Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone
Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone
The Beginning of the End of Woketopia
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The Beginning of the End of Woketopia

When Hollywood decides it's running the country it's all over but the shouting.
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It began with the nation’s first Black President, but it would become much bigger. It would become a movement that captured every major institution in this country, including public schools, universities, corporations, and nearly all of culture. This could not last only two terms. No, this had to last forever.

When Donald Trump won in 2016, the power concentrated in the Obama coalition refused to step aside. Trump was the problem. His supporters were the problem. They didn’t like this new utopia that had become America and wanted change. But that change would never be allowed to take place.

The coup began even before Trump took office. A group of powerful elites decided it was their choice who could and could not represent the people. If one of them offended the ruling oligarchy, he was seen as a “racist” and had to be stopped by any means necessary.

They used every lever of power to stop him, to remove him, and to destroy him. They did this with the full cooperation of the nation’s press corps. They did it in full view of the Security State. And they did it with the enthusiastic support of their voters.

Get him. Destroy him. Remove him.

I was one of them. I wrote endless pieces about why Hillary Clinton had to win because history had to be made. I spent years pushing woke ideology into the film industry. It made me feel important. I was part of a movement, something bigger than myself. I had the admiration of my friends and pats on the back by powerful people. Why would I ever give that up?

I believed Donald Trump was a racist because the Democrats told me so. I believed he was a Russian spy because I watched Rachel Maddow. I believed he was a danger to our country because I read the New York Times, and I believed that the only thing that mattered in our lives was that those of us who were among the white majority did everything we could to elevate the oppressed minorities.

If someone had stood up to stop it all of those years ago, maybe it would have never reached this crisis point. But who was going to do that? Not the FBI, they were in on it. Not the legacy press, they were in on it too. And Hollywood? They were helping to write the screenplay.

“I’m with Her”

I believed in Hillary Clinton, and when she lost, I too, wanted revenge on the system that had denied her the presidency and had prevented us from making history.

When 2019 came along, I knew only Biden could defeat the one-term president with a strong economy. But no one else in our movement did. They wanted a woman to make up for Hillary’s loss. Elizabeth Warren was right for one kind of Hillary supporter. Kamala Harris, however, wasn’t just right. She was a religious figure.

But Kamala Harris gave a bad audition for the role of our new leader. She couldn’t do it. She bombed out. She was too easily triggered. She was testy. She didn’t seem to know much of what she was talking about. She looked right for the part, but she wasn’t believable. And down she went.

However, she was too valuable to abandon. She had that combination of good looks, sex appeal, toughness, and, most of all, she was not white. So Biden, in hopes of gaining some “woke cred,” selected Harris as his running mate.

None of them would have said a thing if Biden’s poll numbers hadn’t dropped. Not George Clooney, not Nancy Pelosi, not Barack Obama. They would have kept the grand illusion going, knowing that Harris was always the final endpoint.

Since the Great Awokening, we’ve watched the richest, whitest people who have all of the power in this country hide behind shields — Black faces that stare out at us from billboards, movies, award shows, and television ads. There must always be diverse representation everywhere you look so everyone at the top won’t be exposed.

And that is exactly the purpose Kamala Harris. She’s an even better facade than Biden was. All those rich Hollywood people can hide behind her and hopefully erase Trump and MAGA. Now, our government looks like a Hollywood movie. They don’t want to be represented by an “old white guy,” they never did.

But this? This is who they are.

A government of Jeffrey Katzenberg and George Clooney, by Steven Spielberg and Sally Field, for Rob Reiner and Aaron Sorkin?

The headline that Joe was stepping down hit my phone right as my mother, our friend, and I were sitting down to watch Twisters.

The advertising showed the breakout star from Top Gun Maverick, Glen Powell, as the hero of the movie. That’s odd, I thought. You don’t see male heroes in Hollywood movies anymore.

But it was a bait and switch. Throughout most of the movie, he is sidelined as the ineffectual “hot guy” who must be rescued by the petite blonde, Daisy Edgar-Jones.

After the film ended and we watched this childlike woman as the smartest scientist and the toughest badass to extinguish the tornado and save the village I was thinking, that’s exactly what the Democrats have done here. They’ve cast the right person for their leader, but it’s someone who is not believable in the part.

It’s impossible to see where the line ends between Hollywood and the Democratic Party. Already, the trades are doing their work by reminding everyone that in this country, culture can only take one side.

There is no chance there will be any critical examination of Harris from the perspective of Hollywood. Just like none of them will ever confront the ideology that has overtaken, and very nearly crippled, Hollywood. It’s baked into the cake.

They’re also out demonizing Trump, not just in Hollywood but across all mainstream publications.

When I say the empire is collapsing, that’s what I mean. When one goes down, all go down.

Suspension of Disbelief

A movie will hold you in its grip for two hours if it can convince you that what you see is real. But if it can’t? The movie has failed. The decision to cast Kamala Harris as the leading candidate for the highest office in the land strains credulity. I can’t believe her as the ‘border Czar,” let alone the Commander in Chief.

But who is Kamala Harris really? Is she a shapeshifter who will play any part that’s required of her? What does she stand for? No one will ever ask because it doesn’t matter. Like the diverse characters in Twisters, the only thing that matters about her is that she’s Black and female.

Whether she’s Black or not also seems to be up for debate:

But it hardly matters. She’s the anointed one, per Nancy Pelosi - the real leader of the Democratic Party.

Who is Kamala Harris? I guess she’s anyone you want her to be. To suckling infants like Drew Barrymore, she’s Momala for the country.

To the Trump deranged, she’s Kamala, the Cop, Kamala, the Prosecutor. And to Hollywood, she’s the perfectly cast female lead prepared to take down the Greatest Villain the World Has Ever Known.

Kind of sounds like a movie title, doesn’t it?

Persistence of Vision

The Left now, the side with all of the power, has decided that elections and democracy don’t matter. Box office and ratings don’t matter. Profits, too, don’t matter. They don’t believe the economy is bad. They don’t believe there is a problem at the border.

They don’t seem to realize who they are and what they’ve become. They don’t seem to recognize how much the general public is starting to hate them, how much clout they’ve lost, and how they’re no longer seen as the “special” people. How they can’t open movies anymore or bring in ratings.

They don’t see themselves as the stale, out-of-step aristocracy they’ve become, what Grand Duke Alexander called the The Last Spectacular Ball in the History of the Empire … [but] a new and hostile Russia glared through the large windows of the palace … while we danced, the workers were striking and the clouds in the Far East were hanging dangerously low.”

They’ve never addressed the urgent needs of the people who sent them a message in 2016 that they were not happy with what our government has become—this de facto monarchy, this oligarchy of wealthy, powerful elites that have decided they should run this country without our approval. Sorry, it doesn’t work like that.

We’ve just lived through something extraordinary. An attempted assassination on a president’s life, and another president removed from office as they might do in a dictatorship, and everyone is mandated to pretend like all of this is normal.

Trump has arrived at this moment in history to show us what has become of our country. He’s the only person with the strength to stand up to them, but he must.

He has pulled back the curtain, and a growing number of us don’t like what we see. Like every Gray Champion of the Fourth Turning, he’s appeared at just the right time to give us one last chance to rescue this country and return it to us, the people.

They’ve decided that the only thing that matters is their persistence of vision — that these moments of truth can’t be recognized on their own when you spin the whole reel through a projector. It will have the illusion of reality, but don’t let it fool you.

In trying to recapture the splendor in the grass, the glory in the hour, they’ve lost the plot. And now it’s a movie that’s badly written. And it’s an empire that is collapsing because most of America no longer wants what they’re selling.

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Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone
Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone
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