Utopias by their nature have only two options if they’re to survive. They must lean into totalitarianism or collapse. We’re now at the moment when the Democrats, with complete control of the legacy media, nearly all major institutions of power — including those run by the government — are slowly adopting totalitarian practices to shut out speech they don’t like. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substa...
Mar 16, 2023•36 min
How is it possible that the highest-grossing, best-reviewed film of the year - by critics and audiences - that was credited with saving the film industry amid near-total collapse would not be winning Best Picture at the Oscars on Sunday, March 12th? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe...
Mar 07, 2023•29 min
President Biden is anxious to take his rightful place in history as a real president, not an establishment stooge who kicked around congress for decades, or a guy who has to be told where to stand, what to say, where to go. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe
Mar 01, 2023•35 min
“The modus operandi of every cult is to convince you there's something wrong with you and only they can fix it.” ― Marty Rubin I grew up in the era of cults. My siblings and I attended a small elementary school in Topanga Canyon back in the 1970s, when it was still a wilderness of hippies and health food stores - not a safe haven for the 1%. We were heathens, without a doubt, raised like weeds by a former beauty queen who had dropped out of high school at 16 to have my older brother. She met my ...
Feb 16, 2023•22 min
This is the podcast version. If you’d like to read the text version, that is here. I usually post them together but this time I didn’t. Which do you prefer? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe...
Feb 08, 2023•17 min
“The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.” John Steinbeck, East of Eden A few days ago, the most powerful, high-profile news media in this country were thoroughly humiliated by Jeff Gerth at the Columbia Journalism ...
Feb 06, 2023•32 min
“I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical. Unsuccesful rebellions indeed generally establish the incroachments on the rights of the people which have produced them. An observation of this truth should render honest republican governors so mild in their punishment of rebellions, as not to discourage them too much. It is a medecine necessary for the sound health of government.” ― Thomas Jefferson, Letters of T...
Jan 30, 2023•33 min
2016 was meant to be the crowning achievement for the Hillary Democrat. Those who stuck by her in her in 2008, during the Benghazi hearings, the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the non-stop criticisms of her during Bill Clinton’s presidency, and the early feminists who followed her leadership out of college and into politics that would eventually make the impossible possible: The first woman President of the United States. I was one of them. The more research I did on the life and career of Hillary Rod...
Jan 23, 2023•29 min
Do you remember good movies? I mean, really good movies you had to see in the movie theater the second they came out? Movies so good you would sacrifice your grocery money to see? Do you remember lining up for hours on opening day? I do. I didn’t just watch movies, I lived in them. I grew up on top of a mountain in Topanga Canyon, back when it wasn’t a gated community for the 1% but was instead the land of the hippies - the Manson Family and the Rolling Stones. This is a public episode. If you'd...
Jan 15, 2023•32 min
Two years ago, I started this Substack to find a path out of the madness that had overtaken the Left. The madness was everywhere. People were getting fired right and left, mostly left, for saying words they weren’t supposed to say. There was a sudden climate of fear that was crippling nearly every institution of power, most especially the one I work in: Hollywood. The fear was that there were racists and rapists everywhere and in everything. Sex and race became two major mass hysteria events in ...
Jan 01, 2023•22 min
“And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” ― George Orwell, 1984 Jamie Raskin wants to tell you a story. It’s one that has tumbled around in his brain for years now. It’s also one he hopes to make his name on. Jamie Raskin: hero at long last. All he had to do was stand before the Amer...
Dec 20, 2022•17 min
As the new owner of Twitter, Elon Musk is, to quote, Ben Shapiro, moving fast and breaking things. He could see a big problem, as anyone outside the media feedback loop can. Twitter had become not just the propaganda arm of the State, but was being used as a filter to dodge the First Amendment, to police thought and speech. They didn’t do it directly or overtly. They did it alongside enthusiastic “good soldiers” for the State. The users - the blue-checks - and the employees saw themselves as the...
Dec 15, 2022•31 min
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 sashastone.substack.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 sashasto...
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 sashastone.substack.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
