Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone cover art

Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone

Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone

By: Sasha Stone
Listen for free

About this listen

 Essays on politics and culture from Sasha Stone's Substack. A former Democrat and Leftist who escaped the bubble to get to know the other side of the country and to take a more critical look at the left. Sashastone.substack.com

www.sashastone.comSasha Stone Art
Episodes
  • Oh Hillary, Empathy? Really? Please.

    Oh Hillary, Empathy? Really? Please.
    Jan 30 2026
    Dear Hillary,Imagine my shock when I saw you wrote an op-ed in The Atlantic. Before I even read a line, I knew what the point of the article would be because I know you.You write:This crisis also reveals a deeper moral rot at the heart of Trump’s MAGA movement. Whatever you think about immigration policy, how can a person of conscience justify the lack of compassion and empathy for the victims in Minnesota, and for the families torn apart or hiding in fear, for the children separated from their parents or afraid to go to school?That compassion is weak and cruelty is strong has become an article of MAGA faith. Trump and his allies believe that the more inhumane the treatment, the more likely it is to spread fear. That’s the goal of surging heavily armed federal forces into blue states such as Minnesota and Maine—street theater of the most dangerous kind. Other recent presidents, including Joe Biden, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton, managed to deport millions of undocumented immigrants without turning American cities into battlegrounds or making a show of keeping children in cagesI see the game. You know selling open borders is an election killer, so you think selling “empathy,” or compassion, will help bridge the gap and maybe win back independents who don’t want an open border but are troubled by what they see on the “news.” As with everything else, it’s a manufactured delusion you too must sell, which explains why the Democrats are in this position now, resorting to the first violent attacks on the government since the 1970s, and no, January 6th doesn’t count. These are coordinated, orchestrated, well-funded attacks - not protests as much as flirting with terrorism. And you know that too, don’t you, Hillary? And you’re worried. You should be. You also know that no president, not Obama or Bush or Clinton, ever had to deal with a cell phone brigade who are screaming, spitting, body slamming ICE agents everywhere they go, stalking them, blocking their paths, building makeshift networks online to find them, harass them, and stop them from doing their jobs. You know this is a first, and you know exactly why.But that won’t stop you from lying, Hillary. What else is new? You are setting up the argument to slime your way out of this moment, where the Democrats are too crazy to lead and are looking more like the Manson family every day.I had to laugh, though, at the misappropriation of yet another word, empathy. As if any of you ever had any empathy for anyone other than those who will be voting blue, no matter who. No, you can’t call the other half of the country “racists” for ten years and then pretend to have any empathy. Just look at Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway on a recent podcast talking about how we’ll have the Nuremberg trials, should all of you crazy people ever get back in power, “and we will,” Galloway says. This obsession with calling Trump Hitler and a Nazi began in 2016 because you could not stand the sting of humiliation when you lost to Trump. So you and the most powerful people in the world decided it was your right to disenfranchise the millions of Americans who voted for Trump and had every right to representation. I used to think you were a person of integrity, I did. I supported you. I fought for you. I was proud to be a Democrat. I made this video to humanize you for independents who did not want to vote for you. I thought I could help them see you the way I did. At least, back then.I was a good Liberal. I repeated the lie that Trump’s win was an existential threat and it required a “hearts and minds” campaign to RESIST everything he tried to do. Oh, the lies, Hillary. The lies. I can barely live with myself; I don’t know how you manage it.After ten years of those lies, there is not much to show for it. Trump is back in power because all of you failed so spectacularly. The people said yeah, we’ll take the twice impeached, four times indicted, convicted felon. That’s how badly you failed. Because you don’t see them, you don’t see them as people, you don’t care about what they need. In other words, you’re lacking in empathy.So now you think you finally have Trump on the ropes, and all it took was throwing federal agents under the bus, demonizing them as hateful, Nazi-like thugs, lying about the “rot” at the heart of MAGA. Here is Tom Homan:The empire is collapsing. A once-thriving culture has been sucked into a cult. Everything I used to love is gone. Movies, books, great journalism, science, and history. Vanished. Replaced with dogma and fanaticism. Because all of you walled yourselves off from the rest of the country, you lost touch with reality, which is why it’s so easy for you now to slip into the fantasy world and blame ICE agents for their lack of empathy. Shame on you.Where is your empathy for the victims of Biden’s border policies? Do you remember the rape van? Yeah, there was a van where an illegal...
    Show More Show Less
    34 mins
  • Why the Democrats Fail in the Art of War

    Why the Democrats Fail in the Art of War
    Jan 28 2026
    Part One | Part Two | Part Three“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”― Sun Tzu, The Art of WarBecause Donald Trump understands this fundamental rule of The Art of War, he reached a compromise in Minneapolis. It was an easy shift for him because he knows himself and he knows the enemy.He knows all they wanted was months of warfare and chaos between ICE agents and the citizen army on the ground, who are now becoming an organized militia, some of them even arming themselves, all in hopes of producing viral content for the churn to keep the hearts and minds of their voters activated and mobilized ahead of the midterms.They wanted him to show up as the dictator, to crack down on protests like the United States had suddenly become Iran. But Trump is too smart for that. He knows once he becomes the version of him they invented, the war is over. He also knows they will ignore the important news of his presidency. The economy is strengthening, crime is declining, and Trump continues to make big moves on the global stage.By contrast, the left is losing but thinks it’s winning because they don’t know themselves. If they did, they would understand that the clever game they’re playing only takes them so far. Creating chaos throughout 2020 meant they scared Americans into voting Trump out and putting the Obama coalition back in power. But they were the dog that caught the car. They had no idea what to do once Joe Biden took office.It was worse than that. Biden failed in his first major move as president with the botched exit from Afghanistan that left 13 soldiers dead and sparked two wars, as world leaders laughed in our faces at the man in the White House.As Biden’s numbers began to fall, and America woke up from the haze of fear from 2020, they wondered why they ever voted out the guy with the strong economy to begin with, and why they were now stuck with a whole new set of rules we were all meant to follow.In truth? Biden was the face of normalcy for the fanatical cult that has now consumed the Democratic Party. They are the socialist socialites who are both the ruling class and the oppressor/oppressed fundamentalists who have no place for America’s silent majority anymore. When the story of this moment is told by their ever-reliable unreliable narrators, they will cast themselves as the Underground Railroad to free the slaves or the Kindertransport to save Jewish children from the Nazis.So we have to ask them and make them answer: who is it they’re liberating now? What are they fighting for? Mass migration? Open borders? True, they want to keep the 10-20 million who crossed over under Biden and will vote blue no matter who, but what is the endgame here? Do they even know?Trump’s greatest blessing and his tragic flaw is that he cannot lose. That’s what makes him a great leader; whether he’s leading a family, a business, or a country, he wants to win. When you’re standing behind him, you get to be a winner too.Some in his base want him to step on the gas, to crack down on protesters and not back off from Minneapolis, but as with so many hard calls Trump has had to make in his second term, he has to somehow find his way through the storm as a guy who, in the end, trusts only himself because he knows himself. If he became the dictator now just to please those in his base, he’d be eaten alive by the empire.They Don’t Understand ThemselvesThe chaos in Minneapolis was designed for the legacy media. It was resistance theater that played well on the Nightly News and on social media. The objective, as we now know from the Signal chats and the ongoing soldier training for activists, was to push ICE agents into acting out, to capture those viral moments to paint a picture in the minds of social media users—ICE are violent thugs, they will conclude.If you see enough video of ICE agents pushing women to the ground and detaining children, well, what is a normal person to think? How could the polls not result in the Left’s favor? What you don’t see is everything that led up to it. You don’t see how many times ICE agents are assaulted, obstructed, body slammed, screamed at, spat on, with whistles blaring in their ears, stalked, harassed, and doxxed.But on the Left, they don’t see that side of the story, just like they didn’t see that side of the story in 2020. The mob terrorizes citizens, and law enforcement and the media call it mostly peaceful protests. I was on the Left. I know that no one was allowed to talk about the violence lest they’d be called a racist. But not being able to say the truth, let alone know the truth, meant we were all walking around in a constant state of confusion. We all knew that Derek Chauvin did not murder George Floyd, but we had ...
    Show More Show Less
    40 mins
  • An Open Letter to Peter Baker of the New York Times

    An Open Letter to Peter Baker of the New York Times
    Jan 17 2026
    Dear Mr. Baker,I am but one in a sea of many Americans viewed as a threat to the established order. I was once a part of that order. I helped build it. It would turn out I couldn’t survive because I couldn’t follow the rules of thought and speech that are mandated by everyone on the Left, especially those at the New York Times.It’s personal, you see. I used to believe that if all I did was read Page One of the New York Times, I’d be well-informed. Brainwashed is more like it.It’s easy to spot the bias now where it wasn’t before. For instance, this was the New York Times on January 12th, and one of the strongest activists for the Democrats pretending they’re pushing some sort of objective conclusion on X.But that’s just another day at the New York Times. I know you didn’t write this piece, Michelle Goldberg did, but it is worth mentioning as an aside that no, the “resistance libs” were not right. They were never right. I was one of them until I wasn’t. It’s been an ugly road out of the Doomsday Cult of the Left, but now, I live free as an exile.We were never the “resistance.” We were always the empire. We colonized the internet, after all, and, together with Barack Obama, the rise of Silicon Valley, social media, and the iPhone, as society migrated online, we were in control of all of it.But that’s a story for a different time, Mr. Baker. This letter is much more urgent regarding the matters at hand. Your “analysis” and observation about Trump and protests is so wildly off base, a complete distortion of reality, that I felt compelled to write you this letter. You wrote:You write:President Trump had a ringing message of solidarity on Tuesday for demonstrators in the streets. “KEEP PROTESTING - TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!!” he wrote on social media. He decried “the senseless killing of protesters,” and added that those pulling the triggers “will pay a big price.”He meant the protesters in Tehran, not Minneapolis. By contrast, the people in the streets of Minnesota, he wrote just 63 minutes earlier, were “anarchists and professional agitators” trying to cover up a fraud scandal. He vowed that “THE DAY OF RECKONING & RETRIBUTION IS COMING!”The eruption of protests on opposite sides of the planet at this moment in history has brought Mr. Trump’s views of democracy and popular dissent into stark relief. The situations in Iran and Minnesota, of course, are different and complicated, but the president’s rule of thumb seems simple enough: Those who take to the streets supporting a cause he favors are laudable heroes. Those who take to the streets to oppose him are illegitimate radicals.I read this, and my jaw dropped open, Mr. Baker. Where have you been for the past five years as we watched a split screen of protests in the Summer of 2020 and then on January 6th? Are you actually saying that you at the New York Times and anyone on the Left saw these things as comparable? Democracy and popular dissent in stark relief, boy, I couldn’t have said it better myself.Tell me this is satire. Tell me you do not live in such an isolated bubble that you can’t possibly see the blatant hypocrisy here? The treatment of these two events was very different and will be written about in opposite ways in history books forever. One will be seen as heroic and democracy in action, and the other, as dangerous. An insurrection in action. People like me were pulling our hair out, not because we would justify the riot at the Capitol, but because all of you said nothing about what happened in the Summer of 2020, a year that broke America and broke me.It wasn’t only your paper that lied that Trump “incited” a mob to storm the Capitol and that it was a threat to “democracy.” That was the narrative pushed by every legacy media outlet, with no kind words for the protesters who were also doing what protesters do - getting angry and having their voices heard by a government and a culture that had demonized them, dehumanized them, and abandoned them. Trump included.The Democrats put up a Green-Zone-like fence around the Capitol. Ordinary Americans had their doors kicked in as the FBI hauled them off to jail. Anyone who even attended the “mostly peaceful” protest on January 6th was called an “insurrectionist” and “election denier,” and anyone who dared to question the 2020 election or who voted for Trump was inspected under a microscope by you all as some kind of insect or insurgent terrorist. Vice President Kamala Harris likened it to 9/11 and the attack on Pearl Harbor. These were American citizens, many of whom had been on lockdown, their businesses destroyed after COVID, and had watched the absurd events of 2020 play out. Masks, no masks, “systemic racism was more urgent than COVID,” then the pivot back to COVID, changing election rules, preventing people from gathering and thus, preventing campaigning, a surge of mail-in voting that won the election ...
    Show More Show Less
    27 mins
No reviews yet