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Sasha Stone is one of the more interesting voices in the conservative space these days — which is all the more interesting since she’s not a conservative.
Stone, founder of the film website Awards Daily, became disillusioned with the extremes of the left in recent years and emerged as a Donald Trump supporter, which radically upended her career, fan base and income stream. But even as she lost advertising and influence in one sphere, she gained them in another.
In the past year, she has been featured in The New York Times among other publications, been a guest on The Megyn Kelly Show, and become a commentator on the state of the Democratic Party and the media. But even as The Hollywood Reporter described her “right-wing turn” and The New York Times called her a “MAGA pundit,” Stone refuses to conform to any political category. And last week, she delivered a lesson in listening to each other that stuck with me.
She listened to a conversation between journalist and podcaster Mark Halperin and Glenn Kessler, a former fact-checker for The Washington Post who recently took a buyout and as such has been newly enabled to share what he really thinks about everything.
Kessler, whose fact-checking system established a scale of “Pinocchios” to rate the veracity of statements, got pushback not only from conservatives but from Halperin, for his insistence that there was no anti-conservative bias at The Washington Post. It’s the sort of take that, to many people, seems breathtakingly naive, and Stone admitted that she’d had the impulse to call him out over it. “I wanted to mock Glenn Kessler or call him out or chide him or Tweet at him or something to shake him out of it,” she wrote.
But instead, she listened, and did so thoughtfully, giving Kessler what Halperin calls “the presumption of grace.” By the end of the conversation, she wrote, “I could see that this is how he genuinely sees the Washington Post, his work there, and reality itself.” Most importantly, she saw him as a person, not a member of the media, with all the baggage that entails.
“I saw a guy who loved his job and loved The Washington Post. Every day, he showed up and worked in that bustling newsroom. How could anyone ask him to throw that newspaper or his work under the bus?” Stone wrote.
Stone still thinks Kessler’s take on the media is wrong, and the result of an ideological bubble that deflects and rejects all contradictory opinions. Escaping our bubbles is essential, she said, and so is treating each other with kindness and decency — in other words, not only presuming but also offering grace.
Those with a solidly conservative worldview won’t agree with Stone on everything — she loved the Best Picture winner “Anora,” for one thing — but this is the kind of discourse America needs. More talk about grace — yes, please.
The problem with Trump ‘comedy’
“I acknowledge we’re losing money. Late-night TV is a struggling financial model. We are all basically operating a Blockbuster kiosk inside a Tower Records.”
Those are the words of comedian Jon Stewart, as defenders of Stephen Colbert continue to rage against the forthcoming cancellation of “The Late Show” despite The Wall Street Journal’s report that it was losing $40 million a year.
As statistician Nate Silver wrote, Google search data shows that interest in both Stewart and Colbert trended downward in the age of Trump, in part because it’s hard to be funny around the ultra-woke: “Comedy usually isn’t very good when you have to tiptoe around people’s sensitivities,” Silver wrote.
But the late Norm Macdonald, of “Saturday Night Live” fame, would have said there was more to it than that. Jokes about Donald Trump, a staple of late-night comedy, just aren’t that funny, MacDonald once said; they’re “low hanging fruit.”
He explained in this interview why good comedians struggle in the age of Trump.
“If you try to do smart comedy, it’s better to stay away from Trump,” said the comedian, who got his start writing for the “Roseanne” show. But few comedians and late-night hosts can resist the lure of the Trump joke and the chance to make a political point. Meanwhile, their undisguised loathing of Trump gets in the way of good comedy, he said.
“If you’re doing an impression of someone, you have to like that person, because people like themselves. You can’t play someone and have contempt for them at the same time. It doesn’t work as an impression,” Macdonald said. (While on SNL, Macdonald often impersonated Bob Dole, a man he once called his hero.)
Trump comedy is also complicated by the fact that Trump engages in self-parody, and “nothing looks dumber than if you parody self-parody — you get caught not understanding," he said.
Macdonald famously rued comedians who styled themselves as political pundits, and his remarks seem even more prescient today. He is still missed.
Recommended reading
Artificial intelligence can write obituaries. But should it? Holly Richardson takes a look at what happens when we outsource our love and memories to a machine — and shares what she got when she asked AI to write her own obituary.
She writes: “For a funeral home to write obituaries may take six hours or more — three hours meeting with the family to gather details and another three to craft an obituary. From that standpoint, it’s easy to see the appeal. Still, it can be cold and impersonal to grieving family members. Disrespectful, even, to use an algorithm to create something as personal as an obituary for a loved one.”
AI is everywhere. Can it write obituaries?
Child care is sometimes seen as at odds with family values, but Elliott Haspel argues that the two are inseparable.
He explains: “Acute, chronic stress is an enemy of healthy families. And at worst, such stress can split families apart: One North Carolina mother, Lindsay K. Saunders, shared in a 2024 op-ed that the stress of trying to afford child care was a factor in her and her husband separating. ‘I wondered,’ Saunders wrote, ‘if only we’d had more support, would we have made it?’”
Good child care doesn’t undermine family values. It supports them
When teacher’s unions make political statements or libraries promote social justice, it’s “mission creep,” according to Naomi Schaefer Riley.
She writes: “Universities and corporations finally seem to have moved away from issuing grand statements about world affairs, but now other sectors should follow suit. And the individuals employed in those sectors might want to also rediscover the importance of their actual jobs.”
As always, thank you for reading and being part of the Right to the Point community. You can email me at Jgraham@deseret.com, or send me a DM on X, where I’m @grahamtoday.