Rebecca Keegan‘s long-foretold hit piece on Sasha Stone (“How an Oscar Blogger Became a MAGA Darling“) dropped today.

It’s a diligent if superficial, half-tabloidy, rat-a-tat-tat thing that portrays Stone as a kind of political blunderer who has apparently alienated a few purse-string holders within Hollywood’s publicity, marketing and ad-buying realms by overplaying her MAGA allegiance. But the piece has no feeling, no soul, no intuition, no heart…no sense of grounded, shake-it-off honesty about the whole, tangled-up, identity-driven mess that we’re all living through.

Sasha’s perceptions about the destructive effects of Hollywood’s woke infection are 100% spot-on, but I’ve told her over and over that if she’d only confined her political jottings to riffs about woke ugliness and anti-cancel culture rhetoric and left Orange Beast out of it, Keegan & Co. would have never come after her. But Sasha felt too wedded to what she sees as the fundamental truth of things to back off even slightly. A victim of her own obstinate integrity.

Keegan’s piece is not technically inaccurate but it’s cheap, scolding and rather cruel in a brusque sort of way, and it couldn’t be more shallow, written in a “just the facts, ma’am” police blotter fashion while completely ignoring and in fact suppressing various underlying Big Picture truths…the vapors, aromas, and toxic social realities of our very own woked-up version of China’s Great Cultural Revolution…the superficially glamorous but rigidly instructive and punitive concentration-camp atmosphere that we’ve all been living under since ’18 or thereabouts.

On top of which the THR editors chose a somewhat unflattering photo of Stone to accompany the headline, and that really tells you where they’re coming from. Sasha has great eyes and a bountiful smile and a generally pleasing earth-momma radiance, but the THR photo makes her look like Bernadine Dohrn on the lam.

Friendo: “The impetus was obviously the ‘white power’ tweet. But since Sasha’s actual views are much more circumspect, what are they really saying about her? Since Keegan’s story accepts that the tweet was a sarcastic joke, what the Hollywood gatekeepers REALLY seem to be saying is, ‘You can’t call our identity politics out like that. That’s toxic.’

“Seriously — everyone in Hollywood and the media piling on Sasha is the quintessence of hypocrisy. I honestly don’t know how these people sleep.”

Keegan excerpt #1: “A quote from Sasha Stone is toxic now,” one executive told me, saying that their studio was pulling their ad dollars from Awards Daily. A representative for another studio said they would no longer invite her to screenings and events. ‘If she’s trying to be sarcastic,’ said a high-profile Academy member, ‘It’s not funny.’ HE sez: Ooohhh, no!!…an Academy member isn’t amused by Sasha’s sarcasm!! Talk about a damaging faux pas…off with her head!

Keegan excerpt #2: “While Stone has provoked reactions from cringe to outrage for her comments on race, gender and sexuality”…” HE sez: “Cringe and outrage” for speaking plainly and frankly about the smallpox epidemic of Hollywood’s identity politics, among other matters? There was no mistaking the fact that Lily Gladstone‘s Best Actress campaign was entirely about identity-brandishing; ditto Karla Sofía Gascon‘s forthcoming Best Actress campaign for Emilia Perez.

Keegan excerpt #3: “[Stone’s] white power remark may be the one to finally get her exiled from Hollywood. In some ways, the ostracism seems like what she’s wanted, living proof of her thesis on the left’s growing intolerance.” HE sez: Notice how Keegan hasn’t a single honest word to say about the cloud of Stalinist wokethink and how the only choice a sensible careerist has is to play along in order to survive?

Keegan excerpt #4: “[Sasha] used to be a little bit anti-bullshit,” says one publicist who represents multiple Oscar winners. “She gave a real read. We appreciated that.”

Keegan excerpt #5: “[Stone] defended Ansel Elgort during the 2020 rollout of Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story when the actor was accused of sexually assaulting a 17-year-old girl (Elgort has denied the allegation).” HE sez: Accused of sexual assault without a shred of credible evidence or testimony, Keegan should have explained. For the alleged victim’s description of what happened “doesn’t sound like sexual assault at all,” I wrote on 6.19.20 . “The sex began as consensual if not eager-beaver on her part, but she felt badly afterwards. It almost sounds like an Aziz Ansari-type situation. In the real world, of course, a 20 year-old guy legally having it off with a 17 year-old is far from Polanski-ville.”

Keegan excerpt #6: “When Green Book was at the center of a debate over its racial politics and old stories about director Peter Farrelly and a tweet from co-writer and producer Nick Vallelonga surfaced, Stone was quoted in the Wall Street Journal decrying the ‘destruction’ of the filmmakers.” HE sez: Green Book‘s basic game plan was to tell a fact-based road movie about racial relations and values according to the prevailing values and attitudes of 1962. The fanatics were enraged that it didn’t tell the story from the perspective of 2018 woke sensibilities.

Keegan excerpt #7: “One of Stone’s few remaining friends is another self-styled anti-woke writer, Hollywood Elsewhere’s Jeffrey Wells, whom she once dated and who is best known for having asked director James Mangold for nude outtakes of an actress and for writing about subjects like Emma Stone’s ‘slender, shovel-like feet” in a review of last year’s Oscar contender Poor Things.” HE sez: I humbly apologize for reporting that Emma Stone has “slender, shovel-like feet”, but this is a dead fact. As for Keegan’s other cheap ditty, which dates back to 2007 or 17 years ago…really? A single paragraph out of a private, 15-paragraph letter that I wrote to Mangold after two glasses of Pinot Grigio still matters to whom exactly? The Boogie Man? If Keegan were to tap out a capsule description of the 42nd President, she would write “Bill Clinton is best known for having been orally pleasured by Monica Lewinsky in the Oval Office, and secondarily for not coming in her mouth but on her dark blue dress.”

Keegan excerpt #8: “Stone says she still plans to attend the Telluride Film Festival this Labor Day weekend, where she says people ‘tolerate her.” Come again? Stone “still” plans to do Telluride despite the compromising assertions in Keegan’s earth-shaking article? Don’t flatter yourself, Rebecca.