Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone

The PsychopathLindsay Clancy, in my opinion, did not want to kill herself. She wanted to kill her children. It was all becoming too much for her, and she felt like she was drowning in it. Drowning in trying to be the perfect wife and the perfect mother. Her thoughts of suicide came as she tried to stop her thoughts of wanting to kill her children because what mother would ever think of doing such a thing?That voice? That was her. That was her hatred bubbling up, especially for Dawson, the middle child. Her hatred at herself for not being the perfect mother, and the loud voice of her inner psychopath who gave her advice on how to end her misery. Kill them. That’s what you really want to do. Then, you can kill yourself.Except that she didn’t really want to kill herself. She is a nurse, after all, and everyone knows how to commit suicide by slitting your wrists. She would know exactly where the carotid artery was, oh, but that voice would tell her just make it look like that was what you were trying to do. Get enough blood to make it convincing, then crawl out the window and into the snow and wait for your husband Patrick to find you and save you.What wasn’t in the plan? The way she fell, paralyzing herself, which is why these, along with whether she had a lawyer or not, were her primary concern once in the hospital. Do my legs work, she asked. The voice guided her through all of this and probably even through the trial now, careful never to disclose that it’s still with her. The camera is on you now, Lindsay. Put on a good show. Maybe a part of her was sad to hear what the voice made her do, but she knew the voice was her own. It was the psychopath within that did not want to do the job of motherhood anymore. She wanted her old life back. She wanted to be who she was before. She wanted control. Her inner voice was herself.She tried every medication she could. She tried aspirations. But the dark thoughts kept seeping through, no matter how much she tried to suppress them. She disclosed these thoughts to her husband and mother and hinted at them to her best friend. What she never did was turn herself in for them as a danger to her own children. If the husband bears any responsibility for these deaths, it is that he did not turn her in himself and keep those precious babies far, far away from her.On the day of the killings, Lindsey Clancy meticulously planned her actions, not as an irrational act but as a coldly rational one. Separating the children one by one and leading them down into the basement would have been scary for them, since it had never happened before. That was where Daddy worked. That was where Mommy worked out. That was where guests slept. It was not where kids belonged. And that ominous walk down those stairs with Mommy must have been terrifying, but their little brains could not comprehend what would happen next. Here is a clip from Chicks on the Right highlighting the prosecutor’s powerful closing.The hope and the reflex is to blame the drugs. We’re a country of people on too many drugs, whether they’re dying on the streets of San Francisco of Fentanyl or they’re murdering their children in Massachusetts. One thing is for sure: lots of people are making lots of money selling the illusion that there is such a thing as being perfect.I noticed this back in the 1990s when suddenly everyone had something wrong with their brains. We’d gone through therapy and healed the trauma and abuse in our past, but it didn’t make us “right” or “correct.” We needed drugs for that. We needed, wanted to be “healthy.”We were the victims of our hard lives, of our society, of our government, of the environment, of our diet, of our education, our culture, our marriages, and yes, even our children. Our children have paid the price, too, because if they weren’t perfect, something had to be wrong with them; we had done something bad or failed at motherhood. The mythical “post-partum” depression came on like one of these ailments in our brains we could do nothing about. We were all supposed to respect women who undergo this affliction and forgive them everything.Over the many decades, especially on the Left, we’ve become separated from ourselves in nearly every way. Whether it’s mothers aborting their children now as a rite of passage and an act of empowerment, or it’s mothers resenting their children and unable to mother them with post-partum. Be afraid, they say, be very afraid.And then, all the way down to our precious babies whose genders we now view as potentially “something wrong with their brains.” Mothers allow gender clinics, teachers, and influencers to tell them they don’t know their own babies. Drugs will fix them. Surgery, intervention, turn them into something else, someone else, someone more perfect.Women did not evolve to do it all alone. We evolved to be hovered over by our own mothers, our aunts, our sisters. Since women had babies so young in every era except the modern one, they needed the help and guidance of older women, which is why humans are among the tiny handful of species that undergo menopause, like Killer Whales. Older women have a role: to guide, to lead, and to help raise the younger generations.Lindsay Clancy wanted to do it all alone. Or at least, she wanted it to look like she did. An athlete, a nurse, and a mom, she wanted that Instagram fantasy all women believe they deserve. It all looked so good outwardly, from photos to testimonies of family and friends. But Lindsay was good at hiding. She was not a good mother at all, it turns out. She was a psychopath.It isn’t that mothers don’t kill their babies. They do. They dump them in trash cans, leave them in toilets, beat them until they can no longer breathe. Andrea Yates believed her children were demons and that they needed to be killed. That is what true psychosis looks like, and it’s more common than it should be. Women should not be doing motherhood alone, at least not those who are fragile enough to crack under pressure.It’s not easy. It's shocking how difficult it can be just to try to live your life after you’ve had a baby, but it is especially so for the modern woman who is used to centering herself. I was one such woman. By the time I had my baby at 32, I wanted her. She was a way for me to heal from my own childhood because I would do everything right.My own mother got so angry at times she flew into violent rages. She had four babies before the age of 25, and that must have been hard. We were untamed, wild children, and she needed control. Even now, I sometimes feel nervous when I spend time with her because we never knew when the fury would arrive or why.Like Lindsay, I was into the “attachment parenting” method, which is just the natural way women raised children before they invented things like cribs and formula. I didn’t want drugs during childbirth and wanted to do it all naturally. This is the kind of pressure women put on themselves to be perfect. If one thing goes wrong, they feel like a failure. And things will always go wrong. Breastfeeding them, co-sleeping with them, hugging them when they cry. Lindsay felt guilt for not being the perfect attachment parent and leaving her baby to cry it out with sleep training. She couldn’t sleep, and this was supposedly the solution. But leaving babies to cry it out is another way to separate mothers from their natural instincts, and Lindsay knew that too. But if the baby went away, then the problems went away too.After 18 hours of agonizing labor, I begged for the epidural. They’d already given me morphine, which did nothing. My labor was induced, and the contractions were unlike anything I’d ever felt in my life. The only thing I could do was scream. And when she finally came out of me, and I saw her face, I knew her already. I recognized her. My baby.I kept yelling for the nurse, “Just give me my baby!” They wanted to clean her up and check her vitals, but I just wanted to hold her in my arms to keep her safe. When they finally gave her to me and when I was complaining that I had wanted to do it naturally, without drugs, the nurse looked at me and said, “Healthy mom, healthy baby.” She was right. That’s all that mattered. That’s also the kind of thing labor and delivery nurses see all the time. They see the perfect and the imperfect. They see the joys and the tragedies. They see the struggles and failures. Lindsay Clancy knew all of them.I didn’t let go of my baby for a full two weeks. She stayed in my arms and close to me at all times. I had nightmares of something happening to her — what would I do? If there was a fire, or an intruder, or an earthquake, or a mass shooter. I was raising her without a father, which made me both the father and the mother, and yes, that was hard. It meant my life would no longer be the most important thing.Of course, I lost my temper on occasion. But I knew I would never be like my mom. I might have been if I’d had more than one. Children are their own people. They don’t do exactly what you want them to do at all times. One of my jobs was writing movie reviews, and if my daughter didn’t go down for a nap, I couldn’t make the showtime, so I’d drive around until she did, and sometimes she didn’t, and I felt the pressure of that, and I would think and sometimes say, “time for sleep!”The few times I lost my temper stay with me. They haunt me. I wish I could go back and scrub them from my memory and my life because I was, I think, all things considered, a pretty good mom otherwise. Perfect? No. And we all want to be perfect because if something is wrong with our kids, it means we weren’t perfect mothers.I would hear the complaints of other mothers and their difficult children. Why couldn’t they behave? I saw them punish them with time-outs, and I always thought I was so lucky to have such a good kid. It was never bad for me. It was the best thing that’s ever happened in my life. So I can’t get there. I can’t imagine wanting a life without my daughter. My life is my daughter. And this is what I think haunted Lindsay Clancy the most. She wasn’t a perfect mother because one of her kids was driving her crazy with his obstinacy. He was the middle child, Dawson. She loved the daughter and the baby, but Dawson did not do as he was told and made everything a battle.When your life runs like clockwork and that life depends on everyone and everything doing things perfectly, one piece of the puzzle that keeps flying out of our hands is the one that will drive you to anger and, in her case, hopelessness. What was it all for anyway? Of course she was depressed. Lots of people struggle with feeling lost and hopeless, but in Lindsay’s case, she believed she was disappearing because everyone’s needs had to come before hers. Unless, of course, she could get rid of the child, the one making the picture not perfect. But how could she just kill him? No, she’d have to kill them all and then kill herself, or at least make it look like she tried.She wanted to terrorize her husband. And terrorize she did. The screams haven’t been heard by the watchers, all of those paying close attention to the trial at home. Only those in the room and the jury heard the husband’s anguished cries upon coming home and seeing his dead babies.I studiously avoided the Lindsay Clancy trial. It was like those animal abuse videos you scroll quickly by or at least fast-forward to the inevitable happy ending, if there is one. I did not want to get inside this story or put the images of those poor, sweet children strangled one by one in my head.But eventually, like everyone else, I had to pay attention to it. There were so many crazy women — mostly on the Left but some on the Right — who have stood alongside Lindsay, sympathized with her, celebrated her, attempted to say she wasn’t guilty, that her husband did it, the drugs did it, the doctors did it, everyone but Lindsay herself.There is such a thing as post-partum depression, which can often lead to feelings of sadness and helplessness after the birth of the child. No one can or should tell a woman she isn’t suffering from it, but it’s also taken on a new meaning in our modern age, a thing that happens to women that they can’t control, separating us from our natural selves. A tragedy waiting for them on the other end of the line. We don’t live in a society that wants us to care about the little life conceived. We live in a society that wants mothers to be victims and martyrs - not only their babies, but their husbands or men in general- are doing something bad to them. The baby grows and changes everything. The man injects the sperm. The woman must be the helpless, passive participant who takes care of everything.That might not have been Lindsay Clancy, but her careful planning of how her husband would find his children and his wife by the time he came home required pre-meditation. She knew what those exercise bands could do, because, of course, she did. She worked out every day.Did she think of what those bands would do every time she picked one up and felt the tension in her hands? What could this do to a child’s neck? How long would it take?The Long DayIt was an ordinary day like any other. She’d taken her daughter to the doctor and texted Patrick, her husband, a photo of their daughter on the day she would murder her. He texted her back a photo of Dawson, who had dressed himself for the first time. Did she think and wonder how Dawson could be so much better behaved with Daddy? Lindsay came home with Cora, who was having stomach problems. She probably was picking up the stress of her mother’s bizarre flatness for some time before the murders. She was the oldest. She would know something was wrong.Patrick went to work in his basement office as their smallest baby, Callan, went down for a nap. Lindsay built a snowman with Dawson and Cora. Did Dawson give her his usual trouble? Did he say something bad to her? Or was she planning this day all along? By the time she got inside, she put her plan in motion. She texted her husband at 4:53 pm, “Any chance you want to do takeout from ThreeV … I didn’t cook anything … It’s been a long day.” She checked the map to see how long it would take him, and it wasn’t long enough, so she asked him to go to the drug store to pick up medicine for Cora.At 5:15 Patrick left, after kissing his daughter Cora and rocking his baby Callan, and said, “I’ll be right back.” That would be the last time he saw them alive. He’d be home by 6:09 pm and arrive to an absolutely quiet house.Lindsey wanted him to call out for her and his children. She probably knew he’d go upstairs next. Maybe she thought he would just go to the basement and find his dead babies, with Dawson lying dead in his office. cBut he didn’t. He tried to find Lindsay. And when he saw the blood and the window and ran down to her where she was still alive, because of course she was, and asked her, “What did you do?” She said, “I tried to kill myself.” All Lindsay said when he asked where the children were was, “They’re in the basement.” She wanted him to see that horror. Why? Who does that? A psychopath does that. Not a woman suffering from post-partum depression. Not a woman in a state of confusion. No, a cold-blooded killer makes these choices to stage an event that would leave her children dead and herself barely alive but alive. A nurse who didn’t know how to properly cut her wrists or her throat? She wanted to punish her husband. She wanted to punish everyone. She wanted to be free. She just didn’t think that would mean being in a wheelchair for the rest of her life. That was the unintended consequence of her plan. The jury was excused for the weekend. I don’t expect this jury in Massachusetts, comprised mostly of women, will convict Lindsay Clancy of murder. That’s what she deserved. No, she’ll get off easier as some version of Not Guilty by reason of insanity. And that will be a lie. Coming up, Part Two: The Sycophants// 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

Today, after staying on Jon Ossoff’s email list for eight years, I finally hit unsubscribe. This is my Dear Jon letter, and in some ways, the moment I will really be saying goodbye to the Democratic Party once and for all.I will admit I held on too long with Ossoff. Try as I might over the past six years since leaving the party to extricate myself from their relentless email machine, I didn’t mind when Ossoff’s emails flew into my mailbox. In 2017, I saw in Ossoff what the Democrats needed as they tried to find their next Obama stand-in. He fit the bill perfectly. I also liked how he didn’t seem to buy into the party's increasingly crazy extremes but was comfortably moderate, at least for a time. My record with Federal political donations tells the tale. If anyone looks at my record, they’ll see I continued donating to ActBlue through 2025. Except that I didn’t. I just didn’t realize they were charging me all that time. That’s how relentless they are and how stupid I am. The Glow-UpBefore the expensive makeup, strategic lighting and tight shirts, Ossoff looked like what Steve Bannon would call a “pencil-necked geek.” He was too skinny, even if he was an Obama clone. He seemed too good, too clean for dirty politics back then. I fell for the lie that Ossoff really was a self-made man, a “filmmaker who turned to politics,” per this Wall Street Journal video.He is hardly self-made. More like a hot house flower.Ossoff grew up in a political household. Both parents were heavily involved in politics. At just 19, he began working on Capitol Hill for Rep. Hank Johnson while attending Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service and continued working for him until 2012. His email list was mostly the kind of thing you’d get in the old days of the Democratic Party, the kind of thing you’d expect from the Obama clone factory. But that isn’t really where Ossoff is now in his political career. He is determined not to go down as a squeaky-clean beta male. No, Ossoff has gotten SWOLE. He appears to have brought in a team to fix the look to be camera-ready. The makeup, the hair, the dimples. Ossoff finally looks the part. He can do alpha. All of a sudden, he’s the guy everyone is talking about. He’s the guy who is suddenly the hottie on tap. True, he’s Jewish, and that’s a problem for the Democrats, but no one really talks about that. Instead, they’re selling the matinee idol on TikTok. The truth is, I didn’t think about Jon Ossoff much until he went viral for channeling his inner sexist in a desperate bid to get attention and rise to the top of the pile. And it worked. He went viral! He’s in the headlines now, and everyone knows his name. But this version of Jon Ossoff will never be president. He’s abandoned what made him exceptional in the first place, his decency and his goodness. The sharks demanded flesh and blood, and he gave it to them, but it will come at a cost. One of the main reasons Democrats have failed for the past ten years to gain any purchase in this country has been their obsessive fixation on Trump, which is pretty much all Ossoff is doing.It’s a race to the bottom to see who can out-Trump Trump, to be more confrontational, more bullying, more vulgar, and tougher. They believe this will solve their “man problem,” and who knows, maybe it will. I look at Ossoff now, and I don’t see someone tough or brave. I see a coward.Ossoff, like James Talarico and almost every Democrat, is now leaning into the party's extremes. Because of course he is. He has to. In his viral speech in Atlanta, he referenced his daughters and said they will ask him one day how he let things get so bad, and, in the same sentence, dismiss the concerns of little girls and women in sports.Guess what, Jon: thousands of little girls will one day ask you why you let it happen, why you allowed so many of them to believe they should amputate their breasts when they could not consent. They will look to you, Jon. You will have to tell them why you pretended biological males had no advantage in sports because you were too cowardly to stand up to your own party. I once thought Ossoff was a good man. Now I see him as a desperate man, no different from any other Democrat, so much so that he’s given himself over to what has become an uncontrollable fetish on the Left to dehumanize Donald Trump and his supporters. They slut-shamed Melania’s modeling photos, splashing them all over social media. They suggested Trump was having an affair with his own daughter. They took a bath in Karoline Leavitt’s Vanity Fair photos, which splashed all over TikTok and led to her being called KKKaroline.They mocked Kellyanne Conway’s age and her face, and Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ makeup. It’s grotesque and repulsive, but it is typical and ongoing. Even now, Rosie O’Donnell is out there on primetime television calling Trump a “serial pedophile and rapist.” It doesn’t matter if it’s true. It only matters if it happened in their imagination.They spent whole seasons giggling about the particulars of the Stormy Daniels affair, and they were willing to forgive lusty E. Jean Carroll’s sexy talk at Anderson Cooper and envision instead a ridiculous, implausible, violent rape incident that most likely never happened.They call Trump a rapist so they can kill him. They call him a racist so they can kill him. They call him a fascist so they can kill him. They call him a pedophile so they can kill him. They just want to kill him, and every day the hungry beast must be fed.Before you say “But Trump says…” there’s a difference. No one on the Right, least of all Trump, pretends to be morally superior to the other half of the country as they have on the Left. There are no death fantasies. They don’t go “no contact.” They don’t destroy your career if you even so much as like a post by the other side. The price of admission in their world is that you have to want Trump dead too. You must forsake him, and then they will welcome you with open arms. That’s who they are and what they’ve become and why I could not and will never be a part of that world anymore.Now, Ossoff has become one of them.The party of women knows destroying a woman like Natalie Harp isn’t a good look, because she is sympathetic. She’s a homeschooled bone cancer survivor whose father committed suicide. And Ossoff, to paraphrase Aaron Sorkin, gets on television and calls her a w***e.And that, more than anything, defines the men of the Left, too. They can’t stand up to those crazy, crazy women. They have no real courage to stand up to the extremists either. They know they are muzzled and must do as they’re told. Cowardly beta males like musician Bill Madden, a keyboard warrior whose fingers tingle every day when he has the chance to say the worst things he can as long as it’s aimed at women on the Right. It kind of helps to see what he really looks like, just a fading nobody clinging to his youth.This quote is on his Wikipedia: “… when it comes to inequality, historically, no group of people has been discriminated against more than women. Men have been f*****g up the world for thousands of years. It’s time we give more women a chance to lead.”Oh really? I guess you have to say which women, eh Bill? Not all of them. It’s possible the Democrats overplayed their hand and have realized the Natalie Harp story is not a win for them. You can see them now reeling it in, trying to say Trump amplified it as a distraction because it makes the Democrats look bad. Oh no, my friends, you did that all on your own. The problem is that where there is chum in the water, there are hungry sharks. The lower the Democrats go, like Jennifer Welch and Hasan Piker, the more the candidates seeking office must feed the hungry beasts. The Party of Crazy, Crazy WomenThey might think the Great Feminization has made society better, but it has left them like a women’s prison, or stranded on a desert island with the only men in sight being the weak, flaccid, pandering, ineffectual men of the Left. And that has left the women, shall we say, a bit unhinged.Can you blame the women stuck on that island for losing their minds when they saw Zohran Mamdani’s TikToks? Most of what he does now seems directly related to how much women on TikTok will swoon over him. Parents’ night out? Free helmets? Doxing millionaires? Free groceries? Rent freeze!Abdul El-Sayed is following the same sales pitch of aiming his TikTok videos at the young ladies, flexing his muscles and waving his backside at the camera in a way no white man could ever get away with, certainly not while positioning themselves as a sexy “Daddy” figure. They don’t just want sexy back; they also want to be the party of fun and are working on a TikTok rebrand. The problem is that the base of the Democratic Party, mostly white women, are nuttier than a five-pound fruitcake. We found out just how nutty this past week as a movement began to form in support of child murderer Lindsay Clancy. There they were again, those crazy, crazy women showcasing their pathology on TikTok. They weren’t shaving their heads this time or wearing blue bracelets. They were elevating Lindsay Clancy as the victim, even after she confessed to strangling the life out of her three kids.These are the kinds of lunatics whose votes Jon Ossoff needs. And that is why he has finally given them exactly what they want.The irony of all of this is Natalie Harp was hurled into the arena for unending mockery, slut-shaming, and fantasies. Doesn’t she count as a woman, too? Isn’t she worthy of support? A Feeding FrenzyThe media was all too ready to devour the bloody chum Ossoff threw into the water. It’s just that, as with everything they do, it’s not real. It’s fake news. There is no bottom when it comes to how they report on Donald Trump and especially the women who surround him. But some of the lows have been extraordinary, like dragging out Harp’s wayward, socialist hippie brother to exploit the tragedy of their falling out after the death of their father. It doesn’t get much darker than that. Or more desperate.Here is Larry O’Connor on Townhall:O’Connor again with Mark Halperin and Kevin Walling on Next Up:Scott Jennings had no trouble setting the record straight.Ossoff’s sleazy attack on Harp reveals his biggest weakness. He wants it too bad, and he sold himself out. And maybe that makes him ready to be the democratic nominee. Want those big donations? Trash women, trash working-class voters, dehumanize your fellow Americans. Sell women and girls down the river. Pander to the extremists. Smear the character of a young woman like Natalie Harp just to go viral, just to please the unhinged women on the Left who don’t even know what a woman is. For his part, Trump flicked Ossoff away like a speck of dust on his suit, calling him Pee Wee Herman. And if we know one thing about Donald Trump, once you get hit with a nickname, it sticks. //Become a paid subscriber or leave a tip.Manage subscription This is a public episode. 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I was caught between worlds in 2020. I began the year as a faithful, loyal Democrat and a true believer in Fauci the Hero vs. Trump the Villain. I was never an anti-masker or anti-vaxxer, at least, not in the beginning. As the year wore on, however, the questions started piling up in my head. Why, I wondered, was it politics as usual if this pandemic was as serious as CNN said it was? Why, if the virus was microscopic, did masks suddenly become not only essential but mandatory identifiers in our society? Why, if it was so serious, did millions flood the street on Memorial Day Weekend to protest the death of George Floyd at the hands of the police, and 1,000 health experts signed a letter saying protesting was more important than a pandemic that was supposedly hitting the black community especially hard?Every time I’d ask a question, the unified whole would scream back at me, parroting the exact same talking points from the legacy media and the Democrats. No one was allowed to even ask a question, much less question the official party line.Why? The cult of Dr. Fauci. We hadn’t seen a hero rise like that since Barack Obama in 2008. We believed in him. We trusted him. We loved him. To question him became blasphemy, and even now, if you say his name among liberals, they will scowl at you.The cult of Fauci and the legacy media became one in 2020. They made him a star and, in turn, he went along with the official narrative that Trump was not competent in a crisis and helped the media convince the public to vote him out.But the truth was always chasing Dr. Fauci like a shadow, and the questions were not going away. Lucky for all of us, he kept a record of what he thought and did in 2020, and it is one history will never forget and should never forget. Dr. Fauci showed the half of America that voted for Donald Trump what he thought of them when he declined to answer any questions in Congress and instead pleaded the Fifth 111 times.Americans required something other than politics as usual when the pandemic arrived on our shores, but taking out a president was already the establishment's primary objective, and Dr. Fauci would prove instrumental in convincing Americans that Trump could not be trusted in a crisis.As Ann Coulter says on her Substack:Fauci was the left’s most promising silver bullet to take out Trump. As such, the media would brook no dissent from his COVID edicts. Liberals would not only destroy the economy, but countless lives, in order to slay a pestilence worse than the virus: Donald J. Trump.Taking down a presidentIt might sound conspiratorial to say that the Democrats and their allies in the administrative state would crash the economy just to take Trump out of power, but the truth is even darker. Everything had to go wrong under Trump, including the economy.The more Fauci contradicted Trump, the more the legacy media celebrated him, elevated him, and the more the Cult of Fauci rallied around him. That led to more attacks by Trump. It’s not a coincidence that cases began to surge as their own kind of October surprise, allowing the Democrats to increase measures ahead of the 2020 election. All the while, what Fauci seemed to care about most was the attention paid to him by high-profile celebrities. I was one of those people who trusted CNN and watched as they scared us, night after night, with the death count from COVID ticking upward, with no mention of who was getting hit the hardest. It just looked like everyone, everywhere was getting sick and dying.What sweet relief to hear RFK, Jr. confront Dana Bash on CNN about their willingness to pump fear into the veins of the unsuspecting public:And yet, as we found out by the Cup Foods surveillance recording, in areas the Democrats supposedly governed, like Minneapolis, the day George Floyd died, no one in that store, including him, who was still recovering from COVID, was wearing a mask. When I saw that, I realized just how small our bubble really was. Dr. Fauci knew he was a media-made star. He marvels at it throughout his diary, shaking his head at the attention paid to him but hanging on every word. But he had no immunity to this level of adulation and celebrity. This was a lot for a guy almost no one knew until he became a household name.Fauci and the BobbleheadsFauci’s diaries throughout 2020 paint a picture of a seduction. Fauci the Hero was drawn in by those who projected their distrust and hatred of Trump onto him. The more he played that role, the higher his profile would rise. Of course, Hollywood would cast him that way. That’s what they do. But it wasn’t just Hollywood. It was all the most high-profile figures on CNN, ABC News, MSNBC, NPR, PBS and SNL. Fauci kept a healthy remove in the beginning. This wasn’t his first rodeo, but he is only human after all. Trump was trying to open the country back up even in late March, instinctively knowing that in an election year, crashing the economy would be the end for him.And then, the press began to tie him to Trump:July 13, 2020:Fauci lapped up the praise with a mixture of astonishment and bemusement. Praise and adoration from Funny Girl and Pretty Woman would have gone to anyone’s head.Or the painting and growing friendship with folk singer Joan Baez:A note to actor and chef Stanley Tucci promising to send cookbooks in January of 2021:Zoom calls with the best and the brightest in April of 2020:The press detailing just how beloved he was becoming in April of 2020:And of course, the bobbleheads:And somehow, Dr. Fauci even became a sex symbol.When you feel the warm embrace of the cultural elite, and you breathe that rarified air for the first time, it can be intoxicating. I’ve experienced a bit of it myself, but one thing you should never do is believe you are one of them, and by the end, that is what happened to Dr. Fauci. He was vulnerable because he was uncool.And of course, being routinely attacked by Trump the Villain, who was desperately trying to win re-election and could see very well what the media was doing by elevating Fauci the hero, only made Fauci more inclined to side with the side that would write his legacy. Fauci became the most important weapon against Donald Trump, as he redirected better solutions to help save kids from lockdowns, bring the economy back, and allow some common sense with masks and social distancing. Trump had to fail, and that's why Fauci became a superstar. Mass Formation PsychosisBy the time Biden took power, the entire Left was locked into “Mass Formation Psychosis,” per Mattias Desmet by way of Dr. Robert W. Malone: Fauci was trotted out to validate all of the bad policy pushed out by the Biden administration once they took power. Through it all, he maintained his tight connection to Joan Baez and Barbra Streisand, having dinner with them, advising them privately. Many were singing songs about him. Love for Fauci, trust in his word, became interchangeable with taking the vaccine. Fauci was the vaccine just as he was the science. No one would dare doubt him or question his advice. He was the leader of a cult by now and drunk on that power.But in casting his lot with the Trump “resistance,” he abandoned the other half of the country as most of our ruling elite did. But they are Americans and Fauci worked for them too. He betrayed their trust again and again and could not even be bothered to show them the respect of answering their questions. The truth would eventually come out. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya was brought back on X after having been shadow-banned for “disinformation” and is now the head of the CDC. We would finally find out that toddlers didn’t need to be masked and most children did not need to be kept out of school, and Trump’s efforts to open them back up that he was attacked for again and again were the right call. Why had we done that to them? How had we all gone along with it? This got much worse under Biden. It was as though the campaign to dump Trump turned into the new normal and everyone had to stand by the story.Here is Jeremy Boreing:The Fauci myth also propped up the legacy media so much so that even now, they have to link arms with the Democrats to defend him.For many Americans, the legacy media propped up the official story the Democrats needed to be true to take out a one-term president with a strong economy. But they built a high wall of protection that meant even when we finally knew the truth - that the vaccine did not stop the spread and masks offered minimal support - the legacy media would not tell the public the truth.My nephew flew in from Thailand to finally see all of us after a year of separation. He’d already contracted and survived COVID, so he was immune, but because he was not vaccinated, members of my family forbade him from visiting. I kept screaming, “He already got COVID! He doesn’t need the vaccine!” But no. If Fauci didn’t say it, if ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, the New York Times didn’t say it, they would not listen. You had to be vaccinated to enter restaurants, theaters, even family gatherings. Dr. Fauci knew the truth. He knew the vaccine was from a lab leak. He knew it might cause harm to some. He knew it was untested. He continued to push a one-size-fits-all solution, and anyone who didn’t go along with it was treated like an enemy of the state. But for him, his legacy was already written, and nothing was going to take it from him.I lost three loved ones during COVID. One overdosed during lockdowns from loneliness. Another dropped dead suddenly of a heart attack in his early 50s. My uncle did not take the vaccine and died from COVID.It was never a one-size-fits-all solution to force everyone to inject an experimental drug, even if it saved the lives of many. It probably saved my life. But it should have been a choice, not a public pressure campaign that demanded all go along with it or they would be demonized as “anti-vaxxers.”People should have been told the truth about what it was and what it wasn’t. That was Dr. Fauci’s job, but at some point, he realized he had to push the party line because that is what got him into the club, over that high castle wall and in the presence of greatness. The two mirror events that depict the Two Americas could not be more stark, as now Dr. Fauci has been held in Contempt of Congress. Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro were not just held in contempt but thrown in jail over January 6th, the first time in over 50 years anyone was put in jail for the offense. It’s unlikely Dr. Fauci will go to jail. Instead, he will go down in history as a hero because the more powerful side still writes that history, at least for now. Fauci might have been a real hero if he’d faced the committee and the people and simply answered the questions, no matter how difficult. That is what you do when you have nothing to hide. 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

Any time Trump or one of his supporters brings up the 2020 election, insisting he didn’t lose it, we hear the usual chorus of groans: why can’t he get over it? He lost. Move on. The thing is, I can’t get over it either. 2020 was the year everything changed. My entire world was turned upside down because I could see, for the first time, that I was in a bubble, a feedback loop that had shaped my perception of reality. It’s just that it wasn’t actual reality. It was a curated, hysteria-inducing delusion. It wasn’t just me. Go on YouTube, and you’ll find hundreds, if not thousands, of people whose lives were fundamentally transformed that year in one way or another. COVID made them quit their job and move into a van. COVID made them decide to divorce. COVID made them learn how to bake sourdough. And a lot of us were red-pilled. It was as though someone pressed the pause button and all of us froze in place for a time. Like in the movie Weapons where the kids suddenly wake up one day…Isolated and shut in, we all turned to social media and the internet, which meant more people were connected than ever before at a time when there were more people alive than ever before. We’ve never really fully processed what happened to all of us that year.It was the year we stopped trusting the science, the schools, Hollywood, the legacy media, and the government. Children were locked down and staring at their screens, with many of the lost boys finding their way into the dark corners of the internet and would emerge years later fumbling their way toward a rifle and a rooftop.That isn’t all of it, or even half of it. None of us would emerge from that year unscathed. We can’t talk about it as a country or a people because we are still so divided. The big things divide us, like the vaccine, the masks, the lockdowns, and most especially, the 2020 election.We were stepping into something we did not understand and weren’t prepared for. Things have changed enough now that it will be hard to remember just how bad things got after Trump won in 2016. I remember because I was on the inside. I lived it with the Democrats and what would become a Doomsday Cult.We called ourselves “the resistance” even though we had all of the power. Trump and MAGA, they were the real resistance, or at least the revolutionaries going up against the most powerful machine in American history, maybe ever.All I knew was that I had to fight for my side. I woke up every day like a good soldier for the cause and went to battle online, wasting precious time with my daughter, or doing anything else except sitting and staring at a screen and fighting with people I didn’t even know over issues that didn’t matter with arguments that had no end and went nowhere.Inside the Doomsday Cult, we were awash with mass hysteria because every single day, every time Trump tweeted, the legacy media sent out more waves of hysteria that pulsed through the hive mind and kept reinfecting anyone who scrolled Twitter or Facebook. It was a new emergency every day. We were stuck in an unending state of trauma.The legacy media desperately wants to forget what happened, how they lied and gaslit the public. The consequences for these moral crimes have been minimal. A slap on the wrist for ignoring Joe Biden’s cognitive decline, but there has never been a reckoning for what they did to all of us, people who trusted them, in 2020.What Happened to MeMy daughter had to leave her senior year at college to have her graduation on my balcony, but we did it because we were doing our part to help save the country during this once-in-a-generation pandemic.Mobilizing for the cause meant sewing our own masks, displaying them proudly on Instagram. It meant mixing our own hand sanitizer because it was all out at the drug store. Some people were wearing face shields. We were living in fear. We were cowed into silence. Half the country fell into Mass Formation Psychosis. We weren’t allowed to attend weddings, churches, or schools, but somehow on Memorial Day, the George Floyd protests became the most important thing in America for months.Systemic racism, they told us, was more urgent than COVID. Really? Bringing the whole country — the whole world — to its knees was less serious than George Floyd dying at the hands of a police officer in Minneapolis? Yes. That’s what they were telling us, and everyone was mandated to go along with everything that came next.These were our idols, we were told. It was the new state religion, even if Trump was still the president. This is the ideology we’re allowed to gather for. This is worth tear ing down statues, burning buildings, carving out “autonomous zones” and demanding everyone put a black square on Instagram, capitalize the word Black and raise their fists to Black Lives Matter. The madness unfolding on the streets meant Democrats could actually lose in November, I believed. So why wasn’t anyone trying to stop them? Why were the Democrats encouraging them? I started wondering what the hell was going on. It felt like unseen hands were manipulating events behind the scenes, and we were all expected to just go along with it.As I began to speak out and ask questions, I was turned into an enemy. “You’ve changed,” wrote Neera Tanden on Twitter. She was right. I had. By the time Twitter pressured the New York Times to back off their Tom Cotton essay, Send in the Troops, I was done. Maybe I was naive. I didn’t understand the assignment. I’d seen too many Frank Capra movies. I’d begun to believe politics was like an Aaron Sorkin screenplay. I thought we were the good guys. We are the side with ethics and decency and fairness.I was like Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2 when Arnold Schwarzenegger shows up, and she thinks he’s a bad guy, but when he says, “Come with me if you want to live, she realizes that everything is backward. The people she thought were the good guys weren’t. The guy she thought was there to kill her was actually there to save her. By the end of 2020, I was as black-pilled as Jack Nicholson in Chinatown, disillusioned and wide awake. Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.But what I saw them do - how we were all manipulated, how they rigged the election to be too big to fail - I could see for the first time that my side had too much power. So much power that American democracy was now beside the point.It didn’t matter how the people voted, because we would decide who was allowed to win and who would become an existential threat to the world we were building, the utopia we were building online.When I left the party, I knew I couldn’t be fully honest about what I believed happened, though I did say that the election had been rigged. I also couldn’t be honest about what I knew about January 6th, at least not in the beginning. When I saw the riot break out, my first thought was, that’s not MAGA. They don’t do that.And anyway, even if they did, why couldn’t the Democrats chalk it up to months of lockdowns and highly enraged, radicalized people on the Right just as there were on the Left that Summer. Why couldn’t they? Because it was all still part of the long con, the mass delusion. These ideas were dangerous to hold for anyone in America but especially someone of the Left, and yet, I could not stop it. The truth began knocking. I ignored it as long as I could, but eventually, the knocking became a banging, and I had no choice but to open the door.How to Rig An ElectionOnce you start tugging on the question of why Twitter and Facebook censored the Hunter Biden laptop, you begin to unravel the bigger picture of just how deep the conspiracy went. But you don’t need the whole story. You just need to know this: The FBI and the CIA worked against the sitting president to lie to the public that the laptop was “Russian Disinformation.” It was just a standard run-of-the-mill October surprise, timed to help ignite a scandal before the election. But it was also information the public had a right to know, as we would find out later. So anyone who shames Trump for calling the election rigged and denying it was legit will have to answer for this. But if you keep pulling on that string, you’ll find the why of it. They were trying to fix all of the problems they believed caused Hillary Clinton’s loss. This would be payback for the email scandal that hit her campaign, which she called “Russian Disinformation.” That would also turn out to be untrue.But there were other problems that needed correcting, like lazy voters who assumed Hillary would win because she was so far ahead in the polls and didn’t bother turning out. They would fix this problem using COVID as the pretext to change everything about how people vote and how those votes are collected.They knew they had Pennsylvania won long before Election Day and it would only be a matter of convincing the public not to get too excited about a “red mirage.” To all of them, that’s the right way to win an election.Trump won Iowa, Ohio and Florida, not to mention the bellwether counties that have decided our elections. The only other time anything like this happened was in 1960, when JFK won in a squeaker. Compare that to 2020, and you can see that something was very off about the numbers. Since the Democrats believed Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook had handed Trump the win in 2016 by using their marketing machine (the Clinton campaign refused their help), it was time for Zuckerberg to undo that damage, which came in the form of a $400 million slush fund used to “fortify” the election but mostly in the heavily blue districts. Had all of this been shared with the whole country as a way to improve our elections overall, that would have been one thing. But it was all done behind the scenes, in the shadows, far from the reach of anyone who might dissent. It was anything but ethical and anything but fair.It was all part of a grand scheme to stay one step ahead of Trump. If they already knew he would claim it was rigged, why not just rig it? Who would the people believe? Trump or the “bipartisan cabal” of unelected bureaucrats hiding in the shadows?The truth is that Trump was pulling ahead because the Left was losing its mind, and Trump picked up on it. He changed his campaign; no matter how many ways they tried to keep him from his rallies, he got the word out anyway. That would explain why he won those key states but lost so much in the popular vote. Our elections should not be decided months before Election Day. Candidates should have to make their case to the people, not hide in the basement and let the system do the work. It’s the candidate’s job to inspire the voters to vote for the kind of government they want, and it’s the voters responsibility to be motivated enough to turn out to the polls and cast their vote. But with an easily manipulated hive mind like the Democrats had cultivated for ten years they didn’t need any of it.The Year That Broke AmericaI’ve never been able to convince anyone of what I believed happened in 2020. If you were on the Left, chances are, you wouldn’t be able to see it either. You would have trusted the same people I used to trust: CNN, New York Times, MSNBC, your social media feed.You would have come out of that year thinking Joe Biden won the 2020 election fair and square and that Donald Trump refused to lose, so he led a dangerous assault on the Capitol, putting our democracy under threat. Yet, after everything they did to Trump that year and for the four years prior, what else could he have done except protest? It was just a little too convenient that there happened to be a riot at the same time, a Reichstag Fire that handed absolute power to Team Blue.If you were still trapped inside the Doomsday Cult, you’d have been primed and ready to go to war on your fellow Americans because Vice President Kamala Harris would tell you January 6th was like 9/11 and Pearl Harbor. You would have thought Liz Cheney and the Prime Time Show Trial was legit. What an easy mark you’d be.If you never escaped, as I did, you’d still be trapped inside the Doomsday Cult and never have any idea that none of this is your fault. You were put into a kind of trance in 2020, even before, like the kids in the movie Weapons, frozen in place and used as an army to do the bidding of the Democratic Party.They made you believe, like they made me believe, that every day really was the end of the world as long as Donald Trump was in power. But it was never true, none of it. All the Democrats ever had to do was offer the people something better. If everything Molly Ball wrote about the election the “Secret Bi-Partisan Cabal” supposedly saved, how did Trump win again? In Weapons, the children are put under a spell and aimed at the enemies of the witch. Once the spell is broken, the children wake up and realize the person they should be mad at isn’t the one she made them attack, but instead the witch herself for robbing them of their ability to think for themselves. And so it goes with the Democrats.// This is a public episode. 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