Spielberg believes ‘they’ are here, and he believes he can “hurry” the day of disclosure along with this movie. Our screen magician is attempting to work a spell on us that will deliver “ontological shock” to make us question the foundations of our faith. The result, he says, will be a harmonious humanity. This idea is turning out to be a little bit controversial.

Share

Spielberg’s comments have some Christians bracing for a perceived offense to their beliefs. The script apparently only touches on Christianity without examining the effect of extraterrestrials on other religions. This tension over what I call ‘Space Jesus’ crystallizes the fraught relationship of Harmonialism (‘New Age’ religion) and Christianity. It makes up a theme of my book draft, A Spiritual Biography of the Flying Saucer.

UFOs are a ‘way of knowing’ among moderns, so Jesus can ride with aliens, or be an alien himself. Christians do in fact object to Jesus being placed in equality with Ascended Masters, Saint Germain, and the rest of the undifferentiated heavenly beings of the Harmonialist imagination.

Spielberg was raised in Judaism. However, his film career is filled with Harmonialist themes. Close Encounters of the Third Kind borrowed heavily from the latter-day Theosophy of Spielberg’s youth through the use of color and sound to communicate with aliens.

Now he is bookending Close Encounters. There is a line in this trailer which mentions a “79-year cover up”. Born in December 1946, Steven Spielberg is 79 years old. It is a useful coincidence that he was born at the cusp of the very first UFO ‘flap’. Obvious self-reference is obvious.

I suggest the dating matters, and not simply because Spielberg has reached the median age of mortality for his demographic. During Spielberg’s first year on earth, Kenneth Arnold reported seeing chevron-shaped metallic objects emitting or reflecting light as they flew. Arnold later experienced a series of paranormal events. This is a pattern to Harmonialism that is reflected in the film trailer.

Emily Blunt seems to experience a paranormal event in a television studio, apparently ‘channeling’ an alien language. This would be a spiritual practice of Harmonialist religion. UFO cults are replete with examples of mediumistic transmission like this. ‘Remote viewing’ is another popular psychic power among Harmonialists. The attempt to combine scientific and psychic is a key trait of Harmonialism.

Wait. Who are these Harmonialists?

As religious historian Sydney Ahlstrom wrote in his encyclopedic description, Harmonialism characteristically seeks to harmonize science with the occult. The result is always a pastiche of incomplete evidence glued together by faith. Paranormal becomes normal. Absence becomes evidence.

Harmonialism must include Christianity, and explain Christianity, in order to encompass the universe of possibility. This is where Harmonialist texts can cross boundaries with Christians.

Harmonialism also departs from reality at the beginning of its story about itself. The month after Arnold’s sensational story in 1947, a US Army balloon crashed to earth at Roswell. This incident has become a falsified narrative origin-point for the flying saucers of Harmonialism.

Ufologist Christopher Lambright is the only researcher who ever asked the famous Roswell eyewitness, Jesse Marcel, “if there was anything in what he saw or found that made him think it was part of a flying saucer or crashed disc”. Marcel’s answer was “an unambiguous ‘No’.”

In The Roswell UFO Crash: What They Don’t Want You To Know, Kal Korff conclusively shows that the material recovered at Roswell perfectly matches a US Army balloon radar target made by a toy company in New York.

Spielberg prefers to believe a different story. Disclosure Day starts at Roswell. My book shows that Harmonialism is two centuries older than Roswell. Believers were contacting aliens through astral projection, automatic writing, and other psychic means throughout the 19th century.

Flying saucers are icons of faith that descended from Harmonialist heavens. Roswell is an article of faith, not history, so Spielberg’s film is a religious epic. Harmonialists have no Ben Hur, no Ten Commandments, no Passion of the Christ. Disclosure Day seems meant to be that kind of a film for Harmonialism.

Spielberg says that he is “much more inclined now” towards belief in extraterrestrials than he was when he made Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I believe him. At his age, that kind of reflection is pretty universal.

Spielberg and Harmonialism

In my drafted book, A Spiritual Biography of the Flying Saucer, Spielberg is mentioned five times. His work has formed a mimetic feedback loop in American culture for decades, profoundly shaping the public imaginarium of the extraterrestrial.

This is normal in Harmonialism, which borrows freely from science fiction, while science fiction frequently takes inspiration from Harmonialism.

Close Encounters cemented the archetype of the alien-visitor-abductor in the public mind: small, gray humanoids with black eyes and nostril slits instead of noses. The now-familiar ‘grays’ were based on the final form that extraterrestrials took in the evolving descriptions of Betty Hill.

At first, Hill described the aliens as having prominent noses. Under the influence of hypnotic regression and Harmonialist religion, however, the aliens progressively lost their noses in further retellings.

Spielberg has been associated with major Harmonialists for his entire career. Two advisers on the 1977 film, J. Allen Hynek and Jacques Vallée, are venerated figures in ufology. In fact, Vallée inspired the scientist character Claude Lacombe played by renowned French actor François Truffaut.

Lacombe is the scientist who remains open-minded while listening to Richard Dreyfuss describe his spiritual experience with the cinematic aliens in Close Encounters.

Whereas Hynek and Vallée are legitimate scientists, they stop being scientific when they delve into metaphysical questions. That is where Harmonialism happens. Vallée is a year older than Spielberg, but he remains a prominent figure in the UAP ‘disclosure community’.

He also has a government background, as do most of the Harmonialists in the UAP disclosure movement. In fact, the ‘deep state’ seems to be a natural habitat for Harmonialism. Harmonizing science and faith requires secret knowledge, so it is reasonable that classified government jobs attract a fair number of Harmonialists.

More problematic and revealing however is the role of Richard C Doty, a consultant on Steven Spielberg’s 2002 alien abduction mini-series, Taken. Doty is the living embodiment of the unreliable narrator, a red flag of falsehood.

During his time with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations in the 1980s, Doty conducted multiple disinformation campaigns within the ufology community that left it divided by controversy.

On at least one occasion, Doty’s pretextual story of extraterrestrial contacts with the federal government clearly borrowed from Close Encounters. One year after Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Doty approached a victim of his psywar with a story about an extraterrestrial abiding on earth before returning home.

Like the character played by Colin Firth in Disclosure Day, Doty is a recognizable Man In Black, a sinister figure from UFO folklore who violates truth boundaries. Doty says that he did it all to protect the human race. Humans “cannot accept what we know”, Firth’s character says in the trailer.

Rather than a cover-up by the government, my research reveals that Harmonialists in the government, including Doty, have used secrecy as a veil of illusion to imbue their prophecies of imminent disclosure with gravitas and drama. The ‘hidden’ flying saucers and autopsied aliens are another mystery box.

The “mystery box” problem is a modern storytelling approach popularized by J.J. Abrams, the co-creator of Lost, a show that infamously exemplifies the trend. Writers pile layer upon layer of enigmatic questions, secrets, and plot hooks to keep audiences engaged and theorizing.

Too often, show writers fail to deliver satisfying, coherent, emotionally resonant, or logical resolutions that satisfy expectations — like the latter seasons of Lost. Harmonialism does the same thing. The ‘disclosure movement’ is a mystery box plot.

Spielberg is using a mystery box. According to Chris Gore at Film Threat, about 80 percent of the film is chase scenes to get to the mystery box. As a moviegoer, this is what really frightens me.

Disclosure is the plot device

Great secrets have been kept from us. Humanity is not ready to know, but humanity deserves to know. This conflict drives the plot of Disclosure Day. Spielberg wants us to believe this moment of disclosure is immanent, a transcendence unfolding in the real world. It is supposed to be spooky, frightening, Judgment Day stuff.

We are meant to fear for our beliefs. Christian belief is apparently questioned, but only with nuns. Anti-Catholicism is common in early Harmonialism. While Harmonialists have tried to incorporate kabbalistic Judaism, anti-Semitism was also a common comorbid symptom of Theosophy, which suffered disasters by trying to incorporate Hinduism. Harmonialists have attempted to incorporate Islam in the past, but there is little of that activity these days.

Perhaps the reader has already noted which dog does not bark, here. From its beginnings as a spiritual movement, Harmonialism was largely a Protestant movement drawing upon Protestant roots. Disclosure Day is a substitute for the Protestant Day of Judgment: souls ascending, angels descending, cosmic justice.

Repent, ye sinners!

Being a Spielberg film, however, the ending will encourage belief. Ideally, we are meant to leave the theater believing even more strongly than we did before. This is the Spielberg form, and it will be in form with Harmonialism.

In his stories that depict extraterrestrials in a positive or neutral light, Spielberg shows us that rapport with the cosmos — being in tune with universal vibes — can do magic. Spiritual power derived from this relationship to the cosmos can work miracles, such as E.T. healing a bloodied fingertip. Spielberg is Harmonialist in his optimism.

In his darker takes, such as War of the Worlds and Taken, Spielberg admits that cosmic forces can be disruptive, invasive, insidious, a poison hidden inside a promise of pure, harmonious benevolence. The motives of our ‘space brothers’ become muddied, their behavior inhumane. Comet-riding ‘Luciferians’ of the Black Lodge are an original trope of Harmonialist religion. Even War of the Worlds managed to have a positive continuity, a faith in the family.

The word for this sort of story, where the aliens arrive and that is good or bad or even both at the same time, is ‘apocalypse’. Disclosure Day is meant to be an apocalypse.

Harmonialists love doomsday: earthquakes, lost continents, interplanetary conflict, Younger Dryas impact scenarios, and ancient nuclear wars abound in their texts. Positive Harmonialism is a narrative of faith in continuity, though it is disrupted by upheaval and change. Darker Harmonialism disrupts the pacifistic promises and good intentions.

It is all very protean, like the Book of Genesis, or the myth of Prometheus.

The “ontological shock” of the shared experience of seeing this movie is supposed to unite humanity in a new understanding of ourselves as connected beings. Talk about marketing to the global box office.

Spielberg wants to “remind us of our capacity for empathy and remind us there is something bigger than us”, he says. Something. It could be God, or gods, or a galactic high council. Notably, he does not say what that something is. But it was aliens.

The call to Harmonialism is presented as a revised version of Pascal’s wager, the proposition that it is safer to believe in God and be wrong than reject God and be wrong. The universe is so big, the argument goes, that we cannot possibly be all alone in it. It is safer to believe in the aliens and be wrong than to disbelieve in the aliens and be wrong.

We should therefore have faith that we are not alone, the movie preview suggests. It is the Harmonialist gospel. I have found iterations of this argument in every Harmonialist text I have examined. The obvious problem with Pascal’s wager is that it also applies to the Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, Odin, Baal, or Baphomet. At some point, empirical probabilities demand respect.

Harmonialists always try to strike a perfect balance of belief and evidence, and always fail, eventually. Every Harmonialist text is dated, aged, in need of updating. They all suffer from the relentless progress of real scientific understanding.

Spielberg disclosed

Harmonialism is an eclectic faith movement that anyone can join. Jews can be Harmonialists. Catholics and Muslims can become Harmonialists. Spielberg does not have to make a public confession of Harmonialism to be in harmony with the universe.

That is a very attractive feature of the faith movement for a great many liberal-minded people. I am certainly not ascribing a narrow religious perspective to Steven Spielberg. On the contrary, he is fundamentally a humanist. His Harmonialism is not grounded in sectarian allegiance. It is a product of his liberal artistic values.

Spielberg told SXSW in March that the 2017 New York Times coverage of alleged UFO sightings “reinvigorated” his belief in extraterrestrials. This is an important topic covered in my book because the ‘news’ story was a sensational propaganda project.

Two of the three authors of that headline story are Harmonialists. They write Harmonialist books. The most prominent of the three is a practicing spiritual medium.

Imagine Helena Blavatsky writing headlines for the newspaper of record, reporting pronouncements from the Lords of the Flame on Venus, because that is more or less what the ‘disclosure movement’ did in 2017. A new UFO flap was at hand. Belief in extraterrestrials was at an all-time high.

My book identifies Steven Spielberg as a bricoleur. He makes new stories out of older material, forming a collage of beliefs. Disclosure Day is a bricolage, or mash-up, of Harmonialist beliefs, and some of these are much older than Spielberg, or the first flying saucer flap. The 2017 NYT story was also a bricolage by bricoleurs.

Death is not a new religious question. It is the original religious question, and Harmonialism has offered answers in every new creative collage that it presents us. Spielberg is near the end of his life, pondering the ascent, and calling on us to watch the sky. Mortality has made this movie.

Reader, see the movie if you want to. Enjoy the popcorn. But do not hold your breath waiting for the day of actual disclosure in the film title. Like Roswell, the day of disclosure is an article of faith. Spielberg may be disclosing his religious values to the world, but the mystery box is all we can ever expect to witness.

Which is not to say I don’t have faith in Spielberg. Buzz about the film is generally good. I hope that Disclosure Day is good. I plan to see it, so I am not judging Spielberg’s film in advance. If there is a sinister conspiracy behind this movie, then that sinister conspiracy is going to get my ticket and popcorn and soda money.

And then I’m sure I’ll have much more to say.

Post script, here are two reviews, one good, one bad.

Jeremy Jahns is a respected and honest YouTuber with a positive review. He doesn’t know, or care, about Harmonialism. He just cares about being entertained. Jahns says he had a good time with Disclosure Day. The real test of a gospel film is whether it annoys us with the altar call. Apparently this film did not do that.

Here is Chris Gore of Film Threat. He also does not know or care about Harmonialism. He is a film critic who demands to be entertained. He says he did not have a good time watching Disclosure Day. The real test of a mystery box is whether the payoff was worthwhile. Apparently this film does not do that, which would also be very consistent with Harmonialism.

Subscribe now

Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter were Chicago psychologists who learned about a flying saucer cult in Oak Park, Michigan and set out to study what happened when their doomsday prophecy failed. They presented their findings in a 1956 book, When Prophecy Fails, that stood for decades as a landmark study.

My reading of that text is at the core of three chapters in my drafted book, A Spiritual Biography of the Flying Saucer: Revealing An Old Time Religion In America. However, the text has always been problematic, and the story of the book suspect.

Thomas Kelly, an independent researcher, published a debunking of the book by Festinger, Riecken, and Schachter in Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences during 2025. Kelly reveals that Festinger et al participated in the whole affair far more than they revealed.

Share

Dorothy Martin, the spirit-medium at the center of the group, regarded Riecken as “the favorite son of the Most God”. In response to her entreaties for a message from beyond, “Riecken claimed to belong to both the Brotherhood of Sara and the Brotherhood of the Light — an admission that deeply impressed her.”

Kelly notes that Bertha Blatsky, a pseudonymous member of the group, told Riecken that “you will have a very important role, you will be a guide to many people”. Kelly does not note that this was during Bertha’s challenge to Dorothy Martin’s spiritual authority as the group channeler. He may not consider this relevant, but the two women were fighting for the favor of one of the study authors, and that is notable.

Then, after the disconfirmation, Riecken pressed the group to explain the failure of the prophecy. Charles Laughead, a leader of the small Harmonialist community, responded with a speech about keeping the faith. Riecken thanked Laughead: “Thank you, Chuck, you’ve given me just what I was looking for.” He then urged the group to release their ‘Christmas message’ explaining the failed prophecy.

Rather than simply observing the rationalization of cognitive dissonance, the researchers had participated in it, shaping the outcome. Kelly further undermines the core thesis of the book by showing that the Seekers cult in Oak Park proselytized far more before their doomsday prophecy failed than after. As he notes, most of the group dissolved, while a few — the Laugheads and Martin — carried on with their Harmonialist revelations

This is consistent with my research into postwar Harmonialism. Psychology very much regarded itself as a “science of the soul”, while Harmonialism always attempts to harmonize the occult with the scientific. The same reinforcing biases play out in “recovered memories” of alien abduction.

Put another way, the entire UFO phenomenon was inflated by Carl Jung, hypnotherapists, and pseudoscience of the mind. L. Ron Hubbard was a competitor in this spiritual market. He understood that Harmonialists wanted a “spiritual technology”. I should have guessed there was more to the story of the research team. It makes perfect sense that they were creating as much as they were studying.

“According to the archival material, Riecken fabricated psychic messages from extraterrestrials to shape group behavior including the pivotal events that unfolded on the night of the failed prophecy”, Kelly reveals.

One of the team observers, Elizabeth ‘Liz’ Williams, further participated in the group’s belief formation by performing automatic writing — a form of spirit-communication — for one of the members that she found gullible. Martin formed a similar attachment to Liz as a result.

The Seekers are a fascinating example of the bricolage effect. As my own book draft explains, humans form pastiches of belief out of the cultural materials around them, which appeal to them. I think this explains just what Festinger, Reichen, and Schacter actually “observed”.

Like the Satanic Verses, the prophecy went down a memory hole while Dorothy Martin used automatic writing to write her way through the disconfirmation. She was a bricoleur, remaking the Harmonialist gospel rather than reciting.

Harmonialists always do this. They have to, because the popular science and pseudoscience they use to buttress their beliefs is continually challenged by new scientific findings. In this sense, the tragedy of Harmonialism is that its scientific prophecies always fail, requiring them to refresh the bricolage-pastiche of belief once again, usually with new literature.

To borrow a joke about communism, the real Harmonialism has not been tried yet.

Some number of believers, usually most, always step back from a disconfirmation. Many of these former seekers continue to seek out Harmonialist ideas and groups. “Many of Martin’s followers had already explored or embraced these teachings before joining her, and some would remain in this New Age and UFO‐believing milieu after leaving her group”, Kelly notes.

One group member “remained interested in Martin’s teaching, but it does not prove enduring, sincere belief.” This person evidently continued to believe in Martin, though.

Then there are always a few who refresh the bricolage, so that the belief behind the failed prophecy carries on. This pattern of pastiche-making makes it very hard for Harmonialism to adhere as a church, but there always some who try.

This does suggest some very interesting historical patterns of what we might call ‘the spiritual mind’. But as Thomas Kelly has revealed in his paper, the alleged scientists behind a core text of modern psychology were actually performing as shamans, and only ‘proved’ a theory they played out themselves, through the group.

That is not an exception to the rhyming patterns of the history in my book. It is the rule. This is very exciting new information, to me.

Three professional psychologists “misrepresented how the group responded to disconfirmation and that the group did not maintain their beliefs after disconfirmation nor dramatically increase efforts at proselytization.”

The group had “planned a book, published articles in multiple magazines, sent letters to editors and spiritual seekers, and welcomed curious visitors with open arms”, Thomas writes.

“Whatever else When Prophecy Fails may have captured about the psychology of belief, it mischaracterizes the group’s efforts to spread its message before the prophecy failed.”

Kelly somewhat confuses the prophecy, a text, for the underlying belief, which expresses as text. William Miller, whose prediction of Judgment Day failed in 1844, disavowed his prophecy without losing his faith in Jesus or heaven. Disconfirmation is indeed a driver of religious creativity, especially with esoteric religion. Festinger et al were not wrong about this.

While the 1954 group never reunited, they had not shared a formalized scripture in the first place. Their beliefs were malleable. Kelly admits “these general beliefs were endemic in those circles and did not depend upon Martin herself.” Indeed, this is why Martin had a second act as Sister Thedra, revealing messages from heavenly beings, until her death. Harmonialist seekers were everywhere.

After her death, her followers compiled some of her teachings in the sixteen volume Great Awakening series and the eight volume Transfiguration series. None of these twenty‐four books defend or describe the prediction that is the center of When Prophecy Fails nor do they defend or promote the “Christmas message.” Even though Martin would gain new followers who believed in her psychic powers and alien contact, and who probably would have accepted her teachings on the failed prediction and Christmas message, she did nothing to spread these teachings or reassemble the followers who had experienced its failure.

Nor did Sister Thedra have much to say about Bertha Blatsky, her challenger for the affections of research Harry Reicken, who seemed to spiritual to her. Indeed, Martin never allowed a competing medium in the same room again. She had learned her lesson about monopolizing spiritual authority.

Harmonialism does this a lot. Seventh Day Adventists are still embarrassed that their sect, which began after the Great Disappointment of 1844, was essentially a cult led by the automatic writing of Ellen G. White. After her writing was revealed as plagiarism, one group of schismatics from her church set out to create a Harmonialist gospel, The Urantia Book.

Thomas Kelly has contributed to a theme that emerges in my drafted book, A Spiritual Biography of the Flying Saucer. From past lives to alien abductions to other recovered memory ‘syndromes’, psychotherapeutic professions always participated in the postwar construction of Harmonialist beliefs.

They conceived themselves as scientists of the soul. In fact their experiments were often unethical and frequently harmful. This is still the case. Up to one in five psychotherapies has iatrogenic effects, almost always through improper therapeutic relationships or methods. Kelly is damning: Festinger et al committed research misconduct.

Carl Jung popularized the term ‘New Age’, but in fact psychology was dabbling in a much older religious current. This is the story I tell in my book. I have a small chapter addition to add, now.

You can read the paper at this link.

Subscribe now

Los Angeles is cooked. Hollywood will not recover from the 2026 mayoral election. Not because Spencer Pratt came in third, but because Nithya Raman has overtaken him in second place through means that are transparently fraudulent, if entirely legalized in Gavin Newsom’s California. Public confidence in the outcome will be nonexistent, the city will belong to vagrants, and all the political power will belong to the communist cargo cults that sustain the vagrancy.

Hollywood “fell off a cliff” right after Bass took office, Pratt has noted. “Karen and Nithya treat productions like a nuisance, and they’ve killed our golden goose” by making Los Angeles an unsafe and unpleasant place for media creators to live and work. In order to bring back production, Pratt wanted “to eliminate every lame reason that makes filming in LA a pain in the neck.” Contrary to the Democratic Party prescription, production incentives are not going to work.

Quick, cheap, easy permitting. Easy parking approvals. Dedicated LAPD patrols in filming hotspots to ensure crew safety. No more addicts roving around the streets. Slashing fees. We need to win back these productions, and tax credits aren’t enough to do it.

Pratt never identified himself as a Republican, or claimed allegiance to partisan principles. His campaign was never ideological. Rather, Pratt’s candidacy threatened the ideology that runs Los Angeles. In the UK, a semi-public body that is financed by taxpayers and appointed by the government is called ‘a quango’, short for ‘quasi-autonomous non-governmental organization’. We may borrow this term.

The quangos of Los Angeles are killing Los Angeles. Burned out, needle-strewn playgrounds in Los Angeles are the praxis (practical implementation) of morality-based economic theories that fly in the face of human nature: communism, basically. The quangos are essentially cargo cults that implement Marxist theories with public resources (money). This program makes the homeless problem bigger.

Then the quangos collect ballots from the homeless (‘harvesting’). Signatures are not necessary as long as a ‘witness’ (the harvester) signs the ballot. It is an open secret in California that the booths conveniently located outside the local county public services centers harvest ballots at election-time. They also collect signatures for petitions.

California makes this all much easier and safer by sending every registered voter a ballot by mail. The homeless can be signed up to receive ballots at DSA offices, or nonprofit offices, or even the Democratic Party office, and then those ballots can be filled out and witnessed by ‘volunteers’, then delivered to drop boxes, without the homeless person ever touching them. Ballot brokers find ballots at apartment complexes, nursing homes, and empty lots, collecting the overflow from voters who have died or moved.

The chain of custody for an unknown number of ballots is therefore unknown, and thanks to California Democrats, impossible to retrace. Laundered votes are legal in California. Gavin Newsom has even protected this form of electioneering by signing new legislation, SB 73, that makes it illegal for election observers to challenge a ballot sent by mail. Validating votes is racist, after all, which is why we cannot have voter ID laws.

The quiet crisis of quango defunding is a major plot thread to the Trump administration and the 2028 presidential election. It is why we see stories designed to make us sympathize with the plight of otherwise-unemployable people losing their nonprofit jobs and shuttering their organizations. It is why we have seen Latin American leftists losing elections ever since USAID funding was cut off.

Now the elevation of Nithya Raman from distant third-place to second place comes at a cost: the permanent diminution of Hollywood. The regulatory burdens of film and television/streaming production in the city now outweigh the incentives offered by the state. Fewer shows and films will be made in Tinseltown, which has taken too many self-inflicted economic blows in the era of programmatic Los Angeles culture war. Put simply, ‘Hollyweird’ is over and woke is broke.

Cargo cult communists direct resources to dependencies through quangos, but the quangos do not alleviate suffering. Suffering increases from the dependency, justifying even greater spending to relieve the problem through quangos. The dependency meanwhile is a reliable voting block. Economists Edward L. Glaeser and Andrei Shleifer identified this phenomenon, in which politicians shape the electorate in ways that drive out business and shrink the tax base, back in 2002.

They called it “The Curley Effect”, naming it for James Michael Curley, the colorful, four-time mayor of Boston and one-time governor of Massachusetts in the early-to-mid 20th century. The Curley Effect is characterized by wasteful, distortionary redistributive policies that drive out higher-income or opposing voters and businesses — think of the mayors of Seattle and New York chasing away their billionaires. They are not really doing something new, or even ideological.

Ideology is fashionable, but the praxis of the Curley Effect is timeless. By placing onerous taxes on the most productive capital, while giving generous benefits and patronage for their core supporters, politicians in every epoch increase the relative size of their voting base compared to the rest of the polity. Divisive rhetoric shrouds this self-interested behavior in sanctimony, and promotes tribal voting behavior. The Curley Effect is a well-studied phenomenon. Quangos and cargo cult communism and ballot harvesting are not really new. They are not even illegal. They are as old as the American democratic experiment.

But they are destructive, negative forces. Hollywood is a key set of institutions that made our American culture so ‘woke’ for the last decade-plus. Los Angeles is not going to experience a renaissance of independent production under Mayor Karen Bass or Nithya Raman. This is just one more act of cultural arson by the same people who elected both of them. The silver lining to the legalized theft of an election from Spencer Pratt is that the people who make our entertainment content are now free to move to freer, greener pastures.

Who knows what grapes of wrath will be sown.

Subscribe now

Share

“I can’t breathe”, he said, because he was bleeding out. “I’ve been stabbed”, he told police.

“I don’t think you have, mate”, one policeman replied. Moments later, Henry Nowak was dead.

Diversity, a political enterprise, had taken the university student’s life.

Inclusion of Sikhs in the political fabric of Britain required an exception to the laws against knives in the street. Politics.

Nowak being stabbed to death with a ceremonial Kirpan is a tragedy, but on the bright side, it furthers the project of global equity for the racist sins of the past: politics.

Diversity, Inclusion, Equity: D.I.E., the new civic religion of the United Kingdom. Politics.

Two-tier police handcuffed Nowak when he was already pale and struggling to breathe. They never handcuffed his killer. Because of the politics.

Vikrum Digwa, the killer, has pleaded guilty and received a sentence. His father and brother have been charged with weapons offenses for possessing “a flick knife, an extendable baton, knuckledusters, a machete, swords and kusaris” in the family home. His mother is under scrutiny for hiding the murder weapon.

The entire family told police that Henry Nowak had committed a racism against their innocent boy. They tried to hide Nowak’s phone, on which he had recorded the attack.

Police did not respond to 999 calls from neighbors reporting that Nowak had been stabbed. They responded to the family’s 999 calls reporting a racism.

D.I.E. indoctrination — politics —has transformed British police from crime-fighters into racism-fighters.

Police continued to operate under the assumption that Nowak was criminally racist for at least the first two hours of their response, because of the politics. He died about halfway through this period of total departmental stupor.

Politics made the murder of Henry Nowak possible. Now the government of the United Kingdom is pleading for calm and tut-tutting about all the horrible right wing hate and division over the fate of poor Henry Nowak.

How very dare you make this political, you monsters.

If you treat this moment as political, you are just misled by misinformation, and we should all blame Elon Musk for the situation. The politics of the Henry Nowak murder are not good for the correct political party. We must correct this situation with swift, decisive action against racist right wing political misinformation.

It is unacceptable politicization when British citizens get upset about two-tier policing. Two tier policing does not exist, Prime Minister Keir Starmer assures us.

Southampton police meanwhile have arrested people for throwing trash bins and other public disorder resulting from anger at the death of Nowak. In at least one case, a man sitting on a wall was thrown to the ground and beaten with riot shields on suspicion of racism.

This is all a little hard for the Brits to take when British courts cannot even hold immigrant men responsible for assaulting female police on camera at the airport.

Immigrant rape gangs are prosecuted at glacial pace while Henry Nowak rioters are processed by the system at warp speed. Six months passed between Nowak’s murder and the disclosure of how he died. Rioters are reportedly going to be sentenced in weeks.

Everyone can see the two different settings at work, but speaking of it is a thoughtcrime that benefits the wrong political team. How very dare you.

How did this happen? “I can’t breathe” was weaponized into a civil rights cause that transcended Atlantic distance. British police were, if anything, hit harder by the George Floyd wave than American police. UK cops were genuflecting on their knees, on camera, before people of the correct skin color.

It is not enough to argue that British police were racist in the past. British police are being racist in the present. Their racism is directed at white people, now, and this makes all the political difference in a country that is still over 80 percent white.

The politics of D.I.E. were always meant to lead Britain to this pass. The advancement of minorities that vote for Labour requires a corresponding reduction in the number of white people who voted for Brexit. This does in fact seem to be a priority for the ruling party.

Not so long ago, the Labour Party was determined to institute assisted suicide on demand, nationwide, ignoring all objections. They very nearly succeeded.

The model for this program, Canada’s MAID system, is overwhelmingly used by whites. Consistently, they make up more than 95 percent of state-sponsored suicides, even though the Canadian population is only 70 percent white.

We are not supposed to notice that the politics of anti-white racism lead to a praxis of dead white people. It is racist to notice. Noticing hurts the political cause of stamping out all the evil white racism from Britain. As long as whiteness continues to exist, racism cannot be allowed to breathe.

Subscribe now

“Although the SPLC has indeed done some good work in the past and still does some good work today, it has proven, time and time again, that it cannot be trusted in the business of identifying hate and policing America’s public discourse”, Tyler O’Neil writes. “Instead, it has abused the trust of gullible donors, media outlets, companies, and states to enrich itself and attack its enemies.”

O’Neill’s book, Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center, was published in 2020. This week, a superseding indictment by an Alabama grand jury charges that “SPLC actively led donors to believe that their donations would be used to ‘dismantle’ violent extremist groups. However, the SPLC hid from donors the fact that a portion of their donated funds was being secretly used to support extremist groups and to fund their violent, racist, and extremist activities.” O’Neill was more right than he imagined.

An employee of SPLC spent donor funds to shack up with one of the organization’s ‘sources’, a man who was on their payroll for 20 years, ‘earning’ $1.2 million as he organized hate. The leader of the National Socialist Party of America also received SPLC donor funds through a fake company, ‘Rare Books Warehouse’. SPLC denies the charges and dismisses all this as proper payments to informants. The grand jury indictment calls it bank fraud.

Share

With SPLC donor money propping up the hate, the SPLC could simultaneously squeeze their donors using the reports they generated from these informants. “These activities were of the same nature as the activities about which the SPLC published articles on its website and other forums in an effort to obtain donations”, the indictment notes. Put simply, there was not enough hate to support the market for fighting hate, so hate had to be created.

The conclusions of Tyler O’Neill and the Alabama grand jury do not surprise me. A decade ago, I was a constant consumer of SPLC information and linked to much of it on a regular basis as part of a newsletter. After nearly two years, I realized that the story SPLC had told us, in which a thousand new hate groups sprang into existence during the first Obama term, was a lie.

Instead of a vast right wing conspiracy, I saw a proliferation of podcasts, Facebook pages, and social media accounts that did not represent an actual increase in the number of ideological racists in America. On the contrary, what I saw was that four people would form a loose connection, create four different online avatars, and get counted as four different ‘hate groups’.

“The SPLC’s list of ‘hate groups’ seems to be constantly growing. In 2000, it stood at a mere 602 groups. By 2005, it reached 803. In 2010, it jumped to 1,002. Between 2011 and 2014, it went down slightly, bottoming out at 784 before jumping back up to a record high of 1,020 in 2018.” That was the same year I stopped paying any attention to ‘hate’ reports, for I had seen too much inflation.

The definition of ‘hate’ at SPLC is ever-expansive, and so is the anti-hate mission of the SPLC. An organization whose events I have attended, and for whom I have done writing and editing work, was named as a ‘hate group’ by the SPLC in 2023. Genspect is the least-hateful environment I have ever encountered. Accusations of ‘transphobia’ seem quite hollow, given how many recipients of ‘gender medicine’ I have met through Genspect.

Weirdly, SPLC wants their donors to believe that Genspect is doing “white supremacy”. Race has never been a subject of any Genspect talk I have attended. The SPLC wants you to believe that southern racism is responsible for a conference that first organized in Ireland. The SPLC expects you to buy the nonsensical proposition that ‘gender’ equals race.

“For far-right extremists, the increased visibility of transgender people is a sign of the growing ‘degeneracy’ of the nation, wrought by ‘cultural Marxists,’ leftists and Jews as part of an assault on white, Christian families and strict gender roles”, Cassie Miller wrote for the SPLC website in 2019.

“They believe that trans people, like immigrants and non-whites, are hastening the destruction of an idealized white, Western culture,” which does in fact describe Queer Theory but does not describe the organizational beliefs of Genspect at all.

This racialist gibberish is not about fighting ‘hate’. SPLC was never fighting ‘hate’, O’Neill’s book reveals. Founder Morris Dees was always a direct mail entrepreneur, and SPLC was simply the most successful of his ventures. It always needed a certain amount of actual hate to exist, and seem threatening, so that liberal, middle-class white Democrats would open their wallets.

Dees met his co-founder Millard Fuller at a Young Democrats meeting. They were millionaires by 1964 and founded the SPLC seven years later as yet another direct mail franchise. Fuller left SPLC later to found Habitat for Humanity. Both men had extensive party connections.

By 1986, “the center had changed drastically,” Randall Williams, an SPLC writer and paralegal, admits. The direct mail start-up had become a trusted source of information for the government. “We were sharing information with the FBI, the police, undercover agents. Instead of defending clients and victims, we were more of a super snoop outfit, an arm of the law enforcement people.”

By the time O’Neill’s book was published, this close working relationship had turned into something quite sinister. As we learned in the first indictment in May, the FBI “stopped treating the SPLC as an outside source and started treating it like a partner”, Nicholas Giordano writes at The Federalist.

“Is anyone really asking for a product like this?” one FBI agent complained in an email exchange regarding a memo listing SPLC terminology targeting Catholics. “Apparently we are at the behest of the SPLC” in a sectarian abuse of power that hinged on the word ‘hate’.

“By treating the SPLC’s partisan analysis as a substitute for sworn evidence, the government laundered ideological narratives into official federal threat assessments. This shadow intelligence partnership was not an accident”, Giordano writes.

Now acting Attorney General Todd Blanche says the government’s scrutiny of the SPLC began years ago. If true, this admission exposes a far deeper scandal where the bureau was aware of the rot and chose to preserve the partnership anyway. The FBI doesn’t get to rely on SPLC training and resources and then plead ignorance about the organization’s methods.

Mark Potok, senior fellow at SPLC, has said that “We see this as a political struggle. We’re not trying to change anybody’s mind. We’re trying to wreck the groups. We’re trying to destroy them. Not to send them to prison unfairly or to take their free speech rights away, but as a political matter to destroy them.” In fact the SPLC was funding the hate groups, monitoring and directing them, in order to destroy the political enemies of the left.

Per the indictment, SPLC money paid the hosts for hate rallies, paid for the attendees to travel, paid for recruitment, paid them to create new chapters of hate groups, bought the crosses to burn, bought the Klan robes, bought the “racist paraphernalia that extremists sold at rallies”, and paid their hate managers such a good living they never needed real jobs.

This programmatic spending seems to have started when multiple KKK members wanted to stop their activities in 2010. It played a role in the 2017 Charlottesville rally, as one of the organizing leaders, listed as F-37, made racist social media posts under the supervision of an SPLC handler and arranged transport for some of the rally attendees. Altogether, the unnamed F-37 received $300,000 in SPLC donor money as an ‘informant’.

The charges in the indictment get cartoonish in their breathtaking shamelessness. SPLC set out to revive the Klan organization responsible for the most infamous church bombing in American history so they could announce a “millennial reboot” of old hate.

Tyler O’Neill anticipated this outcome in 2020. His book features critical voices suggesting shenanigans. Laird Wilcox, an extremism researcher, stopped taking the SPLC seriously when he could not find many of the ‘hate groups’ on their list. O’Neill writes that “critics have suggested the SPLC ‘plants’ apparently racist protesters at civil rights events.”

Here is a clip of O’Neill giving recent congressional testimony.

Making hate pay turns out to pay well. The SPLC has three times the assets of the YMCA and twice the assets of Planned Parenthood, O’Neill noted. Charlottesville was “an investment” that paid handsomely, he said, recalling his research on the SPLC’s “hate map”.

The map also includes groups that barely exist, like a Confederate memorabilia shop and a convent. In 2023, I analyzed the map and found that it exaggerated hate by at least 267% by including mainstream conservatives, double-counting groups, and mentioning defunct organizations.

Given this track record, is it really so far-fetched to think the SPLC might be propping up some of the very white supremacist groups it claims it exists to oppose?

More recently, the SPLC Hatewatch staff criticized Genspect for holding “Detrans Awareness Day.” According to SPLC, detransitioners have “inaccurate narratives” about medical transition, while parents who do not support ‘gender affirmation’ are hateful bigots.

“Anti-trans ‘detrans’ rhetoric weaponizes a small contingent of trans people’s experiences to malign gender-affirming health care and LGBTQ+-affirming public spaces”, the SPLC charges. “Anti-LGBTQ+ hate groups exaggerate the prevalence of transgender people who no longer identify as trans and obfuscate the reasons why.”

Detransition hardly ever happens, goes the propaganda. Even when it does happen, we should not talk about it, because that “weaponizes” the experiences of ex-trans people. Listening to people who have left the self-harm cult hurts the “gender-affirming health care” — the sterilization regimen for kids — “and LGBTQ+-affirming public spaces”, that is, the ‘right’ of men to be in women’s locker rooms and toilets. Also, how dare anyone refer to ‘gender medicine’ as a harmful cult. This is literally white supremacy, says the SPLC.

Tyler O’Neill noted the SPLC turning to ‘transphobic hate’ as a new growth sector in his book six years ago, before Genspect was founded. According to his book, SPLC published “The Gender Spectrum”, the story of a genderqueer fourth-grade child(!) who ‘identifies’ as nonbinary, in 2013. This launched their business interest in smearing Genspect as a hate group.

However, Genspect does not receive funding from the Southern Poverty Law Center. Judging from the grand jury indictment, this is definite proof that the organization has nothing to do with the south, poverty, or racial hate. SPLC is just pandering to the biases of their mailing list. The reason we know SPLC has lost its way is that the marketing plan has transformed the mission.

Subscribe now

Things are getting mighty strange in those woods. An overweight man in a bear costume turned up for a Graham Platner rally with Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows in Portland on Sunday.

The Maine Wire, an online muckraker, reported the event had “by far the smallest crowd we’ve seen for a Platner event in the entirety of his campaign”. Perhaps it was the weather. Or maybe it was the story that blew up this weekend about Graham Platner using the Kik app, an infamous ‘predator’s paradise’.

As the candidate left, Platner staff physically checked the Maine Wire reporters from asking him any questions. Then, while Platner fled the scene behind the screen of staffers, the man in the bear costume made sure to be seen on camera, holding a Bellows/Platner sign.

Reader, I strongly suspect someone is signaling us that a sickening story is going to drop.

To be sure, a man in a bear costume will not be challenged at a Democratic Party event. That would be exclusionary of therian and fursona allies, a violation of the intersectional principle.

Furthermore, I have personally worn a bear costume at a progressive event to pose with Democratic candidates while holding a union sign (don’t judge me). The costume was quite hot. I sweated it out completely during my 30-minute volunteer session, and not because I got to take pictures with Stacey Abrams and Andrew Gillum.

The bear costume at Platner’s rally was purposeful, I think. Someone was paid money to attend the event in the bear suit, to hold a sign, to be seen on camera as close to the candidate as possible, to walk away from the scene with his hands in his pockets, as if he was a little bit sad.

I think someone is using an internet meme, here.

Erick Erickson has a possible scoop. In this clip, he speaks to unconfirmed reports that former classmates of Platner, who remember him from his abortive prep school days, are speaking to reporters. Erickson says that these disclosures have been strategically sequenced, and I believe him.

Timing matters. The first stories about Platner’s old social media posts began to drop right after the voter registration deadline in Maine.

First to plop were the gross Reddit posts about porta-johns. Then, Platner’s takedowns of Purple Heart recipients and combat heroes, and his admiration for Hamas tactics, went plop-plop-plop.

Erickson refers to the 13 July deadline for replacing Graham Platner on the ballot, which is the break-the-glass emergency measure for Democrats. This gives us a timeframe to know when the disclosures might end.

Democrat Janet Mills suspended her campaign a month ago for lack of funds, but she is still on the primary ballot. Maine Democrats will have to make a decision soon about Platner.

Perhaps Maine Democrats will choose Platner regardless of what he has done because Donald Trump is supposedly worse.

His defenders have brushed off every story so far, saying they make him “relatable”. The blows are not landing, they say, because his story of becoming a communist is so convincing.

But the bear suit seems like a hint that some things cannot be so easily forgiven. I will keep an eye out for bear-suit man.

Subscribe now

A hiker found Melissa Casias in the McGaffey Ridge area of the Carson National Forest in New Mexico last week. Casias had been missing for almost a year. She was last seen walking alone along Highway 518 in June 2025. A gun was reportedly found at the scene of her remains.

Casias reportedly wiped her devices before leaving her New Mexico residence and left her keys behind. Only 53, her family was divided over what happened to her. Even clear evidence often fails to satisfy the hopes of survivors after a tragedy. Their turmoil helped feed rumors and speculation that Casias had been ‘disappeared’ by someone because she knew too much about flying saucers.

In fact, Casias worked at the nearby Los Alamos National Laboratory, but she was an administrative employee with a security clearance, not a scientist. If confirmed, a suicide by handgun would not be unusual or hard to believe. It happens every 19 seconds in America.

Share

The disappearance of Casias coincided with the disappearance of Anthony Chavez, a US nuclear weapons scientist. He was last seen in May 2025 when he left his Los Alamos-area home on foot without his wallet or keys.

Chavez was 78 years old and retired. His last work was with the Scorpius Project, which uses nuclear accelerators to make x-ray pictures of plutonium components in order to find flaws. Chavez never worked in space propulsion or any area with an obvious connection to space travel.

Chavez and Casias are two of the 14 people supposedly connected to extraterrestrial research who have died or disappeared under somewhat mysterious circumstances since 2021. As I recently explained for premium subscribers, this ‘list’ is absolute bollocks.

If Casias’s death was a self-inflicted gunshot wound, then 9 of the 14 cases are completely solved as suicides, murders, accidents, or natural causes, and not a bit mysterious at all.

The remaining five cases are either unexplained because someone has disappeared and not been found yet, or because the family has withheld the cause of death from an obituary. That is also not unusual, in fact it is is completely normal, especially when substance abuse is involved or the deceased is very old.

This whole story is apophenia, a false pattern that people are seeing, sometimes on purpose. Melissa Casias and Anthony Chavez were not involved in research related to UAPs, UFOs, or antigravity propulsion. Just three of the 14 ostensible victims of this supposed conspiracy even have any obvious connections to the science of space flight.

Death is not unusual. Death is universal and mortality is not a mystery. With 248,000 federal research and development personnel, however, there will always be enough missing or dead people tangentially connected to breakthrough technology research that this putative pattern can fool people forever.

Subscribe now

Get ready for grim and gross. I did try to warn you, reader. Maine Senate hopeful Graham Platner had an active account on an infamous private messaging app, Kik.

Platner’s Kik account uses a variation of the same “P-Hustle” handle as his Reddit account. Created in 2016, the profile avatar image is a mirror selfie photo of Platner wearing a towel around his waist while standing in a bathroom. Platner’s hand is carefully positioned to cover his Totenkopf tattoo.

Platner’s wife Amy Gertner reportedly discovered “sexually explicit texts with several women” on his phone, presumably the one in the photo, and shared them with Platner’s campaign staff in 2025.

At the time, Platner’s staff was planning to receive big, public endorsements from Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Chuck Schumer, and Ro Khanna. Khanna made himself famous as Thomas Massie’s partner in the Epstein files circus.

So far, all the reporting on this scandal has involved “women”, which implies the recipients of Platner’s Kik messages were adult females. However, the primary user base of Kik is teens and young adults. Anonymity is a chief attraction of the app.

Unsurprisingly, Kik is widely reported to be a ‘predator’s paradise’ for procuring and sharing illegal content. Kik was at the center of a massive sting operation in 2016 that resulted in thousands of arrests of adult men for grooming minors.

In the decade since it first made headlines, the Kik app has continued to turn up in news coverage of men arrested on sex crime charges with remarkable frequency. “Maine, the state Platner hopes to represent, has especially faced issues with residents using the platform to prey on children”, Townhall reports.

In June of last year, one man received a sentence of 30 to 60 years for producing videos of children being sexually abused for users of the platform. Another case from September revealed that a man would attend children’s sporting events to obtain photos he would later sexualize through an AI generator.

Gertner told the staffer that she and Platner went to marital counseling over the matter. “Platner’s campaign said the candidate had long deleted the app from his phone but hadn’t deactivated his account”, the Wall Street Journal reports. They have seen what his campaign staff saw.

More disclosures are coming, be sure of that. Even if there are Carlos Danger sexts with minors, however, the Platner campaign will almost certainly continue regardless, because the man evidently lacks shame.

Democrats lack shame.

Media lickspittles are shameless.

They object to this shameful shaming.

If anything, they say, the scandal makes Platner more “relatable”.

River Page writes that “pointing out that Graham Platner talked like most Americans do when they don’t think the HR manager is listening only makes him more relatable” to average Americans, mainly males, who are who are done with political correctness.

No one has un-endorsed Platner. Apologies are not forthcoming. Instead, Platner had his wife post a humiliating video on his X account. Progressive influencers spun the matter as a private marital problem. How very dare you. “Gossip”, they call it.

His former campaign manager, Genevieve McDonald, declined a $15,000 offer to sign an NDA. Democrats are blaming her for the disclosure, which they admit is true, while their candidate claims that “what Genevieve McDonald said, in the New York Times, is not true”. He can lie to our faces and they will never admit it.

Needless to say, McDonald’s career in Democratic politics is over. But have the disclosures stopped dropping? What would it take to make Democrats disown him? How low does this trajectory go?

Maine Democrats may very well choose Graham Platner, and even put him in the United States Senate, regardless of what he is. But they will know what he is.

Defenses of Platner’s tattoo are untenable, now. He clearly knew what he was doing when he ‘cucked’ his wife. He covered the tattoo in his Kik profile picture because he was conscious of how women would perceive it.

At the time, his wife was receiving IVF treatments in an effort to conceive. This is gross dereliction. It is still not enough to draw a rebuke. Instead, the excuses for Platner all have a familiar character: whatever he is, Donald Trump is worse.

Platner could goose-step his way from the oyster boat to his mother’s oyster restaurant raising his arm in Nazi salutes shouting “SEIG HEIL” and Trump would still be worse because of something something Israel.

Platner could get caught sharing explicit messages with a middle schooler and Trump would still be worse, because something something Epstein files.

I will got further in my analysis than River Page does.

I think Democrats increasingly mirror their own caricature of Trump. If he can be president, they reason, then the worst sort of person can be a Democrat, and win through sheer charisma.

Susan Collins is the most milk-moderate Republican in the Senate. Graham Platner is an edgelord. His shitposts reach something angry in people. Platner anticipates their atavistic desire to scapegoat someone for all the naughty wars in the Middle East.

Collins voted on war two years before Platner ever joined the Marines, or re-enlisted, or became a Blackwater contractor ‘joking’ about Thai hookers. This is not to say she was right or wrong in her vote, but to note that Susan Collins is very old, while Platner, who joined the Marines long after the war vote, is young and edgy.

Platner says he is very sorry about all that killing he wanted to do when he repeatedly pursued a career in legal homicide.

He is sorry as well about the tattoo, and the cheating on his wife.

He has learned his lesson to become a good husband and a good communist. A man of peace. A manly man, gung-ho against The Man.

The only principle to the Graham Platner campaign is oppositional defiance to the man in the White House. Democrats are not worried about brand damage because abnormal is their brand, now. They treat Trump as a permission structure.

Anthony Weiner was ahead of his time. No wonder that man keeps trying to make a comeback. He can see what his party is turning into. Weiner is still ahead of his time because Jews are not doing well in the current Democratic coalition.

Which is weird. Jews have been a reliable Democratic voting block since forever. But then Democrats told us that Trump was a literal Nazi.

ICE were literal Nazis.

Elon Musk was a literal Nazi.

By that point, Catholic schoolboys were literal Nazis and Mitt Romney was a literal Nazi.

Then Israelis were literal Nazis.

Everyone was a literal Nazi — until a literal Nazi tattoo guy became a literal communist, which made the Nazi stuff okay and his porta-john masturbation stories relatable.

Also, it is racist and probably transphobic to notice that Graham Platner shares a certain Weltanschauung, or world-view, with Nick Fuentes.

Platner refers to Gaza as “the moral question” of our time and calls the Israeli response to the worst pogrom since 1945 “shameful”. Israel is guilty of “genocide” and the “mass slaughter of children” — standard Hamas blood libels.

Fuentes is an edgier advocate of the same Palestinian propaganda as Platner. They share a very strong ideological alignment against Israel.

Who are these young men that find Graham Platner “relatable”, therefore preferable to the old white, stale, and female Susan Collins? Why, they are the Groyper generation.

Remember, Groypers were literal Nazis, too. We were repeatedly assured that the young, politically-incorrect men were all Groypers, or else Groyper-adjacent, and that this was in fact a national crisis, presumably located in the Republican Party, which is of course filled with millions of literal Nazis.

Groypers were gross, disgusting, immoral man-babies of the manosphere. We were told to fear the men of the ‘sphere, and now we have Graham Platner being a manosphere’s man because Democrats are really, seriously trying to win back men.

My working theory of Maine Democrats is that they have reached peak online derangement in their pursuit of the male vote. It is the Carlos Dangerfication of the Democratic Party: Donald Trump is so bad that Graham Platner has permission to be worse than Anthony Weiner.

Subscribe now

We both had Star Wars toys as kids and at one time, shared an interest in the artwork used to develop the visuals of the original trilogy. We both felt disappointed in the prequels, but agree they have aged well because Star Wars movies are so bad, now. In fact, most movies are bad, anymore.

One problem John identified, that had not occurred to me, is how the current creators of Star Wars have none of the foundational references that George Lucas had.

The original auteur of the franchise looked back on Flash Gordon serials for inspiration. He took the Death Star escape sequence from Hidden Fortress, and based the entire Death Star trench scene on the final act of the World War II film The Dam Busters.

Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni have only Star Wars, and much of their canon is now their own creation. TMAG is a Star Wars story only in the sense that it references past Star Wars content.

‘Content’ is the correct word for this movie. It does not really feel like a film. It feels like Star Wars fanfiction.

It feels like two, or perhaps four, episodes of a streaming series that have been mashed together. I am not the first to make this observation. “It’s a disjointed mess”, John says.

Nothing makes sense in this series of quests. The New Republic has somehow run out of boffins and has no intelligence agency, so they must rely on Hutts for information. The Mandalorian could “go to a random planet, and go through old imperial databases” to find the mysterious object of his quest, John notes.

Instead, the story is complicated by the search for Rotta, a son of Jabba the Hutt who rejects his lineage in expository monologues that do not sound like a Hutt at all. Rotta has given up the life of a gangster worm to become a gladiator. This is Ben Solo turning into Kylo Ren and killing his father again.

Naturally, the gladiatorial story prompt ends up with the Mandalorian in the gladiator pit against Rotta, and then they are forced to work together against a collection of monstrosities in what turns out to be a recall of the holochess table from the Millennium Falcon.

Remember the holochess table? ‘Member? In the parlance of caustic cultural criticism, this is called member berries. The term comes from a South Park episode that satirizes modern Hollywood writing.

Instead of recalling the gladiator scenes of, say, Russell Crowe or Kirk Douglass, the new Star Wars recalls the very first Star Wars. They are tickling our nostalgia in the most empty, cynical way.

John, who was far more of a toy collector than me, says the flying getaway vehicle used in the first reel by the Mandalorian’s imperial quarry is a ‘mini-rig’, one of several toys that were made to be smaller and cheaper so that kids could buy them with allowance money.

Likewise, the one-man mini-scout walker that the Mandalorian uses to chase the bad guy in the same scene first appeared in some animated Star Wars series that I, like most of the people who saw TMAG, have never watched.

For all that, the ‘member berries’ are the saving grace of this pastiche of a story. Rotta the Hutt has jealous relatives and the New Republic has no better plan than to have the Mandalorian find Rotta and trade him to the Hutts for information. The whole thing feels unnecessary, flat, and stale.

Grogu develops a relationship with a swamp-dwelling creature that never develops. “You could tell his character was supposed to be a larger character than it was, something other than an alien lizard creature in a rocking chair.” But the scene was necessary because someone had to make a magic poultice for the plot to move forward.

Even the part when Din Djarin, the titular Mandalorian, is unconscious from a poisonous monster bite, so that Grogu must tend to him and find the cure, feels emotionless.

The puppets used in the film move like an old Star Wars action figure most of the time, with five points of articulation. Grogu’s ears do all the emotional expression whenever he rides on Din Djarin’s back, since the Mandalorian can never remove his helmet.

John found the film “aggressively mediocre”, but he was not scathing. It might have performed much better at the box office if it had appeared in the era of Rogue One, he thinks. “It’s not terrible. If this was something I wandered onto back in the 90s, when I had cable”, he might feel different.

In fact, we both admitted enjoying it more than we had expected, probably because we had set our expectations so very low. If not for the ruination of Star Wars, we could both see TMAG as a guilty pleasure.

But Star Wars has in fact been ruined. TMAG ruins the stormtroopers and the combat droids. Too many John Wick-style sequences of Din Djarin effortlessly carving his way through what are supposed to be the most dangerous enemies in the galaxy end up cheapening the experience.

Yes, the imperial stormtroopers never shoot straight. When that happens scores of times in two hours, however, the sense of threat evaporates, and so do the stakes.

TMAG is apparently going to lose money and be forgotten. That is a good thing. It is forgettable, and our collective memory of Star Wars will be improved by collectively forgetting that it happened.

Lucasfilm should be persuaded to put away Star Wars for at least a decade, to forget about it long enough that the audience forgets how bad their forgettable Star Wars content got to be.

Better yet, Disney should get some better writers with wider imaginations to come up with original content for Lucasfilm to make instead of this. Nobody asked for this. It feels unnecessary because it was. This is not the way.

Subscribe now

According to VoteHub, the latest monthly finance updates from the Democratic and Republican Party Committees are starkly different. Republicans have held a consistent cash-on-hand edge in 2025–2026 cycle reports, which has widened over time. The Democrats are in a deep, deep funding hole.

The Republican National Committee has nearly $124 million in cash on hand and zero debt. The Democratic Party is meanwhile saddled with $17.5 million in debt from the disastrous 2024 campaign of Kamala Harris and has just $14.4 million in cash on hand. Republicans think they can hold on to control of the House of Representatives in November with this clear cash advantage.

Share

Historically, the party that does not hold the presidency has trouble raising funds without an obvious national leader, while the party that holds the White House has an easier time. Democrats have spent more money since the 2024 election, for example on the redistricting referendum in Virginia broke state election law and was predictably annulled by the state supreme court.

Winning in Virginia and New Jersey took millions of dollars from Democratic National Committee coffers. Donors have shut their wallets in the meantime as the Democratic Party became a protest party, marching for No Kings on Selma bridge. Stopping Trump is so important that Democratic partisan voters tell pollsters they would give up minority-majority districts if doing so could win back Congress.

Last week, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stood on the steps outside the Alabama state capitol and told a large crowd that “a sleeping giant” has been awakened by the Supreme Court ruling that race-based gerrymandering is racist.

Yet if you ask Democrats the right question, they can turn on a dime to support giving up majority-Black congressional districts, as long as they think it stops Trump. Donors see this frenetic value-shifting clearly now and keep their wallets shut. They don’t know what the Democratic Party is because the party does not know.

Democrats have entirely failed to exhibit any growth since November 2024. After a controversial decision to withhold the much-ballyhooed ‘autopsy’ of that election, it has finally been released.

The 192-page report reveals that the party knows their brand is unpopular, especially their identity politics. Donors see no virtue in funding the Democratic Party when it cannot figure out what it is. Right now, to donate to Democrats is to signal confusion.

ActBlue was the one platform that gave Democrats claim to being a popular party with grassroots funding and they appear to be under investigation by the Department of Justice for knowingly laundering foreign donations in violation of federal law.

We still face a long road to November. Anything can happen, and Democrats are humans capable of trying anything, but the party’s financial numbers look bleak and they are unlikely to improve. Democrats head into the midterm races at an historic material disadvantage as a party.

Subscribe now

Originally published in 2023 at The Distance.

Josef Mengele “liked the smell of the crematoria.” To him, it was the scent of progress. In her memoir Echoes from Auschwitz, Eva Mozes Kor tells the story of her incredible survival, along with a twin sister Miriam, at the hands of the infamous camp doctor. “Even today, none of us really knows what was done to us,” Kor wrote in 1995. Her allegations include grisly experimental sex changes on children.

The older girls told of being taken to a lab where blood from some boys was transfused into their bodies and their blood was transfused into the bodies of the young boys. Some of the doctors who were working on this project told the young girls that they were going to make them into young men. One twin had his sex organs removed in an attempt to turn him into a girl.

A eugenicist, Mengele was in fact determined to “resolve the secret of the reproduction of the race,” according to Gerald L. Posner and John Ware in Mengele: The Complete Story, published in 2000. Surviving inmates understood that he “wanted to find the cause of multiple pregnancies in order to be able to repopulate Germany,” and say that Mengele “spoke of it very freely,” according to psychologist Robert Jay Lifton. Conversely, Mengele was an advocate of ‘racial hygiene’ and he definitely took part in untold thousands of experimental sterilization procedures that were conducted on prisoners at Auschwitz, many of whom died afterward from complications and lack of care. Survivors were often left scarred and in pain, suffering lifelong health consequences.

In his 1986 study The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing And The Psychology Of Genocide, Lifton notes that the more bizarre reports surrounding sterilization experiments can be garbled, and it is not always clear which camp doctor did the operation. Nevertheless, after first doubting such accounts, only to spend many years hearing them from survivors and witnesses, Lifton was “not so sure” anymore. “My belief is that each of these reports stems from some form of actual abuse,” he wrote, “usually experimental, even if there was confusion in details, including the question of which Nazi doctor was involved.” Dr. Mengele “exemplified the Nazi biological revolutionary” in Lifton’s words. Based on primary sources, Mengele was clearly a pioneer of pediatric sterilizations, including possible experimental sex change surgeries.

Of course, no perfect picture of the infamous infirmaries of Auschwitz could possibly be reconstructed. Not only are the survivors mortal, but so much evidence of what happened was destroyed in the fires of German defeat. “Isn’t it a pity?” Mengele said of his own records, lost to the Red Army when it liberated the camp. Gone were his collections of eyeballs, “pinned up like butterflies,” carefully curated by color.

Human aesthetics obsessed him. Every test subject was examined in detail by a trained staff of camp nurses who took careful measurements of every physical feature (anthropometry) and remarked on every blemish. German pseudoscience had produced an entire body of theory around racial attributes and this was all supposed to be empirical data which would prove it.

As Posner and Ware explain, despite being considered handsome Mengele did not fit the preferred racial stereotypes of Nazi “hygiene,” and was very conscious of his supposed shortcomings.

Mengele’s own racial classification by the SS had put him in the Dynarisch-Ostisch category, which meant that his predominant features were of “Eastern” origin. Since childhood he had been self-conscious about his slightly tawny skin, his penetrating brown-green eyes, and his dark brown hair. At school he had endured mild taunts from his classmates about his Gypsy looks. And in Bavaria, where Mengele grew up, the word for “Gypsy” had a derogatory meaning denoting an unstable and unsettled person. His home town of Günzburg, especially, was full of folklore about Gypsies coming to kidnap children who misbehaved.

Beauty standards had always shaped the proto-science of anthropology in the German academy. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, the German naturalist who stamped the term “Caucasian” into our racial discourse in 1795, chose the “most beautiful” skull from his collection to be the ancestor of white Europeans. A full-blown pseudoscience in 1933, when Nazis took power in Germany, “racial hygiene” conceived of itself as a progressive movement, even an ethical one.

Mengele personified this mindset. He was clinical, dispassionate, and at the same time “on occasion he even examined and treated prisoner patients, rare for SS doctors,” according to Lifton, because it was his professional calling to do so. Mengele really believed he was making the world a better place, and his benchmark of success in “improving the human race” was a totalitarian imposition of highly-refined stereotypes. Among his most famous experiments were attempts to alter the eye color of living patients. Painful, blinding, these procedures were done without anesthetic.

Witnesses describe Mengele as “particularly cold and cynical” when he took part in the selection process, which he did as often as he could. Mengele was the rare selector who worked extra shifts in this role, which most SS officers found exhausting and demoralizing. Dr. Ella Lingens, a camp survivor, noted that unlike his peers, Mengele “performed the selections without stimulants of any kind,” except perhaps breakfast coffee. As unfortunates emptied from the cattle cars and came down the ramp, Mengele “had the air of a man who took great satisfaction in his work and was pleased with his calling,” according to one witness. He would carry a riding crop. While he examined the nude selections, Lifton records another survivor saying, he occasionally struck someone with his little horse whip, “not at all excited but … casual … just playing around as though it were a little funny.”

Stereotypical sex behaviors were another Mengele obsession. One camp doctor told Lifton he “recalled Mengele being much more concerned than the other SS doctors about lesbianism in the women’s camp as well as about homosexuality in the men’s camp.” Mengele lived his own stereotypes as well. On one occasion, he mistook a topless lesbian for a man. When she turned around to face him and answer his rebuke with disrespect, Mengele was so embarrassed that he fled the scene rather than punish her. Even his anti-Semitism had a stereotypical, and sexual, origin: a Jew had seduced his fiancée, once. He never mentioned the birth of a son to staff in 1944, so detached was his life in Auschwitz. The camp was “a paradise of delusions,” Lifton says.

Every so often, during the selections, Mengele would spot a pair of twins. “Zwillinge!” He would shout, sometimes running to them in joy: Twins! Mengele bargained with other selectors to save pairs of twins from the gas chambers for his strange research project. Lifton thinks that Mengele “probably came to Auschwitz for that purpose” of studying twins. As a student of Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, a professor at the University of Münster, Mengele had been trained in the use of twins for so-called genetic studies. Posner and Ware conclude that at least 200 pairs of twins were selected for Mengele’s project, which Lifton describes as “a caricature of an academic research institute.” Dr. Lengyel, a prisoner doctor, rubbished Mengele as a “charlatan.”

Yet “whatever their hubris, and whatever the elements of pseudoscience and scientism in what they actually did, they identified themselves with the science of their time,” Lifton writes in his 2019 volume Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry. The science was settled, Mengele thought, and only the great experiment to understand it completely remained.

Share

Death was the purpose of Auschwitz and Mengele ultimately expected the twins he selected to die. Dr. Miklos Nyiszli, another prisoner-doctor who performed dissections on dead twins for Mengele, explained why Auschwitz suited Mengele so well. “Where under normal circumstances can one find twins who die at the same place and at the same time?”

For twins like everyone else are separated by life’s varying circumstances. One may die at ten, the other at fifty. In the Auschwitz camp, however, there were several hundred sets of twins and therefore as many possibilities.

Eva Mozes Kor only survived because her sister, the weaker twin, recovered from illness. Her memoir includes the harrowing details of how she procured food for Miriam, and then decades later, donated a kidney. If one twin died in Mengele’s care, so did the other. For science. Usually this was done with a bullet, but often enough it was done with chloroform injection. Mengele would have any prisoner dissected for any reason, for example over a disputed diagnosis. Surviving twins simply did not survive his experiments.

“Crude surgery and other painful tests were performed, often without anesthetics,” Posner and Ware write, reading from the Nuremberg trials.

There were needless amputations, lumbar punctures, typhus injections, and wounds deliberately infected to compare how each twin reacted. In the view of the West German indictment, all were devoid of “any recognizable knowledge being gained from them.” Scores of Mengele’s guinea pigs died at this stage, many of them from a particularly bizarre experiment in which the blood supplies of different pairs of twins were interchanged.

Twins allegedly had blood and sperm taken for injection into German women, to see if they had twins. Other “weird sexual experiments” involved forced sex of twin pairs to see if they also had twins, according to Nazi Doctors. Just as Mengele wanted to “resolve the secret of the reproduction of the race,” however, he saw his work as taking control over nature, a rejection of evolutionary progress. “Racial leadership” not only required the “cleansing” of Jews, it made killing out to be therapeutic, a way to heal humanity.

Thus “mysticism was given a biological and medical face” in Nazism, Lifton writes. One Nazi doctor told Lifton that he joined the party after hearing a speaker declare that “National Socialism is nothing but applied biology.” Jews and Gypsies and other undesirables were a sickness. Even Bolsheviks were a pathogen to be cured. “If you are curing sickness, anything is permissible,” Lifton observes. “Genocide itself can be understood as the purification of the world by means of eliminating a racial, ethnic, or political contaminant.”

Thus the experimental sterilizations. Altogether, historians think some 200-250,000 people were sterilized by the Nazis. It was as high a priority as war production. “Establishing widespread compulsory sterilization became a sacred mission,” Lifton says. To that end, there were attempts to industrialize the process, for example through bombardment of the gonads with X-rays. In order to determine the efficiency and efficacy of this procedure, the sex organs of the subjects could be biopsied. According to witnesses Lifton interviewed, Mengele was in the middle of it all. Emphasis added:

One survivor told me that Mengele “cut the balls” of a very young twin, and that he (this witness), in fact saw the testicles “lying on our table.” A Greek survivor, one of whose testicles had been removed, appeared in court against Schumann but held Mengele equally responsible and told of the latter’s supervising the crude method of collecting sperm from males involved in sterilization experiments.

One twin without his testicles, the other left with them intact to see what will happen, is very much like John Money’s experiment with the Reimer twins. Mengele was playing god, and in fact many camp survivors revered him as God upon their liberation, Lifton reports, for his sinister form of care offered privileges and a perceived chance of survival. Posner and Ware write of the “chocolate and special clothes” that Mengele distributed to his victims. Some survivors confessed to Lifton that their sense of receiving “genuine” affection from Mengele lingered for years afterward, that his crimes had to be “constantly described to me” before a numb acceptance could begin.

If the people who knew his crimes best could still not see his criminality, surely we cannot be certain of all specific crimes Dr. Mengele committed in Auschwitz. However, we know enough.

Read more

It’s not just people with bad politics saying the film is bad. IndieWire says that “Jon Favreau’s film feels like three good-enough TV episodes smushed together” to create “Star Wars at its most generic”. Vulture deplores the “lifeless performances that seem determined to lull us to sleep”, saying the film “probably shouldn’t have been a movie”. The Hollywood Reporter, which exists to glaze the industry, calls it “just good enough to make you wish it were better”. “One of the most empty and hollow” of the franchise, “forgettable and inconsequential … rudimentary, forgettable, and frustrating”, Collider says. These are normally the outlets that would defend it and denounce the haters.

Only small children will be entertained, Chris Gore said in a preview video this week. Box office tracking began to dip as the audience checked out. The Mandalorian and Grogu is likely going to underperform and bomb. Disney has wrecked the biggest single Lucasfilm brand beyond repair. Every creative, including Favreau, has been ruined by the praxis of woke Hollywood, or as I call it, Hollyweird. The Kathleen Kennedy era has been an epic disaster of feminized boy branding. She is gone, now, but the damage lingers on.

Share

Pedro Pascal gives a voice performance for all but a few minutes in the film because his character has a religious devotion to his face-concealing helmet. Pascal’s wooden monotone is noted by many reviewers, especially women. “The Mandalorian was really the thing that sort of made him this pseudo-superstar in Hollywood,” JesterBell says. Pascal’s character experienced no character development, she says. JesterBell was unable to follow the story. Even the opening crawl confused more than it enlightened. She was bored. In another recent video, this YouTube critic accidentally called the movie “Mandalorian and Grok” because she was tired from seeing it.

We are all so tired of Disney Star Wars. It isn’t Star Wars. Sitting through Mandalorian and Grogu made JesterBell hate being a movie reviewer. She is however one of the ‘influencers’ on YouTube who have rubbished so many Star Wars products in the Kennedy era of Lucasfilm, earning the enmity of mainstream media ‘journalists’ (read: influencers) as a class. This is in fact a classic conflict of old guard and new guard that plays out on YouTube in the form of algorithms and access.

But there is a limit to what money can do, and Lucasfilm is actively trying to conceal just how much money was spent on this film. Given the marketing spend will be about the same as the film budget, and the fact that half of every ticket goes to the theater, it is increasingly unlikely that The Mandalorian and Grogu will come close to breaking even. We have good reason to expect that the real production costs will be much higher. Disney went all-in on this bad bet.

Pedro Pascal was never cut out to be a great leading man to begin with. He was however a perfect non-Anglo, non-toxic male to play the male leads at a time when studios were churning out content to own the chuds. After the Harvey Weinstein trial, Hollyweird gave us an era of feminized males and impotent, ‘non-toxic’ fathers. Struggle within feminized cultural institutions produced scrapbook films that satisfy committees of people with a view from nowhere instead of audiences.

Women do not turn out in droves to see feminized boy brands. Men o to see boy brands and take the women and children in their lives. This is the formula that made Star Wars work until Kennedy broke it. Lucasfilm lost that magic the instant the force became female. It just took this long for the damage to be revealed.

Pascal was typecast in the new Hollyweird ‘father’ roles, which explains his overexposure. The Mandalorian character gives women leadership. In this film, he lets a green baby lead and takes orders from Sigourney Weaver. Almost exactly one year ago, the same YouTube influencers I follow today were predicting that his star would set with this movie. We have all had enough of Pedro Pascal, please, we do not want any more of this actor playing emasculated roles.

Subscribe now

Timing is everything. Voter registration ended in Maine on Tuesday, and then right on schedule, the GOP information machine began to let disgusting Graham Platner stories plop.

By the end of the Democratic Party primary on 9 June 2026, three weeks hence, Maine Democrats will know far too much about Graham Platner’s porta-john habits, his opinions on the Virgin Mary, and his di*k art as “P-Hustle” to deny an understanding of what he really is.

Because this story splattered across social media first, every influencer who has endorsed Platner had an opportunity to double-down for 24 hours, defend him, and claim that his dirty Reddit posts make him relatable. The ones with military service resumes were the loudest.

The next morning, on Wednesday, the Washington Free Beacon dropped video of Platner spewing verbal diarrhea on the late “American Sniper” Chris Kyle in an appearance on the Green Beret Chronicle Show. Unlike Platner’s ‘relatable’ gross stories, his story about Kyle is simply gross, and alienating to veterans.

Platner served in Ramadi around the same time as Kyle, a US Navy SEAL. This battle in 2006 is considered one of the bloodiest of the Iraq War. Unlike Kyle, Platner did not serve in an elite unit. In his 2025 interview, however, Platner criticized Task Unit Bruiser and Chris Kyle for winning too hard.

“It’s relatively easy to get high [kill] numbers like that if you’re a little less discriminating in your fire than, say, a more professional unit would be”, Platner remarked.

He claimed that Task Force Bruiser had shot unarmed civilians, presenting no evidence, and questioned whether they were “heroes,” calling it “a weird practical joke” that Kyle was regarded as a “paragon of leadership”.

Context matters. In 2014, Platner praised a Hamas video of a deadly cross-border raid on an IDF base as “a damn fine looking and successful raid against a superior opponent”.

In 2019, Platner criticized an American soldier who was shot by Taliban fighters on video for being a “fumb motherf—er” who “didn't deserve to live. At least his stupidity and fat ass wheezing are available for all future infantrymen to witness and hold in contempt.”

Remember the “locker room talk” Access Hollywood controversy? Platner’s shithouse talk has revealed a side that will surely appeal to female voters, especially military wives. From the Daily Wire yesterday.

Maine Democrat Senate candidate Graham Platner once lamented the closing of a loophole that allowed military contractors to save money on taxes by spending their time off “banging hookers in Thailand” instead of getting “b*tched” at by their wives back in the United States.

“Spend your leave banging hookers in Thailand instead of getting b*tched at by the wife back home, and you could sell it as avoiding federal income tax,” Platner wrote on Reddit in June 2019. “Once the Afghans started using our paychecks as a personal piggy bank, that whole loophole disappeared.”

Sources in The Right Wing™ inform me that this drip-dropping of P-Hustle nincompoopery shall continue for the next three weeks. They tell me much worse is coming.

The Republican plan is obvious. Come the general election, Susan Collins and the GOP will throw a fire blanket over the media, digital and local, to remind voters of the Graham Plopner files. She will destroy him by ten points. So goes the theory. We are witnesses to its application in practice (‘practice’).

Endorsements and commitments by Democrats and their influencer cadre will become liabilities. Those people will of course explain defeat by invoking a conspiracy involving AIPAC and The Zionist Occupation Government™.

Share

Thomas Massie wanted voters to believe that Jews have controlled the world for hundreds of years, but also that re-electing an incumbent Congressman in a Kentucky primary would have ended the Zionist project forever.

Massie wanted voters to believe that thousands of powerful people who run the world are in The Epstein Files™, but also that burdening the Department of Justice with unnecessary paperwork would have brought thousands of the world’s most powerful people to justice.

Now Massie wants his faithful to believe that he won a moral victory by way of defeat. “I would have come out sooner, but I had to call my opponent to concede and it took a while to find him in Tel Aviv”, Massie said in his concession speech.

Massey could lose dozens of times to the Israel lobby, just like the Arab resistance loses to Israel, and still call it a moral victory, just like the Arab resistance does whenever they lose to the IDF.

Election experts like Hasan Piker, Ana Kasparian, Glenn Greenwald, Jill Stein, and Adam Kinzinger have all declared the election stolen with Jewish money. The fact that so many prominent anti-Israel luminaries associated with The Left™ were so excited by Massie and are so angry that he lost completely explains why and how Massie lost.

For those of us who are old enough to remember when election denial was the worst possible violation of norms and literal treason, this is all very rich.

Foreign affairs are the lowest tier of concerns in American voter polling. Hardly anyone in America decides their vote on foreign affairs. (Hardly anyone but Islamists, of course.) AIPAC has tried to stop Massey multiple times. This time was not different because they tried harder.

Massie built a constituency in Kentucky during his time in office, but Israel was never a major voter concern in the bluegrass state. Epstein class warfare was not what his constituents elected him to do, either. Conservative voters did not ask for Massey to become what he is, and now they have shown him the door.

Massie fans refuse to accept this because blaming Jews (‘the Epstein class’) makes bitter defeat feel like moral victory.

Democrats are very excited by Zohran Mamdani. He just became the first mayor of New York to skip the Israel Day Parade in 61 years. Not by coincidence, he has started to consciously mimic Franklin Delano Roosevelt ordering the Japanese into the camps while Islamists protest outside synagogues.

Nothing to see here, voters, stop noticing. It’s racist to notice.

Democratic congressional candidate Maureen Galindo wants to “turn Karnes ICE Detention Center into a prison for American Zionists and former ICE officers for human trafficking”. On Instagram this weekend, she announced that “It will also be a castration processing center for pedophiles, which will probably be most of the Zionists.”

“The billionaire Zionists that control San Antonio and South Texas trafficking networks have coordinated a blitz campaign to propagate the conspiracy that anti-Zionist Maureen Galindo wants Jews in warehouses”, Galindo later updated. Like Hamas, Galindo wants to prosecute a genocidal war on Jews while gaslighting the world that Jews are genociding them.

Galindo has campaigned on putting former Bexar County Public Information Officer Johnny Garcia, her Republican opponent to represent the 35th District of Texas, on trial for treason. She accuses him of running a massive Epstein-style human trafficking network.

Unlike Platner and Massie and Mamdani, Maureen Galindo does not have many big endorsements. Some Congressional Democrats have openly condemned her candidacy.

She is however the candidate chosen by the Democratic Party’s primary voters in a district that leaned Democratic even after the state’s redistricting. She might just make it to Congress. They might just be stuck with her.

If Platner also succeeds, there will be two ‘anti-Zionist’ Nazis in Congress, both Democrats. This is the new diversity they have included in their coalition. Their intentions against Zionism (read: Jews) are equity for the imaginary genocide of Gaza.

But you are not supposed to notice any of this, because noticing is white supremacy.

We are not meant to notice that the Los Angeles Islamic center shooters this week shared the same hatred of Jews and love of Nazis for hating Jews as the security guard who died to stop them. They shared the same hate.

Noticing that they agreed on everything, including their mutual antagonism, would be a phobia, a pathological hatred and fear of The Other™. Literal fascism. Nazi tattoos are not fascism because Graham Plopner is a changed man. He has become a Communist. We have to elect him so we can turn the migration flow back on and open the borders, otherwise the literal Nazis will win.

We are not allowed to notice the grooming gangs in the UK, the absurdly high rates of rape perpetrated by Middle Eastern men against European women, the child brides in Afghanistan, or the practice of polygamy being tolerated in American cities, or Canadian schools enforcing Ramadan and halal standards on non-Muslim students.

To notice this pattern would be cisheteropatriarchy. See what I did there?

I have noticed something about guys like Graham Plopner, by the way. He has a certain oozing performativity in his masculinity. He gives off a gooner glow. Dollars to donuts, there is a skeleton masturbating in his closet while wearing his wife’s clothes.

I detect potential paraphilia problems.

Sexual fetishes are strongly correlated with habitual boundary violation: non-consent, coercion, and the exploitation of other people.

A possible example of the potential skeletons in Platner’s closet, one which is actively encouraged and celebrated in progressive politics, would be autogynephilia, or AGP.

Hypermasculinity is associated with both phenomena. Military service veteran males are some of the most intense cases of AGP.

Rational heterosexual men suffering from intrusive desire to cross-dress and perform femininity are not generally dangerous. However, AGP males who lack an internal locus of control are some of the most intrusive voyeurs as well as the most entitled sex pests in the world.

Men will kill to protect what they love. Tyler Robinson, the man charged in the assassin of Charlie Kirk, appears to be a gynoandromorphophile, or GAMP. I also would not be shocked if Platner turned out to be a gynoandromorphophile.

GAMPs love men who look like women, whereas AGPs have a romantic relationship with the pornified woman that they see in the mirror. If Platner is a GAMP, we are likely to see stories alleging sexual interest in ‘ladyboys’. He does seem to like Thailand, which is famous for them.

Note that I am not an expert on these topics, just an informed reader. I don’t have access to the Republican dirt files on Platner. I am just saying that drag stories would not surprise me. Ladyboys and closeted queening would fail to shock me. Nothing will shock me, not even a second act as Gina Platner, the port-a-potty princess.

Absurdities abound. A fursuit looms too. I am only noticing and speculating with hypotheticals. “Graham Platner, do you still have to masturbate when you see porta-potties?” All we are doing here is asking questions. Video via Townhall.

Of course, noticing those things, if they do emerge from the porta-potty inside Graham Plopner’s proverbial closet, will be an act of kink-shaming. Noticing them is a human rights violation that makes you a literal Nazi.

If the reader thinks that literal tattooed Nazis would never wear drag, they are sorely mistaken.

So many literal Nazis wore drag and took pictures of themselves in drag that there is an entire book of photography of literal Nazis in drag, and some of them probably even had Totenkopf tattoos.

The Distance

The Nazis Who Wore Drag

Your eyes do not deceive you. That is a Wehrmacht soldier wearing women’s clothes and prancing around under a Nazi banner to entertain his fellow German soldiers. Some readers might wonder if he was perhaps an autogynephile, and whether Frida Kahlo was his autoerotic target, but the resemblance is almost certainly an accident, for his purpose was performative, not paraphilic…

Read more

3 years ago · 42 likes · 16 comments · Matt Osborne

Lacking a crystal ball, I can only speculate upon the rivers of excremental revelations to come in the days ahead. The heroization of Graham Platner is inauthentic, which is why he attacks the authenticity of more successful warriors; he is acutely conscious that the most consequential thing he did as a Marine was get that ‘literal Nazi’ tattoo.

We have probably only seen the beginning of the … dirt …. that Republicans collected in advance of the deadline to register as a voter in Maine. Negative information has limited effects, however, especially when voter ideology (‘destroy Zionism’/MAGA) is strong.

My best forecast information is the poll published this week, but taken before voting registration closed, that shows Collins 7 points behind Platner. It is very unlikely that this margin holds all the way to November in any case. Early polling is volatile and there is plenty of poop yet to plop. The objective of Republican operatives in Maine is to make Graham Plopner clips and memes all the way to November.

If that 7-point margin does hold until November, and the Maine voter rushes to the polls in relief, Republicans will lose a Senate seat while the Queers for Palestine coalition gains one, and Democrats shall become the new home of anti-Israel party poopers.

The Plopner porta-potty parade would then arrive in Washington just in time for Bibi Netanyahu and Trump to make a big show of ending the old aid programs. Party pooped!

Literal fascists, the Plopner Democrats will declare. Not good enough. We must give our genocidal urges greater relief.

Sen. Ron Paul of Kentucky and his rather, former Rep. Rand Paul of Texas, opposed Israel aid programs for the same reason they opposed all aid programs. Thomas Massie represented this form of conservative isolationism and it never hurt him before now. There was no sudden burst of Israel-support in Kentucky. There was a collapse of support for Thomas Massie. Voters became frustrated because he kept making Washington worse.

America’s two party system often conceals more than it reveals. The political horseshoe has become highly polarized towards the left. With Israel as the focus of negative energy, and gender-bending as a marker of political identity, the right-libertarian end of the horseshoe appears to be repelling anti-Semitic elements at the same time. Third Worldism, which is inherently anti-Semitic, motivates the communist contingent of the new Democratic coalition. This political marriage of Islamists and the LGBTQMOUSE resulted from the progressive embrace of intersectionalism. It is the libertarian left getting cozy with a strong, virile partner who shares their abiding interest in anti-Zionism and smashing capitalism (read: killing the Jews). Strange alchemy happens when the revolution (‘No Kings’) is the only issue a party coalition shares.

For if there is one thing that radicals of every stripe can eventually agree on, when they agree on nothing else, it is that the Jew/capitalist is responsible for All The Problems™. Imprisonment and castration are the least they can do to answer the Jewish Question. The pogrom is always progressive by intentions, which are always good intentions. Going full Luigi Mangione on Zionists will make the world a better place, they say, and it is a complete accident that whenever this formula gets applied as praxis, it results in genocide of the Jews.

We are not allowed to notice this contradiction.

Shame on you for noticing that Democrats are doing literal Nazi shit. Bigot. You must work for the Epstein class.

Subscribe now

All candidates for voter-nominated offices at every level appear on one ballot, regardless of party preference, creating a ‘jungle primary’. The top two vote-getters advance to the November general election even if they are both from the same party.

Democrat Gavin Newsom exploited the process in 2018 by strategically boosting Republican John Cox, his weaker opponent, against moderate Democrat Antonio Villaraigosa, his stronger opponent, with a series of attack ads. Newsom then beat Cox in the November general election.

Subscribe now

Now in 2026, a fragmented field of unpopular Democrats has made it possible for two Republicans, Steve Hilton and Chad Bianco, to stand on the threshold of making November into an all-GOP runoff.

Suddenly, Gov. Newsom is no longer in favor of the jungle primary system he has used so successfully. Should the election become a Hilton-Bianco runoff, Newsom is prepared to override the will of the people for their own good. Because what could possibly be worse than a Republican being elected governor by plebiscite, according to the laws of California?

“We all have agencies”, Newsom said on Thursday in response to a question about the possibility. “We can shape the future… I don’t anticipate this need to be the case, but there is a ‘break the glass scenario.’ There’s many people that have a deep understanding of what it would look like if Democrats were locked out, and we’re going to do everything to make sure that doesn’t happen. I’ll leave it there.” Watch:

The jungle primary was a key way that Democrats locked Republicans out of power in the state for 15 years. Sen. Adam Schiff has also boosted a Republican opponent to clear the field of his most dangerous Democratic rival. Now that the jungle primary works against Democrats, though, they want to change the rules.

Steve Maviglio, a longtime Democratic operative and the former communications director for Democratic Gov. Gray Davis, first proposed doing away with the jungle primary in a February op-ed as the polls pointed to an all-GOP ballot in November. He filed a new ballot initiative with the state attorney general’s office this month to return California to a party-based primary.

Of course, even if the repeal effort gets on the November ballot and passes, it will not be able to stop the result of the jungle primary because early voting is already underway. That is what makes Newsom’s comment about a “break the glass scenario” so interesting. Which “agencies” would he use to thwart state elections law?

Politico notes that “the Democratic Governors Association recently began sending mail highlighting Republican Steve Hilton as a fierce conservative. The ostensible opposition campaign could drive GOP voters to Hilton, ensuring he consolidates the party’s voters and saps the support of the other Republican candidate” so that Bianco does not finish in the top two.

But what if he does, anyway? Decisions, decisions. Perhaps the party of “No Kings”, that makes so much noise about democracy being spoiled in Virginia, will find a way to annul democracy in California. To, you know, save democracy.

In his budget presentation on Thursday, Newsom — who has so far refused to endorse any Democrat running for his office, since they are all such good friends of his — recalled the time in 2018 when he pulled the same trick that the Democratic Governors Association is doing right now.

Then, Gov. Jerry Brown refused to endorse Newsom. “I developed tremendous animus towards him, and now I offer forgiveness”, Newsom said. See? He really is growing as a person.

Subscribe now

Lionsgate says they will be making an all-female version of The Expendables. The proposed title, Expendabelles, is a terrific dad joke. The positives end there. Yet another gender-swapped ‘boy brand’ is being set up for failure on the wrongheaded assumption that women will t…

Read more

According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, the term ‘cotton-picking’ has been used as an intensifier since at least 1917. The entry also lists the word as “damned” due to its supposed racial connotations, but this is a modern projection on the past, because slavery had disappeared for two generations.…

Read more

Originally published in March 2025, reposted for the premiere of The Mandalorian and Grogu next Friday.

She was horrible at taking notes... but what she did know how to do was interrupt somebody in midsentence. We'd be pitching ideas back and forth, and Kathy — who was supposed to be writing these ideas down — suddenly put her pencil down and would say something like, “And what if he didn't get the girl, but instead he got the dog?” — Steven Spielberg on Kathleen Kennedy in a 2015 interview

She is a woman. She is named Kennedy. These two immutable characteristics are joined in marriage with Frank Marshall, Spielberg’s co-founder of Amblin Entertainment. Kathleen Kennedy is Hollywood royalty by pedigree rather than merit. She became the president of Lucasfilm in 2012, when Disney purchased the company, and her tenure has been a notable failure.

Kennedy has overseen the demise of three George Lucas franchises: the much-anticipated sequel to the classic Willow was such a disaster that Disney removed it from streaming services and took a tax write-off. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny was supposed to replace Harrison Ford with Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who would wear the hat and take over the franchise. Hurried reshoots in the wake of test audience rebellion and intense social media scrutiny produced a confused, awkward mess that barely covered production expenses and certainly did not cover promotional expenses.

And then there is Star Wars. An unconfirmed rumor this week says that Disney has been trying to sell Star Wars, or potentially Lucasfilm as a whole, for as long as seven months — with no buyers. Kathleen Kennedy’s name shall live in infamy, long after her death, for the cruel assassination of what used to be the world’s biggest science fiction brand.

Her flying media monkeys attacked the fandom at every turn: anyone who didn’t like or enjoy the new Star Wars was racist, misogynist, a bigot. Kennedy destroyed the career of Gina Carano, hugely popular co-star of The Mandalorian, over an anodyne, politically centrist tweet. Politics were the entire point of the new Star Wars under Kennedy. The force was now female, per the Nike campaign shirt that Kennedy wore to a 2015 showing of The Force Awakens. Audiences have declined ever since.

More than any other factor, Kennedy’s insertion of feminism into what had historically been a ‘boy brand’ is responsible for the decline of the franchise. The story that she told Disney is that because 40 percent of the Star Wars audience was female, having women lead the franchise would increase its audience. In fact, women enjoy seeing masculine men on screen. They enjoy seeing the man get the woman instead of the dog.

In Kennedy’s Star Wars, the man gets the dog, or rather the droid. Audiences are staying away in droves.

Subscribe now

Heterosexual romance has consistently been depicted in the Kennedy era as a dangerous fusion of good and evil rather than boy-gets-girl. Practically the only Star Wars fandom that Kennedy catered to, on the other hand, was the ‘shippers,’ as Finn and Poe, the characters played by John Boyega and Oscar Isaac respectively, were floated as a gay match after 2019’s Rise of Skywalker.

Luke Skywalker became a shade of his former self, a self-pitying mess. Han Solo returned to the screen just long enough to die. Solo, which appeared four years after its titular character’s pathetic onscreen demise, was the first Star Wars film to ever lose money.

As the franchise expanded on Disney+ streaming, the quality of the visual and narrative storytelling declined even as production costs remained exhorbitant. Obi-Wan Kenobi lasted one season in 2022. The show reduced its male lead to a tortured, gutless failure, inserting a precocious young Leia Organa to steal scenes.

In 2023, Ahsoka featured a girlboss and her girlboss friends in a world of evil or ineffectual men. Sabine Wren, played by Australian actress Natasha Liu Bordizzo, became the first character in the history of the franchise to survive being stabbed with a lightsaber. Viewership declined over the run of series.

These issues came to a head with The Acolyte, directed by Leslye Headland, in 2024. Headland, a lesbian, produced the story of a band of lesbian space witches that have used the force to create twin daughters without a man in sight. A team of jedi arrive to interview the girls. Defying basic logic, character actions do not match their stated motivations. In a series of reversals rather than twists, the resistance of the space witches leads to their accidental demise when their stone cave complex … catches fire? What?

Elsewhere in the series, flames rise from a damaged spaceship into the vacuum of outer space. A franchise set in outer space forgot how outer space works. What little audience remained for Star Wars on Disney+ evaporated after episode 3. The Acolyte performed so badly that media watchers wonder if it has not spoiled any chance for the second season of Andor, a Star Wars show that was more critically acclaimed than watched.

To pile insult onto injury, Kennedy has systematically soft-announced numerous Star Wars projects that have never reached production, diluting any remaining fan enthusiasm. Those vaporware projects were a strategy to maintain Kennedy’s public relations relevance as her stock fell with Disney. Even now, she is holding out for one last, big hit, something to call her own, before she finally hands over Lucasfilm. She does not have it in her, however. Kathleen Kennedy cannot produce a hit to save her life.

Share

Rumors had therefore swirled for years that Kennedy was on her way out, that some sort of stage-managed succession was happening at a glacial pace. Last Monday, Puck co-founder Matthew Belloni announced that it was finally happening, though the process may take all year. There was cautious rejoicing in pop culture circles.

Three days later, Deadline editor-in-chief Mike Fleming, Jr. decried “the appetite for schadenfreude” and “pseudo-drama” surrounding the story in his Kathleen Kennedy puff piece. Kennedy “has done much with the challenge of trying to broaden George Lucas’ Star Wars vision,” Fleming wrote shamelessly. She “has been working on a succession plan for a couple years, eyeing candidates from within in process with Bob Iger and Alan Bergman.” So: story confirmed. Emphases added:

What’s happening at Lucasfilm is I have been talking for quite some time with both Bob and Alan about what eventual succession might look like. We have an amazing bench of people here, and we have every intention of making an announcement months or a year down the road. We are in lockstep as to what that’s going to be, and I am continuing. I’m producing the Mandalorian movie right now, and I’m also producing Shawn Levy’s movie, which is after that. So I’m continuing to stay at Lucasfilm and looking very thoughtfully with Bob and Alan as to who’s stepping in. So that is all underway, and we have every right to make that announcement when we want to make it.

“I am not retiring. I will never retire from movies. I will die making movies,” Kennedy insists, not actually saying she will always make Star Wars movies. But also: “We’ll probably make an announcement months or a year out, and I have every intention of sticking around to help that person be successful.” Story confirmed. Kennedy “deserves to own her own narrative,” Fleming writes. This is all about the ego of Kathleen Kennedy, her embarrassing lack of success, and the embarrassment of having her exit revealed in advance.

According to Kennedy, all that money lost on streaming shows that audiences hated is the secret to keeping George Lucas’s vision alive with the next generation. According to Kennedy, the Mandalorian movie will be a huge hit despite the audience leaving in Season 3. According to Kennedy, “we gave the young audience an opportunity to enter Star Wars at a different place and not feel like you have to have seen everything. It can become their Star Wars. And that, I think is, is the fun storytelling challenge.”

In Season 3 of Mandalorian, the main character played by Pedro Pascal takes a back seat to strong female leadership. It is worth noting that Baby Yoda was at first a huge success with Star Wars fans and collectors. By the end of Season 3, however, sales of Baby Yoda toys had collapsed. In fact, sales of all Star Wars merchandise have collapsed. Hasbro insists that they are not giving up on the brand that made them rich for decades, but the reader may visit any Ollie’s store and see the piles of discount Star Wars merchandise for themselves.

This has happened before. In 1983, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe was all the rage with my peer group. Surprised by how many girls liked the show and the toys, in 1984 the producers introduced She-Ra, a female equal to He-Man, in a bid to grow the female audience. By the time the TV show went off the air in 1985, everyone was already over He-Man, and my local TG&Y could not give the She-Ra toys away, indeed they could not give any He-Man toys away. Feminizing boy brands is the perfect way to destroy them. Just ask Bud Light.

What Kathleen Kennedy claims to have accomplished at Lucasfilm is a generational transfer of the Star Wars brand to the so-called “modern audience” that supposedly demands stories in which the man gets the dog, or else a gay love affair, or else killed, while the girlboss does everything, taking no moral responsibility for anything, deserving what she receives simply because she was born awesome. Audiences have had enough of it.

Asked what was the biggest challenge to running Lucasfilm into the ground, Kennedy wanted “to analyze and understand what was inspiring George when he created Star Wars, when he was still looking at Saturday matinees and Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon and those are things of the past and politically what he was reflecting in his stories.” Entertainment made in the era of rising totalitarianism justifies her insertion of politics into the present-day Star Wars, which “has always had a kind of world building, and it reflects a certain amount of our society.”

Except that Lucas made Star Wars for general audiences, meaning his story appealed to wider society, while Kathleen Kennedy has remade Star Wars in the image of her own, rarefied elite society. She is not, has never been, an average American. She was never in an executive position before Lucasfilm. What skills she has as a producer have been nullified by her choices for the director’s chair. Kennedy kept her name in her marriage because it was her primary source of social power, her one qualification to be in the room while better creators talked amongst themselves. The creators she has given reign have generally underwhelmed viewers.

Americans have given their verdict on Kathleen Kennedy Star Wars: they hate it. Her cultural vandalism has reduced the brand to a joke. The audience no longer cares. They have tuned out. Mandalorian will not, cannot rescue Kennedy’s reputation. A similar effect has occurred across Hollywood: despite ditching Jimmy Kimmel for the less-political Conan O’Brien, this week’s Academy Awards was the third least-watched in history. It seems that nothing can arrest the decline of our cultural elites, for they insist on giving awards to movies that nobody watches, that nobody asked for.

Americans want entertainment that escapes the present-day for a galaxy far, far away, not… this. Kathleen Kennedy has become a figure of resentment on her own terms, with her own narratives of entitled women. Her career of failure tracks with the overall decline of both Disney and Hollywood as the Spielberg-Lucas generation of filmmakers aged out. An honest cultural history of the Kennedy era will not be kind. If Mandalorian and Grogu is a dog, she gets to own it forever.

Subscribe now

We kn…

Read more

During the Democratic Party debate on 20 February 2020, Sen. Bernie Sanders warned that “if we don’t act incredibly boldly within the next six, seven years, there will be irreparable damage done — not to just to Nevada, not just to Vermont or Massachusetts, but to the entire world.”

Stopping this “existentia…

Read more

Turns out that covering up your Nazi tattoo is not enough to get elected in Maine. A new poll by the National Republican Campaign Committee “shows Senator Susan Collins with a lead of 11 percent…

Read more