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.

NEXT: Savage Sword of Conan #15 Delivers Pulp Thrills and a Career-Best Backup From Titan Comics

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!

NEXT: N.K. Jemisin’s Grand Master Speech Is A Race Grievance With a Trophy Attached

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.

NEXT: Review: The Mandalorian and Grogu Plays Like a Repurposed Season Four

The City of Milwaukee has agreed to pay $575,000 to settle a federal civil rights lawsuit filed by former science fiction author Patrick S. Tomlinson and his wife Niki Robinson. The case, Robinson v. City of Milwaukee, 2:24-cv-00264, documented 45 police responses to the couple’s home over two years driven by false emergency calls, none of which were real.

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The facts of the swatting campaign are not in dispute. Milwaukee Police Department officers knew the address was a deliberate target. Court documents show one officer said he “thought the call might be fake,” another testified he “knew there wasn’t an emergency,” and a third said “We know. We know,” when told the address should be flagged. One officer sent a memo asking dispatch to mark the home as a “Swatter House.” A supervisor declined. The swatting worsened after a CBS58 news report on the situation. During at least one response, officers held Tomlinson at gunpoint and handcuffed him.

That institutional failure is real and the settlement reflects it. A police department that had documented knowledge its calls were fabricated and refused to flag the address, resulting in repeated armed responses to an innocent household, created genuine civil liability. Individual officers were granted qualified immunity. The city was not.

Tomlinson is a former Tor Books author whose publishing career ended after In the Black in 2020, his last book with the publisher before the relationship concluded. He has since functioned primarily as a left-wing political activist and Twitter agitator, spending years in sustained online combat with critics who were offended about his awful take stating he never found Norm Macdonald to be funny while threatening legal action against people who mocked him.

The escalation in online fighting led to the swatting originated in 2018 when Tomlinson posted that he did not find comedian Norm Macdonald funny. Rather than ignore the resulting mockery, Tomlinson engaged repeatedly with every antagonist, threatening critics with jail time and filing legal actions that consistently failed.

Tomlinson filed a defamation suit against 60 anonymous members of an online message board. The case was dismissed as frivolous. A San Francisco judge ordered Tomlinson to pay $34,762.25 in opposing attorneys fees. Tomlinson publicly refused to pay the judgment, which resulted in contempt proceedings. By the time the matter was fully resolved he had paid $83,736.99, more than double the original court order, to the forum owner known as Quasi.

It has been widely reported and alleged that the Science Fiction and Writers of America (SFWA) provided approximately $100,000 toward Tomlinson's legal costs for the OnA Forums lawsuit. SFWA did not respond to requests for comment on the matter. The funds came from a professional organization representing working science fiction writers, used to pursue a lawsuit a judge subsequently dismissed as frivolous against an anonymous online message board.

Tomlinson also attempted to obtain a restraining order against an individual online. A judge found the claim ludicrous and denied it.

The $575,000 settlement sounds substantial. After federal civil rights attorney fees, which in cases of this complexity and duration typically run between 35% and 45% of the settlement, the net recovery to Tomlinson and his wife is unlikely to exceed $315,000 to $375,000. The city will fund the payment through a budget amendment expected to take approximately 90 days, meaning the money arrives in mid-August at the earliest.

Some online have speculated that Tomlinson called in the swatting calls himself or hired an agency to do so on his behalf, though none of this has bee nconfirmed to date.

None of that changes who Tomlinson is or what his track record outside the swatting case looks like. A man with a history of using the legal system as a weapon against online critics, who burned through over $100,000 in SFWA funds pursuing a lawsuit a judge called frivolous, who was dropped by his publisher, and who has spent years threatening people on social media with jail time, now collects a settlement from a city whose police department genuinely failed him.

What do you make of the Milwaukee settlement? Let us know in the comments.

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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!

NEXT: What Is a First Edition? The Muddied Waters of McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern

Jack Posobiec has had enough of Star Wars. And right now, a lot of people are agreeing with him.

The conservative commentator and host of Human Events went viral Wednesday with a thread calling on his followers to walk away from the Star Wars franchise entirely, posting under the hashtag #DumpStarWars. The immediate trigger was Mark Hamill’s Bluesky post depicting President Trump lying dead in a grave with an “If Only” caption but Posobiec made clear the Hamill post was the last straw in a pattern, not the sole cause.

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His posts came rapid-fire. “Conservatives have slave mentality for movie franchises like Star Wars,” Posobiec wrote. “Mark Hamill can do videos with Obama, say he wants Trump dead, the series goes completely woke, and they still won’t stop throwing money at Star Wars merch, Disney trips, and Disney+. Weak.” He followed it with a direct call to action: “#DumpStarWars. You have to fight back FOR YOUR FAMILY.” Then: “#DumpStarWars. You have to fight back ECONOMICALLY.” Then, in response to someone pointing out Hamill’s post had gone too far: “Imagine raising your kids on Star Wars where Luke Skywalker calls for conservatives to die. Couldn’t be me.” His mother posted: “Sounds good to me. Mark Hamill has gone way too far.”

Posobiec also linked back to a prior post from the late Charlie Kirk, who had written before his death: “I don’t watch Star Wars, but apparently the latest Disney show, The Acolyte, is the ‘gayest ever’ according to its own creators, and has lesbian witches spawning children using the Force. Don’t think I’m missing anything!” Posobiec’s comment: “Charlie was also not a Star Wars fan.”

The White House’s Rapid Response account responded to the Hamill post directly, calling him a “sick individual” and stating: “These Radical Left lunatics just can’t help themselves. This kind of rhetoric is exactly what has inspired three assassination attempts in two years against our President.”

Hamill posted the dead Trump image days after Cole Allen was federally charged for the shooting outside the White House Correspondents’ Dinner where Trump was the alleged target. Days after Dean DelleChiaie, an FAA employee, was charged with researching how to smuggle a firearm into a federal facility to kill the President. Trump has survived three assassination attempts since 2024. The “If Only” post went up in that environment.

Hamill’s post was not a sudden departure from his public behavior. Fandom Pulse has covered his political trajectory in detail. During the 2024 election, he functioned as a surrogate for the Biden and then Harris campaigns, making the now-infamous “Joe B-Wan Kenobi” trip to the White House. He made posts about Trump’s anatomy during the campaign. He announced he was quitting X for Bluesky to protest Trump’s election and then came back online within hours. He announced a social media fast to protest the inauguration and ended it eight hours in. When he finally did stay off X, he migrated to Bluesky where he has continued the same behavior with fewer eyeballs — until this week.

On May 4, three days before the dead Trump post, Hamill appeared in a promotional video alongside Barack Obama for the Obama Presidential Center. Obama made Star Wars dad jokes. Hamill laughed. Then Hamill came home and posted a dead president image with “If Only.”

Fandom Pulse commented on this matter on May 4th when Obama posed with Hamill directly: “The franchise that once united everyone now functions as a cultural dividing line. Obama gets the Star Wars dad joke promo. Trump gets the Mandalorian image. Hamill laughs and calls it perfect. Posobiec calls the whole property fake and gay.”

That piece dropped before Wednesday’s thread. Posobiec’s thread is the response to the accumulated weight of years, not just one post.

The #DumpStarWars hashtag is now trending. Posobiec’s posts collectively cleared 15,000 impressions on the slave mentality post alone. The backlash to his call is arriving from fans who argue, as one commenter put it: “I’m sick and tired of people telling me what I can and can’t buy. If we stopped watching and buying anything and everything involved with woke idiots we’d all be f---ing Amish. Fuck Mark Hamill, but also, f--- anyone shitting on Star Wars fans just because of him.” Posobiec responded by posting the comment under the header: “Here is the slave mentality in action.”

The John Birch Society weighed in alongside him: “Americans should stop wasting their time with entertainment that rots their minds and pushes subversive ideologies.”

This conversation is happening two weeks before The Mandalorian & Grogu opens in theaters on May 22, the franchise’s first theatrical film in seven years, which is tracking at potentially the lowest Disney-era Star Wars opening ever. It is happening while Hamill, who last appeared on screen as Luke Skywalker in The Book of Boba Fett, continues to serve as the franchise’s most recognizable living face in the culture war.

There is a version of this story where Hamill’s politics are separable from the franchise he represents. Posobiec is arguing that version has expired. The audience that made Star Wars what it was grew up with Luke Skywalker as a symbol of hope against a faceless empire. That same actor spent the last four years functioning as a campaign surrogate, then posted a dead president image while men with guns are being federally charged for planning to kill that president.

Is it possible to separate Mark Hamill from Star Wars at this point, or has he made that impossible?

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Space marines on a holy crusade across the galaxy. If that sentence got your attention, Justified: Saga of the Nano Templar is your next read. Three books of relentless action Read Justified: Saga of the Nano Templar on Amazon!

NEXT: Gina Carano On Kathleen Kennedy: “I Wish Her the Best.”

The Mimi Yanagi story has a new layer, and it changes the entire picture the anime community was sold.

Jordan Williams, the UK VTuber who posted under the name Mimi Yanagi and was arrested April 20 for possessing prohibited images of children, has been exposed as a trans-identified male. Reduxx published the full investigation on May 4, drawing on research from KiwiFarms users who traced Williams’ online history across multiple accounts and handles.

Fandom Pulse covered the original arrest last week. At that point, Williams had been widely defended across anime and VTuber communities as a female artist persecuted by the UK government for drawing her own characters. That framing is now collapsed.

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Barack Obama and Mark Hamill stood in front of the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago on May the 4th and filmed a 68-second promotional video for the facility’s June 19 opening. The Obama Foundation posted it to X. The full transcript is worth reading in sequence.

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Obama opens: “Happy Star Wars Day from the Obama Presidential Center. I have a very good feeling about this.”

He then delivers the pitch: “Mark, I am glad you are here. I want to tell you about someone. A young person born into ordinary circumstances, but restless, unsatisfied. A kid with big dreams. A bit of a rebel.”

Hamill responds: “I like where this is going.”

Obama continues: “They join a scrappy group of underdogs and set out to change things.”

Hamill asks: “By blowing up a giant space laser?”

Obama delivers the turn: “Mark, this is not about you. As wonderful as you are, this isn’t the monument to my legacy. It is a gateway to yours. The Obama Presidential Center is much more than a museum. It is an entire campus built to empower you. A place to come together, get inspired, and become, for change.”

He then adds: “That’s what I did there. Strong the dad jokes are.”

Hamill laughs and says: “That is perfect!”

Both laugh as the clip ends.

The Obama Foundation captioned the post: “May the Fourth be with YOU, from the Obama Presidential Center. Opening June 19.”

To be clear about what just happened: a former president used one of the most beloved sci-fi franchises in history as a vehicle to market his personal legacy center, compared himself to Luke Skywalker, and had the franchise’s most recognizable living face laugh approvingly at the end. The text overlay on the video reads “HOPE A NEW HOME HAS,” rendered in Star Wars font. The word hope. Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign word. In Star Wars font. At his presidential center.

The political alignment between Lucasfilm and the Obama orbit has never been subtle. Kathleen Kennedy, who ran Star Wars for a decade before stepping down in January 2026, moved in the same Democratic donor circles for years. The franchise’s progressive cultural turn under her tenure was well documented, and the fan backlash was proportional. The Last Jedi killed Han Solo and sidelined Luke Skywalker. Solo lost money. The Rise of Skywalker earned roughly half of The Force Awakens’ domestic gross. The Acolyte got cancelled after one season. Kennedy stepped down in January 2026 after years of declining returns.

The Obama Foundation video is the logical endpoint of that era’s relationship with the IP.

Meanwhile, the White House took a different approach to May the 4th. The official White House X account posted an AI-generated image of President Trump as the Mandalorian, helmet on, holding Grogu.

Conservative commentator Jack Posobiec responded to the Obama-Hamill video by calling Star Wars “fake and gay” multiple times on X and urging followers to stop engaging with the Disney property entirely. His posts drew traction from fans who have spent years watching the franchise used as a cultural messaging vehicle.

The Mandalorian film opens June 22. It is currently tracking at $65 million domestic according to World of Reel, which would be the lowest Disney-era Star Wars opening ever. Solo opened at $84.4 million and was considered a commercial disaster. Jon Favreau scrapped an entire planned season of Mandalorian television to make a standalone film accessible to audiences who had never seen the show, telling reporters he “had to start from scratch.”

The franchise that once united everyone now functions as a cultural dividing line. Obama gets the Star Wars dad joke promo. Trump gets the Mandalorian image. Hamill laughs and calls it perfect. Posobiec calls the whole property fake and gay. The Mandalorian film opens in seven weeks to whatever audience is left.

What do you think of Obama and Hamill’s May the 4th promo? Let us know in the comments.

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Space marines on a holy crusade across the galaxy. If that sentence got your attention, Justified: Saga of the Nano Templar is your next read. Three books of relentless action Read Justified: Saga of the Nano Templar on Amazon!

NEXT: Worldcon 2026 Has 101 “Inclusivity” Panels and Zero Christian Ones

Worldcon 2026 tagged 101 panels under “Inclusivity.” Search the full program schedule for the tag “Christian.” Zero results.

That single comparison tells you everything about what the World Science Fiction Convention has become. The organization that administers the Hugo Awards, positions itself as the home of science fiction fandom, and describes its convention as a celebration of imagination has found room for 101 panels on progressive identity politics. It found room for zero panels on Christianity, despite the fact that the tradition it claims to celebrate was built largely by Christian authors.

The scale of the ideological programming at LAcon V only becomes clear when you start reading the descriptions. These are real panels at a real science fiction convention.

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A pattern is emerging across independent creator communities this week that YouTube has not acknowledged and shows no signs of addressing. Small and mid-sized channels are losing their YouTube Partner Program status in bulk, hit with citations for “inauthentic and mass-produced content” — a classification YouTube updated in July 2025 to target AI-generated spam — that is being applied by automated systems to channels that have no AI content whatsoever.

Three cases landed publicly this week, each documented with screenshots.

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David Read has spent nearly six years building Dial the Gate into the definitive fan resource for the Stargate community — nearly 400 episodes of interviews, retrospectives, and deep dives with the cast and crew of one of science fiction television’s most beloved franchises. He’s done it for free. He’s done it out of love. And now, just as Amazon MGM Studios has announced a brand new Stargate series for Prime Video with original writers Martin Gero and Brad Wright back in the fold, Read has been forced to post a video telling his audience he can’t keep going without help.

“This was not an easy video for me to make,” he said. “I can’t even believe that I’m doing it.”

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What Dial the Gate Is

Before the struggle makes sense, the show deserves its proper introduction.

Dial the Gate launched in October 2020 as a long-form interview series presented by GateWorld. The long-running Stargate fan site that has been the internet home of the franchise’s community for over two decades. Read, who has deep roots in that community going back to the early GateWorld days, the Official Stargate Magazine, the canceled Stargate Worlds MMO, and Propworx’s prop auctions from the series, built Dial the Gate into something rare: a fan production that the talent actually takes seriously.

The guest list over nearly six seasons reflects that. Cast and crew from SG-1, Atlantis, and Universe have sat down with Read for conversations that go well beyond convention panel fare. These are long, substantive interviews — the kind that actually document what it was like to make these shows, episode by episode, season by season. For a franchise that ended its television run in 2011 without a proper conclusion, and whose fanbase has been waiting ever since, Dial the Gate has served as both archive and lifeline.

Nearly 400 episodes in roughly five and a half years is a production output that most professional operations would struggle to match.

The Reality Behind the Camera

What Read revealed in his video is the economics that have been running underneath all of it.

“This past five seasons, I have poured well over ten grand into this project,” he said. The majority of that, he explained, isn’t equipment. It’s guest fees. “The higher-profile ones — they will not do the show without being paid. And I will never ask anyone for a dime to help pay for an individual to come on, because that is my cross to bear. That is my choice to bring them on.”

Read has operated on a strict internal code: he brings on who he wants to bring on, he pays what he needs to pay, and he doesn’t pass that cost to the audience. “Up until now, it’s been very much my policy that I will not take from the pocket of a fellow Stargate fan. There’s no difference between us. None whatsoever.”

That policy has now collided with reality. Read went back to school for roughly 18 months, was made promises about work that didn’t materialize, and finds himself in a financial position he hasn’t been in since the 2008 recession, when he was out of work for two years. He’s been driving for Uber since before COVID to supplement his income. “You can’t increase costs 33% on average and reduce everyone’s payouts by about the same amount without there being major load-bearing problems,” he said.

Google ad revenue from the YouTube channel, once enough to keep things moving, no longer comes close. “I thought that’s all it would take, but that’s just not the case anymore.”

The result: Read can no longer produce Dial the Gate at its current volume without the show “doing serious structural damage to the load-bearing parts of my life that really need to hold up everything else.”

What He’s Asking For

Read has set up a Patreon at patreon.com/dialthegate with three tiers. He was characteristically direct about what it is and what it isn’t.

Every piece of content will remain free. Day one. Available to everyone. “It’s designed for you, my fellow Stargate fan. That’s just what it’s for.” There are no exclusives behind the paywall. Patreon members get credit recognition in the show and the option to remain anonymous if they prefer.

He’s also offering his services as an audio and video editor. “I’m not that great with a camera, but I am an editor.” Anyone interested in a consultation can reach him at dialthegate@gmail.com.

The ask is narrow and specific: help him keep up with the volume of coverage the franchise deserves, cover the talent fees for guests who require payment, and fund travel so he can cover the new show in person. “In order to keep the show up at the volume that I want to create it — and that Stargate deserves at this stage, with it coming back — I need a little bit of financial support.”

The Worst Possible Timing, and the Best

Amazon MGM announced the new Stargate series in November 2025. Writers’ room is active. Production is expected to begin in fall 2026 in London. Martin Gero is writing and executive producing. Brad Wright is involved. This is not a reboot — it’s a continuation from people who know exactly what the franchise is.

For the Stargate community, it’s the moment they’ve been waiting fifteen years for. For Dial the Gate, it should be the beginning of the channel’s most important chapter the moment when a show built to document and celebrate the franchise gets to cover its actual return.

Instead, Read is driving for Uber and asking whether he can keep the lights on.

“The question is how frequently, what volume of content — my feet have to touch the ground and I can’t live in the fantasy world anymore.”

That sentence lands hard for anyone who’s watched what he’s built. Dial the Gate exists because one person loved a television show enough to spend six years and more than ten thousand dollars of his own money making sure the people who created it got to tell their stories properly. The franchise is coming back. The audience is there. The host who built the infrastructure to cover it is asking for help.

If you’re a Stargate fan, this is the moment to show up. Head to patreon.com/dialthegate.

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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!

NEXT: Project Hail Mary Is Chasing the All-Time Space Movie Record

Josh Daws spent 12.5 years at The Walt Disney Company. He worked on Disney blogs, ShopDisney, and most recently ESPN Fantasy Sports. On April 15, Disney’s new CEO Josh D’Amaro cut 1,000 employees company-wide, and Daws was among them. An hour later, he posted on X: “I was just laid off from The Walt Disney Company after 12.5 years with the company. Ask me anything.”

The thread went viral within hours.

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The questions poured in from every direction including fans, critics, journalists, and the terminally curious. What came back was not the scorched-earth takedown many anticipated. Daws answered carefully, honestly, and at times with a candor that landed harder than any polemic would have.

On DEI inside Disney: “Peaked in 2020 and has been in steady decline since then. It’s much better internally now. The vibe shift is real.”

He said the same thing again when pressed from a different angle: “Not a fan, but they’ve toned it down a ton since Trump was elected. The vibe shift is real.”

Daws, a Christian, was asked directly why Disney seemed to despise conservative Christians while pushing an LGBTQ agenda at every turn. His answer cut through years of culture war noise: “Very small and vocal minority of the company. Most folks just want to make cool stuff.”

Disney’s critics have spent years treating the company as a monolith of ideological malice. Daws, who was inside the building for twelve and a half years, says the people actually ruining things were never representative of the broader workforce. The 2022 leaked “not-at-all-secret gay agenda” all-hands meeting, which Daws confirmed attending, was the product of a small faction. The rank and file had other concerns.

He dismissed the theory that Disney employees were deliberately sabotaging Star Wars and other franchises. “Nah. No one wants to make crap.” Poor creative direction and ideological tunnel vision, not malice, drove the failures.

On AI’s role in his firing: “On the grand scale, probably to some degree. On the small scale it’s probably more to do with me being remote. Remote workers are easier to cut.” He also dropped a candid verdict on Disney’s new leadership: “I think the new CEO needs to make some big moves to instill confidence in the market.”

His overall outlook on the company’s future was measured. “Cautiously optimistic. I’m rooting for them. America needs a healthy Disney.”

Disney has not responded to press inquiries about Daws’ claims. D’Amaro, who officially became CEO on March 18, now owns the aftermath.

What Daws confirmed on the record lines up with what outside observers have been saying since 2024: the political monoculture inside Disney’s content divisions was never as absolute as the loudest voices made it sound, and it is contracting. That does not rehabilitate the years of franchise damage under Bob Iger’s second tenure or the ideological casting decisions across Star Wars and Marvel. But it complicates the simplest version of the story.

The question fans are left with is whether Disney’s “vibe shift” produces anything on screen, or whether the bureaucratic habits of six bad years outlast the people who built them.

What do you think?

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NEXT: Issa Rae: DEI Is “A Bad Word” in Hollywood and Execs of Color Won’t Co-Sign Anymore

Disney cut roughly 1,000 employees across the company today. Marvel took some of the deepest hits.

Both Marvel Entertainment in New York and Marvel Studios in Burbank lost staff, with layoffs confirmed across film and TV production, comics, franchise, finance, and legal. According to Deadline, approximately 8% of Marvel’s total workforce is gone.

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The visual development cuts tell the real story. Marvel Studios eliminated most of its in-house visual development team and will replace them with outside contractors hired project by project. That is not a restructuring. That is a studio that no longer trusts its own pipeline enough to staff it permanently.

Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro confirmed the cuts, framing them as part of a push toward a more streamlined marketing and brand organization. The Wrap reported the Marvel reductions follow directly from the studio’s artificially inflated production slate, which ballooned during the Disney+ era as the streamer demanded fresh content regardless of whether audiences showed up. They largely did not.

Marvel went through a smaller round of layoffs in 2024. That round was quiet, whereas this one is not. Eight percent across nearly every department signals that Disney has finally accepted what critics have been saying for three years: the machine was producing too much product of too little quality, and the bill has arrived.

This round included several individuals at Marvel Comics. Senior editors Lauren Bisom, Devin Lewis, and Darren Shan are among those let go this week. Timothy Cheng, Marvel’s Executive Director of Communications, is also leaving after years with Marvel.

The comics division being included is worth noting for the right reasons. Marvel’s print operation has run as a largely separate concern from the studio side, but the same ideological capture that damaged the films ran through the comics just as thoroughly, with legacy characters replaced, messaging prioritized over story, and the existing fanbase treated as an obstacle. Whether the layoffs reach the editorial decisions that drove that direction is a different question. Studios rarely cut from the top.

What is clear is that the version of Marvel that treated Disney+ as a content factory, that greenlit She-Hulk and Secret Invasion and Ms. Marvel and assumed the brand would carry them, is being dismantled today. The question now is whether the people making the cuts understand why those shows failed, or whether they believe the problem was volume rather than quality.

Independent publishers and creators have been building audiences while Marvel spent years alienating its core readers. The market was never gone. It went elsewhere.

Is Marvel cutting the right people, or will the same creative direction survive the layoffs intact?

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