The Odyssey, Christopher Nolan’s sweeping adaptation of the Ancient Greek epic about a triumphant military leader who encounters some serious delays on the journey home from war, is finally in theaters after years of development and months of online backlash.

The film, which opened Friday, stars Matt Damon as Odysseus, the heroic king of Ithaca, who leaves his devoted wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) and infant son Telemachus (played as an adult by Tom Holland), to fight in the Trojan War. He spends the next 20 years trying to vanquish the enemy and return to his family safely, battling mythical creatures and his own demons along the way. The high-wattage ensemble also includes Zendaya as Athena, the goddess of wisdom, Charlize Theron as the nymph Calypso, Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, and Robert Pattinson as Antinous, Penelope’s scheming suitor.

As reimagined by Nolan, The Odyssey is a high-minded work of cinematic spectacle. It’s a great adventure, yes, but it’s also the haunting story of a military hero transformed by his wartime deeds and unsure how to return to a life that now seems utterly foreign.

You would think that the Right would be happy to see one of Hollywood’s most celebrated filmmakers tackling a foundational text from the Western Canon. Yet ever since the trailer dropped in May, MAGA grifters, nitpicking history nerds, and racist trillionaires with too much time on their hands have been stoking outrage over the film’s supposed inaccuracies.

The backlash started with Elon Musk, who shared posts on X mocking Elliot Page, who plays a brave soldier named Sinon in the film, and declared that “Chris Nolan desecrated the Odyssey” by casting Nyong’o as the woman whose transcendent beauty set off the Trojan War, according to Greek myth. Professional grievance farmer Matt Walsh also chimed in, saying that “not one person on the planet actually thinks that Lupita Nyong’o is the most beautiful woman in the world,” a claim that is blatantly racist and demonstrably false.

Other pedants took issue with the helmets, armor, and ships pictured in the trailer.

Complaints about historical accuracy conveniently ignore that The Odyssey is set in a fantastical realm inhabited by armed giants and enchanting Sirens whose hypnotic singing lures sailors to their deaths. Strenuous realism was never the point — and fretting over historical details ignores the timelessness of Homer’s poem, which continues to resonate thousands of years after it originated.

But such quibbles are nothing new, especially — for some reason — when it comes to the fantasy genre: toxic fans have freaked out over the casting of non-white actors in Snow White, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, The Little Mermaid, and House of the Dragon. By this twisted racist logic, a whimsical talking crab makes sense, but a Black Hermione is too far-fetched.

But because I can also be a pedant, I was immediately struck by the fact that virtually everyone in The Odyssey speaks with a regionally nondescript American accent, no matter where the character, or the actor playing them, is from. This was especially noticeable given how many of the film’s most prominent stars (Pattinson, Holland, Samantha Morton) hail not from the United States but from England. Why did the soldier played by Himesh Patel — a Brit raised by Indian parents in Cambridgeshire — sound like he grew up in Anytown, U.S.A.? If Nolan deliberately cast The Odyssey so that it visually reflects the gloriously multicultural world we live in now, shouldn’t it sound that way too?

Accents are a tricky thing in historical dramas, especially when you have actors speaking in languages their real-life counterparts never would have spoken. Some viewers who loved everything else about Chernobyl, the acclaimed HBO series about the 1986 nuclear disaster, couldn’t get over the fact that the Russian and Ukrainian characters spoke with British accents. But that was a conscious decision by creator Craig Mazin, who felt that “Russian accents can turn comic very easily,” and opted to let the cast speak in tamped-down versions of their normal accents.

For ancient tales with elements of fantasy, like The Odyssey, the question of how characters should sound is even more fraught. There’s no reliable way of knowing how people who lived in continental Europe thousands of years ago might sound speaking modern English. Filmmakers portraying ancient times have to take linguistic license out of necessity. But they tend to do so in ways that subconsciously reflect the geopolitics of the day. What the heroes and the villains in our movies look like — as well as how they speak — says a lot about the society we live in.

In Hollywood sword-and-sandal epics for most of the last century, from Ben Hur to Gladiator, the default accent for Ancient Roman characters is a generic upper-crust English. It’s a choice that works for modern American audiences because it’s just different enough to track as “foreign” and maybe even “regal,” but isn’t so distracting as to take anyone out of the story. But it also registers on a more profound level, because of the implicit connection between the British Empire and the Ancient Roman one; between Britain’s recent history of conquest and the broader story of Western Civilization. Put another way: if you want someone who sounds like they could be a brutal, marauding imperialist, a British accent tends to do the trick.

So why did Nolan subvert this longstanding cinematic paradigm and make his Ancient Greeks vocally indistinguishable from your average suburban Yank? It may have started with his lead. As we all know, Damon can do a wicked good Southie accent, but his track record for sounding anything other than American, especially in movies involving swords and armor, is not as impressive. Maybe Damon felt more comfortable using his natural accent and Nolan simply opted to make everyone else sound American too, for the sake of consistency.

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But the film’s American flavor also works on a thematic level. Though it is set thousands of years earlier, The Odyssey feels almost like the third installment in a trilogy that includes Dunkirk and Oppenheimer — films by Nolan that examined the horrors of war from different perspectives. Dunkirk embedded audiences with terrified soldiers trapped on a French beach, while Best Picture-winner Oppenheimer told the story of a brilliant scientist who used his genius to create a weapon of mass destruction.

The Odyssey is also about the terrible things humans are capable of doing to one another in wartime, but it’s more concerned with the psychological aftermath of violence — with the literal and metaphorical impossibility of going back to who we once were after the depravity of combat.

The question at the heart of The Odyssey, and the one that haunts Penelope and Telemachus for years, is why it takes Odysseus so damn long to get back to Ithaca. Sure, there’s some bad weather, there’s a man-eating cyclops, and there’s a lengthy interlude spent eating lotus flowers with Charlize Theron (which is going to be hard to explain to Penelope, if we are being honest).

But the real reason for Odysseus’s delay becomes clear near the end of the film. (Minor spoilers ahead.) Disguised as an old beggar, Odysseus tells an unsuspecting Penelope why her husband has taken so long to return and opens up about the terrible things he witnessed during the fall of Troy.

A harrowing flashback sequence shows Odysseus and his men crawling out of the giant wooden horse given to the people of Troy as a peace offering, then laying waste to the city. It reframes the familiar story of the Trojan Horse not as a neat military trick, but as a heinous war crime that violated the most basic laws of humanity.

That night, Odysseus realized that “to burn the walls of Troy was to burn the world-entire, including his home.” Not unlike the nuclear bomb, the siege of Troy unleashed something awful that can’t be reversed.

“Our age of bronze is collapsing,” Odysseus says, “and maybe he couldn’t bear to see the ruins of what he’d done anywhere — least of all, his home.”

Odysseus is tormented by guilt and remorse — emotions that ultimately make him more heroic (but which our current military leaders would probably dismiss as evidence of “low T.”) He might be wearing sandals, but he sure sounds a lot like the conflicted war veterans we’ve seen in movies like The Deer Hunter and Coming Home.

If The Odyssey is ultimately a film about a weary soldier trying to reckon with the atrocities he committed in war, and a society crumbling because of a lack of basic decency, then it makes perfect sense these Ancient Greeks sound like Americans. (Or at least as much sense as if they sounded like posh Brits.) Whatever motivated Nolan’s decision to give everyone the same accent, the result is the same: we don’t have to strain to see ourselves in this timeless story.

Meredith Blake is the culture columnist for The Contrarian.

On Monday, the attorneys general of twelve states, including California and New York, filed a lawsuit to stop Paramount Skydance’s proposed $110-billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, which would dramatically reshape Hollywood by uniting two of the largest film and TV conglomerates into a single behemoth.

The suit claims that the historic merger would “extinguish competition between Paramount and Warner Bros. and inflict substantial harm on movie theatres, basic cable distributors, and, ultimately, audiences nationwide.”

The merger wouldn’t just be bad for business, according to the suit; it would actually violate the law — specifically, the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914, legislation that was created to prevent monopolies and encourage competition in the marketplace.

It would also impact the kinds of stories that get told and the viewpoints that reach a mass audience, something that should trouble anyone who cares about movies, TV, and American popular culture (and doesn’t want to pay more for lousier entertainment choices). As the suit underscores, “The competitive health of markets where professionally created media is produced, distributed, and exhibited determines not only price, quality, and output, but the breadth of voices and viewpoints that reach the public.”

“Film and television are not commodities; they are a principal means by which Americans encounter stories, ideas, and perspectives beyond their own experience,” reads the suit, which cites classic movies produced by Warner Bros. and Paramount, two of Hollywood’s oldest and most storied studios. It includes Titanic, The Matrix, The Godfather, and Casablanca.

At a press conference Monday in Los Angeles, California Attorney General Rob Bonta warned that “audiences on every sofa and in every movie seat would feel the impact of this unlawful merger.” The event was staged in front of the Hollywood sign, a symbolic backdrop that spoke to just what’s at stake: the future of one of the country’s most important industries.

Concerns over the creative vitality of the industry were voiced during a town hall Tuesday with Bonta, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and leaders of the Block the Merger campaign, which has gotten more than 5000 members of the industry to sign an open letter denouncing the merger. Bonta said that movies and TV shows “are not widgets,” but are “critical stories. They expose people to different perspectives. They change minds.”

James, one of eleven Democrats joining Bonta in support of the lawsuit, spoke about how filmmaking personally affected her.

“I can recall seeing documentaries about African American attorneys, about the Civil Rights movement, that inspired me to go to law school,” she said. “To lose all of that content, to lose that history, obviously, is a direct and real consequence of this merger.”

David Borenstein, the Academy Award-winning director of Mister Nobody Against Putin, which followed the chilling events in a small-town Russian school in the wake of the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, also spoke about the difficulty of getting funding for the documentary. Borenstein and his team had to go to Europe to find the money to make the film, which was deemed too risky for American distributors.

“Thankfully, we found financial support there that would take a risk on us. And so for our team, it’s really striking. I’m an American director, and we couldn’t find American financing for an Academy Award-winning film,” he said. “And this was all before the merger was on the table.”

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Much of the opposition to the merger thus far has centered on the fate of CNN, which has endured numerous mergers since it was founded by Ted Turner in 1980 and is currently controlled by Warner Bros. Discovery. This concern is understandable, given the precipitous decline of CBS News under Bari Weiss, who was handpicked to run the division by Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison (and who hosted a dinner “honoring the Trump White House” in April). David’s father, Larry, the centibillionaire co-founder of the technology company Oracle and a friend of Trump’s, has reportedly discussed specific personnel changes with White House officials. Trump has also repeatedly made it clear that he wants an overhaul at the cable news network (just days ago, he told Jake Tapper that “we’re trying to have CNN go on a normal path.”)

The merger would no doubt have an enormous effect on the television news landscape just a few months before the midterm elections that the president is already trying to undermine with claims of voter fraud.

But the lawsuit is more focused on the merger’s potential impact on the entertainment industry, and the likelihood that less competition in Hollywood would be bad for consumers and rank-and-file workers who have been hit hard by years of cutbacks.

The takeaway? If you care about movies, TV, or American popular culture — arguably our greatest export — then you should be deeply troubled by this merger.

Combining Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery — two conglomerates formed through years of unchecked consolidation — would unite a vast array of networks, studios, and brands under a single corporate behemoth, including:

• two of the five remaining major film studios, Paramount and Warner Bros

• three major streaming services, HBO Max, Paramount+, and Discovery Plus

• more than 50 cable channels, including TLC, Turner Classic Movies, Discovery, HGTV, and Food Network (all part of WBD) and MTV, Paramount, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, VH1, and BET (Paramount)

The lawsuit focuses on three sectors of the marketplace that would be affected by the merger and likely see a decrease in competition.

Major Studio Movies in Wide Release

The merger would combine two rival studios and leave just four film distributors (Disney, Sony, Universal, and Paramount-Warner Bros.) in control of roughly 86 percent of major film releases. This would give Paramount-Warner Bros. a huge advantage in negotiating with thousands of theaters around the country to secure the best screens and release dates. Theaters will likely have to fork over a bigger share of their ticket sales to Paramount-Warner Bros., a cost that will almost certainly be passed along to the consumer. Theatergoers will “likely face higher prices and degraded quality,” the suit predicts.

Blockbusters

The suit argues that these issues will be especially pronounced with movies that are expected to be major box-office draws — i.e., blockbusters and tentpole releases, which are controlled almost exclusively by Hollywood’s existing distributors and are essential for driving audiences to theaters. If the merger goes through, Paramount-Warner Bros. alone would control 30 percent of this market, according to the suit.

All of this means that moviegoers would have fewer choices, especially if they want to see something creatively risky that isn’t part of an established franchise.

David Ellison has vowed that Paramount-Warner Bros. would release 30 films a year, which is close to the combined current output of both studios, but Bonta dismissed such promises. As he said in Tuesday’s town hall, “We give little credit to the claims of David Ellison.” He pointed to the Disney-Fox merger in 2019, which resulted in fewer movies getting made and the elimination of much of Fox’s development slate. “What has happened in the past is a better indicator of what will happen in the future than a self-serving claim by an executive who wants the merger to go through,” he said plainly.

Cable Licensing

Last but certainly not least is the issue of cable TV. Combining Paramount and Warner Bros would give the Ellisons control of a portfolio of more than 50 basic cable channels. It would also mean that just two companies, Disney and Paramount-Warner Bros, would control 59 percent of all basic cable in the United States. (Of extreme concern, at least for film lovers, is the future of Turner Classic Movies, which remains one of the most essential platforms for classic Hollywood cinema and has only grown more important with the rise of streaming.) Paramount-Warner Bros. holdings would dwarf those of remaining competitors like Comcast or AMC, and confer the corporation with “enormous bargaining power” when negotiating with cable companies. “With less leverage after the merger, cable television distributors and the subscribers they serve will likely face higher prices and reduced investment in content,” the suit claims.

One only has to look at the networks already controlled by Paramount — once vital, now thoroughly zombified channels like MTV — to imagine what might be in store for the rest of cable TV.

Meredith Blake is the culture columnist for The Contrarian.

For nearly a century, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s tales of hardship and perseverance on the American frontier have captivated young readers around the world. Beginning with Little House in the Big Woods, published in 1932, the Little House books told the story of Westward expansion from the perspective of the Ingalls family as they zigzagged across the plains in search of opportunity, encountering one calamity after another.

Rich with fascinating detail and vividly drawn characters, the semi-autobiographical books have sold over 73 million copies in 100 countries. They were also adapted into one of the most beloved TV shows of all time, Little House on the Prairie, which aired on NBC from 1974 to 1983 and has been consumed in perpetual reruns ever since. More than fifty years after its debut, the family soap starring Michael Landon and Melissa Gilbert remains one of the most popular legacy shows of the streaming era.

But Wilder’s vast cultural legacy is not without complications. Her fiction, though compelling and immersive, is also marred by racism and dehumanizing portrayals of Native Americans and Black people. On the prairie, “There were no people; only Indians lived there,” Wilder wrote in the original edition of Little House on the Prairie — a passage that was later (tepidly) revised to “there were no settlers. Only Indians lived there.” In 2018, the US Association for Library Services to Children removed Wilder’s name from an award for children’s literature, citing “expressions of stereotypical attitudes” inconsistent with their “values of inclusiveness, integrity and respect, and responsiveness.”

Then there are the subtle political messages woven into a seemingly wholesome tale of adventure and survival. Wilder, a longtime Democrat who soured on FDR and the “communists in Washington”, wrote the Little House books during the height of the Great Depression, with extensive input from her daughter Rose Wilder Lane, one of the “founding mothers” of libertarianism. At a time when millions were enduring hard times — much like what the Ingalls family had gone through decades earlier on the frontier — the books emphasized self-reliance and individual effort, rather than government assistance.

Netflix steps into the fray

All of which means that Netflix’s adaptation of Little House on the Prairie, which premiered Thursday, was destined to become a culture-war flashpoint. The latest version of the Ingalls family saga was announced last January, mere days after Trump’s second inauguration — timing that invited reflexive skepticism from liberals who assumed the series would be a sanitized slice of Americana aimed at MAGA devotees and aspiring trad wives. But the involvement of Netflix, a company that the right-wing regards as an outlet for trans propaganda, also provoked knee-jerk outrage from conservatives inclined to see any changes to the source material as evidence of wokeism run amok. (See: Megyn Kelly.)

Now that the series is here, it’s evident that showrunner Rebecca Sonnenshine has pulled off a tricky balancing act. This Little House captures many of the things that make Wilder’s books so memorable — Laura’s plucky spirit, the Ingalls’ deep love for one another and inspiring resourcefulness — while expanding the narrative to include the much-needed perspectives of Native Americans and Black settlers.

The eight-episode season tracks many of the key events in Little House on the Prairie, the third volume in the Little House series, following the Ingalls family — Ma/Caroline (Crosby Fitzgerald), Pa/Charles (Luke Bracey), Mary (Skywalker Hughes; yes, that’s her real name), Laura, a.k.a. Half Pint (Alice Halsey), and their trusty dog Jack — as they relocate via covered wagon from the Big Woods of Wisconsin to a prairie near Independence, Kansas. “There was nothing but grass and waves of light and shadow and a giant sky,” narrates Laura in a voiceover.

Pa finds a plot of land that is supposedly available for settlement, where he builds a single-room log cabin with help from Mr. Edwards (Warren Christie), a kindhearted neighbor with a shady past. Ma discovers she is pregnant, which makes the need for a stable home and ready sustenance even more urgent.

But challenges abound. The family faces many dangers, including treacherous rivers, errant logs, wolves, fire, poisonous wells, and malaria. There’s tension with the Osage people, whose land they are squatting on. Inquisitive Laura befriends Good Eagle (Wren Zhawenim Gotts), an Osage girl, while Pa forms a bond with her father, a mixed-race Osage man named William Mitchell (Meegwun Fairbrother). But Good Eagle’s mother, White Sun (Alyssa Wapanatâhk), is understandably wary of making friends with the white settlers encroaching on her land.

Ma, too, is reticent. “We don’t need to know them. We don’t need to go looking for trouble,” she says. If not overtly racist to Native Americans, Ma is apprehensive in a way that suggests stubborn prejudice. Sonnenshine wisely didn’t gloss over the racism in the books, but she balanced it by rendering the Osage characters as fully-rounded people instead of nameless exoticized others.

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To ensure the show’s cultural authenticity, the producers also employed Osage consultants Julie O’Keefe, Robert Warrior, and Talee Redcorn, who advised on everything from costumes to language. (One aspect of this definitive all-American story that’s less than authentic: it was made in Canada.) If there’s a straightforward villain in this Little House, it’s neither the government nor the Osage people; it’s Eli James (Michael Hough), the unscrupulous land speculator who dupes Pa into settling on tribal land.

The series also significantly beefs up the role of Dr. George Tann (Jocko Sims), a Black physician who offers assistance to the Ingalls family during an outbreak of “intermittent fever.” Dr. Tann appears in the book — and was based on a real person — but in this take, he also gets a tangled backstory and develops a love interest: general store proprietor Emily Henderson (Barrett Doss).

Reckoning with racism

Does acknowledging the basic humanity of Black and Indigenous people — which, if we are honest, should be the bare minimum for a contemporary storyteller — make this a “woke” Little House? Alas, in a climate as badly skewed as ours, when the White House is actively trying to erase the history of non-white Americans, it probably does.

But the show’s most pointed political commentary comes from a surprising source: Half Pint herself. In the season finale, Laura gives an impromptu speech during the town’s Founders Day celebration, describing an ideal community founded on tolerance and mutual support.

“Independence is actually a funny name for a town like this,” she says.

The prairie is so big, and we’re so small. The truth is, none of us can make it alone here. We need help from each other when we need a place to live, and when we get sick, and when we get lonely. Independence isn’t about self-reliance, or liberty or freedom, or any of those things. It’s a place to come together, a place to find out who you really are. Independence means getting to know people who have been here a long time or people who have just arrived, people who are different from anyone you’ve known before, or people who feel like family. Independence isn’t really a place, it’s an idea. It’s the people you carry around in your heart.

The monologue is an elegant rebuke of the bootstraps mentality that Wilder and her daughter espoused, and that many conservatives have embraced in her writing. Little Laura’s manifesto could even be interpreted as an argument for progressive governance. Who’s going to help you when you’re sick or need a place to live if your neighbors can’t — or won’t?

Interpretations that reflect turbulent times

The relationship between past and present is always tricky in a work of historical drama. But it’s even more layered in this version of Little House on the Prairie, Netflix’s interpretation of a fictionalized memoir written during a very specific context in the 1930s about events that took place many decades earlier. Then there’s the added complication of the Landon series, which continues to loom large in the public imagination.

Adaptations of canonical texts always reflect the time in which they were made. NBC’s Little House on the Prairie was so undeniably wholesome that it was reportedly Ronald Reagan’s favorite TV show. But, like the 2026 version, it was made during a period of social and political unrest, when the nation’s anniversary had everyone thinking about our past. Landon, who was an executive producer and guiding creative force on the show for most of its run, often used 19th-century Walnut Grove, Minnesota, as an avenue for exploring contemporary ills. The standout episode, “Soldier’s Return,” which aired in the spring of 1976, featured a Civil War veteran who was addicted to morphine — a character who resonated at a time when many young men who had served in Vietnam were struggling with heroin dependency.

Netflix’s Little House clearly explores what it means to be an American in 2026, through characters who were grappling with similar questions 150 years ago. The Ingallses are essentially economic migrants — not much different from the people who still come to the United States, with little in their pockets, desperate for a better life.

Written by a woman, this version of Little House reveals the limitations of traditional gender roles. Caroline Ingalls might be the ultimate trad wife, able to split logs while pregnant and whip up mouth-watering cornbread over an open fire. But she also serves as a feminist cautionary tale — an educated woman who gave up her teaching career to marry and, along with her children, becomes subject to the perilous whims of her hunky, hard-working, woefully naive husband. (With his neatly trimmed beard and perfectly broken-in flannels, Bracey, the Australian who plays Pa, comes off as an L.L. Bean model who accidentally fell into a wormhole that transported him to the 1870s.)

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In interviews, Sonnenshine has stressed that she was focused on Wilder’s book as source material, rather than trying to remake the Landon series. Yet she also incorporated some of the most cherished TV lore into her version of Little House — like the fact that Mr. Edwards is an alcoholic widower — as if not to challenge viewers attached to certain notions about these characters. (Alison Angrim, who played problematic fave Nellie Oleson in the original series, even has a cameo.)

Netflix has already renewed the series for a second season that is poised to follow the events in On the Banks of Plum Creek. But this incarnation of Little House on the Prairie is unlikely to match the 1970s series in terms of public adoration or cultural influence. Not because it’s bad, or because it sorely lacks an earworm theme song, or because it’s impossible for any mortal to replace Landon as America’s Dad. But a show that drops eight episodes at once into an algorithmic abyss cannot captivate viewers the way that a network show, beamed into millions of living rooms at the same time every week for years on end, once did. Still, Wilder is destined to find new fans via Netflix — technology that the girl raised in that little house on the prairie could never have imagined.

Meredith Blake is the culture columnist for The Contrarian

Recent days have brought weary Americans a pop culture event they can all get behind.

I am not talking about the sparsely attended semiquincentennial festivities in the nation’s capitol, which should have been a unifying patriotic spectacle but were instead a humid dumpster fire marred by extreme heat, apocalyptic thunderstorms, and the president’s delusional blather.

Nor am I referring to Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s much-hyped wedding, which was held Friday night at New York City’s most romantic basketball arena.

I am, in fact, talking about John Oliver’s guest appearance on General Hospital, a three-episode arc that began last week and saw the Emmy-winning TV satirist play a shadowy intelligence agent known only as “Z.” Sporting jet-black hair and a dark blue suit, Z first appeared in the final minutes of Thursday’s episode, arriving via helicopter with heavily armed guards at his side. He rushed to assist Josslyn Jacks (Eden McCoy), an agent for the World Security Bureau, freshly injured in a firefight. “Everything’s going to be ok,” he told her. “I’m here to help.”

Oliver’s unlikely journey to daytime TV began back in March, with a lighthearted segment on Last Week Tonight devoted to his love of soap operas. Though he had perhaps 10 minutes of screen time in total on General Hospital, Oliver got to do it all — even getting slapped across the face by Carly Spencer (played by Laura Wright). And, particularly for someone who has not trained as an actor and who spends most of his time on TV seated behind a desk, Oliver delivered a convincing performance as the enigmatic Z.

“General Hospital was everything I hoped it would be. It’s a true honor to be a small stain on the history of this illustrious show,” Oliver said in a press statement.

He even earned praise from his co-star. “A lot of times, people like to come on and make fun of what we do, and I’m not a big fan of that. Our job is as important as anyone else’s, and we don’t consider it a different type of acting or anything like that,” Wright told Variety. “So, I was so impressed with the writing that honored what he does well while also staying true to what we do, and how he showed up and delivered. It was incredible.”

Many celebrated actors, including Julianne Moore, Michael B. Jordan, and Brad Pitt, got their start in daytime TV. But the reverse scenario — big-time celebs doing soap opera cameos — has also been a thing for decades.

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It arguably began with Elizabeth Taylor, who loved General Hospital so much that she reportedly called up the show’s producers and asked to create a role for her. At the height of the show’s popularity in the early ‘80s, she appeared in multiple episodes as the villainous Helena Cassadine, who crashed Luke and Laura’s wedding in 1981 (watched by 30 million people) and put a curse on the supercouple. At the time, movie stars of Taylor’s stature rarely deigned to do primetime TV, much less daytime. But a soap fan, no matter how wealthy or world-famous they might be, is still a soap fan. And, as Taylor said at the time, “I am wild about that show.” (You can watch some very charming outtakes from Taylor’s GH stint here.)

The best-known example from recent-ish history is James Franco, who also had a recurring role on General Hospital as “Franco,” a performance artist/serial killer. The Freaks and Geeks actor, then at the height of his fame, was trying to become Hollywood’s answer to Marina Abramović by consciously subverting his star persona.

As an A-lister appearing in the lowbrow world of daytime TV, “I disrupted the audience’s suspension of disbelief,” Franco argued in an essay for the Wall Street Journal, “because no matter how far I got into the character, I was going to be perceived as something that doesn’t belong to the incredibly stylized world of soap operas. Everyone watching would see an actor they recognized, a real person in a made-up world. In performance art, the outcome is uncertain—and this was no exception. My hope was for people to ask themselves if soap operas are really that far from entertainment that is considered critically legitimate. Whether they did was out of my hands.”

Franco fully committed to the bit, appearing intermittently as “Franco” from 2009 to 2012, creating an exhibition of his character’s work for an episode of General Hospital that was taped at the Pacific Design Center in LA, and making an experimental documentary about the whole experience. (“Franco” the character even lived on after he left the show, and was finally written off GH in 2021.)

Oliver is clearly more interested in having a laugh (and maybe scoring a Daytime Emmy nomination) than a side hustle as a performance artist. In a segment on Last Week Tonight on March 8, Oliver declared his “genuine” love for soaps and confessed he was jealous of sports commentator Stephen A. Smith, who has had a recurring role on General Hospital since 2016.

He argued that the genre — where a woman might be possessed by the devil, vanquish an enemy with a swarm of bees, or perish by falling into a volcano — is undeniably fun, making it a magnet for celebrity cameos. But Smith has done much more than a one-off appearance: The famously opinionated analyst has appeared in dozens of episodes as Brick, an associate of the Corinthos crime family.

“Over the last 10 years, he has car-bombed an enemy’s limo, tampered with evidence in a custody case [and] forged records to say that the Turkish orphan was actually a member of his boss’s family,” Oliver said, admitting he was jealous.

“I want to be part of that world. So, to all the soap operas out there, let me say this: I’m officially offering myself to you. Write me a role and I will be on your set so fast, it will make your head spin.”

Oliver laid out a few conditions: he wanted to play a character, not a version of himself, and he wanted the character to have a ridiculous name. Also, he added, “I want to do something juicy, like murder, or slapping, or being slapped, or being someone’s long-lost something, and ideally I’d like a dramatic close-up of my face.”

“Call me, soaps. I am available. I’m willing to travel, and I want this more than you can possibly understand,” he concluded.

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Some people might wonder why Oliver, who has won a whopping 23 Emmys for his work on Last Week Tonight and The Daily Show, might bother appearing on General Hospital, the longest-running soap opera still airing on American TV.

Yet for all the praise he’s received for his brilliant topical comedy, Oliver also has a taste for the ridiculous and lowbrow. He is an avowed fan of Bravo and The Real Housewives, particularly the extra bonkers Salt Lake City incarnation of the reality franchise. (He once described the cast of RHOSLC as “the most ridiculous monsters on TV” — an accurate assessment.)

It’s also not hard to understand why a bit of campy escapism might appeal to Oliver, a man who spends many of his waking hours immersed in the news, trying to find funny ways to talk about grim subjects like congressional redistricting and the decimation of USAID. Even — perhaps especially — for someone with his keen intelligence, soap operas offer a respite from the banal horror of the headlines.

It’s fitting, if coincidental, that Oliver’s arc on General Hospital bookended this historic Independence Day, because the daytime soap opera is a distinctly American innovation, a highly addictive, heavily serialized narrative designed to sell consumer goods to a captive audience of homemakers. Originating on radio in the 1930s before moving to TV, the soap opera offered escape to millions of women (and some men) during dark periods like the Great Depression, World War II, and Vietnam. Soaps might not have the cultural reach they once did, but the genre’s anything-goes storytelling remains as irresistible as ever.

A world where literally any outcome is possible as long as someone can write it — what’s not to love about that?

Meredith Blake is the culture columnist for The Contrarian

I’ve rounded up some revolutionary reading recommendations from my colleagues at The Contrarian. The list includes fiction and non-fiction, books about the past and present, books focused on the United States, and books about the entire human race. They vary in tone and subject but offer perspective — occasionally by way of a much-needed escape — at this pivotal moment.

The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life and Legacy of Frances Perkins, Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, and the Minimum Wage, by Kirstin Downey

Before Nancy Pelosi, there was Francis Perkins, the first female Cabinet member, FDR’s Labor Secretary and the mastermind behind Social Security, unemployment insurance, the first workplace safety laws, child labor protections, and other key components of the New Deal. Along the way, she struggled over objections of other Cabinet officials to rescue Jews fleeing the Holocaust, waded into violent labor clashes, and coped with her husband’s severe mental health issues. A resonant read when functional, humane government is under attack, and the super-rich seek to shred the social safety net that bears her imprint.

The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl, by Timothy Egan

A man-made environmental disaster, well-meaning government policy gone terribly awry, tough-as-nails immigrants unwilling to be forced from their homes, and plenty of shady media and real estate hucksters. It’s all frightfully relevant. But it’s also an inspirational story, revealing that Americans — in the face of hardship few can imagine — can show breathtaking resilience.

The Personal Librarian, by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray

Ragtime meets Passing. It’s about race and family identity, private wealth and public philanthropy, and the making of New York as the cultural trendsetter for America. Belle da Costa Greene might be the most fascinating Gilded Age character you’ve never heard of.

— Jennifer Rubin

The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777, and The Fate of the Day, The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780, by Rick Atkinson

Giving Up Is Unforgivable: A Manual for Keeping a Democracy, by Joyce Vance

Liar’s Kingdom: How to Stop Trump’s Deceit and Save America by Andrew Weissmann

The Fix: Saving America from the Corruption of a Mob-Style Government by Barb McQuade

I’m recommending Atkinson’s books — the first two volumes in a planned trilogy on the American Revolution — because they’re a reminder of how we started: in resistance to autocracy. (Can’t wait for part 3!) And books by my friends and colleagues Andrew, Barb, and Joyce because they are a guide to where we need to go from here to get back to where we started!

— Norm Eisen

The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue, by Mike Tidwell

With the nation newly knowledgeable about algae blooms, a book about the climate crisis seems appropriate, especially considering that the Trump administration cut research on algal blooms as part of its broad attack on science and health. Mike Tidwell’s The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue is a glorious love letter to the dying trees in his neighborhood and an assessment of the climate catastrophe that sentenced them to death. Tidwell, founder of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, also looks forward to what America and Americans can do to save the next generation of giant oaks and their ilk.

— Jamie Riley

The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change, by Rebecca Solnit

In this sequel to her bestselling Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit charts and reckons with the dramatic changes we’ve endured since 1960. With characteristic insight and balance, she surveys worlds ranging from hard science to Indigenous beliefs. As inspiring as it is informative, she reminds readers that constant change is an inevitability we must embrace rather than mourn.

The Fire Next Time, by James Baldwin

From one of the most powerful voices of the Civil Rights movement, this personal chronicle (delivered in essays and letters) still resounds and offers an invaluable lesson — through stunning, poetic language — on the complexities of race in America.

These Truths: A History of the United States, by Jill Lepore

Though it pulls no punches, Lepore’s comprehensive history of the past 250 years is infinitely readable and grapples with both our challenging legacy and our troubling present-day. Her narrative aims to provoke the question of whether we have delivered on the promise of the American ideal: political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people.

Our Towns: A 100,000 Mile Journey into the Heart of America, by James Fallows & Deborah Fallows

Renowned magazine journalist and author Jim Fallows and his eloquent wife, Deborah, spent five years traveling across America in a single-engine prop airplane, discovering the lesser-known pockets of the country and emerging with an understanding of what binds us together, the challenges we face, and the inherent opportunities of our complicated nation. If you don’t have five years to spare and have zero desire to traverse our landscape in a prop airplane (or even if you do), this book is a must-read for anybody seeking to appreciate the infinite layers and ludicrous characters that define being an American.

The Declaration of Independence and Constitution of the United States, by the Founding Fathers

In case you were distracted in your American history classes, or on the off chance that you come across one of our six Republican Supreme Court justices who appear to have forgotten the principles upon which we were founded, revisit these blockbusters. Though justly unheralded as the ultimate summer beach read, you’ll be surprised at how digestible these (literally) formative works are, and how astoundingly ignorant of their tenets our current administration is.

— Domenica Alioto

South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation, by Imani Perry

“History sometimes tends and sometimes distends.” If that line isn’t enough to get you interested in Imani Perry’s National Book Award-winning deep dive below the Mason-Dixon line, there are plenty more where it came from. At once a fleet regional history, travelogue, and memoir — Perry excavates her own family history from enslaved ancestors to the present — it’s a brilliant argument for why understanding America will always start in the South.

Is A River Alive?, by Robert Macfarlane

Our premier literary naturalist is back with another soulful ecological pilgrimage-cum-investigation. The question of the book’s title is literal, and along with Macfarlane’s gorgeous descriptions of watery arteries in India, Ecuador and Alaska, his account of the Rights of Nature movement is a fascinating, empathy-expanding exercise in considering legal personhood in its broadest sense. We could do with an updated bill of rights, as Tim Dickinson wrote, and Macfarlane makes a compelling case that it’s not just humans who deserve to be included.

Unruly: The Ridiculous History of England’s Kings and Queens, by David Mitchell

Am I really recommending, á propos of America’s 250^th anniversary, a medieval history of the English monarchy by a British comedian? Yes, but HEAR ME OUT. A recurrent theme in this sharp, hilarious tour of several centuries of nepotism, beheadings, and failed attempts to take over France is how radically disruptive seizures of authority were almost always (falsely) sold as a restoration of conservative ideals. Which, you know, makes one think.

— Meghan Houser

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The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, by V.E. Schwab

A fantasy take on “careful what you wish for,” the novel follows Addie LaRue, who, in 1714, wishes for freedom after fleeing a forced marriage. A dark god grants her immortality, but at a cost: she is forgotten by every single person she meets, unable to leave any trace of her existence. Multiple locations throughout the U.S. have banned or removed the book from their library shelves due to “sexual content, depictions of queer characters, the devil,” etc. Of course, the “sexual content” in question involves nondescript references, and there is no explicit mention of the devil. Queer characters do exist, which is likely the damning factor. This is entertaining, touching, thought-provoking, and a wonderful escapism route. It’s a banned book worth reading.

Yesteryear, by Caro Claire Burke

Published in April 2026, the #1 NYT Bestseller and Book Of The Year (so far) has already made a splash. Yesteryear is a dark, satirical thriller about Natalie, a tradewife influencer with a “homesteading” traditional empire, who wakes up one day in 1855. Flashing between the present and her new reality, Natalie confronts her online and traditional values, which quickly unravel into horrors she tries to escape. You will think you’ve guessed the ending midway through, only to be shocked by its finale.

Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting For Justice, by Virginia Roberts Giuffre

Giuffre’s posthumous memoir is a raw, courageous, and infuriating (given the circumstances) recounting of her life. Virginia holds nothing back as she details her painful, exploitative childhood, being trafficked and haunted by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, and fighting for justice regardless of the risk. In honor of her legacy and to support Epstein’s victims and survivors, her memoir is a must-read. Forewarning: Guiffre’s account is difficult, graphic, and potentially triggering, so please read with discretion and care.

— Ciera Stone

The Calamity Club, by Kathryn Stockett

If you’re looking for a beach read with a bit more gravity to it, consider this novel — Stockett’s much-anticipated follow-up to the ginormous bestseller The Help. Set in Depression-era Oxford, Mississippi, The Calamity Club is narrated by two characters: Meg, an 11-year-old orphan abandoned by her mother who now lives at a grim asylum for girls, and Birdie, an unmarried 24-year-old volunteer at the wretched institution.

The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America’s Culture Wars, by Isaac Butler

In this timely work of history (which I wrote about at greater length here), Butler chronicles the political battle over the National Endowment for the Arts in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. With a keen understanding of the intersection between politics and culture, Butler explains how a newly ascendant, highly organized right-wing coalition turned American artists into public enemy No. 1, stirring outrage over supposedly obscene work by the likes of Robert Mapplethorpe and Karen Finley. The Perfect Moment is a fascinating cultural deep dive that captures the creative vitality of a bygone era in American art. It’s also an illuminating read at a time when the president is actively using the levers of the government to silence his critics and staging vengeful takeovers of the nation’s most revered cultural institutions.

Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Years of Evolution, by Cat Bohannon

I have had Bohannon’s sprawling book in my “to read” pile for longer than I care to admit, because I was a little intimidated by its length (400 pages) and subject matter (evolutionary biology). Turns out, I had nothing to worry about. A shockingly entertaining combination of On the Origin of Species and Our Bodies, Ourselves, Eve nimbly moves through the eons to explore the evolution of the female body. Bohannon introduces us to various “Eves” — genetic predecessors who first developed traits associated with the female body — starting with morganucodon, a prehistoric weasel-like creature that co-existed with the dinosaurs and secreted milk through its skin (nipples weren’t a thing yet). Instead of a dry tome about science, Bohannon has written a colorful, pithily funny time-travel adventure that has much to teach us in 2026. As she notes with dismay, the scientific establishment still fails to take sex differences into account when conducting medical research — sometimes not even using women as subjects because their fluctuating hormones make the science too “messy.” In post-Roe America, we’ve seen how few policymakers understand how women’s bodies work and the disastrous implications of this ignorance. Eve is a necessary and compulsively readable step in the right direction.

Lawless: How the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories, and Bad Vibes, by Leah Litman

Contrarian contributor and co-host of the Strict Scrutiny podcast uses humor and vivid pop culture analogies to argue that the Supreme Court, which is supposed to be a nonpartisan arbiter of the law, increasingly operates based on personal bias and “vibes.” She likens the court’s bros — with their hostility to rights for anyone who isn’t a white male — to Ken and his embittered buddies in Barbie. Rather than merely fretting over the woeful state of the judiciary, Litman lays out the path forward through court reform.

On Courage: How to Be a Dissident in an Age of Fear by Julia Angwin and Ami Fields-Meyer

Anyone looking for practical, research-driven advice on resistance should check out this book by Angwin, an investigative reporter, and Fields-Meyer, a senior policy advisor in the Biden White House (and Contrarian contributor). To write this practical guide, an expansion of their 2025 New Yorker piece, “So You Want to Be a Dissident?”, the authors spent a year interviewing political dissidents across five continents, from Cairo to suburban New Jersey. They found that most of these people were just ordinary citizens who let their conscience — and not their fear — guide them. “Dissidents don’t choose to be dissidents. They simply choose to be who they are,” they write.

Living Declaration: A Biography of America’s Founding Text, by Ted Widmer

Just in time for the 250th, Widmer — a historian, presidential speechwriter, and Contrarian regular — has written this fascinating book tracing the living history of our country’s founding document. He analyzes 68 texts by authors including John Locke, Emma Goldman, Hannah Arendt, and Barack Obama to tell the story of how the Declaration came to be and how it has shaped political thinkers around the world for two and a half centuries.

This is the Plan: How to End America’s Meltdown and Save Democracy, by Ben Wikler

In this book, out July 21, Wikler shares the lessons he learned as chair of Wisconsin’s Democratic Party from 2019 to 2025, a period which saw widespread democratic reforms at the state level, including the end of conservative rule of the Supreme Court and the reversal of state legislative maps gerrymandered by Republicans. Wikler argues that the lessons of Wisconsin — a state where five of the last seven presidential elections have had margins of victory of under 1% — should be applied nationwide in the fight against Trumpism. As he puts it, “To hear Wisconsin’s story, told from the inside, is to realize that there’s a way out of this mess.”

— Meredith Blake

Happy reading, Contrarians!

The last time the United States celebrated a major birthday, back in 1976, there were only three national TV networks, and cable was just beginning to be a thing. But it was the first major anniversary of that nascent TV era, and bicentennial fever was ubiquitous on the small screen.

Every night for two years, beginning in 1974, CBS rolled out Bicentennial Minutes, short educational films in which celebrities like Lucille Ball told viewers about events that had happened on that day 200 years earlier. Sitcoms like Maude, The Jeffersons, and The Mary Tyler Moore Show featured episodes that tapped into this widespread civic fervor. Even Saturday morning cartoons got in on the action, with a season of Schoolhouse Rock! about American history, which delivered the all-time banger “I’m Just a Bill.” In 1976, the wounds of Vietnam and Watergate were still fresh, but a shared popular culture helped create a sense of national unity — at least for the summer.

As the country heads into its 250th birthday next week, we face a much different reality. Our politics are quite possibly more divided than at any time since the Civil War, and we exist in a fractured media landscape that would have been unimaginable in 1976. The big three TV networks, which once powerfully shaped American monoculture, are now minor cogs in giant multinational conglomerates. Anyone with a smartphone and an internet connection has access to millions of movies, TV shows, and short-form videos. And, thanks to hyper-specific algorithms, a viewer is unlikely to be introduced to anything that doesn’t align with their interests or worldview.

The increasingly unpopular president, a creature of reality TV who has long craved (but mostly been denied) the adoration of big-name celebrities, accelerated this divide by planning his own highly politicized Freedom 250 celebration, featuring a series of concerts on the National Mall showcasing one-hit wonders from the ‘90s. But Trump has grown so toxic that even the guy from Milli Vanilli backed out of the event, leaving Trump and Kash Patel’s girlfriend as the biggest draws.

All of which makes this national anniversary feel like less of an opportunity to come together to celebrate and reflect on the meaning of democracy than a moment to retreat into our preferred cultural silos. And when it comes to 250th programming, there’s something for everyone — but nothing for all of us.

If you’re a history buff who missed The American Revolution, Ken Burns’ 12-hour magnum opus about our country’s violent origins, which aired on PBS this fall, can (and should) be watched online anytime you like. Without drawing explicit connections to the present day, the series will leave you with a deeper understanding of how we got into this mess.

For those who want more uncritically patriotic content, there’s Young Washington, a biopic about the early years of the country’s first president, distributed by Angel Studios, the “values-based” company behind the hit The Sound of Freedom. (In theaters July 3.)

On Netflix, you can now stream The American Experiment, a painstakingly bipartisan documentary series from executive producer Tom Hanks. The first few episodes, which focus on the Revolutionary War, feel like a sped-up version of Ken Burns’ series, with copious maps and dramatic voice-over performances. (TV’s favorite president, Martin Sheen, plays George Washington). The American Experiment even features many of the same talking heads as The American Revolution, including Maya Jasanoff, Kathleen DuVal, and the late Gordon S. Woods.

Directed by Brian Knappenberger, the series gets more interesting in later episodes, which chronicle the ideological battles and often shameful compromises that went into the writing of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. There are probably too many reenactments with actors in wigs wielding bayonets and quill pens, but given the lack of photographs or video from the era, this shortcoming is understandable. More vexing is the commentary from contemporary politicians — a scrupulously balanced mix of folks from the left and the right, including Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton, Rand Paul, and Mike Pence, who earnestly extol the virtues of decency and bipartisan cooperation. A little political sincerity is not a bad thing, especially these days, but The American Experiment is so cautious that it ultimately doesn’t have an editorial point of view. Plus, it’s beyond maddening to hear Ted Cruz — a guy who still won’t admit that Biden won the 2020 election — pontificate about the dangers of hyper-polarization.

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For my money, the most perfectly pitched show of this semiquincentennial moment is Life, Larry, and the Pursuit of Unhappiness, a sketch comedy series starring the chronically irascible Larry David. At a time when millions of Americans are feeling a little grumpy about the state of our democracy, David’s caustically funny, contrarian take on our national heritage feels cathartic.

Two years after bringing Curb Your Enthusiasm to an end after 20+ years on HBO, the beloved curmudgeon is back on the network, playing a barely-fictionalized version of himself who pops up at pivotal turning points in American history, ready to irritate the bravest and most visionary figures in our nation’s past. He adds his own set of grievances to an early draft of the Declaration of Independence. He talks to Rosa Parks so incessantly that she regrets sitting at the front of the bus. He “chat ‘n’ cuts” in a soup kitchen line during the Great Depression. He turns up, uninvited, at the Boston Tea Party — and immediately kills the vibe.

The series is executive-produced by Barack and Michelle Obama, and the former president introduces the first episode. “What truly makes America unique is the fact that we’ve always been a work in progress,” he intones with faux gravitas. “We’re not perfect, we can be irascible, petty, selfish, cheap, and let’s face it, some of us will always find something to complain about.” (Cue David’s entrance.)

There are cameos from dozens of big-name stars, including Jerry Seinfeld (who plays Clark to David’s Lewis) and Lin-Manuel Miranda, who shows up as a revolutionary who finds Larry more unbearable than the British.

Written by David and Jeff Schaffer, the show doesn’t pretend to be educational. But if you watch with an open mind (and perhaps an open browser tab), you might learn something anyway, as I did when I fell down a rabbit hole about the disputed election of 1876. (Thanks to a sketch about the stupidity of the electoral college, in which David plays Democrat Samuel Tilden.) Another bit has fun at the expense of noted anti-Semite, Henry Ford.

Life, Larry, and the Pursuit of Unhappiness also has something to say about our current political malaise, and takes aim at the current administration in clever, bitingly funny ways. Episode 2 ends with a surprisingly poignant sketch that asks what happens when a president won’t accept the results of an election. (I am forbidden by HBO from saying more, but rest assured that it will infuriate Trump if he ever sees it.) A later episode celebrates the achievements of modern medicine while skewering a certain vaccine skeptic who happens to be married to David’s former Curb co-star.

Yet the most radical thing about the show isn’t its anti-Trump politics, but its irreverent tone. Across the political spectrum, there’s a tendency to look at the history of the United States, particularly its founding, with a whole lot of piety and not a lot of humor. David reminds us that even the greatest leaders and innovators can also be petty, self-interested, and peevish — and that complaining is as American as apple pie.

Meredith Blake is the culture columnist for The Contrarian

Less than two years into Donald Trump’s second presidency, it often feels as if we are living through a perpetual culture war. In the MAGA era, seemingly every choice we make — from the sports we enjoy to the music we listen to — feels like a political statement, while quotidian items like jeans and beer have become battlegrounds in an endless conflict between left and right.

Two events last week threw this divide into stark relief: Trump’s $60-million UFC cage-fighting birthday bash on the White House lawn, followed days later by the star-studded opening of the Obama Presidential Center, where music legends including Bruce Springsteen and Stevie Wonder performed.

“Everything is a culture war right now, because we have gotten into this period where whatever consensus there is about who we are as a people and our values has completely broken down,” said Isaac Butler, author of The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America’s Culture Wars.

In his gripping and exhaustively researched book, Butler argues that this state of non-stop cultural warfare dates back to the twilight of the Reagan era. As the Cold War began to wind down in the late ‘80s, the newly powerful religious right found a convenient new enemy in artists whose provocative work was indirectly supported by the federal government via the National Endowment for the Arts.

Fanatical conservatives like Jesse Helms, the long-serving senator from North Carolina, and Donald Wildmon, founder of the American Family Association, stirred outrage over the use of taxpayer money to fund supposedly obscene works of art and somehow made it seem as if a handful of downtown New York artists who few normies had ever heard of were the greatest threat facing the country.

Their targets included Robert Mapplethorpe, the celebrated photographer known for elegantly composed images of gay men engaging in sadomasochistic activity (among many other subjects), and multimedia artist Andres Serrano, whose 1987 photograph Immersion (Piss Christ) depicted a crucifix submerged in urine.

They also included the “NEA Four” — Karen Finley, John Fleck, Holly Hughes, and Tim Miller — controversial performance artists known for exploring gender, sexuality, and queer themes.

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During this pivotal chapter in American history, the religious right waged a largely successful campaign to undermine the NEA, often by cherry-picking the most extreme examples of work underwritten by the agency and painting the left as out of touch elitists. Their movement created a template for right-wing grievance campaigns and attacks on free speech that have accelerated under Trump 2.0.

The Perfect Moment “is in some ways a military history, of a war fought by other means. Through politics. Through religion. Through letter-writing campaigns and posters and performance art,” Butler writes. “It’s the story of two sides — American artists and the religious right — who viewed their opponents as existential threats to their way of life.”

“A FIGHT OVER WHAT IT MEANS TO BE AN AMERICAN”

In a recent video chat with The Contrarian, Butler explained why this raging debate over cultural identity is relatively unique to the United States. “There are countries that work hard to have a coherent national identity and national culture,” he said. “We do not, we never have, and so, as a result, our nation is quite prone to huge and sometimes violent eruptions of conflict over cultural objects, because it’s really a fight over what it means to be an American.”

Butler’s book primarily focuses on the period between 1988, when Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ inflamed the Christian activists who would soon mobilize against “blasphemous” contemporary art, and the end of the millennium. Until recently, Butler explained, this discrete period is what people meant when they referred to “the culture wars.”

“Now, we say it, and it could mean anything, because now we’re fighting over everything, from Miller Lite to whether Helen of Troy should be played by a Black actress.”

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The Perfect Moment borrows its title from a retrospective of Mapplethorpe’s work that was shown at the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati in 1990, resulting in the arrest and trial of director Dennis Barrie on obscenity charges. But it also refers to the very specific historical moment from which the culture wars emerged in the latter part of the 20th century.

Butler points to the rise of the New Right, a “coalition of evangelicals, neo-cons, right-wing Catholics, and free marketeers” who objected to government funding of the arts for a variety of moral, religious, and economic reasons. The end of the Cold War also brought the end of “the post-war consensus on which the NEA rested,” Butler said.

Then there was the AIDS crisis, which had mobilized large swathes of the LGBTQ+ community who could only express themselves through street protests — or art. “They’re shut out of the news media, they’re shut out of most movies, they’re shut out of the political square,” Butler said. The religious right understood that “LGBTQ Americans, people with AIDS, and people of color had built a locus of power within the federal government” through the NEA. “They don’t want those communities to have any power, and they don’t want them to be able to have their say in the public square.”

HEROES AND VILLAINS

One of the most powerful themes in The Perfect Moment is the connection between AIDS activism and the artists who became the focus of right-wing outrage. David Wojnarowicz, for instance, was an influential member of ACT UP whose work spoke directly to the horrors of the epidemic (and was singled out in deceptive mass mailings by fundamentalist groups). His ashes were spread on the White House lawn in a 1996 protest inspired by his writing.

“AIDS activism was really the secret fuel of the arts response movement,” Butler said.

Butler has a personal connection to the subject matter: as the battle over the NEA was reaching a fever pitch in the early ‘90s, he was a twelve-year-old professional actor starring in a hit production of Falsettoland, a musical about a family affected by AIDS, at Washington, D.C.’s Studio Theatre.

The experience gave him a personal connection to the crisis and also made him aware of how deeply intertwined art and politics actually were.

“It just really lit this fire, both for theater and art in general, and about this horrible thing that was ripping through the country, and that a significant portion of the country not only didn’t give a shit about, but seemed hostile to the idea that they should have to give a shit about it,” Butler said.

If activists like Wojnarowicz are the unsung heroes in the battle over the NEA, the undisputed antagonists are Helms — a.k.a. “Senator No” — and Wildmon, whom Butler reluctantly described as “political geniuses.”

“The thing they both share is an absolute genius for communications and organizing,” he said. “We really live in the country Jesse Helms helped make.” Their crusade began with The Last Temptation of Christ, which they weren’t able to suppress. Soon after, they saw an opening with The Perfect Moment and Piss Christ, “and they just fucking pounced.”

They also benefited from the fact that the left was repeatedly unprepared for such attacks and seemed to suffer from what Butler calls “recurring amnesia.”

“The liberal establishment seemed to really not understand that this was a highly networked, incredibly disciplined alliance,” he said. “This was a real social movement, and they just thought it was a bunch of yahoos who every now and then got pissed off about a movie.”

If that scenario sounds painfully familiar, that’s entirely the point of Butler’s book.

WHAT NOW?

As Butler explores in The Perfect Moment, there’s a level of irony to the right-wing assault on the NEA. The agency was established in 1965 as a way of bolstering the country’s standing as a cultural superpower. “In the era of the Cold War, the arts were a way of expressing the unique value of the American way of life to the rest of the world.” Butler writes.

Compared to other federal expenditures, the budget for the NEA was always relatively tiny (never more than $500 million annually, adjusted for inflation, according to Butler), but it was money well spent, fostering the exponential growth of local arts councils, non-profit theaters, modern dance troupes, and symphony orchestras.

“The National Endowment for the Arts is the greatest expression of what the American federal government can do,” said Butler, whose previous book, The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act, explored the history of Method acting.

The NEA (just barely) survived the culture wars of the ‘90s. It also endured repeated attempts by conservatives to defund it since. But under an emboldened Trump, the future of the NEA is now more precarious than ever. Last year, the administration canceled hundreds of NEA grants, saying it was focusing on “funding projects that reflect the nation’s rich artistic heritage and creativity as prioritized by the President.” Trump has repeatedly called for the elimination of the NEA, and his proposed budget for 2027 includes $29 million that would be used to wind down the agency.

Butler has a lot of ideas about how to rebuild American arts without the NEA, starting with a more generous system of public welfare that would enable artists to pursue creative work while also being able to afford groceries and rent. (It worked for Britain in the ‘70s.) He also looks to France, where a small percentage of every movie ticket sold goes to funding the national film council and supporting the ecosystem as a whole. “If you look at France’s film culture, it’s incredibly robust and healthy,” he said, suggesting American creative industries, like the theater, could implement a similar system.

“I think it would be revolutionary, and it would transform the soul of our country for the better.”

Meredith Blake is the culture columnist for The Contrarian

Jane Austen had very few nice things to say about Mary Bennet, the homely middle sister in Pride and Prejudice.

“Mary had neither genius nor taste;” she writes early in the beloved novel, “and though vanity had given her application, it had given her likewise a pedantic air and conceited manner.”

But a new series recasts tedious, self-righteous Mary as an awkward yet deeply relatable young woman who goes to some regrettable extremes while trying to figure out her place in the world.

Based on the novel by Janice Hadlow, The Other Bennet Sister revisits Pride and Prejudice from the perspective of a marginal character who largely serves as an object of ridicule in Austen’s story.

It stars Ella Bruccoleri as Mary, who is constantly defined in opposition to her four sisters — witty Elizabeth, beautiful Jane, spirited Lydia, good-humored Kitty.

Under pressure from her overbearing mother (Ruth Jones) to marry well, Mary tries to stand out by being the “the intellectual one.” (Spoiler: it does not go well.) But following a life-changing event, Mary goes to live with her aunt and uncle in London, where she flourishes — and attracts the attention of multiple suitors.

Writer Sarah Quintrell calls Mary “a brilliant heroine for 2026.”

“Jane Austen writes incredible characters, but I think that Mary was overlooked and unloved. Actually so many of us resonate with her — with her difficult family circumstances, with feeling like a failure,” says Quintrell. “She feels like the odd one out, the outsider. Most of us like to think we’re Lizzy, but we’re actually Mary.”

The Other Bennet Sister premiered in the U.K. earlier this year and became a huge hit for the BBC. It has also been a breakout critical success for BritBox, the specialty streaming service where it airs stateside. (The season finale lands next week.) Chock full of sly references to other films and series in the Austen Cinematic Universe, The Other Bennet Sister is aimed squarely at Janeites. But it also has a distinctly contemporary sense of “cringe humor” — there’s a thoroughly adorkable scene in which Mary and her love interest, Mr. Hayward (Donal Finn), flirt by making bird calls.

While some Austen purists have quibbled with the show’s supposed disregard for Regency social customs and its unorthodox take on canonical characters like Lizzy and Mrs. Bennet, it is resonating broadly with others who praise it as charming “nerd propaganda.”

“The Other Bennet sister, for me, was always a story about the transformative power of kindness on a young life, and I just can’t think of a better time to be telling that story than now,” Quintrell says.

“There Are Definitely Years Where She Pops”

The Other Bennet Sister is the latest project to arrive a wave of Austenmania: last year brought worldwide celebrations for the author’s 250th birthday; the Oscar-nominated short film Jane Austen’s Period Drama, a feminist satire; Jane Austen Wrecked My Life, a French romantic comedy about a Parisian bookseller who finds love on an Austen-themed writing retreat; and Miss Austen, a historical drama about the complicated relationship between Austen and her only sister, Cassandra.

And there is more to come: In October, Focus Features will release a new film version of Sense and Sensibility, Austen’s debut novel, which will star Daisy Edgar-Jones, of Normal People fame, as Elinor Dashwood (the sensible sister). Later this year, Netflix will take yet another swing at Pride and Prejudice, which was adapted into a BBC series in 1995 (a.k.a. the one with Colin Firth and his wet shirt) and into a lush feature film a decade later (a.k.a. the one with Keira Knightley and the erotically charged hand squeeze). This latest version stars The Crown’s Emma Corrin as Lizzy and Jack Lowden — a ginger! — as Mr. Darcy, and features a script by millennial dating columnist Dolly Alderton.

While Austen has maintained an almost continuous pop culture presence since the mid-90s, when adaptations and modern interpretations of her work (like Clueless and Bridget Jones’s Diary) suddenly seemed to be everywhere, “There are definitely years where she pops,” says Devoney Looser, a professor of Arizona State University and author of multiple books about Austen including Wild for Austen: A Rebellious, Subversive, and Untamed Jane. “This is another moment that will be looked back on as significant.”

In 2026, Austen is a rare cultural figure who is revered by factions that agree on little else — by conservatives who appreciate her narrative focus on marriage and family, and by liberals who see her as a protofeminist and sharp critic of social convention.

“At a difficult moment in cultural history, there’s more agreement around her and her greatness than maybe any other figure,” Looser says. “She can be claimed by people who want to see her as mild and who want to see her as wild, who want to see her as of the right or of the left, and that makes her fascinating.”

“There Are Many Kinds of Heroines”

It is safe to say that Julia Aks connects to Austen’s “wild” side. She is the co-writer, co-director, and star of Jane Austen’s Period Drama, a feminist satire about a young woman who gets her period at the very moment her handsome suitor is about to propose — putting her in the awkward position of having to explain the blood stain on her empire waist gown. Aks made the short film, with visuals borrowed from cinematic adaptations including Joe Wright’s Pride and Prejudice, with the hope that “it would inspire a lot more people to speak more openly about their periods.”

It also shares something with Austen’s writing, which is a biting sense of humor.

“Her literary voice is so freaking funny,” Aks says, “which is something I don’t think I understood just from watching the films [adapted from her novels].” As she and co-writer/co-director Steve Pinder developed Jane Austen’s Period Drama, they looked at scenes from Pride and Prejudice that they could heighten in their parody. “But you read the scenes, and you’re like, ‘She’s already done it. There’s no more heightening to be done.’”

Quintrell also leaned into the comedy with her adaptation of Hadlow’s book, which is at times “quite brutal,” she says. “I wanted the audience to really look forward to sitting down and watching this.”

The screenwriter recalls reading Pride and Prejudice for the first time when she was 17. “I’d avoided it forever, thinking Austen was probably a bit posh. I’m from southeast London,” she says. But she connected deeply to the book — much as viewers are connecting to her take on Mary.

Quintrell doesn’t think her version of Mary is radically different from the character in Austen’s pages.

“We only see Mary in public in Pride and Prejudice. We only see her when she’s being a pedant, when she’s correcting people, when she’s saying the wrong thing, when she’s embarrassing herself at the piano,” she says “What The Other Bennet Sister does is show you the private Mary, the one who’s deeply in pain, who knows she’s made a fool of herself, who knows she shouldn’t have said that, who feels like she’s getting life completely wrong. What that does is allow her to be vulnerable, which means that we connect, and we go, Oh my god, I have felt like that, too!”

As peripheral as Mary is to Pride and Prejudice, there is evidently something about the character that is appealing right now and has inspired fans to explore in their own works of fiction. In addition to The Other Bennet Sister, there are multiple books about Mary published in the last decade ,including The Secret Life of Miss Mary Bennet, a mystery series by Katherine Cowley, and Mary B.: A Novel: An Untold Story of Pride and Prejudice, by Katherine J. Chen.

Looser thinks Mary’s cultural rehabilitation reflects a broader desire “to recapture the noble aspects of the plain, bookish young woman.”

“There are many kinds of heroines, they don’t all have to be like Elizabeth Bennet, so captivating, witty, and at the same time with ‘fine eyes,’” she says, quoting Mr. Darcy. “The recovery of the most plain sister as deserving of her own happy ending and her own story — that makes sense for any moment, but I think especially for our own moment.”

Meredith Blake is the Contrarian’s culture columnist.

Twenty years ago this fall, Idiocracy arrived in theaters under a cloud of bad buzz. The pitch-black comedy from Mike Judge starred Luke Wilson as Joe Bauers, a deeply unremarkable Army librarian who is recruited to participate in a cryogenics experiment — and promptly forgotten. Five centuries later, Joe emerges and discovers that the human race has devolved so badly that he’s now by far the smartest person alive.

The United States has become an anti-intellectual dystopia and corporate hellscape in which the president is a former professional wrestler, every citizen receives a mandatory barcode tattoo, Cabinet members get paid each time they mention Carl’s Jr., and a sports-drink conglomerate owns the Food and Drug Administration, the Federal Communications Commission, and the Department of Health and Human Services.

20th Century Fox, reportedly concerned about alienating the very real corporations lampooned in the movie, repeatedly delayed the release of Idiocracy. Test screenings went badly, and the studio declined to screen it for critics — rarely a good omen. After sitting on the shelves for nearly two years, the film was dumped on barely a hundred screens in a handful of cities (not including New York or San Francisco). Judge, Wilson, and co-star Maya Rudolph did virtually no press.

The film, Judge’s much-anticipated follow-up to the cult favorite Office Space, was marketed so badly that some wondered if the studio was intentionally trying to drum up curiosity and film-nerd outrage ahead of a wider release. Alas, this conspiracy theory proved inaccurate: Idiocracy quickly disappeared from theaters and ultimately made just $444,000 at the box office.

But in the years since its brief, ignominious theatrical run, Idiocracy has become an unexpected cultural touchstone. It is no longer viewed as an embarrassing misfire from the guy behind irreverent favorites like Beavis and Butt-Head, King of the Hill, and Silicon Valley, and is instead seen as alarmingly prescient satire that accurately predicted the era of garish stupidity and self-destructive consumerism in which we now live.

If Judge’s vision of the future once seemed too cynical for mainstream filmgoers, in many ways it actually overly optimistic. Idiocracy is set 500 years in the future, after centuries of evolutionary decline. The president has stopped even pretending to address real problems and is able to distract the public with violent spectacle backed by major corporations. In reality, the United States got to this point in less than 20 years. (Likewise, the White House in Idiocracy is in disrepair and has been outfitted with a tacky above-ground pool, but that’s less intrusive than a 92-foot-tall “claw” — and the fictional East Wing is still standing.)

On Sunday, Trump celebrated his 80th birthday by hosting a massive U.F.C. fight on the south lawn of the White House — an occasion that Variety dubbed “peak Idiocracy.” Featuring analysis from leading public intellectual Joe Rogan and costing a reported $60 million to produce, the event was full of ludicrous details that Judge and his co-writer Etan Cohen probably would have dismissed as too far-fetched or crass to be believed.

It was sponsored by Bud Light and Ram Trucks, and streamed on Paramount+, a second-tier streaming service that’s desperate for eyeballs and is also controlled by the Trump-aligned Ellison family. Fighters were paid in crypto from a Trump company. Ring girls wore star-spangled gowns that may have violated the U.S. flag code. One of the event’s headliners, Alex Pereira, has been accused by two women of domestic violence, sexual assault, and stalking. After winning his fight, heavyweight Josh Hokit for some reason chose to lob a juvenile, transphobic insult at Michelle Obama, a woman who hasn’t lived in the White House for nearly 10 years, and gave his chain to Trump.

Idiocracy’s strange afterlife began nearly as soon as it flopped at the box office, and fans have been noting its prescience for most of the last 20 years. There’s a dedicated Reddit forum — which was created in 2009 and now has close to 200,000 members — where people share real-world occurrences that feel lifted from the movie.

But the Idiocracy comparisons truly kicked into gear with Trump’s rise to power a decade ago. In 2016, Cohen tweeted that he “never expected #idiocracy to become a documentary.” Rumors even swirled that Terry Crews would reprise his role as President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Camacho in a series of anti-Trump ads, but were then shot down. During Trump’s second term in office — as the emboldened president does whatever he wants, from repainting the reflecting pool in “American flag blue” to building a billion-dollar ballroom with tech bro money — the Idiocracy allusions have become almost impossible to resist.

The irony is that Judge never really intended to make a grand political statement with Idiocracy. Early drafts of the script didn’t include President Camacho, the character most often likened to Trump. Judge told the Los Angeles Times he was inspired to write the movie during a trip to Disneyland with his daughters in 2001. They were standing in line for the teacup ride when a fight broke out between two women. The vulgar display gave him an idea:

I started thinking about the movie 2001, and wouldn’t it have been funny if, instead of this monolith and intelligent people and this kind of pristine sci-fi world, it was just gigantic Costcos and The Jerry Springer Show and all this, people yelling at each other, yelling obscenities at Disneyland? Taking the progression from when the movie 2001 came out to the year 2001 and just projecting that forward many years — just where would that go?

It’s worth noting: Idiocracy is not a great movie. Despite a running time of just 84 minutes, it somehow feels long — like a one-note Saturday Night Live sketch stretched to feature length. Wilson is almost too well-cast as a boring regular schmo, and the satire is about as subtle as a blow torch to the face.

Then there’s the quasi-eugenic premise of the whole film. In the opening scene, a narrator explains that in the early 21st century, “human evolution was at a turning point.” People with low IQs were procreating at a higher rate than their more intelligent counterparts, leading to a fundamental change in the process of natural selection that “once favored the noblest traits of man.” By way of example, we meet Clevon, who has an IQ of 84 and a litter of children with multiple women, and a childless professional couple named Carol and Trevor (141 and 138, respectively).

Idiocracy’s implicit warning — that smart people need to start having more babies or humans will eventually be too stupid to tie their own shoelaces — feels like something JD Vance might endorse. (This sequence also appears to have resonated with Joe Rogan, who interviewed Mike Judge about the legacy of Idiocracy on his podcast in 2022. Yes, the irony is too much to bear.) The IQ obsession is also reminiscent of Trump, a man who loves to boast about his cognitive abilities and regularly insults his critics, especially when they’re Black, by calling them “low-IQ.”

At the end of the film — spoiler alert — Wilson’s character decides to stay in the year 2505. He eventually becomes president and gives a speech in which he declares, “There was a time in this country when smart people were considered cool. Well, maybe not cool, but smart people did things like build ships and pyramids, and they even went to the moon,” he says. “I believe that time will come again.”

We can only hope that Idiocracy was right about this, too.

Meredith Blake is the Contrarian’s culture columnist.

Glaude spoke with Abraham Kenmore shortly before the book published on May 26. The following is excerpted from that conversation with edits for length and clarity. Quotations from other authors are left as spoken and may not be exact.

Throughout the book, you’re quoting [James] Baldwin, you’re quoting Frederick Douglass, you’re quoting Walt Whitman, President [Gerald] Ford — all these people who’ve been thinking about and writing about this issue of race in America, Blackness in America. When you were approaching this book, what did you feel like hadn’t been said that you wanted to say?

I think at the heart of it was a curiosity, a kind of sense that there’s a haunting at the heart of the American project, that there’s something that cycles repeatedly — and it happens at these moments when we have to tell the story of our founding, tell the story of ourselves.

Here we are in 2026, and we’re grappling with the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, we’re grappling with the racism of Trumpism, white nationalism, white Christian nationalism, however you want to describe it, and it’s happening in the 250th year of the country. And my gut was telling me this is a repetition of sorts, this is a rhyming, to use Twain’s language, of sorts.

I’m not Jill Lepore, I didn’t want to write a 250-year history of the country, so I thought, well, let’s look at these milestone anniversaries. And when you think about it, 1876 is the beginning of the collapse of Reconstruction, 1926 it’s the decade of the Klan, 1976 a deep sense of skepticism coming out of Watergate, Vietnam, Black Power and the like. And each of these moments when the country has to tell a story of itself the vexed issue of race, of its divided soul, is in full view.

Your first line is, “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” and the last word of the book is “blues,” right? I feel like a lot of times when I’m reading books, there’s this impulse to — even if you go into a dark place — to end on a note of hope. I’m not saying that this book doesn’t have hope, but why did you want to have so much of that sense of blues throughout? What made you steer away from reaching to end on a high note?

I think that’s part of the American fantasy, it’s one of the reasons why we can’t grow up. Everything has to end in resolution, we’re always already on the road to a more perfect union, you want to end in that space.

Even though I disagree with, a little bit, Robert Bellah, the sociologist who gave us the notion of American civil religion — when you read his 1975 book, “The Broken Covenant,” or you read Robert Penn Warren’s book on the legacy of the Civil War, both of them are saying that we need to have a more tragic sense of the country, right? That we have to attend to our losses and our failures and our evils, and I use that possessive on purpose. And to attend to that, to recognize it, acknowledges what I take to be the blue note at the heart of the country. You know that blues scale is predicated upon the most unstable chords you can imagine, right?

I was hoping that you’d speak a little bit about the role of music in this book and why you chose to weave this composition through it.

In so many ways, it’s an homage to W.E.B. DuBois, his classic book, “The Souls of Black Folk.” At the beginning of each chapter in “The Souls” is a bar of music from the slave spirituals, and then a line of prose from the Western canon. For him, it’s kind of showing the doubleness of the country.

And because I say, well, Du Bois is right, and his description of Black folk as experiencing a kind of double consciousness — that we see ourselves through the eyes of those who despise us — but the country itself, I argue, is experiencing that what we experience as double consciousness, the divided soul of the country.

So I asked the award-winning classical composer Joel Thompson to compose a composition in response to the argument, because I didn’t want the duality — slave spiritual or blues and western prose. No, I wanted it to be in one body, I wanted it to be me, us. Joel came back with this amazing piano concerto called “And Blue.”

Throughout this book you use the image of freedom dreaming. I wonder if you’d talk a little bit about where you see people dreaming of freedom or doing that freedom dreaming in this moment?

Yeah, so you know, freedom dreaming is really important. Freedom seeking is really important in the book. And freedom dreaming is, and freedom seeking is, of course, contrasted with freedom snatching.

A horrific story of Moses Gordon crystallizes that for you, that is a slave who was freed during the revolution in 1776, re-enslaved two years later because of a statute passed by the colony of North Carolina, escapes to Philly, lives a life for 10 years, and then is captured because of the Fugitive Slave Clause in the Constitution. And as he was incarcerated to be extradited to North Carolina, he commits suicide.

We’ve always freedom dreamed is the point in that long-winded preface. Freedom dreaming today is — we can see it in spaces that are fighting against ICE and spaces that are fighting for full citizenship, as we fight the battle around the gutting of the Voting Rights Act. There are those who are fighting for working people.

Now, I think our task, at least my task as a writer, is to give them space to dream even more expansively. To not just simply tinker around the edges, but to imagine the country shorn of those commitments that keep it mired in the muck, you know?

If you’re handing someone a book this year, one book that you should read on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration, what book are you handing folks?

On the 250th? I should say this, this book is the third in a trilogy. [James] Baldwin has been a through line, so much so that the second volume was about him — or not really about him, but he was walking with me as I was trying to understand Americanism at the dawning of the Trump years.

So I would give them the collected nonfiction of James Baldwin, and say start from the beginning and make your way all the way to the end and track his voice. Feel how it coarsens, not just simply because the cancer is eating it up, but what does he mean when he says on his deathbed “sometimes I feel like — I felt like a broken motor saying the same thing over and over again.” What does it mean when he says that about Ronald Reagan?

I would give people the portal to a vast literature that demands that America grows up. So I would give them Baldwin.

When I read your first line, I thought, of course, of “Notes of a Native Son,” “I love America more than any other country in the world, and exactly for that reason, I insist upon the right to criticize it perpetually.” But as you write about Baldwin evolving, he kind of moves away from that — and you aren’t really in that space either.

That first sentence is operating on three registers. One is just a visceral register of the wounding. Another is a riff on Hannah Arendt. She is very skeptical of loves of people and nations and the like. And then there’s this, this, this Baldwinian riff — and unlike Baldwin, you know, my love is located closer to the ground. When it comes to the country, that’s just an abstraction for me, and it’s an abstraction that’s dangerous.

And so what I want to do is to bring it from the abstraction to the ground, and what is clear, I hope, is that my love of this place — not the abstraction of this place — is rooted in the people, and that love includes us all, not just the people that matter to me. This is that beautiful formulation from Ralph Ellison, that “democracy at its best is a form of disinterested love,” that I care for your well-being, even though I do not know you. And I want that sensibility to be rampant in our lives.

Dictators are people, too — and, like all people, they need to eat. Not just to sustain their bodies, but also, as explored in an unsettling new documentary, to sustain their power.

How to Feed a Dictator, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival this week, profiles five ordinary people who cooked for some of modern history’s most brutal tyrants. It offers rare insight into the culinary predilections of men who who were collectively responsible for the execution, starvation, and torture of untold millions:

Idi Amin, whose nickname “Big Daddy” reflected his voracious appetite, feasted on whole roasted goat, which was presented standing up and adorned with a beard — as if it were still alive. Augusto Pinochet enjoyed caldillo de congrio, or conger eel stew. Pol Pot liked vegetables and prahok, a fermented fish dip. Kim Jong-il was a pizza guy. Saddam Hussein loved masgouf — carp splayed open and grilled over an open fire — so much that he stocked his many palaces with fish ponds, a clue which helped lead to his capture in 2003.

Directed by Andrew Neel, the film is much more than just Lifestyles of the Rich and Genocidal. It looks at how authoritarians use food as a weapon, dining on elaborate meals designed to signify their wealth (and in the case of Hussein, frequently going to waste) while withholding essential resources from their own people. It also offers stark examples of the impossible choices faced by everyday people under authoritarian regimes, and the willful blindness it can take to simply do one’s job.

“The question that interested me is, ‘How does the everyman survive under these conditions, and to what extent could we all become complicit in a system that is foisted upon us?,” said Neel in an interview this week. “One of the unseen tragedies of dictatorships is that they create a system where moral compromise is a necessity if you want to survive, if you want to thrive.”

Based on the book by Polish journalist Witold Szabłowski, How to Feed a Dictator includes frequently jaw-dropping interviews with these chefs, whose motives, circumstances, and levels of complicity vary as widely as the dishes they prepared.

Keo Samoun was eight years old and already separated from her parents when the Khmer Rouge sent her to work in a kitchen making food for Pol Pot. Jorge “Coco” Pacheco was a successful Chilean restaurateur and fervent anti-communist who became Pinochet’s personal chef. Italian Ermanno Furlanis was recruited to make pizza for Kim Jong-il in North Korea and made up to 30 pies a day for years on end. Otonde Odera was a poor farm boy who rose to the top of Ugandan society by cooking “the kind of food white people ate” for Amin, a terrifyingly mercurial figure known for his sadistic impulses.

Finally, there is the chef, known as Abu Saif (a pseudonym), who began cooking for Hussein in 1996 and was given the following advice: “If you want to get close to the president, learn how to grill.”

Neel was grateful to be able to portray such an array of experiences. “People’s motivations are very different,” he said, “but the trap is the same. You’re forced to either look the other way or find a way to justify it to yourself. Even if you completely don’t agree with it, you still have to survive in a society that is by definition compromised, and that’s what they do.”

Experts like scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat and author Riccardo Orizio (Talk of the Devil: Encounters with Seven Dictators) offer perspective on how authoritarians acquire and maintain power — and the specific role that food plays in this process.

“A nation is a living thing full of resources that you can extract for yourself,” says Orizio. “Since the beginning of humankind, food has been a way to exercise power and to accept submission.”

The documentary took Neel to seven different counties, including many, like Cambodia, “where the detritus of human rights violations is just spread everywhere.”

Even decades after the collapse of these regimes, some of the film’s subjects were apprehensive about talking to Neel and his crew. Furlanis nearly backed out at the last minute because “he thought that maybe we were North Korean Secret Service and we were going to kill him,” Neel said. Fearing reprisal due to his association with Hussein, Saif wears a black mask and clothing that distorts the shape of his body.

Few of these chefs are willing or able to acknowledge the crimes committed by their former bosses. Pacheco says Pinochet, whose regime killed and disappeared thousands of people, “would hug you and you would feel good vibes. He was a patriot, a soldier of this country.” Saif calls Hussein “the father of this country.”

Odera might be the most candid. He speaks freely about working for Amin, who reportedly threatened to kill his kitchen staff because one his children had come down with a stomachache, but it is clear the experience left him deeply scarred.

Others profess ignorance of the horrors unfolding around them. Furlanis worked in North Korea in the 1990s, during a famine that killed between 300,000 and 3 million people. Yet, he claims, “There was plenty of food where I was…I didn’t see the people starving over there.”

Ben-Ghiat offers perspective on this pervasive sense of denial. “Ultimately,” she says, “authoritarians require that you betray yourself.”

How to Feed a Dictator is a film of jarring contrasts. In lushly photographed sequences that would feel at home on a high-end cooking show, the chefs are shown preparing meals just as they would have done for their bosses. This alluring, almost sensual imagery is intercut with harrowing archival footage and photographs.

The idea, Neel said, was “to draw people in with this very relatable human thing, and then trap them in this moral conundrum. The genocide, the war crimes that you see on camera wrap you up inside the process of food preparation. That was literally happening to these chefs, and we wanted the audience to have the same experience.”

Neel was drawn to the subject because it felt all too relevant at a moment when dictators — both real and wannabe — are on the ascent across the globe, and people in war-stricken regions like Gaza and Yemen are facing starvation.

“There are always piles of rice being stacked up in various places, with people waiting to get that rice, and the people who run those countries are either authoritarians or dictators, who are stealing three-quarters of the rice for themselves and reselling it,” Neel said. “I don’t think food is going to stop being a weapon of war.”

Meredith Blake is the Contrarian’s culture columnist.

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One day in 2018, when 26-year-old photographer Wyn Wiley filmed himself in the mountains dancing in a pair of high-heeled boots, an unexpected new drag persona was born: Pattie Gonia, “the world’s first backpacking queen.”

That initial post went viral, and Pattie’s popularity has grown steadily since. She now boasts more than 1.8 million followers on Instagram and close to 900,000 on TikTok — numbers achieved by few drag performers who haven’t appeared on RuPaul’s Drag Race.

A self-styled climate activist and community organizer, Pattie Gonia has carved out a niche in intersectional environmentalism, advocating to protect the earth while making outdoors spaces more hospitable to LGBTQ+ people.

She’s given TED talks about the importance of bringing joy to climate activism, raised a million dollars by hiking in drag, and challenged Pete Hegseth to a kettlebell-swing competition in a post mocking his performative masculinity. “I’ll do it tucked and in heels,” Pattie Gonia said.

With a bushy red mustache and an even more voluminous red wig, Pattie Gonia’s look is at once high glam and rugged. Her costumes bring new meaning to the “camp” drag performers have long embraced: She wears carabiners as earrings and tents as skirts.

Pattie is, in short, a rising star in the worlds of drag, social media, and activism.

Yet she finds herself at the center of a legal dispute with Patagonia, the eco-friendly outdoor clothing brand (which is, in turn, named after the region of South America known for its stunning natural beauty).

In January, the company (which was restructured in 2022 so that profits fight climate change) filed a trademark infringement lawsuit against Pattie Gonia, who had begun to sell branded apparel and also a trademark application for the “Pattie Gonia” name.

The public didn’t really take notice until earlier this month, when Pattie Gonia took to social media to urge her followers to speak up on her behalf. “This is a corporation trying to erase an activist, and this is how corporations bully individuals who cannot match their resources,” she said in a lengthy Instagram post.

In a statement, Patagonia said the lawsuit only came after repeated attempts to find a path forward with Pattie Gonia. “This matter is not about seeking financial gain, nor is it about challenging anyone’s identity or right to advocacy, protest, or creative expression,” the statement read. “The last thing we wanted was a legal fight with someone who shares our values, but we must protect our business and employees.” (Pattie Gonia did not respond to a request for comment.)

The story has taken off online, where many see Patagonia as a hypocritical corporation claiming it owns the name of a place.

But there has also been some pushback from within the drag/queer community.

Tom Fitzgerald, one half of the fashion and pop culture criticism duo Tom & Lorenzo, weighed in a recent episode of the duo’s podcast. “When you start trying to sell things, when you bring your drag to a more merchandisable level, then you’re no longer the underground drag artist who’s poking fun,” he said. “You’re actually a company and a brand.”

Vanity Fair last week detailed the protracted and messy legal back-and-forth between Patagonia and Pattie Gonia — and made the compelling case that this expensive fight has no real winners. (When progressives are squabbling over trademarks, the only people benefitting are the lawyers.)

But the lawsuit has also drawn attention to the importance that names often play in the creation of a drag persona — and the unforeseen complications that arise when a name borrows from a well-known company.

The name game

Along with wigs, makeup, costumes, and choreography, names are part of “the distinctive way an artist creates a drag character,” says Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, an expert on Puerto Rican drag and a professor at the University of Michigan. “Names are a world unto themselves.”

A drag name can “convey all sorts of information,” he said. “It can be a tribute. It can highlight femininity, but it can also center comedy. It really varies. Names are a space of engagement, and they signal as much as your appearance and your performance,” explained La Fountain-Stokes, who performs drag as Lola von Miramar, a name that references a neighborhood in his hometown of San Juan.

“The performer’s name serves as your introduction to them,” said Joe E. Jeffreys, a drag historian who teaches at New York University. “Their name establishes their tone or points of reference.”

Alexis Michelle, who appeared on RuPaul’s Drag Race and the reality series Dragnificent!, remembers flipping through queer magazines in the 1990s and seeing performers whose clever names instantly captured their wit, such as Hedda Lettuce and Miss Understood.

When it came time to create her own name, she thought of doing something punny, but “nothing resonated.” Ultimately, she settled on a feminized version of her legal name. “I wasn’t deeply passionate about that choice when I made it, but everything happens for a reason,” she said, noting that the less showy name ultimately suited her best. “I really realized that my drag is not a costume to me, it’s not an alter ego, it’s not a character, it’s my female side.”

The pundamentals

In her initial post, Pattie Gonia argued that “drag is built on parody, puns, and jokes.”

Drag is meant to be a transgressive art form that sends up mainstream culture through a queer lens, and camp humor is often a part of that.

La Fountain-Stokes also cited the example of Hedda Lettuce, who commits to the bit by dressing in shades of green. “The name immediately communicates her style of drag — comedy queen. Invoking camp, making people laugh or chuckle just by repeating your name or hearing your name — it’s to your advantage. You’re already ahead with the audience.”

There’s a long tradition of names that, like Hedda Luttuce, use puns and wordplay. They can be cheeky, irreverent, bawdy, or silly. (e.g. Tess Tickle, Dixie Normous, and Izzy Uncut.) But clever, playful names don’t have to be limiting, said Alexis Michelle.

Jan Sport, another drag queen with a name based on a well-known brand, is “a multi-hyphenate artist who has the ability to be very funny and silly, but by no means is that the center of her brand,” she said. Brita Filter is also more than a goofy joke about water purification systems.

“Her main sense of purpose outside of performance is politics, and standing up for our community,” Alexis Michelle said. “Even with these honey campy brand names, people are not defined or boxed in by them.”

Brita Filter and Jan Sport have been careful about using their names in ways that avoid legal trouble. They both starred on RuPaul’s Drag Race and went by “Brita” and “Jan,” respectively. Jan Sport collaborated with Jansport on a line of backpacks, suggesting a fruitful partnership between corporations and the drag queens sending them up is possible.

Similarly, Trixie Mattel, a Barbie enthusiast and Drag Race alum, uses only her first name on business ventures such as Trixie Cosmetics and the Trixie Motel.

La Fountain-Stokes said that Pattie Gonia is “a really interesting example of the political things that drag can do. She is in that tradition of using drag as a tool to offer social critique at the same time that she entertains,”

He thinks Patagonia’s lawsuit is “ridiculous.”

“Pattie Gonia represents no tangible threat to this corporation,” he says. “It signals people who don’t understand anything about drag.”

Meredith Blake is the Contrarian’s culture columnist.

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Over the decades, the journalists at 60 Minutes have covered countless stories of global significance: The My Lai massacre. The murder of Emmett Till. Watergate.

Launched in September 1968 with an episode that went behind the scenes at that summer’s party conventions, 60 Minutes has been the No. 1 news program in the United States for a staggering 52 seasons straight. The newsmagazine, with its iconic ticking clock, is a singular institution in American TV: a commercially successful, widely-watched program known for its exceptional journalistic standards.

Since she was handpicked by a billionaire nepo baby to run CBS News last year, despite being an opinion writer with virtually no experience overseeing complicated investigations or producing TV news, Bari Weiss has taken a wrecking ball to the show.

In December, she yanked a report by correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi on the hellish conditions at CECOT, the Salvadorean megaprison housing people deported by the Trump administration. The segment leaked online, went viral, and was finally broadcast a month later than originally scheduled, opposite an NFL playoff game on NBC.

Then last week, Weiss committed the journalistic equivalent of the Red Wedding, firing much of the show’s leadership, including executive producer Tanya Simon, a 26-year veteran of 60 Minutes who took over the show last year and steered it to record ratings. Weiss replaced her with Nick Bilton, a tech journalist whose scant TV credits include producing one documentary seven years ago and writing a few episodes of the catastrophically bad HBO Series The Idol.

Weiss also canned Alfonsi, who had been openly critical of the decision to shelve her CECOT piece, and Cecilia Vega, the show’s first Latina correspondent, who in a statement said that in recent months she and her producing team faced pressure “to insert political bias into our stories.”

At a staff meeting Monday, esteemed correspondent Scott Pelley went nuclear, saying Weiss was “murdering” the show and questioning Bilton’s “slender qualifications” for the job. On Tuesday, he too was fired, essentially for doing what should be standard for journalists: asking tough questions of people in power. In a statement Wednesday, he said that he had been pressured to inject “falsehoods and bias” into a story by the network’s new management.

On Friday, remaining correspondents Lesley Stahl, Bill Whitaker, and Jon Wertheim issued a joint statement saying they would stick with the show because “We don’t want to see 60 Minutes die.”

Given the collective institutional knowledge that has departed — and may yet leave — it is now uncertain whether 60 Minutes, which averaged 9 million viewers a week last season, will even be on the air with new episodes come September.

The crisis comes as David Ellison, the CEO who hired Weiss and paid a whopping $150 million for The Free Press, tries to acquire Warner Bros Discovery and gain control of CNN. He has not been shy about courting the favor of one very specific TV viewer: in April, Ellison hosted a gala dinner “honoring the Trump White House” that was attended by Weiss.

Many have noted the hypocrisy of Weiss — a supposed champion of free speech who flounced out of her plum gig at The New York Times in 2020 because she believed the paper of record was intolerant of dissenting opinions — firing Pelley for saying a few things she didn’t want to hear.

Social media is rife with jokes about how Weiss, an anti-woke crusader, critic of trans rights, and unwavering supporter of the Israeli government, might reshape 60 Minutes. (Like this from the satirical account NYTPitchbot: “I’m Kid Rock.” “I’m Naomi Wolf.”“I’m Kanye West.” “I’m Matt Taibbi.” “I’m Catturd. Those stories, plus Rob Schneider, tonight on 60 Minutes.’) It’s not that far-fetched: Weiss already conducted a much-hyped town hall with Erika Kirk and hired a slew of dubious contributors at CBS News, including supposed longevity expert Peter Attia, who had to step down because of vile emails he sent to Jeffrey Epstein.

Weiss’s efforts to reshape CBS News (which also include installing Tony Doukopil as anchor of the evening news broadcast) have been lauded by FCC chair Brendan Carr, who recently told the Financial Times that he supported anyone who challenges “school-of-fish groupthink” in the media (a phrase that could have been lifted straight out of a Weiss memo).

It is understandable that people are upset by her sabotage of a revered TV institution, particularly when Weiss is so clearly catering to an audience of one (Trump, as we know, is fixated on 60 Minutes) and has no interest in “modernizing” the broadcast like she claims.

Ironically, though, by targeting 60 Minutes, Weiss has dismantled a show that for decades was anything but a bastion of wokeness or liberal advocacy journalism. The only story that has been retracted in the last two decades is Lara Logan’s report on Benghazi, which hinged on a fabricated eyewitness account (and was highly critical of the Obama administration). CBS also famously delayed airing reports about torture at Abu Ghraib and tobacco industry whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand. If the show is beholden to anyone, it’s risk-averse corporate lawyers and ad sales executives, not a specific political party.

60 Minutes became the crown jewel of broadcast journalism by exposing hypocrisy, misconduct, and corruption. But for decades, it was also a workplace where verbal abuse and sexual harassment were apparently rampant.

Don Hewitt, the legendary newsman who created the show, was accused of repeat sexual misconduct. According to The New York Times, in the 1990s CBS reached a legal settlement with a former employee who claimed that Hewitt sexually assaulted her multiple times and “destroyed her career.” As of 2018, the woman had been paid $5 million. Sally Quinn claimed that Hewitt sabotaged her TV career after she rejected a romantic overture from him. (Hewitt didn’t deny hitting on her.) Women who managed to make it at 60 Minutes didn’t always last long: Hewitt fired pregnant correspondent Meredith Vieira in 1991 because, he said, “I need someone who can pull his or her own weight.”

Mike Wallace, the equally renowned correspondent, was apparently nearly as bad as his boss. In 2021, former producer Ira Rosen published a tell-all book, Ticking Clock: Behind the Scenes at 60 Minutes, in which he recalled Wallace regularly groping women’s bodies and snapping their bras. He accused Wallace and Hewitt of “Neanderthal behavior toward women.”

Writer Mark Hertsgaard witnessed similar conduct while reporting a piece for Rolling Stone in 1992 that Hewitt allegedly tried to get killed.

Most upsettingly, given 60’s reputation for holding the powerful to account, people in positions of authority within CBS News have consistently downplayed or tried to bury reporting about the treatment of women at the show.

In 2017, executive producer Jeff Fager published a book on the history of 60 Minutes that left out the more unsavory aspects of the Hewitt-Wallace era. He reportedly took over the project when another writer, Richard Zoglin, started asking too many questions about women at the show. A year later, Fager, who became the second person to run 60 Minutes after Hewitt stepped down in 2004, was fired for sending a threatening text to a reporter looking into sexual harassment allegations against him and Les Moonves, then the network’s CEO.

It’s possible that Weiss, who has decried the supposed excesses of #MeToo, would be fine with a return to the days when the network’s stars could snap women’s bras with impunity. What’s clear is that she is happy to undo the progress 60 Minutes was just beginning to make, and that she has little interest in producing the kind of hard-hitting journalism that made men like Wallace and Hewitt untouchable for so long.

Meredith Blake is the culture columnist for The Contrarian.

Culturally speaking, it can often seem as if Donald Trump is trapped in the early ‘90s, his taste permanently stunted the moment he opened the Taj Mahal Casino (a.k.a. “the 8th wonder of the world”) and left Ivana for Marla Maples.

He loves Les Misérables, which opened on Broadway in 1987. He reportedly believes that “November Rain” by Guns n’ Roses is the best music video of all time, an opinion which proves the adage that even a broken clock is right twice a day. At rallies, he is known to play Sinéad O’Connor’s 1990 hit “Nothing Compares 2 U.” His favorite movies include Goodfellas (also 1990) and Bloodsport (1988). He is preoccupied with broadcast TV, especially 60 Minutes and late-night talk shows, and barely seems aware that streaming exists, even though his wife’s documentary is on Amazon.

Which is why it made perfect sense last week when Freedom 250 announced the lineup for “The Great American State Fair,” a series of concerts on the National Mall this summer to celebrate the nation’s semiquincentennial.

The roster was of artists who all peaked before Bill Clinton was elected president: Milli Vanilli, Vanilla Ice, C+C Music Factory, Young MC, and Poison’s Bret Michaels, among others. It was a nostalgic cavalcade of has-beens and never-were, an extravaganza of where-are-they-nows that would have inspired every seventh grader in the country in 1990 to do the Roger Rabbit in their Z. Cavariccis. (The only group that was missing from the lineup? Peach Pit favorite Color Me Badd.)

But, much like the romance between Brandon Walsh and Emily Valentine, this ‘90s fever dream was doomed from the start. What was touted as a concert series full of “nostalgia, iconic hits, and live performances from some of the era’s most recognizable names,” quickly spiraled into a debacle of comic proportions — Trump’s very own Fyre Festival, minus the catering.

Nearly as soon as the lineup was announced, artists started backing out, claiming they had been misled about the nature of the event, which was organized by Freedom 250, a public-private partnership established by the Trump administration last year (not to be confused with America 250, which was set up a decade ago).

First to bail was Minneapolis funk star Morris Day, who said simply, “It’s A No For Me😎.” Rapper Young MC busted a move out of the concert, saying he had no idea it was a “Trump-backed” event. Martina McBride, the country music star whose 1993 hit “Independence Day” is often mistaken for a patriotic anthem even though it’s about a woman leaving an abusive relationship, also bowed out, saying she was also under the impression the fair would be a “nonpartisan event.”

Most confusingly, Jodie Rocco, a singer who performed on dozens of songs released under the name Milli Vanilli, said the musicians behind the group had never been asked to perform at Freedom 250. Instead, organizers had apparently booked Fab Morvan, the surviving member of the notorious European duo that sold millions of records and won a best new artist Grammy before it was revealed that they were lip-synching to music recorded by other singers in a scheme devised by German producer Frank Farian. (In an email, Rocco said she was actually a “staunch Trump supporter” who objected to the “fraudulent” use of the Milli Vanilli name, not the political nature of the event.)

Even Michaels — a man who broke his nose onstage at the Tony Awards and starred in not one, not two, but three seasons of the VH1 dating show Rock of Love (including one set on a tour bus) — concluded that the fair was beneath his dignity.

“Unfortunately, what was presented to us as a celebration of our country has evolved into something much more divisive than what I agreed to be a part of,” he said in a lengthy Instagram post.

By the weekend, the situation had gotten so bad that even the president couldn’t deny the collective rejection. In a Truth Social tirade, he railed against the “boring,” “overpriced” musicians “who nobody wants to hear,” and suggested canceling the concert series entirely and replacing it with — what else? — a MAGA rally. For his inauguration not even 18 months ago, Trump was able to book artists like Carrie Underwood and Snoop Dogg.

Now, he can’t retain the guy from Milli Vanilli. Morvan initially said he was planning to perform (and actually sing the songs), but by Monday he, too, was out.

“I was there to unite the people, to have them walk down memory lane, celebrate life. It was a way to say, ‘Hey, I’m still here, you’re still here. Let’s have a good time together,’” he said on CNN. “But throughout the week it turned into a circus. I’m not into politics, so you hear it first here: I’m not attending the June 26th celebration.”

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Arguably even more humiliating than the defections were the statements from the few artists who have doubled-down on performing.

Freedom Williams, the guy who once vowed to make dance music enthusiasts sweat until they bled, responded to the controversy with a rambling, seven-minute Instagram video which he apparently filmed while sitting on the toilet. In the N-word-laden rant, which included digressions about vaccines, Muammar Gaddafi, Zionists, and “white capitalists,” Williams said he still planned to perform even though he isn’t a Trump fan. In fact, he said he would vote for “Genghis Khan, Hitler, and motherfucking Ivan the Terrible” before he’d let anyone tell him what to do. (You can read the full transcript of his tirade here, if you dare.)

Vanilla Ice also made it clear that, despite the criticism, he still planned to light up the stage and wax a chump like a candle.

“I don’t even vote, so I don’t even care,” the rapper and home-flipper also known as Robert Van Winkle told TMZ. “I’ll go play for Putin and I’ll play in Iran, if you want. It don’t matter. There’s music fans everywhere.”

Trump’s desire to celebrate the nation’s 250th by time-traveling to 1990 makes some sense when you consider the sorry state of the music business 36 years ago.

Vanilla Ice, whose 1990 hit “Ice, Ice Baby” became the first hip-hop song to reach No. 1 on the Billboard hot 100 and more recently has been used to troll anti-ICE protestors, was a master of what we’d now call “cultural appropriation.” He was a handsome white guy with a goofy haircut who sold millions of records by peddling a sanitized version of Black music to an audience of suburban girls. (And told his detractors to “kiss my white butt!”)

Milli Vanilli was even worse, a particularly egregious example of a powerful white producer exploiting Black artists — an all-too-common pattern in the music industry. As detailed in an excellent 2023 documentary, Farian made a fortune peddling a hoax but faced little of the vitriol that Morvan and Pilatus endured in the wake of the scandal. Meanwhile, the mostly-Black musicians who played on the Girl You Know It’s True album received little compensation or credit for their work.

Then there’s C+C Music Factory, another producer-driven dance pop group accused of lip-syncing. Martha Wash, who recorded key vocals that were used in the group’s hit “Gonna Make You Sweat” filed a lawsuit in 1990 accusing the producers of fraud for replacing her in the music video and album art with the svelter Zelma Davis. (Wash would become what Rolling Stone called “the most famous unknown singer of the Nineties,” contributing vocals to numerous dance hits from the era without being in the videos or album art.)

Instead of celebrating this milestone by showcasing the best in American culture, the Trump administration tried to resurrect some of the worst musical trends of the recent past. As the cancellations continue to roll in, the future of “The Great American State Fair” looks increasingly uncertain. But what’s clear is that Trump has turned the nation’s anniversary into an embarrassing fiasco — and he can’t even blame it on the rain.

Meredith Blake is the culture columnist for The Contrarian

As the people of Los Angeles head to the polls Tuesday to elect their next mayor, they should consider what Lauren Conrad told her roommate Heidi Montag on The Hills nearly twenty years ago.

He’s a sucky person.

Conrad was speaking candidly about Spencer Pratt, who was at the time Montag’s then brand-new boyfriend. She (accurately) believed that Pratt was a manipulative, untrustworthy creep who was trying to sabotage their friendship.

Two decades later, that “sucky person” is now running an alarmingly viable campaign for mayor. Pratt’s home burned down in the Palisades fire last year, a conflagration that killed 12 people, destroyed more than 6000 buildings, and was allegedly started by a disgruntled part-time Uber driver who was mad at rich people.

Pratt, forever a creature of reality television, has leveraged this tragedy for the one thing he thrives on: attention. Soon after the fire, he began lashing out at Mayor Karen Bass and Governor Gavin Newsom on social media — where he has millions of followers — and on “The Fame Game,” the aptly-named podcast he hosts with Montag, his wife since 2009. (Naturally, they got married on The Hills.)

On the first anniversary of the disaster in January, he announced he was running for mayor, casting himself as a crusader for truth and his campaign as a mission “to expose the system.”

“We are going into every dark corner of LA politics and disinfecting the city with our light,” he said.

A few weeks later, he released a memoir, The Guy You Loved to Hate: Confessions of a Reality TV Villain, chronicling his lifelong quest for notoriety and wealth.

What the book does not detail is any interest in public service or improving the lives of everyday Angelenos. Other than a degree in political science from USC that he took more than a decade to complete, Pratt has zero experience in politics. The forty-two-year-old registered Republican and his wife — collectively known as “Speidi” — have spent most of their adult lives going from one reality TV show to the next, with side hustles in music and healing crystals. They made themselves rich by being utterly shameless, then squandered a $10 million fortune on wine, bodyguards, and Mayan Apocalypse preparations. Now Pratt wants to run the second-largest city in the country and manage its $15 billion budget, an idea that’s about as sound as letting a guy who went bankrupt running casinos be president.

In a sane world, Pratt’s “resume” would be a non-starter for anyone pursuing a career in politics. However (as Americans are now all too keenly aware), being a white guy whose sole talents are wasting money, getting his name printed in the tabloids, and convincingly playing an asshole on TV is enough to get elected to the highest office in the land. Twice.

And while Pratt is still a long shot, given LA’s deep-blue demographics, he is faring far better than he should be: According to a poll released Thursday, he has the backing of 22 percent of likely voters, putting him within striking distance of city council member Nitya Raman (25 percent), and Bass (26 percent). If none of the candidates receive more than 50% of the vote, then the top two finishers will compete in a November runoff.

Pratt’s standing has surged since a debate earlier this month, when he put his reality-TV skills to effective use, lobbing catchy soundbites and barbed insults rather than policy specifics. His campaign was also bolstered by an AI-generated ad portraying him as a Batman-esque crusader who directs an angry mob to hurl tomatoes at Mayor Bass (in Joker makeup), Newsom, and Kamala Harris.

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Pratt has clearly borrowed some pages from the Trump trolling playbook, deploying racist attacks against Bass (whom he refers to as “Mayor Basura,” the Spanish word for trash) and calling her supporters “Bassholes.” He has used dehumanizing language to describe the city’s homeless population (calling them “fentanyl zombies” who choose to live on the streets) and stoke fears about “super meth,” a drug that doesn’t exist.

He has made crime a signature issue, pledging to increase the number of officers in the LAPD to more than 12,000 (the current number is about 8,700) without explaining how he’d pay for it. He has also played up his own victimhood, claiming in an ad that he’s been living in an Airstream trailer — even though TMZ reported he has actually been staying at the Bel Air Hotel. In his most significant deviation from Trump, Pratt has said he doesn’t want ICE in the city because, as he told Vanity Fair, “I’ve eaten more Mexican food than any white person in Los Angeles.”

Arguably Pratt’s most Trumpian trait is his ability to capitalize on intense voter anger that transcends traditional right-left politics. He has tapped into a deep well of frustration over the devastating wildfires, homelessness, crime, the steady loss of film and TV jobs to runaway production, and the perception — fair or not — that Bass is not up to the task of steering LA through multiple crises.

Not surprisingly, Pratt has been praised by Joe Rogan, the world’s most enthusiastic booster of mediocre white men, and was also endorsed by Rupert Murdoch’s recently launched West Coast tabloid, The California Post. His most vocal supporters include other chronically thirsty reality TV dingbats like sunscreen truther Kristin Cavallari, Brody “Son of Caitlyn” Jenner, and American Idol runner-up Katharine McPhee (whose much older husband is David Foster, Pratt’s mentor and Jenner’s ex-stepdad, information I am ashamed to admit I can recall without consulting Wikipedia).

But Pratt has also won over much of the West Side donor class and business elite, including Lakers’ governor Jeanie Buss, producer and MAGA convert Brian Grazer, Universal Music CEO Lucian Grainge, Power Rangers mogul/Democratic fundraiser Haim Saban, and Nicole Avant, wife of Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos (and former ambassador to the Bahamas under Barack Obama).

Ironically — or fittingly — the constituency that seem least likely to support Pratt’s political ambitions are people who actually watched The Hills. To my knowledge, there are currently no pollsters tracking the opinions of people who spent way too much time consuming MTV docusoaps during the George W. Bush administration, so I can’t offer any hard data. But a quick glance at the Reddit forum for The Hills suggests he is even less popular than Sean Duffy is with Real World fans.

That’s because Pratt was not merely the guy viewers loved to hate on The Hills, he was the epitome of everything wrong with pop culture in the aughts — and with politics today.

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Pratt grew up in the wealthy enclave of Pacific Palisades and attended Crossroads School, a haven for nepo babies — experiences that seemingly made the future star of Celebrity Wife Swap believe that fame was his destiny. He left USC early to executive produce The Princes of Malibu, a short-lived Fox reality series starring his best friend, Brody Jenner.

When that was canceled after two episodes, Pratt weasled his way onto The Hills by hanging out at LA nightclubs where the show was filming and striking up a romance with Montag. The docusoap, a spinoff of Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County which premiered 20 years ago this week, followed Conrad as she moved to Los Angeles and pursued a career in fashion.

As soon as he officially joined the show in Season 2, Pratt eagerly stepped into the role of antagonist, driving a permanent wedge between Conrad and Montag, then her best friend. It was all part of a mission to upstage Conrad and make himself (and Montag) the star of the show, and it was alarmingly successful.

For several years, “Speidi” was inescapable. When Montag got radical plastic surgery — undergoing 10 procedures in a single day — it made the cover of People magazine (the Obamas were relegated to a corner). Over the years, Pratt has made it seem that he was willingly playing the role of villain and doing producers a favor by bringing drama to the show. He and Montag have presented themselves as shrewd Warholian performance artists whose entire life is “content.” (Case in point: Montag filed for divorce in 2010, in what she later admitted was a bid to drum up publicity when The Hills was winding down.)

Since the show ended in 2010, Pratt has tried to cultivate a gentler, more woo-woo image as a hummingbird enthusiast and crystal entrepreneur. But he has never reckoned with — or apologized for — his conduct on The Hills, where he epitomized the foul misogyny that permeated celebrity culture in the mid-aughts. He joined the show in 2007, the same year that a mentally unwell Britney Spears shaved her head and attacked a paparazzo with an umbrella. It was an era when celebrity tabloids and gossip blogs feasted on the troubles of young female stars and brutally scrutinized their appearance.

Pratt was an early and eager adopter of this unfortunate Y2K trend: well before he appeared on reality TV, he made $50,000 selling personal photos of a teenage Mary-Kate Olsen which he’d taken from his friend Max Winkler, her ex-boyfriend.

On The Hills, he upped the misogyny, spending an entire season spreading an unfounded rumor that Conrad had made a sex tape with her ex-boyfriend. He leaked the story to Perez Hilton, the once-influential gossip blogger known for scrawling ejaculating penises on paparazzi photos of celebrities he didn’t like (and a major supporter of Pratt’s mayoral campaign). Conrad wasn’t the only woman he regularly insulted and demeaned: During his many meltdowns on The Hills, he dismissed his mother-in-law as “just the vagina that brought Heidi to Earth” and called his sister Stephanie a “crazy bitch.”

And as much as Pratt likes to claim he was playing the bad guy for the cameras, he was even more of a villain outside of the show: on his blog, he referred to Conrad using a vulgar slang term for female genitalia (and, as an extra dig, claimed her ex-boyfriends used the nickname for her all the time).

Conrad, the woman Pratt tormented on TV and in the press for years, has gracefully deflected questions about her former nemesis’s run for office. (“I am not a resident of Los Angeles,” she told Jenna Bush Hager on Today.) Pratt, meanwhile, continues to insist the sex tape is real and expresses zero remorse for his behavior toward Conrad.

“If I’m not gonna get elected mayor because I never apologized to [Conrad], I’ll take that.”

So would the rest of us.

Meredith Blake is the culture columnist for The Contrarian

Anyone who ever read Lord of the Flies as an adolescent (or otherwise) is hard-pressed to forget its imagery: the conch, the signal fire, the beast in the forest, Piggy’s broken specs. First published in 1954, William Golding’s dystopian novel about a group of British schoolboys stranded on an uninhabited island has resonated with readers for more than 70 years.

It has also inspired numerous film and TV adaptations, including a Netflix series released earlier this month. At a time when less-than-faithful literary interpretations are all the rage, this latest version of Lord of the Flies is noteworthy for just how closely it hews to the source material, down to the midcentury wartime setting and famous lines of dialogue.

Written by Jack Thorne and directed by Marc Munden, the four-part drama opens on a lush tropical island where a few dozen prepubescent boys have landed following a plane crash. With no surviving adults to care for them, the children must attempt to govern themselves and establish their own civilization — with disastrous results.

Ralph (Winston Sawyers) is elected leader, with support from the intellectual Piggy (David McKenna), who is focused on practical concerns like shelter and sanitation. They clash with the egomaniacal Jack (Lox Pratt), leader of the school choir, who is more interested in hunting pigs. The ethereal Simon (Ike Talbut) floats between the two groups. Tensions quickly boil over, suggesting that humans, even seemingly innocent children, are inherently prone to violence.

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Thorne and Munden have created an adaptation that feels relevant at a moment of heightened concern about the social and emotional struggles of boys and young men — at a time when democracy is under threat across the globe.

“I would have made this show at any time, but there is something about this moment that feels like it fits Lord of the Flies,” Thorne said in a recent video interview with Munden.

It feels like right and left are unable to see each other anymore, I don’t think this is just about the rise of rise of a powerful right wing. I think this is also about the way that the left wing behaves towards that right wing and the inability of two sides to see each other clearly, and the way in which it feels like it’s easier to be defined by what you hate right now than what you love. It feels like we are in an age where shouting about what you don’t like has become a major preoccupation in a way that is obviously incredibly damaging.

Thorne made small but meaningful changes to Golding’s novel. In the series, unlike the book, Piggy is given a real name, Nicky — a thoughtful gesture that imbues the character (and the young actor playing him) with greater dignity. Thorne also makes judicious use of flashbacks to flesh out the characters’ backstories and show that these boys are very much a product of the society in which they were raised.

Thorne notes that Golding wrote the novel at the dawn of the Cold War — when the horrors of World War II remained fresh in the collective memory. “These are kids that are made by damaged people, that’s why they behave this way on an island,” said the English writer, whose credits include the play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. “He writes it with great specificity, and that thing of ‘what we give, they inherit’ feels like a very important lesson to be talking about right now.”

Coincidentally, Thorne was working on this project at the same time as Adolescence, the Emmy-winning limited series which explored similar themes. Released last year, the drama followed a thirteen-year-old boy accused of murdering a classmate and was inspired by real-life incidents of violence in the U.K.

“The deterioration of the society that the boys form on the island is not inevitable,” Munden said. “It’s an accumulation of all these fractures, the hero worship, and all those things that everyone can understand as one’s baser instincts.”

Thorne’s interest in Lord of the Flies dates back to when he was eleven and plucked the book from his mother’s shelf one night when he was unable to sleep. Though it’s unlikely the book helped him get much rest, it was a revelation. “Within about 40 pages, I was like, ‘I’m Simon,’” Thorne recalled. “Those moments in literature, film, or TV where you see yourself reflected back at you are extraordinary.” Later, Thorne reread the book several times as an adult, and was forced to reconsider his connection to Simon and his opinion on Jack, a character he’d always despised.

Thorne’s evolving take on the characters speaks to just how fully formed and deeply human they are. Each embodies a different leadership style: Piggy is pragmatic, empathetic, and concerned with protecting the most vulnerable. Ralph is charismatic and naturally popular but dislikes confrontation. Jack is arrogant and cruel but also offers the boys something in short supply on the island: fun. Simon is the spiritual one, guided by a strong sense of morality and self-sacrifice.

Lord of the Flies is frequently interpreted as a political allegory about democracy versus authoritarianism. It’s tempting to look at the current state of the world and conclude that we live in an era when too many Jacks are in positions of authority, and not enough Ralphs, Piggies, or Simons.

But that’s not really the point, Thorne said: “I think that what the book is about is you need to be part of a collective. One chief is not the answer to any problem, and any society which thinks it is is going to do damage to itself.” Munden thinks that while Piggy would be an ideal “spad” — a Britishism for “special adviser” — none of the characters would necessarily be a great leader in their own right. “They’ve all got their piece of the puzzle that they put together in their society,” he said, “and it could have worked so well.”

Given that there are almost no adults in the series, casting the right young performers was crucial. Remarkably, virtually none of the cast had professional acting experience prior to Lord of the Flies, but they are uniformly superb. (And McKenna is especially heartbreaking as Piggy/Nicky.) Casting directors Martin Ware and Nina Gold “scoured the U.K, seeing thousands of boys and getting them to tell them what they would do if they were stranded on a desert island,” Munden said. On set, the ensemble faced a steep learning curve, but intuitively connected to their characters. “They understood the instincts of those boys, just from the playground, as it were,” Munden said.

Video clip of Meredith Blake interviewing series creator Jack Thorne and director Marc Munden.

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Filmed on location in Malaysia, Lord of the Flies is gorgeous to behold, with breathtaking shots of the dense rainforest and turquoise waters, which remind us that terrible human violence is possible even — perhaps especially — in the most stunning natural settings. (It’s reminiscent of The Thin Red Line, Terrence Malick’s gorgeous, harrowing 1998 film set during the Battle of Guadalcanal.)

Making the series on actual uninhabited islands with a cast of untrained children was a difficult process, but one that gave Munden and Thorne greater faith in the young people with whom they were working. (In other words, Lord of the Flies did not descend into Lord of the Flies behind the scenes.) Safeguards were put in place to protect the actors who played the “littluns,” the youngest characters in the series. They were kept away from set during the most violent sequences, and unable to hear the older actors chant variations of “Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood.”

Rather than going feral, the boys spent their spare time playing silly games in the hotel pool and squirting one another with sunblock. “They understood what they were doing, but they also treated it with great joy,” Thorne said. “If you ask them what they kept from the filming process, it’ll be the moments when one of them ate sand and everyone laughed… They really do give you great optimism, because they’re wonderful.”

Meredith Blake is the culture columnist for The Contrarian

Ask E. Jean, the poignant yet entertaining documentary about E. Jean Carroll — the colorful advice columnist who beat Donald Trump in court twice — is finally in theaters.

But getting it there wasn’t easy.

The documentary’s journey began in 2019, when director Ivy Meeropol read the New York Magazine article in which Carroll accused Trump of raping her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room 23 years earlier. The filmmaker was struck by the tone of the piece — devastating, raw, yet full of verve — and reached out to see if Carroll would be willing to participate in a documentary. She received a blunt answer:

“It’a classic E. Jean line,” Meeropol recalled over Zoom this week. “But that just made me want to meet her and get to know her more.”

Carroll had been approached by numerous filmmakers, but was eventually won over by Meeropol’s take: she was interested in creating a complete portrait of Carroll, one that also chronicled her remarkable career as a writer during the heyday of the glossy magazine. They spent a lot of time talking before the cameras started rolling.

“Building trust is no small thing, and I take it very seriously,” Meeropol said. “I am pretty protective of the people I’m making films about…I’m very collaborative. They don’t get to give notes on cuts, but in terms of ‘what should we do together?’, it’s a conversation, not me firing questions at them.”

There were obstacles other than Carroll’s reluctance, starting with two high-profile civil trials in which Trump was found liable for sexual abuse and defamation, and ordered to pay Carroll a combined $88 million in damages. (Of which he has paid $0, while continuing to appeal the judgments, which may go to the Supreme Court.) While those cases were underway, Meeropol had little access to her subject.

Then came what Meeropol calls “The Trump Effect” — the fear that has taken over much of the entertainment business and made streaming services and film distribution companies reluctant to put their weight behind a project that could provoke the outrage of an increasingly vengeful and instinctively litigious president. Some producers and crew members asked to have their names left out of the credits for fear of retaliation.

Still, Meeropol believed a film about Carroll had appeal. “She’s the documentary character that you dream of — to tell a story like this with someone like her? To me, it was a no-brainer.”

Ask E. Jean premiered at the prestigious Telluride Film Festival last fall, and initial reviews were positive, but they received no offers. Months later, a deal finally seemed to be in the works until the distributor “ghosted” the film, according to Meeropol. “I absolutely felt the Trump effect making this film, on so many levels, in so many instances,” she said. (Carroll was not available to discuss the project because of ongoing legal proceedings.)

The film, which opened in New York City Thursday and will expand across the country over the next few weeks, is drawn from archival footage, videotaped legal depositions, and original interviews with Carroll and her closest confidantes. Ask E. Jean traces its subject’s fascinating evolution from Indiana cheerleader to Montana housewife to professionally fabulous New York City raconteur who hobnobbed at Elaine’s and once worked at Saturday Night Live. Carroll’s eccentric personality shines through as she recalls some of her wild journalistic escapades, like making out with profile subject William Hurt and writing an unauthorized biography of Hunter S. Thompson.

“I was always interested in how her early life was very traditional. She was doing all the ‘feminine’ things,” Meeropol said.

Because of various limitations on the production, Meeropol only spent about five days in total interviewing Carroll on-camera — less time than she ideally gets with her subjects, yet somehow enough. “Sometimes I will interview people for like six hours to get something really good for maybe 10 minutes. This was the opposite. I’d talk to her for two hours, and everything she said was gold,” she said.

Arguably the most revelatory material in the film is the deposition footage in which Carroll describes the 1996 assault — and its long, devastating aftermath. Meeropol obtained the videos, which had not been made public, from Carroll’s attorney, Robbie Kaplan.

Meeropol calls it “the greatest gift” for the film because “I wanted people to experience this through E. Jean.”

In the deposition, Trump’s lawyer Alina Habba bombarded Carroll with a stream of irrelevant, hostile questions: Were you wearing underwear? What about your handbags from that day? Did you wear a bra? What is your highest level of education? Where’d you go to college? What was your first job? What year did they stop taking your article ideas? Have you ever had acting classes?

“It’s this incredible chance for us to see what really happens when someone who’s brought a charge of rape or sexual assault is deposed,” Meeropol said.

Even as she recalls the horrific details of the assault and fields deeply personal, accusatory questions, Carroll is irrepressibly funny. At one point, she is asked how many many men she dated after her second divorce. “It was such a gorgeous array of chaps,” she says, sweeping her hands in dramatic arcs. “Let me think.”

Meeropol also uses footage from Carroll’s cable talk show, also called Ask E. Jean, which aired from 1994 to 1996 — around the time she was assaulted by Trump. On the program, she doled out sage advice that, we now know, she was not always able to follow herself. In one clip, she tells a rape survivor that “the woman who best survives a rape is the woman who doesn’t perpetuate and worsen her misery by adding guilt to it.” (Carroll told friends about the attack, but did not report it to police.)

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Meeropol also unearthed a remarkable clip of Carroll appearing on the 1960s game show, To Tell the Truth, to talk about earning the title of Miss Cheerleader USA. With her trademark wit, she responds to loaded questions from the panelists (e.g. “How did you get the crowd worked up?”)

“What we were doing with a lot of that older archival [material] is showing how insidious the misogyny is,” Meeropol said. “It really delivered in telling the bigger story that we were trying to get at, which is that from the minute we’re born, we are confronted with having to look at ourselves through how men are perceiving us.”

“It’s so deep,” she continued. “And you get to really see all of it play out through this one remarkable person.”

Ask E. Jean also shows how Carroll internalized some of this thinking. As seen in the film, she once called Anita Hill and Paula Jones “wimps” and criticized them for not immediately standing up to their alleged harassers. This attitude even seeped into the pages of her Elle advice column.

“I told women to suck it up and just get on with it. That’s the silent generation,” Carroll says.

But a turning point came in 2017, when she read the harrowing accounts from women accusing Harvey Weinstein of rape and harassment.

“The surge of #MeToo rose up and just swallowed America, and what happened is women started to write to me to ask E. Jean, should they come forward. How can I sit there silent?” she says in the film.

The movement inspired Carroll to go public and confront the trauma of what happened at Bergdorf — a difficult task for someone with such a feisty persona.

“Being vulnerable isn’t easy for her,” Meeropol said. “But that is why the depositions are so powerful — because she couldn’t run away from those feelings. To me, one of the most powerful, poignant moments is when after all of it, she has to admit that she still blames herself.”

For Meeropol, making films that examine political subjects through a personal lens is nothing new. Her first documentary, Heir to an Execution, focused on her grandparents, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were convicted of spying for the Soviet Union and executed in 1953, at the height of McCarthyism. “I respond to stories of individuals battling these big power structures,” she said.

More than 70 years later, we are living through another moment of fear and paranoia, when it’s hard to get a political documentary financed and made — much less seen by a wide audience. But that’s the goal for Ask E. Jean.

“We are getting it out everywhere — as many theaters will have us,” Meeropol said. “We’re taking the film all over the country.”

Meredith Blake is the culture columnist for The Contrarian

When Stephen Colbert signs off from The Late Show on Thursday after 11 years and 1801 episodes, it will be a loss for comedy fans, for people who believe in free speech, and for the 200 or so writers, staff, and crew members who will be out of a job come Friday morning.

The end of The Late Show will also be a loss for anyone who values thoughtful dialogue about religion, theology, and spirituality, and thinks that liberals of faith have an important role to play in contemporary political discourse.

Colbert is a brilliant satirist and comedian who co-created the cult favorite Strangers With Candy, coined the term “truthiness,” and even formed a super PAC in order to demonstrate the absurdity of our campaign finance laws.

He also happens to be one of the most visible practicing Catholics in the United States. On The Colbert Report, which he hosted from 2005 to 2014, Colbert played a blowhard character who liked to claim he was the most famous Catholic in America. Yet the real-life Colbert has arguably become just that, speaking freely about his beliefs without lecturing or proselytizing. He is also among the most politically influential members of the American church, along with Vice President J.D. Vance and the six Catholics on the Supreme Court.

His voice is much-needed at a time when many so-called faith leaders remain cultishly devoted to the president, even as he posts AI-generated images of himself as Jesus Christ, picks fights with the pope, and threatens to annihilate entire countries. Colbert is a prominent Christian who holds the powerful to account, believes in the separation of church and state, and doesn’t claim that God is on his side, politically speaking.

As he told me in 2018, “You’re only going to corrupt the message of Christ by saying that he likes Republicans more than Democrats. Or he likes Democrats who care for the poor more than Republicans who want to cut taxes. Don’t get your politics in my Jesus, please.”

The youngest of eleven children in a tight-knit Irish Catholic family, Colbert faced unspeakable tragedy at the age of 10, when his father and brothers Peter and Paul — the siblings closest to him in age — died in a plane crash. As he recalled on Father James Martin’s podcast last year, Colbert was suddenly home alone with his grieving mother, a daily communicant who urged him to consider his pain “in the light of eternity.” After a brief atheist phase in college, Colbert returned to Catholicism in his 20s and went on to become a Sunday school teacher.

Though his early forays into professional comedy were more silly and absurdist than spiritually profound, that began to shift with the premiere of The Colbert Report in 2005. On the Comedy Central program, he adopted the persona of an ignorant conservative, a la Bill O’Reilly. But the character had two things in common with the man who played him: he was Catholic, and he loved Tolkien.

“I cannot remove that from me anymore than you can remove the marble from a statue,” he told Martin, a Jesuit priest and author who frequently appeared on The Colbert Report to talk about church news and eventually became the show’s official chaplain. (I would link to some of these interviews, but — unfortunately — Paramount, a corporation dedicated to torching its own legacy, purged virtually the show’s entire archive from the web.) There were many times when Colbert’s Christian beliefs were detectable even through the layers of irony, like when he testified in character at a congressional hearing about migrant farm workers.

“Stephen is, in my mind, an especially good evangelist of the Gospels’ emphasis on care for the poor,” said Martin in 2015, when The Colbert Report was winding down (he has since made numerous visits to The Late Show.)

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When Colbert succeeded David Letterman at The Late Show in 2015, he ditched the blustery persona and had to learn how to be himself on camera. It was an awkward transition. The show initially faltered in the ratings, but surged once Trump took office in 2017, and has been the most-watched program in late night broadcast for nine seasons straight. (Ending The Tonight Show’s long ratings dominance.) The turnaround is often attributed to Colbert taking a more sharply political tone. But one could also argue that he thrived once he was able to speak sincerely about his views of the world.

For Colbert, responding to the news requires reflection and self-examination.

“My spiritual practice on a daily basis is trying to understand how I feel about what happened in the world in the last 24 hours,” he said on Martin’s podcast. “I don’t mistake that for prayer, but that deconstruction of the day is like examining your conscience, and you can’t be hypocritical — or rather, it’s best not to be hypocritical — when you’re making jokes about hypocrites.”

In a recurring segment called “Big Questions with Even Bigger Stars,” Colbert and his guests lie on a blanket and ask faux-profund questions while gazing at the sky. But In a genre increasingly dominated by silly games and canned interviews, The Late Show has become something like the Fresh Air of TV. It is a place where celebrities feel comfortable going a bit deeper, as when actor Andrew Garfield spoke about the death of his mother and musician Nick Cave discussed losing two of his sons,. In 2022, pop star Dua Lipa brilliantly flipped the script on Colbert by asking how his faith overlapped with his comedy, creating yet another viral moment.

A quick glance at the most popular videos on The Late Show’s YouTube reveal just how these moments resonate with the public: Among the most-watched clips is a debate over atheism with Ricky Gervais and a conversation with Jimmy Carter about why he prays for Donald Trump. In a recent interview, which CBS refused to air and subsequently went viral, Colbert chatted with Senate candidate James Talarico, a Presbyterian seminarian, about how the religious right has co-opted Christianity.

Crucially, Colbert doesn’t pretend that he has the answer for everyone, and he clearly delights in having lively, respectful debates with non-believers. Even when dealing with someone as smug and condescending as Bill Maher, he avoids being smug or condescending.

As The Late Show winds down this week, Colbert has booked some heavy-hitters, including David Byrne, Jon Stewart, Steven Spielberg, and Bruce Springsteen. Guests for Thursday’s finale have not been announced, Colbert has repeatedly expressed interest in having Pope Leo XIV on the show, and it doesn’t seem entirely impossible that the pontiff might make an appearance.

As of Friday, Colbert will no longer have a regular perch on the country’s most-watched broadcast network. Even as CBS insists the cancellation was a purely financial decision, we should be concerned that such an essential voice is being pushed off the airwaves.

Yet crestfallen fans should also remember what Colbert told Dua Lipa a few years back:

“No matter what happens, you are never defeated. You must understand and see this in the light of eternity, and find some way to love and laugh with each other.”

Meredith Blake is the culture columnist for The Contrarian

This is the true story of a transportation secretary and his nine children, picked to live on the road and have their lives taped. To find out what happens when a cabinet member decides to stop being polite (or ethical) and start getting cash: It’s The Great American Road Trip

Once upon a time, it would have been considered uncouth for a cabinet secretary to star in a reality series of any kind — much less one sponsored by major corporations subject to oversight by his department.

But in 2026, apparently, anything goes. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, his wife Rachel Campos-Duffy, and several of their nine children will appear in a YouTube series called The Great American Road Trip. The five-episode series, which launches in June, is ostensibly designed to promote domestic tourism ahead of the country’s 250th anniversary in July. A four-minute trailer shows the family meeting with Donald Trump in the Oval Office, visiting the Liberty Bell, enjoying the rides on a gargantuan cruise ship, avoiding any service that helps the American people, and — of course — hanging out with Kid Rock.

The series has triggered a huge social media backlash. Duffy has been called tone-deaf for going on a free family vacation when gas is averaging $4.50 a gallon, there’s a national shortage of air traffic controllers, and airlines are rapidly going out of business.

In his defense, Duffy says he was not paid for participating in the series and the production costs were covered by a nonprofit called The Great American Road Trip, rather than taxpayers. But this only raises more ethical concerns, since the group’s corporate sponsors include Boeing, Toyota, United Airlines, and other companies regulated (and in some cases under active investigation) by the DOT.

According to a pitch deck obtained by Politico, these companies paid up to $1 million for perks including logo placement in the series, social media mentions, and invitations to VIP networking events. Tori Barnes, the executive director of the Great American Road Trip, is a former lobbyist for General Motors and the U.S. Travel Association.

Duffy responded to the Road Trip criticism on X with his usual bluster:

The radical, miserable left has noticed our awesome Great American Road Trip trailer and they hate it. It’s too wholesome. It’s too patriotic. It’s too joyful. They’re upset because they don’t want you to celebrate America! And they definitely don’t want you to teach your kids civics & patriotism. So they tell lies to undermine the mission.

Playing the token conservative

Duffy was using a playbook (respond to any criticism, no matter how legitimate, by casting yourself as the victim of petty haters) that he has been perfecting since 1997, when he was the token conservative on Season 6 of MTV’s seminal reality show, The Real World, set in Boston.

The following year, he appeared in the spinoff series Road Rules: All Stars, which followed former Real World cast members as they traveled in an RV. While filming the show, he hooked up with his future wife, Rachel Campos, who starred in Season 3 of The Real World (alongside AIDS activist Pedro Zamora).

They were married in 1999, when she was already pregnant with their first child. In 2002, he returned to the MTV fold and won The Real World/Road Rules Challenge, a Survivor-like competition series (that later became known as The Challenge). The same year, he became district attorney of Ashland County, Wisconsin, launching a political career that would take him to Congress and, eventually, the executive branch.

Much like the guy he works for, Duffy owes his political rise to reality TV. Starring in multiple shows on MTV at the height of the network’s cultural influence turned Duffy into a mini-celebrity, giving him the kind of visibility rarely enjoyed by competitive lumberjacks from the Northwoods of Wisconsin. But, just as important, reality TV was an effective training ground for his career in Republican politics, a venue where Duffy learned how to communicate in combative soundbites and play the role of the aggrieved white conservative.

Duffy was selected from a field of 10,000 applicants to star on The Real World, and his thick accent and small-town roots were a selling point for producers. “They said I sound like Fargo,” he said in an interview at the time. One of 11 children in an Irish Catholic family raised in Northern Wisconsin, Duffy had little contact with Black or queer people before The Real World. For six months, he lived in a converted firehouse with six other young people whose lifestyles, backgrounds, and political beliefs differed wildly from his own.

Duffy would later go on to brand himself as a social conservative and pro-natalist, but on The Real World he cultivated a more libidinous persona. In his audition, Duffy said that he hadn’t slept with anyone in three months and that he hoped to meet some “cute girls” through the show. “I’m kinda starvin’ right now,” he told producers. Throughout the season, he flirted with his co-star Montana McGlynn — an ardent feminist — and taped her on a camcorder as she flashed her breasts at him (then watched it over and over). Duffy was also reprimanded for drinking while on the job in an after-school program for kids.

But perhaps the season’s most memorable dynamic was the contentious relationship between Duffy and Kameelah Phillips, a Black Stanford student (who went on to become an OB/GYN). During a dispute over directions, he called her a “bitch.” He also likened her to Hitler because he equated her Black pride with racism. At one point in the season, Duffy suggested their roommate give Phillips a gun so “she can play Russian roulette.” None of this rhetoric damaged Duffy’s reputation: he was back on MTV within months of The Real World finale.

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Duffy was elected to Congress in the Tea Party surge of 2010, flipping what had been a Democratic seat for decades. His bid was boosted by an early endorsement from Sarah Palin (who by then had already abandoned politics to cash in on reality TV herself.) The Duffys spoke in favor of Trump at the 2016 Republican National Convention, before many in the GOP had thrown their support behind the candidate. Duffy stepped down in 2019 supposedly to care for a child with health complications, and went on to become a CNN commentator, Fox Business host, and — naturally — a lobbyist before Trump tapped him to head the DOT.

In a 2019 interview, Duffy said that The Real World taught him how to find common ground with people different from himself. “I think that’s an important lesson for all young people, is to give people a chance.” But the 2026 version of Duffy seems to have absorbed a different lesson from reality TV: that being combative will get you lots of screen time. In his frequent cable news hits, Duffy points fingers at his predecessor Pete Buttigieg, and recites familiar culture-war talking points about the supposed danger of DEI and pronouns.

‘Let’s go back to our roots’

With The Great American Road Trip, Duffy is returning to the genre that shaped him — and which has increasingly shaped the country’s political discourse. The series is being produced by Bunim/Murray Productions, the company that created The Real World and numerous other landmark unscripted series. BMP has long touted its inclusive storytelling, with a section on its website listing the causes (#MeToo, HIV/AIDS awareness) it has helped champion through its shows. (Conspicuously absent from the website: any mention of The Great American Road Trip.)

In an appearance on Fox News last week to promote the series, the Duffys emphasized the project’s ties to their romantic backstory.

“Rachel and I actually met on a road trip on a reality show,” Duffy said. “Our motto is ‘To love America, is to see America.’ And there’s so much to see in this beautiful country.”

Campos-Duffy, an on-air personality at Fox News, said Trump encouraged his cabinet members to “do something to celebrate America.”

“Then we started talking about: let’s go back to our roots. Let’s do this one for free. We’ll put it onto YouTube. We’ll let the whole country see it,” she said. “We live in a Pornhub world. This is really wholesome, good family stuff.”

The trailer, released last week, suggests the show will be a slickly produced unscripted sitcom that depicts the Duffys as a relatable family with a dad who makes goofy jokes and a mom who calls the shots. The Duffy kids feature prominently in the preview, which teases an incident that lands one of them in the hospital — yet another ethically dubious aspect of this project. (If you want to know why kids who are too young to sign a contract shouldn’t be on reality TV, no matter how “wholesome” it purports to be, read this.)

The Duffys aren’t the only reality TV veterans to go into careers in conservative media and politics. Podcaster Theo Von got his start on Road Rules, while Spencer Pratt, who is running for mayor of Los Angeles, is still mostly known as the bad guy from The Hills.

From that list, the Duffys are currently the most powerful reality TV conservatives who just can’t quit having a camera pointed at them at all times. And they didn’t get that way by being polite — or, for that matter, by getting real.

Meredith Blake is the culture columnist for The Contrarian

Every spring since 1932, tourists have flocked to the city of Natchez, Mississippi, to visit stately antebellum homes and gardens, where women in hoop skirts and men in Confederate regalia recreate a romanticized version of the Old South. The annual rite is known as the “pilgrimage,” presumably because it holds a quasi-spiritual appeal to believers in the Lost Cause.

Natchez, a documentary airing tonight on PBS’s Independent Lens, immerses viewers in a community where competing versions of history play out on a daily basis. Directed by Suzannah Herbert, the film follows a number of locals who make a living in tourism but who tell different stories about the region’s past. (It will also be available to stream on the PBS app and PBS Documentaries YouTube channel.)

Tracy “Rev” Collins is a Black preacher who talks openly about the ugly legacy of slavery and segregation and greets visitors by proudly announcing, “I’m about to violate some Southern pride narratives with truth and facts.” His tours include a stop at Forks of the Road, the former site of one of the busiest slave markets in the Deep South. Rev’s warts-and-all philosophy is a stark contrast to that of David Garner, the white, elderly owner of Choctaw Hall, who shows off the period finery in his well-preserved 19th-century mansion and whose gay identity doesn’t prevent him from going on racist tirades.

We also meet Tracy McCartney, a volunteer who gives tours of Choctaw Hall while dressed up like Scarlett O’Hara, yet also defies the Southern Belle stereotype, and Deborah Cosey, the first Black woman admitted to Natchez’s influential garden club, who pushes her white peers to acknowledge the enslaved people who once labored in their homes.

Even though Natchez was filmed before Trump returned to the White House, it feels particularly urgent at a moment when statues of Confederate generals are being restored, unvarnished depictions of the brutality of slavery are being removed from National Parks, and the gutting of the Voting Rights Act has paved the way for a new Jim Crow era in the South.

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The film is “all about history,” Herbert says. “But it’s really about the stories we tell, how we engage with that history, and how people understand our past through our lived experiences.” For many in the community, Southern nostalgia is especially irresistible because it has also been economically beneficial.

“The history that they learned and the history that they believe is now being yanked out from under them,” says a National Park employee in the film. “It’s hard work to come to a point where you’re able to say, ‘The history I learned was a mythological construct that was used to sell tickets.’”

Natchez is devoid of the scholarly talking heads you might expect in a documentary about American history, and is instead rich with allusions to cinematic portrayals of the South, particularly Gone With the Wind. In a sequence that evokes one of the most memorable shots from the 1939 epic, McCartney takes a sunset walk in her period garb, her silhouette dark against the vivid sky.

Says Herbert:

I wanted the film to visually nod to Gone With the Wind, but also to make it a kind of antidote to Gone With the Wind. To this day, Gone With the Wind is still the highest-grossing film, adjusted for inflation, of all time. It has this huge grasp on white-dominant popular culture, and how we think about the South, American history and the Civil War. I wanted to disrupt that, but also pay homage to it.

Cinematographer Noah Collier shot the film using vintage lenses from the 1960s, which “really bring audiences into the fantasy and the allure of it, and show how enticing that is,” Herbert says.

Herbert, who grew up in Memphis, originally envisioned a different type of film: she planned to explore the phenomenon of heritage tourism by embedding herself at a Louisiana plantation over a single wedding season. But during a research trip, she stopped by Natchez — located on the banks of the Mississippi River across from Louisiana — and was unnerved by the experience.

“I was just so struck by the beauty and the fantasy of it all,” she says of the city, which was occupied by the Union for much of the Civil War. “It’s a unique place in that the antebellum structures are so well-preserved, but there was this underlying tension and pain that was right underneath the surface. That dichotomy made me really uncomfortable.”

Herbert eventually realized that discomfort is exactly what made Natchez a rich subject to explore. “Natchez is actually a community grappling with how we tell history,” she says, “and that’s actually so much more complicated and interesting than one specific site.”

Herbert started working on the film in 2022 and spent weeks in Natchez getting to know people before she even considered breaking out her camera. She went on countless tours and observed an array of approaches. In some of the private home tours led by white owners, “It was about what was not said, what was not acknowledged. If slavery was talked about, it was referred to with euphemisms or talking about how the ‘servants’ were happy.” But there were also homeowners who have been trying to engage with the history. “It definitely runs the spectrum,” Herbert says.

Because she’s a white woman, Herbert thinks some residents were more comfortable revealing their true selves to her — including Garner. In the film, he jokes that gay men are the only people with “the money and the taste” to take care of Natchez’s historic homes and also host an LGBTQ benefit at Choctaw Hall. But he also freely drops the N-word while the cameras are rolling.

“Just because he’s been oppressed doesn’t mean he cannot be an oppressor,” Herbert says. “The way he clutches on to his whiteness is so revealing.”

Garner notwithstanding, Herbert is heartened by the changes she’s witnessed in Natchez, where many community leaders “are really working to expand the narrative,” she says. Herbert points to the boom in tourism in Montgomery, Alabama, since the National Memorial for Peace and Justice was opened there. The city “has done an incredible job embracing its past,” she says. It turns out that good history can also be good for business.

Meredith Blake is the culture columnist for The Contrarian