Angus Johnston

Seems to me that if you're upset that there's not more of a student movement fighting fascism in 2026, the first place to direct your anger is the people who crushed the wave of student organizing that crested in the months immediately preceding the fascists' rise to power.

Charlie Kirk was shot during an audience Q&A. I swear that the following transcript is real. Question: "Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America over the last ten years?" Charlie Kirk: "Counting or not counting gang violence?" He was shot a split second later.

One thing about never-Trump Republicans, during Trump II particularly: They understand that the world they knew is dead. They have no investment in either reviving the former GOP (because they understand it's impossible) or maintaining the pre-2016 Democratic Party (because it's not their party).

“When you look at the factors weighing down Democrats, it’s not crime or trans rights or wokeness. It’s the deep-seated belief among independents and Democratic voters that Democrats are weak and feckless.”

Never would have occurred to me without this, but Hot Fuzz and The Wicker Man (1970s) would make a lovely little revival house double feature.

This is a very silly framing of the relevant issue. It's like saying "if a text-to-speech converter is analyzing speech, interpreting it, and converting it to written language, but is not 'listening,' the word 'listening' has no meaning." No. "A meaning different than mine" is not "no meaning."

It does occur to me as well to contemplate where Lisa Murkowski, who is up for re-election in 2028, lands on all sorts of questions in 2027 if she finds herself in a Dem senate—particularly one in which Mary Peltola is her Alaskan colleague.

This is such a good point (the post below and the one after it). The distance from where we are to "financially successful narrative AI movie with AI actors" is vast, and the distance from there to "AI movie stars" is probably just as big, maybe bigger.

And the evidence that we have so far indicates that it would be pretty much unwatchable. AI video is competent at the one-to-five-second level, as long as you don't need any actual acting, but beyond that, every example of it I've seen has been janky, incoherent, and deadly boring.

One thing I’ve noticed about the Tilly Norwood media blitz: There’s a lot of talk about an upcoming movie, but very little evidence that that movie actually … exists.

“There are dozens of us! Dozens!”

We've reached the "Republican House Members cutting anti-Trump campaign ads" stage of the GOP implosion.

This post encapsulates a lot of my feeling about the Trump implosion—that the sheer scale of it is likely to provide Dems with a template for a pretty sweeping 2029 agenda.