A tweet about the Holocaust? Sorry, Gina Carano, you’re finished with Disney . A tweet about how violent protests lose elections got you fired? Sorry, David Shor, those are the consequences of your action s. You have to be held accountable. It’s not “cancel culture,” they insisted. It’s “consequence culture.” Intent doesn’t matter. Only impact does. Not even Thomas Jefferson was safe from the “Eye of Sauron” that sought to root out the thought criminals wherever they may have been hiding. If you...
Oct 26, 2023•17 min
“And so shines a good deed in a weary world,” that’s the line that ran through my head as I finished John Nolte’s first novel, Borrowed Time . The truth is that I didn’t want it to end. I didn’t want to leave that imaginative world and have to face the reality of ours. I had already started it over just before the last few chapters to stave off the inevitable. Was it the book’s protagonist I liked so much? A man blessed (or cursed) with immortality who falls in love for the first time in thousan...
Oct 20, 2023•19 min
Once upon a time, there was a Paper of Record. They proudly claimed that moniker because they valued journalism. They valued getting the facts before broadcasting the headline. For decades, they built the most trusted newspaper in the land. And that newspaper was called the New York Times. Then came the internet. A gaggle of hoodie-wearing flip-flop dudebros moving fast and breaking things nearly put the Times and other outlets out of business. Now, anyone could have a website and report the new...
Oct 18, 2023•23 min
As we watch the horrific images of Hamas's brutal attack on Israeli citizens, there is no mistaking the face of evil. This is brutality on a scale most of us here in America have never witnessed - the rapes of women who are dragged through the streets to cheers. Babies murdered in their cribs — beheaded — fathers shot while trying to help their families escape—charred remains of still-smoking corpses in gardens, doorways, and cars. For the past three years, our government has lied to us about wh...
Oct 12, 2023•39 min
I was part of a movement on the Left that endlessly softened language to avoid offending a single person we deemed marginalized. What we couldn’t say, what we had to say … The list just kept getting longer. The judgments more severe. That Trump is an existential threat not for anything he’s ever done, but what he says is proof enough that this war we’re fighting is a war of words. I’m not allowed to use the word “sterilize,” just like I’m not allowed to use the word “mutilate” to describe what’s...
Oct 07, 2023•34 min
“If they want a monster so badly, they ought to be provided by one.” ― Margaret Atwood Their monster is Trump. He is the entire economy of the media machine. Without him, whole news networks would die, social media would become stagnant, and, more importantly, there would be no named evil for the New Puritans to unite in fear and hatred against. Their God is Barack Obama. Yes, that’s right. We're caught in a clash of the titans that involves two movements, largely built and cultivated online, th...
Oct 03, 2023•29 min
Joe Biden lied about who he was when he ran for president. He said he was a moderate. He isn’t. He said he would unite the country. He hasn’t. He said he would revive the economy. He didn’t. Lying is nothing new to the Democratic Party. The lies are big - The exit from Afghanistan was fine, January 6th was a violent insurrection , lockdowns were successful , the vaccine was not risky, the economy is strong, gender is a construct . And their lies are small, S tephen Colbert is funny. One of the b...
Sep 29, 2023•27 min
“ We create the illusion that being informed is a kind of action in itself. So to wash that guilt out—to eliminate the shame and discomfort you feel over doing nothing as the world goes mad—you'll keep tuning in.” - Matt Taibbi, Hate, Inc. The other night on MSNBC, Nicolle Wallace reached her breaking point. Something must be done, or we will all live to regret it. “Something bad is going to happen,” she said. “What will we tell our children and grandchildren when it does”? Then she looked direc...
Sep 22, 2023•31 min
Yes, Trump can win. Many Conservatives worry that Trump can’t win. Democrats, they believe, have rigged the system in their favor, and there is no defeating them now so why even bother voting? Yes, that’s exactly where they want you to be. They want the grassroots movement that is MAGA to shut up and sit down and fade into obscurity. But here’s the truth. Trump can win on the economy alone. He can win on his own record on the economy, which ordinarily would have meant winning a decisive second t...
Sep 15, 2023•28 min
The 50th Annual Telluride Film Festival went off mostly without a hitch. It was the same beautiful town in the mountains of Colorado I’d been visiting for at least ten years. There were movies earmarked for the Oscar race, critics and bloggers, and film industry professionals scurrying from place to place. But something felt different. It wasn’t just the lack of celebrities that are usually the draw for such an exclusive, expensive fest. The actors’ strike meant they could not show up, even if a...
Sep 05, 2023•24 min
By the rude bridge that arched the flood, Their flag to April's breeze unfurled, Here once the embattled farmers stood, And fired the shot heard round the world. -Ralph Waldo Emerson You maniacs. You finally did it. You finally made people like me actually want to vote for Trump — not just vote for him because he’s a Republican, and he’ll do the dirty job of putting the brakes on “gender-affirming care.” I was already there. But actually wanting to vote for Trump specifically, to believe that on...
Aug 29, 2023•29 min
Memes sprouted up online as the rare, once-in-a-generation Hurricane Hilary threatened Los Angeles. “She’s back,” they all said. No one could mistake the namesake, with or without the extra “l.” Just before the hurricane was downgraded to a tropical storm and made its way toward me, I was revisiting Disney’s Snow White in the wake of comments made by Rachel Zegler, the young star chosen to revive and rebrand the Disney princess as non-white, feminist, and woke. Gone were the seven dwarfs. Gone w...
Aug 20, 2023•31 min
“Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” - Shakespeare Despite the shock and awe of the four indictments against former president Donald Trump, the Democrats are more vulnerable than they’ve been in decades. It isn’t just the Afghanistan exit, the economy, or the cancer growing inside the presidency, it’s also the radical policies the Democrats...
Aug 17, 2023•39 min
Dear Mr. Brooks, Your column might be the best thing written in the New York Times in the past seven years. You’ve undoubtedly been subjected to a fair amount of abuse for it. You should probably never have written it if the comments are any indication. But those are people in the bubble. They don’t represent either the majority or the future. They think they do, but they don’t. Your question, “Are we the bad guys”? The answer is yes. You are the bad guys. You have systematically dehumanized hal...
Aug 06, 2023•32 min
Part 1 - America at the Hands of a Cult | Part 2 - A Religious War As yet another indictment of Trump rolls out, they can barely contain their excitement. Is this finally it? Will that long-awaited termination of their tormenter give the ruling class the peace they demand? They’ve been patiently waiting, spending too much of their precious time hunched over a keyboard, saliva pooling at the edges of their mouths, tongues flicking with the promise of release - will anyone put them out of their mi...
Aug 03, 2023•29 min
“Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts... perhaps the fear of a loss of power.” ― John Steinbeck I not only believed in the myth of Joe Biden, I helped sell it. My father had just died and it was easy for me to transpose my grief onto Joe as I tried to convince my fellow Hillary supporters that he was the only candidate to beat Trump. Yes, the “old white guy” whose moment had finally arrived. He would save us, we all thought. He was empathetic and kind. He was, I insisted, a good man. He’d once ...
Jul 29, 2023•38 min
This is a supplement to the piece I posted yesterday that needs clarification. It is all too easy to see both Barbie and Oppenheimer as two sides of the same coin - Barbie as the ultimate “woke” movie and Oppenheimer as a movie that attempts to vindicate or sympathize with Communism. But that would be a mistake. Barbie reflects our society now, a society not unlike what the Communist hunters most feared: ideological capture of our major institutions, our culture, our schools, and our government....
Jul 22, 2023•31 min
It’s beginning to look a lot like the 1950s. No two films recall that era more than Barbie and Oppenheimer, both opening this weekend. Despite these films being completely different in every way imaginable, they have captivated the internet as a reach back in time to a forgotten world, just as the sci-fi movies of the 1950s reached forward to a world they could never know. There is something about the two of them as Romeo and Juliet on the eve of the apocalypse that has inspired the internet to ...
Jul 22, 2023•33 min
Sound of Freedom is sailing toward $100 mil without breaking a sweat. It topped all Hollywood blockbusters, from Disney’s catastrophe, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, to Insidious, to Jennifer Lawrence’s middling sex comedy, No Hard Feelings. Only Tom Cruise’s Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning could top it. For a film that cost just $14.5 million, Sound of Freedom is rounding the bases and humiliating Hollywood by the minute, as if to say - what, like it’s hard? They have one job in Holly...
Jul 16, 2023•30 min
“The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.” ― Thomas Jefferson November 8th, 2016. That was the day journalism, as we once knew it died. Gone was objectivity. Gone was a search for the truth, no matter where it led. Gone was holding the powerful to account. Gone was the desire to serve the public’s best interest. It’s been seven years now, and most of us are still in mourning. We can’t forget what journalism used to be. We sit glumly in fr...
Jul 14, 2023•39 min
Houston, we have a problem. Now that COVID is long gone, and studios are putting out blockbusters again, it almost seems like things are back to “normal.” Yet, movie after movie keeps underperforming, which is a polite way of saying Hollywood movies are bombing at the box office. Why? Well, I don’t have to tell you why. You know why. Everyone knows why except the people tasked with covering Hollywood who are too afraid to say why. You can’t fix a problem you can’t name. In a recent poll, 42% cit...
Jul 09, 2023•29 min
The first time I realized I was a proud American was the month I spent in Italy in 1997 with a man who would become the father of my child that month, unbeknownst to either of us. The news was earth-shattering to him because we were worlds apart. We fought and then broke up over the best decision I ever made, to keep my child. He complained about America a lot, and I tolerated it, but then I found myself protective and defensive of my country. “Yeah, well, you sure like our Levis and our Marlbor...
Jul 04, 2023•17 min
Part One: The Timeline is here. Are we living through a culture war or a religious war? Can we even tell the difference by now? The Left demonized the religious for nearly all of my life, yet here we are, a country at the hands of a cult, and the intellectuals can’t get us out of it — No proper boundaries to protect children, no guiding principles beyond categorizing us by skin color or gender identity, a godlessness that has left us awash in narcissism and hollowed out morality. Progressivism i...
Jul 03, 2023•50 min
The Summer of 2020 was both a revolution and a coup, ultimately resulting in an unshakable pact between the Woke and all major corporate and cultural institutions in this country, up to and including the President of the United States. It isn’t a cult of one personality but of many. It’s a tawdry tale of influencers and algorithms, fast-moving technology and helicopter parents, social media, and Critical Theory. But Joe Biden is no cult leader. He’s more like a George Spahn figure, presenting a ...
Jun 25, 2023•53 min
My Dad called me “happy Sash,” which was ironic because I was never a happy kid. I was a worried kid, just like I’m a worried adult. My dad would say it often, “she’s a Happy Sash.” I think he wanted me to be happy because then maybe he wouldn’t worry. He was a worrier too. There aren’t many pictures of me as a baby, but here’s one. That’s me in the middle. As you can see, not exactly smiling. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus e...
Jun 18, 2023•13 min
“We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men – not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular” - Edward R. Mur...
Jun 12, 2023•42 min
What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff — I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye. - JD Salinger Taylor Swift’s concerts have become cultural phenomenons, religious-like experiences for so many people worldwide, especially little girls. Happy moms post videos of their flushed, excited faces and near-hysteria at the first s...
Jun 07, 2023•44 min
I used to be a true blue loyalist. My grandmother, an FDR Democrat, and lifelong social worker, kept a signed picture of Bill Clinton on her kitchen wall until the day she died. My earliest memory kicks it all the way back to 1988 when I wore a Dukakis button to work and was mocked for it. “Who would vote for du-Taxus,” one woman said. 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...
May 31, 2023•45 min
As I began my drive across this big, beautiful country of ours, I saw real life going on. RVs filled with families hitched to trucks making their way somewhere. Lights turning on at grocery stores. Workers high atop utility poles fixing electrical lines. I drove through cities and pastures, across state lines, and on an interstate conceived and built by President Eisenhower. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sash...
May 17, 2023•31 min
The same network that called Tucker Carlson a “Right-wing extremist” has decided to put Donald Trump back on prime time. As their hypocrisy comes full circle, a pathetic #boycottcnn hashtag bloomed on Twitter. As if. CNN’s ratings were in near-total collapse when Trump threw them a lifeline. By contrast, the Murdochs dumped their best ratings-getter for speaking too many uncomfortable truths. To many on the Left, reality and truth are negotiable. They can fool themselves into believing Carlson w...
May 11, 2023•24 min
