『Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone』のカバーアート

Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone

Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone

著者： Sasha Stone
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今ならプレミアムプランが3カ月 月額99円

2026年5月12日まで。4か月目以降は月額1,500円で自動更新します。

概要

 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. Sashastone.substack.com

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  • Close Encounters of the Totalitarian Kind

    Close Encounters of the Totalitarian Kind
    2026/04/08
    —Jacob Siegel, the Information State, excerpts from audiobook, which can be found here.Totalitarianism came to America slowly at first and then all at once. It began as a utopia, one I helped build. It seemed like a perfect new America and gave all of us godless creatures, who’d been chewed up and spit out by the Boomers’ counterculture revolution, a collective sense of purpose. It was all going so great until it wasn’t.A Virtual UtopiaI got online 30 years ago. I never planned on living half of my life on the internet. It just turned out that way. I had motive, means, and opportunity to kill off my real-life self and be reborn in the virtual world. Why wouldn’t I escape a life that had become a full-spectrum failure at everything I tried to do? A relationship that blew up when the man I thought loved me went back to his wife, the Graduate Film Program at Columbia I’d targeted as my life’s dream ended in one semester as I chased that loser guy back to LA. There are things about that moment that are too painful to write about, at least for now, but I will someday. The result was me staring at the wall with nothing achieved and nowhere to go. I had just turned 30.The internet allowed me to remake myself as someone else. I could be strong. I could be confident. I could be beautiful because who knew what you looked like? I could just use words, and I was good at words. So I dove into a life online full of excitement and wonder, a dreamscape of endless possibilities. There was no Amazon, no eBay, no Google. There was barely a web browser.I fell in love with an Italian I met online and came back from Italy pregnant. He didn’t want to be a father, but I wanted to be a mother, so I had my baby, and then I built a website so I could stay home with her and support us. I was the success story for every progressive female: a single mom and a business owner. A daughter of feminism en route to helping launch the Great Feminization and the Great Awokening.I was in Italy when I sent my first Tweet from my Treo. When Barack Obama signed on, I followed him, and he followed me. Then I became part of his army of clicktivists, shaping the new rules and building our desired narratives. We felt omnipotent. This was the internet, after all, and you could be anything you wanted to be - an activist for moral good? Check. An outspoken exhibitist? Check. West Wing-like politicos acting like experts in politics? Check. Remaking a new America one social media post at a time? Check. Virtue signaling with images blasted out to followers displaying our goodness? Check.For all the ways we used the internet, it shouldn’t be that surprising that we built a virtual America - a fantasy utopia - that we forgot wasn’t real. We were riding high with our media stars like Jon Stewart and Rachel Maddow. We were the new, the progressive, the forward thinkers, the early adopters. We colonized the internet in our image. Utopias only have two paths forward. They either collapse or they must become more totalitarian out of necessity, to quote Milan Kundera in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.Our utopia was opt-in at first, and who wouldn’t want to be a part of it? For a time, it felt like the best thing ever, all of our problems solved. It was everything, everywhere, all at once. A “whole of society” effort. It was # OscarsSoWhite. It was Critical Race Theory. It was every institution, corporation, legacy media outlet, and movie studio. But it was also dull. Movies became infused with dogma. The rules became stifling. Sooner or later, people like me were going to shake the tree.Says Siegel:Maintaining utopia, let alone defining it, meant that there would eventually be people like me who asked too many questions, who would be hurled before the almighty panopticon — an army of puritanical scolds policing thought and speech — and eventually destroyed and purged as the mob cheered. The BreakdownI’d been a good liberal, a loyal and devoted Democrat all of my adult life. I’d never thought about conspiracy theories. I didn’t really challenge the system. I never doubted the intent of our government. I was all in for Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden. I was so loyal a supporter that I was invited to an early Biden fundraiser in May of 2019. I watched him speak with tears in my eyes. He will save us, I thought. One year later, however, COVID hit. My daughter had to leave her senior year of college and have her graduation on my balcony. We were sewing our own masks and making our own hand sanitizer. It was a whole-of-society effort to deal with this once-in-a-generation pandemic. But by the end of May, the George Floyd video whipped around the world, and before long, the whole of society's effort had to shift to racial injustice as millions poured into the streets. What I saw unfold that year, the lies that were told, the gaslighting, the lurching from one narrative to the other, and all of the obedient robots going ...
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    34 分
  • The Cruel Irony of "No Kings" For the Women of Iran

    The Cruel Irony of "No Kings" For the Women of Iran
    2026/03/29
    Imagine being an Iranian right now, especially an Iranian woman, as hundreds of thousands of American women gather to exercise their freedom in a free country, people like Jane Fonda who have everything and yet are still out there bleating about fascism and oppression. Imagine protesting something that doesn’t exist: a king in America. Protesting the very same democracy that put said “king” in power. Yes, that’s what democracy looks like. Sometimes it doesn’t go your way.Imagine being in Iran, knowing how many brave citizens attempted to protest their government, only to be mowed down just for standing there, seeing all of these idiots in America marching in their No Kings parade. It would be like someone dying of hunger watching the line form at the Golden Coral all-you-can-eat buffet. Even NPR covered the women protesting in Iran back in January:And now:They have no shame, these people. They throw their public temper tantrums, holding their dumb signs that say things like “fascism” and “dictators” and “No Kings,” serving only to project to the rest of the world how delusional and cut off from reality they have become. And we’re supposed to put these people — this cult — back in power? Imagine being anyone in Venezuela and watching this grotesque spectacle play out. Imagine what it must feel like in Iran as they hope and pray that Trump is successful in castrating their dictatorial, oppressive regime, and to see so many Americans rooting for his failure, protesting a war alongside the Houthis. That is how desperate they are now to win their war on Trump.I mean, you couldn’t make this up if you tried. The headline says it all: “Houthis enter Middle East war | Millions join anti-Trump protests worldwide.”The Houthis mantra: “God is the Greatest, Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse the Jews, Victory to Islam.”Please let this be the moment the entire world sees them for what they really are, pampered, entitled, privileged aristocrats who wouldn’t know real problems if they shot them in the face for not wearing a mandatory hijab - oh, I know, hijabs are cool now, so why don’t you, Jane Fonda, put one on and move to Iran? Their protest might be seen as a “show of force,” and it’s true that they are a united, conformist, obedient cult, and sure, it will help them motivate their base to turn out and vote in the midterms, but all it really is, Jane Fonda, Bruce Springsteen, Robert De Niro, is a well-funded temper tantrum. We’re MAD because you wouldn’t all just go along with Kamala being installed after we coup’d out Joe Biden!We’re MAD because Barack Obama isn’t in power anymore, and our empire is collapsing.We’re MAD, and we can’t self-improve, yoga, meditate, or buy our way out of it. We’re MAD because our world is not pristine, harmonious, and sustainable because we LOST not once but twice to Trump!Maybe at any other time, we could laugh at their dumb No Kings protest, but it’s hard when our country is at war with a real dictatorship to watch these spoiled brats show the rest of the world how stupid Americans really are.At least on the Right, they’re consistent. They’re America First, anti-war, and uncomfortable with the US and its relationship with Israel. They’ve made that clear, even if I think most of them are still useful idiots for Russia, Iran, and China. But on the Left? The side that supposedly cares about human rights and women’s rights, especially? What’s their excuse? The truth is that they have been conditioned over almost 20 years to repeat the mantras fed to them by the media and social media, handed down by politicians. They don’t even know what is true anymore, much less the meaning of words. What is a dictator? Trump.What is a fascist? Trump.What is oppression? Trump. These people have no idea what oppression means. To Robert De Niro, it’s getting a bad seat at a restaurant. To Jane Fonda, it’s the wrinkles on her face that show her age. To Bruce Springsteen, it’s losing his power to influence voters away from Trump one Born in the USA at a time. Boo hoo. Cry me a river. There was always an easier way to remove Trump from office. All they ever had to do was offer the people something better, and they couldn’t even do that. They’ve never admitted failure. They’ve just decided to make everyone miserable until we finally relent and vote them back into office. Oh, how I wish we had good writers who could point out the absurdity of a would-be king trying to liberate a country from a dictatorship as his own citizens march in the streets, free as can be, demanding he be removed from power. Who will shame them? Not I, said the legacy media. Not I, said SNL, John Oliver, Stephen Colbert, or Jimmy Kimmel.Here are some hard truths from TikTok:Freedom over FascismIn my very affluent, very white, very liberal town, they shamelessly virtue signal: Freedom over fascism as Iranians huddle in their homes begging...
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    26 分
  • How Do You Measure the Happiness of a Dog?

    How Do You Measure the Happiness of a Dog?
    2026/03/21
    I stood in the corner of our tiny shack atop a mountain in Topanga and waited for my brother to come home. He would be there any minute and would see his beloved black lab mix, Cinder, dead under a sheet in the front yard. We’d been out riding that afternoon. My mom was on our quarterhorse Teddybear. My younger sister and I rode the twin stallion ponies, Pumpkin (mine) and Fireball (hers). It was summer. We were riding to Topanga Elementary to play in an empty schoolyard. Cinder came along. It was always hot, but that day, it was baking, and we were not prepared. All of a sudden, Cinder collapsed. My mother, in a panic, ordered my sister and me to ride our ponies to the school and bring back water. Maybe we could save her, we thought. When we finally got to the school, we scoured the trash cans and found empty milk cartons. We rinsed them, filled them, then galloped back, Pony Express-style, to where my mom was waiting. But it was too late. Cinder was gone.I don’t remember much else about that day, except what happened to my brother later, when he came home. I’d never seen my tough, strong older brother cry. That was my first lesson in the unique grief of losing a dog. They call them “soul dogs” or “heart dogs” on Reddit. It’s that connection you have with a special dog that will never be matched by any other. I have always hated how the internet flattens things into group ideas, but in this case, they were right. I had to let go of my soul dog, Jack, and I’ll never be the same.Mind you, I didn’t want to. I rationalized it many times. I even almost took him to the hospital and asked them to cut him open, remove the large cancerous mass inside of him, give him kidney dialysis, and chemo. Something, anything to keep him alive. Needles, hospital room, strangers, bright lights. That would not have been for Jack. That was for me. I couldn’t do that to him.People have said, “You gave him such a happy life,” and I tried. But how do you measure the happiness of a dog? To me, Jack wanted more than anything to be free. Free of the leash. Free of doing only what I wanted him to do. Free to have maybe found a mate one time instead of having that possibility taken off the table. Free to roam, most of all, through the hills and the fields.I could not give that to him. The best I could do was make a situation for a dog with the urge to roam slightly less terrible. Oh, I suppose I could have never gotten him in the first place, waited for the ideal owner, like a rancher to pick him up. I don’t know if I was Jack’s ideal owner or not. I just know that he was my soul dog, for better or worse.You don’t choose dogs. They choose you. I’d pulled into a gas station near the Four Corners of Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico en route to the Telluride Film Festival in 2014 when I looked down, and there was a furry little wolfen creature, redheaded, with bright green eyes staring up at me, and was that a smile? He already knew how to ask for food, and I was happy to oblige. Only I didn’t want to just feed the dog. I wanted to rescue him. I don’t know why, exactly. It felt like a calling. He was redheaded, like my pony Pumpkin. He had green eyes like mine. But it was his sweet disposition that meant it was love at first sight, even if I didn’t know it yet.I told my daughter and her friend, both named Emma, to go get some dog food because we were taking this dog. When I turned around, he had crawled away and hidden under a trailer, but a woman pulled him out and handed him to me. That sealed Jack’s fate, to be rescued by city girls. Jack wasn’t going to be my dog at first. My daughter’s friend wanted him, but her parents said no. That night, as the girls hung out in their basement room and I was cooking a roast chicken, I heard little feet tap-tap-tapping up the stairs, and there he was again, smiling up at me, wanting food. Okay, little pup, I thought, I guess I’m a dog person now.“Don’t take him if you can’t keep him,” my younger sister warned. I knew what she meant. She’d thought I’d abandon Jack if some guy wanted me to, as I’d done once before when I was too stupid to know better. The dog went to my mom, who doted on her, but still. It sent the message that I couldn’t be trusted with a dog. We had three cats already, but dogs weren’t allowed in our apartment in North Hollywood. When they found out, I was ordered to get rid of Jack. So we split to Burbank. I also broke up with a boyfriend over my dog. Sorry, I made my choice, and there was no going backFour years later, we finally adopted a friend for him because he hated being alone, and my daughter Emma was leaving for college. We had a hard time choosing and were about to leave the shelter when a volunteer came out, holding a tiny, terrified terrier-poodle mix. She’d been there two weeks, and no one wanted her. How could we say no? It felt like another kind of calling.Her name was Pippa, but we ...
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    20 分
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