Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone copertina

Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone

Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone

Di: Sasha Stone
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A proposito di questo titolo

 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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Episodi
  • Interview with Jenny Holland

    Interview with Jenny Holland
    May 15 2026

    Jenny Holland has been running a similar track to mine for the last five years or so, but she got there before me. We both were more or less red-pilled by Steve Bannon. Here, we had a conversation for about an hour and a half. I hate doing video because I have a face for radio. But Jenny looks great so I thought I would put it up anyway. Also, I think my camera’s focus was off a bit - but the audio works great.

    I don’t have a timecodes but the transcript should appear.

    You can find her Substack here:

    And her YouTube is here:

    I will be driving across the country starting this weekend so I will be dropping some travel pics and whatnot. Hope you have a great weekend. And, as always, thanks for being so supportive and such a great community.



    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
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    1 ora e 29 min
  • Spencer Pratt is the Hero We Didn't Know We Needed

    Spencer Pratt is the Hero We Didn't Know We Needed
    May 12 2026
    “Now you know why they call me Dirty Harry, every dirty job that comes along.”Just as audiences didn’t know how much they needed Dirty Harry until he showed up on a movie screen in 1971, residents of Los Angeles had no idea how much they needed Spencer Pratt until they saw him face off against two of the leading candidates for Mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass and Nithya Raman.Bass and Raman couldn’t even answer simple questions, like whether illegal immigrants should be able to vote or whether there should be homeless encampments outside elementary schools. And every time the camera cut to Pratt, his reaction was always the same: “ You have got to be kidding me.”He spoke truths no one in the Democratic Party ever could or would because they don’t have to. They are never asked hard questions they don’t already have answers to, and they are never challenged as directly as they were by Spencer Pratt.They’re also protected by the legacy media, by Hollywood, by late-night comedy. As long as they properly virtue signal and obey the rules of Woketopia, no one ever holds them accountable for the problems in a city overrun by crime, drugs, and homelessness. Until now.Pratt wiped up the floor with Bass and Raman, so much so that they have now dropped out of a debate by the League of Women Voters that would have been held on May 13th. Now, it’s been canceled because someone, somewhere, told them they'd do better if they employed the Biden basement strategy: stay out of sight and let the system win the election. The Democrats and Hollywood have the same problem. They can’t tell the truth. Just as in 1971, when Dirty Harry sliced through the pretense like a hot knife through ice cream, so too has Spencer Pratt gotten our attention with his innovative campaign and simple, common-sense messaging, in an entertaining, imaginative way. True, AI might be the beginning of the end, but the way Pratt uses it has expanded the possibilities. With the help of Charles Curran, whose studio is responsible for many of these, we can now see how useful AI can be for creating an effective, viral campaign ad without the heavy lift of an entire production company and millions of dollars in campaign funds. This is AI at a grassroots level, but in its own way, it’s also artful commentary, the kind we never see aimed at the Left.AI, now in Pratt's hands, poses an unpredictable threat to the opposition, who will figure it out soon enough. It is also a threat to Hollywood for the same reasons. It doesn’t have to be politically correct or rely on partisan celebrities to approve of the messaging. AI also cuts through the noise, like Dirty Harry, like Spencer Pratt, because it represents freedom at a time of extremely oppressive micro-managing over all culture, and film especially.Dirty Harry was politically incorrect, but it told the truth at a time when most people were too afraid to talk about the soft-on-crime policies in the wake of the counterculture revolution. Too many rapes and serial killers on the rise, too many hippies, the Zodiac killer, the Manson murders - crime was everywhere, yet the culture of the time wasn’t exactly tuned in. If critics in the 1970s thought Dirty Harry was fascist, as Pauline Kael did, ordinary Americans - Nixon’s Silent Majority - felt seen.And now, residents of Los Angeles, many of them too poor to afford homes in the gated communities of the rich and famous who fund Mayor Karen Bass, might feel seen in the passionate messaging of Spencer Pratt. His voice is urgent in a time of complacency. He sees the problems the Left ignores. He speaks the truth when everyone else parrots the comforting lies. Los Angeles has been neglected for far too long, with the wildfires that burned down Pratt’s home becoming the tipping point. It was time for someone to rise up and say enough is enough. They don’t know how to deal with a shooting star like Pratt. When the Democrats try to dismiss him as a fame-hungry reality star, he hits them with something moving and undeniable. It’s true that Pratt was the enfant terrible of a mid-aughts reality show called The Hills. Not exactly the kind of leader people who shop at Erewon after doing hot yoga on La Brea have in mind for a leader. But his sincerity shines through. This is personal, and we can feel it. He says Bass has the unions and the money, but he has the moms. He has Democrats and Conservatives backing him. They call him MAGA, but he really isn’t. He is the first politician who is genuinely attempting to run a non-partisan campaign and actually reach across the aisle, which is exactly the hero America needs right now, not just in LA, but everywhere. It’s hard not to be won over by Spencer Pratt because he is so sincere. All of that manic bluster from the old days of The Hills has clearly been transformed by the trauma of his house burning down in a fire that the city should have been more prepared for, to put it mildly. He is ...
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    35 min
  • What My Mom Taught Me: Just Do The Next Thing

    What My Mom Taught Me: Just Do The Next Thing
    May 10 2026
    My mom doesn’t read this Substack. We sit on opposite ends of the great divide. But she doesn’t hold my political shift against me, even if she doesn’t understand it. When I visit her, I often find CNN or the BBC filling up the silence. The same messages drone on and on: Trump is bad, the world is coming to an end, it’s all terrible. And there’s my mom, absorbing it like a sponge. It’s a wonder she talks to me at all. We get along because we studiously avoid any mention of the Orange Man or politics. She is always on one side, and I am almost always on the other. If it does come up, and she makes an off-handed comment, it’s like someone lighting a match near a gas leak. We can’t talk about it at all, none of it, and so we don’t. I’m grateful that politics doesn’t define her to the point that she would go “no-contact” with her own daughter. No one in my family went that far. I guess I’m lucky. I think they think I caught a crazy bug, and one day I will go back to normal. So we just tread water until things change. My mother’s life wasn’t what she wanted it to be, although whose is? She was a bright light who looked like an adult by the age of 12. At 14, she was pretending to be 16 to compete in beauty pageants. Here she is, at number 1.It wouldn’t last long, just a few short years. But it must have made her parents proud to see her star rise that fast. She never knew her biological father and still doesn’t, but those genes are partly what made her such a stunner.Not long after, she would meet a man, get pregnant, and drop out of high school. That would never become a marriage and a family. Eventually, she’d start working nights at Pandora’s Box in Hollywood, where she met my dad, a Jazz drummer. My dad would split, and she’d be a divorced mom with four kids before the age of 25. She was still too young to understand what she’d done to her life by having us, but over time, it would start to sink in, everything she gave up to raise us instead of chasing her own dreams. It wasn’t easy for her, that’s for sure, but we had what was kind of like a little farm, with goats, chickens, and ponies on top of a mountain in Topanga Canyon. Because I grew up in the era of blaming your parents for your bad childhood, we didn’t spend a lot of time thanking them for giving us life at all. We were too busy looking at what was wrong. But I can’t pretend it was all sunshine and roses either. It wasn’t. It was painful and explains why my life is the way it is now, at least partly.Understanding what shaped my life is different from blaming my mom, who really did do the best she could under the circumstances. We felt guilt throughout most of our childhood for having taken her life away from her. She gave up everything, it felt like, but now I bet she can’t imagine her life without us.Back in the 1970s, parents didn’t coddle their kids. We grew up like weeds. We had to learn how to survive, and it wasn’t shameful to punish your children or leave them to fend for themselves. Or teach them hard lessons. It’s just how it was. I don’t remember being very close to my mom. She didn’t comfort me when I cried. If anything, she tried to toughen me up. I was too sensitive for her liking. But I do remember her holding me in the Pacific, taking me out into the waves to show me that I could do it, since I was too afraid. I remember feeling close to her then, and it’s one of the only times I've felt that way. I was still scared of the water, but I felt safe in her arms, and I’ll forget how warm and soft her skin felt as I clung to her through the crashing waves. The truth is that we were lucky to have that life, at least in the early days before we left Topanga. We spent every morning until night living in the wild. We were always barefoot, always with our hands and feet in nature. I remember plunging into the mud during rainstorms, tasting different kinds of grass, watching the weather turn, and the smell of my pony’s fur after a long ride. Ultimately, how things changed in the coming decades, after Columbine and 9/11, how kids were over-protected, I am grateful I got the harder, rougher childhood. It prepared me for right now, for living through this era of people mostly online, of coddled children, of dehumanizing each other and tribal warfare, of cancellations and assassinations, and overly medicated and emotional women who couldn’t handle the election of the Orange Man. What I learned from my mom was hard work and resilience. The reason I work every single day, and have ever since I started working online over 20 years ago, is my mom. Her words have often echoed in my mind over the years, “Just do the next thing. Keep moving forward.” Then again, for both of us, work is something we understand. The complications of everyday life, especially relationships, not so much.Just do the next thing is how you manage a messy life, or a broken life, or even a hard life -...
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    15 min
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