Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone

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

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

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

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The 2024 election was a disaster for the Democrats. They have never been held to account for any of it. That would ordinarily be the job of the legacy media, but they’ve long since abandoned any pretense of objectivity. They are part of the “resistance,” and friendly fire is not in the job description.
Do I sound bitter? I suppose I am. I once believed in not just the Democratic Party but the Obama coalition. I was a loyal, devoted soldier who believed we were all fighting the good fight, even before Trump won. We were the side that cared about climate change, women’s rights, the poor, and the marginalized.
It took me decades to go from being a cynical 18-year-old in the 1980s who didn’t think there was any point to voting to a person who believed my vote could change the world.
That cynicism would be polished off over time, as we headed into the 1990s with political correctness and therapy culture on the rise. We wanted to fix ourselves. We wanted — needed — to fill the void left by the doom spiral in the aftermath of the “Me Generation” and their counterculture revolution.
It was Bill Clinton, by way of Aaron Sorkin, who ultimately pulled us out of it and primed us for a spiritual revival under the euphoric, history-making win of Barack Obama. I believed in hope and change. I believed in a new America.
I believed my friends on Facebook who treated me with respect and love every time I fired off an impassioned plea for votes. I believed all of the women who made those signs for the Women’s March, the Climate March, and the Gun Control March. I, too, thought Trump’s win meant America couldn’t handle the first black president and the Confederacy was back for another round.
What I know now is that none of it was real. We were not the New Puritans leading the country into the promised land. We were like every other political party, seeking absolute power and total control. Any truthful autopsy would have to start there.
The Democrats have been lying to themselves and lying to their voters about what these last ten years have really been about: the refusal to relinquish power after losing an election. Democracy becomes a problem for a party that no longer believes in it if the wrong people win.
From Real Clear Politics podcast Andrew Walworth, Tom Bevan and Carl Cannon:
Any honest autopsy of the 2024 election would have to start back in 2016, when Hillary Clinton was anointed by Obama, who leapfrogged Biden, meaning Biden would finally get his shot in 2020. They should have thought that one through because it would come back to bite them four years later when they pushed him out of office.
They practice top-down democracy, in which party leaders attempt to steer voters in the right direction rather than allowing candidates to make the case to the people. The problem with the Democrats is that they needed someone like Donald Trump to blow through their carefully laid plans.
The shame of what the Democrats did in 2024 is almost as bad as what they did in 2020 to orchestrate Joe Biden’s win. Both of these elections were rooted in the mass delusion that Donald Trump wasn’t just a political opponent but an existential threat, so anything goes - even censoring the Hunter Biden laptop, or pushing out a duly elected president.
That delusion gave them unlimited power in their minds, which made them the most corrupt political party in my lifetime, taking what never belonged to them, pushing “resistance theater” throughout American society, and coming up mostly empty anyway.
A real autopsy would require cleaning house on all of it, admitting everything. It would require admitting to their voters that they knew they were lying about Trump to cover up their own failures.
After all, wouldn’t it have been easier just to offer the people something better rather than treating Trump like a supervillain that could not be destroyed by ordinary means?
No, because their biggest problem is that their only vision for the future is to reach back into the past. They still want to undo the Trump presidency rather than learn from it. They are fighting to bring back the utopia we all built under Barack Obama, and that has been the Democrats’ fatal mistake.
Barack Obama’s grip on the party means they can’t move forward.
A real autopsy would have to talk about Obama’s ongoing influence and control of the party. Why do you think he’s making appearances with Zohran Mamdani and James Talarico?
He sees them as the party’s future because they are Obama clones, more or less. You don’t see him out there boosting Gavin Newsom, just as you don’t see many leaders on the Left rising to take Obama’s place. They must all be shadows of him, which is why it was Kamala Harris in 2024, Joe Biden in 2020, and Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Obama couldn’t lose. He was treated like a god and king. He was never going to let Trump win this ten-year war. He couldn’t hand the country over to the guy who dared question his birth certificate, the guy they called a “racist” and a “rapist,” but more than that, he represented the undoing of the Obama Coalition and the worldwide movement it inspired. There was no way the Democrats were ever going to let that happen.
By 2016, they had control of almost everything, from institutions to universities to culture, so why not use it? Exiling and disenfranchising Trump voters was all done in the name of Barack Obama. You see, it had to be racism that gave rise to Trump because Obama couldn’t fail.
Isn’t it so much easier to blame America? To blame it on sexism and racism? Isn’t that what they tell themselves now about 2024? America wasn’t ready for any woman, especially a woman of color? Isn’t it easier to see it that way rather than address the real problem with the utopia we all built: it shuts too many people out?
The Culture of Silence and the Climate of Fear
The Vanity Fair story about how Democrats fear Kamala Harris running again is telling. Or rather, not telling.
They are too afraid to use their real names. It is still considered blasphemy inside the Democratic Party to criticize her, as she has attained Obama-level status. She campaigned for Obama back in 2008 and was once called the “female Obama.” Harris rode the coattails of making history.
Winning was easy for her. She was pretty and tough. She made the Democrats look good and won every single race as her star began to rise: District Attorney, Attorney General, Senator, and Vice President, next in line behind a very old Joe Biden.
Probably, he would have stepped aside and handed her the presidency had he won a second term. Either way, Harris was not the best choice for Vice President, and the Democrats knew that at the time.
The 100 people who signed a letter urging Biden not to choose Harris for “cosmetic reasons” were then shamed back into silence lest they be called racists and misogynists. The so-called autopsy vindicates Harris, which is all part of the same game. She is too big to fail and too popular to be cast aside, especially now after the redistricting fight has put Democrats back in “Jim Crow 2.0” mode.
A real autopsy would have to confront this: how they continue to fall back on the same blame game: it’s those racists over there. It’s not our fault. We haven’t failed our voters. We have to stop them. We have to keep fighting this war against them, our fellow Americans.
How can they even begin to confront who they are and what they’ve become? How can they reckon with all of the madness they’ve put the American people through for ten long years?
The January 6th show trials, the lies about Kenosha being a “Civil Rights” protest, the mocking and celebrating of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the raiding of Mar-a-Lago, the censoring of dissent via the FBI on social media, Russiagate, the collapse of a once-thriving culture, impeachments, indictments, and the unending No Kings protests.
If they want a real autopsy, they should talk to people like me, once loyal supporters who were chewed up and spit out by a political party that could not tolerate even simple questions about “cancel culture” mass hysteria, or the rising intolerance in the Left writ large, or why someone’s career would go up in flames just for voting for Trump. And forget about asking whether toddlers should wear masks or pre-teens should take medication that sterilizes them for life.
I walked away from the party in 2020. I couldn’t believe what I watched them do, what I helped them do, to drag Joe Biden over the finish line. I knew he was too old. I knew Kamala Harris was a ticking time bomb. I knew it would all blow up in our faces eventually. But lying was so much easier, especially with a full-court press serving as a propaganda front.
They have been lying for so long that they don’t even know how to stop. The biggest lie was that Trump was a “fascist.” They’re still telling that lie. They’re still scaring Americans into manic desperation every day. The lies are what drove me away. I couldn’t live with them. The truth matters, especially if you’re cutting up the body to find out what killed it.
The lies began in 2016 when Hillary Clinton, the Democrats, and loyalists like me couldn’t face the truth about why she lost. It was one lie piled on top of another, and no one had the courage to face down the social media mobs to set the record straight. Any dissent was met with strict reprisals. Before long, everyone settled into a climate of fear and a culture of silence as the new normal.
Their problem goes back to the Art of War. If you don’t know yourself or your enemy, you will succumb in every battle. They should first try to understand themselves. If they could just see who and what they are, and why America would choose Trump a second time, they’d be halfway there.
Then, if they could understand Trump, who he really is, rather than the character they invented, they’d finally come back to the real world with the rest of us.
The Democrats are in love with the dream Obama sold, not the reality of what America became with the Democrats in power. There are too many truths left to face. There are too many ghosts haunting them. There is no point in performing an autopsy on a body with nothing inside but smoke mirrors.

//



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[A crosspost with Hollywood Woketopia, my other Substack]
Every so often, a moment in culture arrives, a Sydney Sweeney ad, or Project Hail Mary.
Every time, we hear that the Woke fever has finally broken. Hollywood cares about the people again. Right?
The same reason Kamala Harris is likely to be the nominee in 2028, the same reason the Democrats are still selling the lie that any kind of attempt by Republicans to even out the redistricting is “Jim Crow 2.0,” is proof enough that on the Left, Woke is not going anywhere. It is who they are now. Not all of them, but the most powerful among them.
Early on, when Mark Halperin and others were insisting Gavin Newsom would be the nominee in 2028, I said there was no way the Democrats would get behind a white guy, no matter how passionately he genuflects to the Woke (“Anti-woke is anti-black!”). I know the Democrats. I was one. I helped build the modern-day party of the Great Feminization and the Great Awokening. I know what fires them up every day, and it isn’t just taking back power; it’s foisting their religion upon the rest of us.
They think it’s the opposite, that it’s the Right that is foisting their “Christian Nationalism” upon them. While it’s true that a faction of the Right has unmasked to become the very thing Rob Reiner warned about in his movie, God and Country, they aren’t the majority. Perhaps that’s true on the Left. But look around. Their religion is the dominant culture in America.
When news got out that Christopher Nolan had cast Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, the “most beautiful woman in the world,” whose face launched a thousand ships, it ignited yet another culture war.
How you reacted was like whether or not you wore a mask outside in 2020. It was a test. You’re on one side, or you’re on the other. Notice it, comment on it, object to it, criticize it, and you’re one of the bad people to be purged.
And if that weren’t enough, Nolan brought back Ellen Page from Inception, now recast as Elliot Page, the male, as an act of affirmation and yet another test. These are Orwellian 2+2=5 and force people to choose between ignoring it and going to see a big-effects movie in IMAX, or not buying a ticket and boycotting the film.
Elon Musk took the bait, becoming the villain Hollywood needed to turn seeing The Odyssey into a righteous and political act. You can see them now: the bearded male feminists buying tickets ten times in a row. “Take that, Elon Musk!” The ladies of Blue Sky will go in groups, then fawn over how beautiful Lupita Nyong’o is and overuse the male pronoun for Ellen/Elliot Page. “Wasn’t he great?”
The game is becoming exhausting by now, as Hollywood demands the hard-working American public be impressed by them, lectured by them, and corrected by them. All audiences really want is the one thing Hollywood seems unable to accomplish: entertain them.
It isn’t that Nyong’o isn’t pretty. She is. It’s that Helen of Troy was white, famously so, even if Greek. Nyong’o is a unique beauty, not a universal one, a reality the Left wants to force, because Hollywood doesn’t care about its audience. They want to look good.
Probably the worst thing about the game Hollywood plays with the movie fans they helped raise is that Lupita Nyong’o is held out as a sacrificial lamb. She isn’t pushing any ideology, unlike Ellen/Elliot Page. They are putting her out there and expecting her to absorb criticism about herself, including whether she is pretty enough.
I met her once, back in 2013 in Telluride, before her career took off. She was too young to know how to act like a celebrity. She was so nice, I was won over. She would win an Oscar that year and become a big star in Hollywood.
Is it fair to put her in this position just so they can feel good about themselves? No. Does it change anything? No. There is still such a thing as truth and reality, even if that is the thing that is unfair.
The Woke Code and the Hays Code
The Hays Code (1930-1968) represented an era wherein decency and morality were mandated in all Hollywood films.
The Christian conservatism/morality mandated by the Hays Code reflected less a separation between art and governance and more a united effort toward a utopian society of goodness, especially as we moved through the last Fourth Turning, the Great Depression, and World War II, a time where the world saw true evil in Hitler and Stalin, not to mention the nuclear bomb.
That isn’t all that different from what the Woke Code is now. It’s roughly the same kind of thing: rigid rules to depict an ideal society. The difference is that Christian advocates have been replaced by progressive activists, and the villain is the white male patriarchy.
What is different now, amid our current Fourth Turning, is that the Woke Code includes only half of America. To the Left, they would rewrite this narrative to say that Hollywood depicted mostly White America, and that is what has changed. But really, if you respond to the box office, as Hollywood doesn’t anymore, you will always default to the majority. It isn’t rocket science — beautiful, sexy women and masculine men and a great story.
The end of the Hays Code was entirely due to economics. Television became so popular in the 1950s that there wasn’t much of a need to go to the movies if all you saw was the same kind of buttoned-up themes you could see on TV. That’s true now, too. Movies, then, had to break out of the Hays Code and become much more subversive, leading into the 1970s, which saw some of the best films ever made.
While it’s true that The Odyssey will be eligible to win Oscars under the new rules, it’s also true that the criteria could have been met in a way that didn’t make audiences play this same exhausting game that has alienated them from everything Hollywood puts out. The casting of Nyong’o and Page is less about Oscars and more about status.
Perhaps Nolan was under pressure to cast a non-white woman as Helen, or maybe he wants to be seen as a good person using his wealth and fame to make change, as the most famous white male directors reach for things money can’t buy, like Martin Scorsese making Killers of the Flower Moon, Steven Spielberg making West Side Story with a real Latina, and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Peak Woke Best Picture winner, One Battle After Another.
No film has better exemplified Hollywood in the Trump era than this one. It says it all. ICE as the Gestapo, check. America is run by a cabal of wealthy white Nazis, check. A woman of color must save herself, check.
All of it is held together by a hapless white man, Leonardo DiCaprio, who represents the film’s beating heart. He’s the only good white guy, which is how those in Hollywood who make these kinds of choices would like to be seen. One Battle is actually a movie about them.
Had Nolan cast a blue-eyed blonde woman as Helen of Troy, all hell would have broken loose. When you go against the rules of the Woketopia, you aren’t just getting hit on X with lots of angry tweets by loyal fans who continually feel betrayed; they bring out the big guns - agonizing op-eds in the New Yorker, for instance. If you obey the rules, then you are praised. The problem is that it all feels so artificial, so pre-planned, so inorganic.
I used to write the Oscars report for Jane Fonda’s Women’s Media Center (who fired me after they found out I voted for Trump), counting the number of female nominees and winners. The statistics were always grim.
Every year, it was bad news. As things began to change for women after the Academy announced its DEI mandate in 2020, that change was forced. If before merit had made too many white men winners, now we were seeing something a little closer to gender parity. So then the line moved back, and it became not just about women but women of color and trans women.
Now, it’s all about Marxism disguised as art. If life isn’t fair, movies will make it fair. It isn’t just because the Oscars have it written into their new rules, and it isn’t just because activist groups like GLAAD breathe down the neck of every Hollywood studio, counting heads and making reports. It’s that this is a deeply felt belief system that isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
I have no doubt The Odyssey will make money. It’s a Christopher Nolan film, after all. Who doesn’t want to go see a giant visual effects epic filmed entirely on IMAX? If you can ignore the elephant in the room, the performative casting, you might have a great time. But if you were hoping that Woke is over, well, I think that was its own Hollywood fairy tale.
It’s why Kamala Harris was the nominee in 2024 and why she will once again be the nominee in 2028. This is how the ruling class in America wants to be represented. They want to force change, and they do that by elevating minority groups to high-status positions as symbols for the mostly white people who run things.
Culture, like the Democratic Party, will have to be built anew. That, more than anything, explains why AI is about to completely consume the business, becoming the subversive counterculture revolution Hollywood never saw coming. They can do it all and more without the millions of dollars necessary to mount a production.
AI artists don’t have to be held to the same rigid standards. They can be purely about bringing in eyeballs by showing what people most want to see, rather than what Hollywood wants them to want to see. In other words, they can make the women as beautiful as they want, and no one can cancel them for it.
I spent my life in movie theaters gazing up at the big screen and watching some of the best films ever made. The only way that makes sense is if you are escaping real life and finding your way into a fantasy world, and maybe for the Woke, seeing Lupita Nyong’o cast as the most beautiful woman in the world is its own kind of fantasy fulfillment.
After the movie comes out, we’ll have to see whether it works or not. At the moment, it feels like just another test to decide who gets to stay and who has to go.



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