I’M SO OLD, I CAN REMEMBER WHEN “STATE-RUN MEDIA” WAS HYPERBOLE:
This is straight up commie shit, BTW. The State is going to enforce political content restrictions? California is indistinguishable from a communist country. https://t.co/x0XwIkycFi
— Spencer Pratt (@spencerpratt) September 19, 2026
FASTER, PLEASE:
“The blockade proves the success of sanctions. If the U.S. keeps its chokehold, Tehran will likely break.”https://t.co/OFPqa5tbxc
— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) September 19, 2026
A CHOICE, NOT AN ECHO:
Stephen Miller delivered the greatest on-air masterclass on why you have to vote Republican in the midterms
“Democrats’ policies aren’t just wrong; their policies are evil.”
“You cannot sit on the sidelines when we are trying to save this country from an agenda that is… pic.twitter.com/XAvISmBYp7
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) September 19, 2026
Related:
Want to dominate the midterms?
Show up and vote.
There are way more of us than there are of them.
— Gunther Eagleman™ (@GuntherEagleman) September 19, 2026
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:
No One Notices As Entire Cast Of 'The View' Replaced With Shrieking Feral Pigs https://t.co/qOabXsloS7
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) September 19, 2026
VERTIGO: THE BOBBLEHEAD DOLLS. This Incredible ‘Lunch Atop a Skyscraper’ Bobblehead Puts All 11 Ironworkers on a Beam, Limited to 1,932 Pieces.
INGRID JACQUES OF USA TODAY: The real reason people are mad at Sydney Sweeney’s new ad.
After the first American Eagle ad, critics accused her of promoting “White supremacy.” She was outed as a registered Republican. Then President Donald Trump posted his support on social media.
That’s all it took for Sweeney to become blacklisted for her views among progressives, especially the Hollywood crowd.
Unlike most of Sweeney’s liberal acting colleagues, who can’t shut up about their obnoxious anti-Trump views, Sweeney is very private about her personal politics, demurring consistently when she’s asked about it. And she often is.
In an interview with Cosmopolitan in January, for instance, she was questioned about the “MAGA Barbie” nickname that some had given her online and how she “understood” the moniker.
“I’ve never been here to talk about politics,” Sweeney responded. “I’ve always been here to make art, so this is just not a conversation I want to be at the forefront of. And I think because of that, people want to take it even further and use me as their own pawn.”
That’s exactly what they want to do.
New Yorker writer Jennifer Wilson wrote an entire piece questioning whether conservatives have “taken sexy back” and the “political implications of cleavage,” devoting her opening to Sweeney and her SYRN lingerie campaign.
“While we were pretending not to be looking, breasts had somehow become Republican-coded,” Wilson opines.
Despite all the discourse and uproar over Sweeney and her bosom, she’s trying to live her best life and make the most of her 20s (which, trust me, go all too quickly).
Let’s not stand in her way.
Jonah Goldberg has some thoughts on those “Cashing In on Sydney Sweeney’s Cash-In:”
I just gave a talk to some Fund for American Studies students. The assigned reading was the introduction to The Myth of Left and Right by Verlan and Hyrum Lewis. One of the very effective techniques the authors use is to show how the positions held by the left and right move back and forth over time. I don’t think they talk about porn in the book, but it fits. When I was in college, Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin were leading a crusade against porn as dehumanizing to women. It commodified women, turned them into objects, reinforced sexual stereotypes, etc. I think they sometimes overstated their case, but the case was pretty solid. There were definitely feminists who disagreed, but in the early 1990s, the anti-porn side of second-wave feminists had the whip hand, so to speak.
By the middle part of the decade, the pro-porn side grabbed the whip, sometimes kinda literally. Camille Paglia is a special case, but there was also Susie Bright, Wendy McElroy (author of XXX: A Woman’s Right to Pornography), and all the feminists who embraced sex work, sex “positivity”, etc. Suddenly, selling sex—literally and figuratively—was empowering and cool.
I think there were wrong and right opinions all along the continuum. But we don’t need to get into the weeds on all of that. My only point is that these arguments are often weaponized for essentially partisan purposes. I don’t necessarily mean Republican vs. Democrat—though that certainly happens. If Donald Trump had run as a Democrat—not at all improbable given that he was one for quite a long time—I’m sure his appearances in softcore porn Playboy movies would have offended a lot of Republicans who now couldn’t care less about his cameo in Playboy Video Centerfold: Playmate 2000 Bernaola Twins (sorry pervs, no links to the actual movie). Heck, they don’t care that he cheated on his (third) wife with Stormy Daniels, award-winning star of Sexbots: Programmed for Pleasure. Heck, given all the AI chatter these days, I’m surprised she hasn’t been interviewed on MS Now about that one. And, let us not forget that many of the people who don’t care about Stormy D now cared a great deal about Monica Lewinsky back then.
No, I simply mean partisan in terms of the culture wars more generally. I think it’s preposterous to claim that Sweeney dallied “with eugenics-inflected advertising” or “flirted” with the “aesthetics of white supremacy.” The same ads could have been made with Beyoncé, and the people who read “great jeans” as an offshoot of The Boys from Brazil would probably be shouting “you go, girl!” at Beyoncé’s ownership of patriarchal white male space or some such.
The obsession with Sweeney’s very familiar self-marketing strategy is a great example of how media bias isn’t just about left versus right. Sex sells. Ask any TV producer to choose between two hot controversies (well, at least one of them is hot). The first is about water safety and the other is about Sydney Sweeney using footballs to barely conceal her boobs. When the choice is between a story with B-roll of people in lab coats testing water samples and footage of Sweeney frolicking, guess which one they’ll pick? When the B in B-roll stands for boobs—very nice ones, at least—your notes from that seminar at the Columbia Journalism School achieve their highest utility as a coaster for your coffee. I don’t make the rules.
This morning, in response to The New Statesman piece, I tweeted that “People are just trying way, way, too hard on this topic.” My friend Kyle Smith replied, “When you’re writing about bazongas, you have to try extra hard to convince yourself you’re writing an intellectual think piece.”
Trump wants to Make America Great Again – that’s a tall order. Sweeney, simply wants to Make America 2012 Again, a much more fun era before “breasts had somehow become Republican-coded:”
THE NOT SO FINAL COUNTDOWN: If You Were Born Before 1980, The Left Has Killed You With Climate Change At Least 17 Times!
That’s SEVENTEEN. Dated. Sourced. Expired. Verifiable in about twenty minutes by anyone with an internet connection and the mild curiosity to actually look. And I didn’t even reach for the ones still technically ticking, AOC’s 2031 deadline, Bernie’s “eight or nine years” from 2019 running out around 2028, Bill McKibben’s “nine years left” from 2021 expiring 2030, or Leonardo DiCaprio’s “nine-year window” from 2022, which lands, shockingly, right around 2031 too. Funny how the math always seems to land somewhere comfortably past the speaker’s own current relevance and never, ever inside it.
Here’s the pattern, and I want to be fair about it, because I don’t think these are all stupid people. Some of them hold genuine credentials. What they’re responding to is an incentive, not a conspiracy. “Sea level may rise a meter or two over 150 years under a specific emissions pathway” does not get you a Vanity Fair cover or a standing ovation. “TEN YEARS TO SAVE THE PLANET” does. Every single time, somebody got the applause and moved on to the next stage before the receipts caught up with them.
NOW WATCH THE BODY COUNT CLIMB, BECAUSE THIS IS WHERE IT STOPS BEING FUNNY AND STARTS BEING GENUINELY STRANGE.
Once “years left” stops scaring people, the next move is always the corpse count. Watch the actual number inflate, in order, name by name.
Rush Holt, 2013: “millions will die.”
Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth, 2006: showed Florida, Shanghai, and Calcutta going under from a Greenland-and-Antarctica collapse, and warned about the impact of “a hundred million or more” refugees. A UK High Court judge who reviewed the film for British classrooms called that specific section “distinctly alarmist,” and pointed out that a full Greenland melt plays out over MILLENNIA, not a news cycle.
Florida? In 1982, Dan Rather believed that would be underwater with (say it with me now) ten years:
Exit question: What Is Their Next Lie?
That’s a pretty easy one, to be honest:
The cover of Time magazine in 2006 and 2026. From "climate change will destroy humanity" to "AI will destroy humanity". pic.twitter.com/d59DCbTQFi
— Dr. Eli David (@DrEliDavid) September 16, 2026
CHIVALRY WAS A CODE THAT MADE BEHAVIORAL DEMANDS ON WOMEN AS WELL AS MEN:
What, precisely, obligates men to perform physical tasks at the behest of woman in our vicinity?
In turn, what tasks should we expect women to perform for us on our behalf, when we deem it necessary?
— El Jacobo (@eljacoboaqui) September 18, 2026
COMING SOON, AI TO FACE “COUNTLESS LAWSUITS FOR INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY THEFT?”
This right here is the “real” reason for the PsyOp
https://t.co/Ivi6LIKqDH https://t.co/BdJKYzXHdO
— Rosanne Clifton (@SoyMsrcc) September 18, 2026
JONATHAN TURLEY: Gandhi is Out, Mangione is In: Political Violence is in Vogue in America.
For years, politicians, pundits and professors have fueled political rage by claiming that those with opposing views are seeking to end democracy, bring back the Confederacy or turn citizens into slaves of the oligarchs. Such apocalyptic claims give a sense of license to people to free themselves from all social and moral constraints, allowing them to hate completely and unreservedly.
The saddest aspect of this trend is what it says about our hold on not just our civility but our humanity. The irony is that the arc of the moral universe, famously described by Martin Luther King Jr., is being bent back in the name of perverted notions of equity and justice. By demonizing others like corporate executives, many on the left are now free to enjoy gratuitous violence, even the killing of a new mother in Times Square.
In “Rage and the Republic,” I write about the fear of the founders that democracies historically devolved into what Benjamin Rush called “mobocracies.” John Adams put that history in its starkest terms: “there never was a democracy yet, that did not commit suicide.”
The founders watched as the French Revolution, occurring shortly after our own, unleashed a blood-soaked “Terror” as a population engaged in a spasm of violence against aristocrats, clergy and then themselves.
Maximilien Robespierre would legitimize the slaughter by telling citizens that violence was noble and mercy was weakness. He explained that “Terror is only justice: prompt, severe and inflexible; it is then an emanation of virtue.”
Past movements from the French Revolution to the Cultural Revolution to recent genocidal campaigns in Europe and Africa show that a dark element rests deep within us that can be released when we are sufficiently angry or afraid.
In my book, I call it the “Saturn Gene.” During the French Revolution, journalist Jacques Mallet du Pan observed that “like Saturn, the Revolution devours its children.” It is an inexorable pattern where movements release long-suppressed rage only to destroy those who led the mob to collective acts of murder and mayhem.
To be fair, violence wasn’t that far removed from anti-Vietnam War era late ‘60s and early ‘70s, though it did frequently take a very different form: The Bombings of America That We Forgot.
It may be hard to recall now, but there was a time when most Americans were decidedly more blasé about bombing attacks. This was during the 1970s, when protest bombings in America were commonplace, especially in hard-hit cities like New York, Chicago and San Francisco. Nearly a dozen radical underground groups, dimly remembered outfits such as the Weather Underground, the New World Liberation Front and the Symbionese Liberation Army, set off hundreds of bombs during that tumultuous decade—so many, in fact, that many people all but accepted them as a part of daily life. As one woman sniffed to a New York Post reporter after an attack by a Puerto Rican independence group in 1977: “Oh, another bombing? Who is it this time?’”
The underground groups of the 1970s were a kind of grungy, bell-bottomed coda to the protests of the 1960s; their members were mostly onetime student leftists who refused to give up the utopian dreams of 1968. While little remembered today, there was a time during the early 1970s when the U.S. government—the Nixon Administration—considered these groups a genuine threat to national security. Alarmed by a series of Weatherman attacks, Nixon told J. Edgar Hoover during a June 1970 Oval Office meeting that “revolutionary terror” represented the single greatest threat to American society. Hoover promised to do what he could, which wasn’t much.
As paranoid as Nixon could be, it was hard to argue with his line of thinking: Bombing attacks were growing by the day. They had begun as crude, simple things, mostly Molotov cocktails college radicals hurled toward ROTC buildings during the late 1960s. The first actual bombing campaign, the work of a group of New York City radicals led by a militant named Sam Melville, featured attacks on a dozen buildings around Manhattan between August and November 1969, when Melville and most of his pals were arrested.
Weather’s attacks began three months later, and by 1971 protest bombings had spread across the country. In a single eighteen-month period during 1971 and 1972 the FBI counted an amazing 2,500 bombings on American soil, almost five a day. Because they were typically detonated late at night, few caused serious injury, leading to a kind of grudging public acceptance. The deadliest underground attack of the decade, in fact, killed all of four people, in the January 1975 bombing of a Wall Street restaurant. News accounts rarely carried any expression or indication of public outrage.
The leaders of those crazy Weathermen. Whatever happened to them?
AT THE APOGEE OF MEDIA BIAS:
35% of media coverage of Lindsay Clancy is negative.
96% of media coverage of Elon Musk is negative.
One killed her children and the other exposed government theft.
So telling… pic.twitter.com/fnTwVNbN38
— C3 (@C_3C_3) September 17, 2026
PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS: Trump ‘I did that’ stickers pop up on gas pumps, four years after Biden got the same treatment.
I’m so old, I can remember Obama’s soon-to-be energy secretary telling the Wall Street Journal in the fall of 2008 that “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe,” and the LA Times extolling “The joy of $8 gas.”
But then, I can also remember when candidate Bill Clinton savaged George H.W. Bush for raising taxes, after Clinton’s fellow Democrats begged Papa Bush to raise taxes.
EMMY AWARDS’ AUDIENCE BECOMING INCREASINGLY MORE SELECTIVE: Emmys Ratings Fall as Awards Show Eyes End to Its Broadcast Era.
Monday’s Emmy Awards, aired Monday by NBC, posted a 9% decline in audience from the show’s 2025 viewership, marking what appears to be the end of the Emmys broadcast-network era.
According to Nielsen’s preliminary audience estimate, 6.7 million viewers watched the Emmys this year, down from the 7.4 million who tuned in last year.
While the viewership of awards shows has been treading downward in recent years, several factors complicate efforts to draw solid conclusions about the cause of this year’s drop in Emmys audience from 2025:
* * * * * * * *
If the Emmys do, indeed, move to Amazon, they will join other awards programs – such as the Oscars, SAG-AFTRA’s Actor Awards and the Academy of Country Music (ACM) Awards – who have signed deals to move to a streaming service.
One advantage of signing a multi-year deal with a single outlet is that the platform would have more incentive to promote the show, since doing so won’t benefit the competitor who gets the Emmys the next year.
So a streaming platform will be hosting an awards show dedicated to promoting network and cable TV shows? And note that the movie industry’s Academy Awards are moving to YouTube, the original streaming platform, in a couple of years as well: Failing Oscars Demoted to YouTube. “Starting in 2029, the irrelevant Oscars will have its annual irrelevant Academy Awards show broadcast on — lol — YouTube.”
As Steve wrote earlier today: Say Goodbye to Hollywood… If It Even Exists Anymore.
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:
Macklemore Performs Concert In Gaza And Oh No! They've Thrown Him Off A Roof https://t.co/C3l9qDT5JY
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) September 16, 2026
VDH: Iran, the Midterms, and October Surprises.
The theocracy is now vastly diminished after months of Israeli and American bombing and crushing new sanctions. Moreover, the desperate regime has continued to murder dissidents in the months since the failed uprising of January 2026.
In sum, the Iranian conflict is one of the strangest wars of the modern age.
The Iranian regime has suffered terrible material and financial damage.
Its nuclear program is likely in ruins, and its original command-and-control leadership has been destroyed.
The people detest it. The Kurdish minority loathes it. Conditions on the ground are dire, with terrible shortages of food, medicine, and fuel.
The resistance may sense that the Trump administration would double down on kinetic force to finish off the wounded regime if a mass popular uprising emerged and needed support from the air.
Taken together, these possible October surprises before the November midterms could make the next 50 days the most volatile in modern memory.
Trump could well be facing domestic warfare as well next year: Jeffries has not ‘ruled anything out’ on impeaching Trump if Democrats win.
OLD AND BUSTED: The Snail Darter and the Delta Smelt.
The New Hotness? Great crested newts could thwart Piddington migrant camp.
Great crested newts could scupper plans to build a camp near an Oxfordshire village to house as many as 1,256 asylum seekers.
Campaigners in Piddington, which voted to leave the UK in protest at the proposed camp, have unearthed records showing a plethora of protected wildlife next to and on its site.
In an apparent blunder, the Home Office’s ecological assessment of the area, submitted as part of its planning application, claimed that there was no evidence of protected newts, bats or reptiles.
Campaigners are claiming that unless the Home Office redoes its ecological assessment, and introduces protective measures possibly including moving the newts, it will be open to a legal challenge that could thwart the asylum camp.
The errors form the basis of a High Court challenge to the plans launched on Wednesday night.
Dr Claire Brenner, a resident with a zoology degree who uncovered the evidence, said: “If the Secretary of State determines this application with this materially incomplete information, that’s open to legal challenge.
“If they proceed to work on the site without a licence, then potentially it’s a wildlife crime.”
As one wag asked on X, “So let me get this straight… The Government care more about the safety of NEWTS than Women and Girls?”
Yes. Next question?
I JUST WANT TO TELL YOU GOOD LUCK, WE’RE ALL COUNTING ON YOU: Can James May land an Airbus A350?
THE IRONIES OF DEM-SOC: In Blue State America, It’s Always 1984.
One thing Orwell understood about the all-powerful state is that it can’t tolerate the family or organized religion. In 1984, the state survives by turning children against their parents.
Massachusetts just proved that he was right.
In December 2024, Massachusetts child welfare authorities removed 15-year-old Sophie Kutzko from her devout Catholic parents’ home after they refused, on religious grounds, to affirm a transgender identity that a counselor at her school initiated with their knowledge or consent. Sophie is 17 now, still a ward of the state under the Department of Children and Families. Joseph and Arlene Kutzko are suing to get her back.
“You start with school policies that refuse to inform parents when a child rejects their sex and claims another identity,” said Vernadette Broyles, the attorney representing the Kutzkos. “That’s part of a system that starts everything down the rabbit hole.” She added there was “a direct school to DCF pipeline in this case as we have seen elsewhere.”
This isn’t confined to Massachusetts. Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.) signed two bills in 2021 letting minors hide abortions and transgender treatments from their own parents. And school districts across the country have quietly followed suit, concealing gender transitions from moms and dads who still, legally, have every right to know and reject.
When leftists started picking up Orwell’s 1984 after Trump took office, it wasn’t because they saw it as a warning; it was because they saw it as an instruction manual. Make no mistake about it: in blue states, there is a coordinated campaign to convince children that the state loves them more than their own families do. Orwell called it decades ago. The Democrat Party is out here proving him right.
Insert obligatory reference to Nat-Soc operatives asking themselves, “Are we the baddies?” here:
Amid all this there was one radiant certainty: that he believed in civilization, and that civilization was still alive—precariously in England, perhaps, but magnificently in France, in its architecture, its wine, its national culture, in the villages and churches he had loved to visit on his Lambretta scooter ever since he first arrived in the Pyrenees. Even the president, Charles de Gaulle, had once granted a state funeral to the poet Valéry, and de Gaulle’s own memoirs, Scruton discovered, were both exquisitely written and illuminated by what the president called a certain idea of France.
In May 1968, then, as he visited Danielle in Paris, with his friends spending their days on the barricades, what Scruton saw shocked him. The atmosphere of that month was genuinely revolutionary. Ordinary life practically stopped, replaced by strikes, occupations, demonstrations, meetings, and spontaneous theater events. The entire city seemed to be involved in a mass political conference. The Paris police chief, Maurice Grimaud, called the events of May 1968 “the strangest . . . that Paris, and indeed France, had ever lived through.” As Arthur Marwick wrote in his history of the ’60s, the activists really believed that transformation was around the corner—that “the society we inhabit is the bad bourgeois society, but that, fortunately, this society is in a state of crisis, so that the good society which lies just around the corner can be easily attained if only we work systematically to destroy the language, the values, the culture, the ideology of bourgeois society.”
When the bricks started hitting the windows and the cars went up in flames, Scruton felt, at one level, a “literary critical” distaste: The whole performance was shallow and vulgar. More viscerally, he experienced an anger, a desire to fight back on behalf of what was most precious to him. He had little political knowledge. What he had—from his battles with his father and his headmaster, from his experiences as a grammar-school boy at Cambridge—was a long training in rebellion and its ironies. You can rebel against the left by being more radical than they are; you can rebel against people and institutions that you also respect; you can rebel to provoke; you can rebel on behalf of tradition and the establishment; you can rebel simply by baffling and disconcerting the people who think they’re better than you. (“What do you mean, potatoes?”) Many people in the 1960s were caught up in the revolutionary fervor of the hour, or swept along on a current of their own emotions. Scruton’s rebellion was always likelier to be conscious, deliberate, and original.
And so we come to the celebrated moment, described many times and most vividly in Gentle Regrets, when looking down from the little flat on the Rue de Bérite, Scruton recoiled with all his mind and heart from the revolutionary spirit of 1968. Probing his friends’ politics in the following days, he became convinced that whatever he believed, it was the opposite of that. “I came back to Cambridge,” he once said, “determined to reanimate a political outlook for the modern world.”
Rejecting “les événements de Mai 68” was extremely wise: Michel Foucault and the Glamour of Evil.
ROB LONG: Coyote Vs. Studio.
A successful studio walks a tightrope. It needs to be big enough to take the Coyote vs. Acme swing—big enough to green-light the oddball, release it widely, and eat the loss if it comes—but not so big and debt-saddled and answerable to a fractious quarterly-earnings call that the verdict on a promising movie gets made in the tax department instead of the theater.
Warner Bros., under David Zaslav, didn’t make it across the tightrope. It was big enough to pay for Coyote vs. Acme, but too big to release it. The studio is now in the process of being swallowed by Paramount Skydance, in a deal worth something north of $110 billion. The proposed combination is making its treacherous path through regulators and hostile state attorneys general. And to sweeten the prospect, David Ellison, the man trying to do the swallowing, has made a very specific California-friendly promise: The combined company will release 30 theatrical films a year, 15 from each studio, each with a real 45-day theatrical window. Last year, for comparison, Paramount released eight movies. So, big talk from Ellison. It’s worth remembering that in 2022, Zaslav promised that Warner Bros. would release 16 films in 2023 and 20 in 2024. He ended up delivering 11 and nine. Quarterly debt payments don’t care about your promises.
If Ellison keeps his promise, there will soon be a shelf of weird, specific comedies that got to exist because the combined company was large enough to absorb the risk but not too large to take the risk in the first place. But Ellison might simply end up owning the latest studio to fall off the tightrope, and the guys at Ketchup [Entertainment] will have another shot at picking up dead projects and making some real money.
Speaking of Warner Brothers: Warner Bros. Is Having Its Worst Box Office Stretch in Nearly Three Decades.
As September arrives, Warner Bros. still hasn’t produced a single $100 million domestic grosser this year. The Bride!, Mortal Kombat II, They Will Kill You and The Mummy have all failed to provide the sort of mainstream theatrical breakthrough the studio desperately needs. Practical Magic 2, arriving this week, was supposed to be one of the obvious candidates to change that. Current tracking, however, has been nowhere near the level required for a $100 million domestic run.
And that makes the historical comparison particularly fascinating.
Warner’s last comparable drought came in the late 1990s. Contact, released in July 1997, became a $100 million domestic film, finishing just above the century mark. Then Warner went roughly a year without another one until Lethal Weapon 4 arrived on July 10, 1998. Lethal Weapon 4 ultimately reached $130.4 million domestically.
There is a delicious bit of irony in that comparison. Contact was a prestige-minded science-fiction movie starring Jodie Foster, directed by Robert Zemeckis and based on Carl Sagan. Lethal Weapon 4 was the fourth entry in a wildly successful action franchise starring Mel Gibson and Danny Glover. Warner’s solution to the drought was not some carefully engineered brand strategy. It was simply a giant movie arriving at exactly the right moment.
The same problem feels different today because the theatrical marketplace itself has changed.
Assuming Warner Brothers is swallowed up by David Ellison’s Paramount Skydance, they’ll be yet another Covid-related death: Christopher Nolan’s Warner Bros. Partnership Betrayal Was a Big Mistake.
Like with all things regarding the current state of media, from the fading popularity of the MCU to the rise of video game movies, Nolan’s breakup with Warner Bros. can be traced back to the COVID-19 pandemic. On Mar. 15, 2020, all theaters in the United States shut down following the pandemic as many states went into lockdown. There was concern about whether theaters would ever open again. Christopher Nolan’s then-current film, Tenet, was given the director’s favored third-weekend-of-July release date and was set to be one of the year’s biggest films.
Nolan was never going to let Tenet be sent straight to streaming as Warner Bros. had done with Scoob!, and the studio wanted to keep the filmmaker happy after many years of creative partnership. Nolan wanted the movie delayed until September 2020 and hoped it could be positioned as the first major Hollywood film to welcome audiences back to theaters. Tenet had a limited release at first and was rolled out in the United States and a few select countries over the coming weeks. However, this was before a vaccine became available, leaving many moviegoers uneasy about returning to theaters.
Four months after Tenet’s limited release, Warner Bros. made the controversial decision to release its entire 2021 slate of films, along with Wonder Woman 1984 at the end of 2020, in theaters and streaming on HBO Max day-and-date. This initiative was known as Project Popcorn. Nolan, a big proponent of the theatrical experience, famously balked at the decision. On Dec. 7, 2020, Nolan told The Hollywood Reporter:
“Some of our industry’s biggest filmmakers and most important movie stars went to bed the night before thinking they were working for the greatest movie studio and woke up to find out they were working for the worst streaming service. Warner Bros. had an incredible machine for getting a filmmaker’s work out everywhere, both in theaters and in the home, and they are dismantling it as we speak. They don’t even understand what they’re losing. Their decision makes no economic sense, and even the most casual Wall Street investor can see the difference between disruption and dysfunction.”
Related: The Inexplicable Suicide of Hollywood.
EXPLOSIVE JUDICIARY COMMITTEE REPORT ACCUSES ACTBLUE OF MAJOR FRAUDULENT DONATION COVER-UP:
It also noted that “internal logs show how ActBlue maintains a culture that instructs fraud analysts to err on the side of accepting questionable foreign donations.”
ActBlue continues to deny any wrongdoing.
This report should send shockwaves through the Democrat Party, because the issue here is bigger than a handful of suspicious donations or a few questionable decisions by fraud analysts. Federal law prohibits foreign nationals from contributing to American elections, and ActBlue, as it moved billions of dollars into political campaigns, had a responsibility to take signs of foreign or fraudulent activity seriously and to follow federal law.
The Committees’ investigation alleges that ActBlue repeatedly did the opposite: weakening safeguards, loosening guidelines, giving questionable donors the “benefit of the doubt,” and instructing employees to look for reasons to accept contributions even when transactions raised red flags.
A criminal organization masquerading as a political party, to coin a phrase.
MORNING IN AMERICA:
I dunno, but if I were President and the poverty rate dropped to the LOWEST RATE ON RECORD I might make a big deal out of it — a lot bigger deal than the Trump White House is making. https://t.co/ze8Q2ikGhO
— Mickey Kaus (@kausmickey) September 16, 2026
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