Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone

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

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

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This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe

It’s been said that you can spot an American from a mile away. Travelers to Europe are advised to adjust their attire to blend in with locals and avoid looking so … casual. The French think Americans are loud and rude, and Europe has a long tradition of sneering at how classless we all are, even before Trump.
I spent a month in Italy, and it’s a beautiful place. The slow living, the long naps when all the stores shut down for hours during the day, the tiny cars, the laundry drying on the balconies, the fresh food at the Farmer’s Market. I feel lucky that when I came back from Italy, I was pregnant and having my baby is the single greatest thing that has ever happened to me. But I’m also glad she grew up in America.
I used to travel to France to cover the Cannes Film Festival, and again, I admired their way of life, the food especially. But every time I stayed too long, I began to miss my home in America. There is something thrilling about living in a free country that I’ve never felt anywhere else.
It seems to me that if you are born here, you make up your life as it goes along. It is not planned out for you, necessarily, although in some cases, I guess it probably is. In my case, it wasn’t. I knew I could invent myself any way I wanted. And if I didn’t like that version, I could reinvent myself. We’re like our country, a work in progress. It’s always there for the taking, that promise of opportunity.
Donald Trump is all of America’s freedoms wrapped up in one imperfect man. He broke through the thick layer of oppressive thought and speech and showed the world that here, you really can say anything you want - as long as some crazed totalitarian doesn’t try to shoot you.
That’s the country I want to live in. It isn’t that the greatest writing or art has come from a place like America. Plenty of great works have come from places that don’t center freedom as their main objective. But once you’ve tasted it, you can’t give it up.
In his speech last night, Trump said:
The American founding represents the best ideas and traditions in history by the best people, like you. You can be loyal to Karl Marx or you can be loyal to America. You can be a communist or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both. As for those who peddle Marxist lies about our heritage, tell our children that we live on stolen land or that our heroes were oppressors, they’re doing something much worse than slandering our past. They are slandering and attacking our future. Not going to let that happen.
They’re trying to tear down the great American character to destroy the people who declared independence, who crossed the Delaware, who settled the West and conquered the skies. You know who those people are. But we will never let that happen.
In America now, two stories are competing to claim the right to rule the future. Trump is telling the better story, the one America was founded on and the one we’ve all believed, at least up until recently, when a new wave of progressives decided that the better story paints America as a corrupt, rotten, white supremacist empire that has to be torn down to the studs and rebuilt.
They must be terrified about the 2030 Census because they’ve decided to die on the hill of illegal immigration, which is fast becoming their most important issue. That, alongside Democratic Socialism, is a recipe for disaster.
This was Bill Clinton’s bummer message on the Fourth:
I always thought Bill Clinton was a good president, but reading that just now makes me think he wasn’t. All he’s ever been able to do is point the finger at the other side and never offer any real solutions. He’s not the man in the arena. He’s the man on the sidelines.
What I love about Trump and his supporters is how much they love America. They love it so much that they plant flags all over their homes. They admire the Founding Fathers. They call themselves Patriots. We didn’t have that kind of pride on the Left when I was growing up.
And even now, so many see the American flag and the love of country as dangerous, racist, bigoted, fascist. Whoever told those people that is what MAGA is about lied. They’re protective of America’s laws and its border. That is out of love for the country.
The Left has taken almost everything from them. They’ve locked them out of culture, forbidden them from participating in any of their major events, dehumanized, demonized, and disenfranchised them.
But the one thing they couldn’t take was their citizenship. They hit the jackpot just by being born in America. To think it would be so easy for people all over the world to come here illegally and claim that prize or to come here and attempt to remake America into something it was never meant to be devalues the one thing they treasure most of all.
I’ve always been a proud American. I’ve always preferred this country over any other, but only in the last few years have I understood what it means to be a Patriot, to be ready to fight for the country I love. And that is because of the people I’ve gotten to know on the Right.
This country is worth fighting for. I might not agree with all of the policies on the Right, or even Trump himself, all of the time, but I’d rather have the future of this country in the hands of people who love it the way Trump does than people who hate it, the way so many on the Left do, just because their candidates are weak and their policies are toxic.
I wanted to write 250 things I love about America, but it got too long, so this will have to do. Here are just some of the things I love:
I love the interstates as part of the great legacy of Dwight D. Eisenhower.
I love the Pacific Ocean because it stretches along the state.
I love Catalina Island off the California Coast, where I spent many a summer with my best friend.
I love seeing our history in the many cultures that came here, like Chinatown, Little Italy, Mexican food in LA, soul food in the South, Irish bars and pubs in the middle of nowhere. And yes, you can appreciate a nation of immigrants while still policing our borders now.
I love how nice people are in some places, like California, Ohio, and Iowa, where they smile at you on the street.
I love the weather extremes, from the dusty plains to the snowy mountains to hurricanes by the sea.
I love the historic monuments from the Civil War and the Revolutionary War.
I love the town squares that you can still see if you drive through the middle of America. Even though many are abandoned, they still look like hope to me.
I love how each town square has a church, a post office, and a school.
I love the many farmlands that blanket the Midwest.
I love the small mom-and-pop coffee drive-throughs, and even the convenience of a Starbucks in nearly every town.
I love Route 66 and how people still drive it and visit the forgotten places.
I love the absurdity of Las Vegas, how it sprouts up impossibly in the middle of the desert.
I love the American writers who helped shape our country’s sense of itself - Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Flannery O’Connor, Richard Ford, Maya Angelou.
I love the musical traditions that started here: Jazz and the Blues. And became Rock n’ Roll.
I love the Legend of Sleepy Hollow and the town that still remembers it.
I love diners and dive bars.
I love Gone with the Wind and how it’s still the highest-grossing film of all time when adjusted for inflation.
I love The Twilight Zone and find it timeless, as relevant today as it was in the 1950s.
I love the footprints at the (Grauman’s) Chinese Theater in Hollywood.
I love the US military and its devotion to the country.
I love the wildflowers that bloom in California every year.
I love soft-serve ice cream at the DQ.
I love Levi’s.
I love New York pizza.
I love Solvang in California.
I love driving up the Oregon coast.
I love the songs of Bob Dylan.
I love the tap dancing of Fred Astaire.
I love how anyone can be a star on YouTube, no matter where they come from, but YouTube couldn’t have been invented anywhere but America.
I love how I could build a business as a single mom in a one-room guesthouse in Van Nuys, and that business would, five years later, become profitable because I worked hard and had a good idea.
And then, when my career went up in flames in 2024 because I voted for Trump, I could build another career on Substack because that is what America is all about - inventing and reinventing yourself.
I love the innovative spirit that built America in real life and online.
I love reading about the early settlers, the Puritans, and the homesteaders, how much they sacrificed to help make America a home. And I love the history of the Native Americans, too, even if so much of it remains a tragedy now.
I love high-speed internet and Wi-Fi that are available almost everywhere, and if they're not, I have a hotspot.
I love the old American cars that were not just exceptional but beautiful.
I love the tradition of baseball.
I love that people faithfully watch football, even if I don’t.
I love the tradition of sourdough bread all over social media.
I love that the best basketball players in the world are from here.
I love that every state is different from one to the next.
I love Harper’s Ferry, how it’s frozen in time.
I love that we found a way to move on from the trauma of our past with slavery and how we fought a bloody Civil War to end it.
I love that we were the good guys in World War II. We did the right thing in entering the war and helping the Allies win.
I love that you can be anything here. The door is always open. It’s up to you to walk through it.
I love that America is a Christian nation, and you can see that if you drive across it. But it’s also a country that stands for freedom of religion, too.
I love the American comedians: Groucho Marx, George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Steve Martin, and Johnny Carson.
I love that the best films from the 1970s were American movies, like The Godfather, The French Connection, Taxi Driver, and Network.
But I also love more modern masterpieces by American filmmakers, like No Country for Old Men and Sideways.
I love that people play the lottery, thinking one day they will hit the jackpot. They never will, but they can still dream.
I love Thanksgiving and the way we celebrate it in America, which is to say, all together as one big dysfunctional family.
I love the tradition of Halloween and how every October, the pumpkins and costumes come out. I love the way the weather changes.
I love the Declaration of Independence and those who dared to build this wild, untamed, optimistic work in progress.
I love that America is always looking to the future to find a better version of itself and its people. I love that so many Americans still believe in the American Dream.
I love watching the movie Jaws on the 4th of July.
I love that people watch fireworks, even if I never do, because they traumatize my dogs.
I love that we have a holiday just to celebrate the day we became a country, a ragtag group of deplorable revolutionaries who set out to build a brand new country. Oh, the audacity of it.
I love living here and would not want to live anywhere else.
Happy 250th Birthday, my beloved country.
Happy 4th to you, dear readers. Thanks for everything. I hope you are having a wonderful weekend.



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It took 65 years for that message to completely reverse itself in the Democratic Party and on the Left. Out is personal achievement. In is victimhood. Out is reaching for the stars. In is ushering in oppressed people from all over the world to ensure a steady supply. Out is the right of American citizens with their vote. In are people who don’t respect that vote.
As Trump gives his speech at Mount Rushmore later this evening, Zohran Mamdani, who is supposedly just the Mayor of New York City, has positioned himself as Trump’s equal, the Mirror President for the other America.
Thirsty as ever, in love with his own image, thinking who the hell he is, he has the audacity to sit in George Washington’s chair to make a speech about a new America he hopes to invent, one without borders, without Capitalism, without billionaires.
His speech paints the American government as oppressive, while demonizing them for policing immigration:
"We see it just as clearly in every American who still believes this country belongs to we, the people. We see America each time neighbors link arms with neighbors without asking how long they've lived here or what papers they have as ICE invades our neighborhoods. We see America each time working people demand more, not just for themselves, but for their fellow Americans."
The irony is that he demonizes the rich, the very people who pad his risks in New York City and help him present a fake-pretend utopian fantasy that only works because of the rich people in the city, because they won’t let it fail. It’s absolution, after all, and there is no price high enough for that.
It took America 250 years to arrive at a place where the country might finally, at long last, “be like Europe.” How many times did I hear that throughout my life? Why can’t we be like Europe?
We were raised to hate our country, to see it as a Capitalist hellhole of the haves and the have-nots, a lesser nation than France or the UK or Italy. No wonder Mamdani thinks he speaks for everyone. But we didn’t have a bloody revolution just to copy England.
Mamdani is like a cult leader who can now exploit whole generations who have been indoctrinated to believe that there is something rotting at the core of America’s heart, a disease of “white supremacy” and a history of exploitation, colonization, slavery, trauma, abuse, and poverty. Their only answer for this is to “be more like Europe.” At best, that is where they land. Really, it’s probably closer to “be more like China.”
They’re already halfway there. Cancel culture has silenced all dissent. The DSA is rising, and the Democrats have kissed Mamdani’s ring.
Not because it is easy…
It’s not easy making it in America. It’s not easy making enough money for a decent home, to raise a family, and to take a vacation once in a while. No one ever said it would be easy, least of all, JFK:
We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we're willing to accept.”
JFK was assassinated before I was born. The Democrats were haunted by him for my entire life, until Barack Obama came along and was the first to erase the ghosts of the past and redefine what it meant to be both a Democrat and a person of the Left. That meant fundamental things would change. One of the biggest changes was going from believing in personal achievement to believing in victimhood.
Obama took the obstruction of his policies personally. It was those racist Republicans. So they set about changing the hearts and minds of the young and teaching them that the only reason they couldn’t succeed was their victim status, and before long, that became the only thing that mattered about them. But for that movement to succeed, it required a sick country, not a healthy one.
The Democrats were split in 2016 between the “white working class” in Bernie’s Democratic Socialism and the identity politics of Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. Now, what we’re seeing is a marriage between the two. Now, it’s not what Vivek Ramaswamy called Woke Capitalism, but rather, Woke Socialism. Isn’t it just another way to sell to Gen-Z?
They are the most privileged generation ever to walk the face of the earth. Capitalism gave them social media, email, a computer in the palm of their hand, DoorDash, Google, Uber, TikTok, YouTube, streaming music, television shows, fast food, fast fashion, Instacart, Airbnb, influencer culture, and movies.
And it’s not enough.
Why can’t they be a Kardashian and have birthday parties with ten thousand balloons? Why can’t they travel to Europe? Why can’t they own a house? Why can’t they live on Manhattan’s Upper West Side? Why is Elon Musk a trillionaire with so many homeless people on the streets? Why are they so miserable, so full of anxiety, so full of hate? How can a life of convenience be so hard?
They want an easy life as they have in Sweden, Italy, or France. They want to Free Palestine. They want their happy ending for all oppressed people all over the world, especially those crossing the border. They were told this was America's problem, so why can’t they change America to fix it?
And if they can’t have it, well…
They were raised to believe it should all be easy. If you have anxiety, take a pill. If movies and books trigger you, they’ll have trigger warnings. Bullies at school will be eradicated. Self-esteem is what matters most. Words are violence. If masculinity is too toxic, we’ll feminize society to make it easier.
Mothers of my generation coddled the American mind. We helicoptered our children. We kept them from every imaginable harm, and we tried to clear a path to success. We taught them that you should only do things if they’re easy, not if they are hard. Because if they are too hard, that might lead to failure, and our kids could never fail.
But we forgot to teach them the value of hard work and failure because we never wanted them to feel any discomfort. If their lives were easy, we felt like we’d accomplished something because they’d be happy. But happiness comes from service, from building something, achieving something, doing something hard.
This country has always been “move fast and break things” but also “move fast and build things.” Invent things, envision things, start a business. I could never have started a business as a single mother in Italy as I did in America in 1999. America is the only country where anyone can build anything. The downside of that is that it’s hard. There is a price to pay for freedom.
Unless you’ve felt freedom, real freedom, in your mind and heart, you’ll never love this country the way I do. I love feeling free and always have. I had to escape the Left and the Democratic Party because I no longer felt free, as they no longer believe in freedom. They believe in forced compliance and conformity.
But freedom also means this:
And this:
They’re just too dumb by now to realize that they live in a free country where they can say and do anything they please without being shot on the spot or thrown in jail. They’re free to call Trump a fascist dictator because he isn’t one. They’re free to protest “No Kings” because Trump isn’t one.
Mamdani wants to fundamentally transform America and turn it into a Communist utopia, and the Democrats are letting him. That is not the way to lead America 250 years in. No, we have to fight for what America is. It is not a failure, not yet. It is worth fighting for.
Younger generations should be taught that they can do anything with their lives, no matter their skin color, and that they can make money right now on YouTube, Substack, and TikTok. They can start a business. They can go to trade school. They can use AI to get them where they need to go because it can make any ordinary person well-skilled and productive. And it’s free. It’s all there for the taking, but it will never be enough for a movement fueled by victimhood.
A Nation built on strength
Obviously, Donald Trump is not perfect. Every day, someone throws out another immoral or unethical thing they believe disqualifies him from leading. Ya, we got that. Your job was to beat him by making a better case to the American people, and you never did.
Trump was called to this moment in history to hold fast and true to America’s founding principles. I’ve never seen a more patriotic American, let alone a president, in my entire life. He’s celebrating every part of it. He’s reviving our history. He’s making us proud of our country.
Trump’s White House YouTube channel has videos like this:
Endless amounts of them, trying to fill the cup back up to halfway full for future generations.
Later tonight, Trump will once again be at Mount Rushmore to give a speech for America at 250. I already know what he will say because I know him, and I know no president in my lifetime has loved this country more. He’ll remind us what America is and what threatens us now.
And seething in the background will be bitter, angry, jealous people who have to root for America’s failure, not because they hate him that much, but because they refuse to relinquish their power back to the people. They could have won the election, but instead, they went to war.
They will have to hold on to that hate for years to come so they can pass it on to their children and make them understand why they could not celebrate a country that, to paraphrase U2, gave them everything they ever wanted … it wasn’t what they wanted.
I live in a town that is full of wealthy white liberals, and almost no one has a flag out front. I put two up by my fence to show my gratitude and my love for this glorious, young, imperfect, beautiful country. I can only hope no one steals it in a rage.
On the other hand, people in my town have a long tradition of putting out chairs for the 4th of July parade a month in advance. The chairs stretch out for miles, and no one ever takes them.
To be an American means self-governance, but it also means being part of that fragile, invisible thread that ties us together, like chairs that line the main highway, all different but somehow the same because we’re all in it together and celebrating the nation’s birthday, not because it is easy — but because it is hard.
This isn’t my love letter to America. That will come tomorrow. But it is my way of saying that no one should lead this country who wants it to be anything other than what it was born to be: free.

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“In our schools, our newsrooms, even our corporate boardrooms, there is a new far-left fascism that demands absolute allegiance. If you do not speak its language, perform its rituals, recite its mantras, and follow its commandments, then you will be censored, banished, blacklisted, persecuted, and punished. It’s not going to happen to us.
Make no mistake: this left-wing cultural revolution is designed to overthrow the American Revolution. In so doing, they would destroy the very civilization that rescued billions from poverty, disease, violence, and hunger, and that lifted humanity to new heights of achievement, discovery, and progress.
Donald J. Trump, July 4th, 2020
It’s been ten years since the purges began, and I still have a hard time believing it actually happened. Did so many of my friends really go along with it? Did institutions, corporations, and all of Hollywood allow themselves to be shamefully cowed by the fanatical mob? Yes.
Not only did it happen, but it’s become the new normal on the establishment Left — in Hollywood, in culture, in government. Everyone is still too afraid to say what they really think. Just appearing at the America 250 or the Kennedy Center will still ruin your career. The only difference now is that the wheel of oppression keeps spinning. Now it’s illegal immigrants. Now it’s “Free Palestine.”
I don’t know why I didn’t see it sooner: this direct line from cancel culture to Communism. I thought it was mass hysteria after Trump’s shocking win in 2016, and that eventually, as with other episodes of mass hysteria in the past, it would burst, and we could all go back to the way things used to be, where we weren’t fighting a virtual Civil War.
But now that three Democratic Socialists won their primaries in New York against one of the party’s shining stars, Dan Goldman, all because of Israel, what we’re seeing is Communism, but merged with Woke tyranny and radical Islam. It is essentially the perfect storm to destroy America.
Now, we can clearly see what ten years of Cancel Culture have done to the Left. It has given them enormous power to force compliance, not just to those of us who dissented, but to members of their own party. In other words, the mob is about to come for them, too.
What do they want? What the millionaires and billionaires have. They want what’s coming to them after years of indoctrination that told them that they are oppressed because of the color of their skin, their gender ideology, or their ethnicity. America, they were told, was founded on White Supremacy and colonization, and they’re owed something for it.
They seem to have no place for the working class that Mamdani is always talking about, not if they’re white. Bernie Sanders might have cared about the “white working class,” but not these folks. Some animals are more equal than others, and with this new fundamentalism, it is meant only to redistribute wealth, not from the rich to the poor, but from the white majority to the marginalized minorities.
It isn’t their fault exactly. They’ve been indoctrinated. None of us noticed this was happening right around Obama’s second term, 2012. Racism, they believed, had infected the majority in America, and it had to be rooted out. They had to be re-educated on “correct” history.
They were not taught the American dream. They were taught the American nightmare. Here is a video from Katharine Birbalsingh:
And now, they’ve finally found their magic man in Zohran Mamdani, who is everything they need wrapped up in one charismatic leader. He’s TikTok-friendly. He goes viral. He is pop-culture literate, and, most importantly, he’s the Wokest of the Woke. He speaks their language. He wants what they want. He goes to the Pride Parade but not the Israel Parade, becoming the first Mayor of the city in 60 years not to attend.
He doesn’t just want to be the Mayor of New York. He wants to be a worldwide inspirational leader, which fits the new Left well since they don’t really want to unite with the other half of America so much as with those other countries that are ideologically aligned, you know, like 1984?
It might seem like one big party, but this is a disaster for the Democrats. Everyone knows that any Democrat who goes against them will be stalked, swarmed, and harassed before getting primaried out. All the Republicans have to be is the more normal side, and they can win.
Some Democrats are now sounding the alarm that Democratic Socialists are overtaking the party and will alienate people, even James Carville:
No Democrat is safe from the mob, not even one of their most progressive politicians, Scott Weiner, in San Francisco, who was just harassed in public for not being sufficiently pro-Palestine. And obviously, for being Jewish.
Dan Goldman was banned from a coffee shop for the same reason just before getting voted out. Mamdani and his acolytes shield their true selves behind a warm smile and a viral video, but there can be no mistaking the language of the Cancel Culture Left.
The Democrats know what this means. Even the Ladies of The View know.
The DSA wins in New York were driven by a small group of mostly white, pampered college kids who are very online. It is the fault of the Democrats for not seeing the accident before it happened. They might have fought harder for Goldman if they had any idea just how bad it would be for them if these candidates actually won.
And it’s bad.
David Sacks from the All in Podcast:
What people went through in Stalin’s Soviet Union or China’s Cultural Revolution is worse than anything any American has ever or will ever suffer, but let’s not kid ourselves.
We’ve already seen what the Left will do, from three assassination attempts on Trump’s life, to the assassination of Charlie Kirk, to their violent riots for the past ten years. Burning Teslas, trying to throw Trump off the ballot, the impeachments, the indictments.
Now, they’re threatening Nuremberg-like trials and another impeachment should they take back power in Congress, and the Right should do everything they can to make sure they don’t.
We know there are no limits on what they will do. We know because history tells us. George Orwell told us. We’ve seen this movie many times before. Utopias have only two paths forward: they collapse, or they become more authoritarian.
These folks don’t even know what words mean anymore, much less the point of 1984. No one ever taught them why Communism or tyrannical mobs are bad, so why wouldn’t they behave this way?
I noticed it for the first time when a small group of fanatics at Evergreen College chased Bret Weinstein off campus, calling him a racist and holding the administrators hostage until they gave them what they wanted.
All of those pampered, spoiled, overeducated-yet-still-uneducated brats made their way into the workforce, boosted by using their identity categories to secure high-profile slots at newspapers and corporations. The threat was implicit: hire us or you’re an “ist” or a “phobe” and we’ll get loud about it.
Only the Republicans have taken a consistent and principled stand against this madness and done so since it began. The Democrats, however, have stuck their head in the sand and denied it even exists.
That’s why they can’t address crime in the major cities, or the rapes by illegal immigrants, and why their wheel of oppression has amounted to the party standing for only three things: Socialism, illegal immigration, and Palestine.
No one seemed to take it seriously on the Left because they never took Cancel Culture seriously. No, we weren’t being slaughtered by the millions or thrown into gulags, but we built this new civilization online and with it, the power to decide who can participate, who is accepted, and who must be hurled into the public square for character assassination and career ruination.
No matter what the consequences were, it was wrong, and no one had the guts to stop it, and now, those chickens have come home to roost, and it’s the Democrats’ problem. They'd better get used to selling Democratic Socialism or else. This is what happened the last time the Centrists went up against the Socialists.
Two years later, Al Franken would be chased out of the Senate by all of the top Democrats caught up in Cancel Culture and unable to stop the mass hysteria that drove it.
And now, we have yet more insurrectionary behavior with Zohran Mamdani and some governors refusing to comply with the Supreme Court’s ruling on sending back Haitian migrants, and many states aligning to protest the Great American State Fair. It looks like we have a Democratic Party that wants to secede from the Union, again.
In the old days of Bernie Sanders’ Democratic Socialism, they understood that taking care of American citizens required secure border programs like Medicare for All. Well, not now. The new kids want it all and believe they’re entitled to it all. Borders? Who needs those? They are oppressed and therefore deserving of our tax dollars to absolve us of our white colonizer guilt.
The big picture here should be frightening for all Americans. Unchecked migration with the oppressor/oppressed mindset, while also demanding the government and the “billionaires” pay for all of them - that is what the Democrats will have to sell to the American public because the Cancel Culture machine that they helped build and did nothing about will demand it.
The Gray Champion Rides Again
The Republicans have a unique opportunity now to change the course of history. They have been given a gift by the Left, whether they choose to take it or not. They are experiencing their own brand of crazy right now. It’s starting to look a lot like Communists to the Left of me, Nazis to the Right, here I am, stuck in the middle with you.
But if the sane Republicans can pull it together, they can bring in reasonable people, like Bill Maher:
At the moment, the Democrats have the bigger headache on their hands. No one who seeks the nomination in 2028 will survive if they don’t have Zohran Mamdani on their side.
But honestly, the Republicans could be here too, depending on how their current war plays out. But if they want to win, they will have to open their doors to more moderate Democrats, perhaps giving up the old dream of outsider populism. They’ll have to decide which they believe is the greater threat.
Here is Larry O’Connor with Mark Halperin on 2-Way.
America, the Beautiful
In 2020, I was hopeless and lost. No one on my side would talk about what all of us could see happening to our party, to our young people, with this unprecedented climate of fear and culture of silence.
But then I heard Donald Trump’s speech at Mount Rushmore on July 4th, and even though I’d been told he was a dangerous fascist and racist, I heard the words that anchor me to my own patriotic pride, words that describe the country I know and love. These were and are subversive words, but necessary. This is the America I believed in.
Ever since then, I’ve trusted Trump because he did not bend, did not break, and never, ever, ever surrendered. I’m sorry he’ll be leaving office in two years. I can’t imagine the fight without him, but he’s carved a path and lit the way. Now, it’s our turn to finish the job.
The race to normal begins right now.



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