Debra Wilson has had a long career as a comedian and voice actress. She was an original MadTV cast member, did sharp impressions of Oprah and Whitney Houston, and has logged extensive credits in games and animation. None of this is in dispute. There is, however, an ongoing issue with the pattern of how she keeps appearing.

The defense is always the same: she is a working professional. The writers and directors make the creative choices, and she just performs. While this is likely true, it is beside the point. The point is what is governing the decision to put her particular face and presence in front of audiences again and again. This is about pattern recognition.

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The face-capture aspect sits inside a larger, openly stated project of typecasting. Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty is a clear example. Advertisers and game developers deliberately use “real” women with older faces or non-idealized bodies to promote identity empowerment and subvert classical definitions of beauty. This language has circulated through advertising, casting departments, and media for years: challenge traditional standards and prioritize representation. Naturally, we get repeated exposure to faces that many people find unappealing. But the industry is not incentivized to change anything because, religiously, it has been compelled to treat conventional attractiveness as something that needs correction.

Audiences who prefer traditional beauty are told they are the problem.

What should also be emphasized is that none of what follows here really has anything to do with Wilson herself. She is likely easy to work with, and there is no personal reason to dislike her, even when her politics differ. The issue is the larger pattern and the ideological container the industry keeps placing around her. Refusing to believe the Left operates this way is one reason the Right keeps losing the culture war. The Right rarely adopts durable symbols, rarely elevates them, and rarely fights for victory in the spiritual and aesthetic realms. That is precisely where much of the Left engages, and where it continues to win.

The Leftist mindset works through icons. That is why we will keep seeing more of Debra Wilson in AAA titles and far less of Sydney Sweeney in any mainstream role. Regardless of what either woman actually believes, both have been turned into icons, and icons are tools for waging culture war.

Wilson’s case is useful because it is concrete. Her roles are high-profile enough to notice, and the projects often carry a similar political flavor as well. In Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, she voices Grace Walker, a militant Black resistance leader written with clear left-leaning revolutionary energy, and in Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, she voices Amanda Waller. She also provides the face capture for both characters. In some projects, these do not appear to be random jobs, but recurring assignments of a specific look and delivery to roles that carry ideological weight. One might even be led to believe that specific studios keep selecting her for those roles.

Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus places her inside a deliberate political frame. The game is set in an alternate 1960s where the Nazis won the war and occupy the United States. The resistance includes black revolutionary elements alongside socialists, communists, and anarchists. American white supremacists, specifically the Ku Klux Klan, appear as open collaborators with the Nazi regime. Klansmen in robes walk the streets of occupied towns and speak with German soldiers. The game treats this collaboration as some kind of natural continuation of pre-existing American racism, even though the connection has little historical basis.

The protagonist receives a rewritten personal history that reinforces the same themes. B.J. Blazkowicz is a third-generation Polish-American whose mother is Jewish. His father, Rip, is an abusive, racist, anti-Semitic collaborator who thrives under Nazi rule. In a key flashback experienced by the player as young B.J., his father beats his wife and son after discovering that

B.J. has befriended a black girl. He also forces the boy to shoot the family dog as a lesson in strength and later sells out his Jewish wife to the regime. Domestic American bigotry and Nazi ideology are presented as fundamentally linked.

Bethesda’s marketing leaned into the contemporary political moment. The campaign used the slogan “Make America Nazi-Free Again,” the hashtag “NoMoreNazis,” and imagery of punching Nazis. It arrived shortly after Charlottesville and the public rise of the alt-right. Official statements framed the game as simply anti-Nazi and “on the right side of history.” Many on the right read the marketing and the depiction of American collaborators as equating contemporary right-wing politics with early-to-mid-20th-century Nazism.

Wilson’s role as Grace Walker sits at the center of that entire package. The character’s look, politics, and placement inside a game that already treated American white identity as continuous with Nazism made her a convenient face for the larger project. That association is part of why the repeated casting of Wilson continues to register negatively for some audiences. It is not only about her appearance, but the specific ideological container the industry keeps placing that appearance into.

The New Colossus functions as a kind of victory flag in the propaganda field for a Left still stuck in the late-2010s era. The game elevated her as the face of a specific political moment, and that elevation has been maintained. She keeps being put forward as a kind of living emblem for the same set of ideals the industry wanted to push at that time. The claim that this is only about performance quality requires ignoring the pattern of the roles, the timing, and the surrounding cultural incentives. Therefore, one ought to see the continued use of Wilson’s face as an ongoing affirmation of a particular moment in history. Because large parts of that political culture still cannot divorce fact from fiction, and routinely treat ordinary political opponents as literal Hitlers, the same aesthetic and ideological packages keep getting recycled today.

Anyone who still insists otherwise can be asked a simple question: For the sake of argument, assume the behind-the-scenes reason for her repeated promotion is exactly the ideological one described here. Would that be wrong? The honest answer from most of the people defending her casting is no. It would be correct. It would be good. At that point, the earlier denial collapses. What they first called a conspiracy or an unfair accusation becomes, under light pressure, something they quietly approve of. The sequence is familiar: it is not happening, and it is good that it is happening. That is the real position. The rest is just the performance of innocence.

If you genuinely believe casting decisions are completely separate from ideology, what evidence would ever convince you otherwise? At what point does a pattern stop being a coincidence and become a deliberate cultural statement?

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NEXT: The Leaker Who Turned Rockstar’s Silence Into a Crypto Pump

A great example of how Hollywood self-imploded is the career of Harrison Ford.

In his heyday, he starred in not one but two of the most successful franchises in history: Indiana Jones and Star Wars.

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As Han Solo in the original Star Wars trilogy, Ford embodied the ultimate rogue—cocky, charismatic, quick-witted, and always getting the girl in a classic damsel-rescued-by-hero dynamic.

In Raiders of the Lost Ark and its THREE sequels, his Indiana Jones was the epitome of rugged masculinity: a whip-cracking archaeologist-adventurer who outsmarted Nazis, romanced strong but supportive women like Marion Ravenwood, and saved the day with brains, brawn, and unapologetic heroism.

Air Force One saw Ford playing the President of the United States, kicking terrorist ass and declaring “Get off my plane!” in a peak-patriotic, alpha-male role that grossed over $315 million worldwide.

In other hits like Blade Runner, he was the brooding, hard-boiled detective Deckard.

In The Fugitive, he was the wrongly accused everyman fighting the system.

And “Witness” earned him an Oscar nod for protecting the innocent.

Ford was Hollywood’s go-to leading man for action, drama, and romance, raking in billions and defining pop culture for decades.

Then the female empowerment agenda hit, and Hollywood started deconstructing his icons to make room for “diverse” reboots and girlboss narratives:

Han Solo: DEAD from a sacrificial stab by his own son, paving the way for Mary Sue Rey to inherit his ship, his blaster, and his legacy without earning it.

Indy: Depressed, old, and cucked by his snarky goddaughter Helena, who bosses him around, steals his thunder, and even wears the fedora in promotional vibes—it went on to FLOP HARD at the box office ($384 million against a $300 million budget).

Deckard: Relegated to cameo status in Blade Runner 2049 (2017), where the once-iconic replicant hunter is a hermit hiding in a casino, his mystery unraveled to serve Ryan Gosling’s story—another legacy character diminished for the new guard.

Ford’s box office draw plummeted from consistent $100M+ hits to bombs, with audiences rejecting the “get woke, go broke” formula that turned his tough-guy personas into cautionary tales of male obsolescence.

Hollywood didn’t just age him out—they neutered his legends to push empowerment propaganda…

…proving that when you mess with classics for politics, fans bail and empires crumble.

Rest in SHAME, Hollywood.

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You can read more of Byl Holte on his Substack:

Byl Holte

Tracking the self-immolation of Hollywood, one WOKENESS at a time, and happily exposing THE FEMOCRATS at their own game.

Hayden Panettiere is dead at 36, five days short of her 37th birthday. Greenville, South Carolina police responded to a 911 call reporting an unresponsive woman on Sunday afternoon. Dispatch audio obtained by People captured officials discussing an “overdose” and “cardiac arrest.” Paramedics administered advanced cardiac life support at the scene. It didn’t work. Panettiere was pronounced dead at 2:32 p.m. The Greenville County Coroner’s Office has an autopsy scheduled to determine an official cause of death, and police say the preliminary investigation has found no signs of foul play.

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None of that should have surprised anyone who read her memoir.

Panettiere published “This Is Me: A Reckoning” on May 19 of this year. In it, she wrote about a traumatic C-section, a uterine infection, seven blood transfusions, and a postpartum depression that hit before she left the hospital. “I wasn’t OK,” she wrote. “I had to figure out how to bond with her. It felt like an insurmountable task, and I was only on the first day.” She wrote about hiding bottles of Fireball from Wladimir Klitschko, the father of her daughter Kaya, and drinking from morning to night while telling almost no one. She wrote about entering rehab, leaving early to return to “Nashville,” relapsing within the show’s fourth season, and eventually checking into an eight-month program in a last attempt to get sober.

She said the same things in interviews for months before her death. On the “On Purpose” podcast with Jay Shetty in May, she described handing over custody of Kaya to Klitschko while she was in crisis. “The idea that anybody would think that I would just give away my child and be OK with it is heartbreaking,” she said. “It couldn’t be further from the truth.” In a 2022 interview with People, discussing an earlier opioid and alcohol addiction, she put it more bluntly: “I was on top of the world and I ruined it. I’d think I hit rock bottom, but then there’s that trap door that opens.”

That trap door kept opening. Her brother Jansen Panettiere, also an actor, died in 2023 at 28, a loss she said compounded her grief. Her ex-boyfriend Brian Hickerson served jail time for abusing her. Neutrogena dropped her as a spokeswoman after a decade, over a morals clause, once she started talking publicly about postpartum depression. She wrote in the memoir that “Nashville” writers used her real breakdown as material for her character’s storyline while she was still living through it, and that she was eventually written off the show because, as she put it, she “needed a drink to function.”

A teenager who grew up on camera, forced in front of Hollywood and its destructive Hellmouth for her entire childhood, then as a young mother, her worst days became a subplot on the show that employed her. Finally, we have a woman who told two different interviewers, three years apart, that she’d hit bottom before, that the bottom moved, that there was always another one underneath. Fandom Pulse has said for years that Hollywood’s celebrity machine chews up the people it puts in front of the camera as children and spits them out with a publicist and a relapse. Panettiere spent a decade telling the industry press exactly that, on the record, in her own words, and the response was a memoir tour and a podcast circuit rather than an intervention.

The tragic part about this is she wasn’t living for her child, but for herself even as she grew older, showing the destructive course that Hollywood values and feminism take upon a life. The psychological abuse of this system leads women toward a destructive path, and this is a harrowing end that should never have occurred.

She leaves behind her daughter Kaya, now eleven. Her father Skip Panettiere called her “an incredible light and a force of nature who brought immeasurable love and joy to all who knew her.” Whatever the coroner finds, the record she left in her own words already says plenty about what almost 20 years in that industry did to her.

How many more memoirs does Hollywood need before “cry for help” stops being a headline and starts being a warning somebody acts on?

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First contact with the Oridians was supposed to be humanity’s proudest moment. Instead, their chief engineer is dead, their ship is sabotaged, and an ancient alien technology is stealing souls. Book one of the Valiant Frontiers series delivers exploration, mystery, and the kind of crew you’ll want to follow across the galaxy. Read The Soul Catcher on Amazon and start the adventure.

NEXT: Delilah S. Dawson Wrote That Her Books Had Too Many White People, And Now She Owns Shannara

John Oliver used a Last Week Tonight segment about the Trump Justice Department’s courtroom losing streak to take a direct shot at his own corporate parent’s superhero slate. The exchange with the DOJ’s record led into DC’s box office history as the punchline:

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“OK, first: No one’s accusing you of ‘running away’; they’re accusing you of losing. Rest assured, everyone believes you ran cock-first as hard as you could straight into a brick wall. And second, I didn’t realize the existence of repeated unsuccessful attempts was actually good news — that’s huge for DC movies, if true.”

He then rolled a poster collage of six DC films onto the screen: Black Adam, The Flash, Birds of Prey, Shazam! Fury of the Gods, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, and Supergirl.

The segment’s actual target was designate Attorney General Todd Blanche, responding to NBC’s Laura Jarrett listing off a string of DOJ setbacks: dismissed indictments against James Comey and Letitia James, an Adam Schiff case that never got off the ground, a grand jury declining to indict six Democratic lawmakers, and a judge tossing a subpoena for Fed Chair Jerome Powell. When Blanche insisted the department wasn’t running from hard cases, Oliver pivoted the joke straight into DC’s box office record, an unmistakable target given the segment aired on HBO, a Warner Bros. Discovery property that shares a corporate parent with DC Studios itself. Variety reported Oliver appeared to catch himself mid-bit, laughing once the irony landed that he was mocking his own employer’s output on his own employer’s network.

Cosmic Book News’s follow-up reporting adds a layer the segment’s graphic conveniently left out: four of the six films shown, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, Black Adam, Shazam! Fury of the Gods, and Supergirl, carry producer credits for current DC Studios co-CEO Peter Safran, while the remaining two bear Gunn’s creative fingerprints regardless of who’s credited. The joke wasn’t really about DC’s old, pre-Gunn era at all. It landed squarely on the regime currently running the studio, the same one that’s spent three years promising a coherent turnaround.

The numbers back up the punchline. Supergirl closed its run at roughly $125.8 million worldwide against a reported $170 million budget, a projected loss north of $100 million for the studio airing the joke about it. Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom’s $440 million looked especially rough next to the first film’s $1.15 billion. The Flash pulled in about $271 million despite a marketing push built around multiple Batman variants, and Shazam! Fury of the Gods managed only $134 million.

This lands in the same stretch where Spider-Man: Brand New Day just crossed $700 million domestic for Marvel, and where a California antitrust trial over the Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger sits scheduled for March 2027, leaving DC’s entire corporate future genuinely undecided. A comedy writer on the DC/Warner payroll openly mocking his own studio’s track record isn’t spin, it’s the most honest assessment of the DCU’s box office reality anyone at the company has offered all year.

Does it say more about DC’s struggles that a rival studio is dunking on them, or that the harshest joke about DC’s failures this month came from inside Warner Bros. Discovery’s own building?

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First contact with the Oridians was supposed to be humanity’s proudest moment. Instead, their chief engineer is dead, their ship is sabotaged, and an ancient alien technology is stealing souls. Book one of the Valiant Frontiers series delivers exploration, mystery, and the kind of crew you’ll want to follow across the galaxy. Read The Soul Catcher on Amazon and start the adventure.

NEXT: James Gunn’s DCU Just Lost Two More Shows

William Shatner’s X account renewed its standoff with YouTube creator Nerdrotic this week, insisting there was “ZERO misunderstanding” behind a block that has lasted more than four years. The exchange, screenshotted and shared by Nerdrotic himself, reopened a dispute that traces back to May 2021 and a joke about Wil Wheaton. However, pretending not to understand what’s going on to open up a controversy for clicks seems to be the onus of what’s going on here, since there’s not a lot of new information here, and as we’ve detailed, William Shatner himself isn’t even aware of what goes on on this account.

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Vic Mignogna is out as a guest at New Mexico Comic Expo, and the convention’s own statement makes clear they still have nothing on him beyond the same 2019 allegations that never produced a single finding against him in court. The Albuquerque event had announced Mignogna for its September 26-27 show at the Marriott Uptown, covering his work as Broly in the Dragon Ball films and his Captain Kirk role in the fan production Star Trek: Phase II. Days later, the convention reversed course.

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The organizer’s statement, posted through the account nmcomicexpo, read in full:

“In the excitement of creating a guest roster for a comic convention, we learn some lessons. At times, we look to our fans, in this case, the anime community, to share their thoughts to help us determine who would be the best fit for our shows.

With that said, we would like to confirm that Vic Mignogna will no longer be appearing as a guest at New Mexico Comic Expo. We apologize if our previous announcement caused any disappointment or confusion.

As we’ve continued to listen to our community and learn more, we’ve made the decision that moving forward without him is the right choice for our event.

The safety, comfort, and overall experience of our attendees, guests, vendors, artists, and volunteers will always be our highest priority. We are committed to creating an event where everyone feels welcome, respected, and safe.

We appreciate your understanding and your continued support as we work to continue build the best possible New Mexico Comic Expo for our community.”

The statement names no allegation, no incident, and no new complaint. It cites “community” feedback and a commitment to “safety” without saying what, specifically, Mignogna is alleged to have done at this convention or any other since the last time this played out. It’s very obvious some political activist concern trolls are coming at him again.

The 2019 Cancel Attempt

Vic Mignogna built his career on decades of voice work, most notably as Edward Elric in “Fullmetal Alchemist,” a role that won him the American Anime Award for Best Actor in 2007. He has voiced over a hundred anime and video game characters, including Broly in the Dragon Ball franchise, Tamaki Suoh in “Ouran High School Host Club,” and Qrow Branwen in “RWBY.” Outside the booth, he wrote, directed, and starred as Captain Kirk in “Star Trek Continues,” a fan production that ran from 2012 to 2017 and drew praise for capturing William Shatner’s original performance. He is also a Christian musician who served as a worship leader at Houston’s First Baptist Church and produced several gospel and Christian pop albums.

In January 2019, anonymous accusations of harassment surfaced online alongside the release of “Dragon Ball Super: Broly.” Voice actresses Monica Rial and Jamie Marchi came forward with claims against him. Funimation opened an internal investigation and dropped Mignogna within a week. Rooster Teeth followed. Mignogna denied the accusations and expressed regret for any discomfort his fans may have felt, but he never admitted to the underlying claims.

Mignogna’s supporters raised roughly $260,000 through a legal defense fundraiser and organized under two hashtags, #IStandWithVic and #KickVic, turning the dispute into one of the loudest fights the anime convention scene had seen. Mignogna filed a defamation suit against Funimation, Rial, Marchi, and Marchi’s fiance in Tarrant County, Texas.

No Verdict Against Him

Here is what the record shows. The lawsuit did not fail because a judge or jury weighed the harassment claims and sided with the accusers. It was dismissed under the Texas Citizens Participation Act, the state’s anti-SLAPP law, which protects speech on matters of public concern regardless of whether that speech is true. Texas’s Second Court of Appeals said as much directly, writing that the dismissal “does not serve as a factual adjudication of the underlying harassment allegations.” No court ever ruled that Mignogna did what he was accused of, and no criminal charge was ever filed. There was also no formal police report ever produced. What Mignogna lost was a procedural fight over Texas free speech law, and he was ordered to cover the other side’s attorney fees, a separate matter from guilt or innocence.

Six years later, that is still the entirety of the record. New Mexico Comic Expo did not cite a new complaint, a new accuser, or a new incident. They cited “the anime community” and their own listening exercise, then pulled a guest whose only public offense remains a set of unproven 2019 claims that a Texas appellate court explicitly declined to rule on.

A Pattern With No New Facts

This is not the first time Mignogna has been removed from a guest list years after 2019 with nothing new attached to the decision. The pattern holds: an announcement goes up, a portion of the online anime community objects, and the convention caves within days, always citing the community and never the specifics. Meanwhile Mignogna keeps working. He has appeared at dozens of conventions since 2019, founded his own dubbing studio in partnership with Anime Matsuri in 2021, signed with a UK talent agency in 2024, and continues narrating audiobooks and voicing new roles.

New Mexico Comic Expo had the chance to either stand behind its own booking or point to an actual reason for reversing it. It did neither, but asked its audience to accept a decision made because a segment of Twitter was loud about it.

If a six-year-old set of allegations that never survived a single court ruling on the merits is enough to bounce a guest from a con in 2026, what would it take for a convention to say publicly why they made the call?

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First contact with the Oridians was supposed to be humanity’s proudest moment. Instead, their chief engineer is dead, their ship is sabotaged, and an ancient alien technology is stealing souls. Book one of the Valiant Frontiers series delivers exploration, mystery, and the kind of crew you’ll want to follow across the galaxy. Read The Soul Catcher on Amazon and start the adventure.

NEXT: The Only Star Trek Novel Harlan Ellison Ever Approved: Peter David’s Imzadi

A new BBC documentary, “Jared Leto: Hollywood’s Dark Secret,” aired this week with ten women coming forward against the actor and Thirty Seconds to Mars frontman, nine of them sharing their accounts publicly for the first time. Four of the women describe conduct the BBC characterizes as criminal sexual conduct, occurring when they were teenagers between 2002 and 2016, when Leto was in his 30s and 40s.

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Michael Shanks isn’t waiting for Amazon MGM to make the next move. The actor who played Dr. Daniel Jackson for all ten seasons of Stargate SG-1 announced today at the #SaveStargate campaign’s official Comic-Con event that he’s launching a new retrospective podcast, a full rewatch of SG-1 starting with the original pilot, featuring cast and crew guests on every episode. “I’m going to break the mold here and be the first one of the original cast to do the Stargate rewatch podcast,” Shanks said. David Read, host of the existing Stargate interview series Dial the Gate, is producing. If the show catches on, Shanks said the plan is to keep going: “David is going to produce it and be part of it, and we’re going to get guests for every episode of SG-1. If it carries on, we’ll do Atlantis and we’ll do Universe.” The team is targeting a mid-October launch.

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Shanks was direct that the podcast exists because of the cancellation, not despite it. The idea grew out of watching how fans reacted to Amazon’s decision to scrap Martin Gero’s revival roughly 20 weeks into preproduction back in June. Rather than wait on a studio that’s said nothing since, Shanks is building new, ongoing Stargate content himself, on a platform no executive can cancel out from under the fanbase.

The podcast announcement wasn’t the only thing happening at Comic-Con today. The #SaveStargate campaign flew a second aerial banner, this one directly over the San Diego Convention Center from 11 AM to 1 PM, the same tactic organizers used a month earlier when they flew a banner over Amazon MGM Studios’ own Culver City headquarters. That first flyover was funded through a GoFundMe that blew past its original $4,500 goal within days and eventually raised over $11,000, with Christopher Judge, Teal’c across all ten SG-1 seasons, marking the moment with a simple public post: “#SaveStargate Indeed!” Today’s follow-up flyover puts the campaign’s message directly above tens of thousands of genre fans and press already gathered in one place for the industry’s biggest convention week, with a rooftop happy hour event at Bay City Brewery following that evening.

The campaign has kept escalating at a pace few fan movements sustain this long. What started as a single flyover in mid-June has grown into a Times Square billboard reading “Unscheduled Off-World Cancellation,” a Change.org petition now closing in on 115,000 signatures, and public support from cast across all three live-action series. Franchise producer Joe Mallozzi has stayed the campaign’s most consistent voice throughout, previously accusing studio executives of holding their own audiences in “contempt.” Through the petition, both banner flyovers, the billboard, and now a Comic-Con presence with a plane over the convention itself, Amazon MGM Studios has maintained the same position it’s held since June 2: total silence. No comment on the cancellation reasoning, no comment on the flyovers, no comment on the billboard, and as of today, no comment on a fanbase organized enough to buy airtime over the studio’s own conference and its biggest annual competitor’s convention in the same month.

Six weeks in, the #SaveStargate movement isn’t losing momentum. It’s building its own infrastructure. A podcast that doesn’t need Amazon’s permission to exist is the clearest sign yet that this fanbase isn’t just waiting for a reversal anymore. It’s building something Amazon can’t cancel a second time.

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First contact with the Oridians was supposed to be humanity’s proudest moment. Instead, their chief engineer is dead, their ship is sabotaged, and an ancient alien technology is stealing souls. Book one of the Valiant Frontiers series delivers exploration, mystery, and the kind of crew you’ll want to follow across the galaxy. Read The Soul Catcher on Amazon and start the adventure.

NEXT: Rings of Power Brings Back A Character It Killed Off Itself, And The Timing Says A Lot

Ben Shapiro gave Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” a score between an 8.5 and a 9 out of 10, and the reaction split down two fronts at once. Segments of the right accused him of betraying a chance to unite conservatives against the film. It is noteworthy to look at our screenshot of his review and see the “includes paid promotion” in the top left corner, telling you a lot of what you may need to know about where he gets his opinions from.

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The defamation case between former Kotaku Senior Editor Alyssa Mercante and gaming YouTuber Jeff Tarzia, known online as SmashJT, has been moving through federal court since December 2024. The actual docket looks nothing like what the commentary sphere has been reporting.

Sites like That Park Place and Geeks+Gamers, along with Tarzia himself, framed this lawsuit as a slow-motion humiliation for Mercante: a frivolous SLAPP suit crumbling under Ron Coleman’s motions. One May 2025 piece declared the case “increasingly looks like what it is.” A July 2025 That Park Place article titled Tarzia’s latest filing the “final filing” and treated dismissal as a foregone conclusion. Tarzia has updated his audience across multiple videos and Substack posts with a consistent narrative: Mercante is losing, the case is nearly dead, Coleman is winning at every turn.

The federal docket for Mercante v. Tarzia, case 1:24-cv-08471 in the Eastern District of New York, does not support that narrative.

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The Texas State Board of Education voted 9-4 on June 26 to add Bible passages to the required reading list for all K-12 public school students in the state. Elementary students will read picture-book versions of David and Goliath and Daniel in the Lion’s Den. Fifth graders will study sections of Exodus. Seventh graders will read the Twenty-Third Psalm. High schoolers will study Adam and Eve and the parable of the Prodigal Son. The passages sit alongside Charles Dickens, E.B. White, Shel Silverstein, Kurt Vonnegut, and Elie Wiesel on a list of approximately 200 mandated texts. The changes take effect in the 2030-31 school year. Texas parents retain the right to opt their children out.

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Tim Russ saw this news and went to X.

“The Texas (Christian Nationalist) School board has mandated that Bible passages will soon be required reading in public schools. Not only is it a blatant violation of the Constitution but more importantly, it’s replacing actual science and history with mythology.”

He followed up: “Christian Nationalists keep arguing that the country was founded on Christian principles. It was not!! The founding fathers omitted any reference to religion in the constitution for an obvious reason. I’m sure the Texas schools won’t be reading from the Koran or Torah also.”

Both posts contain factual errors as to the nature of America and even what’s going on with this ruling.

Texas is teaching the Bible as literature, alongside Dickens and Vonnegut, in an English and reading curriculum. It is not replacing science with mythology. No science class is affected. No history class is being restructured around Genesis. The required reading list is exactly that, a literature reading list that includes biblical texts alongside secular ones. Russ either did not read the actual policy or chose to misrepresent it.

The constitutional claim requires more unpacking because it is more widely believed and more consequential. The First Amendment’s Establishment Clause reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Two things are immediately apparent to anyone who reads that sentence carefully. First, it applies to Congress, not to state boards of education. The Fourteenth Amendment extended many federal constitutional protections to the states through incorporation, but the Supreme Court’s Establishment Clause jurisprudence has evolved significantly and continues to be contested. Second, the clause prohibits the establishment of religion, meaning the government cannot create or impose an official state church. It does not prohibit the teaching of religious texts as literature, history, or cultural context.

The founders Russ invokes as evidence of secular intent were operating in a country whose colonial governments were explicitly religious by design. Massachusetts Bay was founded on Puritan theology. Virginia had an established Anglican Church with state tax support well into the founding era. Connecticut’s Congregational Church was state-supported until 1818. The idea that the founders were constructing a secular public square is a reading of American history that requires ignoring the religious establishment that every single original colony maintained.

What the founders were actually protecting against was the kind of ecclesiastical tyranny that had plagued Europe, a state church with the power to imprison, tax, and execute dissenters. Thomas Jefferson’s famous “wall of separation between church and state” phrase does not appear in the Constitution. It appears in a private letter to the Danbury Baptist Association in 1802, written to assure Baptists that the federal government would not favor Congregationalists in Connecticut over them. The Danbury Baptists were not asking Jefferson to keep religion out of public life. They were asking him to keep the government from picking one denomination over another. That is a very different thing from what Russ is describing.

The current interpretation of the Establishment Clause as requiring the removal of all religious expression from public education is a 20th-century judicial development, not an original founding intent. It emerged primarily from Engel v. Vitale in 1962, which prohibited government-sponsored school prayer, and Abington School District v. Schempp in 1963, which prohibited state-mandated Bible reading as devotional practice. Neither case prohibits teaching biblical texts as literature. The Supreme Court has explicitly held that “the Bible is worthy of study for its literary and historic qualities” and that its inclusion in an academic curriculum is constitutional. Teaching the Sermon on the Mount as a literary text alongside Dickens is not the same as opening school with a devotional prayer.

Texas is also a sovereign state with the right to set its own educational standards. The federal government does not control curriculum. The Texas State Board of Education is the elected body whose mandate includes precisely this kind of decision. If Russ or anyone else believes the policy violates the Constitution, the courts are available.

Russ is not engaging with any of this. He is posting that the founders were secular, that Texas is teaching mythology in science class, and that the policy is a “blatant violation of the Constitution,” three claims that range from oversimplified to factually wrong.

This is not the first time Russ has posted about religion with this level of inaccuracy and heat. In 2021, following the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan, he posted: “The Taliban are as fanatical about their beliefs and culture as the millions of people right here in the U.S. who believe in religion, conspiracy theories, and alternate reality.” Equating American Christians to the Taliban in a post about a regime that was executing women for showing their faces. In 2019, he responded to a Christian commenter on abortion by writing: “You fanatics don’t give a damn about anybody AFTER they’re born, never have and never will.” In response to Sarah Sanders saying God wanted Trump to be president, Russ declared that America already has “Sharia law... Christian Sharia law. There is no difference.” In 2024, he posted an image suggesting he would drink Drano if Trump won the election. In September 2025, days after Charlie Kirk was shot and killed, Russ posted an image of Captain Kirk with the caption “The only Kirk that matters.” His Voyager co-star Robert Beltran had called Kirk “first a Christian” who “spread the gospel with patience and love.” William Shatner, who actually played Captain Kirk, expressed condolences and said “assassination is so senseless.” Russ made a joke of a horrific death.

Most Star Trek fans who know Russ know him as Tuvok, the Vulcan security officer on Voyager whose entire character was built around logic, discipline, and emotional restraint. Tuvok’s defining quality was the ability to set aside personal feeling in order to think clearly. He would not have approved of his actor’s X account.

Texas teaching the Prodigal Son alongside Great Expectations is not the imposition of a theocracy. It is a state board making a curricular decision that reflects the overwhelming influence of Western Christianity on the literature, history, law, and culture that public school students are supposed to understand.

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First contact with the Oridians was supposed to be humanity’s proudest moment. Instead, their chief engineer is dead, their ship is sabotaged, and an ancient alien technology is stealing souls. Book one of the Valiant Frontiers series delivers exploration, mystery, and the kind of crew you’ll want to follow across the galaxy. Read The Soul Catcher on Amazon and start the adventure.

NEXT: Celia Rose Gooding Turns Trek Long Island Into a Political Rally: Joy, Resistance, and “The Powers That Be”

Trek Long Island 2026 was billed as a joyful conversation with Celia Rose Gooding. What it became was an extended political address, with the Star Trek: Strange New Worlds actress using her convention panel to deliver commentary on black joy as political resistance, institutional oppression, and the ongoing “discourse” around the direction of Star Trek itself.

Gooding, who plays the young Uhura in Strange New Worlds, sat down with Tamia of the Sci-Fi Sisters for what started as a warm personal conversation about joy and creativity. It didn’t stay there long.

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Brianna Wu, also known as Literally Wu, the trans activist most famous for riding GamerGate to a political career, posted a lengthy Facebook statement this week endorsing a recent New York Times essay arguing that gay and lesbian Americans have had their movement taken over by people who have nothing in common with them.

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Dwayne Johnson told Esquire magazine this month that he is done talking about politics publicly. He told them, “What I have learned through experience is that I need to keep — need, not want — the main thing the main thing. And the main thing for me, the thing that in the morning I swing my legs out of bed and I run towards, is creating. It’s art. It’s storytelling. I’ve learned I’m going to keep my politics to myself.”

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Star Trek actor Wil Wheaton has had a patern of angrily lashing out over politics over the years, and he seems to be getting worse with each passing month. This one might be something for the FBI to get involved with, because he and other Star Trek actors have been calling for violence.

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Wilson Cruz played Dr. Hugh Culber across five seasons of Star Trek: Discovery. We covered covered his April 2026 Facebook posts in which he called for Trump’s death and shared imagery of James Comey suggesting the President should be assassinated. Now Cruz is back on Facebook, and this time he came after me directly.

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Gary Buechler, known online as Nerdrotic, posted a photo this week of a shuttlecraft seat from Star Trek: Starfleet Academy now sitting in his home. His caption: “I have taken possession of a screen used shuttle seat from Starfleet Academy. You can call it a trophy. I would call it a scalp.”

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The chair came from the 403 Auction fire sale Paramount ran in April, quietly selling off the entire physical inventory of Starfleet Academy and Star Trek: Discovery through two auction rounds totaling nearly 700 lots. Notable items included turbolift set pieces from the USS Athena at $10,000 each, shuttlecraft seats in the $2,500-$2,700 range, lab jars, terrarium displays, and door frames. The turbolift pieces received zero bids. The sets that Paramount spent millions building to celebrate Star Trek’s 60th anniversary got auctioned off alongside a note that buyers needed their own vehicle for pickup because no shipping was available due to “tight auction deadlines.”

Showrunner Michelle Paradise described the sale to The Hollywood Reporter as “deaccessioning narrative infrastructure.” The chair in Nerdrotic’s living room is what narrative infrastructure looks like when it sells for $2,700.

Starfleet Academy was canceled after two seasons. Paramount+ greenlit it in November 2021 as a youth-skewing Star Trek series set at the Federation’s flagship training school. The show starred Mary Wiseman, Celia Rose Gooding, and Bella Poarch, and was produced by Alex Kurtzman’s Secret Hideout. It debuted on Paramount+ in late 2025. When Paramount released the first episode for free on YouTube to drive subscriptions, it peaked at approximately 1,300 concurrent live viewers.

Nerdrotic, watching this number, ran an experiment. On January 15, 2026, he set up a camera pointed at a plastic Spock action figure sitting in an empty chair and started a livestream. He beat the Starfleet Academy premiere’s peak concurrent viewership in under three minutes. His stream ran 52 minutes and peaked at 3,389 concurrent viewers — nearly three times what Paramount’s flagship franchise launch managed with no barrier to entry. He posted his own summary afterward: “My live stream with a Spock action figure in an empty chair beat Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’s 1300+ peak live viewers on YouTube in under 3 minutes.”

The moment made national television. Greg Gutfeld mentioned it on his show, telling his 3.3 million nightly viewers: “Some dude, a YouTuber, live streamed a Spock action figure sitting in an empty chair and it got three times more viewers.”

Nerdrotic responded: “My Spock action figure made it on the Gutfeld show. Thanks for the shout out. Sincerely, Some dude, a YouTuber.”

Paramount quietly made the Starfleet Academy YouTube premiere private shortly after.

The Critical Drinker’s review of the show pulled 403,000 views in 14 hours with a 99% like ratio. Nerdrotic’s own review more than doubled the premiere’s total viewership within a single day. The show’s trailer was ratioed. Its YouTube premiere was private. Its sets were auctioned off in Toronto with a no-shipping policy. The actress Gina Yashere, a cast member, spent the show’s final weeks posting about “fragile, angry White men” and the show evaporated without a third season.

Alex Kurtzman produced every incarnation of NuTrek since Discovery launched in 2017. Nine years. Discovery, Picard, Strange New Worlds, Lower Decks, Prodigy, Starfleet Academy. The franchise that in 2017 he inherited with existing goodwill and a built-in audience is now a fire sale in a Toronto warehouse. Strange New Worlds has already had its sets torn down. There is no Star Trek in production anywhere.

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When genetic engineering nearly doomed the species, humanity made a desperate bargain: let the frontier do what nature intended. In a harsh universe, these cadets have to make impossible decisions. Read Space Fleet Academy today.

NEXT: GraphicAudio Completes Elizabeth Moon’s Vatta Saga, One of the Best Military Space Operas Most Readers Missed

Brendan Wayne, one of the stunt performers who physically portrays Din Djarin inside the Mandalorian suit, gave an interview to MovieWeb this week and used the opportunity to call a portion of the Star Wars fanbase toxic. His film, The Mandalorian and Grogu, has now grossed $155.8 million domestically on a $165 million production budget, making it the lowest-grossing Star Wars theatrical release ever and almost certain to lose money before marketing costs are added.

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Wayne went in on the fans as we’ve seen many do before: “It’s interesting to see people who are pulling against the franchise they love, just because of their ownership. That can be 100% toxic.” He added: “They didn’t ruin your Star Wars. It’s our Star Wars.”

Nobody staked out a more direct ownership claim than Wayne in the same breath he accused fans of the same impulse.

The “toxic fans” accusation is not a new instrument in Lucasfilm’s communication toolkit. It has been the franchise’s standard deflection from creative and commercial failure for nearly a decade, and its deployment this week follows a well-worn pattern.

In 2018, The Last Jedi directed by Rian Johnson generated the most sustained fan backlash in franchise history. Johnson called critics “manbabies” on Twitter. When actress Kelly Marie Tran deleted her Instagram following harassment, the resulting coverage cemented the “toxic fan” narrative as the frame through which all Star Wars criticism would be processed going forward. Johnson’s framing: “A few unhealthy people can cast a big shadow on the wall.” Kathleen Kennedy adopted the same framing. When she spoke to The New York Times in 2024 ahead of The Acolyte, she said female stars face disproportionate fan attacks “because of the fan base being so male dominated.” Her response to criticism of The Acolyte’s casting choices: “I stand by my empathy for Star Wars fans. But I want to be clear: anyone who engages in bigotry, racism or hate speech, I don’t consider a fan.”

The Acolyte was canceled after one season. The Mandalorian and Grogu opened below Captain America: Brave New World. It dropped 70% in its second weekend. It is now in sixth place.

The problem here is that Disney and Lucasfilm have spent ten years applying the toxic-fan label to the much broader category of viewers who simply did not want to watch what Disney was making. Those people do not post harassment. They do not leave nasty comments. They stop buying tickets. They cancel Disney+. They do not buy the toys. Their opinions register only in box office data and subscription numbers, where they are impossible to dismiss as a vocal minority of bad actors.

The Mandalorian and Grogu’s opening weekend number is the sum of every person who chose not to show up. There were tens of millions of them. They were not posting harassment on social media. They were doing something worse, from Disney’s perspective: they were staying home.

The trajectory tells the story clearly. Star Wars: The Force Awakens opened to $248 million in 2015. The Last Jedi opened to $220 million in 2017. Rise of Skywalker opened to $178 million in 2019. Solo opened to $84 million in 2018. The Mandalorian and Grogu opened to $81.7 million in 2026. The line is not ambiguous. With each installment, Disney’s claim that the backlash came from a toxic fringe became harder to sustain against the arithmetic of the actual audience.

Wayne is not a studio executive. He is a performer with a long personal investment in this property, and his frustration is understandable on a human level. But the interview he gave arrives at the same moment as his film’s third-weekend grosses, and the argument he made lands differently when the film has lost money on the franchise’s most beloved characters.

Kathleen Kennedy left Lucasfilm. The Acolyte was canceled. The Mandalorian and Grogu bombed. Every project that came wrapped in the “toxic fans” defense has underperformed or been discontinued. The audience that Disney spent ten years calling toxic was the audience that built this franchise and funded the $4 billion acquisition price that Disney paid George Lucas in 2012.

“It’s our Star Wars” is a fair statement. It is also a statement the box office has been making every weekend for three years, and the message it keeps sending is not the one Wayne intends.

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First contact with the Oridians was supposed to be humanity’s proudest moment. Instead, their chief engineer is dead, their ship is sabotaged, and an ancient alien technology is stealing souls. Book one of the Valiant Frontiers series delivers exploration, mystery, and the kind of crew you’ll want to follow across the galaxy. Read The Soul Catcher on Amazon and start the adventure.

NEXT: Russell T Davies Says Doctor Who Wasn’t Cancelled

Steven Spielberg opened his mouth on CBS this week and said something no major filmmaker has said quite so directly in a mainstream interview.

Asked by host Ben Mankiewicz whether aliens have been here, Spielberg did not deflect. He answered.

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