Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone

In 1984, George Orwell wrote, “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”The New York Times is no longer free to say what is true. They are compelled to lie either by their newfound fundamentalism, fear of their readers and subscribers, or pressure from the strident activists who police thought and speech in our New Woke Order. We can’t let them get away with it. Not this time. The SuspectIt looks like a real headline - a search for the truth. So far, so good. But a few paragraphs in, and it’s clear that the New York Times has crossed the Rubicon:On Tuesday afternoon, Jesse Van Rootselaar, 18, grabbed two firearms from her home and, the authorities in British Columbia said, killed her mother and 11-year-old brother. Then she traveled a mile to the Tumbler Ridge Secondary School and killed five students and one educator before turning her weapon on herself.The mass shooting, which also left two children injured with gunshot wounds, has sent shock waves across Canada, where such violence is rare, and has devastated the small rural community of 2,400 people.Her home? She traveled? Before turning her weapon on herself? Was the shooter a woman? If so, wouldn’t that be the lead? After all, it’s rare for any woman to be pulled into violence online, let alone go on a shooting spree. Sure, there was Audrey Hale out in Tennessee, but according to the Times, she wasn’t even a SHE. Back in 2023, they awkwardly opted out of using any pronoun to describe Hale, adding this to their story:But by 2025, when Hale was no longer the only one, they made the decision to use preferred pronouns, yes, even in the wake of a horrific shooting like the one in Minneapolis that, as with Audrey Hale, massacred children.Using that logic, we’d have no choice but to conclude that two women had committed these acts of violence in Minneapolis and now, in Canada, while one male went on a shooting spree in Tennessee. Make it make sense, New York Times. What we’re really talking about here is three transgender shooters who targeted children. Robin Westman himself was obsessed with them:If the latest school shooter in Tumblr Ridge targeted and killed children and was also transgender, you’d think that there might be something, anything that the Times could offer its readers instead of lying that the shooter was female. No, the shooter was male. And it matters. The truth matters. Biological reality matters especially when we’re talking about criminal profiling.It wasn’t just the New York Times, either, though they set the standard. It was CNN, too. The suspect in Canada’s Tumbler Ridge mass shooting posted about guns and hunting on her YouTube channel and appeared to have written about her struggles with mental health online, according to social media posts.And the AP:“Cis White Men” No MoreThese white male shooters are given an extra layer of protection just by declaring themselves trans. The formerly hated “cis white males” are magically transformed into women and become the center of attention, treated with sympathy, and are, above all, forgiven almost everything.Look no further than the New York Times to see how they’ve decided that the only demographic to fear is white men.If any shooter who hailed from the Right went on a rampage and killed kids, it would be the biggest story in the world for weeks, if not months. Everyone would have a convenient receptacle for their rage. Ah, but here, with their most protected, elevated, marginalized group responsible, they must divert that empathy and call a mass murderer a “she.”Then bend over backwards to ensure no one demonizes this specific group, even if an obvious pattern is emerging, as the Times writes:In the aftermath of the shooting, there has also been a focus on Ms. Van Rootselaar’s gender identity, at a time when transgender issues have become a socially polarizing force.In a handful of high-profile shootings in the United States in recent years, the perpetrator has been wrongly identified as transgender on message boards and social media, including in the assassination last year of Charlie Kirk.Fewer than 1 in 1,000 mass shooters over the past decade have been identified as transgender, according to the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit research group that tracks gun violence in the United States using police reports. The group defines a mass shooting as one in which four or more victims were shot or killed.Tyler Robinson might not have been transgender himself, but he fits the pattern regardless. He was, by all accounts, avenging the pain and suffering of his “trans-furry lover” and wanted to silence Charlie Kirk, who, he said, “spread too much hate,” and it could “not be negotiated down.” Even if this odd new type of killer does not represent real transgender people overall, it represents a new kind of influencer—a hybrid of social justice extremism, self-pity, and fringe losers who want Columbine-level fame. And online, they’re getting it.It’s not the job of the New York Times to police the Right. It’s not their job to do the bidding of Left-wing activists either. It’s their job to tell the truth, and in this story, they did not tell the truth about any of these three prominent cases of transgender shooters slaughtering children, choosing instead to use their preferred pronouns. Telling the truth is a dirty job, and it takes someone bold to get that job done. It takes someone like Bridget Phetasy, who does not hold back (full video here): Girl, Boy, Son, DaughterImagine your child has just been shot by a psychotic madman, and in the wake of that murder, as you hold the limp body of your precious son or daughter, you have to then grapple with whether or not to misgender the shooter. That is the absurd reality of the times we’re now living through at the hands of the Left.When bodies are identified, we identify them by their biological sex and don’t ask anyone how they prefer to be addressed. So why would the New York Times and other outlets play this ugly game? Why? Using preferred pronouns out of politeness in certain situations is one thing. But using them to refer to extreme acts of violence? No. Say what is true. A man raped a woman. A man assaulted a woman. A man massacred children. Do not lie to us about something so important. If a woman did it, as with Audrey Hale, tell us that. We don’t care how she identifies. We care that her victims were children and that it was extremely rare for a woman to commit these crimes, unless, of course, you understand she was pretending to be a man, which itself is a story.Only a movement rooted deeply in narcissistic tendencies would divert empathy away from the murdered children to protect the sensitive feelings of transgender people. It is perhaps the height of irony that the Left has abandoned its protection of children entirely while chasing this fast-moving contagion. What has been done to children on their watch is horrific. They’ve had their breasts amputated. They’ve been castrated. They’ve been rendered broken and infertile, dealing with health complications for life. And all for what? Utopia? Does utopia also include covering up the crimes of vicious psychopaths on shooting sprees? Softening them with preferred pronouns to garner sympathy? Oh, New York Times, how the mighty have fallen.Your Lying EyesAlmost nothing we read or see online can be trusted. This image, for instance, has made the rounds but is not the Tumbler Ridge Shooter. And yet, when you head to Snopes to read up on it, this is the correction:On Feb. 10 2026, an 18-year-old Canadian woman shot and killed her mother and stepbrother at their home before heading to Tumbler Ridge Secondary School and killing at least six more as of Feb. 12, 2026, and injuring dozens of others. Of course, it’s wrong that this false image was splashed all over the internet and that this person, according to Snopes, is now afraid to go outside. But now we need a Snopes to correct Snopes and tell us the truth about the shooter’s gender.And besides, any child knows that’s not a woman in the photo, and any reasonable person knows the man who shot those kids in Canada is also not a woman, including the victims who survived and the parents. How long are we going to play this game?Is there any middle ground here? Is there any way to accept that there are transgender people and they should be treated with respect, while also understanding that there is no such thing as transgender people, not really, and that everyone is just kind of pretending? What divides America now, the war we seem to be fighting, is for reality itself. One side is devoted to the oppressor/oppressed mindset, which tells them that ICE is the Gestapo, Trump is Hitler, no humans are illegal on stolen land, and trans women are women. The other side believes in mass deportations, voter ID, and that there are only two sexes. Should we be that surprised that the Republicans took all three branches in 2024?There is such a thing as the truth. And the truth is most definitely not that a woman “traveled a mile to the Tumbler Ridge Secondary School and killed five students and one educator before turning her weapon on herself.” That is the side that is lying. Meet the new influencer: the violent warrior for social justice. To understand this phenomenon of the rise of the trans mass shooter who seeks to do maximum damage by killing children, we have to first travel back to 1999, after Columbine. It wasn’t just the shooting itself, but how it was covered. The 24-hour news cycle became popular after the OJ Simpson case, just before the rise of the internet and, with it, instant notoriety that could travel across the world in minutes.Mass shooters feel victimized by society and want to do maximum damage as a form of revenge. The worst of the worst was Adam Lanza, whom many of the subsequent shooters see as a star because he inflicted maximum damage by killing the most children. That is the thrill they’re seeking.But we must also look at the effects of the internet —especially social media —on the teenage brain—specifically, the male brain — as whole generations come of age online. It can’t be a coincidence that so many of the mass shooters and assassins, from Mathew David Crooks and Tyler Robinson to Robin Westman and Jesse Van Rootselaar, were radicalized right around 2020, during lockdowns. Van Rootselaar began to believe he was trans around that time. It wasn’t long after that that his head was filled with violent fantasies, as it is with almost all of these shooters.The rise of transgender ideology can also be tracked alongside social media, not coming into prominence until right around 2012, as Critical Race Theory began to hit schools and universities, and the oppressor/oppressed mindset took hold, and internet users began living double lives - their real lives and their avatar lives. Many white girls sought refuge in becoming trans as a way out, but also as a way to have a protective status for their online avatars.For young men who already felt disconnected and abandoned amid the Great Feminization and Great Awokening, with increasing isolation and lots of attention directed at anyone who chooses to transition, we begin to see a new hybrid - a violent shooter with transgender leanings, merged with anime, furries, and other online fetishized genres. Violence is on the rise on the Left. We can see it everywhere. But this particular brand of violence, killing kids for notoriety, is specific to this odd new hybrid emerging online. Like this video posted five years ago, "Trans Girls Need Guns," an extreme reaction to what they believe is the transphobic Right and MAGA, that there is a “trans genocide” in progress, and they need to arm themselves and seek revenge. Little Pig, Little Pig let me inI’m gonna make a rug out of your skinI’m hunting you down like you’ve done our worldI’m hunting you down like you’ve done our girlsThis ain’t another witch hunt, ain’t another lieWe’re gonna burn down every last pig styYou heard it right here and you heard it here firstEvery dead queer leaves behind a curseTrans Girls Need Guns!Bigger than the ones we were assigned toTrans Girls Need Guns!Keep a knife to the thigh in case you gotta slice throughTrans Girls Need Guns!Burn the cis at the stake if they try and stab a stake through youTake them to the gallows, unveil the guillotineIt’s the only accountability they’ve ever seenThey kill us in the streets, desecrated by their lawsNow we have the numbers and we have the clawsLittle pig, Little Pig so full of sinMy boot’s gonna kick your face right inYou weren’t so sweet & you didn’t play niceWe are the cats and now you’re the miceTrans Girls Need Guns!Burn the cis at the stake if they try and stab a stake through youGet an extra piece for an enby & a trans boy too!Understanding, let alone stopping, mass shooters has plagued our society since Columbine. It isn’t getting any better. It seems that almost every day, someone is opening fire somewhere. What makes these cases unique is not so much that they’re transgender but that, because they are transgender, the legacy media will offer a layer of protection to prioritize their fragile feelings over the deaths of even children.We must speak the truth about who they are, what they are, and where they are. Otherwise, there will be more of them. More psychopaths looking for infamy and more dead children. By now, we can’t deny what is happening anymore. We need responsible journalists to dig into it and help the public better understand what’s going on.Unfortunately, that’s not the AP, Reuters, the BBC, CNN, and certainly not the New York Times.// 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

After Memegate went viral on Friday, the usual battle in our virtual Civil War raged on. I had this exchange on X and was answered by Conor Friedersdorf:To Trump’s enemies, this was yet another crisis not to go to waste. It was the perfect way to reel back some of those Nicki Minaj supporters who might be thinking about flipping to Trump. The midterms are coming up, and they’re desperately worried about losing votes of yet another necessary demographic. That’s all it’s been for ten years now, emotional blackmail to convince us that Trump really is that bad while offering nothing in return. They have addressed nothing. They have fixed nothing. They have offered only a fanatical cult and a rigid ideology of an oppressor/oppressed mindset, and then demanded everyone go along with it, or they’re racists, homophobes, bigots, Nazis. Here is a TikTocker:The Democrats and the ruling class that props up their collapsing empire are in a hell of their own making. They never addressed the people's needs after their 2016 loss because that would mean acknowledging their own failures. Instead, they made Trump the enemy and went to war, a war they’re losing.All they ever had to do was offer the people something better, but they couldn’t even do that because what they want is their utopia back, the one I helped build, and the one I escaped once it became a Doomsday Cult. Had they left him alone, just allowed his four years to play out like a normal president, as opposed to Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden attempting to frame him as a Russian asset, the Demcorats impeaching him, the legacy media and all of culture taking a side against him and his supporters, maybe he would have been a one-term president and gone back to a life of golfing at Mar-a-Lago.But instead, they whipped up a World War II fantasy in which they were “brave resistance” fighting an existential crisis that threatened to topple America and the world, with very little evidence to show for it, then or now. That made it oh so easy to blame Trump and not themselves.I look now at those still trapped inside the Doomsday Cult that I escaped, and I can’t believe the level of delusion. Look at this post by musician Jack White, which is liked by Jimmy Kimmel. So let me make it perfectly clear for those who might be wondering after the scandal du jour: I don’t regret my vote for Trump and I never will, because even now, the Left is worse. Their reaction is worse. They are never telling the truth, not to us, not to themselves. All they have to sell is hate and fear. They aren’t getting less crazy and more sane. They are not becoming kinder, more tolerant, and more forgiving. They still have no idea what democracy means - spoiler alert: you can’t always get what you want. They have never learned the lesson in ten years. They still believe that winning their war is forcing all of us to go along with their distorted version of reality. And add that to these crazy people on TikTok, and you start to see that the reason Trump won is that he’s closer to normal than they are. They just don’t realize that they’re the problem. Their totalitarian tendencies left over from 2020 never fully died because there was never any accountability in the mainstream. Remember that crowd that swarmed that woman and demanded she raise her fist for Black Lives Matter:Here are a bunch of crazy women at a Core Power Yoga studio in Minneapolis doing the same thing: go along with us or else.That same autonomous zone that was erected in 2020:Well, that’s back too, only this time the police got rid of it much quicker, knowing Tom Homan and Trump won’t stand for it.Do they really expect us to vote for these psychopaths? Put them back in power? And why, because Trump accidentally shared a meme with a racist image of the Obamas at the end of it? Sorry, they have to deal with the fanatics who have swallowed up their party first because they are still too erratic and unhinged to lead this country. What are they going to do with all of us? With Trump? Throw us into re-education camps? Gulags? Shoot us outright?GET TRUMPThe Left’s 10-year campaign to get Trump is like watching Yosemite Sam go after Bugs Bunny. They always think they’re just seconds away from catching him at long last.They believe deeply in their mission to destroy Trump, just as Yosemite Sam does. It’s just that we see Bugs Bunny a little differently. Whatever else Trump is, he’s not the guy they say he is, and for that, they will always be one step behind, swinging and missing. I didn’t get that until I found my way out. As someone who got online 30 years ago, I wasn’t ready for the effects of the feedback loop on my brain, and I don’t think most people on the Left even realized they were living inside a reality-distorting machine. I had to watch Trump videos on my own, get to know him and his supporters, and humanize them. I found that I unexpectedly empathized with Trump. It wasn’t just that I could finally see the real human being, but because I, too, had been demonized and attacked for being a person I knew I wasn’t. All I had to do was walk in the shoes of his supporters to see what monsters they really are on the Left. The more they attack Trump, the more his supporters rally to protect him, not just because they have been thrown away like human garbage by these people, but also because they look at Trump and they see a flawed hero, someone who doesn’t always get it right, who makes big mistakes, who is anything but perfect. But he’s also someone who fights for them.Our culture used to understand flawed heroes because they were in so many movies and books.Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark:Humphrey Bogart Casablanca.Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven.What counts isn’t their past or their goodness or their purity, but their actions. We all treated Obama like a religious figure, and still do, which partly explains the over-reaction by the Left. It’s blasphemy to mock Obama, whereas it's an American pastime to mock Trump. Today’s Left seems to desire perfection from cradle to grave and is unforgiving of flawed heroes, especially white men. But Trump is a great character of history, a living legend. They just got the story wrong. Here is Dominic Sandbrook on Triggernometry:Trump is a hero to so many of us, not because he’s perfect or “good” but because he is a fighter who got the dirty job done and saved the day. Crimes against humanityI asked Conor Friedersdorf the same question I would put to any Democrat. Can you name something — one thing — Trump has done that is worse than sterilizing children who can’t consent? Destroying their bodies with medical experiments? Never having the courage to stand up to the cult? Now that the lawsuits are coming, and prominent groups like the AMA are openly opposing gender transition treatments for minors, the Democrats will pretend they were always against it. But we can’t let them do that. The Democrats have not just supported it every step of the way; they have actively blocked any action taken to safeguard children. It took the Republicans standing on the right history yet again, as they did during the Civil War, to push this thing through, and it took the election of Donald Trump to finally bring the hammer down.Only Trump, in his plain-spoken, flawed hero kind of way, had the guts to say it out loud, without fear, and that gave others more courage to fight back. But Trump wasn’t only saying things. He was doing things. And before long, the dominoes began to fall. What could Trump have done that even comes close to what has happened to kids at the hands of 15 years of Democrat rule? What’s worse? Saying “Quiet, Piggy” to a reporter? Tearing down the East Wing to build a ballroom? The Kennedy Center? An offensive meme?Their climate of fear and culture of silence made it too dangerous to take a brave stand, which is why it was left to the brave men and women who risked their lives and careers to put a stop to the madness once and for all.And along with their ever-increasing authoritarianism, we’d be the UK if Elon Musk had not bought Twitter and turned it into X, and if Trump hadn’t won.Here is Graham Linehan speaking in Congress:So when people say, “You could have picked a different Republican, but you picked Trump,” I flip it back onto them. Tell me what Trump has done, just one thing, that comes close to this, and be prepared to answer it 20 years from now, because I promise to hang it around your necks like a dead cat for as long as I live. Here is a TikToker:On this alone, I would have voted for any Republican. I’d always say, “I am not a Trump supporter but…” Then, they raided Mar-a-Lago, and when they indicted him, when they tried to throw him in jail, that made me a Trump supporter. That made me the Braveheart meme.There won’t be any Sister Souljah moments in this Democratic Party.I have been waiting for six years for the Democrats to snap out of it and come back to reality. That day never came. If anything, they’re crazier now than they’ve ever been. Anyone who wants their votes has no choice but to go along with it. The Democrats can’t snap out of it even if they wanted to. Gavin Newsom can’t sell anything but hate and hysteria. Even Jon Ossoff, a guy I once supported and fought for, must sell the same thing because they have nothing else.They have given people like me no path back because the only option is going back to the Doomsday Cult that insists I call Trump and the other half of America racists when I know that it isn’t true. A cult that demands I buy into the oppressor/oppressed mandate, and demands I look the other way as they indoctrinate our kids and destroy every great thing this country ever built.I could have been one of those who hovered reluctantly in the middle and held my nose and voted for Trump. Maybe I could have salvaged some of my reputation such that when I died, they might say good things about me instead of dancing on my grave.I could have spent my time apologizing, trying to rebuild my liberal cred by denouncing Trump and throwing him under the bus, like Marjorie Taylor Greene. I could have used that to boost myself, every time another wave of mass hysteria pulsed through our society, because see, Trump IS a fascist! And see, Trump is a dictator and a racist! You were right all along! But that would not be the truth. Trump is only in power because we put him there. We wanted someone tough enough, strong enough, and persistent enough to never back down, never shrink back, never hand power to those who want to put half the country in re-education camps. The Democrats might still be the ruling class, dominating most institutions, all of our culture, and the legacy media, but the rest of us have Trump, our last best hope to fight for the country we love.And if some days it feels like trying to keep from falling overboard or getting seasick, most of us knew what we were getting into when we climbed aboard. We got what we voted for. So no, I don’t regret my vote for Trump. I only regret I didn’t see it sooner. I didn’t see what we were building, the damage we would cause, or where it was headed until it was too late. // 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