『Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone』のカバーアート

Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone

Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone

著者： Sasha Stone
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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

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  • Happy Birthday America - There's No Place Like Home

    Happy Birthday America - There's No Place Like Home
    2026/07/05
    It’s been said that you can spot an American from a mile away. Travelers to Europe are advised to adjust their attire to blend in with locals and avoid looking so … casual. The French think Americans are loud and rude, and Europe has a long tradition of sneering at how classless we all are, even before Trump.I spent a month in Italy, and it’s a beautiful place. The slow living, the long naps when all the stores shut down for hours during the day, the tiny cars, the laundry drying on the balconies, the fresh food at the Farmer’s Market. I feel lucky that when I came back from Italy, I was pregnant and having my baby is the single greatest thing that has ever happened to me. But I’m also glad she grew up in America.I used to travel to France to cover the Cannes Film Festival, and again, I admired their way of life, the food especially. But every time I stayed too long, I began to miss my home in America. There is something thrilling about living in a free country that I’ve never felt anywhere else.It seems to me that if you are born here, you make up your life as it goes along. It is not planned out for you, necessarily, although in some cases, I guess it probably is. In my case, it wasn’t. I knew I could invent myself any way I wanted. And if I didn’t like that version, I could reinvent myself. We’re like our country, a work in progress. It’s always there for the taking, that promise of opportunity.Donald Trump is all of America’s freedoms wrapped up in one imperfect man. He broke through the thick layer of oppressive thought and speech and showed the world that here, you really can say anything you want - as long as some crazed totalitarian doesn’t try to shoot you. That’s the country I want to live in. It isn’t that the greatest writing or art has come from a place like America. Plenty of great works have come from places that don’t center freedom as their main objective. But once you’ve tasted it, you can’t give it up.In his speech last night, Trump said:The American founding represents the best ideas and traditions in history by the best people, like you. You can be loyal to Karl Marx or you can be loyal to America. You can be a communist or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both. As for those who peddle Marxist lies about our heritage, tell our children that we live on stolen land or that our heroes were oppressors, they’re doing something much worse than slandering our past. They are slandering and attacking our future. Not going to let that happen.They’re trying to tear down the great American character to destroy the people who declared independence, who crossed the Delaware, who settled the West and conquered the skies. You know who those people are. But we will never let that happen.In America now, two stories are competing to claim the right to rule the future. Trump is telling the better story, the one America was founded on and the one we’ve all believed, at least up until recently, when a new wave of progressives decided that the better story paints America as a corrupt, rotten, white supremacist empire that has to be torn down to the studs and rebuilt.They must be terrified about the 2030 Census because they’ve decided to die on the hill of illegal immigration, which is fast becoming their most important issue. That, alongside Democratic Socialism, is a recipe for disaster.This was Bill Clinton’s bummer message on the Fourth:I always thought Bill Clinton was a good president, but reading that just now makes me think he wasn’t. All he’s ever been able to do is point the finger at the other side and never offer any real solutions. He’s not the man in the arena. He’s the man on the sidelines.What I love about Trump and his supporters is how much they love America. They love it so much that they plant flags all over their homes. They admire the Founding Fathers. They call themselves Patriots. We didn’t have that kind of pride on the Left when I was growing up.And even now, so many see the American flag and the love of country as dangerous, racist, bigoted, fascist. Whoever told those people that is what MAGA is about lied. They’re protective of America’s laws and its border. That is out of love for the country. The Left has taken almost everything from them. They’ve locked them out of culture, forbidden them from participating in any of their major events, dehumanized, demonized, and disenfranchised them. But the one thing they couldn’t take was their citizenship. They hit the jackpot just by being born in America. To think it would be so easy for people all over the world to come here illegally and claim that prize or to come here and attempt to remake America into something it was never meant to be devalues the one thing they treasure most of all. I’ve always been a proud American. I’ve always preferred this country over any other, but only in the last few years have I understood what it means to be a Patriot, to be ready ...
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    26 分
  • The Left at 250: Ask Not What You Can Do For Your Country...

    The Left at 250: Ask Not What You Can Do For Your Country...
    2026/07/03
    It took 65 years for that message to completely reverse itself in the Democratic Party and on the Left. Out is personal achievement. In is victimhood. Out is reaching for the stars. In is ushering in oppressed people from all over the world to ensure a steady supply. Out is the right of American citizens with their vote. In are people who don’t respect that vote.As Trump gives his speech at Mount Rushmore later this evening, Zohran Mamdani, who is supposedly just the Mayor of New York City, has positioned himself as Trump’s equal, the Mirror President for the other America. Thirsty as ever, in love with his own image, thinking who the hell he is, he has the audacity to sit in George Washington’s chair to make a speech about a new America he hopes to invent, one without borders, without Capitalism, without billionaires.His speech paints the American government as oppressive, while demonizing them for policing immigration:"We see it just as clearly in every American who still believes this country belongs to we, the people. We see America each time neighbors link arms with neighbors without asking how long they've lived here or what papers they have as ICE invades our neighborhoods. We see America each time working people demand more, not just for themselves, but for their fellow Americans."The irony is that he demonizes the rich, the very people who pad his risks in New York City and help him present a fake-pretend utopian fantasy that only works because of the rich people in the city, because they won’t let it fail. It’s absolution, after all, and there is no price high enough for that. It took America 250 years to arrive at a place where the country might finally, at long last, “be like Europe.” How many times did I hear that throughout my life? Why can’t we be like Europe? We were raised to hate our country, to see it as a Capitalist hellhole of the haves and the have-nots, a lesser nation than France or the UK or Italy. No wonder Mamdani thinks he speaks for everyone. But we didn’t have a bloody revolution just to copy England.Mamdani is like a cult leader who can now exploit whole generations who have been indoctrinated to believe that there is something rotting at the core of America’s heart, a disease of “white supremacy” and a history of exploitation, colonization, slavery, trauma, abuse, and poverty. Their only answer for this is to “be more like Europe.” At best, that is where they land. Really, it’s probably closer to “be more like China.”They’re already halfway there. Cancel culture has silenced all dissent. The DSA is rising, and the Democrats have kissed Mamdani’s ring.Not because it is easy…It’s not easy making it in America. It’s not easy making enough money for a decent home, to raise a family, and to take a vacation once in a while. No one ever said it would be easy, least of all, JFK:We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we're willing to accept.”JFK was assassinated before I was born. The Democrats were haunted by him for my entire life, until Barack Obama came along and was the first to erase the ghosts of the past and redefine what it meant to be both a Democrat and a person of the Left. That meant fundamental things would change. One of the biggest changes was going from believing in personal achievement to believing in victimhood. Obama took the obstruction of his policies personally. It was those racist Republicans. So they set about changing the hearts and minds of the young and teaching them that the only reason they couldn’t succeed was their victim status, and before long, that became the only thing that mattered about them. But for that movement to succeed, it required a sick country, not a healthy one. The Democrats were split in 2016 between the “white working class” in Bernie’s Democratic Socialism and the identity politics of Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. Now, what we’re seeing is a marriage between the two. Now, it’s not what Vivek Ramaswamy called Woke Capitalism, but rather, Woke Socialism. Isn’t it just another way to sell to Gen-Z?They are the most privileged generation ever to walk the face of the earth. Capitalism gave them social media, email, a computer in the palm of their hand, DoorDash, Google, Uber, TikTok, YouTube, streaming music, television shows, fast food, fast fashion, Instacart, Airbnb, influencer culture, and movies. And it’s not enough. Why can’t they be a Kardashian and have birthday parties with ten thousand balloons? Why can’t they travel to Europe? Why can’t they own a house? Why can’t they live on Manhattan’s Upper West Side? Why is Elon Musk a trillionaire with so many homeless people on the streets? Why are they so miserable, so full of anxiety, so full of hate? ...
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    27 分
  • From Cancel Culture to Communism

    From Cancel Culture to Communism
    2026/06/29
    “In our schools, our newsrooms, even our corporate boardrooms, there is a new far-left fascism that demands absolute allegiance. If you do not speak its language, perform its rituals, recite its mantras, and follow its commandments, then you will be censored, banished, blacklisted, persecuted, and punished. It’s not going to happen to us. Make no mistake: this left-wing cultural revolution is designed to overthrow the American Revolution. In so doing, they would destroy the very civilization that rescued billions from poverty, disease, violence, and hunger, and that lifted humanity to new heights of achievement, discovery, and progress.Donald J. Trump, July 4th, 2020It’s been ten years since the purges began, and I still have a hard time believing it actually happened. Did so many of my friends really go along with it? Did institutions, corporations, and all of Hollywood allow themselves to be shamefully cowed by the fanatical mob? Yes. Not only did it happen, but it’s become the new normal on the establishment Left — in Hollywood, in culture, in government. Everyone is still too afraid to say what they really think. Just appearing at the America 250 or the Kennedy Center will still ruin your career. The only difference now is that the wheel of oppression keeps spinning. Now it’s illegal immigrants. Now it’s “Free Palestine.”I don’t know why I didn’t see it sooner: this direct line from cancel culture to Communism. I thought it was mass hysteria after Trump’s shocking win in 2016, and that eventually, as with other episodes of mass hysteria in the past, it would burst, and we could all go back to the way things used to be, where we weren’t fighting a virtual Civil War.But now that three Democratic Socialists won their primaries in New York against one of the party’s shining stars, Dan Goldman, all because of Israel, what we’re seeing is Communism, but merged with Woke tyranny and radical Islam. It is essentially the perfect storm to destroy America.Now, we can clearly see what ten years of Cancel Culture have done to the Left. It has given them enormous power to force compliance, not just to those of us who dissented, but to members of their own party. In other words, the mob is about to come for them, too. What do they want? What the millionaires and billionaires have. They want what’s coming to them after years of indoctrination that told them that they are oppressed because of the color of their skin, their gender ideology, or their ethnicity. America, they were told, was founded on White Supremacy and colonization, and they’re owed something for it.They seem to have no place for the working class that Mamdani is always talking about, not if they’re white. Bernie Sanders might have cared about the “white working class,” but not these folks. Some animals are more equal than others, and with this new fundamentalism, it is meant only to redistribute wealth, not from the rich to the poor, but from the white majority to the marginalized minorities.It isn’t their fault exactly. They’ve been indoctrinated. None of us noticed this was happening right around Obama’s second term, 2012. Racism, they believed, had infected the majority in America, and it had to be rooted out. They had to be re-educated on “correct” history.They were not taught the American dream. They were taught the American nightmare. Here is a video from Katharine Birbalsingh:And now, they’ve finally found their magic man in Zohran Mamdani, who is everything they need wrapped up in one charismatic leader. He’s TikTok-friendly. He goes viral. He is pop-culture literate, and, most importantly, he’s the Wokest of the Woke. He speaks their language. He wants what they want. He goes to the Pride Parade but not the Israel Parade, becoming the first Mayor of the city in 60 years not to attend.He doesn’t just want to be the Mayor of New York. He wants to be a worldwide inspirational leader, which fits the new Left well since they don’t really want to unite with the other half of America so much as with those other countries that are ideologically aligned, you know, like 1984?It might seem like one big party, but this is a disaster for the Democrats. Everyone knows that any Democrat who goes against them will be stalked, swarmed, and harassed before getting primaried out. All the Republicans have to be is the more normal side, and they can win. Some Democrats are now sounding the alarm that Democratic Socialists are overtaking the party and will alienate people, even James Carville:No Democrat is safe from the mob, not even one of their most progressive politicians, Scott Weiner, in San Francisco, who was just harassed in public for not being sufficiently pro-Palestine. And obviously, for being Jewish.Dan Goldman was banned from a coffee shop for the same reason just before getting voted out. Mamdani and his acolytes shield their true selves behind a warm smile and a viral video, but there ...
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    49 分
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