Sasha Stone: The Breitbart News Interview Part 2 – No One Wants to Watch the Oscars Anymore

This is the second part of my two-part interview with Awards Daily founder Sasha Stone. You can read the first part here. 

BREITBART NEWS: Moving to the movies: What do you think all of this is doing to the art? I believe the primary responsibility of any storyteller in any medium is to cast a spell and not break it. All the time now, the story stops so the writer or director can step in to yell at us, shame us, lecture us… You look at Jane Fonda, who is never given enough credit… She produced Coming Home, The China Syndrome, and Nine to Five. All three are very political, have an agenda, and all three are fantastic because the stories are beautifully told, the characters are flawed and therefore sympathetic. Jane Fonda gets her point across without breaking the spell. Hollywood doesn’t know how to do that anymore and can’t make left-wing movies without being obnoxious with off-putting smugness. Jane Fonda wanted to change our minds through our hearts. No one’s trying to win us over anymore. It’s all about preening and shaming, and it makes for terrible art. 

SASHA: That’s what I saw in 2020, which is when my perspective started to change. What I was looking at were documentaries. Instead of teaching, documentary after documentary assumed that everyone watching thought and believed the same way. That’s not a documentary. That’s a piece of propaganda. I saw the same with movies and TV shows that won awards. I don’t know how you create any meaningful or lasting art or comedy if you’re holding to rules, if compliance with those rules stops you from fully expressing the truth of what you believe.

And to be able to tell the truth, you have to be able to see the truth. That’s the job of the journalist, the scientist, the artist… But if they are on the inside, insulated and cocooned from the whole experience of American life in 2022, how can they possibly tell any kind of truth? I think of Diane Keaton’s character at the beginning of Sleeper. She has been brainwashed and is inside her bubble, and thus, she can’t write a poem, and the one poem she does write, she gets it wrong — the butterfly doesn’t turn into the caterpillar. 

BN: What the left has effectively created a reward loop where quality and popularity don’t matter. The message is this: If you remain in compliance, if you stay on the plantation, we can still give you good reviews, awards, and money regardless of merit or quality. Look at Jimmy Kimmel. He barely cracks a million viewers. Even in our atomized culture, that’s embarrassing. He’s not popular, but he’s compliant, so he hosts award shows and just renewed his contract for three years. They’ve brilliantly rigged it to reward and bribe people to sell out. Politics is rewarded now — not popularity with the public or quality.

SASHA: Yes, we called that selling out. I think of Orwell all the time now and 1984, a world where you can join the inner party and get all the gifts, food, nice housing, acceptance, and status. But the deal is that you have to love Big Brother. It’s not enough to comply. You have to truly love Big Brother. With the story’s protagonist, they accomplish this by strapping a rat to his face. But look at what he gives up: his love of language and history, freedom of thought and mind, and to Orwell, that’s a bullet through the brain, killing everything you love. And if you’re going to rule storytelling and film that way, you are taking away everything.

BN: And in the same way, Winston Smith couldn’t only say “2+2=5,” he had to truly believe it. Today you can’t just say, “America is a racist country,” you have to believe it. You can’t just say that what happened to George Floyd was an act of murder. You have to side with rioters. So that’s something else I’m seeing. It’s no longer enough for the left to not participate or remain silent. You must perform. You must say the right things. If you remain silent, you are suspect. Other than the McCarthy-era loyalty oaths, we’ve never seen this before.

SASHA: The believing part is the weird part. You have to say, “Men can get pregnant.” Meaning you can’t just say that transgender men can get pregnant. You have to say MEN — but how can it be a construct if they’re so committed to those words specifically? They want you to deny biology because when nothing means anything, everything can be rearranged.

You have to believe it, or you’re a troll, pushed out. But I’m starting to think that the place to be is on the outside. Maybe we can build a new industry, a new Hollywood, a place for courageous artists… I know some of that is being done, but I’d like to see it done in a much bigger way so that if I want to write a book, I can write it without it being checked for harm. If this new industry were to happen — and it will take time to develop and start over — it could be really interesting. We could start all over again with what a great book is.

BN: But you would have to convince great storytellers to leave the reward loop. I’m sure plenty of them hate this woke stuff, the restrictions of it, but they will never start their own thing. They will never give up all that status and money. The other fear is having their life destroyed. The people who produced outside-the-box movies, quality movies like Dragged Across Concrete and Brawl in Cell Block 99, had their whole company systematically dismantled over some sort of sexual harassment issue. On no planet did that annihilation fit the alleged crime. But the destruction was the point, a message to others that you’d better not color outside the lines.

SASHA:  That’s true. Jimmy Kimmel is a good example. What would be his incentive to say something he’s not supposed to? You had people like Bruce Springsteen and Stephen King, whose core audiences were Trump supporters, who discarded them to perform for the elites. I’m going to cater to the people in this bubble. I don’t care about the working man anymore. You have to wonder how that’s fulfilling for a guy like Springsteen. How does he feel good laying in bed at night? What makes Jimmy Kimmel feel good about being the court jester for only these elites?

BN: It’s like the question Jack Nicholson asks John Huston in Chinatown: How much richer can you get? How much better can you eat? Why would a guy like Springsteen, who’s worth a billion dollars, sell out this way? At this point in his life, why would he care about appealing to elites rather than his core audience, the people he grew up with? Jimmy Kimmel has all this money. They have everything in the world, and they still sell out. Status means more than anything else.

SASHA: It’s like the old religious indulgences when the Catholic Church allowed people to purchase their way out of sin. It’s the same kind of thing. They’re buying their way into Heaven, into status and acceptance. Unfortunately, the Motion Picture Academy is there too. No one wants to watch the Oscars anymore. Everyone knows, even on the left, that no one wants to watch the Oscars talk about how great and noble the Oscars are.

BN: And the Oscars don’t care!

SASHA: They don’t care, so we don’t care. What they care about is appearing to be good among their peers. Nothing we do in society is ever new. We’ve seen this dynamic play out again and again. The only thing we’re missing right now is subversive art to challenge it.

BN: As far as indulgences, look at these people and their carbon credits. I’m shamed over my thermostat setting while they fly all over the world in private jets. But that’s okay because they pay someone in some third-world country 30 cents an hour to plant a tree.

SASHA: And think about how great it would be to have an artist make a movie exposing that. Instead, we get an Adam McKay who makes a movie lecturing the rest of us… Well, how big was the carbon footprint to make that movie Don’t Look Up? And I’m not saying you don’t make your movie. But how about not being a hypocrite? Don’t tell some truck driver in Texas he’s hurting the climate when you’re flying around in your private jet and using high-speed Internet all day. And then they act morally superior. At least admit you’re part of the problem.

BN: That’s the other thing. Part of the fun for them is being a hypocrite, trolling us, throwing their hypocrisy in our face…

SASHA: Yes. A good example is their new phrase, “election denier.” Election denier?! What defined the Democrats for most of my life? Election denial! That’s what we were.

BN: You have Hillary Clinton and Stacey Abrams denying the elections they lost, and that’s fine. You have Black Lives Matter burning down predominantly black cities, and we’re told it’s a ‘mostly peaceful protest.’ Then January 6 comes along, and that’s an insurrection, a threat to democracy, and all that. And no one’s saying that people who committed actual violence at the Capitol don’t deserve what they get, but they are trying to troll us and provoke people, which is what I think Joe Biden was trying to do with that speech you wrote about.

SASHA: I think so too, and for a time, I thought I was paranoid because whenever I compared cancel culture to Salem or the Red Scare, people would argue that wasn’t true because the government isn’t involved in cancel culture. But now the government is involved.

BN: And I always try to remind people that government wasn’t involved in the Hollywood blacklist. That was Hollywood — actors, directors, producers, sponsors, and studios — creating those lists and choosing who they would and would not work with based on politics.

SASHA: And we have a choice… To go along or hold on to our core principles and humanity. Come what may, for me and my business, you can’t dehumanize other people, especially whole groups of people. You can’t join a mass-hysteria mob. You can’t condemn and ruin people without due process. Everyone deserves the presumption of innocence, and that includes the January 6 rioters. Instead, the government is throwing the January 6 people in a Guantanamo Bay-style solitary confinement before trial… When has the left ever gone along with something like that? Certainly not when they were blowing up the U.S. Capitol in the 1970s.

2020 was incredibly hard on all Americans. Locked down, polarized, lonely, frustrated, with social media algorithms driving up mass hysteria — they could sympathize with the largest protest in American history during a global pandemic, but when it came to Trump supporters, they’d already dehumanized them long before that. They could not understand how people who were never violent before that day would get caught up in something. Our government becomes tyrannical, and people go along with it. Where are the revolutionaries who defended the Chicago 7? Only one is out there doing it, Alan Dershowitz.

BN: It’s very simple: you are not a free speech warrior unless you are defending speech you disagree with and find repulsive. You are not a civil rights warrior unless you defend everyone’s civil rights, from a child molester to someone who participated in the violence on January 6.

SASHA: The Constitution is the only thing protecting us now from the totalitarianism the left is threatening. I’m not a Republican. I don’t support most of the things Republicans support. But I want the Republicans to win, so we get these Democrats out of power. I want people like Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz to go after Big Tech. The more we move online… Your site and my site could be removed from search engines. If I had ever sold my site to some big media groups, I would have been fired long ago.

BN: Don’t get Nikki Finke’d! They offered her a ton of money, made her sign a non-compete, and fired her.

SASHA: They silenced her.

BN: They won. That voice is gone. That site is now part of the Borg collective.

SASHA: It’s good my site was never so successful someone wanted to buy it. I would be at their mercy. I’m very happy I have this little site for my voice.

BN: Where do you see the Woke Terror (as I call it) in five years? Do people get sick of it? Or are you and I in Room 101 with rats strapped to our faces?

SASHA: Ha. I think and hope that more people start to build outside the system and let the free market do its work. Top Gun: Maverick taught Hollywood that people out there are starved for movies that aren’t ‘woke.’ Besides being a fun ride, that was the film’s main selling point. But I’ve also noticed that people have mostly just accepted it as the new normal and stopped fighting it. People won’t get fired if they say nothing — now they know the rules.

I’ve read the book the Fourth Turning but also another book called Pendulum: How Past Generations Shape our Present and Predict Our Future. That book explains exactly why we’re at this moment. It also says that the pendulum will begin to swing back. It was written back in 2011 or something like that. They take Neil Howe and William Strauss’s generations theory and divide it into two 40-year cycles. One is the “me” cycle (individualism), and the other is the “we” cycle (collectivism). Each cycle works until humans take a good thing too far, and that kicks the pendulum back in the other direction.

So here is what they say about the time we’re living through right now — again, written years ago and predicted based on the patterns of history:

The second half of the Upswing of ‘We’ and the first half of the Downswing from it (2013–2023) bring an ideological ‘righteousness’ that seems to spring from any group gathered around a cause. The inevitable result is judgmental legalism and witch hunts.

The origin of the term witch hunt was the Salem witch trials, a series of hearings before county court officials to prosecute people accused of witchcraft in the counties of Essex, Suffolk, and Middlesex in colonial Massachusetts, between

February 1692 and May 1693, exactly at the beginning of the second half of the Upswing toward the ‘We’ Zenith of 1703. Senator Joseph McCarthy was an American promoter of this witch-hunt attitude at America’s most recent ‘We’ Zenith of 1943 (see the ‘House Un-American Activities Committee,’ 1937–1953); Adolf Hitler was the German promoter (see the Holocaust, 1933–1945); and Joseph Stalin was the Soviet promoter (see the Great Purge, 1936–1938). Our hope is that we might collectively choose to skip this development as we approach the ‘We’ Zenith of 2023. If enough of us are aware of this trend toward judgmental self-righteousness, perhaps we can resist demonizing those who disagree with us and avoid the societal polarization that results from it. A truly great society is one in which being unpopular can be safe.

So 2023 is apparently when it reaches its height or its last gasp. The problem, I think, is less about what it’s done to our culture — wrecked it almost completely — but that it’s now gotten into government. We have a president and political leaders, not to mention a corrupt DOJ, that are policing citizens in a way that is much more dangerous than what’s happening in Hollywood.

What gives me hope are these two books. This is a moment of history we’re passing through. You want to make sure you are on the right side of it.

BN:  As I get older, I tend to care less and less about the future. I want to use my emotional energy for other things, and honestly don’t believe the future belongs to me anymore. It’s up to young people to fight for the future they want. But some things still infuriate me, like watching the obscene injustice of what’s happened to Woody Allen… Is there any victim(s) of the Woke Terror that particularly angers you?

SASHA: Woody Allen is a big one, but he is wise enough to see what kind of moment of moral panic we’re living through. I wrote about him the other day on Awards Daily — he’s been such an important part of my life. We have to leave breadcrumbs for people in the future to look back and see that not all of us were crazy. As members of Generation X, we’re tasked with being teachers for the younger generation, which is our only value at this point. We can only try to help guide them out of the madness. We need truth in art. We need truth in comedy. Without it, these industries become instruments of propaganda and thus become not only useless to us right now but will be mocked and judged by future generations as such.

BN:  In your Voir episode, you talk about how free you were as a child, maybe ‘too free’ you say, but do you think part of today’s problem with these thin-skinned Hitler Youths (my term again) is that we went from ‘latchkey kids’ to ‘helicopter parenting’ in the blink of an eye (at least that’s how it seems). There’s no better armor than a thick skin and sense of humor for a contented life. Unfortunately, something denied those traits to the Zoomers. No one taught them the emotional freedom that comes from “sticks n’ stones,” and we’re now living with the terrible consequences.

SASHA: You can draw a clear line between the counterculture generation (Boomers) who broke free from the clutches of their parents and religion in the 1950s, then exploded outward to discover a whole new world of culture. But they were also self-centered, distracted narcissists. So many of us in Generation X, children of the boomers, grew up needing better parents. Therapy, self-help, meds all rose in the 1990s to make us ‘better’ people. We just kept improving ourselves, trying to fill that emptiness. So not only were we going to ‘fix’ our children by raising them to be perfect, but we did this in the shadow of the McMartin preschool scare, Columbine, 9/11. We kept them close, kept them indoors, coddled them, and over-projected them while simultaneously boosting their self-esteem and ensuring everyone got a certificate.

The result of that is an army of Children Spies. They forged their own identities in virtual spaces, and then once they entered the real world, they saw it was a disaster and nothing like their carefully constructed one online. So now they’re trying to turn our chaotic country into a Tumblr site where their rules are our rules. But yes, imagine this generation watching, say, Hitler drop bombs on London. Imagine them dealing with the Great Depression.  We worry they are unprepared for what life has in store. But that’s just life, right? Every generation has to learn things the hard way.

BN: Are you going to get into trouble now that you’ve done business with Breitbart News?

SASHA: Well, I just did Glenn Beck, so…

BN: So you’re doomed.

SASHA: [laughs] I have this credo I learned from Megyn Kelly: I will say what I think. I’m going to be honest and not pay attention to the blowback. I honestly don’t have that much to lose. I like the money, but money’s not everything. I can find another way to make money. So I’m going to try and be as honest as I can. Someone’s got to say something.

BN: And it doesn’t move the ball when I say it. When you say it, someone from the left, people take notice.

SASHA: I wish I had more clout, more influence. Because they can exile me just like everyone else.

BN: Well, even though we probably disagree on 80 percent, you’ll always be welcome on the right. I think you’ll find we tolerate differences of opinion. Joe Rogan disagrees with Trump supporters on almost everything. We still defend him. Rogan agrees with the left on almost everything, but the left still tried to blacklist him over one or two issues.  

SASHA: Even when I was a Hillary supporter, I only found one Republican who was rude. Other than that, people on the right have always been nice to me despite our differences. The intolerance on the left is becoming unbearable.

BN: This was great. Thank you for doing this, and it was nice to meet you.

SASHA: Thank you for asking me.

Sasha Stone’s work can be found at Awards Daily and Substack. 

Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.