Free Daily Podcast Summary
Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone: Daily Summaries Delivered
by Sasha Stone
Essays on politics and culture from Sasha Stone's Substack. A former Democrat and Leftist who escaped the bubble to get to know the other side of the country and to take a more critical look at the left.
Latest Episodes
The most recent episodes — sign up to get AI-powered summaries of each one.
- Yesterday58 min
Why We Can’t Feel 9/11 25 Years Later
What kind of people would dance in the streets after the 9/11 terrorist attack that killed upwards of 3,000 people? The same ones who have now become elevated martyrs by large swaths of the Global Left: the Palestinians.Katie Couric, like most mainstream journalists back then, had no problem exposing such monstrous behavior by those fed a steady diet of dehumanization of the American people. Would she do it today? No. Would any of them do it today? No.Who would celebrate the live execution of a prominent activist on the Right, so much so that they’d lose their jobs for exposing what sociopaths they really are? Hundreds, if not thousands, on the Left did just that. Radicalized or mainstream, it didn’t matter. They have become what the Palestinians were back then: so propagandized and radicalized, they’ve lost their humanity.You can see it now in those TikTok videos that have turned “When it Happens” into a viral trend. That’s what ten years of dehumanizing can do to otherwise decent people. They say they’re decent, but TikTok proves otherwise.They have cast themselves as morally superior to the other half of the country and would point to how some on the Right mocked George Floyd after his death in 2020. But the difference is that many prominent Republicans like Ted Cruz instantly condemned it. No Democrat has condemned the mockery and the celebration of Charlie’s death. Oh sure, they all said what they had to say: the standard “violence has no place in our politics.” They said it, but did they mean it? How could they if they’ve never condemned the rising cult-like fantasies of Trump’s death and the celebration of Charlie's execution?If anything, the Democrats were more worried Charlie’s influence would grow, so they sent out their One True King, Barack Obama, to put Charlie’s legacy in context.Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did the same thing, acting as though what Charlie said - the cherry-picked, out-of-context quotes fed to them- was worse than their own side mocking and celebrating his murder. His words were worse than his death.But that is who they are now. Speech is violence. Speech is hate. Speech must be tightly monitored and controlled. Is assassinating Charlie Kirk or trying to assassinate Donald Trump any different from the Jihadists who mass-murdered journalists at Charlie Hebdo in Paris for blasphemy against Mohammad? Hasan Piker, aka the “Twitch streamer in California,” like Dean Withers, condemned those who made jokes of Charlie’s death. At least at first. Once Piker sensed the vacuum left in Charlie’s absence, he turned his death into a viral meme just a month or so later. Credit to Axios’ Alex Thompson for pressing him to explain it.Piker’s song became a TikTok dance meme and a permission structure for many to showcase themselves as dead-eyed zombies dancing to the sound of the bullet hitting his neck a year later for the “Kirkaversary.”Utopias only have two paths forward. They either collapse or they become more authoritarian. The Left still hasn’t confronted the radical elements on their side, not just Hasan Piker, but the many shooters who have risen up to become martyrs and heroes.They mock, they meme, but underneath it all, as with Al-Qaeda or other radical Islamic groups, what motivates them is pure hatred. Words are violence. Words are hatred, and “some hate can’t be negotiated out.” They can laugh it off all they want, but they’ve left a paper trail.Turning Point put up a Charlie Kirk statue, and it was immediately vandalized.If they can meme a live execution and feel nothing, then why wouldn’t they see America as bad or worse than Al-Qaeda? The oppressor/oppressed indoctrination factory that is public schools and universities has raised them in the good/evil binary. Video games, IP, and superhero movies all adopted that binary, and after Columbine and 9/11, parents like me shut our kids indoors to keep them safe, and this good/evil binary would one day become white people evil, brown people good, and Al-Qaeda, like the Palestinians, can’t be seen as the villains. Abdul El-Sayed and Zohran Mamdani have arisen as cult leaders almost because there is nothing the Left will hold them accountable for, lest they be called racists. No one will look at El-Sayed’s erased history, the videos or the tweets. What did he think? What does he still think? No one will know because no one would dare ask.The Democrats have never been held accountable for the sharp rise of radicalized violence and death fantasies that have gone mainstream. They’re rewarded for it with likes and reposts. They’ve never confronted it. They’ve never solved it, and the legacy media has supported them every step of the way, all the while demonizing MAGA as the more extreme side. Piker was their masculine, patriarchal, non-white Joe Rogan. No more Mr. Nice Guy! Let’s get those Gen-Z and male voters. Th
- 1 weeks ago52 min
Why They Had to Kill Charlie Kirk Twice
America lived through a political assassination one year ago today, and millions of people either barely noticed, shrugged it off, or openly celebrated. That was one of the darkest days in American history, a day I never thought I’d live through, watching people I used to know lose their humanity.One famous example was the actress Amanda Seyfried, who posted this:Charlie Kirk did not incite violence, and he was not “hateful.” Tyler Robinson shot Charlie Kirk to please people like Amanda Seyfried.She doesn’t regret her words. She stands by them, like the good little cult member she is. She complained about having to hire a bodyguard. She should feel lucky she wasn’t shot in the neck, lucky her kids don’t have to grow up without her. The Left felt emboldened by his death, even going so far as to celebrate it then and even now. When people lost their jobs for it - because who wants to employ a sociopathic monster - they whined about free speech. Jimmy Kimmel's cold heart could only make a bad situation worse. And then the videos.They tweeted and were rewarded for their ugliness. There was no bottom.I watched in horror as they went at Charlie’s memory; so scared were they that his legacy would expand and grow like a mushroom cloud. They thought their true hatred could extinguish everything Charlie left behind, but they were wrong. They were attacking a cartoon they invented, not the real Charlie Kirk.Charlie was right in the text he wrote the day before he died that Andrew Wilson read: the Left was trying to kill him. Tyler Robinson said the reason he killed Charlie Kirk was that “Some hate can’t be negotiated out.” Amanda Seyfried said “hate,” so did Tyler Robinson, and so did his defense attorney at the hearing where Robinson pled Not Guilty.The Left killed Charlie Kirk. Tyler Robinson just pulled the trigger. Their conviction in the Court of Public Opinion was that dissent was hate and Charlie Kirk would not stop spreading it; therefore, he should be silenced one way or another. Assassinations don’t happen every day, not in my lifetime anyway, especially not from a rooftop at a public event. A year prior to Charlie’s murder, on July 13, 2024, another killer climbed onto a rooftop and almost shot Trump to death. He missed. Just barely.There would be two more assassination attempts on Trump’s life, and plenty more that might have been. Why is it so important to the Left that their enemies die? Because that’s where all of this totalitarianism has to go. Charlie stood for exactly the opposite. He didn’t incite violence. He stood up for robust debate. But to the Left, they don’t believe that, which is why they’ve begun to resort to violence, excusing violence, celebrating violence. To them, that’s their solution to their biggest problem - what to do with all of these people who don’t agree with them?Hate to the Left is described as being anti-abortion, against “transing the kids,” and holding traditional beliefs about family and faith. That’s the first layer. It goes deeper. If you are against illegal immigration, you’re a fascist; if you support lower taxes, you’re killing Americans. “You’re a racist, a bigot, a homophobe, a transphobe.”They don’t even know what defines their hate anymore. They just know they’re consumed by it, which is all the more ironic given that they tagged Charlie with that word: hate.There was nothing hateful about Charlie Kirk, and he leaves behind a deep, dark hole that won’t be filled any time soon. The Left has become not unlike the jihadists who kill those who mock Allah. Even if they aren’t condoning violence, they’re condoning punishing people just for the crime of criticizing them. That no one shamed those who celebrated tells you everything about their values, and we’re supposed to put these people back in power? No, Charlie wanted to talk to them, to change their minds, to put himself in danger every time he faced them. They hit him with everything they had to shut him up, and nothing worked. And Charlie Kirk got through to them just by stating his opinion and making his case. Imagine that. He was about the best the Right had to offer. He was a lighthouse. The Left had to kill Charlie again because they had to kill his ideas, his thoughts, his speech, lest they somehow find a way out and reach the minds of the indoctrinated and maybe introduce critical thinking. We can’t have that.Are there enough voices to counter the lies by the Left as they attempt to write Charlie’s history? I don’t know. But just for the record, here is how Charlie Kirk spoke about gay people or the LGBT community.Here is how he spoke when confronted about his opinion on affirmative action. He never backed off of what he believed, but he made indoctrinated college kids defend what they’d been taught, and many of them mig
- 1 weeks ago37 min
Mass Hysteria in Massachusetts. Again.
In the good old days, before the Great Feminization, social media tribalism, and the instant fame of TikTok, most people felt disgust and horror at the thought of a mother killing her kids, let alone methodically leading each one down in the basement, then strangling them with an exercise band. This is the stuff of nightmares. Imagine your mother, the person you trust most in the world, telling you to “go to God, baby” as you felt your throat close and your life wither away. We’ve seen their faces, and we know their names. Everyone should be horrified, and yet, three years after the murders, Lindsay Clancy is not seen as a monster by hundreds of thousands of women all over the world but rather as their hero and a martyr for the agony and pain of motherhood.We are Lindsay! We stand with you, Lindsay!A triple homicide suspect whose fate was upended by one juror who withstood the pressure of 11 others to insist she was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt has become, for women, another Me Too moment. Me too, Lindsay. Me Too.Why are so many women losing their minds over this case, insisting Lindsay isn’t guilty because either she was afflicted with postpartum psychosis and had no control over these acts or Patrick did it because Patrick “said it” and he wanted out of the marriage to go have an affair with the woman he’s now married to.I wish it wasn’t mostly women who are vulnerable to this level of group psychosis. But it is. Women are communal. They tend to form groups or tribes, out of necessity and human evolution. Every time I scroll TikTok, I see them. There they are, staring back at me, those crazy, crazy women, performing for total strangers, united only by one singular idea: Lindsay Clancy is not guilty.Welcome to Rock BottomLindsay Clancy has been cast as a typical heroine in a Lifetime movie, or the protagonist in one of the psychological thrillers so popular on Audible. I know this world all too well. I watch these movies as a guilty pleasure, and I consume so many of these books that I forget which ones I’ve already read.It looks something like this:This might explain why the less camera-ready child killers like Andrea Yates or Susan Smith never became a worldwide sensation. The plots play out almost the exact same way. The ambitious, successful, beautiful woman has a seemingly ordinary life until it is disrupted by a dark force. Almost always, this is an abusive, manipulative, lying, cheating man. But not always. Sometimes it’s a woman. Whatever it is, the protag is never to be rescued. She must always rescue herself. Men who are “good” are allowed to admire them from afar and serve them but never save them.Lindsay Clancy has fit neatly into this role, especially if you are one of the truly insane women who believe she didn’t do it, and there are a lot of those. How perfect for a Lifetime movie or a psychological thriller if we found out in the last act that Patrick really did do it and Lindsay emerges as the true victim.Their theory is that Lindsay only thinks she killed the kids when, in reality, Patrick did it. It’s just that Lindsay did do it. She admitted it. She told the Chaplain first. Then, she told her husband and a psychologist that a voice told her to do it. The voice never appeared before or since because the voice was actually the mother who wanted to kill her kids.If Patrick Clancy is guilty of anything, it’s being too kind and trusting of his wife. Their text message exchange the day of the murders:And a recent appearance at his church. Patrick Clancy and their entire family have forgiven Lindsay and believe this was the result of postpartum psychosis, which is why Patrick and Lindsay are both suing the healthcare providers who treated her. And it also explains why they stonewalled, testified for the defense, and refused to give any insight into what else might have driven Lindsay to murder that day.These are not the cries of someone who lost her children but the cries of a woman who remembers that moment she caused them so much fear, so much pain, and their deaths. If a voice ordered her to do it, why didn’t she just say no? Why didn’t she scream for her babies when she snapped out of it? Believe WomenI always thought it would be funny to put out a bumper sticker amid the Me Too movement that said: “Believe Children, Salem, 1692.” I’m not sure anyone would have gotten the joke. There aren’t many people out there like me who have read every book, listened to every podcast, and know everything there is to know about the Salem Witch Trials.One thing I know for sure, however, is that it wasn’t about “burning witches” nor was it about the patriarchy punishing women. These are lies that have never been corrected. The truth is that it was adolescent girls, not men, who had the power to decide who could live and who would die. <p
- 3 weeks ago37 min
Lindsay Clancy: The Psychopath and Her Sycophants
The PsychopathLindsay Clancy, in my opinion, did not want to kill herself. She wanted to kill her children. It was all becoming too much for her, and she felt like she was drowning in it. Drowning in trying to be the perfect wife and the perfect mother. Her thoughts of suicide came as she tried to stop her thoughts of wanting to kill her children because what mother would ever think of doing such a thing?That voice? That was her. That was her hatred bubbling up, especially for Dawson, the middle child. Her hatred at herself for not being the perfect mother, and the loud voice of her inner psychopath who gave her advice on how to end her misery. Kill them. That’s what you really want to do. Then, you can kill yourself.Except that she didn’t really want to kill herself. She is a nurse, after all, and everyone knows how to commit suicide by slitting your wrists. She would know exactly where the carotid artery was, oh, but that voice would tell her just make it look like that was what you were trying to do. Get enough blood to make it convincing, then crawl out the window and into the snow and wait for your husband Patrick to find you and save you.What wasn’t in the plan? The way she fell, paralyzing herself, which is why these, along with whether she had a lawyer or not, were her primary concern once in the hospital. Do my legs work, she asked. The voice guided her through all of this and probably even through the trial now, careful never to disclose that it’s still with her. The camera is on you now, Lindsay. Put on a good show. Maybe a part of her was sad to hear what the voice made her do, but she knew the voice was her own. It was the psychopath within that did not want to do the job of motherhood anymore. She wanted her old life back. She wanted to be who she was before. She wanted control. Her inner voice was herself.She tried every medication she could. She tried aspirations. But the dark thoughts kept seeping through, no matter how much she tried to suppress them. She disclosed these thoughts to her husband and mother and hinted at them to her best friend. What she never did was turn herself in for them as a danger to her own children. If the husband bears any responsibility for these deaths, it is that he did not turn her in himself and keep those precious babies far, far away from her.On the day of the killings, Lindsey Clancy meticulously planned her actions, not as an irrational act but as a coldly rational one. Separating the children one by one and leading them down into the basement would have been scary for them, since it had never happened before. That was where Daddy worked. That was where Mommy worked out. That was where guests slept. It was not where kids belonged. And that ominous walk down those stairs with Mommy must have been terrifying, but their little brains could not comprehend what would happen next. Here is a clip from Chicks on the Right highlighting the prosecutor’s powerful closing.The hope and the reflex is to blame the drugs. We’re a country of people on too many drugs, whether they’re dying on the streets of San Francisco of Fentanyl or they’re murdering their children in Massachusetts. One thing is for sure: lots of people are making lots of money selling the illusion that there is such a thing as being perfect.I noticed this back in the 1990s when suddenly everyone had something wrong with their brains. We’d gone through therapy and healed the trauma and abuse in our past, but it didn’t make us “right” or “correct.” We needed drugs for that. We needed, wanted to be “healthy.”We were the victims of our hard lives, of our society, of our government, of the environment, of our diet, of our education, our culture, our marriages, and yes, even our children. Our children have paid the price, too, because if they weren’t perfect, something had to be wrong with them; we had done something bad or failed at motherhood. The mythical “post-partum” depression came on like one of these ailments in our brains we could do nothing about. We were all supposed to respect women who undergo this affliction and forgive them everything.Over the many decades, especially on the Left, we’ve become separated from ourselves in nearly every way. Whether it’s mothers aborting their children now as a rite of passage and an act of empowerment, or it’s mothers resenting their children and unable to mother them with post-partum. Be afraid, they say, be very afraid.And then, all the way down to our precious babies whose genders we now view as potentially “something wrong with their brains.” Mothers allow gender clinics, teachers, and influencers to tell them they don’t know their own babies. Drugs will fix them. Surgery, intervention, turn them into something else, someone else, someone more perfect.Wome
- 4 weeks ago38 min
Good Luck with Hasan Piker, Democrats
The Democrats are just now waking up to a viral video of Hasan Piker singing We Are Charlie Kirk to a cacophony of cheers from the clapping seals in the sociopathic dehumanization factory known as the New Left.Why do they believe they are morally superior to the working-class Trump voters? Because the legacy media props them up and never calls them out. Well, now, they have a bad case of Hasan Piker, and as long as they stand with him, they will have to excuse the idiotic things he says and does, like wearing a Mao costume and mocking the grief of the Right after Charlie’s brutal murder.Not many Democrats will take that moral stand against Piker. They’re too afraid to look uncool, un-manly, and lose all of his millions of followers. And besides, they will say, Trump is “just as bad.” Trump mocked the deaths of his enemies, but Charlie Kirk was not Hasan Piker’s enemy. Maybe he’s jealous of the love millions had for Charlie - real love, not the kind Hasan Piker has, his sycophants begging him to be more sadistic, not just to his dog. These are dark and disturbed people. We are now approaching the one-year anniversary of the brutal, bloody, premeditated, calculated murder of Charlie Kirk by a guy whose desire to become a somebody drove him to become a hero for a day. Maybe he did it for his confused and anguished lover who could not decide on his gender identity. Maybe he did it for the pathologically insane furry community on Discord. Maybe he was whipped into a frenzy and aimed at Charlie by, oh, I don’t know, the CIA or the FBI. They’ve done worse. Israel, however, it was not. That didn’t stop craven psychopath Candace Owens - whom Piker calls his “Queen” - from plundering the grave of her “friend” Charlie. The truth is that he kept her at a distance, needed her to help build Blexit, and then, when she got too crazy, he slowly, carefully backed away. She blamed Erika for that. She blamed Turning Point. One thing is for sure: she is too much of a narcissist to put the blame where it really belongs, on herself. Chicks on the Right had an illuminating interview with Andrew Kolvet of Turning Point to clarify just what kind of relationship Charlie really had with Candace and why she’s become a woman scorned. But if Candace’s exploitation of Charlie’s death dwarfed the Left’s celebrating, Hasan Piker somehow manages to top them all. What most people who are just waking up to the true evil that is Hasan Piker singing We Are Charlie Kirk don’t know is that just over a month after Charlie’s murder, one of Piker’s putrid streams brought him a tiny bit of internet fame for mocking the song. Why did he think it was funny? Because he’s a dehumanizing, repulsive shitheel who uses his dog as a prop when he’s not shocking her to keep her in place. He’s mocking MAGA for listening to and celebrating an AI-generated song that, to date, has over 6 million views. There were lots of AI songs about Charlie. I even fell for it for a brief moment because I wanted to believe there were people on the Left kind enough, empathetic enough, and generous enough to sing about Charlie. But of course not. It was an empty void, one that AI filled.And Hasan Piker, puny little cockroach that he is, found it “funny.” You see, he’s trying to outdo 4chan all in the name of selling Communism and Islam. Hey, it’s worth it to sell your soul to take control of America. He kept dipping back into that bowl because that’s what you do if you are an influencer. You give the people more of what they want, and in his case, it’s sitting on his dog-torturing basement throne, while mocking the working class.He couldn’t get enough of it. He was like an uncut bull let loose in a field of fertile cows. On and on it went. He made his name on it. Most of this was done just over a month after the shooting, but he’s continued to use it for the lols, even two months ago.So it was natural that when he took the stage, he would sing it live, like he was the Rolling Stones, dragging out “Jumping Jack Flash,” or Elvis Costello, singing “Pump It Up” one more time. Yes, he was mocking MAGA, people he deems lower class and beneath his sorry ass, and making fun of how deeply the murder of Charlie Kirk dug into their morale. Most people don’t exist in the dank, slimy corners of the internet, so they might not know how long Piker has been dragging this story out. What else is he going to do? Talk about healthcare? No, everyone wants to see human suffering, and he’s more than willing to give it. He loves Candace Owens too because water seeks its own level. But it was a serious thing. Even Megyn Kelly once talked about why it mattered that we were saying “We are Charlie Kirk.” We are people the Left wants to see unpersoned at best and dead at worst. But most of all, just to shut up, and that’s what Tyler Robinson did to Charlie Kir
- 4 weeks ago54 min
Yes, Jon Ossoff Is That Desperate
Today, after staying on Jon Ossoff’s email list for eight years, I finally hit unsubscribe. This is my Dear Jon letter, and in some ways, the moment I will really be saying goodbye to the Democratic Party once and for all.I will admit I held on too long with Ossoff. Try as I might over the past six years since leaving the party to extricate myself from their relentless email machine, I didn’t mind when Ossoff’s emails flew into my mailbox. In 2017, I saw in Ossoff what the Democrats needed as they tried to find their next Obama stand-in. He fit the bill perfectly. I also liked how he didn’t seem to buy into the party's increasingly crazy extremes but was comfortably moderate, at least for a time. My record with Federal political donations tells the tale. If anyone looks at my record, they’ll see I continued donating to ActBlue through 2025. Except that I didn’t. I just didn’t realize they were charging me all that time. That’s how relentless they are and how stupid I am. The Glow-UpBefore the expensive makeup, strategic lighting and tight shirts, Ossoff looked like what Steve Bannon would call a “pencil-necked geek.” He was too skinny, even if he was an Obama clone. He seemed too good, too clean for dirty politics back then. I fell for the lie that Ossoff really was a self-made man, a “filmmaker who turned to politics,” per this Wall Street Journal video.He is hardly self-made. More like a hot house flower.Ossoff grew up in a political household. Both parents were heavily involved in politics. At just 19, he began working on Capitol Hill for Rep. Hank Johnson while attending Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service and continued working for him until 2012. His email list was mostly the kind of thing you’d get in the old days of the Democratic Party, the kind of thing you’d expect from the Obama clone factory. But that isn’t really where Ossoff is now in his political career. He is determined not to go down as a squeaky-clean beta male. No, Ossoff has gotten SWOLE. He appears to have brought in a team to fix the look to be camera-ready. The makeup, the hair, the dimples. Ossoff finally looks the part. He can do alpha. All of a sudden, he’s the guy everyone is talking about. He’s the guy who is suddenly the hottie on tap. True, he’s Jewish, and that’s a problem for the Democrats, but no one really talks about that. Instead, they’re selling the matinee idol on TikTok. The truth is, I didn’t think about Jon Ossoff much until he went viral for channeling his inner sexist in a desperate bid to get attention and rise to the top of the pile. And it worked. He went viral! He’s in the headlines now, and everyone knows his name. But this version of Jon Ossoff will never be president. He’s abandoned what made him exceptional in the first place, his decency and his goodness. The sharks demanded flesh and blood, and he gave it to them, but it will come at a cost. One of the main reasons Democrats have failed for the past ten years to gain any purchase in this country has been their obsessive fixation on Trump, which is pretty much all Ossoff is doing.It’s a race to the bottom to see who can out-Trump Trump, to be more confrontational, more bullying, more vulgar, and tougher. They believe this will solve their “man problem,” and who knows, maybe it will. I look at Ossoff now, and I don’t see someone tough or brave. I see a coward.Ossoff, like James Talarico and almost every Democrat, is now leaning into the party's extremes. Because of course he is. He has to. In his viral speech in Atlanta, he referenced his daughters and said they will ask him one day how he let things get so bad, and, in the same sentence, dismiss the concerns of little girls and women in sports.Guess what, Jon: thousands of little girls will one day ask you why you let it happen, why you allowed so many of them to believe they should amputate their breasts when they could not consent. They will look to you, Jon. You will have to tell them why you pretended biological males had no advantage in sports because you were too cowardly to stand up to your own party. I once thought Ossoff was a good man. Now I see him as a desperate man, no different from any other Democrat, so much so that he’s given himself over to what has become an uncontrollable fetish on the Left to dehumanize Donald Trump and his supporters. They slut-shamed Melania’s modeling photos, splashing them all over social media. They suggested Trump was having an affair with his own daughter. They took a bath in Karoline Leavitt’s Vanity Fair photos, which splashed all over TikTok and led to her being called KKKaroline.They mocked Kellyanne Conway’s age and her face, and Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ makeup. It’s grotesque and repulsive, but it is typical and ongoing. Even now, Rosie O’Donnell is out there on primetime t
- Aug 18, 202652 min
Woke 1.0 Canceled America. Woke 2.0 Will Destroy It.
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 1.0I’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 WastelandWhat 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 ult
- Aug 6, 202659 min
The Cult of Fauci
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 presidentIt 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 BobbleheadsFauci’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. <
Get Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone summaries in your inbox
Free AI-powered daily recaps. Key takeaways, quotes, and mentions — in a 5-minute read.
Get Free Summaries →Free forever for up to 3 podcasts. No credit card required.
You Might Also Like
Listeners also like.
Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar
Political analysis and interviews challenging mainstream narratives and holding power to account.
Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams
Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams
Runaway Country with Alex Wagner
Alex Wagner explores America’s political divisions through conversations with people living through the nation’s most urgent conflicts.
To The Contrary with Charlie Sykes
Charlie Sykes
The Truth with Lisa Boothe
A political commentator cuts through media noise to deliver unfiltered analysis on current events and policy issues.
Diabolical Lies
Katie Gatti Tassin & Caro Claire Burke
Why Is This Happening? The Chris Hayes Podcast
A journalist explores pressing global issues with writers and experts to understand the forces shaping our world.
The Rubin Report
Political talk show with interviews focused on free speech and current events.
Steve Deace Show
Daily commentary on principled conservatism with a snarky tone.
Left, Right & Center
A political podcast that examines ideological differences through balanced, in-depth conversations between left and right perspectives.
The Argument
Two journalists debate current political and policy issues with research-driven arguments and civil discussion.
Keeping It Real: Conversations with Jillian Michaels
Jillian Michaels hosts candid conversations with experts and pioneers on health, mental wellness, relationships, and personal growth.
About Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone
Essays on politics and culture from Sasha Stone's Substack. A former Democrat and Leftist who escaped the bubble to get to know the other side of the country and to take a more critical look at the left.
Customized Recaps
AI-powered recaps with compact key takeaways, quotes, and insights.
Straight to Your Inbox
Get key takeaways from Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone in a 5-minute read.
Save Hours Every Week
Stay current on your favorite podcasts without falling behind.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Podzilla's Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone daily summary?
It's a free AI-powered email that summarizes new episodes of Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone as soon as they're published. You get the key takeaways, notable quotes, and links & mentions — all in a quick read.
How does the Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone podcast summary work?
When a new episode drops, our AI transcribes and analyzes it, then generates a personalized summary tailored to your interests and profession. It's delivered to your inbox every morning.
Is this an official Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone product?
No. Podzilla is an independent service that summarizes publicly available podcast content. We're not affiliated with or endorsed by Sasha Stone.
Can I get summaries of other podcasts too?
Absolutely! The free plan covers up to 3 podcasts. Upgrade to Pro for 15, or Premium for 50. Browse our full catalog at /podcasts.
How often does Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone release new episodes?
Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone publishes 2x weekly. Our AI generates a summary within hours of each new episode.
What topics does Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone cover?
Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone covers topics including Arts, Politics, Film, TV & Film. Our AI identifies the specific themes in each episode and highlights what matters most to you.
Start getting Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone summaries tomorrow morning.
Free forever for up to 3 podcasts. No credit card required.
Free forever for up to 3 podcasts. No credit card required.