Old Journalism Ethics | Rivers “We're under a lot of pressure, you know, and you put us there. Nothing's riding on this except the, uh, first amendment to the Constitution, freedom of the press, and maybe the future of the country.” - Ben Bradlee, All the President’s Men The break-in at the Democratic National Committee was small-time, ticky-tacky surveillance to get dirt on Nixon’s opponents for his upcoming re-election bid. When the burglars were caught, but for the efforts of the Washington P...
Dec 05, 2022•30 min
When Jack Dorsey invented a chat-like social media platform with character limitations, he probably had no idea it would one day become the most powerful propaganda tool this country, this world, has ever known. The danger was always that any Big Tech platform, let alone three of the biggest, would one day be under the control of one political party. In 2020, the combination of lockdowns and violent protests of the Summer and January 6th led to the mass formation of hundreds of millions of Ameri...
Nov 29, 2022•29 min
“A Native American elder once described his own inner struggles in this manner: Inside of me there are two dogs. One of the dogs is mean and evil. The other dog is good. The mean dog fights the good dog all the time. When asked which dog wins, he reflected for a moment and replied, The one I feed the most.” ― George Bernard Shaw 28 years ago, I escaped real life for life online. I was desperate, you see, to find an escape. I had made such a mess of things when I found the internet in 1994. It wa...
Nov 25, 2022•21 min
Trump was nearing the end of a campaign speech for Marco Rubio in Miami, days before the midterms when it started to rain. The MAGA faithful used their Trump signs as makeshift umbrellas. Trump’s mic cut in and out. He could barely read the teleprompter. “Is everybody having a good time?” he shouted to the crowd. The answer came roaring back. They were having the time of their lives, even as thunder cracked in the sky and the rain came down in sheets. Covering Trump’s head was the red MAGA cap. ...
Nov 21, 2022•33 min
“Heroes may not be braver than anyone else. They're just braver 5 minutes longer.” ― Ronald Reagan The 2022 midterms have emerged as a Rorschach test—anger, disappointment, finger-pointing on the Right, and typical self-satisfied smugness on the Left. There are lessons to learn on both sides. Lingering in the back of everyone’s mind is how a president with such low approval ratings, high inflation, discontent among the electorate, high crime, and failures across the board escaped a midterm wipeo...
Nov 14, 2022•20 min
Joe Biden had a smile on his face the morning after the midterms. That’s the look of someone who just escaped total disaster. At least for now. The lesson they were all supposed to get with one decisive red wave never arrived. That is bad news for them. Or maybe it’s bad news for all of us who are much more worried about America at the hands of the Democrats. For weeks, they parroted the mantra, again and again, politicians and media pundits, not to mention the blue-check army on Twitter, “Elect...
Nov 11, 2022•23 min
[ Apologies for the audio - it was raining pretty hard here and the power kept cutting off] “We had to do something [in Bush v. Gore ], because countries were laughing at us. France was laughing at us.” ― Antonin Scalia, The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court I grew up in the 1980s thinking my vote didn’t matter. I became an “election denier” because that is what the Democrats have always been. I grew up with cynicism and mild hatred of the government. My childhood was spent livi...
Nov 09, 2022•25 min
“I do this real moron thing, and it's called thinking. And apparently I'm not a very good American because I like to form my own opinions.” ― George Carlin Joe Biden and the Democrats have a big problem. It isn’t just that they stand to lose in the midterm elections and maybe the Presidency in 2024. They stand to lose much more than that. They stand to lose everything. The American people, by now, have had enough. They’re sick of cowards who cannot stand up to the activists who control them. The...
Nov 03, 2022•24 min
As we head into the midterm elections, our virtual civil war all too often is fought on social media, as each side battles daily to capture the media narrative. Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter felt like a major win for the real “resistance.” He is our Luke Skywalker, one of our last best hopes for freedom against the Empire. 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...
Oct 31, 2022•17 min
The look on Joy Behar’s face said it all. Confusion, befuddlement, and an ever so slight hint of anger. She was reacting to a recent poll from the New York Times that showed only 8% of Americans were worried about the “The State of democracy” heading into the midterms. She understood people were worried about putting food on the table, she said, but expecting the Republicans to clean up the mess was crazy. They weren’t going to fix the economy. Her pivot said it all. It was never about the threa...
Oct 24, 2022•21 min
“Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official, save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. It is patriotic to support him insofar as he efficiently serves the country. It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country. In either event, it is unpatriotic not to tell the truth, whether about the president or anyone else....
Oct 14, 2022•22 min
“Everybody can be great...because anybody can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.” ― Martin Luther King Jr. It turns out that the “antiracists” never meant a single word of any of it. They were trying to preserve their status. That Herschel Walker is a Black man raised in the same “systemically racist” country as George Floyd doesn’t cross their minds, ...
Oct 10, 2022•23 min
Andrew Dominik’s new Netflix movie Blonde has offended just about everyone. Based on the Joyce Carol Oates novel of the same name, it is a fictional account of the life of Marilyn Monroe. Almost immediately, the robot-army of the Left in the media rallied the troops to broadcast a single message about the movie: it is “anti-abortion,” and “misinformation about abortion.” This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sash...
Oct 06, 2022•22 min
No matter how justified you think it is, prosecuting someone for what lives inside their minds and hearts is a road to ruin. It’s even worse than that. It’s a road to moral panics that lead to systematic dehumanization that wrecks whole societies. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg might have been selling secrets to the Soviets but that didn’t mean everyone in America who ever supported Marxist ideology was a traitor. Fear of what you can’t see leaves it up to your imagination, and when it comes to huma...
Sep 28, 2022•44 min
Joe Biden told a bedtime story about the border. It was secure, he said. But more importantly, those in charge were now humane, not like the previous administration’s barbaric practices. It was a good story. His supporters believed it. Then he closed the storybook, turned off the lights, and they all went to sleep. When they awoke, Governor Ron DeSantis had sent 50 migrants from Venezuela to Martha’s Vinyard, the home of his former boss, Barack Obama. They were refugees fleeing socialism for a p...
Sep 19, 2022•27 min
Joe Biden emerged from his speech last week “on the continued battle for the soul of our nation” like a squalling infant birthed from the loins of blue-check Twitter, bathed in the blood-red light of militant fascism. That was just the beginning. I used to be a faithful Democrat but they've lost me. 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...
Sep 08, 2022•25 min
“The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerated the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That in its essence is fascism: ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power.” ― Franklin D. Roosevelt The same week Mark Zuckerberg admitted the FBI pressured him to deep-six the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop, Joe Biden called the populists on the Right “semi-fascists.” From the FBI’s raid on...
Aug 29, 2022•31 min
“I don't like that man. I must get to know him better.” - Abraham Lincoln We live in a time where there are more people connected than ever before, and there are more people alive than ever before. Every day, each side of this Cold Civil War broadcasts nonstop agitprop against the other side. It’s Orwell’s two minutes of hate, except it’s 24/7. The problem is that these are not two equal sides. 65% of Twitter users are Democrats . The platform increased by 21% after Trump was banned. The media l...
Aug 23, 2022•33 min
The Democrats, the media, and the blue-checks on Twitter have no idea how many people have been red-pilled over the past three years. No one who watches Joe and Mika or Rachel Maddow or reads the New York Times will ever be red-pilled. They simply believe that is the only reality. How could it not be if every high-status person in America is going along with it? If your friends and family go along with it, if your social media feed confirms it every day with links. If it’s in the media, it must ...
Aug 16, 2022•28 min
In 2020, an unprecedented alliance of the richest and most powerful entities in the country came together to rig an election. Now I’m not saying they did anything illegal. Or that there was widespread fraud. But really, does that matter? By now, after they spent four years trying to remove Trump from power, impeached him twice, and now Merrick Garland has launched the “largest investigation in American history,” all to boost the Democrats chances in the midterms and try to knock Trump out to kee...
Aug 01, 2022•32 min
What has become obvious to anyone paying attention is that we are living through a kind of revolution. It is not a physical one. As my friend Abe Greenwald wrote in Commentary Magazine, it “is not being fought within the physical limits of a battlefield. It is instead happening all around us and directly to us. It is redefining our culture, our media, and giving new shape to our public and private institutions. It is remaking the nation before our eyes.” In other words, this is a revolution of c...
Jul 13, 2022•35 min
If there is one thing I learned watching the Johnny Depp and Amber Heard trial it’s this: you can’t just hear one side of the story. Because of social media, apparently, convictions in the Court of Opinion have now replaced due process and the presumption of innocence. Had Depp never sued Heard, we would never have known Heard was the abuser. The January 6th hearings look a lot more like the show trials in the Soviet Union under Stalin. Witnesses would only be called if they backed up the accusa...
Jun 30, 2022•19 min
Since 2020, after the protests and the riots erupted on the streets of major cities, causing over one billion dollars in damages, implied threats have become the norm on the Left. Windows are boarded up in anticipation of more. During the Derek Chauvin trial, the crowd outside, including some politicians, openly threatened violent riots should he be found not guilty. Random beatings go unnoticed on the streets because they only play on Right-wing channels. Like my friends on the Left, I mourn th...
Jun 27, 2022•21 min
The January 6th riot was ugly and violent. It was one of the worst things to happen in this country after one of its most difficult years. Protests are the voices of the unheard. The MAGA supporters who gathered in DC that day were exercising their First Amendment right to protest at their Capitol. At the same time, agitators near the Capitol were whipped up into a frenzy, believing they had a patriotic duty to stop the election of Joe Biden. The footage was proof at last of what the Democrats h...
Jun 21, 2022•50 min
PROFANITY WARNING — cursing all through some of the videos. When Johnny Depp won his defamation case against Amber Heard it marked the first time a #metoo casualty had fought back and won. Unless you watched the trial, all of the trial, you would not know just how badly Amber Heard fared on the stand, how weak her case was, the many contradictions in her story and that here we have a true defamation case that could be proven with evidence. What was telling, however, was the reaction by the media...
Jun 05, 2022•55 min
[Update: Since writing this, Elon Musk has actually bought Twitter!] The American dream says that the best and the brightest can rise as fast and as far as their talent and perseverance will allow. The Democrats say - that isn’t true; only white men have that advantage because this is a sexist, racist country built on and supported by patriarchal white supremacy. Regardless of that disconnect, Elon Musk made his fortune the American way and is now the richest man in the world. Musk’s “great man”...
Apr 22, 2022•22 min
Will Smith slapping Chris Rock on live television was probably the most truthful ten minutes anyone in Hollywood or watching at home had seen in five years. It was ugly. It was violent. It was disturbing. It was unforgettable. And it was the truth. A real thing happened that couldn’t be scripted. There is a reason this uncensored clip of Will Smith slapping Chris Rock has over 90 million views when the Oscar telecast only had 16 million. It’s because it was the truth at a time when the “Left” di...
Apr 04, 2022•30 min
This Sunday, the beleaguered Oscars will hold their 94th Academy Awards ceremony. I will be attending, as I have for the last several years. I get my one ticket that is usually on the highest tier. I put on a fancy dress. I drive myself to the ceremony, park in the garage, and take the escalator to the Dolby Theater, which is located in the same mall as the Mann’s Chinese, where I used to visit as a kid to look at the footprints and handprints of all of the stars. I love going to the Oscars, eve...
Mar 25, 2022•24 min
A long while back, during the Obama presidency, when my daughter was in elementary school, we were taking a walk with another mother and her daughter. We saw a baby bird that had fallen out of its nest. I urged the other mother to take the bird, as I had cats who would eat it. She was going to take it to the wildlife refuge but instead decided to raise it on her own, thinking it would be a good experience for her daughter. She named the bird after me, Sasha, because I had encouraged her to rescu...
Feb 26, 2022•20 min
“Neil and Joni, if your side wins—and Spotify bends the knee to your demands—it will mark peak woke and the beginning of your end. In defeat, Joe will just go elsewhere and everyone with a genuinely liberal bone in their body will follow. Most importantly, our present “Eat Me Last” public posture—from which you benefit mightily—will crumble. Enough people will see clearly the threat you pose to open-inquiry and they will gird their loins, say “enough!” and start pushing back at scale. It’s ironi...
Feb 13, 2022•29 min
