Comedian Chris Rock doesn’t consider himself a Trump supporter, but there is one opinion the president holds that he believes is correct: fake news.
The entertainer discussed his thoughts during a recently published <a href="https://variety.com/2026/film/features/chris-rock-interview-misty-green-oscar-buzz-will-smith-slap-1236852060/">interview</a> with Variety. “I’m not a fan. But it’s weird when somebody gets one thing right, and the one thing almost clears them of all their other sins. The news is fake. He got that right.’”
Curtis Houck, managing editor of the Media Research Center’s NewsBusters, said Rock is picking up on what’s so obvious to others.
“In this day and age, we often find ourselves feeling like we’re approaching cats-and-dogs living together on certain issues, and that includes the acknowledgment that the legacy, elitist media have failed to serve the public,” Houck said in a <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/media/chris-rock-says-president-trump-correct-one-key-issue-almost-redeems-his-other-sins">statement</a> to Fox News Digital. 
“The widespread awareness of both media bias and press ineptitude will be one of President Trump’s longest-lasting legacies. Chris Rock certainly seems to be on the president’s wavelength,” he added.
During a 2023 comedy event in Washington, D.C., Rock warned the assembled crowd, including former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and members of President Biden’s administration, that their efforts to arrest Trump would surely backfire.
“Are you guys really going to arrest Trump?” Rock said at the time. “Do you know this is only going to make him more popular. It’s like arresting Tupac. He’s just gonna sell more records. Are you stupid?”
Like most of Hollywood, Rock is a long-time liberal who frequently uses his stand-up platform and satire to critique American politics, race relations, and cultural issues. 
In a 2020 interview with The New York Times, he argued former President Barack Obama&#8217;s big win was nothing more than &#8220;progress for white people.&#8221;
&#8220;I said this before, but Obama becoming the president, it&#8217;s progress for white people,&#8221; Rock told the outlet at the time. &#8220;It&#8217;s not progress for black people. It&#8217;s the Jackie Robinson thing. It&#8217;s written like he broke a barrier, as if there weren&#8217;t black people that could play before him. And that&#8217;s how white people have learned about racism. They think, when these people work hard enough, they&#8217;ll be like Jackie.&#8221;

Untitled design – 2026-09-10T134557.798

Chris Rock Admits Trump Got One Thing Right

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Transgender-identifying actress Elliot Page says it has become &#8220;a little tricky&#8221; to get cast now that Hollywood sees her differently as she seeks work as a white man.  
Page discussed her career during an appearance on the &#8220;On Film&#8230; With Kevin McCarthy&#8221; podcast after playing the male Greek soldier Sinon in Christopher Nolan&#8217;s blockbuster &#8220;The Odyssey,&#8221; which was released in July. 
McCarthy suggested Page must have &#8220;a zillion calls&#8221; coming in following the film&#8217;s success.
“No, Kevin, I’m not,” Page responded. “So, let’s — if someone wants to call me …”
McCarthy sounded surprised and asked Page to confirm she really didn&#8217;t have another job lined up. 
“Not really,” Page replied. “I’d really love to do, ideally, good work. That’s what I’d love to do.”
The actress said she wasn’t “comfortable” while working on “Inception,” but that’s all different now, since she’s moved on to demanding that everyone call her a man.
“I was seen in a certain way before and it is different now,” she added. Page jokingly said, “I think that’s probably for pretty obvious reasons.”
Page then jokingly blamed her difficulties on &#8220;the Canadian thing.&#8221;
The comments on the clip were predictably brutal, and accurate.
“Let’s give Elliot the benefit of accepting his premise at face value. Cool. Elliot is a 5’1’’ slender male with an unattractive face and no special skills like comedy or martial arts,” one commenter <a href="https://x.com/failed_testing/status/2095223674206830887">wrote</a>. “The number of men with that description who get roles in Hollywood is zero. Elliot is getting precisely what any man would, and isn’t that the goal?”
“Already a mediocre actress, now a twink manlet who looks creepy as hell, yeah I wonder why it ain&#8217;t raining contracts,” another person <a href="https://x.com/ElonBuyRedditz/status/2095502113442775479">agreed</a>.
“Ellen is just going to have to deal with the fact that despite her elaborate costume, she is cross-dressing as a tiny, effeminate male and there’s just not any parts for that unless it’s somebody’s sidekick,” <a href="https://x.com/C130GuyBNA/status/2095161207997038896">echoed</a> a third. “She might take some of Kevin Hart’s parts and be the tiny cohort of the Rock… but she doesn’t have a sense of humor like he does.”
“She chose to type cast herself and she’s not a believable romantic lead, heroic figure, or even male. She looks exactly like what she is – a woman who enjoys dressing like a man.”
Page announced to the world in December 2020 that she identified as transgender, about six years after coming out as gay. In a March 2021 issue of Time magazine, Page discussed undergoing top surgery and said she was excited to continue acting while living as a man.

Elliot Page

Elliot Page Claims It’s Too Hard To Get Work As A White Man

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An examination of actor Tim Curry&#8217;s body revealed that the &#8220;Rocky Horror Picture Show&#8221; star died of coronary artery disease.
According to <a href="https://people.com/tim-curry-cause-of-death-revealed-12068616?taid=6a9876e907aa2e0001642749&amp;utm_campaign=peoplemagazine&amp;utm_content=new&amp;utm_medium=social&amp;utm_source=twitter.com">documents</a> from the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health — obtained by PEOPLE — Curry&#8217;s primary cause of death was coronary artery disease. His previous stroke (2012) and a history of kidney cancer were also listed as significant conditions that contributed to his overall failing health.
The documents, PEOPLE reported, do not show that Curry had any operations related to his prior stroke, the kidney cancer, or the coronary artery disease.
After &#8220;Rocky Horror,&#8221; &#8220;Clue,&#8221; and Stephen King&#8217;s &#8220;It&#8221; made Curry a household name, he went on to appear in dozens of films and television shows — from comedic appearances in &#8220;Muppet Treasure Island&#8221; and USA Network series like &#8220;Monk&#8221; and &#8220;Psych&#8221; to a terrifying turn in the long-running procedural drama &#8220;Criminal Minds.&#8221;
A massive stroke in 2012 left Curry unable to perform at the level he was used to.
&#8220;I was having a massage at the time and I didn’t even actually notice anything, but the guy who was doing the massage said, ‘I’m worried about you. I want to call an ambulance.’ And he did, and I said, ‘That’s so silly,'&#8221; Curry recalled — but after the stroke, he struggled with the use of his left leg in particular for the rest of his life.
Instead, he focused primarily on voiceover roles. From behind a microphone, he voiced hundreds of characters from Nickelodeon&#8217;s &#8220;The Wild Thornberrys&#8221; to Disney Channel&#8217;s &#8220;Phineas and Ferb&#8221; and many more.
Curry, according to a statement from his publicist, passed away at the age of 80 at his home in Toluca Lake, Los Angeles, on Tuesday, August 25.
The Los Angeles Police Department confirmed that officers were called to his home to investigate. Officials also confirmed that the actor died just after 11 p.m.

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Actor Tim Curry’s Cause Of Death Revealed

Actor Tim Curry's Cause Of Death Revealed

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Former “Spider-Man” star Andrew Garfield still thinks the character should be gay.
The 43-year-old actor said his mind hasn’t changed since the infamous interview in 2013 when he pitched that idea for the first time. 
Garfield reflected on his initial comments during a press tour for “The Uprising,” as Entertainment Weekly <a href="https://ew.com/andrew-garfield-supports-gay-spider-man-12074854">reported</a> earlier this week. 
“It was an exercise in rebellion that I felt passionate about,” Garfield told the outlet of his previous comments. “I just still believe that anyone can be in that suit. That’s the point of why it’s such a kind of universally beloved character, one of the greatly beloved characters in the history of fiction is because you don’t see skin color, you don’t see gender, you don’t see sexuality. Anyone can project themselves into that suit.”  
“I like the idea of a place where everyone is being honored and everyone is being included, and it was just a kind of act of saying, ‘Well, why not?’ And you’ll be telling on yourself if you have a strong opinion either way,” the actor went on.
This was a reflection on his suggestion in 2013 that Spider-Man could be gay. Garfield even had a love interest picked out for the character.
“I was kind of joking, but kind of not joking about MJ. … I was like, ‘What if MJ is a dude?’” the actor said at the time, referencing Spider Man’s love interest, Mary Jane. “Why can’t we discover that Peter is exploring his sexuality? It’s hardly even groundbreaking! … So why can’t he be gay? Why can’t he be into boys?”
He said an ideal option for the part would be actor Michael B. Jordan. Garfield added, “I’ve been obsessed with him since ‘The Wire.’ He’s so charismatic and talented. It’d be even better — we’d have interracial bisexuality!”
Garfield played Spider-Man in the films “The Amazing Spider-Man” (2012), “The Amazing Spider-Man 2” (2014), and later reprised the role alongside Tobey Maguire and Tom Holland in “Spider-Man: No Way Home” (2021).
Tom Holland played the character in the most recent installment, “Spider-Man: Brand New Day,” which broke box office records over the summer to become one of the top earning superhero films of all time, surpassing $2 billion in earnings.

Andrew Garfield

Spider-Man Star Doubles Down On His Woke Superhero Pitch

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The supremacy of superhero movies has come to an end: American moviegoers have superhero fatigue. In August, Marvel <a href="https://www.marvel.com/articles/live-events/d23-2026-all-the-marvel-news-recap">announced</a> a slew of new releases, including another reboot of the &#8220;X-Men&#8221; and a second television series featuring Paul Bettany’s Vision. Paired with a re-release of &#8220;Endgame,&#8221; these titles were criticized by fans for rehashing the same characters and plot lines. The culture has slowly been turning away from superhero movies. At its height during the 2010s, the superhero genre made between $6 and $8 billion annually. In comparison, <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2025/08/25/from-superman-to-fantastic-four-its-the-worst-performing-superhero-year-since-2011/">2025</a> was the worst-performing year for superhero movies since 2011.
After the Marvel Cinematic Universe had a legendary run in the 2010s, with movies like &#8220;Avengers: Endgame&#8221; raking in over a billion dollars, the fad fizzled out in the 2020s. For many, the notion of a cinematic universe became too overwhelming, as it required audiences to watch dozens and dozens of movies to understand characters’ relationships and situations. For others, the genre had become stale, with narrative arcs sticking to a similar format from film to film. Some people complained about the kinds of heroes being portrayed, as attempts to expand the cinematic universe required both Marvel and DC to reach deeper into their archives to find fresh characters; others complained that they were sick of seeing the same faces over and over again, such as Robert Downey Jr., who played Iron Man in the namesake 2008 film and returned this year to play a different character, Dr. Doom. 
Beneath each of these complaints lies a deeper concern about how Hollywood has decided to portray heroes. One of the reasons why superhero movies became so popular in the 21st century was their ability to humanize larger-than-life characters. &#8220;Iron Man&#8221; became a hit because Tony Stark’s billionaire-playboy attitude gave him an oddly relatable edge. Every iteration of Spiderman, from Tobey Maguire to Tom Holland, showed him grappling with the tension between power, responsibility, and personal troubles, like getting a girlfriend and keeping your grades up. Both Peter Quill and Stephen Strange acted like jerks, and by the time &#8220;Captain America: Civil War&#8221; rolled around in 2016, even the all-American hero’s ethics were up for debate. 
Superhero movies gradually abandoned the premise that there are clearly defined good guys and bad guys. As the heroes became morally gray, the villains became likable and charming. Despite being the primary adversary in the &#8220;Avengers,&#8221; Loki was given a strange redemptive arc that left many audiences wondering whether his attempt to overthrow Earth was really that bad. In &#8220;Black Panther,&#8221; the villainous Killmonger was <a href="https://www.ign.com/articles/2017/07/24/comic-con-2017-what-motivates-villain-killmonger-in-black-panther">described</a> by his actor, Michael B. Jordan, as “strategic, thoughtful, patient.” Even the pinnacle of MCU malevolence, Thanos, had his plan to wipe out half of all life justified by a Marxist-adjacent desire to redistribute resources. 
Subversive storytelling muddies the definition of &#8220;good&#8221; and &#8220;bad&#8221; characters, and that’s what most of these comic book movies initially clung to. At the time, it felt fresh. Christopher Nolan’s &#8220;Dark Knight&#8221; trilogy had done something similar in the mid-2000s, to the tune of billions of dollars in success. Studios assumed people were tired of the good guy versus bad guy trope that had been circling Hollywood since its inception. While that may have been true for a little while, the endless attempts to blur the lines between heroes and villains eventually felt stale. 
The 2020s haven’t been particularly kind to the superhero genre: 2023’s &#8220;The Marvels&#8221; was a certified box office bomb, reportedly losing <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2024/05/04/the-marvels-reportedly-lost-237-million-last-year-much-more-than-the-flash/">$237 million</a>; 2021’s &#8220;Black Widow&#8221; failed to cover its <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinereid/2023/10/03/revealed-the-marvel-movies-that-failed-to-cover-their-production-costs-at-the-box-office/">production costs</a> at the box office, and the same year &#8220;The Eternals&#8221; lost Disney an estimated $50-$60 million. Sony’s infamous 2024 failure, &#8220;Madame Web,&#8221; lost the studio as much as $<a href="https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/madame-box-office-much-did-162117602.html?guccounter=1&amp;guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&amp;guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAFiA0MrC08eqqZoLsjh3DrVMX822uASuYSQpbxAyJAr0bGTrUoH0afHRQ3UZowJ2HT2WhMYL4ugQrj58H-ix07r_nDnM7jKqmsx7G79qdVo3TDcsD_uZEihjfRZqzTSvfkZax0_6iwNscVNaWBbK_zvWvP8R6FhtGorAer2X3MOq">100 million</a>. Each of these movies followed the now decade-old trend of spotlighting flawed heroes and finding grains of good in every villain. 
Audiences are naturally drawn to clearly defined stories about good versus evil. During World War II, stories that depicted the bravery of American soldiers were extremely popular. In midcentury America, westerns that showed cowboys facing off against bank robbers and invaders were all the rage. In the 1970s, timeless box office hits like &#8220;Jaws&#8221; and &#8220;Star Wars&#8221; showed the power of good triumphing over evil. The inversion of traditional heroism popped up in cinemas during the tail end of 1960s cultural changes. 1967’s &#8220;Bonnie and Clyde&#8221; depicted the criminal couple as cool and romantic. At the time, it was groundbreaking, but nearly 50 years later, it has become the blueprint for storytelling. 
Superhero movies are incredibly important. Human beings like to know that there is something good and true worth striving toward. When they are repeatedly told that goodness and success are out of reach, it is demoralizing. Young Americans are in the midst of a crisis: <a href="https://ifstudies.org/report-brief/americas-demoralized-men-part-ii-lost-pathways-greater-struggles">67%</a> of young men feel like they have “no control” over their lives and almost <a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/1613301/gen-z-often-anxious-depressed-by-age-us/">half</a> of all Zoomers experience mental health issues. Now, more than ever, young people need to be exposed to heroes. They need to see positive depictions of great men doing good things so they can be encouraged to emulate that greatness. Superhero movies are fun and often funny, but they serve a greater purpose: to represent that good will overcome evil. For a culture that feels like it has no control over its future, we may need a superhero now more than ever. 
***
Brooke Brandtjen is a writer and journalist from Wisconsin who focuses primarily on culture, politics, and religion. She is a senior contributor at New Guard Press, a publication she joined while attending Hillsdale College.
This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/upstream" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream</a>, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

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The Real Villain Behind The Death Of Superhero Movies

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I kept hearing that sex in movies was dead, but I’ve spent the summer watching a surprising amount of sex in the theater. It hasn’t been actual, physical sex on screen — not porn, and not drama, either. The movies continue to lack costume-drama ravishing. &#8220;The Odyssey&#8221; was surprisingly sex-free, given the source material. But that old standby, the sex comedy, is legitimately back, and this time, it has a conservative twist. 
Classic 1980s sex comedies featured horny teenagers and hot female objects of desire who not only lacked agency, but sometimes even lacked names. The woke backlash to these movies produced joints like &#8220;Blockers,&#8221; &#8220;Booksmart,&#8221; and &#8220;Bottoms&#8221; (apparently studios required “B” titles), where our horny female heroines were either lesbians or just as prone to objectification as their male counterparts. 
But this summer’s sex-coms are as smart, knowing, and skeptical as their classic late &#8217;60s-early &#8217;70s numbers like &#8220;Bob and Carol&#8221; and &#8220;Ted and Alice,&#8221; and &#8220;Carnal Knowledge,&#8221; which revealed the sexual revolution in all its farcical absurdity. Now that revolution is long in the past, and we live in the crater of its aftermath. The sexual revolution won so completely that movies no longer find sexual availability inherently liberating or even particularly interesting. The new comic problem is what to do once everybody is theoretically allowed to get with everybody else. Four summer movies, in particular, examined the dilemma of what it means to be horny (or not), in a post-revolutionary age. 
The most obvious choice is the <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hollywoods-latest-sex-comedy-has-an-unexpected-conservative-message">arthouse hit</a> &#8220;The Invite,&#8221; directed by Olivia Wilde (who also directed &#8220;Booksmart&#8221;), from a knowing, funny screenplay by Rashida Jones and Will McCormack. Wilde and Seth Rogen play married San Francisco bohemian parents who live in a state of severe artistic and sexual repression. Enter their nonmonogamous upstairs neighbors, played by Edward Norton, and, in a delicious parody of intimacy therapist Esther Perel, Penelope Cruz, who has rarely been hotter on screen, which is saying a lot. 
The movie doesn’t really judge Cruz and Norton’s lifestyle. In fact, it presents it as somewhat appealing, if also somewhat easy to mock. The surprising twist isn’t that Wilde and Rogen try swinging and don’t like it. The movie makes it pretty clear that if Rogen hadn’t thrown out his back, they might have liked it just fine. Instead, it ends up reaffirming or rebooting their commitment to each other. That’s a radical statement for a movie, playing mostly to Blue State crowds, to make.
Less subtle, less interesting, and more pop-culture forward is the <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/one-night-only-turns-hookup-culture-into-the-real-villain">bizarre dystopia romcom</a> &#8220;One Night Only,&#8221; which released in August to mass confusion. The bizarre premise either turned people off or turned them away. In a nightmare for libertarians, a putatively Republican government has banned premarital sex except for one 12-hour period every summer, a mandate it enforces through biometric branding. Set in New York City — because One Night in, say, Des Moines wouldn’t be nearly as multicultural or full of pizza and subways — the movie plays out as a kind of Logan’s Booty Call. 
Apparently, the original cut of &#8220;One Night Only&#8221; contained a lot more sex, but Gen Z audiences rejected it. Yet I saw much more sex in this movie than I have in any other movie this year. Every scene and frame is full of people making out frantically in public and half-naked people orgiastically hanging out of windows. We even see Molly Ringwald and LeVar Burton doing kink in bubble wrap, which wasn’t something I had on my 2026 pop culture bingo card. 
Even our gorgeous leads, Monica Barbaro and Callum Turner, obviously destined to be together, come very close to getting fully naked, and not with each other. Barbaro, wearing a green spangled dress that leaves nothing to the imagination, nearly gets laid twice, spoiled once by the fact that her hookup is an art thief, and later because another hookup is an arrogant rock star who falls off a piano. Turner himself has a series of near-misses. The movie goes out of its way to get his shirt off as often as possible. 
Though the movie’s characters don’t seem to like the sex mandate, they also seem oddly resigned to it. Barbaro and Turner are softly apolitical. And in the end, they make the sweet, and ultimately conservative, choice to spend a year getting to know each other before hopping in the sack. 
&#8220;Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass,&#8221; on the other hand, features an act of wanton infidelity as its inciting incident. Directed by David Wain and written by Wain and Ken Marino, this is the most lib-coded sex movie of the summer. It’s also the funniest. Zoey Deutch plays a perky Midwest hairdresser whose fiancé hooks up with Jennifer Aniston, the actual Jennifer Aniston, who’s in town to sign a cookbook that she wrote. This sends our heroine to Hollywood so she can take revenge by hooking up with Jon Hamm. 
The premise is stupid, but the execution is stupider than you could possibly imagine, and contains more laughs per scene than any movie I’ve seen this year. &#8220;Gail Daughtry &#8220;uses its infidelity scaffolding as a way to make fun of action movies, and also to present a lightly parodic, mostly affectionate, and occasionally blood-soaked modern take on The Wizard of Oz. It’s not fantasy or wish fulfillment. It’s just dumb fun, like a rare improv performance that actually entertains.
&#8220;Tony,&#8221; the wonderful new Anthony Bourdain <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-powerful-life-lesson-hidden-in-tony">coming-of-age biopic</a> from director Matt Johnson, acts as a surprising corrective to the Horny Young Man narrative that has dominated sex movies for so long. It’s a necessary one as well, given that we all know the tragic circumstances surrounding Bourdain’s death, and realize he probably could have benefited from some treatment for relentless pursuit of sexually charged romance. 
Young Tony, played with accurate intensity by Dominic Sessa (&#8220;The Holdovers&#8221;), pursues a lovely Manic Pixie Dream Girl (Emilia Jones) to Cape Cod for the summer. Broke and delusional, Bourdain stumbles into working in a kitchen run by Antonio Banderas. His coworker, Leo Woodall, is a drug addict, a bad boy whom women find irresistible. He collects door notches as signs of sexual conquest, and he has no problem banging a bride out back of the restaurant on her wedding night.
Woodall’s behavior is appealing in a down-and-out kind of way, but the movie doesn’t glamorize it either or portray it as a lifestyle worth pursuing. When Bourdain finally finds himself in a position to make it with the girl of his dreams, he instead breaks down and reveals an uncomfortable truth about himself. In the end, honesty and respect are more important qualities than bedpost-notching. It’s a surprisingly conservative conclusion to come to for a movie about a bohemian liberal icon. But it wrapped up the summer of the conservative sex movie in a nice little bow of integrity. 
***
Neal Pollack, “the greatest living American writer,” is the author of 12 semi-bestselling books of fiction and nonfiction and is a three-time “Jeopardy!” champion.
This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/upstream" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream</a>, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

OneNightOnly

Hollywood’s New Sex Comedies Have a Surprising Twist: Traditional Values

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Any movie fans hoping to escape politics for two hours while enjoying a piece of entertainment are bound to be disappointed by “National Treasure 3.”
The third installment of the Nicholas Cage-led franchise will likely address America&#8217;s political divide, according to director Jon Turteltaub. 
After confirming that the third film is “finally real” and has an approved script during a “National Treasure Hunt” podcast recording last week, Turteltaub said it’s been hard to work on the project due to rising political tension. He mentioned a conversation with former Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) about the previous “National Treasure” films.
&#8220;He, like others, were surprised that Democrats made that movie because Democrats can’t be patriots,&#8221; Turteltaub said, <a href="https://www.inquirer.com/entertainment/national-treasure-three-confirmed-director-john-turteltaub-20260821.html">per</a> The Philadelphia Inquirer. &#8220;That’s the thought and it just got worse. And on the Democrats’ side: ‘Oh, Republicans, they just want to keep stuff to themselves, they hate everybody, they want to kill everyone, and blah blah blah.'&#8221;
Without giving any specifics, the director alluded to the heightened political divisions — especially on social media — being part of the storyline.
&#8220;We have to be very careful, but I don’t feel we are allowed to ignore it,&#8221; Turteltaub said. &#8220;I think we have to include that idea in the story somehow without making someone feel put off.&#8221;
Daily Wire contributor Christian Toto said Turteltaub&#8217;s comments sum up the &#8220;sad&#8221; reality of where America is in 2026.
&#8220;It sounds like Turteltaub, a veteran Hollywood director who isn&#8217;t known for his political views, was accurately assessing how Hollywood views patriotism and the political divide,&#8221; Toto <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/media/national-treasure-director-predicts-upcoming-third-film-wont-ignore-politics">told</a> Fox News. &#8220;It&#8217;s actually a sad sign of the times — a franchise about U.S. history is now seen as problematic or challenging, when it should be nothing of the kind.&#8221;
&#8220;A franchise like this would be best served staying apolitical, and the director&#8217;s comments suggest a way to thread the needle between acknowledging our political chasm and moving forward with a fresh new story,&#8221; he added. &#8220;Heck, if that delicate balance works, it might be the biggest film in the franchise.&#8221;
“National Treasure” (2004) features Cage as historian Benjamin Franklin Gates, who is working to decipher hidden codes in the nation’s founding documents and landmarks to uncover fortunes. &#8220;National Treasure: Book of Secrets” was released in 2007. Both films are popular for blending mystery, adventure, and a deep dive into history.

Nicholas Cage

‘National Treasure 3’ Director Suggests Politics Won’t Be ‘Ignored’ In New Film

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When Dolly Parton died, the entire country went into mourning — Left and Right, virtually everyone. 
There&#8217;s a reason for that. Dolly Parton coded country. She coded Christian. She coded optimism. She coded entertainment. 
She did not code political. And she refused to engage in that way. 
This made her perhaps the most popular figure in America. 
We are never going to get another Dolly Parton because Hollywood will not allow it.
Jelly Roll just proved it.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ben-shapiro-show-ep-2494?elementPosition=1&amp;row=0&amp;rowHeadline=Recent+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-981859" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif" alt="" width="1024" height="171" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-300x50.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-768x128.jpg 768w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>
Jimmy Kimmel has taken a couple of weeks off, and his substitute hosts are somehow even worse than Jimmy Kimmel. I didn&#8217;t know that was possible, but apparently it is. 
First there was Rosie O&#8217;Donnell, who returned from Ireland to wear hideous outfits and sing about the president&#8217;s penis. 
And then Jelly Roll showed up. 
You know him as the country singer who has shed a lot of pounds. He showed up to host Jimmy Kimmel’s show, and there he decided to do the obligatory mea culpa for his prior cultural conservatism by ripping into the president of the United States. He stated:
<blockquote>Well, Mr. President, from one fat pig to another, take it from me that physical fitness is very important. And trust me, you&#8217;ll be happy to see your penis again.</blockquote>
He came back and did another show the next night, and he defended his Trump jokes:
<blockquote>Let&#8217;s be honest for a second. Any U.S. president should be able to handle a few jokes, right? Yes, they should also be able to handle gas prices, health care, and the occasional international conflict. &#8230; Look, y&#8217;all, I get it that some people are mad at me for goofing on Trump, but if you wanted me to make jokes about Kamala Harris, you should have voted for her.</blockquote>
What is Jelly Roll doing? The answer is that in Hollywood, you no longer can just be Johnny Carson — where you make jokes about all the different sides — and you can no longer be Dolly Parton, where you make jokes about neither of the sides.
You just can&#8217;t do that anymore. You must repeat the left-wing nostrums. There comes a point in your career when you have to make a choice: Are you going to double down on the base? Are you going to keep dancing with the gal that brung ya? 
Or are you going to swivel hard into the cultural leftism and try to expand that base? This has been happening in the music industry for probably two to three decades, and it&#8217;s one of the reasons our cultural milieu has been completely fragmented.
That’s why there are no big stars anymore. It’s why no one can open a movie. It&#8217;s why there are very few crossover stars, even in the musical arena at this point. 
Jelly Roll is a great example of this. Remember, Jelly Roll didn&#8217;t just code conservative. He was very openly Christian and pretty conservative. His history resembles Parton&#8217;s in the sense that he&#8217;s a rags-to-riches story.
He was born Jason Bradley DeFord in Nashville in 1984 and ended up in jail before he even graduated high school. He was imprisoned at age 14. He welcomed his first child while he was still behind bars. Then, after he got out of jail and had his daughter, he decided to pursue his GED and try his hand at the music business. 
In 2003, he started out in hip-hop, pivoted to country and rock, and ended up on the Grand Ole Opry stage in November 2021. He turned into a national phenomenon. 
Along the way, he didn’t just code Country and code down-home; he also coded very hard Christian. In 2026, he won the Best Contemporary Country album. He said:
<blockquote>First of all, Jesus, I hear you and I&#8217;m listening. Lord, I am listening, Lord. Second of all, I want to thank my beautiful wife. I would have never changed my life without you. I&#8217;d end up dead or in jail. I&#8217;d have killed myself if it wasn&#8217;t for you and Jesus. I thank you for that. …
That&#8217;s why I wrote this album. I didn&#8217;t think I had a chance, y&#8217;all. There was days that I thought the darkest things. I was a horrible human. There was a moment in my life that all I had was a Bible this big, and a radio the same size and a six-by-eight-foot cell. And I believed that those two things could change my life. I believed that music had the power to change my life, and God had the power to change my life. And I want to tell y&#8217;all right now, Jesus is for everybody. Jesus is not owned by one political party. Jesus is not owned by no music label. Jesus is Jesus and anybody can have a relationship with him.</blockquote>
This is how Jelly Roll coded: very, very, very faith-based. That was his image; he certainly didn&#8217;t code Left. There is tape of him greeting President Trump and Elon Musk at an event where they got along just fine. 
And then things changed. He&#8217;s been dropping a lot of pounds. He has been saying that he loves his new body. 
He got divorced in July from the woman whom he was paying homage to at the Country Music Awards. An insider said, “The reality is that he will always love her, but that doesn&#8217;t mean he wants to stay married. He&#8217;s in a very different place than he was when they met &#8230; Jelly feels healthy, focused and in control of his future.”
What&#8217;s going on here?
What&#8217;s going on is that there&#8217;s enormous cultural pressure for people who reach a certain level of stardom to then have “crossover stardom.”
And the way you get crossover stardom is to start signaling Left. 
You can&#8217;t just live in a culturally conservative space, even if you&#8217;re not overtly political. That&#8217;s not good enough. You must speak out on issues. You must. You&#8217;ll be forced to. 
This is why there will never be a Dolly Parton again, because 1) society will not allow there to be a Dolly Parton again, and because 2) our public figures don&#8217;t have the strength of character to avoid this.
A great example of this is Taylor Swift. Taylor Swift is the most successful example of somebody who went from a Dolly Parton-type figure to somebody who&#8217;s overtly political. For years and years and years, there was speculation on the Right that Taylor Swift was secretly conservative because she started off in country and the gospel area.
When she was 22, she said, “Listen, people don&#8217;t want to hear my politics. I just figure I&#8217;m a 22-year-old singer. And, you know, I don&#8217;t know if people really want to hear my political views. I think they just kind of want to hear me sing songs about breakups and feelings.”
This sounds like something Dolly Parton would say. 
But within a few years, she realized this wasn&#8217;t where the money was. This wasn&#8217;t what would allow her to achieve crossover stardom. So she did a documentary for Netflix in which she pretty openly started pushing left-wing social values because her silence was too deafening. She needed to have that crossover appeal to the Left. It made her far richer. 
But that is the price of admission. The price of admission in today&#8217;s day and age is, you must repeat, particularly on social issues, the nostrums that the Left is pushing. You must. 
Taylor Swift, back in 2020, talked about how Christian values support abortion. She did the same thing in 2020 when she was pushing LGBTQ+- politics.
It was really important for her to speak like that, because the cultural Left in Hollywood will only allow you to become a gigantic crossover star if you say things that the Left wants you to say.
Katy Perry originally started singing Christian music; she was known by her birth name, Katy Hudson, at the time. Then it turned out she couldn&#8217;t sell copies. 
So she adopted the stage name Katy Perry. And then her first big hit was about experimenting with lesbianism, and then she became an Obama surrogate, and now she&#8217;s dating Justin Trudeau.
In other words, this is not rare. What you&#8217;re watching with Jelly Roll is how you do things in Hollywood. You cannot even mildly code conservative. You must be overtly liberal. 
If you&#8217;re Sydney Sweeney and you&#8217;re not overtly conservative, just kind of apolitical, but you code a little conservative because you&#8217;re a pretty white girl and you have a little bit of a country feel to you and because you once registered Republican, this means that you are a target in Hollywood.
If you are Chris Pratt and you&#8217;re a huge star and you&#8217;ve never said anything remotely offensive, but you&#8217;re openly Christian, and you don&#8217;t go to an LGBTQ+- church, then X will come after you incessantly for years on end. If you&#8217;re Gal Gadot and you just happen to be Israeli and pro-Israel, you will get blacklisted in Hollywood.
That&#8217;s how it works. If you&#8217;re Mark Ruffalo and pretty overtly anti-Semitic, you&#8217;ll never stop working. 
If you are on the Left, you will likely never stop working. 
But that doesn&#8217;t mean this is going to work for Jelly Roll. There&#8217;s a mixed record in the country arena for this. The Dixie Chicks were a huge band. And then, in 2003, Natalie Maines decided to go after George W. Bush in London while she was on stage. The Dixie Chicks had this huge cultural moment and then disappeared. 
Maren Morris had a breakout single that was literally called “My Church.” She ended up ostracized after public fights with Jason Aldean&#8217;s wife over the kids. She went after Morgan Wallen, and then she came out as bisexual. Has that been a big boon for her career? Probably not. 
Hollywood&#8217;s dynamic used to be obvious: The entertainment industry was about protecting your stars, singers, songwriters, movie stars, and athletes. The goal of our entertainment industry was to create marketable stars who were separate from their politics. You didn&#8217;t know much about the stars. All you knew was what you saw on the screen.
This is why Dolly Parton was very famous and very rich and very good at what she did. All you saw of Dolly Parton was what she wanted you to see. 
This is why American stars were transferable throughout the world. This is why the most famous people on planet Earth were all American stars. You didn&#8217;t know much about their politics at all; you just knew that they were stars. 
That&#8217;s when America was the dominant cultural force on the planet, because it was cool people doing cool things, and they avoided politics. 
And then everything had to be weaponized. The star power had to be weaponized. The entertainment industry had to be weaponized. We had to know every view of all of our stars, and the stars just weren’t stars anymore.
There won&#8217;t be any more Dolly Partons, because the entertainment industry will not allow there to be any more Dolly Partons. 
You must say the words. You must.
If you refuse to say the words, then they will treat you as though you are persona non grata. 
Jelly Roll made his decision. 
We&#8217;ll see how it works out for him.

IMG_6375

The Hidden Political Price Of Fame In America

dolly parton

jelly roll

jimmy kimmel

taylor swift

Movies are back and, if not better than ever, at least they’re drawing a crowd at the cinema again. This summer generated more than <a href="https://variety.com/2026/film/box-office/movie-theater-owners-summer-box-office-fall-films-1236836744/">$4 billion at the U.S. box office</a>, the most since the pre-COVID-19 days of 2019.
But what about R-rated comedies, the films that made us howl but Hollywood deemed “problematic?” The last decade gave us: “Step Brothers,” “The Hangover,” “Bridesmaids,” “Old School,” “Wedding Crashers,”  and “Superbad.”
Well, we’re still waiting. As the Elon Musk-dubbed “woke mind virus” fades in Hollywood, roast comedies are back, and comedians aren’t being punished for telling the “wrong” jokes.
Even canceled comics like Shane Gillis and Louis C.K. are snagging sweet Netflix deals. Except we’re not seeing big-screen comedies take advantage of that pendulum swing.
The woke movement unofficially ended the industry’s hunger for R-rated humor. Movies like “Animal House” promoted toxic masculinity, or so said USA Today. “Get Hard,” a 2015 Will Ferrell/Kevin Hart comedy, was <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-32032467">deemed racist</a> even though its popular co-star was, and is, black. It made an impressive $90 million stateside.
Progressive Amy Schumer got attacked for two back-to-back comedies – “Snatched” (2017) and “I Feel Pretty” (2018). Why? The former was allegedly racist for making people of color the villains and using <a href="https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2017/05/154094/snatched-movie-racism-latino-stereotypes">racial stereotypes</a>, while the <a href="https://www.indiewire.com/features/general/bill-maher-defends-i-feel-pretty-amy-schumer-slams-critics-1201960712/">latter purportedly promoted fat shaming.</a>
Is it any wonder comedy stars decided to do something, anything, else rather than make big-screen comedies?
Even Todd Phillips (“The Hangover,” “Old School”) <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2019/10/joaquin-phoenix-cover-story">gave up on the genre</a>:
<blockquote>
Go try to be funny nowadays with this woke culture … There were articles written about why comedies don’t work anymore — I’ll tell you why, because all the f*cking funny guys are like, “F*ck this sh*t, because I don’t want to offend you.” It’s hard to argue with 30 million people on Twitter. You just can’t do it, right? So you just go, “I’m out.”
</blockquote>
That was in 2019, right before woke peaked with the George Floyd riots.
Seven years later, the landscape seems open to a bawdy, big-hearted comedy that offends and delights. Good luck finding them.
The quasi-comeback began with 2023’s “No Hard Feelings.” Star Jennifer Lawrence played a desperate woman being paid to take a young man’s virginity. The laughs flowed for the first two acts, and Lawrence proved game for the task at hand with an extended, comical nude scene. The larger-than-necessary budget ($45 million) made the film’s $87 million global haul less exciting.
“Dumb and Dumber” co-director Peter Farrelly vowed to personally bring back R-rated comedies, and his first attempt, 2024’s “Ricky Stanicky,” hit closer to the mark. The film debuted on Prime Video, not theaters, and it didn’t crash the zeitgeist like previous Farrelly romps “Kingpin” and “There’s Something About Mary.”
The director’s more recent film, the Prime Video exclusive “Balls Up,” netted terrible scores from critics and audiences alike at Rotten Tomatoes (23/29 percent “rotten”).
David Spade brought his comedy gravitas to an indie project that also vowed to bring back retro comedy fun. His independent 2026 film “Busboys,” co-starring Theo Von, made an anemic $2.6 million earlier this year.
This month’s “Super Troopers 3” hoped to build on that cult franchise’s R-rated vibes, but the film won’t break the $10 million mark in U.S. theaters. The cast told this critic they hoped to <a href="https://www.hollywoodintoto.com/super-troopers-3-interview-r-rated-comedies/">revive R-rated comedies</a> at the theatrical level.
No luck yet.
The only recent R-rated film to break out? The sixth installment of the “Scary Movie” franchise earned $231.4 million worldwide. The filmmakers vowed to offend everyone with the saga’s no-holds-barred approach, but the film itself proved mostly toothless.
Critics torched the film, but even steadfast fans of the franchise weren’t smitten – the film has a 64% “fresh” rating with general audiences at RottenTomatoes.com.
The year offers one more swing at the R-rated fences. Super hot stand-up comic Matt Rife is teaming with Owen Wilson (“Wedding Crashers”) for “Rolling Loud.” The Fall comedy finds Wilson losing his son at a hip-hop music festival, with Rife playing a local trying to reunite father and son.
The film’s first trailer flexes hip-hop-heavy cameos, but those looking for big laughs will have to bank on hope.
The culture at large may have changed, giving stand-ups and comedy podcasters more freedom moving forward, but the problem may persist behind the scenes.
Luke Wilson (“Old School”) hinted at that sorry state of affairs in a recent interview. The actor told podcaster John Feitelberg of the “Scene Stealers” podcast how one studio executive <a href="https://www.hollywoodintoto.com/luke-wilson-old-school-woke/">responded to an unnamed comedy script</a>:
<blockquote>
I got back a note about a joke in a script that said it was “imperialistic.” I was like, I don’t even know what the f*ck that means. Is imperial a compliment? Does that mean like empire building?
</blockquote>
Wilson, an industry veteran not used to rocking the culture war boat, shared a more global comment about the dearth of R-rated comedies. “The people in charge are just not funny and too careful and worried about feelings,” he said, warming to the topic. Then, he shared a specific example to prove his case. “There are so many things that wouldn’t get made today that used to get made in the old days,” he added.
Here’s guessing “Old School 2” isn’t happening anytime soon.
***
Christian Toto is an award-winning journalist, movie critic and editor of <a href="http://www.hollywoodintoto.com/">HollywoodInToto.com</a>. He previously served as associate editor with Breitbart News&#8217; Big Hollywood. He&#8217;s also the host of <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-hollywood-in-toto-podcast-w-christian-toto/id1186449155">The Hollywood in Toto Podcast</a>. Follow him at <a href="https://twitter.com/HollywoodInToto?lang=en">@HollywoodInToto</a>.

John Belushi in Animal House

The R-Rated Comedy Comeback Is Still MIA

film industry

r-rated comedy

woke culture

Somewhere on the press tour for &#8220;The Odyssey,&#8221; director Christopher Nolan appeared with Jimmy Fallon and watched his cast play Cyclops beer pong. Then he went to Beijing, sat down with a political philosophy Ph.D. student named Zhong Shu, and was asked a series of questions about his <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/what-christopher-nolan-couldnt-bring-himself-to-do">interpretation of Homer</a> and whether he was a “bard for a civilization at dusk.”
The viral Beijing interview was so much more than a well-read academic finally giving Nolan an intellectual challenge. It was a snapshot of the new story “arms race” that’s been quietly brewing between the U.S. and China — a narrative cold war where each civilization is grappling with its relationship to the guiding stories of the past in an effort to determine which culture will lead the world in the future.
The interview with Nolan ran nearly 20 minutes and instantly went viral in the West for good reason. Zhong asked thoughtful questions about hubris by way of Thucydides and the fall of Athens. She asked whether the gods in the film were merely projections of the human psyche and if Nolan had intentionally “Christianized” Homer in any way. She challenged Nolan on whether a story that originally celebrated Odysseus as a cunning, noble king had to be refitted into a story that demands greatness and must repent. 
 
“We turn greatness into privileges and we demand apologies for it. That’s a fact of Hollywood,” Zhong stated before asking Nolan if he agreed. Nolan told the young Chinese intellectual that, in a democratic age committed to equality, storytellers have to manage the audience&#8217;s built-in resistance to greatness. Do we have to apologize for that greatness? &#8220;And the answer is yes, we do,&#8221; he said, or the audience rejects it. He did not demur or deflect. He wasn&#8217;t defensive. He described it the way an engineer describes a load-bearing wall: This is simply how the mechanism works in our culture today.
The West&#8217;s most prominent living filmmaker calmly conceded that his civilization can no longer receive a story about greatness unless greatness acknowledges wrongdoing first. This admission — delivered in Beijing to an educated Chinese classicist who came prepared with provocations from our own civilization’s foundational myths and stories — revealed a deeper civilizational conflict over what guiding story and set of values are most suited to lead the world. How we relate to Homer, the stories of the Bible, Dante, and even our modern mythological heroes such as Superman matters, and the Chinese know this. The line of inquiry in that interview was not incidental.
For years — and with very little media attention — China has been quietly engaged in a narrative arms race with an American culture and the broader Western world that it believes is in decline. There’s a <a href="https://ia801806.us.archive.org/12/items/america-against-america/America%20Against%20America.pdf">belief within the Chinese government</a> that the modern West abandoned its own inheritance by deconstructing its foundational myths and values, and that now is the time to build where we have faltered. So for years, the Chinese have been mining the “classics” of Western Civilization for the insights that once gave us a civilizational advantage.
In November 2024, Beijing hosted the first World Conference of Classics: 600 participants and scholars, a congratulatory letter from Xi Jinping read aloud by the CCP&#8217;s propaganda chief, and a new Chinese School of Classical Studies established in Athens. Over the past decade, Peking University and Renmin have built classical studies programs too. 
A key figure in China’s modern fascination with Western classical education is political philosopher Liu Xiaofeng, who spent the 2000s importing “Great Books education” into Chinese universities at precisely the moment Western universities were more focused on critiquing, subverting, and deconstructing these stories. Three of his students now run a classics division inside the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. While there is no evidence of any direct relationship between Liu Xiaofeng and the viral interviewer Zhong Shu, Zhong’s own approach and line of questioning were clearly influenced by Liu’s philosophy.
Here in the U.S., we too are reexamining our relationship to the stories of old and grappling with their importance. Even if Nolan’s interpretation of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/how-homers-odyssey-explains-the-american-soul">Homer’s epic myth</a> is a matter of contested debate, the fact that he believed it was the right time to return to a 2,800-year-old story means something.
Hollywood has been in a confused state of nostalgia for quite some time. Prequels, sequels, and reboots have dominated our narrative landscape. Oftentimes, they’re revisiting classic fairy tales or our modern mythic heroes to deconstruct them, and other times they’re going back to celebrate them. What is undeniable is that the relationship to these stories of our past matters.
This isn’t just a Hollywood entertainment phenomenon either. Throughout America, a new alternative to the SAT and ACT as the standard college entry exam has been quickly gaining traction. Developed by Jeremy Wayne Tate and a bipartisan network of educators and philosophers, the Classic Learning Test puts understanding of the “Great Books” and foundational myths of the West on center stage. Pete Hegseth, head of the U.S. Department of War, called it the new “<a href="https://x.com/PeteHegseth/status/1918730699500089459?s=20">gold standard</a>” of tests and is working to make it the norm at West Point.
At the highest levels of government, among the two most powerful superpowers in the world, there is a shared admission: Civilizations run on stories. They are the operating system of a society. They give a people who are not bound by blood a shared identity, shared values, shared customs, and even a way to mark their days through shared holidays and mass cultural celebrations. 
This is a lesson both nations learned about the “soft power” of story during the 20th-century Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The Cold War wasn’t just a conflict between two different economic theories. It was a civilizational collision between two different guiding stories about God, human nature, and the purpose of life, with the economics being downstream of those guiding stories. Many have even half-jokingly wondered over the years whether the movie &#8220;Rocky IV&#8221; is what finally beat the Soviets.
Both sides in today’s new cold war know that the stories we tell about our past are essential to any sense of shared cultural identity and that they determine the direction of our future. Going back to even the early 1990s, Chinese officials could see that the developing culture war in America was really a story war. “Nihilism has become the American way, which is a fatal shock to cultural development and the American spirit,” was the <a href="https://ia801806.us.archive.org/12/items/america-against-america/America%20Against%20America.pdf">famous conclusion</a> that Chinese political scientist Wang Huning came to after an extensive tour of American universities. 
As I first wrote about in &#8220;<a href="https://a.co/d/09v1C2CN">Based on a True Story</a>,&#8221; the Chinese government believes so strongly that a civilization’s destiny is bound up with the foundational myths and stories of its culture that officials now forbid time-travel stories from primetime television out of fear that the very notion that these core myths could be critically reassessed could cause their civilization to self-destruct.
This gets to the tension in Nolan’s confession about our association of greatness with “privilege” and the underlying assumption that all power is inherently oppressive. That story has not always been part of our shared cultural identity. There was a time when we unashamedly celebrated a modern mythic character like Superman as the most powerful and greatest being on the planet, and didn’t ask him to apologize for anything, because we believed that virtuous character could shoulder the weight of that power.
Zhong was clever to probe whether Christian notions of repentance were somehow influencing Nolan’s take on Odysseus. Certainly, a central emphasis of historic Christianity has been “whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant,” but this is not what Nolan, by his own admission, was trying to communicate. Jesus was not claiming that greatness was inherently a byproduct of some sin of “privilege” that requires repentance just for being great, but that the shape of greatness should resemble his own virtues and sacrifice. This is the central guiding story of Western civilization.
Whatever civilization rediscovers this truth first will be the one that averts civilizational armageddon and stands the test of time.
***
Paul Anleitner is a cultural theologian whose work focuses on the role of culture and story in our quest for meaning. He is the author of “Based on a True Story: Vibe Shifts, the End of Deconstruction, and the Reboot of Meaning.”
This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/upstream" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream</a>, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

GettyImages-1631541063

Christopher Nolan Exposes Hollywood’s Strange New Rule About Greatness

china

classic learning test

Many people are wondering why so many famous movie actors are having transgender children to go with their fifteen-hundred-dollar Origami Cubic Pumps, and the sensuous new Liquid Under Shorts, which are perfect for those daring evenings when you pick up a smoking hot stranger in a Port-o-San at a West Hollywood construction site and then spend the next two weeks wondering why it burns when you urinate.
Now some experts feel the mathematically miraculous number of transgender kids parented by movie stars is due to the fact that each of these amazingly popular celebrities possesses a powerful charisma that masks a case of narcissistic personality disorder so extreme it would qualify as a psychotic condition of the type usually found in ax murderers, mass shooters and opinion columnists at The New York Times, and that an actor’s skill in slipping almost seamlessly into movie characters as diverse as Spiderman and Spiderman 2 is less a talent than a symptom of a mental illness in which the desperate loneliness of emotional emptiness is alleviated by the self-medication of performative delusions similar to those witnessed in psychiatric hospitals where inmates wander around believing they’re someone like Napoleon Bonaparte or Jesus Christ or Spiderman 2 instead of the addled, self-destructive, sexually ambiguous theater kids they in fact are, and that this combination of virulent narcissism and self-comforting delusion combine to render most movie actors as incapable of loving their own children as they are of truly loving themselves, so that the children of these famous thespians also never develop fully functional personalities and, in a tragic imitation of their seemingly successful parents, they become convinced they can find some comfort in a make-believe world where they are the opposite gender to the one God made them, and so they begin mutilating those portions of their bodies in which the urgent desire for the love and connection missing from their dysfunctional upbringing are most blatantly expressed, after which, as soon as they grow up, they plan to travel to Canada to take advantage of their program of medically assisted suicide.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/andrew-klavan-show-ep-1291"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone wp-image-974735 size-full" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/Klavan-watch-now.jpg" alt="" width="1800" height="300" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/Klavan-watch-now.jpg 1800w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/Klavan-watch-now-300x50.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/Klavan-watch-now-1024x171.jpg 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/Klavan-watch-now-768x128.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/Klavan-watch-now-1536x256.jpg 1536w" sizes=" (max-width: 1800px) 100vw, 1800px" /></a>
Anyway, that’s how some experts explain the phenomenon. Other experts believe it’s the result of a bite by a radioactive spider.
To find out more, The Daily Wire sent our crack reporter Jimmy Crack to the West Coast to interview some of the silver screen’s most in-demand mentally ill people. In an article phoned in from Hollywood’s famous Michael Jackson Memorial Bathhouse and Daycare Center, Crack reported his findings shortly before he disappeared without a trace.
In Crack’s exclusive interview with Lola Vavoom, the ravishing female lead of the new hit Spiderman 2B, the actress explained why, of the seven children birthed for her by her faithful surrogate Lulubelle Squeeze, five have decided to change their sex from the one they are to the one they can never actually be.
Ms. Vavoom said, “I think it might have started when I was getting into character for the remake of Monster, the film for which my idol, Charlize Theron, won an Oscar playing serial killer Aileen Wuornos before Theron had her transgender child. Using the method acting techniques I acquired at the Scientology Self-Transformation and Daycare Center, I got into character by chasing my sons around the room with a butcher knife, screaming, ‘Here comes mommy to cut off your wiener, and I’d like to thank the Academy very much for this great honor.’ It was soon after that that all my sons came to me and said, ‘Mommy, I think we’re little girls, so will you please unlock the closet door now and let us out.’ I was so moved, I immediately scheduled their surgeries and rented a gown for awards night.”
Unfortunately, it turned out Ms. Vavoom was not eligible for the Oscar because the remake of Monster went straight to streaming on the Disney Channel, but there are rumors it will soon be made into a ride at Disney World’s new Gender Fantasyland and Daycare Center.
We hope Crack’s crack reporting has illuminated the issue of child transgenderism in Hollywood, and will help to inspire reasonable methods of addressing the phenomenon, like the forced sterilization of everyone in show business.

Hollywood

Hollywood Blames Trans Epidemic On Radioactive Spiders To Hide Severe Narcissism

celebrity

entertainment

narcissism

satire

Radical Leftists and radical Muslims have clearly formed an alliance. That alliance is ready to infiltrate the U.S. Senate, and pretty much everybody is afraid to talk about it. 
 
But for us at the Daily Wire, fear will never be an obstacle to telling the truth. 
 
We’ve talked about the Red-Green alliance in our coverage of the news on our podcasts and on social media, but America needs to see the reality of the Red-Green alliance for themselves. 
And there’s no better way to tell that story than through film. 
 
For decades, Hollywood has not made a single major film where the bad guys were Islamists. Villains are always Russian anarchist groups, white supremacists, or North Koreans. 
 
So while Hollywood avoids the fact that radical Islamic terrorists have perpetrated attacks around the world, the Daily Wire is going to lean into it. 
 
The film is called &#8220;Run Hide Fight: Infidels.&#8221; 
 
Starring Jonathan Majors, it’s a 1990s-style action blockbuster — think &#8220;Toy Soldiers&#8221; meets &#8220;Red Dawn&#8221; — where ISIS takes over a liberal American university.
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It&#8217;s exciting. It&#8217;s intense. It&#8217;s funny. It&#8217;s the biggest movie we&#8217;ve ever done. The radical jihadists lose, the red-blooded Americans win, and nobody apologizes for any of it. More importantly, it also says the thing: radical Islam is a threat to America, and we are all morons if we let it take over our country. 
 
When we dropped the trailer, Mehdi Hasan said it would be “difficult to come up with a more bigoted, Islamophobic and cliched trailer than this one.” 
 
Mehdi, why is it Islamophobic to point out what ISIS actually does and says? Why is it bigoted to say that ISIS wants to murder Americans? 
How exactly does depicting ISIS implicate all of Islam? 
 
Hasan also took issue with the claim that Hollywood has refused to tell the story of radical Islam, but you could probably count on one hand the number of major movies where Muslims are the villains. 
 
In fact, Hollywood has routinely changed Muslims from being the villains of films. Tom Clancy’s &#8220;The Sum of All Fears&#8221; was written with Palestinian terrorists originally, but in the film adaptation with Ben Affleck, the villains were neo-Nazis. 
 
I&#8217;m also old enough to remember when &#8220;24&#8243; had to deploy Kiefer Sutherland to publicly apologize for Islamophobia because there was one season where the Muslims were the bad guys. 

Meanwhile, streamer Sneako put out a tweet saying, “The kuffar are getting so desperate they&#8217;re trying to do Bush-era propaganda in 2026. No one cares anymore. We all know the Israelis are the real terrorists.”
The root of “kuffar” is also kafir, which means “infidels.” This is the same guy who congratulated Abdulrahman El-Sayed on his primary victory in Michigan with, “Islam will save America. Inshallah.” Sneako doesn’t want you to worry about Islam while he <a href="https://x.com/DrewPavlou/status/2043323509565530153?s=20">chants</a> on the streets of New York about the army of Muhammad returning to kill Jews. 
 
As for the notion that ISIS is simply not a threat anymore: according to the Global Terrorism Index, 20% of all terrorist attacks on planet Earth are attributable to ISIS right now. ISIS remains the chief threat of terrorism worldwide today. 
 
It is good to be able to say that the American people know their enemies. We ought to know what our enemies think, what they say, and what they do. 
 
Director Kyle Rankin’s script definitely does that. 
 
And if the Left is this pissed off at the trailer, just wait until they see the film.

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