The Walt Disney Company:

The Walt Disney Studios announced today that, after nearly 14 years of leading Lucasfilm, President Kathleen Kennedy is stepping down from her role and will transition back to full-time producing, including the studio’s upcoming feature films The Mandalorian and Grogu and Star Wars: Starfighter. Going forward, Dave Filoni will take on creative leadership of Lucasfilm as President and Chief Creative Officer, Lucasfilm, and Lynwen Brennan will serve as Co-President, Lucasfilm, with each having held senior executive roles at the studio for more than 15 years. The two will report to Disney Entertainment Co-Chairman Alan Bergman, and their close collaboration will carry Lucasfilm into its next chapter of storytelling, with a strong foundation of creative vision and operational leadership guiding the studio forward.

Matthew Belloni, writing at Puck News:

Seven years between Skywalker and May’s The Mandalorian and Grogu is an inexcusable eternity in franchise filmmaking, and the projects Kennedy abandoned during that stretch could fill a Sarlacc pit. She announced new films with Rian Johnson, and Damon Lindelof and Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, and the Game of Thrones guys, and Josh Trank, and Taika Waititi, and Patty Jenkins (that one came with a hype video). She sidelined Gareth Edwards for Tony Gilroy in the middle of Rogue One, and fired Lord and Miller while they were shooting Solo despite signing off on their vision for a more comedic prequel. She booted Colin Trevorrow from Rise of Skywalker and paid a fortune for J.J. Abrams to undo Johnson’s creative choices in The Last Jedi because some nerds online were pissed. That’s just the stuff that became public. Over and over, sources pointed to a chaotic process at Lucasfilm. Now Donald Glover, Simon Kinberg, and James Mangold are awaiting the fate of their projects. Only Star Wars could keep convincing these Charlie Browns to line up to kick Kennedy’s football.

It’s harsh, but I can’t disagree. So many projects have been announced and so few have actually happened. Most of the output has been on television, and that’s not necessary bad, but the results have been mixed at best. To be fair, it’s probably not all her fault. Steven Soderbergh and Adam Driver pitched a film called The Hunt for Ben Solo and it seems that Kennedy was on board, but Bob Iger and Alan Bergman killed it. And even Marvel Studios has announced a few projects that didn’t end up happening, although Kevin Feige certainly has a much better track record.

As far as Dave Filoni being the new creative lead, I’m not excited. The great thing about the Star Wars universe is that it has the potential to tell many different kinds of stories, but it seems like Filoni is only interested in a few of them. He usually sticks to similar themes and tone, and sometimes it works out really well. The Clone Wars contains some of the greatest moments in all of Star Wars, but I don’t want everything to feel like that. Andor is radically different in both theme and tone, and that’s what elevates it to one of the best works in the entire franchise. I’m not sure that show would have been greenlit under his leadership. I hope Dave Filoni remembers that the world is wide enough for both Cassian and Grogu.

Wikipedia was founded 25 years ago today, on January 15, 2001. In that time, it’s become one of the most important websites on the internet. So today I wanted to share some of my favorite parts from this article on The Verge: “How Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks.”

Wikipedia is the largest compendium of human knowledge ever assembled, with more than 7 million articles in its English version, the largest and most developed of 343 language projects. Started nearly 25 years ago, the site was long mocked as a byword for the unreliability of information on the internet, yet today it is, without exaggeration, the digital world’s factual foundation.

This is a fantastic article that talks about how Wikipedia was created, how it works, and why it’s under attack. It started with Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger attempting to start their own online encyclopedia called Nupedia; only experts could contribute to it, and there was a rigorous review process before anything could be posted. Unsurprisingly, it took them a year to write just 20 articles. To speed things up, they decided to open-source the project, and thus Wikipedia was born. There were more than 20,000 articles created in its first year.

There were few rules at first, but one that Wales said was “non-negotiable” was that Wikipedia should be written from a “neutral point of view.” The policy, abbreviated as NPOV, was imported from the “nonbias policy” Sanger had written for Nupedia. But on Wikipedia, Wales considered it as much a “social concept of cooperation” as an editorial standard. If this site was going to be open to anyone to edit, the only way to avoid endless flame wars over who is right was, provocatively speaking, to set questions of truth aside. “We could talk about that and get nowhere,” Wales wrote to the Wikipedia email list. “Perhaps the easiest way to make your writing more encyclopedic is to write about what people believe, rather than what is so,” he explained.

I think everyone would agree that the NPOV policy is a good one, and setting aside questions of truth in favor of beliefs is a good way to get there. If people can’t agree on an issue, at least they should be able to agree on what it is they’re disagreeing about. But of course, people believe all sorts of silly things. So how do you handle things like climate change deniers or flat-Earthers?

In response, the early volunteers added another rule. You can’t just say things; any factual claim needs a citation that readers can check for themselves. When people started emailing Wales their proofs that Einstein was wrong about relativity, he clarified that the cited source could not be your own “original research.” Sorry, Wales wrote to an Einstein debunker, it doesn’t matter whether your theory is true. When it is published in a physics journal, you can cite that.

Instead of trying to ascertain the truth, editors assessed the credibility of sources, looking to signals like whether a publication had a fact-checking department, got cited by other reputable sources, and issued corrections when it got things wrong.

At their best, these ground rules ensured debates followed a productive dialectic. An editor might write that human-caused climate change was a fact; another might change the line to say there was ongoing debate; a third editor would add the line back, backed up by surveys of climate scientists, and demand peer-reviewed studies supporting alternate theories. The outcome was a more accurate description of the state of knowledge than many journalists were promoting at the time by giving “both sides” equal weight, and also a lot of work to arrive at. A 2019 study published in Nature found that Wikipedia’s most polarizing articles — eugenics, global warming, Leonardo DiCaprio — are the highest quality, because each side keeps adding citations in support of their views. Wikipedia: a machine for turning conflict into bibliographies.

It’s not Wikipedia’s job to ascertain truth; its job is to present information from credible sources. So each article acts like a summary, and you always have the option to check the citations and explore the topic in more detail. And if you think important information is missing, you can add it as long as you follow the rules: neutral point of view, no original research, and verifiability.

If each article is a summary, the Talk page is the history of how we got to the summary. If you ever wonder why an article is written in a particular way or why some piece of information is included, you can view the Talk page to see the discussion. There may be fierce disagreement, but everyone must follow the rules. And it’s all documented so that anyone can read the arguments and see how the editors arrived at that conclusion.

In 2009, law professors David A. Hoffman and Salil K. Mehra published a paper analyzing conflicts like these on Wikipedia and noted something unusual. Wikipedia’s dispute resolution system does not actually resolve disputes. In fact, it seems to facilitate them continuing forever.

These disputes may be crucial to Wikipedia’s success, the researchers wrote. Online communities are in perpetual danger of dissolving into anarchy. But because disputes on Wikipedia are won or lost based on who has better followed Wikipedia process, every dispute becomes an opportunity to reiterate the project’s rules and principles.

In 2016, researchers published a study of 10 years of Wikipedia edits about US politics. They found that articles became more neutral over time — and so, too, did the editors themselves. When editors arrived, they often proposed extreme edits, received pushback, and either left the project or made increasingly moderate contributions.

This is obviously not the reigning dynamic of the rest of the internet. The social platforms where culture and politics increasingly play out are governed by algorithms that have the opposite effect of Wikipedia’s bureaucracy in nearly every respect. Optimized to capture attention, they boost the novel, extreme, and sensational rather than subjecting them to increased scrutiny, and by sending content to users most likely to engage with it, they sort people into clusters of mutual agreement. This phenomenon has many names. Filter bubbles, epistemological fragmentation, bespoke realities, the sense that everyone has lost their minds. On Wikipedia, it’s called a “point of view split,” and editors banned it early. You are simply not allowed to make a new article on the same topic. Instead, you must make the case for a given perspective’s place amid all the others while staying, literally, on the same page.

That last sentence is my favorite in the whole article. Wikipedia is designed to force everyone to literally get on the same page. And the content of each page lives or dies based on who did a better job of following the rules. It doesn’t matter what your personal opinion is, you must maintain NPOV and verifiability if you want to be taken seriously. Unfortunately, some people can’t handle that.

There’s a whole section of this article about all the people who complain because they think Wikipedia is biased. A lot of the complaints are about a page called Reliable sources/Perennial sources. This is where editors have compiled a massive list of sources and determined the credibility for each one. This way they don’t need to keep having the same arguments over and over again about the same source on every Talk page. And of course, as with all of Wikipedia, you can see the the historical record of all the arguments that led to that decision.

But to Wikipedia’s critics, the page has become a symbol of the encyclopedia’s biases. Sanger, the briefly tenured cofounder, has found a receptive audience in right-wing activist Christopher Rufo and other conservatives by claiming Wikipedia has strayed from its neutrality principle by making judgments about the reliability of sources. Instead, he argues, it should present all views equally, including things “many Republicans believe,” like the existence of widespread fraud in the 2020 election and the FBI playing a role in the January 6th Capitol attack.

Last spring, the reliable source page collided with one of the most intense political flashpoints on Wikipedia, the Israel-Palestine conflict. In April, an editor asked whether it was time to reevaluate the reliability of the Anti-Defamation League in light of changes to the way it categorizes antisemitic incidents to include protests of Israel, among other recent controversies. About 120 editors debated the topic for two months, producing text equal to 1.9 The Old Man and the Seas, or “tomats,” a standard unit of Wikipedia discourse. The consensus was that the ADL was reliable on antisemitism generally but not when the Israel-Palestine conflict was involved.

Unusually for a Wikipedia administrative process, the decision received enormous attention. The Times of Israel called it a “staggering blow” for the ADL, which mustered Jewish groups to petition the foundation to overrule the editors. The foundation responded with a fairly technical explanation of how Wikipedia’s self-governing reliability determinations work.

The article goes on to talk about how people will cherry-pick examples of things getting deleted in an effort to prove bias, but when you read the Talk page that explains why it was deleted, it’s usually because it wasn’t following the rules. One person tried to use some kind of GPT language model to prove bias, but that study wasn’t peer reviewed, and those who looked into it explained why it doesn’t hold up.

There are biases on Wikipedia, but it’s not about the politics of left versus right. It’s more about the site as a whole and what topics even get a page in the first place. Sometimes this reflects bias in other media; as former Wikimedia CEO Katherine Maher said, “We’re a mirror of the world’s biases, not the source of them. We can’t write articles about what you don’t cover.” Other biases could come from the fact that most editors are men in Europe and America, so topics that interest them are much more comprehensive.

Then there’s a large section of the article that explains in detail all of the ways that authoritarian governments around the world have attempted to manipulate Wikipedia. There’s even been some threats from the US government, and American editors are getting concerned:

In April, the Trump administration’s interim US attorney for DC, Edward Martin Jr., sent a letter to the Wikimedia Foundation accusing the organization of disseminating “propaganda” and intimating that it had violated its duties as a tax-exempt nonprofit.

From a legal perspective, it was an odd document. The tax status of nonprofits is not generally the jurisdiction of the US attorney for DC, and many of the supposed violations, like having foreign nationals on its board or permitting “the rewriting of key, historical events and biographical information of current and previous American leaders,” are not against the law. Sanger is quoted, criticizing editor anonymity. In several cases, the rules Martin accuses Wikipedia of violating are Wikipedia’s own, like a commitment to neutrality. But the implied threat was clear.

“We’ve been anticipating something like this letter happening for some time,” a longtime editor, Lane Rasberry, said. It fits the pattern seen in India and elsewhere. He has been hearing more reports of threats against editors who work on pages related to trans issues and has been conducting security trainings to prevent their identities being revealed. Several US-based editors told me they now avoid politically contentious topics out of fear that they could be doxxed and face professional or legal retaliation. “There are more Wikipedia editors getting threats, more people getting scared,” Rasberry said.

Most people don’t really understand how Wikipedia works, and that can lead to them being skeptical of it or mistrusting it completely. But the great thing about it is that anyone can participate. One of the guidelines is to assume good faith, so as long as you’re engaging in good faith, you will be welcomed. The article mentions that there are many people who first got involved by vandalizing certain pages, but after talking to the community and learning the rules, they became valuable editors. The best defense of Wikipedia is to explain how it works.

As for the letter from the interim DC attorney, Trump withdrew Martin’s nomination in May, though he still has a position leading the Justice Department’s retribution-oriented “task force on weaponization.” In any case, the Wikimedia Foundation responded promptly.

“The foundation staff spent a lot of passion writing it,” Wales said of the reply. “Then they ran it by me for review, and I was ready to jump in, but I was like, actually, it’s perfect.”

“It’s very calm,” Wales said. “Here are the answers to your questions, here is what we do.” It explains how Wikipedia works.

Now that we’ve reached the end of 2025, I wanted to look back at this year in television. Obviously I don’t have time to watch all of the biggest shows, and this isn’t a complete list of everything I watched, but these were my favorites.

Andor

A lot of movies and TV shows give us the myth of The Chosen One who goes on The Hero’s Journey. But it’s called a myth for a reason. The truth is that if you actually want to build a rebellion, you need an organized grassroots effort with a lot of people working together toward a common goal. And you need that organization so that you can elevate someone to the position where they can become a hero. Most of those people will not be remembered, but they’re just as important. As Nemik said, “Remember that the frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward.”

This is a show about what it actually takes to fight back against a fascist regime. It’s going to be difficult, it’s going to be ugly, and a lot of people are going to die without ever getting the credit they deserve. But it’s always worth fighting and we must always have hope. After all, rebellions are built on hope.

The Rehearsal

Once again, Nathan Fielder is doing things that have never been done before on television. In some ways, this season was weaker than the first because it had less of a consistent storyline throughout. Each individual episode was great, but sometimes I felt that it wandered a bit from the central premise of the season. However, this season reached even greater heights (literally and figuratively), and the finale was extraordinary. This man is a genius with a level of commitment to the bit that is unmatched.

Pluribus

There’s been a lot of conversation about what this show is about. I’ve seen people argue that it’s about COVID, AI, or even colonialism. The great thing about this show is that I think everyone is kind of right. There are so many interesting ideas packed into this one season that it’s very open to interpretation. One of the themes that resonates the most with me is loneliness, including a specific kind of loneliness: this is what it feels like to be the only sane person in an insane world.

Severance

Looking back, I’m not sure how well this season holds together as a complete work. I think the story had a couple of unnecessary detours or things that never really payed off, at least not yet. This felt like a season that was very heavy on lore and emotion, and a little light on making progress within the larger story.

All of that being said, this was a ton of fun to watch week-to-week and the quality of this show is still very high. The premise is fantastic, and I’m totally captivated by the possibilities of where this could go. I think this season was a lot of character exploration and setup for what comes next, but the finale delivers an incredible point of no return. Now all the pieces are on the board, the battle lines have been drawn, and there’s no going back.

The New York Times:

It was supposed to be a celebratory milestone, the final step in the process to obtain U.S. permanent residency. Instead, as each interview with an immigration officer wrapped up, federal agents swooped in, handcuffed the foreign spouse and took him or her away.

But the couples and their lawyers said they had followed the required steps: They had submitted extensive paperwork and paid fees. The foreign spouses had been fingerprinted and passed medical exams. None had criminal records. None had entered the country illegally. They had already been granted employment authorization.

I think ICE has realized that it’s actually somewhat difficult to find undocumented immigrants because those people are purposely trying to evade the system. On the other hand, documented immigrants are, well, documented. These are people who are trying to do things the right way. This means that they’re in the system, there’s records of their homes and their workplaces, and they have meetings set up with immigration officers. If your job is to deport people and your boss is demanding that you get your numbers up, it’s much easier to arrest someone when you know exactly where they’re going to be at a specific time.

They said they were only going after people who were here illegally. They said they would start with the violent criminals. They said they just want people to come into the country the right way. They lied about everything.

Reuters:

Two months after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, a government-backed campaign has led to firings, suspensions, investigations and other action against more than 600 people. Republican officials have endorsed the punishments, saying that those who glorify violence should be removed from positions of trust.

The article goes on to mention that 22 academics were fired in 2020 for comments about George Floyd, and more than 160 people were fired in 2024 for being pro-Palestine. It appears the latest round of cancellation is the most successful yet. I think this is a great example of how the right-wing operates and how efficient they can be.

First, they spend years screaming about cancel culture. They talk about it as though everyone who is even slightly left of center are all engaged in a mass campaign to get people fired simply for being conservative. They make it sound like online lefties, media liberals, and the Democratic Party are all working together to take away free speech.

Second, they decide that they should use the tools of their enemy against them. However, their enemy’s tools are imagined. They believe they’re taking a page from the enemy’s playbook, but actually they’re writing the playbook themselves.

Third, they become the very thing that they claim exists on the other side. A highly organized group of people consisting of online activists, media personalities, and politicians, all working together to get others fired for political speech that they don’t like. I would say they’re no different from their enemy, but the truth is, they’re worse.

This also feeds into their attacks on education. From the article:

Teachers, academics and university administrators were among those most frequently punished for criticizing Kirk. More than 350 education workers were fired, suspended or investigated in the days following the assassination, including 50 academics and senior university administrators, three high school principals, two cheerleading coaches and a theology instructor.

It’s amazing how effective a movement can be when everyone works together to achieve a shared goal. If only this kind of energy could be put towards something that actually helped people.

The New York Times:

Zohran Mamdani, a once unheralded state lawmaker from Queens whose affordability platform and charisma fueled a meteoric political rise, was elected on Tuesday as the 111th mayor of New York, according to The Associated Press.

The victory by Mr. Mamdani, 34, a democratic socialist, placed a final stamp on the astonishing ascent of an assemblyman who rose from anonymity to defeat better-known rivals like former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, first in the Democratic primary and now again in the general election.

His win represents a major triumph for progressives, empowering a new coalition of younger voters and immigrants who volunteered for his campaign, filled its coffers with thousands of small donations and flocked to the polls to elect the city’s first Muslim mayor.

I had never heard of Zohran Mamdani until early this year. I came across a video of him on TikTok where he was on the streets of New York, interviewing people about the 2024 presidential election. He was asking people if they voted, who they voted for, and why. It didn’t matter if they had stayed home on election day or if they voted for Trump, he wanted to hear about what was important to them.

After listening to people express their concerns, he would outline some of his ideas that could address the issues people care about. Then he did a fun thing where he would ask people if they would vote for a politician who would implement those policies. When they said yes, he would introduce himself as candidate for mayor. And most importantly, he did all of this with a smile.

In the age of Trump, it seems like everyone is angry about politics all the time. Part of that is because Trump himself is often angry and upset about various things, and he expresses that very clearly. I wouldn’t say that this is a deliberate political strategy by Trump (I think that’s just how he is), but it’s certainly effective. If the people are angry, it makes sense that they would choose a leader who reflects that.

Zohran Mamdani has proven that there’s another way. He was a nobody, up against establishment candidates, running on a very ambitious policy agenda, getting attacked on all sides, and he did the whole thing with a smile on his face. Even when he was speaking seriously about the issues, he always appeared to be in a good mood. Rather than express anger about the condition of New York City, he showed that he’s excited to fix it. While Trump projects rage, Mamdani projects hope.

It often feels that better things aren’t possible, but it’s not true. There is always hope because there are always good people who are willing to fight. It may seem like that’s not enough stop the rise of fascism, but remember this: Rebellions are built on hope.

Tomorrow we get back to work, but today we celebrate. In celebration, say the following out loud with me:

Better things are possible.

The Associated Press:

President Donald Trump and other high-ranking Republicans claim Democrats forced the government shutdown fight because they want to give free health care to immigrants in the U.S. illegally.

Democrats are trying to extend tax credits that make health insurance premiums more affordable on marketplaces established by the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare, and reverse Medicaid cuts in Trump’s big bill passed this summer. But immigrants who entered the country illegally are not eligible for either program.

A big part of conservative political philosophy is small government. They believe that government should not be responsible for so many things, and instead should be left up to the free market and the private sector. As a result, many of their goals are about shrinking government wherever possible. We saw it earlier this year with DOGE enacting mass layoffs, and the Big Beautiful Bill cutting funding for Medicaid and SNAP. For conservatives, the effectiveness of these agencies and programs is irrelevant because philosophically they believe that it’s not the government’s job.

But normal people don’t have this weird philosophy. Most people don’t really care where this kind of assistance comes from, they just want it to work. The problem for Republicans is that many of these programs are actually effective, and it’s very difficult to advocate for getting rid of things that help people. So they turn to a classic strategy that has worked over and over again: they lie.

They say it’s just about cutting “waste, fraud, and abuse” (even though there are already government offices who do this job). They say it’s just about cutting off people who are abusing the system (the overwhelming majority of Medicaid fraud is committed by providers, not beneficiaries). And now they’re saying that the shutdown is because Democrats want to give free healthcare to undocumented immigrants (again, it’s about tax credits).

Republicans have to lie to enact their agenda because if they were actually honest about what they believe, most people wouldn’t support it. And if people knew the actual consequences of the agenda, they would be furious.

Ken Klippenstein:

With the mainstream media distracted by the made-for-TV drama of James Comey’s indictment, Trump has signed a little-noticed national security directive identifying “anti-Christian” and “anti-American” views as indicators of radical left violence. Called National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, it’s being referred to as “NSPM-7” by administration insiders.

Just to get this out of the way, studies show that the majority of political violence comes from people with right-wing ideology. It appears that the administration knows this too, considering the DOJ deleted their report that came to the same conclusion. If the government actually wanted to tackle the problem of political violence, they would start on the right.

Of course, they don’t care about political violence coming from the right. I’m not even sure they care about violence coming from the left; or rather, they only care about it to the extent that it gives them an excuse to go after political opponents. And that’s exactly what this directive is.

Some of the things that are considered to be indicators of violence include anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity. Not only do we have a First Amendment right to express these views, it’s unclear how these will even be defined. Trump has said that he thinks Democrats hate America, so is being a Democrat an indicator of violence? What about someone who supports Medicare for All? Is that anti-capitalism and therefore that person is considered dangerous? If I say that I think Christianity does more harm than good, will I be put on some kind of list?

Other examples listed as indicators of violence include extremism on migration, race, or gender. Again, it’s unclear what this actually means. Polling data from multiple sources including PBS, Gallup, and CNN, shows that over half of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of immigration and think the administration has “gone too far.” Could half the country be classified has having an extreme position on migration? Is it extremism on race to talk about racial disparities in prisons? What does it mean to be extremist on gender? Will trans people be surveilled for simply existing? Or is simply supporting trans rights enough of an excuse to be investigated by law enforcement?

The follow-up article details how law firms are interpreting the directive, and what they believe the practical effects will be. The general assessment is that this could apply to a wide variety of non-profits and political advocacy groups. It seems that not only could the organizations be targeted, but their employees and supporters as well.

The reason this is possible is because, as Hasan Piker said, “It’s not violence that they’re combating, it’s rhetoric.” This is another attempt by this administration to shut down political dissent and erode free speech. Perhaps the First Amendment will hold strong in the end, but it’s frightening how proudly and violently they’re attacking it.

In summary, I return to Ken Klippenstein:

I don’t want to sound hyperbolic but the plain truth is that NSPM-7 is a declaration of war on anyone who does not support the Trump administration and its agenda.

This is fascism.

Last week, two news stories happened back to back: Apple announced new iPhones, and Charlie Kirk was killed. In the days after, I started to feel weird about everything that happened, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Until now.

On Tuesday, Apple announced iPhone 17, iPhone Air, and iPhone 17 Pro. As usual, these iPhones have better cameras and more features than the ones that came before it. Now, all of the back cameras are 48MP, and the front cameras are 18MP. They also include a new feature called Dual Capture, which allows you to record with the front and back cameras at the same time.

On Wednesday, Charlie Kirk was shot and killed while speaking at an event he was he was holding at Utah Valley University. He has a regular series where he debates college students on various political topics, and this was the first stop on a scheduled tour around the country. These events are usually recorded and posted online, and often go viral on social media.

To recap, Apple showed off their new products with new cameras and features, talking about all the beautiful moments you can capture on your phone. The next day, college students used their phone cameras to record a political assassination. As a result, there is high quality, up close video of the moment he was shot, as well as many videos of the chaos that unfolded immediately after. This is the reality of what these devices will be used for. You can capture horrific tragedies in stunning 4K resolution. And soon, with Apple’s new Dual Capture feature, you can record video of an increasingly violent country while also getting your live reaction.

But that was just the first thing that gave me weird feelings last week. The second has to do with the parallels between how Charlie Kirk got famous and how he died. As I said, he’s done many of these events on college campuses where he debates students. In a way, maybe it’s not too strange that a controversial person who hosts public events, challenging people to argue with him, was attacked at one of these events. At least until you consider the internet of it all.

Charlie Kirk made a name for himself, at least in part, because video of his campus debates would get circulated around social media. It didn’t matter how the video was edited, or whether it was being shared to agree or disagree with him, he was going viral. And on the internet, attention is the most valuable commodity.

In the wake of his death, some people in the media have said that on these campus tours, he engaged in good-faith debate. This is obviously untrue. Charlie Kirk was a propagandist. His job was to hold and defend a specific point of view. How else could he maintain a relationship with the president of the United States. That’s not to say that he was lying about what he believed. As Noam Chomsky said, “I’m sure you believe everything you’re saying. But what I’m saying is, if you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.”

Charlie Kirk was not in the business of honest debate, he was in the business of farming content. He spent much of his life engineering situations for the purpose of getting clips to go viral. And in a bizarre twist of fate, his death became the final viral moment. In a dark and horrific way, it all came full circle. The footage of his murder became more content.

To be clear, I’m not saying this is necessarily bad. I’m not sure it’s wrong or immoral to share video of what happened. You can argue that because he was a high profile political figure, footage of his assassination has real journalistic importance. I’m simply highlighting this odd symmetry between his life and his death that can only exist because of the internet.

Another thing that felt weird about last week is the videos that emerged from people who were there, showing the initial response to the gunshot. We could see the reactions of individuals, the movement of the crowd, and even footage of the shooter running across the roof of a building. Julia Alexander wrote a piece called “A Generation Posting Through It” where she perfectly summarized the strangeness of these videos:

One video I came across showed a TikTok creator filming people running from the shooting site, taking about 40 seconds to show the horrifying chaos surrounding students in attendance, but ending on a “make sure you subscribe” message. Nothing about the video’s existence is startling, which is in itself an alarming realization.

It gets weirder when you think about how many of these video sharing platforms can have a monetization component, so users can make money when their videos get a lot of views. Is this profiting from someone’s murder? Or is it fair compensation for video that has real journalistic merit? Or is it simply a way to throw someone a couple of bucks after they witnessed traumatic violence?

In 2018, Bo Burnham sat down with Grace Helbig to discuss his film Eighth Grade. Toward the end of the Q&A session, he said something that has always stuck with me:

This movie is not about, like— it’s not a Ted Talk. It’s not telling you what to think. It’s going, like, this is sort of how I think it feels; this is how the internet registers to me in my tummy.

I do think it’s worth talking about the ethics of how we use the internet, and it’s good to have a conversation about the ways in which the internet affects real life. But it’s also worth taking time for each of us to ask ourselves, “How does the internet make me feel?”

There it is again, that funny feeling.

“You trust everyone and think everyone you ever met is, like… beautiful.”
“Maybe that’s the real punk rock.”

It feels like in order to get anything made in Hollywood these days, it has to be part of a franchise. So if it’s becoming more difficult to tell an original story, it can be smart to do the next best thing: use IP to explore interesting themes and make a statement. After all, some of our favorite genre movies are the ones that take familiar characters and tropes, and then use them to do something more.

This is a movie about one of the most famous superheroes of all time. It includes cartoonishly evil villains, space aliens, sci-fi portals, and a flying dog. It’s also a movie that is overtly political and willing to criticize the American government. While other studio blockbusters steer clear of politics, this one drives fast right on down the middle.

At some point in the last decade, the term “virtue signaling” was popularized online, referring to the act of expressing moral values for the purpose of showing others how good of a person you are. In reaction to this, a new phenomenon has emerged: “vice signaling.” This is when a person proudly expresses immoral or offensive opinions, seemingly with the intent to show how much they don’t care about what others think or feel. It seems like there’s a lot of that going around these days.

We’re all taught that we should be kind and honest and care about others, but doing those things requires vulnerability and introspection. It’s much easier to build a wall around your feelings and be an asshole. Plus you get to feel like you’re different from everyone else, like a rebel: “I’m not gonna be what they want me to be.” A younger version of me certainly saw the appeal.

But what happens when this attitude becomes mainstream? Are you really so different from everyone else when everyone else is as much of a dick as you are? Are you actually a rebel when your behavior and statements resemble those of the president of the United States? This is the political climate in which Superman is released.

Right now, a lot of people think it’s cool to not care about others, so this movie gives us a hero who is radically compassionate. Granted, it’s expected that the hero will be a good person who tries to save people, but it does feel like a response to the current time. And it goes even further by making it political: sometimes doing the right thing means going against the American government.

Superman is meant to show us the best of what humanity can be. So in a time when people seem encouraged to do their worst, Superman returned.