I’ll admit that this Thanksgiving road trip wasn’t exactly fun. Oh, don’t get me wrong. The minute I see my daughter, I am over the moon. Thanksgiving was as it should be: warm family, good food, and giving thanks. I never want to say goodbye and I hate that she lives all the way across the country.
It was the before and the after when the trouble began. Somehow, last May’s road trip did not bring the darkness, but this one did. It was too much time spent thinking about things I’d been pushing aside for too long. I feel like I’ve been running just ahead of a tidal wave. And no, that doesn’t mean anything like depression but just the plain truth of what has become of me and my life after the past four years of moving from one side of a Civil War to the other.
Was it a Civil War, or was it a revolutionary war? I can’t really tell. I just know that it was a war with two sides. You had to pick one. However, no one on the Right punishes anyone on the Left for believing what they believe, not really. They boycott companies that sell their ideology, like Budweiser. But they don’t disinvite you to Thanksgiving.
I knew I could not discuss politics with my daughter’s boyfriend’s family, and I didn’t. Whatever they believed, I was willing to put it aside because we were all together for a holiday about appreciating everything we had. And in the big picture, I have much to be thankful for. I feel lucky in that way.
Last May I ended up in the ER twice on my road trip, once for slicing open my palm in Lincoln, Nebraska and once while trying to outrun a screaming ambulance with my elderly dog barely able to make it across the street. I tripped and landed on my elbow, breaking my arm. But the dog was fine.
Nonetheless, I wasn’t haunted last time like I have been this time. If my life was a novel, those injuries might have been warnings for something much more serious to come. Not serious like the death of a loved one or a terminal illness, but serious in a different way, a life-shattering, unavoidable way.
But my life isn’t a novel. Maybe the tidal wave finally caught up with me now that I had so much time to think. At home, I am always online, reading and listening to like-minded people and not feeling so alone. But in a car driving for hours, there was no escaping it.
This isn’t some nightmare I’m living through, and one day, I will wake up. I’ve bought a one-way ticket aboard the Counterculture Express, and there’s no turning back now.
It wasn’t so much everything I’ve been writing about and saying for the past four years that haunted me. It was what’s just happened to me in the past few months. I’ve spent almost a decade being that one person who stands on the side of those being canceled, using whatever online clout I’d attained from a life lived mostly online to defend them.
I have even stood up for those accused of being sex offenders. I’ll never forget spending much of my reputational clout standing up for a writer named Devin Faraci. Long before Hollywood blacklisted me, the worst thing they could say about me was that I was a rapist apologist. And they said it all of the time.
Later, when I began drifting away from the Left and writing here on Substack, I was interviewed by Megyn Kelly. Somehow, Devin Faraci saw it. After being a patron on his Patreon, writing columns defending him, and standing up for him at great cost - he threw me under the bus. He called me out on Twitter because he had to let everyone know that he might be a sexual assaulter, but I was now on the other side of the war, and that was worse.
But even as horrible as that was, it wasn’t what had occupied my thoughts for the past two weeks while doing something I usually love. Driving. No. It was how I’d wasted so much of my time working a 24/7 job, investing my whole life in an industry that would completely turn its back on me in the way they have. It has always been chilling to live through it, but somehow, I’d avoided really thinking about it, and now, as I drove nearly 3,000 miles to Ohio and back, I couldn’t think of anything else.
It’s Oscar season, and I’m doing what I’ve done every year since 1999: reporting on the Oscar race. Even back in May, I had a whole staff working with me to proofread my stories, remind me of breaking news, or run a contest form. Now, it’s a ghost town, and it’s just me. But driving all day means I can’t do the job alone.
I was playing with fire, I always knew, and said so many times when people asked me how I was able to get away with writing honestly here on Substack while the climate of fear and the culture of silence crippled so much of Hollywood. How had I remained untouched?
Because I kept what I really thought confined to Substack and a private Twitter account, in the months leading up to the election, I thought I had an obligation just to tell the truth, to come clean, to be “out” about who I was and what I was fighting for.
But I danced too close to the flame. I made a joke mocking White Dudes for Harris, joking that finally White Power was back in fashion, and I championed Trump on Twitter on my official account, and that was the red line. That meant I was a traitor in our war, and that caught the attention of a journalist named Rebecca Keegan, who interviewed many publicists and an Academy member who said my joke wasn’t funny and that I was now “toxic.” No blurbs on movie ads for me. But worse, no advertising either. No staff. A 25-year career was wiped out overnight.
For weeks, the gossip around town was that Keegan was talking to people who knew me and worked for me, looking for dirt, trying to uncover yet more information to expose me as a bad person. But I’ve done nothing except try to live an honest life and speak the truth. In doing so, I felt compelled to support and vote for Donald Trump.
Probably the worst part of Keegan’s “investigative report” (which I still have not read) was that she ended it by suggesting that I was pushing this far just to prove how intolerant the Left had become as if that was even necessary.
During our interview, she explained why she was so shocked by my tweets and what I said, “But Sasha is smart,” she would say to herself. Finishing that sentence for her would be something like, “So how can she be writing alt-right talking points and disinformation?”
What she would never do, however, is consider anything I’ve said to have any merit in her world. When you only read the New York Times, listen to NPR, and end the night with MSNBC, how can your mind crack open even a bit to consider there is another way to see things?
It would never occur to her to do what I did, to get to know the half of the country she feels comfortable shunning. To humanize them. To walk in their shoes. Now that I have done that, how can I see her or any of them as decent people anymore? I can’t.
And that is what haunted me the most. Peering into the dark side of human nature, the ugly side, the unavoidable truth about what we’re all capable of. I try to remember what it was like to be one of them when I saw my old high school boyfriend and prom date coming out on Facebook as a MAGA guy, how I thought “What happened to him?”
But even if I thought he had lost his mind or been radicalized, I would never do to him what they’re doing to me. I could never. So how can they? Why is it like this? How can so many people go along with it? How can so many people be this weak, this cowardly? That’s the thing I can’t seem to reconcile in my mind.
And yes, a part of me did do it as a kind of test. What if I just told the truth? Sooner or later, someone would write a story like Rebecca Keegan did anyway. It was only a matter of time. When you have the power to destroy people overnight, it’s hard not to pull the trigger. They’d been trying to destroy me and my business for years anyway. They just didn’t have the Trump card.
You might wonder why I am wasting your time whining about my own life yet again. Get over it, you might think. Turn the page. Snap out of it. We’ve been dealing with this a lot longer than you have. Stop being so fragile. This is who they are. This is what they are. Accept it.
In one sense, that’s true. It’s time for me to walk away from writing about Hollywood, especially the Oscars. They’re dead anyway. No one cares. It’s become, as my friend says, “Best Picture from a film festival.”
But in another sense, I’ve never been one to back away from a fight, and a part of me refuses to abandon what I’ve built. That’s what they want. They want me to not exist anymore. I will walk away but I’ll do so when I decide, not them.
“And if I’m flying solo, at least I’m flying free….”
As I came to the end of my long road trip, I could see the light at the end of the tunnel. The answer, I discovered, was in the Wizard of Oz. Or rather, the update, the movie musical Wicked. I finally watched it with my daughter and I saw for the first time that this movie is about what we’ve all just lived through. It’s about all of us, the outcasts and the condemned witches.
And yes, this is a distortion of the film The Wizard of Oz, which is perfect in every way and one I think about a lot. I think about how Oz is a delusion or how we must have the brains, the heart, and the nerve. I think about how there’s no place like home. And yes, I think about the Wicked Witch as Mrs. Gultch, a Karen who wanted to destroy Toto, and how those of us watching would have done anything to save him.
But Wicked in 2024 is the film that needed to be made, even if no one involved in it realizes this. It is a retelling that somehow tells the truth about this moment, even if those telling it will never see what they’ve manifested, just like those in my very liberal town putting on a production of The Crucible without having any idea just how ironic that was.
Cynthia Erivo brilliantly plays Elphaba, an outsider who is told to conform and be like everyone else. She is also worried about the animals because the establishment (the Wizard of Oz, played by Jeff Goldblum) plans to put them in cages and remove their ability to talk.
True, the Left can distort this and somehow pretend that Oz is Trump and the animals are migrants. Or the animals are transgender people. They can twist it around that way and no doubt have. They can pretend because Erivo is Black that this is a story about racism and marginalized people. But the truth of the story is that it’s anti-establishment. It’s about speaking up and speaking out and becoming an exile as a result.
I watched Wicked with my daughter, and at the moment Elphaba becomes a witch and takes to the sky for the first time, we hear this wonderful part of the song—that was when I realized that in a world of Glindas, it’s more important to be an Elphaba.
It wasn’t just that movie; it was also a movie about Bob Dylan called A Complete Unknown. No one who has gone along with this cancel culture madness and this extreme polarization can possibly understand what it meant to be Bob Dylan when he went electric.
That was the counterculture. That was a musician refusing to follow what everyone around him expected him to be, think, and say.
Back then, America was shedding old skin, just like it is now, and on the way to a rebirth, a revolution of culture that defied the established order and, in so doing, defied gravity.
Those who make these movies, love them, sell them, and attempt to win Oscars for them, or even those who vote on them, will never understand their role now as we watch the birth of a new counterculture, one that will leave them behind.
They have convinced themselves that they’re still the good guys because they use identity politics to absolve themselves of their sins of wealth and privilege. But that isn’t the truth about who they are. They are part of the old world, the one a growing number of us are choosing to escape.
The only thing more powerful in Hollywood than money is the truth. Being able to tell it is the kind of power I suddenly felt that helped change how I saw things, and I was no longer haunted by what had happened to me. There it is, the audacity of the counterculture, the audacity of hope.
Almost no one on the Left sees me as a good person. That’s been true for almost ten years. They see me as a witch hiding in the shadows, a dangerous force threatening their utopia. But what a beautiful thing it is to be that free. Free in the mind and in the heart. To see the future that promises the new, the thing born after the dead skin falls away.
You see, sometimes it’s the witches who will be remembered well, while those who persecute and condemn them will become the villains of history.
And so it will go with Hollywood.
Flagstaff, AZ
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