There’s a line in this week’s Law & Order Toronto: Criminal Intent that says more about the state of modern masculinity than the writers probably intended.

“You can’t push an entire generation of boys into the shadows and expect us to feel last century’s sun on our faces.”

It’s a hell of a line. Especially because it comes from “The Business of Boys,” an episode that treats the MANOSPHERE as something society should fear, ridicule, and ultimately despise.

The detectives sneer at its influencers, dismiss their ideas, and practically question whether free speech is worth the trouble.

But here are the questions the writers seem far less interested in asking:

WHY are so many boys looking for answers outside the institutions that raised them?

WHY are so many young men feeling unwanted and disposable in a culture that once celebrated their ambition?

And WHY does Hollywood portray the men reaching these boys as villains instead of asking what made their message appealing?

Because Hollywood has been taken over by angry, insane feminists who seem to believe the best way to empower women is to tear men down.

AND MALE HOLLYWOOD IS EMPOWERING THEM TO DO IT!

The Manosphere Didn’t Emerge From a Vacuum

The manosphere didn’t appear out of nowhere. It grew in a world where WOMEN increasingly treat masculinity as a problem to be corrected - AKA ELIMINATED - rather than a force that can be directed toward something meaningful.

Traditional masculinity gets framed as toxic. Male ambition becomes a threat. A man who stands his ground is accused of being controlling, and a man who disagrees with a woman risks being branded a misogynist.

Eventually, boys notice.

They notice when the culture celebrates female strength but treats male strength with suspicion. They notice when women are encouraged to be unapologetically themselves while boys are told to suppress or apologize for the qualities that might help them become capable, confident men.

They notice when their concerns are dismissed, their frustrations mocked, and their desire for male role models treated as something sinister.

And then Hollywood wonders why they go looking elsewhere for guidance.

But let’s remember something THE GYNOSPHERE seems determined to forget.

WE MEN BUILT THE WORLD.

We fought wars, raised families, built industries, explored the world, developed technologies, and constructed much of the infrastructure that makes modern life possible.

For generations, men took risks, endured hardship, and sacrificed their lives to protect their families and communities.

And now, because men helped make modern life safer and more comfortable, ***THE GYNOSPHERE increasingly acts as though the very sex that helped create that security is an obstacle to its liberation.***

The message is no longer simply that women deserve equal opportunities.

**It’s that men, masculinity, and the institutions shaped by generations of men must be dismantled.**

It’s DEATH TO THE PATRIARCHY THAT HELD US BACK FOR SO LONG.

Hollywood demonizes the very men whose work helped build the world they now take for granted.

But the answer isn’t to eradicate masculinity. It’s to recognize its value, encourage its best qualities, and give boys a reason to believe they have a future worth fighting for.

Hollywood can keep sneering at the manosphere, or confront the culture that helped create it.

We’re not going to apologize for being men.

And we’re not going to stay in the shadows forever.

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Byl Holte

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

Malfoid, the fan-art trend that redraws Draco Malfoy as a blonde anime girl in a Slytherin uniform, has put one X post past 21.9 million views and 174,000 likes since Sept. 22, and artists were still posting new animations this morning.

The character is not in the books, the movies or HBO’s Harry Potter series. She is a Harry Potter fan creation that has spread from art accounts into Reddit, YouTube, a fan-made dating sim and a music video.

A Slytherin Girl Who Mocks Harry and Then Blushes

The standard Malfoid has long platinum hair, a Slytherin uniform and a hoop earring. She keeps Draco’s rich-kid contempt for Harry, and the artwork usually ends with her showing a crush. Know Your Meme lists the trend as “Malfoid / Female Draco Malfoy,” with the alternate names Fem Malfoy and Draconia Malfoid.

In the post below from @infraflakes, she asks, “Don’t you have a human heart, Pot-tah?” in front of a background of “Love me, Potter” repeated down the page. The post shows 460 likes and 14,000 views.

The enemies-to-lovers setup is the draw. In a three-panel strip posted by @34kInferno, Hermione demands to know who used a slur, Harry holds a tearful Malfoid, and Ron asks, “Harry, why are you over there?” The poster’s caption reads, “If this was canon it would make $10 billion at the box office.” It has 957 likes.

One Sept. 22 Post Reached 21.9 Million Views

Female Draco art is old. Know Your Meme traces it to a Nov. 9, 2011 Tumblr post, and a March 2024 @grizz056 drawing titled “If Malfoy was a girl” passed 60,000 likes. The current wave began Sept. 22, 2026, when @redteneri posted an early Malfoid illustration. As of Oct. 12 that post shows 21.9 million views, 174,000 likes and 20,000 reposts.

The imitators followed within days. On Sept. 27, @spaz141 quote-tweeted it with a drawing of Malfoid and Hermione competing over Harry and wrote, “love triangle // hope you dont mind the tag, not even a harry potter fan but i was enamored by the eyes thus i must contribute.” That post has 45,000 likes. @masoq095 posted three versions on Sept. 29 under the single word “malfoid” and reached 126,000 likes and 1.9 million views. @yunayuispink’s Oct. 6 post shows 122,000 likes. A r/dankmemes post on Sept. 29 drew more than 1,700 upvotes in a day, and Know Your Meme added its entry on Sept. 30.

Japanese artists joined in as well. The Sept. 29 post at the top of this article, translated from Japanese, reads, “It seems it’s called Malfoid.”

The spread has not slowed. Another artist’s one-minute animation, posted the morning of Oct. 12 with the caption “Potter asked if she enjoyed the dance. #Malfoid,” shows 867,000 views and 30,000 likes.

The trend has spun off other work. A YouTube explainer from the channel Weeknight, “How ‘Malfoid’ Took Over the Internet (and Fixed Harry Potter),” has 249,000 views since Oct. 8, and ComicBookMovie.com reports a fan-made visual novel called Pure Blood & Prejudice.

The Name Joins Malfoy to an Incel Slur

The name is a blend of Malfoy and “foid,” which Know Your Meme describes as a derogatory incel term for women derived from “femoid.” The site’s explainer by Phillip Hamilton says the term does not appear to be used in this trend to call Malfoid unintelligent, and that the words were likely combined because they blend easily.

IBTimes UK reports that some people questioned why the name was chosen when “Fem Malfoy” was available, while others see a simple pun. The earliest known use of “Malfoid” for Draco, per Know Your Meme, is a text-only tweet from Jan. 10, 2026.

A Music Video, a LifeSite Column and a Bluesky Backlash

The reaction has split along the usual lines. On the right, Shad M. Brooks published a music video, “MALFOID - Be My Potter,” on the KNIGHTS WATCH YouTube channel on Oct. 9. It has more than 40,000 views. Brooks’s description calls the song a celebration of the “MALFOID fanfiction meme taking the internet by storm” and says, “I love it for its wholesome depiction of traditional romance and narrative potential.” The description also says the music and vocals were made with Suno AI and the video with Grok Imagine.

LifeSiteNews ran a column on Oct. 8 by Jonathon Van Maren under the headline “’Malfoid’ memes are the latest bizarre front in the trans war against JK Rowling.” It is an opinion piece, and the fan site malfoid.wiki disputes its account of how the trend started.

On Bluesky the response was hostile. Cybernews reported on Oct. 6 that the backlash tied the trend to Rowling’s gender views, and OtakuKart adds the name’s slur origin. The artist yunayu deleted a drawing from Bluesky, and the OtakuKart report quotes the apology: “I’ll be more thoughtful and careful in the future.” Cybernews quotes yunayu saying, “I never intended to hurt or offend anyone with my drawings.” Yunayu reposted the drawing on X, where the post has 122,000 likes.

The YouTuber SmugAlana’s reaction video, “The Malfoyd harassment backfired completely,” has 214,000 views and frames the Bluesky response as harassment of the artist.

One Malfoid post has passed 21 million views while one artist deleted a drawing and apologized after the backlash; does that tell us who the real audience for Harry Potter is?

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Six books. One unforgettable world. The Adventures of Baron Von Monocle is steampunk adventure with the kind of worldbuilding and heart that made you fall in love with fantasy in the first place. Start the series on Amazon.

The World Fantasy Convention opens in Oakland on Oct. 22, and its program reads like a convention that remembers what it is for. Robin Hobb, Robert Silverberg and Joe Haldeman are on the schedule, and most of the roughly 50 panels, talks and interviews are about how books get written, edited, designed, sold and collected.

Contrast that to Worldcon (the World Science Fiction Convention) that tagged 101 of its panels “Inclusivity” and returned zero results for “Christian.” The two conventions drew up their schedules for the same genre, and they landed in very different places.

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Hobb, Silverberg and Haldeman Fill Saturday

Robin Hobb has four slots on the schedule. On Friday at 1 p.m. she holds a kaffeeklatsch limited to ten seats. Saturday opens with a 10 a.m. panel, “Transformation: Wouldn’t You Rather Have a Talking Frog?”, built around a simple question about the trope: “People are magicked into becoming a bird, a rat becomes human; some even prefer their new state of being.” The 3 p.m. hour lists her twice, for a reading and for a sword-and-sorcery panel with Steven Boyett, Ellen Kushner and Madeleine Robins on Robert E. Howard’s Agnes the Sword Woman.

Saturday afternoon belongs to the veterans. Robert Silverberg is interviewed by Richard Wolinsky at 3 p.m., and Joe Haldeman sits down with Wolinsky at 5 p.m. Haldeman returns Sunday at 10 a.m. for a panel on speculative poetry alongside poet guest of honor Linda Addison. Silverberg and Haldeman each get an hour of conversation with no signing line attached, so the room is there to hear them talk.

The rest of the bill is stocked the same way. Peter S. Beagle holds a kaffeeklatsch on Friday and Kim Stanley Robinson reads Saturday. Tad Williams, Nancy Kress, Karen Joy Fowler and Cecelia Holland take the historical fantasy panel, and Paolo Bacigalupi, Ellen Datlow and Sharon Shinn are all programmed. A convention that books working novelists and editors at this density has earned credit for it.

A Program Built Around the Book as an Object

The panel list reads like a working writer’s syllabus. “Mapping Fantastic Worlds, Or Why Are Those Mountains There?” asks:

“What’s with the chasm of knife-sharp rocks? Is that a lake or just a stagnant mere? Why is there an impenetrable forest?”

“Fantastic Food – Can your Army March on its Stomach?” covers provisioning an elvish army and keeping magical librarians fed through the winter. “Red Ink is Our Medium: Editing as an Art Form” puts Ellen Datlow and Nick Mamatas in a room to discuss a relationship that “can be a match made in heaven, or a deal with the devil.” Saturday adds a panel on John Crowley’s Little, Big that asks what makes a classic, a swordplay demonstration for fiction writers and a session on cover design called “The Cat on the Cover Made Me Buy It!”

The book trade gets its own hours. “Brick & Mortar in the 21st Century” brings in DreamHaven Books and Dark Carnival to explain what keeps specialty stores open. A librarians’ panel asks why people collect books, a magazine panel with the editors of Weird Tales and F&SF covers the role of magazines, and the American Bookbinders Museum runs two hands-on workshops where attendees bind a book. Friday night ends with a mass autographing session open to every published author.

The convention has a theme of its own, “Reimagined Identities & Fantastic Literature,” and some panels follow it. “Fantasy and Horror Writing: An Act of Resistance” takes on fascism and nationalism, and “Anti-Imperialist Themes in 21st Century Fantasy and Horror” opens with this:

“Though fantasy and horror historically often skewed towards a conservative longing for a ‘time that never was,’ many of the 21st century’s most exciting and engaging works have had strong anti-imperialist themes.”

By the descriptions, about six of the roughly 50 programmed items take identity or politics as their subject. The rest are about craft, books and the people who make them.

Worldcon’s Schedule Went the Other Way

Fandom Pulse reported that Worldcon 2026 tagged 101 panels “Inclusivity,” while a search of the full program schedule for “Christian” returned zero results. The panels behind the tag include “Let’s Get Physical: Positive Body Representation in SFF,” “Time-Traveling Lesbians Save the Universe,” “Decolonizing D&D” and “Reading Is Political: SFF as Political Conversation.” The last of those states its premise in the title.

Neither convention schedules a Christian fantasy panel. The difference is what fills the schedule around that absence. Worldcon’s program carries an identity tag and fills 101 slots under it. World Fantasy’s fills its hours with the work: maps, food, editing, cover design, bookstores and collecting.

The same names show up on both. Annalee Newitz appears on Worldcon’s program and also joins Ted Chiang at WFC on “What Are We Going to Do about AI?”, a panel with this stated goal: “to explain/dispel common myths about LLMs and to have experts discuss rewarding human creativity in an age of generative slop.” Newitz is the same author in both places, and the two programs ask her to talk about different things.

If a convention can fill most of its schedule with editing, cover art, map-making and bookselling, why did Worldcon need 101 panels tagged Inclusivity?

One of the strange scandals surrounding the end of the Doctor Who era at Disney Plus is former showrunner Russell T. Davies, who’s 63 years old, engaging in a homosexual relationship with a 27-year-old fan that began with Instagram flirting during the show’s tenure. As Davies is about to release his autobiography, The Queerest of Folk, he is bizarrely giving interviews stating that people are accusing him of being a groomer and a pedophile, which raises eyebrows about the age gap and the timing.

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Popverse is losing its editorial news operation this month, becoming the latest casualty in a string of geek media closures tied to the collapse of the old online advertising model. ReedPop laid off Popverse’s editorial staff and confirmed the site will no longer function as a news platform, four and a half years after it launched in May 2022 as a companion to ReedPop’s convention business.

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ReedPop tried to soften the announcement. “Popverse is not shutting down. While Popverse will no longer serve as an editorial news platform, we remain committed to our original mission to provide our passionate fans with a hub for content, community, and fandom in all its forms,” the company said. What survives is the convention-adjacent shell: presale tickets, photo ops, autographs, merchandise discounts, streaming panels. The news desk that actually covered the industry is gone, and the people who staffed it are out of a job. ReedPop has not commented further, and Popverse employees declined to comment when reached.

This is not an isolated event. Newsarama, a comics news outlet running since 1998, effectively ended in April 2026 when parent company Future PLC laid off its last remaining staff writer, George Marston, after 17 years at the site. “After 17 years, I am no longer writing for Newsarama,” Marston wrote. “I am devastated. My career is my passion.” Newsarama had already been folded into GamesRadar’s comics vertical years earlier, shedding staff at every step until there was nobody left to cut.

Independent outlets have taken the same hit from a different direction. Giant Freakin Robot, which built a readership of more than 20 million monthly visitors by 2021 and 2022, saw its traffic collapse to a few thousand a month after Google’s search algorithm shifted to favor large media brands over independent publishers. Founder Josh Tyler shut the site down as a standalone publication and moved what remained of the operation to YouTube.

The mechanism behind all of it is the same one gutting the open web generally. Google’s AI Overviews now appear in roughly 26% of all searches, and publishers report their click-through rate falling from around 15% on a standard search result to roughly 8% once an AI summary sits above the link. Some sites have lost 20% to 60% of their traffic to this shift alone. AdSense revenue tracked the same collapse: publishers reported drops of 50% to 90% in a single stretch in January 2026, with one operator watching daily earnings fall from $500 to $35. Google’s own systems experienced what the company itself described as “systemic decline in Ad Exchange match rates and delivery.” Whether the traffic loss comes from AI Overviews answering the question before a reader ever clicks through, or from Google’s search algorithm simply favoring bigger names, the effect on a mid-size or independent outlet is the same: the audience stops showing up, and the ad revenue that paid the staff disappears with it.

Popverse, Newsarama, and Giant Freakin Robot are three different business models, run by three different kinds of owner, hit by the same forces from different angles. Geek media outlets that spent the last two decades built entirely around Google search traffic and display advertising are finding out in real time that the foundation under that model is gone.

How many more of these outlets are still standing on the same foundation, and how long before the rest of them find out the same way?

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Sydney Sweeney’s newest ad campaign, for sports-prediction platform Novig, has the actress appearing fully or partially nude across a 60-second spot, covered only by footballs, basketballs, a soccer ball, and hockey equipment, while joking to camera, “You can’t trade this. I just look good here.” Sweeney isn’t just the face of the campaign either, she’s a strategic partner and equity holder in Novig itself. The ad, part of the company’s “Just Sports” campaign launched September 9, has already racked up over a million likes on Instagram, and it’s sparked real backlash from female athletes who say it sexualizes women’s sports, including Canadian skier Cassidy Gray, who called it “idiotic” and “senseless” in a viral TikTok, and UK athlete Lucy Davis, who wrote: “I don’t know wtf Sydney Sweeney was doing, but it’s 2026. Stop sexualizing women in sport.”

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The predictable reflex from a large slice of conservative media was to treat that backlash as just more of the same script that played out with Sweeney’s American Eagle “jeans” campaign in 2025, feminists and progressives losing their minds over a beautiful woman, right on cue. Author and commentator Mike Cernovich named the pattern directly on X: “Sydney Sweeney is a loophole for conservatives to post borderline pornography. Much like the obsession with ‘gun girls in bikinis.’” TheQuartering, a large conservative YouTube commentator, posted the reflexive take himself: “Women mad at Sydney Sweeny for using what God gave her to promote stuff are just admitting they think they are ugly.”

That’s where Melonie Mac stepped in, and where this actually gets interesting. Rather than piling onto the ad or staying quiet, Mac posted a direct, faith-first rebuke of her own side’s instinct to defend the content just because it triggered the right people: “I will not compromise my faith to ‘own the libs.’ Without Christ, Liberals and Conservatives are both evil.” No hedging, no culture-war framing, just a flat refusal to let tribal loyalty override an actual moral standard.

What happened next is the part that almost never happens on social media. TheQuartering didn’t dig in or ignore her. He publicly reversed his own position, quote-tweeting Mac directly: “You know what, I was wrong. @MelonieMac is right. Sydney Sweeny sharing soft-core garbage, just because the libs are big mad, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t call it out for what it is.” That’s a large, established commentator admitting on the record, in public, that a smaller creator changed his mind through a straightforward moral argument, not a pile-on, not a ratio, an actual conversation that moved someone.

Mac’s win here matters beyond just one influencer changing one opinion. Cernovich’s framing captures exactly why the “beautiful women being attacked” defense was always a weak foundation to build on: it’s not really about defending Sweeney from unfair criticism, it’s about finding cover to promote content that, stripped of the political framing, is simply soft-core advertising, whether it’s Sweeney with a hockey net or “gun girls in bikinis” content that’s been recycled through conservative media spaces for years. Conservatives shouldn’t want women objectifying themselves like this. It isn’t good for the culture, whichever side is cheering it on, and it certainly isn’t a Christian standard just because the people criticizing it happen to be progressives this particular week.

Mac didn’t win this argument by being the loudest voice in the room. She won it by refusing to let political tribalism replace an actual moral compass, and by being willing to say so plainly even knowing it would cut against her own side’s instinctive reaction. Getting someone with TheQuartering’s platform to publicly say “I was wrong” is a genuinely rare outcome online, where digging in is almost always the default. This is what it looks like when it goes the other way.

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BasedCon is a small science fiction and fantasy convention in West Michigan, founded in 2021 by novelist Robert Kroese as an alternative to Worldcon and the rest of institutional fandom.

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The pitch was simple: A room for right-leaning and libertarian writers that would not run an ideological screening at the door. Unfortunately, in 2025, that room closed on Jon Del Arroz.

Jon is a conservative Christian science fiction author and, of course, the main writer/editor of Fandom Pulse. When it came to BasedCon, the fight on X is the record. Jon posted that he had been banned. There are tweets, quote-tweets, a refund image, and recaps after the fact. And while I cannot sit as a judge over whose private memory is clean, I can quote what they posted.

Jon’s line on X:

“Why did you tell me I would not be allowed to attend in the first place? Rob Kroese is a cancel pig.”

“Except they ban conservative authors. Even Worldcon isn’t doing that anymore.”

“It’s better that you’re not affiliated with this canceled convention that hates right wing /Christian authors like myself.”

Kroese’s line on X:

“And note that he bought a ticket (the cheapest option, of course) after I told him he would not be allowed to attend, because all he knows how to do is jump in front of trains and then play victim.”

“Since a certain author is still spreading lies about me, saying I ‘stole’ his money after he bought a ticket to BasedCon, here’s the record of me reversing the charge 27 minutes after he made it.”

“He also bought a ticket after I told him he was not welcome. I immediately refunded it and then he repeatedly lied that I had ‘stolen’ his money. He’s a lying psychopathic piece of shit.”

“The other funny thing about this is that he bought the cheapest ticket he could… because he never actually intended to come; he was hoping I’d keep his money even though he was banned so that he could accuse me of stealing from him. Then after I returned his money he accused me anyway because he’s a grifting piece of shit.”

“JDA is banned because he’s a psychopathic asshole.”

“He was banned for being a huge fag.”

“I’ll ban jerks from BasedCon all day and there isn’t a damn thing you can do about it.”

Consider Worldcon 76. In 2018 they barred Jon from the floor. The committee cut his membership from attending to supporting and said he had “made it clear that he fully intends to break our code of conduct.” He sued. They settled. He today still brings it up: “You’d think after I sued WorldCon and won they’d stop.”

BasedCon was built as the answer to that kind of machine. Kroese’s pitch was an alternative to Worldcon: None of this inclusivity stuff and no committee deciding who was too politically radioactive to stand in the hall. The name itself was supposed to be its own claim to fame. But now, ironically, he alternative con is the one posting the ban on Jon. Jon’s even joked about the irony: “Except they ban conservative authors. Even Worldcon isn’t doing that anymore.”

The Ticket

After the ban was already public, the fight moved to money. Jon bought a BasedCon ticket even though Kroese says he had already told Jon he could not attend. Jon says he bought the ticket to show he would show up and debate but later posted that Kroese had taken the money and would not give it back. Kroese posted a screenshot of a refund and said Jon was lying.

Jon’s posted claim:

“Ask Rob why I’m too ‘scary’ and banned from BasedCon. Then ask him why he stole my ticket money and won’t refund it. Dude is worse than SFWA/Worldcon.”

“Why did you tell me I would not be allowed to attend in the first place? Rob Kroese is a cancel pig.”

Kroese’s posted reply:

“And note that he bought a ticket (the cheapest option, of course) after I told him he would not be allowed to attend, because all he knows how to do is jump in front of trains and then play victim.”

“Since a certain author is still spreading lies about me, saying I ‘stole’ his money after he bought a ticket to BasedCon, here’s the record of me reversing the charge 27 minutes after he made it.”

“He also bought a ticket after I told him he was not welcome. I immediately refunded it and then he repeatedly lied that I had ‘stolen’ his money. He’s a lying psychopathic piece of shit.”

“The other funny thing about this is that he bought the cheapest ticket he could (the regular ticket includes meals but we have a cheaper option for people with food sensitivities) because he never actually intended to come; he was hoping I’d keep his money even though he was banned so that he could accuse me of stealing from him. Then after I returned his money he accused me anyway because he’s a grifting piece of shit.”

That is the ticket record as posted on X. Jon said the money was taken and not refunded. Kroese posted a screenshot of a reversal twenty-seven minutes after the purchase and called Jon a liar. However, the point of laying the posts out is not to pick a winner. An outsider can play armchair bank examiner with those two memories and still not know whose card statement is clean. But that is not the real issue here. The banning and the refund fight only exist because a door was already shut between these two.

Where It All Started

The spark that both sides still name is the Satanic Panic exchange. It started on X in January 2025.

Jon wrote:

“There was never a Satanic Panic. It was a mainstream media psyop to remove Christianity from the culture. That’s why our culture sucks now, because boomers fell for it. Don’t be like boomers.”

Kroese quote-tweeted him:

“There was absolutely a satanic panic. People wanted to ban D&D and heavy metal music. I was there.”

“I knew people who burned their D&D books. We had a school assembly where they taught us to see the devil in ice cubes in liquor ads.”

The next day Jon posted:

“Dungeons & Dragons is satanic. We must destroy it for good, like we’re an adventure party fighting evil monsters. Are you going to join the quest?”

Kroese quote-tweeted that against the first claim:

“‘There was never a Satanic Panic’ / ‘Dungeons & Dragons is satanic’ / You’re an absolute clown, Jon.”

Jon answered by shifting the target from the 1980s panic to the current company:

“Why are you simping for the objectively evil Wizards of the Coast company which is pushing satanic LGBTQ propaganda on gamers? So much for ‘based con’ guy. Just another Woke propagandist. You’re all fake.”

That is the posted argument.

Herman P. Hunter posted a chronology. Kroese marked it “Accurate.”

“This whole feud started when Jon claimed that there was no Satanic Panic. Rob mocked him for it. Then Jon threatened to show up and demand to debate Rob. In short, creating a scene. That’s what got Jon banned. No one there wanted that kind of drama.”

That last sentence is the whole case. You do not need a verdict on who lied about the ticket, nor on whether the 1980s panic was a psyop or a real moral panic. The posted reason for keeping Jon out of the building is that a debate would be “a scene.” Jon said he would show up and argue the point. The response was a ban.

So why wouldn’t you just debate him, Kroese? What are you worried about? That he might be correct about something?

Guess who else is allergic to debate? The left. The same progressives BasedCon, ostensibly, tries to dissociate itself from. For the left, debate risks a public that will not stay inside their narrative. So what did the left do? They established their “safe spaces,” where they could close their ears and minds to any outside “drama.” BasedCon is using the same vocabulary: Keep your dissenting reading of my franchise out of these halls so we can maintain our consensus. That is why the centrist-lib types are not really a third position. The consensus mob runs on feminine traits. They want a consistently lower room temperature, where they can preserve the feeling of “getting along” rather than confront anything that might hurt their feelings.

To be fair, Jon can be exhausting on X. But his posts still leave one question standing: If a convention that names itself “Based” cannot survive one man demanding a debate over Dungeons & Dragons, then the name on the banner is just pretentious nonsense.

If “based” means anything to these people, why is the argument not allowed in the room?

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Jacksepticeye (Seán McLoughlin), a high-energy Irish YouTuber who spent a decade selling Let’s Plays, charity streams, and a family-friendly brand, recently dropped a line on stream: “You look like Charlie Kirk. You want to get Kirked?” After the clip spread and comments piled up, the line disappeared from the uploaded video. The raw footage did not.

A year after Charlie Kirk was killed at a Utah campus, the internet has turned his death into a running gag. “Get Kirked” is now slang. But this is not a debate about dark humor. 9/11 jokes still exist, and school shooting jokes also exist. The distinction here is which corpses are allowed to stay sacred and which ones get laughed at. Sensitivity is selective and consensus-based. The same accounts that treat Kirk’s assassination as fair game treat any joke about their own martyrs as stochastic terrorism.

After the clip leaked, Coyota (@Berryslushie56) sneered that the “edgy” right had suddenly become snowflakes. “People joke about 9/11, school shootings, etc. Why is Kirk the exception?” Asmongold answered the actual question: No one objects to jokes about Kirk, but they object to the people making them who are not joking. The probability Seán would laugh at a George Floyd joke? Zero. Seán's own history makes the slip obvious. After his father died in 2021, he uploaded Loss and called people who posted memes about it “absolute scum.”

Here's a simpler argument: The edit answers its own defense. If it was just a harmless joke, the kind everyone is supposedly allowed to make, then there was no reason to cut it. End of story.

Consider Seán’s résumé. He is no longer only a YouTuber who can shrug off a bad take. In 2025 he voiced Punch Up in Dispatch, the narrative superhero game that also featured Aaron Paul, Laura Bailey, Matthew Mercer, and MoistCr1TiKaL (Charlie White). He returned as Shawn Flynn in Bendy: Lone Wolf. In 2026 he has a credited role in 007: First Light, a cameo in Markiplier’s Iron Lung, and a co-producer credit on the announced Bloodborne film. His worksheet is getting longer. That is usually the moment people get quieter, not looser. “You want to get Kirked?” reads like a man who thinks the credits have made him too big for his breeches. Too often we have seen the same institutions that police “harmful rhetoric” look the other way whenever the target is someone they already despised. Too often we have seen the speech rules they enforce on everyone else are never applied to themselves.

So, if it was only a joke, why cut it? And if the same line had been aimed at someone like George Floyd, would Seán still have a growing list of studio credits? Or would the clip have ended his career?

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The fight over who controls Warner Bros. Discovery has been running for nearly a year, and it’s reached the point where nobody outside the lawyers involved can keep the timeline straight without a scorecard. Here’s the full picture, start to now.

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It began as a Netflix deal. Warner Bros. Discovery had agreed to sell its Streaming & Studios business to Netflix, with WBD spinning off its Global Linear Networks and other cable assets into a separate company. Paramount Skydance, under CEO David Ellison, swooped in with a competing all-cash offer. WBD’s own board eventually determined Paramount’s bid was a “Company Superior Proposal” under the terms of its Netflix agreement, and after months of dueling offers, Paramount raised its bid to $31.00 per share in cash for the entire company. On February 27, 2026, Paramount and WBD signed a definitive merger agreement, an all-cash deal valued around $110 to $111 billion, guaranteed in part by the Lawrence J. Ellison Revocable Trust, David Ellison’s father Larry Ellison’s own trust. The agreement carried real teeth built in from day one: if the deal wasn’t closed by September 30, 2026, Paramount would owe WBD shareholders a “ticking fee” of $0.25 per share every quarter until closing, worth roughly $650 million a quarter, or about $7 million a day. If the deal collapsed entirely, Paramount would owe a $7 billion breakup fee.

Regulators moved fast on the merger itself. The Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division cleared it in June 2026, and European regulators granted their own approval shortly after. On paper, the deal looked done.

Then, on July 13, 2026, a coalition of state attorneys general filed suit to block it. Led by California’s Rob Bonta and joined by New York’s Letitia James along with AGs from Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, and Washington, twelve states in total, plus the Writers Guild of America as a co-plaintiff, the suit argued the combined company would violate the century-old Clayton Antitrust Act by controlling nearly a third of the film industry and nearly a third of basic cable TV programming in the country. Bonta’s public statement was blunt: the merger “would lead to higher prices, lower quality, and less content for film and television, harming movie theaters, basic cable distributors, and ultimately, audiences on every sofa and movie theater seat in the U.S.”

The judge overseeing the case, Araceli Martinez-Olguín, granted a temporary restraining order pausing the deal. Paramount agreed to delay closing to as late as June 2027 rather than fight the order outright, a decision that immediately started running up the ticking-fee clock, and a trial date was set for March 2027.

That’s when things turned genuinely adversarial. On August 17, Paramount filed a motion demanding the plaintiff states and the WGA post a $1.88 billion bond, specifically $1,884,726,092.73, to cover what the company called the “extraordinary losses” it would suffer from the delay: an estimated $1.3 billion in unrecoverable ticking fees by the time trial concludes, plus roughly $190 million in additional financing costs. Bonta’s office didn’t hold back in response, calling the move a “do-over” attempt and telling CNN it “reeks of desperation.” Antitrust experts reading the filing largely agreed it looked less like a genuine legal claim and more like a pressure tactic aimed at forcing the states toward a pre-trial settlement rather than dragging this out to a March trial. Judge Martinez-Olguín set a hearing on the bond request for September 24, and as of this writing that request is still unresolved, sitting just days before the October 1 ticking-fee deadline hits.

Settlement talk has been circulating since late August without producing an actual resolution. Bonta told CNBC on August 20 that any settlement would require “robust structural remedies,” changes to the actual shape of the merger, not just a monetary concession, and analysts have warned those remedies might be dealbreakers Paramount simply won’t accept. The two sides reportedly met for preliminary talks around August 24, but by most accounts remain far apart, and part of that meeting was simply part of the standard pretrial mediation process the judge had already ordered, not a sign of genuine movement toward a deal. As of early September, Deadline reported there was still “no real settlement talks underway” in any substantive sense heading into the September 24 bond hearing.

Paramount has also been playing hardball off the legal record. The company has floated, and gotten mocked for, the idea of relocating operations out of California entirely, to Texas, Tennessee, or Georgia, if meaningful settlement talks haven’t started by October 1, the same date the ticking fees kick in. That threat sits alongside a Democratic push for closer scrutiny of David Ellison personally amid the fight, and separate reporting that federal film and TV tax credits, an issue Adam Schiff has said remains unresolved with active White House involvement, are tangled up in the broader industry politics surrounding this deal.

The fight has also spilled well outside the courtroom. This outlet has covered the parallel battle between Paramount and actor Mark Ruffalo, who has spent months publicly campaigning against the merger and tying the Ellison family’s business interests to Oracle’s work with Israel’s military. Paramount accused Ruffalo of invoking antisemitic tropes; more than 170 Jewish artists, including Joel Coen, Tony Kushner, and Joaquin Phoenix, responded with an open letter defending him and calling the accusation “a false and dangerous weaponization” of the charge. That fight is running on its own track but is very much part of the same broader story about how contentious this merger has become.

And most recently, the fight has escalated to a level most merger disputes never reach: the Supreme Court has ordered the blue-state AG coalition to respond to a formal objection filed by Iowa and Montana, two states not part of the original lawsuit, pushing back on the antitrust case itself. That’s an unusual wrinkle, outside states weighing in against the plaintiffs, and it’s added yet another layer to a fight that already involves a dozen state governments, a national actors’ guild, a federal antitrust trial, a $1.88 billion bond dispute, and now the nation’s highest court.

Where it stands right now: no settlement, no resolved bond ruling, a September 24 hearing bearing down fast, an October 1 deadline for both the ticking fees and Paramount’s stated settlement ultimatum, and a March 2027 trial still on the calendar if none of that produces a deal first. Nothing about this is close to resolved. It’s just gotten a lot more expensive to stay unresolved.

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Commentators like The Critical Drinker have built large audiences by formerly mocking franchise mismanagement. There was a time when that kind of criticism landed well with viewers and grew his channel. While many of his complaints were surface-level in substance, viewers latched onto the sentiments expressed as some kind of traditional zeal against progressive politics. Many left-wing observers frequently label him as right-wing or even conservative simply for opposing progressive media. However, if one digs a little deeper into his commentary, one will find his beliefs align more with the Left than the Right.

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This topic is worth addressing because of the real influence Will Jordan (Drinker) has accumulated. Millions of people treat his videos as more than casual entertainment; they take his cultural diagnoses seriously. He regularly appears alongside other prominent commentators, collaborates with organizations, and shapes discourse far beyond his own channel. The “I’m just an entertainer” or “it’s only my opinion” framing does not cancel that influence. When enough people treat the commentary as meaningful, and when the commentator himself engages with political and cultural institutions, the ideas themselves become fair game for examination.

Jordan frames his standards as neutral and craft-based rather than political or subjective. In interviews, he has said he approaches reviewing “from a politically neutral standpoint,” that he wants to “review on its own merits,” and that he refuses to dismiss a film simply because it is liberal or conservative. He consistently invokes a set of practical standards (setup and payoff, consistent character logic, earned development, etc.) and treats them as obvious measures of quality. While he attempts to contrast older films with modern failures, he never explains where the standards for those films come from, how they developed, or (most importantly) why they should be authoritative beyond the claim that he believes they produced better entertainment.

Ultimately, there is no sustained appeal to any defined principles of storytelling or film theory. Jordan has never even invoked a specific cultural or moral tradition, much less a detailed historical argument about why older practices were superior on any deeper grounds than a matter of personal taste. His standards are presented as self-evident.

https://www.hollywoodintoto.com/critical-drinker-interview-woke-movies/

Note that he explicitly refuses to dismiss a film simply because it is liberal or conservative and that he will not discount stories or viewpoints merely for falling on one side of the political spectrum. In his eyes, both the Left and the Right are just “viewpoints” to be weighed by craft rather than by truth. This reduces the culture war to nothing more than optional flavors of content consumption rather than competing accounts of reality.

Jordan also consistently frames the problem with media as execution. He repeatedly refers to the heavy-handed “Message,” which is his catch-all for progressive identity politics, virtue signaling, and ideology overriding story/character. He objects when studios lecture to you (surface-layer stuff), but he does not outright reject the deeper progressive premises that make those practices seem legitimate in the first place. For instance, he acknowledges the idea that there has been some historical underrepresentation of certain identity groups which has created an ongoing moral debt that must be repaid through preferential casting, hiring, or narrative focus. This means that he views said “representation” itself as a primary artistic good. Just so long as the movie doesn't announce it.

When he talks about people who “never got their shot,” he is describing the progressive claim that certain groups were systematically excluded and therefore deserve compensatory inclusion now. By treating that claim as the background reality (and only criticizing the clumsy or reverse-discriminatory ways it is applied), he leaves the premise unchallenged. That is a tacit acceptance of the Left’s framing of history and justice, even if he rejects the most aggressive applications of it. A more thorough critique would question whether the historical narrative itself is accurate or relevant as a guide for current creative decisions.

Jordan treated the Bill/Frank episode of HBO's The Last of Us (“Long, Long Time”) as good television. He praised the episode for its writing, performances, and emotional weight. However, he did not treat the fact that Bill and Frank were homosexuals as something requiring comment, much less a moral evaluation. He did not frame the relationship as a positive or negative development in cultural terms at all; in fact, he simply proceeded as if the homosexuality was just another background detail. That silence is the data that reveals the operating assumption: adult homosexual relationships are already normalized and outside the realm of live moral or cultural dispute. The only variables that still matter to him are the quality of writing and whether the material stops to lecture you about its progressivism.

Jordan's commentary doesn't come from a traditional conservative posture nor is it a classical Christian one. Instead, his is the posture of someone whose moral baseline was set by the post-1990s liberal settlement in which sexual liberalism had already been largely accepted, and the remaining fights were over how explicit the activism ought to be. Traditional right-wingers and conservatives who treat influencers like the Critical Drinker as some kind of cultural ally should register this clearly. While the shared opposition to the progressive heavy-handed “Message” creates an appearance of common ground, Jordan's silence on the actual substance of progressivism itself reveals where his true allegiances lie. Despite his insistence that he does not critique on political grounds, his operating assumption is that adult homosexual relationships are normal and outside the realm of moral or cultural dispute. The only variable that matters to him in that regard is whether the material lectures him about it. Otherwise, the sodomy passes without remark.

This is one of the main difficulties when engaging anyone who operates in a contemporary centrist-libertarian mode. They will insist they are not political and that they simply want good stories judged on craft. Yet they almost never question the deeper progressive assumptions that now govern how identity is handled in entertainment. This includes assumptions about sexuality and traditional moral frameworks. People like Jordan operate based on the premise that underlying progressive assumptions are settled background reality rather than politically charged, contested claims. In practice, he is working inside a progressive framework that he has already accepted as given, even while presenting himself as neutral.

The reason we will never roll the culture back to 2005 or 1998 or whenever Jordan believes movies were "better" is because society has moved the moral center of gravity away from any residual Christian influence. Media that once operated under a broadly Christian (or at least traditionalist) canopy was essentially rendered a politically and ideologically neutral commercial product before it was eventually and inevitably updated according to the evolving tastes of the educated progressive class. And Jordan tacitly accepts this mode of thinking, which means that he is in no position to contest its contemporary iterations as any kind of culture war "ally."

There is no public evidence that Will Jordan is a Christian. He has never spoken about personal faith, church involvement, Christian belief, or any theological commitments. While he wants the residual comforts and cultural amenities that a broadly Christian society once produced, he remains uninterested in (or actively detached from) the Christ who made those amenities possible. He wants coherent storytelling and competent male heroes who face real adversity, and yet he fails to acknowledge that those ideals are downstream of a culture that flourished for centuries under a Christian moral and anthropological framework. Jordan's posture is one that enjoys the fruit while declining the root.

What do you make of this pattern among anti-woke cultural critics? Is the centrist-libertarian posture a useful temporary alliance, or does it ultimately limit any meaningful pushback on the culture war front?

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Warner Bros. Discovery, the parent company of DC Studios, HBO, CNN, and Cartoon Network, remains legally frozen inside Paramount Skydance’s $111 billion acquisition attempt after a federal judge scheduled the antitrust trial that will decide the deal’s fate for March 2027. The ruling, issued Tuesday by Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín of the Northern District of California, pushes final resolution of the biggest media merger in a generation more than a year past its original closing target and leaves DC Studios, Cartoon Network, and every other Warner property under a corporate cloud through at least the middle of next year.

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The fight has pulled in Oracle founder Larry Ellison’s personal fortune, a spiked “60 Minutes” segment, twelve state attorneys general defying the Trump administration’s own Department of Justice, and the Writers Guild of America. Here is how it got here.

Paramount Skydance’s pursuit of Warner Bros. Discovery began quietly in September 2025 with an informal offer near $19 a share. Warner’s board rejected it within days, calling the price too low. Paramount came back on September 30 with $22 a share and a $2 billion termination fee attached. Warner kept looking.

In November 2025, Warner’s board passed over both Paramount and a competing bid from Comcast to sign a $72 billion agreement with Netflix, valued at $27.75 a share for Warner’s studio and streaming operations. The cable networks, including CNN, TNT, and Discovery, were slated to spin off into a separate public company called Discovery Global.

Paramount refused to accept the loss. On December 8, the company launched a hostile tender offer straight to Warner shareholders: $108 billion, $30 a share, all cash, for the whole company. Warner’s board unanimously rejected it nine days later, calling the offer “inadequate” and warning it carried “significant risks” for shareholders, largely because the board doubted Paramount’s financing was solid.

Paramount answered the financing question on December 22 by putting Larry Ellison’s personal fortune on the table. The Oracle co-founder, whose net worth then sat near $243 billion, agreed to personally guarantee $40.4 billion of the deal’s equity and raised Paramount’s breakup fee to $5.8 billion, matching Netflix’s offer. The per-share price stayed at $30.

That same weekend, CBS News, which Paramount already owned, pulled a “60 Minutes” segment titled “Inside CECOT” hours before it was set to air. CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss made the call. Correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi, who reported the piece on the El Salvador prison, called the decision political. Weiss had been installed atop CBS News after Paramount bought her outlet, The Free Press, and the incident became a preview of the argument critics would make for the rest of the fight: that David Ellison’s ownership of news organizations comes with an editorial thumb on the scale.

Warner’s board rejected Paramount’s amended bid anyway on January 7, sticking with Netflix for a second time. Paramount kept pushing. On February 24, Warner granted Paramount a seven-day waiver to negotiate under the terms of the Netflix agreement after Paramount filed a new proposal. Three days later, on February 27, Paramount and Warner announced a signed, definitive merger agreement worth $111 billion, or $31 a share, terminating the Netflix deal outright.

Through the spring and summer, the deal cleared more than a dozen national regulators, including the European Commission, which is expected to approve it on condition that Paramount exit its joint venture with Universal Pictures, along with regulators in China and South Africa. The U.S. Department of Justice approved the merger in June.

Twelve Democratic state attorneys general, led by California’s Rob Bonta, filed suit anyway on July 13, arguing the combined company would violate Section 7 of the Clayton Act by controlling roughly 27% of wide-release theatrical distribution and giving one company outsized power over basic cable licensing. Bonta said the merger would put “one company in charge of nearly one-third of all theatrical motion picture and basic cable programming.”

The Writers Guild of America East and West filed a separate suit the next day, arguing the merger would make the combined company the largest buyer of film and television writing in the country, with the power to suppress wages and cut jobs. WGA East president Tom Fontana called the potential damage “an absolute, unmitigated disaster.” Paramount responded that a “stronger Hollywood only means something if it’s stronger for the writers who power it,” pledging more development slates and more greenlights under the merged company.

A federal judge granted a temporary restraining order in late July, and on July 24, Paramount agreed to delay closing the deal until after trial, or until June 1, 2027, whichever comes first. Both companies’ stock slid on the announcement.

While the legal fight played out in court, a separate threat emerged to the deal’s financial foundation. Oracle stock has fallen roughly 34% over the past month amid growing doubts about whether the company’s enormous AI infrastructure spending will pay off. That collapse has erased an estimated $213 billion from Larry Ellison’s net worth, cutting it from a peak near $388 billion to roughly $175 billion and dropping him from the world’s second-richest person to around eighth. Because his personal guarantee behind the Warner deal rests on his Oracle holdings, the stock’s slide has quietly weakened the exact backstop that got Warner’s board to say yes in the first place.

David Ellison stayed mostly quiet on the lawsuits until Tuesday, when he published an op-ed in the New York Times arguing the states’ case is not really about market share but about control of CNN. “I believe this fight is not really about market share,” Ellison wrote. “If it were, it wouldn’t have been reviewed and approved by regulators reflecting 65 countries, including the United States, the European Union and China. I believe a plainer worry sits beneath the briefs and the news releases: the news. The issue is whether I can be trusted as a steward of Warner’s CNN.”

Ellison disclosed that the combined company would account for less than 20% of American watch time, dropping to roughly 13% when YouTube is included, and would represent 18% of the domestic box office over the past twelve months. He also addressed the Bari Weiss speculation directly, writing that he does not “aspire to lead these companies to bend their newsrooms to my views” and that he has voted for candidates of both parties. One commenter on the piece was unconvinced, noting that the lawsuit involves considerably more than one state attorney general and that Ellison’s op-ed said nothing about the unions opposing the deal.

Around the same time, Ellison held his first in-person town hall with Warner Bros. Discovery’s senior leadership, addressing roughly 160 executives at the Steven J. Ross Theater on Warner’s Burbank lot and another 300 by videoconference. He called the process “turbulent” but said that part was “now behind us,” praised HBO as “the gold standard in television,” and cited an expected $6 billion in cost savings from the merger without committing to a specific number of layoffs.

Every property inside Warner Bros. Discovery, including DC Studios, now operates under a corporate parent that will not know its final ownership structure until at least the spring of 2027. Prior reporting on Ellison’s stated plans indicated he intended to keep DC Studios’ existing leadership in place and combine HBO Max with Paramount+ into a single streaming service rather than break up the creative divisions, though those were pre-deal statements made before the current legal fight began and carry no binding weight now.

The trial itself will run twelve court days, from March 2 through March 19, 2027, with a final pretrial conference set for February 24 of that year. Until then, Warner Bros. Discovery operates in the same limbo it has occupied since the lawsuits landed: still legally independent, still facing the possibility of a merger that would fold it into the studio behind CBS, still waiting on a court date more than a year away.

If Paramount wins in March, does the company that inherits DC Studios look anything like the one that exists today, or does a fourteen-month delay give Warner’s board time to find a way out?

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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.

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Elizabeth Moon will appear at ArmadilloCon 48 in Austin, Texas, September 11-13, and for a writer who almost never works the convention circuit, that alone makes the show worth circling on the calendar. The con’s announcement read in full:

“ArmadilloCon #48 - Sept 11-13, 2026. Special Appearance by Elizabeth Moon. Elizabeth Moon grew up on the Texas border, served three years of active duty in the USMC (1968-71), and now lives with her husband, also a veteran, near Austin, Texas. She has published more than twenty-five novels, including Nebula Award winner The Speed of Dark, Hugo finalist Remnant Population, and the enduring epic fantasy series The Chronicles of Paksenarrion. She has published more than fifty short-fiction pieces in anthologies and magazines and in four of her own short-fiction collections, most recently Moon Flights and Deeds of Honor. When not writing, Moon enjoys photographing native plants and wildlife, knitting socks, and cooking.”

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According to Moon’s own site, her last convention appearance of any kind was ArmadilloCon in 2024. That is the full extent of her public schedule over the past two years, which makes a second ArmadilloCon booking a real event rather than a routine stop on a tour.

Moon’s ArmadilloCon appearance lands just weeks ahead of the biggest Paksworld news in years. Baen Books releases Horngard on October 6, the opening volume of a new trilogy set in the world she built almost forty years ago. Moon had gone quiet after mentioning health problems to fellow authors, and her last novel-length release was Into the Fire in 2018, a return to her Vatta’s War space opera series. Fans had no clear signal of whether new Paksworld fiction was still coming. Word that Moon has finished all three books in the new trilogy, with book two set for spring 2027, turned that silence into one of the year’s better surprises for military fantasy readers.

Horngard centers on a power vacuum at an empty throne, with a dragon moving to install one of his own kind as ruler while two pairs of siblings, Mikeli and Camwyn, Gwenno and Aris, get pulled into the fight over who controls it. Baen kept the Paksenarrion world in print through the gap with Deeds of Wisdom in 2025, but Horngard marks Moon’s first new novel in the setting since the five-book Paladin’s Legacy sequence wrapped in 2014.

Moon’s foundation in the genre starts with The Deed of Paksenarrion, published across three volumes in 1988 and 1989 and still counted among the defining post-Tolkien fantasy epics. Sheepfarmer’s Daughter, the opening volume, won the Compton Crook Award for best first novel. The trilogy follows Paksenarrion Dorthansdotter from a mercenary company recruit fleeing an arranged marriage to a paladin who reshapes the kingdoms around her, and Warner Bros. acquired film rights to the books in December 2019.

Moon’s range beyond Paksworld is its own case for why this appearance matters. The Speed of Dark won the Nebula Award, told from inside the perspective of an autistic narrator facing a forced medical procedure. Remnant Population was a Hugo finalist. The Vatta’s War series built a devoted military science fiction following of its own, running parallel to her fantasy work for over a decade.

Before any of that, Moon served three years of active duty in the United States Marine Corps from 1968 to 1971, one of a small number of major fantasy authors of her generation with a direct military service background feeding into the realism of her battle scenes and command structures. She holds degrees in history and biology, was elected to public office, and spent six years working as a paramedic on a rural Texas ambulance service before her writing career took off.

ArmadilloCon has a reputation as a literary-focused convention built around panels and craft discussion rather than a media-guest autograph circuit, which fits a writer of Moon’s habits better than a large commercial expo would. For Texas fans who have waited years for a chance to hear her speak in person, and for readers anywhere planning a trip around one of the only public appearances she is likely to make this decade, September 11-13 in Austin is the window.

You can get tickets at https://armadillocon.org/

Given how rarely Moon takes a convention stage, is ArmadilloCon 48 the moment Horngard gets introduced to a room full of readers who have waited a decade to hear what happens next in Paksworld?

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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.

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Realm Makers has spent over a decade building something genuinely rare: a writers’ conference built specifically for Christians who write science fiction and fantasy, a corner of publishing that historically didn’t have a home in either mainstream genre fandom or traditional Christian publishing circles. They’re under attack by someone creating serious allegations against them and relentlessly posting claims of human trafficking online without evidence.

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Founded in 2013 by Becky Minor, with her husband Scott taking on operations as the event grew, the conference started with 60 authors at a single event in St. Louis. By 2024, per Christianity Today’s own coverage, it had grown to 475 attendees, alongside a dedicated online community called the RealmSphere, an annual awards program called the Realm Awards, a traveling bookstore, and an expo wing added in partnership with the Christian Game Developers Convention. Publishers Weekly has covered the event favorably multiple times, quoting Becky Minor’s description of the gap it fills: “Christians have always enjoyed fantasy and science fiction, but the authors have had to bifurcate their creativity from their faith.” That’s independent trade press confirmation, not just the organization’s own marketing, that this is a legitimate, steadily growing craft-and-community conference with no prior history of this kind of allegation.

Scott and Becky Minor opened a GiveSendGo campaign to cover legal fees in what their own site calls “an 18 month battle” against a man who’s operated under several names, most consistently David Solomon, and Justin Alan Hayes, host of the podcast Voices for Voices. Realm Makers laid out a detailed timeline on their site to explain the lawsuit. In their own words: “In Oct 2024, Solomon reached out to Scott making claims about author Bryan Davis being a child trafficker. It must be said right away that after reviewing A LOT of content and videos Scott found absolutely no evidence to support Solomon’s claims. What Scott did uncover was that David Solomon has been repeatedly contacting Christian authors as far back as 2012... Solomon has been publicly accusing Bryan Davis of child trafficking SINCE 2015.” Realm Makers banned Solomon from the RealmSphere a week later, stating plainly: “Realm Makers refused to allow Solomon or any other member to use the direct message function of the RealmSphere to mislead others, which we came to the conclusion Solomon was doing.”

The Minors describe what followed as escalation rather than resolution. Per their site: “5 months elapsed after that incident, but in March of 2025, Realm Makers leadership began seeing videos accusing Scott of child trafficking, expanding previous accusation against Bryan Davis to now include Realm Makers.” They describe the resulting volume as significant: “it took 15 pages of legal material to document the claims being made against Scott and Realm Makers, and that was just to call out the statements made in videos posted between March and June of 2025... This was not a one-time accusation; it has been an ongoing, relentless campaign to ruin Realm Makers’ reputation.” They also point to a recorded two-hour phone call from October 2024, posted publicly by Solomon himself, and ask readers to draw their own conclusion from it: “Not once does Solomon accuse Scott of being a child trafficker in this phone call, and yet, 5 months later, Hayes and Solomon began spreading rumors of heinous crimes, pointing to this phone call as just cause to claim Realm Makers is dangerous.” Their account of that call includes a specific, checkable claim: “the alleged emails didn’t come from Bryan Davis’s actual email address. The texts didn’t come from Bryan’s phone number. Scott spent hours tracing back source email addresses and phone numbers to verify this.”

Solomon’s recorded statements are harsh allegations but he doesn’t offer any details or evidence based on the YouTube podcast we watched: “It all began when I got back into the writing world of Christian fantasy... I stated that one of the people that trafficked me his name was Brian Davis, he’s a Christian fantasy author and he had a strong relationship with a group called Realm Makers.” On what he describes as Scott’s initial response: “Scott Minor learned who I was and basically crucified my wife saying, ‘Well, you know I want the police report number and then I also want the national human trafficking number of your case... you either send that to me or I’m going to destroy your career forever.’” On the aftermath: “So me and Amanda decided we had nothing to lose... so hey I gave him the case number and I was an honest person he was not. And instead of being an honest person he did the opposite and started a hate group in the shadows.”

Notice what’s actually present, and absent, across those statements. Solomon names Realm Makers as having “a strong relationship” with Bryan Davis rather than directly restating the trafficking accusation against Scott himself in his own words here. He asserts a police report number and a national trafficking case number exist, but neither the podcast nor the Minors’ own account of the phone call identifies either number ever being independently verified by a third party. When asked in one episode whether Davis was a trafficker, Hayes describes checking the claim by “asking ChatGPT,” which simply returned Solomon’s own prior public accusations back to him, that is not evidence, it’s a search engine echoing an existing internet claim.

The specific, checkable claims Solomon does offer don’t hold up well under scrutiny either. He cites what he calls Davis’s “Harvest interview,” saying: “If you look up Brian Davis Harvest interview he admits to talking to minor children behind their parents’ back about pornography and cutting, and Scott Minor justified it by saying that’s God’s work.” That’s a specific, nameable piece of evidence, an interview that should be locatable, dated, and quotable in full if it exists as described. Neither this outlet nor the Minors’ own detailed rebuttal page identifies or addresses that specific interview by name, and we have not been able to find that alleged admission as of this writing.

Solomon’s framing swings between measured and extreme within the same set of statements. On whether Realm Makers should be shut down entirely, he says: “I don’t think so... I think it needs new leadership because if you shut it down you make a mistake of killing all Christian content.” On his posture toward Davis personally: “I have no hate, I have no discontent and I have no anger towards him. I pray for him... I can’t change the past, I can only change the future.”

He even walks back a claim against a different author entirely, Wayne Thomas Batson: “I have nothing negative to say about that person nor have I, and there is no evidence to suggest at the moment that he is involved in this,” a retraction that shows Solomon is capable of distinguishing between people he has evidence against and people he doesn’t, at least when directly asked.

But in the same body of statements, he also tells parents: “These authors are predators... probably like maybe 40% of the professional authors... are the predators and the rest are just users, kids, and people that want to be normal authors.” That’s an unsourced, sweeping percentage applied to an entire professional community, offered with no methodology, no named study, and no case-by-case accounting, the exact kind of claim that sounds alarming and specific in the moment while collapsing the instant anyone asks where the number actually came from.

That’s the core problem running through the entire campaign against Realm Makers: a great deal of talk, framed with the language of survivor testimony and moral urgency, but very little that functions as actual evidence when examined individually. A police report number that’s referenced but not shown. A named interview that isn’t quoted or linked. A percentage with no source, and finally a pattern of accusations against a growing list of different authors stretching back more than a decade, with no independent law enforcement action, journalistic investigation, or court finding surfacing anywhere in that entire span outside Solomon and Hayes’ own podcast. For a charge this serious, that gap between the volume of accusation and the presence of verifiable evidence is the story.

We support Realm Makers and their mission and having been victims of defamation ourselves urge support on their GiveSendGo.

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You open YouTube and the feed presents itself as a single surface. A man ranks the worst genetics for building muscle. Beside him a historian stands before a bronze statue and speaks of open-source weeks at the United Nations. A boxer faces a six-foot-seven opponent called a psychopath. Britain is drawn as a map locked in combat with a cartoon woman in a hijab.

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Somewhere lower a police officer weeps on camera. The titles sit next to one another without any discernable hierarchy. Ten years ago many of these subjects lived on the margins of public speech. Today they occupy the center and yet the center no longer holds the shape of a public square. Instead, all these things have become an asylum in which every patient shouts at once and the attendants have long since abandoned the idea of keeping them quiet.

On June 30, American Krogan noted that YouTube seems much worse today than it was ten years ago despite the fact that many dissident talking points have entered the mainstream. So why hasn’t anything changed? The answer, in a word, is density. Dissident talking points have entered the mainstream, yes, but so has literally everything else.

There’s no room for any victory of any particular argument on YouTube. Instead, YouTube and all of mainstream Internet conversation has collapsed the conditions under which viable arguments still matter. Imagine a room full of voices speak at the same volume and the same speed. Eventually, the ear loses its capacity to distinguish your name from the rest of the noise. The human power of appropriately responding to a call to action in our time is drowned in any number of simultaneous demands.

This is the society of transparency in its finished form. Transparency was sold as the ally of trust. In practice, however, transparency it has abolished the very intervals in which trust can

grow. Actual trust requires the possibility that something remains unsaid and that time may pass between the speaking of a word, considering it, and then answering it in kind. Total exposure has removed that interval. Now, everything is made available at once and anything secret is treated as an obstacle. Any resistance that forces thought to slow down and take shape has been smoothed away and all we have left now is an endless stream of content that can be calculated, ranked, monetized, and then forgotten.

The flood of information itself does the work that was formerly assigned to censorship. No committee needs to meet in order to produce the asylum when the inmates were busily producing it themselves. The architecture of permanent visibility already guarantees that outcome. Platforms reward all these simultaneous messages and the algorithms prefer everything hits you immediately. Everyone has been trained to consume rather than to answer. Everyone concerned with free speech has forgotten that speech is worthless if it ceases to be an act that binds the future with the past. In stead, speech is just pure exhibition, made to turn human beings into glass. Every interior surface is offered to the light, and in that light the capacity for authenticity has died.

History has always depended on the power to hear a call that arrives from beyond the present moment. A people becomes a people when they answer something older or larger than themselves. God is infinite and discerning His answer takes time. It requires sequence and the freedom to refuse something immediate in favor of something long-lasting.

This asylum is the logical result of a culture that has made illumination its highest value. When every shadow is abolished, the soul loses the darkness in which it once learned to see. When every secret is forced into the open, the possibility of trust dissolves into mutual surveillance. When every voice is amplified to the same volume, no voice can call a person out of himself. The result is the condition we now inhabit: a mainstream that has become indistinguishable from the psyche ward and a public square that functions as a continuous panic.

Our civilization produces more information than any previous age but with less capacity to respond to any of it.

There is no conspiracy behind this state of affairs. The intention is already written into the demand for total openness. More information, more communication, more acceleration: these were the promises. Their fulfillment is the nuthouse. And the cure will not be found in still more transparency. It will begin only when men and women recover the right to remain hidden, to speak in sequence rather than in simultaneous flood, and to answer only The Word that still possess the authority of a genuine call to action.

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Julie Bell announced this week that her husband, fantasy artist Boris Vallejo, has officially retired from commercial and commissioned work. She posted the news on Facebook alongside their recent collaborative painting, “Inferno,” which the couple spent three years completing together:

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“Hello everyone! I have an announcement to make and feel now is the time as we’ve received so many kind comments on our recently shared painting ‘Inferno.’ Boris and I worked together on this piece for the past three years and we deeply appreciate all the notes from people who enjoy our collaborative paintings. Boris is now 85 and has Parkinsons. He has been creating magical worlds for others to enjoy for over five decades and is now officially retired from commercial or commissioned work. ‘Inferno’ is his last piece of this type. This decision has taken quite some time to arrive at and even more time to feel ready to announce. He’s still signing prints and cards, he still does some painting for himself, and he still plans to be at Illuxcon in October in Reading, PA because he loves seeing all of you and chatting about art! We thank everyone for all of the love and support you’ve shown all these years!

”

For anyone who grew up browsing a spinner rack of paperback fantasy in the 1970s or 1980s, Boris Vallejo’s name is inseparable from the genre itself. Born in Lima, Peru in 1941, Vallejo started painting at 13, sold his first illustration at 16, and earned a five-year scholarship to the Escuela Nacional Superior Autónoma de Bellas Artes, where he took home a gold medal before he’d even finished his training. He emigrated to the United States in 1964 at 23, and within a few years he’d built a reputation good enough to work for Warren Publishing’s horror line, painting covers for Creepy, Eerie, and Vampirella.

Marvel Comics is where Vallejo’s name really took hold. His covers for The Savage Sword of Conan in the mid-1970s were striking enough that fans and editors started calling him “the next Frazetta,” an enormous comparison to live up to and one Vallejo more than earned on his own terms. His painting for Savage Sword #1 in 1974, Conan and Red Sonja locked in a swirling battle against a horde of ghouls, is still considered one of the defining images of the entire sword-and-sorcery boom. From there, he moved into paperback covers for Ballantine and Del Rey, and for the next several decades there wasn’t a major pulp hero whose books didn’t carry his work at some point: Conan, Tarzan, Doc Savage, John Carter of Mars, Red Sonja. He painted the Gor novels, contributed pin-ups to Heavy Metal, and created movie posters for Knightriders, Barbarian Queen, and Q. His most widely seen piece of art, by his own admission, wasn’t a barbarian or a monster at all. It was the poster for National Lampoon’s Vacation, a self-aware parody of his own house style that millions of people saw without ever knowing his name was attached to it.

What made Vallejo’s work stand apart, even among a field full of talented genre painters, was a hyper-representational realism built almost entirely in oil on board, often composited from his own photo references to get the anatomy and lighting exactly right. It’s a technical rigor that turned pulp paperback covers, an art form most people treated as disposable, into paintings serious collectors still chase decades later. He earned a Locus Award for best professional artist in 1979, one of several honors across a career built almost entirely on commercial deadlines rather than gallery ambition.

Much of Vallejo’s later work became a shared act with his wife, artist and former bodybuilder Julie Bell, herself a celebrated fantasy and wildlife painter in her own right. The two built a body of collaborative paintings good enough that fans came to recognize both signatures on a single canvas as its own kind of seal of quality, and “Inferno” carries the weight of being the final entry in that specific chapter of his work.

Boris Vallejo isn’t disappearing. He’ll still be at Illuxcon this October in Reading, Pennsylvania, signing prints and talking with the fans who grew up on his covers, and he’ll still pick up a brush for himself when the mood strikes. But the commissioned work that put a barbarian, a warrior queen, or a half-glimpsed god on the cover of a paperback and made you pick it up off the shelf without knowing a single word inside it, that chapter is closed. Fifty years is a rare enough run for anyone in this business. Vallejo spent his entire adult life making the genre look exactly the way several generations of readers still picture it in their heads, and that’s not a small thing to leave behind.

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Return to the World of John Carter with this pulpy action epic by Batman writer Chuck Dixon. What happens to Barsoom a thousand years after John Carter? Find out by reading today.

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Bjo Trimble has been invited to Creation Entertainment’s Star Trek convention circuit this August, closing out the fan campaign Fandom Pulse covered last week asking why the woman whose 1968 letter-writing campaign saved the original series from cancellation had not been invited to Star Trek’s own 60th anniversary events.

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Trimble’s daughter Lora announced the news directly. “Mom will be at Creation Aug 5-7th. Mom will be hanging out at Masquerade Lobby Bar. Wednesday 5 Aug, Day 1 of Con, Bjo in Vendor’s Room. Thursday Aug 6 Day 2 of Con, in Vendor’s Room. Friday Aug 7 Bjo will head home after days of fun and Star Trek fandom! Thank you Creation, Stephanie, who was instrumental in coordinating this, her podcast page is: https://www.facebook.com/nx7062 and Yez Ze Masc for making this happen.”

Lora also listed two additional appearances already on the books. “Upcoming Bjo Convention Appearances: World Science Fiction Convention, Anaheim, CA, Thursday and Friday, August 27 & 28. Schedule TBD. She will definitely be at the opening ceremonies as she is being recognized for her non Star Trek fanac. USS Galileo christening in Ticonderoga at the Star Trek Tour, Friday-Sun, September 18-20. Schedule TBD.”

A fan letter campaign built a franchise in 1968. A fan campaign got its architect recognized in 2026. Which convention should be first in line to put her in front of a live audience?

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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: Trek Star: Doug Drexler’s New Book Tells the Story of How a Lifelong Fan Helped Shape Star Trek’s Visual Universe

Worldcon’s business meeting spent ten minutes this week debating a new committee called “bidding trust and safety.” The pitch sounds reasonable on its surface: to protect convention attendees, ensure future host cities are “safe.” Listen to the actual debate, though, and the mask slips fast.

The proposal, item D.5 on the agenda, was introduced by Brandon O’Brien, who framed it:

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Westercon is dying. The West Coast Science Fantasy Conference has been running since 1948 and once drew 2,500 attendees with legends like Ray Bradbury, Frank Herbert, and William Gibson as guests of honor. This week it posted a notice that nobody has filed a bid to host the 2028 convention.

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Variety published a new interview today with Rhea Seehorn and Bryan Cranston, the two principal actors in Vince Gilligan’s corner of prestige television. Most of it is warm career retrospective. The relevant section concerns Seehorn’s character on Pluribus, the Apple TV+ sci-fi series now in its second season, and the fan complaint that has dogged the show since its first season launched last year: Carol Sturka is not a likable person.

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For readers who haven’t caught Pluribus, the premise is Gilligan’s inversion of the alien invasion genre. Nearly every human being on earth has undergone “the Joining,” a mass possession event that converts people into relentlessly cheerful, optimistic automatons. Seehorn plays Carol, a romance novelist among the thirteen people on the planet who remain unconverted. Carol is not heroic. She is, in Gilligan’s own description as relayed by Seehorn, designed around the question: “What if the most miserable person on Earth had to save the world from happiness?”

Variety pushed on the fan likability complaints, and in doing so handed Seehorn an easy opportunity to play victim. She did not take it.

It started with this interchange: “Vince’s little logline that he came up with was, “What if the most miserable person on Earth had to save the world from happiness?” And we had a couple people say, “I don’t think she’s the most miserable.” Certainly, the brilliant Carlos Manuel Vesga’s portrayal of Manousos is pretty angry. I would also put out there that — and Vince has said this on panels — nobody asked that about Walter White. Nobody asked that about Jimmy McGill: “What’s up with them being so unlikable?” They were behaving in an honest way to the situation they were in.”

Cranstonthen asked: “You think it’s a gender issue?”

She replied, “I don’t know. When people are like, ‘She’s so unlikable,’ I’m like, her wife’s dead; they killed her. Career’s done, might not ever be back. You may very well die alone and never speak to anybody again on a couch eating a frozen meal, watching ‘Golden Girls.’ There are no friends anymore, there’s no family and the world is saying, ‘We’re just waiting around until we can take your brain away.’ And she’s not polite about it.”

She immediately redirected to Gilligan’s instruction to play the character with complete realism given an absurd situation, and left the gender grievance on the table untouched. Variety clearly wanted her to pick it up. She declined.

Her restraint is worth noting because it is not what the current entertainment press cycle rewards. Seehorn had a ready-made narrative, “fans call her unlikable because she’s a woman,” and she chose not to run with it. Her co-star raised the prompt and she answered with a shrug and a pivot back to craft.

What she did not avoid entirely was the identity politics baked into the show’s construction. The character is written as a lesbian, which Seehorn acknowledged without much elaboration. This was an Apple TV choice: Vince Gilligan originally conceived the Pluribus lead as a man. The network pushed for a female lead to create what has become a recognizable pattern in prestige streaming, the mandatory strong female lead regardless of original creative intent. The gender swap brought the lesbian characterization as part of the same package. Seehorn plays it without making it the center of every interview, which is something.

In the rest of the interview, Cranston describes the experience of shooting Breaking Bad without knowing where the story was going. He recounts performing a scene in which Walter White furiously denies poisoning a child, then receiving the next script days later and discovering Walter did in fact poison the child. He describes his performance choice: play the denial as completely genuine, because Walter had to be believable. It is a useful data point on how Gilligan’s withhold-the-script method produces a specific kind of naturalistic tension that more structured productions tend to write out.

The interview also includes Cranston’s tribute to Catherine O’Hara, who died in January at 71. He played her husband in three separate productions and appeared opposite her in The Studio, the Apple TV+ series in which O’Hara won a posthumous SAG Award. “I miss her so much,” Cranston said. “She was such a joy to be with. Catherine O’Hara was a person who, you not only marveled at her comedic chops, but when it’s ‘cut,’ you say, ‘I want to sit next to Catherine.’”

On Pluribus itself, Seehorn confirmed Season 2 is in the writers room and she has received no scripts or outlines. She does not know what Carol does with the atom bomb in the driveway at the end of Season 1. Whether the show can sustain an audience remains the open question. The first season earned critical attention but did not generate the fan engagement that Breaking Bad or Better Call Saul built. The likability complaints are a symptom of something the show has not solved, which is giving viewers a reason to want Carol to win beyond the logic of the premise. Seehorn defends the character well. The defense and the viewing experience are not the same thing.

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If the golden age of Trek and Babylon 5 left a hole in your sci-fi diet, The Stars Entwined fills it — interstellar espionage between two civilizations on the brink of war. Read The Stars Entwined on Amazon!

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A YouTuber named Reckless Ben says he has uncovered what he describes as a sprawling web of corporate theft, police indifference, and legal intimidation — all centered on Legos.

The story, which has since gone viral, involves a man whose father spent years building what Reckless Ben claims is the world’s largest Lego Star Wars collection, estimated at around $200,000 in value. According to the video, the collection was stolen, and the collector doesn’t even know it happened. His son Brian reached out to Reckless Ben because, as the YouTuber covering the story puts it, “he has no clue how to break this news to his dad.”

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The company at the center of it all is Bricks and Minifigs, a franchise chain widely regarded within the Lego community as the gold standard for selling collections. “Even me, a drooling crow-magnon man who is not deep into the Lego community, I’ve heard of Bricks and Minifigs,” the YouTuber said.

According to Reckless Ben’s account as described in the video, Brian approached a Bricks and Minifigs franchise to sell his father’s collection on consignment. The scale was staggering. “This was a store’s worth of inventory,” Brian says in the footage. “That store that day was nothing but my dad’s collection — all the shelves filled. They had to bring in extra shelves and filled the whole party room with shelves.”

A contract was drawn up stipulating the Legos remained the family’s property, with the store taking a percentage of each sale. The franchise owner, a woman identified as Crystal, confirmed her husband had to leave the country for work-related reasons. Shortly after, according to the video, corporate informed her they were terminating her franchise agreement and moving to install a new owner, and they wanted her out immediately.

Crystal, the YouTuber says, saved all the security camera footage from that night. On that footage, according to the account, corporate can be seen telling her they are taking over the business — and critically, confirming they are also taking on the consignments, including Brian’s collection. “That means that they are legally taking on the responsibility of Brian’s Legos,” the YouTuber said. “At least as I understand it, that’s how it seems to be. I mean, how do you possibly wiggle your way out of that one? That’s pretty indefensible. It’s right there on camera.”

With Crystal gone and corporate in control, Brian reached out to inquire about his collection and the money owed. Things soured quickly. According to the YouTuber’s account of Brian’s description, the new store owner crossed his arms and delivered what amounts to a legal threat: that any lawsuit would be dragged out until it cost Brian more than the collection was worth. “He let the mask slip,” the YouTuber said. “He let the evil out.”

Brian’s father had health problems. An expensive, multi-year legal battle was not an option. Meanwhile, the store’s social media began filling up with posts about the vintage Star Wars Lego sets — the ones Brian says they still haven’t been paid for. “It feels like they are just gloating,” the YouTuber said. “Just openly mocking Brian and his father’s collection.”

Word spread. A group of YouTubers picked up the case and began working to help Brian recover his collection or his money. Then, according to the video, Bricks and Minifigs threatened legal action against them. They stopped. “Bricks and Minifigs knows that they can just bully anyone that tries to expose them with frivolous lawsuits,” Reckless Ben says in his video.

Ben drove 16 hours to the store with his crew, wearing glasses equipped with a recording device. He asked about Brian’s collection. The employee, according to the YouTuber’s account, immediately told him to leave, then called police claiming harassment, after what Ben describes as a two-sentence exchange. “He’s just mentioned Brian’s Legos and asked what’s the deal with all of that, and she instantly starts playing this card,” the YouTuber said.

The store directed Ben to corporate. Corporate directed him back to the store. Nobody would take responsibility.

Eventually Ben reached the store owner by phone, presented the contract, and was told: “Are you stupid? Are you an idiot?” Police arrived. The officer trespassed Ben from the location for life. “The police officer literally didn’t care at all that the store just stole $200,000 worth of Legos,” Ben says in the footage. “For some reason, he made it seem like I was the bad guy.”

The YouTuber, a self-described connoisseur of police body cam footage, found the officer’s behavior unusual. “In instances of someone being trespassed, I’ve usually seen a conversation about what was your purpose here. He’s trying to explain they took this from my friend. And instead of answering that question, he’s just like, ‘Nope, you’ve just got to leave.’”

Ben then went directly to Bricks and Minifigs CEO Ammon McNeff. According to the video, McNeff denied knowing who Brian was. Ben pulled up the store’s own social media — posts showcasing Brian’s vintage Star Wars collection, describing its value, and essentially advertising it. McNeff, according to the account, dismissed it and had Ben removed. “Get the hell out of here,” Ben says he was told. “Don’t know what you’re talking about. If you come back, you’ll be arrested.”

Through an employee contact, Ben eventually reached store owner Josh by phone. Josh said he would return the Legos on one condition: a written apology from Brian, removal of all negative posts, and only positive reviews going forward.

Brian refused. “I walked in there with the best of intentions,” Brian says in the footage. “I want it back. And they’ve done nothing but lie and make my life a living hell over this. I’ve gone through nine months of anxiety, stress, hospital, medication-taking types of burden. I am not apologizing to this person.”

The YouTuber sided with Brian. “To be the insufferable person who is knowingly engaging in this shadiness — I’ll call it shadiness, but I think it’s far harsher than that — and then demanding that the guy representing his father, who is medication-ridden, who is not in the best of health, and only wanted to sell the collection to help with their living situation, is actually the bad guy here — is just completely crazy.”

Ben tested whether the apology demand was genuine by creating a deepfake video of Brian apologizing, using a friend’s voice synced to Brian’s image. Josh, according to the account, accepted it warmly. Then stalled for weeks. Then claimed the Legos were simply gone. “These are just actual degenerate scammers, allegedly,” the YouTuber said.

With a full lawsuit financially out of reach, attorneys quoted Brian $60,000 to $70,000 just for an injunction, given the previous owner had relocated internationally, Ben landed on small claims court. Low cost. Fast judgment. No corporate legal army required.

Bricks and Minifigs didn’t respond. Ben won by default judgment. One day later, according to the video, the store permanently closed.

“At first it did feel kind of cool that our plan worked so well it completely shut them down,” Ben says. “But pretty quickly it sunk in that we are not the winners here. The only winners today is Bricks and Minifigs. Now there’s absolutely no way to hold this store liable for what they did.”

The store closed so fast it didn’t update its Google listing. Customers arrived expecting an open shop and left negative reviews about the locked doors — unaware of the months of events behind them.

Ben put a sign outside.

It went viral.

Brian and his father have not been paid. The collection is unaccounted for. The franchise location is closed but Bricks and Minifigs as a corporation continues operating. According to the YouTuber, Ben’s investigation continues — a second part exists behind a Patreon paywall, and a teaser suggests Ben and his crew end up in handcuffs at some point.

None of the claims in this article have been independently verified. They derive from Reckless Ben’s YouTube investigation and the commentary YouTuber covering it. Bricks and Minifigs has not publicly responded to the allegations as described in the video.

What do you think about this situation?

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The second book of The Secret Scrolls of Naruto shifts the action from the open roads and waterways of the Kamigata to the warren of Tokugawa-era Tokyo, where the conspiracy runs deeper, the villains are closer, and nobody can be trusted. Two killers strike a deal over saké: one will murder the swordsman-monk Gennojō, the other will claim the woman he has been hunting since Osaka. Underground chambers, a great urban fire, a swordfight in total darkness on a plum-scented path, a deathbed confession that transforms a pickpocket, and a midnight ambush at Sensō-ji temple — this is the book where Yoshikawa Eiji earns his reputation as the Alexandre Dumas of Japan.

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