THE NEW SPACE RACE: Revolutionary rocket engine company Venus Aerospace raises $91 million to scale design. “RDREs differ from conventional rocket engines in the way they ignite and expel their propellants. Typical engines burn fuel as part of a controlled process inside a combustion chamber, which is directed through the engine nozzle and bell. RDREs use a ring-shaped combustion chamber and feature a continuously circulating detonation wave, which produces higher pressure and increased thrust while burning less fuel, in theory.”
Some of us cinephiles are breathing a sigh of relief. “Finally,” we think, “we may be free of this thing.” We know that, in the end, Star Wars was a blight on American cinema, a 50-year disease that killed the last golden age of movies and polluted the art form for what seemed to be forever.
I do not say this with any happiness. Like most children of my generation—the tail end of Generation X—I adored Star Wars as a child, and when I watch the original film, I still feel some of the youthful joy I first experienced at the age of three.
But when I became a man, or simply a teenager, I put away childish things. I realized Star Wars was, in the end, a fairly shallow children’s film, and there were works infinitely greater to discover, from The Godfather to The 400 Blows to Citizen Kane to DW Griffith’s Intolerance and Buster Keaton’s masterpieces. There was all the vast history of the art form, yet for so many, its richness had been buried by Star Wars and the empty blockbuster industry it founded.
This was no better illustrated than by the fate of the era from which Star Wars emerged: the great and fleeting moment of the 1970s New Hollywood. Kicked off by Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider, this era moved us through The Godfather, Chinatown, Taxi Driver, and numerous other masterpieces before its brutal last gasp with Martin Scorsese’s transcendent Raging Bull. In that era, movies were daring, ferocious, and above all, better than anything that had come out of Hollywood since its previous Golden Age of the 1930s and ‘40s.
And what an ending, eh? Han Solo — Harrison Ford in his first great relaxed performance, and his last — conquers his selfishness and redeems himself. Luke uses the Force — which is sort of like magnetism, plus ethics — and blows up Peter Cushing and his Death Star, along with untold engineers, support staff, kitchen workers, etc. The movie could have ended there, but no: It concluded with an awards ceremony. At the shank end of the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate, Carter-era malaise and ennui, Lucas filmed a movie that ended with a princess giving medals to heroes.
After a generation of movies with tortured antiheroes who couldn’t order a sandwich without making A Statement, it seemed remarkably fresh.
It saved science fiction. You could argue that “Star Wars” saved “Star Trek” as well; the success of the movie had everyone greenlighting space operas now, and the first Trek movie — a long, serious film by the director of “West Side Story” — was released a while later, leading to three more decades of Trek.
Fast-forward to 2026. As Will Jordan, aka the Critical Drinker, told an interviewer from GBNews recently, “I don’t know where [Disney goes] from here. ultimately they might be better off just trying to sell off the [Star Wars] IP to someone else because they’re not turning a profit from it.”
On the other hand, there’s one more cash grab left for Disney, and I’m eagerly looking forward to contributing to their coffers: “Disney has announced that it will be releasing the original theatrical version of the original Star Warsin theaters once again on February 19.”
Astronomers have observed two Russian military satellites passing within 3 metres (10 feet) of each other in an unexplained manoeuvre.
The COSMOS 2581 and COSMOS 2583 satellites, launched by Russia’s space agency Roscosmos in February 2025, performed the operation last week while orbiting at an altitude of around 585 kilometres.
The incident. which was tracked by US-based space situational awareness firm COMSPOC. has raised concerns about space-based surveillance and orbital collisions .
“This week we observed a complex proximity event involving Russian satellites,” COMSPOC wrote in a post to X, alongside a simulation of the event.
“This wasn’t a coincidental pass – COSMOS 2583 performed several fine manoeuvres to maintain this tight configuration… Whatever Russia is testing, it’s sophisticated.”
Russia has not disclosed the specific purpose of the satellites, though space analysts noted that one of them released a “sub-satellite” referred to as Object F.
They are believed to be part of a program involving “inspector satellites”, designed to test or perform surveillance operations of other spacecraft in orbit.
I’d guess they can do more than just observe.
TIME TO SHUTTER NASA? Well, spend a few minutes comparing the records of NASA on its Artemis II project with that of the private sector-based Space X. And for those who recall the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, the recurring problems with liquid hydrogen and leaking seals raise multiple red flags.
“And what has been happening elsewhere while NASA has been fumbling around with leak-prone, decades-old rocket technology and failure-prone heat shields? Private companies are leaving it in the dust.
“Just since April 2023, SpaceX has launched 11 test flights of its cutting-edge Starship – the most powerful rocket ever built. The first stage is powered by 33 Raptor engines that have been redesigned twice in the past decade. And, unlike the old Artemis rocket, it will all be reusable. SpaceX even managed to catch the 20-story booster in a pair of ‘chopsticks.’
“When NASA last went to the moon in 1972, it was using cutting-edge technology developed at breakneck speed in the midst of the Cold War. Today, it looks like a dinosaur ready for the boneyard.”
F-BOMBS GALORE FROM THOSE WITH TDS, BUT MY GENTLEMAN FRIEND AND I ARE THE ONES WHO GET EJECTED FROM BLUESKY: About a year ago, a parade of Democratic members of the California Assembly abandoned X (Twitter) and took up residence in the “safe spaces” of Bluesky. It’s a lonelier place. Most of them don’t get too many followers there.
Last summer, I started an account at Bluesky too. I had almost no followers there, but I didn’t open the account to get followers. I wanted to be able to tag my posts to the Assembly Members so they (or their staffers) would see them. Call it an exercise of my constitutional right to petition the government. I wanted to inform them about the folly of their latest effort (known as ACA7) to gut the California Constitution’s prohibition on state-sponsored preferential treatment based on race and sex.
My posts were perfectly civil—though I expect I was saying things some of them preferred not to hear. But within a very short period, I was unceremoniously thrown off of Bluesky—probably at the behest of one of the Assembly Members or staffers. Evidently, if you’re not a sycophant telling progressive politicians that they’re wonderful, they throw you off.
Much more recently, my gentleman friend was kind off to open an account and post for me. It’s very tame stuff–sometimes things like “Keep Discrimination Illegal: No on ACA7.” Much of it was information on polls that suggest ACA7 will lose or links to op-eds.
Still they can’t stand to hear it. Very quickly he got thrown off too.
Meanwhile, stuff like “[F-bomb] THE UNEDUCATED UNEMPLOYED MAGA MAGGOTS” and “[F-bomb] every democrat [that showed to the SOTU address]” is evidently just fine. So is “Donald Trump is a [f-bombing] traitor to the United States of America.”
Perhaps I was naive for even trying with these folks.
A NYC manufacturer that supplies drones to Israel to monitor the Gaza Strip border was booted from the city-owned Brooklyn Navy Yard six weeks after pro-Palestine Mayor Zohran Mamdani took office.
The Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corp. — whose board members serve at the pleasure of the mayor and manage the 300-acre industrial park — opted not to renew its lease with Easy Aerial, Councilman Lincoln Restler (D-Brooklyn) gloated on X Thursday.
“This public asset should not be leasing space to companies producing drones that are being transformed into weapons of war,” he said.
The company has long been the target of protests outside the former Navy shipyard, including by a group called “Demilitarize Brooklyn Navy Yard” that demanded the board evict tenants that assist Israel.
State Assemblyman Kalman Yeger (D-Brooklyn), a staunch Zionist, said the decision to boot Easy Aerial is foolish.
“Chasing good jobs out of New York because Mr. Mamdani and his friends hate Jews is probably not a very good economic development program,” he said.
Super Bowl commercials often spark conversation, but one 2026 ad in particular has caused quite a stir.
The home security company Ring aired a Super Bowl advertisement highlighting the AI-powered Search Party feature. When a pet owner reports their pet missing in the Ring app, Search Party kicks in on participating outdoor Ring cameras, scanning the area for the missing pet.
The commercial presented the feature as a wholesome way to reunite pets with their beloved owners, but many viewers took issue with the implications of Search Party.
“Do you see what I did there? I disguised mass human surveliance [sic] as a puppy search party,” one X user wrote.
Other social media posts slammed the commercial as “creepy as can be,” “concerning” and “invasive.”
“Marketing team at Ring Camera HQ seriously sat around and was like, ‘How do we sell unconstitutional surveillance of our citizens during the Super Bowl?’ And one guy was like “DOGS!’” one person quipped.
Another X user stated that their main takeaway from this year’s Super Bowl commercials was “never buy a Ring camera.”
One wag tweeted yesterday:
I’ve never seen a commercial destroy a company’s reputation before.
To be fair, it wasn’t just the appearance in 2023 of Dylan Mulvaney, it was the words of Bud Light’s (now-former) marketing VP Alissa Heinerscheid, attacking her (now-former) customers:
“It’s like we need to evolve and elevate this incredibly iconic brand. What does evolve and elevate mean? It means inclusivity,” [Heinerscheid] opined. “It means having a campaign that’s truly inclusive and feels lighter and brighter and different. And appeals to women and to men. And representation, isn’t it the heart of evolution?”
She went on: “We had this hangover, I mean Bud Light had been kind of a brand of fratty, kind of out-of-touch humor, and it was really important that we had another approach.”
This corporate jabber and diversity talk might wow the sisters and woke crowd. It makes many of her actual beer drinkers want to barf.
Born into a high-powered lawyer family with connections extending from Texas to Southern California and the East, she attended Groton, Harvard and then Wharton. Alissa is the ultimate brand manager and Prep-Woke Girlboss.
Alissa talks in fluent psychobabble: the trendy drivel of her finding emotional safe spaces to process her feelings, the listening and empathy, the journey and trials. In this self-scripted narrative, she overcomes uncertainty, hardship and suffering to be the best in her field, catnip for aspiring female managers. She professes to be a beacon, “bringing women along with me and inspiring the next generation of female leaders to keep moving forward and pursue careers in male-dominated industries.”
But does Alissa Gordon Heinerscheid, Anheuser-Busch’s vice president for marketing Bud Light, by far the nation’s biggest beer brand, know her product or her customers? Does she even like them? At least she could pretend.
Speaking of hating their longtime customers, in less than a decade, Jaguar went from depicting the average Jaaaaaag man like this…
….to this, which blew that brand up in spectacular fashion:
On Wednesday night, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman revealed that the Crew-12 and Artemis II astronauts will be allowed to bring iPhones and other modern smartphones into orbit and beyond.
“NASA astronauts will soon fly with the latest smartphones, beginning with Crew-12 and Artemis II,” Isaacman wrote on X. “We are giving our crews the tools to capture special moments for their families and share inspiring images and video with the world.”
NASA astronauts have long captured amazing photos from the space station, but having a smartphone on hand will open up a world of video possibilities. This will likely be especially useful when astronauts are conducting an experiment or looking outside a window and see an interesting, transient phenomenon.
“Can you hear me now?” is a joke, but only until SpaceX builds out Lunar Starlink.
According to the New York Post, Atta-Mensah, who Mamdani praised as his most trusted pick to advance racial equity in City Hall, shared and amplified a series of inflammatory political statements, and her account was deleted within about a week of her appointment on Thursday.
Among the posts flagged by the New York Young Republicans Club critics were multiple comments disparaging liberal white women. In one exchange, Atta-Mensah replied approvingly to a tweet claiming, “we don’t talk about white liberal racism enough,” writing: “Facts! It would need to be a series of loooooonnnnnnnggggg conversations.”
She also reposted part of a thread asking, “Who’s not police but FEELS like police to you?” A reply she boosted called out “white women at nonprofit organizations.” In another post, she reacted enthusiastically to a tweet comparing some white women in nonprofit spaces to Amy Cooper, the woman who became known as “Central Park Karen” after calling police on a Black birdwatcher in 2020, responding: “THIS IS A WHOLE WORD!!!!”
Atta-Mensah also frequently used the term “comrade,” and amplified a statement declaring there is “NO moderate way to black liberation.”
New York is about to learn just how immoderate, good and hard.
Astronomers using XRISM first spotted a brief but intense burst of X-ray radiation erupting from the area around the black hole. A few hours later, XRISM picked up the blast of wind unleashed from the same area racing outward at 134 million miles (216 million kilometers) per hour. XRISM’s instruments measured the speed and structure of the wind and pinpointed its source, while instruments on the XMM-Newton X-ray telescope helped measure the extent of the cosmic storm. Space Research Organization Netherlands astrophysicist Liyi Gu, who is another author of the study, and colleagues say the process that spawned the storm is not much different from the process that causes solar flares and coronal mass ejections from our own sun — just on a gargantuan scale.
“The winds around this black hole seem to have been created as the active galactic nucleus’s tangled magnetic field suddenly ‘untwisted,'” said Guainazzi.
The magnetic field around our sun is a restless thing. It’s constantly in motion, and sometimes its magnetic field lines snap and then reconnect. That violent severing and rejoining kicks off a solar flare, a short burst of radiation from the sun’s surface. The same process often flings a massive glob of plasma (electrically-charged gas particles) out into space.
But the supermassive black hole lurking at the core of NGC 3783 is 30 million times the mass of our humble sun, and the magnetic field writhing around is millions of times stronger, so when its lines snap and reconnect, the resulting flare is an eruption of almost unfathomable power.
There’s something wrong with Gavin Newsom. Americans recoiled in horror, then squinted in fascination at the images of Newsom’s appearance at the New York Times Dealbook Summit. There he was, the greaseball California governor, sitting in a chair with his legs crossed impossibly tight, protruding akimbo at improbable angles like a human swastika, a wanton display of “testicle-crushing” contortion. It was the opposite of manspreading, the inverse of kink-splaying, yet Newsom’s gnarled pose, his tangled appendages—like a steel-beamed hedgehog standing guard at Omaha Beach—still managed to intrude upon the public space in a way that many found unsettling.
His press office was quick to bite back, releasing an AI-generated image of the Democrat sitting his legs to in the air and his ankles crossed by his face. His hands were raised to his middle and pressed flatly into each other.
‘Democracy requires flexibility,’ his office wrote on X Friday.
Newsom, himself, reposted the image, writing: ‘WOW!’
Conquest’s Third Law of Politics states, “The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.” Particularly those who staff its social media departments.
Space X titan Elon Musk is a major investor in the sector. His Amazon arch rival, Jeff Bezos, wants to beat him to the holy grail. Tech magnate Bryan Johnson is a living experiment, and treats his body like a laboratory.
And now we learn that our very own music mogul, Simon Cowell, has joined the bonkers “Midlife Crisis Collective” of men striving to solve the “problem” of – whisper it – ageing.
Yes, the 66-year-old who gave the world The X Factor and One Direction is now setting his sights on if not eternal youth, then its next best equivalent: tinkering with his body fluids to turn back time.
Forget fillers and Botox – if you want to stay young, according to the “Age-Dodgers Alliance”, you have to start from the inside. In a new tabloid interview, Cowell cheerfully admits the lengths he goes to.
“I go to this place, this wellness clinic, where they actually take your blood, they rinse it, they filter it and then they put it back into your body,” he said.
“You do all these tests, and they tell you your age – so I’ve actually aged backwards by eating better, more exercise, less stress, certain supplements.”
I think by “rinsing”, he most probably means therapeutic plasma exchange, a technique employed in longevity clinics in which harmful substances, such as toxins, are removed.
No word yet if Cowell was helping fight the War on Terror in the early 2000s (language alert, not surprisingly):
Every media era gets the fabulists it deserves. If Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair and the other late 20th century fakers were looking for the prestige and power that came with journalism in that moment, then this generation’s internet scammers are scavenging in the wreckage of a degraded media environment. They’re taking advantage of an ecosystem uniquely susceptible to fraud—where publications with prestigious names publish rickety journalism under their brands, where fact-checkers have been axed and editors are overworked, where technology has made falsifying pitches and entire articles trivially easy, and where decades of devaluing journalism as simply more “content” have blurred the lines so much it can be difficult to remember where they were to begin with.
Freelance journalism in 2025 is an incredibly difficult place to build a career. But, it turns out, it’s a decent enough arena for a scam. On their website, Outrider says they pay $1,000 per article. Dwell’s rates start at 50 cents a word—a fee that’s difficult to justify if you actually want to interview 10 of the top designers in the world, but a healthy payday if you only need to enter a few words into ChatGPT.
Not every Victoria Goldiee story I looked at raised the same questions. A writer by that name had, in fact, spoken with actor Nico Santos for a story in Vogue Philippines, according to his publicist. Others were impossible to debunk with certainty. Had Victoria actually interviewed an incredibly elusive Korean production designer for a story in Architectural Digest about how people were, apparently, redesigning their rooms to match K-dramas? I can’t say for sure, and Architectural Digest did not respond to questions about the story. A story she published in October headlined “20 iconic slang words from Black Twitter that shaped pop culture”—which was syndicated across dozens of small-town American newspapers desperate for content, from northeast Mississippi to Waynesville, North Carolina—contains lines like “‘Brazy’ is another word for ‘crazy,’ replacing the ‘c’ with a ‘b.’” Is that story written by AI? It’s impossible to know and, frankly, impossible to say if it even matters.
My favourite “Victoria Goldiee” story is a piece she published in The Guardian just last month. It’s a first-person essay without quotes, and thus difficult to fact-check. In it, Goldiee—who told me she lives in Toronto, writes as an American in other work, enthuses about the daily jollof specials at a restaurant in Ghana in yet other writing, and lists herself as based in Nigeria elsewhere—vividly describes discovering underground music as she moves through life in 21st-century England. It follows her from a Somali football league in east London to “Morley’s fried chicken shops lit up after midnight” and “community centres that smell of carpet cleaner and curry.” It’s a rousing argument that real culture happens in real spaces, between real human beings, not in some cold, computer-generated reality. “The future of our music,” it reads, “is not written by algorithm.”
“Wonderful article,” reads one of many approving comments.
“Beautiful message that a lot of people aren’t trudging wide-eyed and brain-dead through this increasingly soulless, corporate-heavy… modern world,” reads another. “They are socialising, communicating, loving and laughing and making culture like real, thinking, feeling human beings.”
In the days after our conversation, Victoria’s online writer’s portfolio vanished. Her Muck Rack page (a listing of a journalist’s published works) was switched to private. An X account with her handle that had shared previous stories disappeared.
As I emailed the editors of the publications I’d been investigating, one by one Victoria’s articles came down.
Between “journalists” pushing out AI slop, and foreign rage farmers being exposed on social media, the Dead Internet Theory is looking less and less like a conspiracy theory every day.
EVEN BEFORE KIRK’S death, right-wing personalities like Andy Ngo were sharing images of trans people taking up arms on social media, implying they present a threat. Following the arrest of Kirk shooting suspect Tyler Robinson, that paranoia reached a fever pitch, with many ostensible supporters of the Second Amendment suggesting trans people be stripped of their arms. “How much do you want to bet we are going to find out there is a Trans terror cell that groomed Tyler Robinson and possibly even provided him with the gun to kill Charlie?” asked MAGA influencer Laura Loomer on X on September 13, following up with a slur. “There are literally shooting clubs now where Trannies meet up to learn how to shoot rifles and they wear shirts that say ‘Kill fascists’ and ‘the 2nd Amendment is for shooting cops.’ They are training for war. It’s very dangerous.”
READER, THEY ARE not training for war. Certainly not at this event.
Instead, I’ve been getting the tea about how Brutality matches are a kink-friendly space from Deviant Ollam, a 48-year-old hacker and guntuber with an “arm trans women” patch above his right butt cheek and “Abolish ICE” stickers he’s handing out freely. Ollam is poly, pansexual, and currently figuring out his status with Gun Bunny. The two of them, who have 180,000 and 22,000 YouTube subscribers, respectively, affectionately hold each other throughout the weekend. Bunny’s boyfriend, who is married, poly, and wearing a “Pro Gun, Pro Gay, A Better Way 2A” shirt, is also here.
During the pre-dawn hours in South Texas on Friday morning, SpaceX’s next-generation Starship first stage suffered some sort of major damage during pre-launch testing.
The company had only rolled the massive rocket out of the factory a day earlier, noting the beginning of its test campaign said on the social media site X: “The first operations will test the booster’s redesigned propellant systems and its structural strength.”
That testing commenced on Thursday night at the Massey’s Test Site, a couple of miles down the road from the company’s main production site at Starbase Texas. However an independent video showed the rocket’s lower half undergo an explosive (or possibly implosive) event at 4:04 am CT (10:04 UTC) Friday.
Post-incident images showed significant damage, perhaps a crumpling of sorts, to the lower half of the booster where the vehicle’s large liquid oxygen tank is housed. Neither SpaceX, nor company founder Elon Musk, had commented on the failure within a couple of hours of its occurrence on Friday morning.
The likely loss of this vehicle, “Booster 18,” is significant for SpaceX. Although the company is hardware rich—indeed it has built a massive factory in South Texas to churn out such vehicles—it nonetheless had a lot riding on this rocket. This is the first Starship Version 3, which was intended to have many design fixes and upgrades from the previous iterations of Starship vehicles to improve the reliability and performance of the massive rocket.
Better luck next time, fellas — and knowing SpaceX, that won’t be very long from now.
Nasa has rejected a claim by the reality star Kim Kardashian that the 1969 moon landing was faked.
In an episode of the television programme The Kardashians, Kardashian told the actress Sarah Paulson that the space mission “didn’t happen”.
Sean Duffy, the US transport secretary and acting administrator of Nasa, corrected her on X. He wrote: “Yes, Kim Kardashian, we’ve been to the moon before … Six times!
“And even better, Nasa Artemis is going back under the leadership of [President Trump],” he added. “We won the last space race and we will win this one too.”
The co-creator of Father Ted, Graham Linehan, was arrested at Heathrow Airport on Monday on suspicion of ‘inciting violence’. His crime? Criticising trans ideology on social media.
No sooner had Linehan disembarked his flight from Arizona than he was apprehended by armed police. In a post on Substack, he explained that his arrest was for three posts on X. One of the tweets read: ‘If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space, he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.’
The arrest at Heathrow was made by officers from the Met Police Aviation Unit. There are only 5,700 or so deployable armed police officers in England and Wales at present. Yet five of them were sent to arrest Linehan for his social-media posts. However you slice it, this was complete overkill – and a massive waste of police time. Worse, as a condition of bail, Linehan has been banned from using X. ‘A legal gag order designed to shut me up’ is how he describes it.*
A disgraced transgender police officer is believed to have reported gender-critic Father Ted creator Graham Linehan to the police over his social media posts.
Former Pc Lynsay Watson, who was born Alex Horwood, was sacked by Leicestershire Police for gross misconduct in 2023 after allegedly harassing a free speech campaigner and critic of gender ideology.
An anonymous social media account, believed to be linked to Watson, boasted in April this year of reporting Linehan, the Father Ted writer and gender sceptic, to the police over several social media posts he made about transgender issues. The account encouraged other transgender activists to do the same.
Watson has a well-documented history of calling on police forces to pursue criminal investigations of campaigners who are sceptical of the belief that self-identification, and not biological sex, determines what a man or woman is.
* It’s not exactly working, as Linehan isn’t backing down:
This is how Graham Linehan shows up for trial in the UK just days after being arrested in the London airport for posting "offensive tweets"
Here’s the order and here’s the White House Fact Sheet. Excellent and overdue; helping to clear away the bureaucratic underbrush that’s slowed, for example, Space X.
Two things happened online in the past week or so, both online, both quite mad. First was the spread of a podcast clip – hosted by “men’s health” influencer Myron Gains – featuring a rainbow coalition of Gen-Z Americans discussing whether Germany’s 1930s Jews had done something to make the Nazis hate them. They reimagined Hitler as someone who simply had to perpetrate a genocide because the Jews deserved it. The second event was an American Eagle jeans advertisement starring Sydney Sweeney. One of these moments caused a meltdown about the rise of Nazism, and it wasn’t the podcast.
Within hours of the jeans campaign going live, Sweeney – who is guilty of nothing but taking a presumably sizable paycheck to model some pants – was being accused of Nazi dog whistling due to a word play in the ad: she claimed to have “great genes/jeans.” In response came TikTok video essays and lengthy X threads and a cacophony of chatter from talking heads debating just how sinister the ad is. This kind of feverish reaction would be far more credible if the people getting so worked up were consistent.
The critics of the Sweeney ad – largely younger and leftist – are part of a growing population of Americans able to spot Nazi resurgences everywhere except, weirdly, those instances of actual attacks on Jews. I don’t remember seeing so many TikToks about the unprecedented rise of anti-Semitism in the real world following the shooting of two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, DC, or after the Jew-hating arson attack in Boulder, Co., last in June.
In the 1950s and ‘60s, when Birchers saw communists everywhere, their paranoia rarely got beyond the newsroom. Space for content was limited, whether it was a newspaper, the nightly TV news, or a weekly news magazine, and the vast majority of journalists didn’t share their politics. Today, there’s a 24-hour news cycle, and newsrooms chockablock staffed with leftists who already see the Bad Orange Man as Hitler incarnate. Since they share the worldview of the pants truthers, it’s not hard to understand how the ravings of some loonies on social media become amplified into actual news articles. (This pattern works equally well in reverse, of course; see also: Memories Pizza.) Or as America’s Newspaper of Record cogently reported last week:
Fortunately, American Eagle knows that the mob will quickly move on to the next big thing to be outraged about.
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