gender affirming care.” I know, I’ve tried. They melt down like the housewife in The Stepford Wives who glitches at any confrontation of reality.
That’s how it’s felt to me all these years, like I’m trying to talk to preprogrammed robots who know what you can and can’t say. I kept wondering what happened to everyone and why they were all acting exactly the same way. They were insulated from the rest of the country, and their imaginations got the better of them.
What really happened to the ruling aristocracy, especially, is that they fell in love with their own reflection. They began to believe their own publicity, and so they couldn’t imagine the fault could ever possibly lie with them.
It would have just been so much easier and so much better for everyone if they had just tried to understand why they lost. They never will, and so, they are doomed to repeat the same mistakes. And we have to suffer through it every time one of them finds a microphone.

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Charles Manson famously said, “You can’t kill me. I’m already dead.” I thought about that quote as the 60 Minutes scandal erupted, with a conversation between reporter Scott Pelley and newly hired producer Nick Bilton. From the NYT:
“She is murdering ‘60 Minutes,’” [Scott Pelley] said. “She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it, and she’s been doing exactly that.”
Mr. Pelley added: “She has no qualifications for her job; you have slender qualifications for this job. The changes that she’s made at the ‘Evening News’ have been catastrophic, so why should we expect that any of this is going to be any better?”
Mr. Bilton responded: “Well, I will show you. That’s what I have to say. That is my plan over the next two weeks. I’ll be meeting with everyone. I’m very excited to meet with everyone, yourself included.”
Needless to say, it didn’t exactly go as planned. Several sanctimonious “don’t you know who I am” statements later, Pelley was out.
60 Minutes isn’t quite dead, but it is a relic of the past. In the 1990s, it was pulling in 20-30 million viewers. That dropped to 14-16 million in the 2000s. By the 2010s, it was down to 10-12 million. Now, just 9 million people tune in every week in a country of 340 million. Much of that is due to the changes in technology, but still.
There is no doubt that 60 Minutes, like all of legacy media, is trapped inside the same bubble that thinks Jimmy Kimmel’s nightly monologue is still relevant, believes the Oscars still represent the majority of moviegoers, and that the New York Times has its finger on the pulse of everyday America.
Like so much of what we might call “resistance era culture,” there doesn’t seem to be a place for 60 Minutes in our culture now, beyond being a propaganda tool for the Democrats, which explains why so many of them feel a profound sense of loss now that Bari Weiss was brought in to give them a refresh.
Pelley’s statement to call out the new management at 60 Minutes was the hissy fit heard round the world. The irony is that his statement is itself bad journalism. He throws around serious allegations without offering any concrete examples:
Pelley has since talked to the New York Times to explain what he means by some of this, but even still, these are all examples of his own bias, one he can’t see and refuses to admit even exists. Instead, he insists that 60 Minutes is now showing bias simply by representing the other point of view.
In the interview, he explains how Bari Weiss wanted him to portray the other side of the story in the killing of Alex Pretti and Renee Good. He says he did not think she drove her car into the officer or that Pretti was in any way violent. While that doesn’t mean they should have lost their lives, there is no question that they were at war with federal officers in a way we’ve never seen since the last Civil War.
His bias was front and center at a speech in 2025, where his mass delusions about what this country has become were laid bare. This guy was willing to give Bari Weiss a chance, come on.
Already a legend in his own mind, Pelley is writing his own legacy now as a self-made hero who stood up to the fascist regime.
Here is Michael Moynihan:
A Woketopia, if You Can Keep It
Some say 60 Minutes never recovered from its biggest scandal, when CBS Corporate forced the show to censor an interview with Big Tobacco whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand, as depicted in Michael Mann’s brilliant film The Insider.
The Hollywood of today would never make a movie like that unless it somehow blamed Trump and the Republicans. Not only wouldn’t they make it, but they couldn’t make it, no one inside the empire would allow it because, contrary to their own mass delusions, the fascism was always coming from inside the house — all sticks of wood bound together as one, where no dissent is allowed.
I look around now, and I see relics of the old empire. They’re frantic and wild-eyed. They’re terrified that it all came crashing down. They don’t know why America turned away. But I do.
We never set out to build an empire. For us, it was riding the wave of new technology, new social media, a new computer in our pockets, and a brand new president to bring us into the promised land.
It was not Donald Trump's fault that our empire collapsed. It was the old cliche about how power corrupts. We acquired too much of it. Every company, institution, celebrity, movie studio, publishing house, and ordinary person has a social media platform. If you controlled social media, you could control them. Our public humiliation factory kept everyone in line, lest they be “it” on social media.
That was true even before Trump won, but the tweak to the algorithm in 2017, Donald Trump becoming president and ruling over Twitter at the same time, sent those of us inside the empire into waves of uncontrollable mass hysteria.
Many of them would never come out of it and are still locked in the spell of the mass delusion that a “fascist dictator, racist, rapist, criminal, pedophile” won the election in America not once, but twice. Somebody had to be lying. Pelley simply can’t tell the story the other way because he can’t see it. He’s still inside of it.
I see them now, those who bought the dream like I did, befuddled as to what to do next. They just want their power back, their empire, their utopia. Use fear, that always works to drive lazy voters to the polls. Fear of what? Tax cuts for the rich? Fox News? No, fear of the big things, the existential things, like “fascism” and “democracy.”
How do you even come back from that and make a pitch to the people that you should be put back in power to rule over a country you believe is under a Nazi occupation? How does Bruce Springsteen, Robert De Niro, Barbra Streisand, Katie Couric, Ellen DeGeneres, not to mention every single Democrat politician, come back from that?
Maybe it’s the effect of the internet on our brains, but the so-called “resistance” seems to have lost touch with the tangible reality of history, of what it looks like to fight real fascism. What Nazis really were. When you can make any reality you want, why wouldn’t you?
They are fine with the guy who has a Nazi tattoo because to them, that isn’t real.
Of course, leave it to Salena Zito to do the job of a real journalist and remind us:
70-80 million people died in World War II fighting to save the world from a fascist dictator, a real one. How can these people live with themselves by spreading the lie that we are living through anything like that now?
And that, more than anything, is why the empire collapsed. It was built on a foundation of delusions and lies.
Bari Weiss and the Fourth Turning
I have Bari Weiss to thank for starting this Substack. Very few people had the courage or the moxie to stand up to the Twitter mob back in 2020, but she did. I was on Twitter the night the mob came for her.
The screeching scolds had already been nipping at her heels at the New York Times after she was brought in to shake up the ideological chokehold the Left had on the paper (and still does).
They hated her, gossiped about her, shunned her, and yet, there she was, showing up anyway. She is built of stronger stuff than the kind of person who would ever crumple under the weight of the mob.
Tom Cotton's essay, Send in the Troops, reflected the views of most Americans, that if the riots over the Summer could not be controlled, the military should be brought in. Their opinions did not matter to the mob or, apparently, to the New York Times.
While 60 Minutes spent many stories on January 6th, they barely touched the riots in the Summer of 2020. They didn’t talk about the false narrative of Jacob Blake in Kenosha. That was left to local reporters.
They never told the other side of the story because no one did until Bari Weiss tried and was smacked down in a way that woke me up. It was like the lantern dropping out of the sky in The Truman Show.
It punctured the delusion at long last, and I realized that I was not getting the truth from the legacy media. They were lying to us and gaslighting us because Trump had to lose the election, and nothing else could matter.
But the truth still mattered to me. And it mattered to Bari Weiss. Eventually, she would launch a Substack revolution with The Free Press and urge others to follow her. And so I did.
Weiss is a millennial, the generation that’s to take the baton from the Baby Boomers, per the book, The Fourth Turning. You can see this unfolding everywhere, but perhaps nowhere as profoundly as with what happened at the Times and now at 60 Minutes.
Here is how the Times’ Lulu Garcia-Navarro’s interview with Pelley went on how he came to know Bari Weiss:
Um, yeah, sure pal. That sounds like padding for an upcoming lawsuit, not the truth. There is no way the Scott Pelley, who gave that speech at Wake Forest, is going to give someone hired by David Ellison “the benefit of the doubt.” That he had never even heard of Bari Weiss or had no idea any scandal had erupted at the Times over the Tom Cotton op-ed says it all.
The Fourth Turning is like winter. The old must die to make way for the new. Trump didn’t collapse the empire on his own, but he’s a “Gray Champion” all the same. The one Baby Boomer who could tear it all down to make way for the millennials, like Bari Weiss, to reshape the future for the generations to come.
MAGA
In 2020, I escaped the Doomsday Cult our empire had become and was searching for signs of life, for truth, for something that felt real. I began driving across the country and saw an America that people like me had forgotten even existed.
It wasn’t a virtual world where we make our own reality. It was a tangible place, with things people built with their own hands. It was farms, churches, town squares, neighborhoods, highways, and factories. What we built online had no place for this America. If you never understand that, you’ll never understand MAGA.
From the hills, the backyards, and the fields, one name called out from this forgotten America: Trump.
Even now, in 2026, these signs still stand. Not just in one state, in nearly every state.
Trump is not in power because he’s a fascist. He’s in power because we, the people, put him there to fight for us against the mighty empire that was like a black hole, sucking all of American society into it.
Anyone who thinks Bari Weiss would do Donald Trump's bidding at CBS News is living in a fantasy. They don’t know her, they don’t know him, and they most certainly do not know this country anymore.
It doesn’t seem like it’s asking too much for guys like Scott Pelley to snap out of it at long last and to realize this is a big country with lots of different kinds of people in it. And all of them have the same right to representation. If the culture stopped speaking to them and the government stopped representing them, well, it’s all over but the shouting.

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Dear Paul Krugman,
You used to be the kind of journalist I thought was telling the truth. I looked up to you, as I did so many writers at the New York Times. I was a different person then. That was before everything changed. The year was 2020, a summer of riots and a breakthrough moment when many of us realized for the first time that the Gray Lady was not telling us the truth.
I have been on the internet for 30 years. I watched the collapse of traditional media and the rise of opinion-based journalism, the kind you do, Paul. Do you mind if I call you Paul? Mr. Krugman sounds so formal, and really, I’d like for you to see me as a human being, someone worthy of your attention and respect.
Now that I have confirmation of what I’ve assumed all along, that people like you, Kara Swisher, Peter Baker, and Susan Glasser would like people like me thrown into re-education camps or gulags, I feel it’s worth the extra effort to get you to see real people again.
To the horror of many, you went viral last week for your comments on what all of you will do with Trump supporters and the system that elected him. It was ugly, Paul. As ugly as anything I’ve seen written by a high-minded journalist and certainly closer to what the Nazis believed about the Jews than anything I’ve seen in my lifetime:
“Purging of the United States, we need a de-MAGAfication. I’m not going over the top by using a word that’s very similar to the de-Nazification that we pursued successfully after World War Two in Germany.
It’s not just the MAGA ideology, but the whole structure of hugely unequal power, hugely unequal wealth that made this horrific moment possible. It’s not going to be easy, but, and maybe it’s not going to be doable, but we have to try, because this is an absolute, this is a nightmare, this is the nightmare beyond, I think, even the worst fantasies of progressives, beyond the worst fantasies of conservatives, who still have a conscience, there still are plenty of those, but they’re no longer MAGA.
This has to be turned around, and we should not, above all, whitewash or forget this moment. This is where a lot of forces in America have been leading, and if we don’t do something beyond just getting rid of Trump, it’s going to happen again.”
It can’t have been easy, watching Trump win a second time and this time the popular vote, or to admit you are no longer relevant and that the only value you have is in giving the base of the Democratic Party their daily dose of hate and fear. Why didn’t Americans listen to your constant bleating about the end of the world? That’s an important question to ask, Paul.
After all, they’re your most popular videos.
Your Substack, with over 500K subscribers, is no less alarmist:
It looks like your Substack is paying you more than you made at the Times, that’s for sure. So why not keep pumping it out, day after day, like a broken record — fear, hysteria, hatred, more fear, more hatred. What could possibly go wrong?
You all seem certain you’re about to take back power and put things back where they belong. The only question you seem to have on your lips is not how we can better address the needs of the people, but what you will do with all of those MAGAts.
You don’t even pretend there is a whole country or even half of a country that voted all of you out, not once but twice. You have no shame in admitting you see yourselves as better than the working-class half of America. You fully admit it. You bask in it. You know your power, Paul, and that’s maybe the only true thing you know about yourself.
So let me set you straight on a few things. You are not the Allied Forces after World War II, and Trump is not now, nor has he ever been, Hitler. The closest thing to Fascism this country has ever seen is with all of you in power. It became “all sticks of wood bound together as one,” a “fasci,” with all elements of our society mandating conformity or else.
Your side ruled through fear and violence, and still does. You violently beat Trump supporters and feel emboldened to do so, just like Hitler’s Brown Shirts. You probably never even knew that in 2015, Trump supporters were beaten and harassed and called Nazis.
On the Left, there is no such thing as free thought and speech, which is why cancel culture collapsed the empire and why Tyler Robinson had to silence Charlie Kirk. So who are the real fascists, Paul?
On your side, thought and speech are heavily policed throughout our culture. Everyone is tracked, monitored, and under constant surveillance lest they like the wrong tweet, follow the wrong person on social media, or read the wrong news outlet.
Just because people like you cosplay that ICE is the Gestapo doesn’t make it so. It took 80 years for the world to forget about the Holocaust. But no one should ever forget what that looked like, and it wasn’t mass deportations or even detaining a five-year-old or shooting Alex Pretti and Renee Good.
Shame on you. Shame on all of you for even suggesting that what we’ve just lived through is on any level the same as what happened during World War II. 70-80 million people were killed. 600,000 in America alone. Even the war in Gaza can’t compare, and shame on anyone who suggests it’s the same.
None of this should have to be said to a man who enjoys high status inside utopia, a well-educated elite who lives on the Upper West Side and enjoys a decent retirement while he’s discarding half of America like human garbage. You tell me who the real Nazis are.
You don’t have to tell me. I already know. I escaped the suffocating dystopia that you live in. I escaped the world that no longer knows the meaning of important words like fascist, Nazi, dictator, king, and pedophile, never mind man or woman. I escaped that world because the truth always mattered to me more than being liked, making money, or having status.
I can’t say the same for you, Paul, or any one of your former colleagues at the Times. We’re watching the destruction of legacy media in real time, just one of the pillars of your now collapsing empire. Trump won because ordinary Americans can’t stand living under the oppressive thumb of the high and mighty, like yourself.
I didn’t see what kind of power we all had until 2020. We had built a Shining Woketopia on the Internet that gave us complete control of all institutions of power - educational, cultural, corporations, and institutions. We thought we could shape the America we dreamed of. The problem was that there was a whole other America outside our bubble, and it took Donald Trump to ignite a populist revolt.
The idea that this was about racism and bigotry was a lie. It was never Hitler invading. You were never the resistance. You’ve been living in a dream world of your own making. You destroyed yourselves trying to destroy Trump. The real story of the last ten years will never be told by any of you, much less seen or understood.
I still see signs of the MAGA I know. I just saw one near the memorial site for the deadly battle of Antietam. From the middle of America, on the side of a store just living out their ordinary days near the ghosts of profound history, this:
I am no longer welcome in your world, Paul. Some days, that hurts more than others. But when I see what you have become, calling for a “purge” and “de-MAGAfication, I know you don’t know this country anymore. You’ve been isolated for too long, and you’ve been participating in a decade-long deception.
I also know I have the truth on my side, and that makes me the lucky one.

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Ashley St. Clair is all of us. Well, she might not be you. She might not even be me. Although I see some of myself in her. But she is this mess we’ve built. Like all of us, she has played a role in this ongoing virtual Civil War between Left and Right, played out amid tangled algorithms, giant egos, hurt feelings, and cash flow.
She is the same age as my daughter, just 28 years old, but it feels like she’s lived five lifetimes. She has shapeshifted from MAGA to having Elon Musk’s baby, to a public fight over said baby, to throwing herself at the feet of the Left, branding herself as a one-woman confessional who will dangle all of the dirty details of “the MAGA cult” like bloody chum to hungry sharks.
She is smart enough to know two things. First, the Left still controls most of our culture. If you want book deals, successful podcasts with the top-tier advertisers, or stories about you in the New York Times, or even movie deals about your life, you have to be accepted by them. And second, they won’t accept you unless you bring the goods.
And boy does she ever.
What do you want to know, she says on her TikTok as she applies gobs of makeup she doesn’t need - contour, foundation, concealer, blush, more concealer, more contour, powder. Do you want to know MAGA is a cult? Here you go. Are they racists? Oh yeah, she says, as she dabs her eyes with a powder puff.
She might not realize it, but her makeup is a metaphor for the role she’s playing now, a real person hiding under layers and layers of disguise. Who is she this time? She’s the one talking to Jennifer Welch, the Wicked Witch of the Left:
She was on with the chipper lunatic Suzanne Lambert:
And Haley on the Go:
And the most cringey of all was a giggly appearance with our favorite Cartier Communist, Hasan Piker.
Baby Mama Blues
Ashley has not gone full Monica Lewinsky and claimed victimhood to excuse her role in becoming yet another baby mama for the Henry VIII of Silicon Valley, Elon Musk. She does seem to take some responsibility for agreeing to go to bed with him upon first meeting. He even asked her what name she liked. Elon was upfront about what he wanted from her, and she seemed fully on board.
As a hot conservative female who already had one kid in her early 20s, her ovaries were calling Elon’s name. He slid into her DMs before sliding into other places - yes, says Ashley, she joined the Mile High Club, courtesy of Elon’s private jet.
But one thing an influencer, however fluid in politics, must preserve is their platform. What good is having the richest man in the world’s baby if you can’t brag about it? Be known for it? Have instant status because of it? Not to mention the child having to wander around the planet, not being Elon’s son, while everyone knows he is, like that b*****d son of Henry VIII.
St. Clair is throwing around the figure of $40 million to buy her off, but she doesn’t say exactly who is offering it. Musk had originally offered a deal with $15 million up front and then $100,000 per month to raise the child, money most people couldn’t imagine in an entire lifetime. But that came with an NDA. She refused.
Musk has said he gave her $2.5 million up front, then $500,000 per year. She has said he slashed her child support payments, causing her to sell her Tesla to cover expenses.
Either way, whatever she’s gotten is not enough, not in 2026 when the platform is everything. Ashley St. Clair wants more.
And in that way, too, she is all of us and this grotesque online machine we’ve all helped build, where a person can become a star overnight, then the object of scorn, with an angry mob attempting to destroy them as the entire internet watches. She was viciously attacked as a gold digger by MAGA, then they made AI porn of her, she says, even depicting her as an underage sex object, which is why she’s suing Musk.
How it started, how it’s going
Ashley St. Clair started her career as a blonde, appearing on Fox News pushing the MAGA line:
And at the Babylon Bee, making content like this:
Her past warring against the transgender community means it’s iffy whether or not she’ll ultimately get a pass, no matter the mea culpas she’s handed out like candy. This TikTok user says forget it.
After all, Ashley St. Clair wrote a children’s book in hopes of saving some of the young from destroying their bodies. It kind of seemed like she believed it, right?
Since then, however, she has found ways to get out of it. She’s thrown herself at the mercy of prominent Democrats like podcaster David Pakman:
She’s talked about how ignorant she was, how she fell into a cult and didn’t know what she was doing. She talks about her past of being locked away and home schooled, where she was isolated from other people, before going to college and hitting the party scene, and eventually, to hear her tell it, she ended up in a cult.
I know what it feels like to believe in a movement, then get chewed up and spit out, and find myself in a place where I’m telling all of the secrets of my former side, trashing them to the delight of the opposition. I know what motivates her and why she so badly needs affirmation and acceptance.
But confessing her sins wouldn’t be enough for people whose ultimate goal is to end Trump and MAGA forever and retake power. They need a lot more than just confirmation of their mass delusions about Trump (he’s Hitler!) and MAGA (it’s a cult!).
No, they needed a way to deny reality yet again and cast themselves as the real winners. How could they, the most perfect people in the world, have lost to Trump? Why did half the country reject them again? It’s a truth they still can’t face. Lucky for them, Ashley St. Clair has gifted them with the perfect way to explain the 2024 election. It was rigged by Elon Musk.
The Democrats have done everything they know how to do to destroy Donald Trump and his MAGA army. They have framed him as a Russian spy, called him a racist, a rapist, a bigot, a dictator, a fascist, Hitler, a king, and a felon. They impeached him twice, indicted him four times, and attempted to throw him off the ballot in several states. He has survived three assassination attempts so far.
They’ve obstructed everything he has tried to do, from cleaning up the streets to closing the border to bringing manufacturing back to stopping Iran from getting a nuke. He’s stood up for women who are forced to deny reality by competing against biological boys. He’s stood against “gender affirming care” that destroys the bodies of children who can’t consent.
If Trump is for it, they are against it. They have pressured all artists to take a side against half the country, in Hollywood, in music, at the Kennedy Center. They insist that supporting him is like supporting Hitler, even if he’s beating back his own right flank by standing up for Israel.
And yet, for the Left, he is the only thing standing in their way and for all of us the only bulwark against total societal control.
It all sounds great because it absolves the Democrats of any blame. See, they did everything right. It wasn’t a coup against a sitting president running for re-election or the installation of his Vice-President without a single vote. Or that she was a terrible candidate. No, it wasn’t their fault they lost. It was Elon’s space lasers.
Now that she has their attention, the warnings are getting more urgent, just in time to prepare for the midterms.
And that is the real gift Ashley St. Clair has laid at the feet of the side she hopes will embrace her, value her, accept her, and elevate her. If she can help them win elections, whether the midterms or 2028, she can destroy both Elon Musk and MAGA. Well, how could a $40 million payout even compare?
I would just offer her one word of caution as someone who came from the Left. Don’t tell them what they want to hear. Tell them what you know to be true because that’s what they need to hear. Confirming their mass delusion only sinks them in deeper.
They don’t realize it yet, but their empire is in a state of collapse, and not a moment too soon. The counterculture is rising to take its place. When that happens, Ashley St. Clair will want to be more than just a footnote hitching a ride on a sinking ship.

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