In a clip now circulating widely, Nicolas Kenn De Balinthazy — better known to his audience as SNEAKO — declared that “if everybody was Muslim, the way it should be, we would have world peace,” blaming human “ego” for the “chaos” he predicts “for years to come.” The 26-year-old streamer, who commands more than two million followers across platforms despite being permanently banned from Twitch for “extreme hateful conduct” and removed from YouTube and Kick, has spent the past year transforming a content brand built on shock-value commentary into an explicit religious-supremacist platform.

The remark arrives just weeks after Australia’s federal government imposed a lifetime entry ban on him, and only months after he was filmed in a Miami nightclub singing along to a song that samples a speech by Adolf Hitler. SNEAKO’s trajectory matters because his reach is not fringe — it includes a sitting big-city mayor who hosted him for an hour-long interview at the official mayoral residence.

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The Quote in Context

SNEAKO’s “everybody should be Muslim” statement is not an isolated theological musing. It follows an extended sit-down with Dr. Zakir Naik — the Indian Islamic televangelist barred from the United Kingdom, Canada, and Bangladesh over hate-speech concerns — and months of SNEAKO framing Islam as the singular cure for what he describes as Western moral collapse. On the podcast circuit, he has told audiences that his pre-conversion life was “destroyed” — in his telling, for the better — by his new faith, while warning that those who reject it are responsible for the world’s disorder.

A Documented Pattern of Extremist Rhetoric

SNEAKO’s religious-supremacist turn did not emerge in a vacuum. His public statements have been catalogued such as him wishing Adolf Hitler a “happy birthday” on multiple occasions and hosting a video series asking whether contemporary leaders are “worse than Hitler.” His commentary regularly traffics in totalizing claims — that “every conspiracy theory from the last century” can be reduced to a single villain, that “every politician” is owned by hidden forces, that “the West will inevitably fall.”

That rhetorical pattern — collapsing complex global events into a single enemy and a single solution — is the through-line connecting his earlier output to his current call for universal religious conversion.

The Miami Nightclub Incident, Platform Bans, and Mainstream Access

In January 2026, SNEAKO was filmed at Vendôme nightclub in Miami Beach alongside Nick Fuentes, Andrew and Tristan Tate, Myron Gaines, and Clavicular, singing along to Kanye West’s track “Heil Hitler” — a song that samples an actual Hitler speech and is banned from most U.S. streaming platforms.

SNEAKO has been permanently banned from Twitch under the platform’s “extreme hateful conduct” policy, removed from YouTube for what the company described as repeated policy violations, and barred from Kick. None of that prevented New York City Mayor Eric Adams from hosting him for an hour-long, cigar-smoking interview on the porch of Gracie Mansion on June 14, 2025 — an event Adams later claimed he did not know was happening and that the streamer had not been vetted.

Australia’s Lifetime Ban

On May 6, 2026, Australian Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke cancelled SNEAKO’s visa and imposed a lifetime entry ban — the first high-profile invocation of provisions amended by Australia’s Parliament earlier this year. “We will use every power available to us” to stop “people coming to this country to spread hatred,” Burke told Sky News. Shadow home affairs minister Jonathon Duniam, in agreement, described SNEAKO as a “misogynist” who “praises Hitler.” SNEAKO responded on X with “Thanks for having me Australia.”

The “everybody should be Muslim” clip is the natural endpoint of a content arc that began with shock-jock provocation and has hardened, on camera, into an explicit demand for religious uniformity as the price of “world peace.” That demand is being delivered to a multi-million-strong audience of young men — by a creator who has been banned by every major streaming platform that hosted him, banned by an entire country, and welcomed at Gracie Mansion. The question is no longer what SNEAKO believes. It is who is still willing to give him a microphone.

On April 19, 2026, two U.S. citizens — Lyle Prijoles, 40, of the San Francisco Bay Area, and Kai Dana-Rene Sorem, 26, of Steilacoom, Washington — were killed in Barangay Salamanca, in the Negros Occidental town of Toboso, during a twelve-hour series of firefights between the Philippine Army’s 79th Infantry Battalion and the Northern Negros Front of the New People’s Army (NPA).

The NPA and its parent body, the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), have been designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations by the U.S. State Department since 2002. Prijoles and Sorem were not tourists who wandered into a war zone. Both had been groomed over years inside a network of diaspora organizations that recruit on American campuses and ferry their cadres into the Philippine countryside on “exposure trips.” The shock is not that two Americans died. It is that the pipeline that placed them in the line of fire of a U.S.-designated terror group operates openly in the United States, unregistered under federal foreign-agent law.

The Toboso encounter

The Philippine Army reports that troops recovered roughly two dozen firearms at the site and killed Roger Fabillar, the Northern Negros Front commander on whom a one-million-peso bounty had stood for four years.

The CPP itself acknowledges ten of the nineteen dead as its own armed revolutionaries; it disputes the status of the rest, including Prijoles and Sorem, whom its U.S. affiliates call “civilians” doing community immersion. The Philippine Commission on Human Rights has opened an investigation, and the forensic pathologist Raquel Fortun has raised procedural questions worth taking seriously. The narrower facts of that morning are properly contested. The wider facts are not.

From SFSU and Central Washington to Negros

Prijoles chaired the San Francisco State University chapter of the League of Filipino Students (LFS) and, in 2012, was elected founding Solidarity Officer of Anakbayan-USA at its founding congress in Chicago. He later served on the U.S. council of the International Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines.

Sorem’s own organization recounts that she was radicalized in 2020 as a music student at Central Washington University, came to “see a future for her people in the National Democratic movement,” co-founded Anakbayan South Seattle, joined the Anakbayan-USA “Exposure Trip” in 2025, and returned in 2026 to live among “peasant farming communities.” This is not gossip; it is the network’s own promotional language.

A documented front network

The structure these two moved through is not a mystery. A 2025 report by Kyle Shideler at the Center for Security Policy, drawing on CPP defector testimony compiled in the Philippine government study Unmasking the Myth of Communism in the Philippines, documents that Bayan-USA (founded 1994) and its student wing Anakbayan are controlled by the CPP’s National United Front Commission through the Leninist discipline of democratic centralism.

Above them sits the International League of Peoples’ Struggle (ILPS), founded in 2001 by CPP chairman Jose María Sison and overseen by the CPP’s International Department; it claims more than 350 member organizations in 40 countries. A declassified CIA study catalogued the same front structure decades ago. None of these U.S. affiliates is registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

The American blind spot

The Philippine government has now formally warned of “terror-grooming” of overseas Filipinos, and NTF-ELCAC executive director Ernesto Torres Jr. stated that recruitment “has expanded beyond Philippine borders, exposing individuals from the diaspora to the dangers of armed confrontation.” American institutions, by contrast, treat the U.S. nodes of this network as ordinary ethnic advocacy. Faculty at San Francisco State, Cal State Los Angeles, the University of Washington, and Vassar publicly advertise affiliations with Bayan-USA, Anakbayan, or ILPS on their official pages.

A May Day rally by the Georgia Revolutionary Student Union featured an NPA flag and a burning American flag; Center for Security Policy analyst Kyle Shideler observed the obvious — that a comparable display for ISIS or al-Qaeda would have generated immediate federal interest.

What the deaths actually expose

Whether Prijoles and Sorem personally fired rifles on the morning of April 19 will be litigated by the Philippine human-rights commission. What is not in dispute is that they had been formed inside organizations that publicly venerate the founder of a U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organization, that travel back and forth to its operational areas, and that face no scrutiny under American counterintelligence law.

The pipeline did not end at Toboso; the pipeline runs through American classrooms. Two coffins are coming home from Negros. The networks that filled them remain on the syllabus.

Grand Prairie, Texas canceled a June 1 Eid celebration at its city-owned Epic Waters Indoor Waterpark after Governor Greg Abbott threatened to withhold $530,000 in state funding. The event, organized by Aminah Knight to celebrate the Islamic holy day of Eid al-Adha, was initially advertised as “Muslim only” in promotional materials before being revised to emphasize modest dress requirements.

Abbott cited the early version of the flyer, arguing that reserving a taxpayer-funded facility for a single religious group violated constitutional principles. The city canceled the event hours after the governor’s deadline, raising questions about how religious accommodation operates at publicly owned facilities.

The “Muslim Only” Language

A flyer for the “Epic Eid” event initially described the celebration as “Muslim only” in two places. After the language generated controversy, organizer Aminah Knight changed the flyer to emphasize modest dress requirements instead. Knight told KERA News that the event’s goal was “to promote modesty and was never about excluding other faiths.”

The revised flyer specified that men must wear swim trunks and shirts, and women must wear “burkinis”, a full-body Islamic swimwear designed to meet religious modesty standards. Knight said she was “curating a space where people who value modesty can come together.”

Whatever Knight’s intent, the disconnect between the original promotional language and her later explanations reveals the tension at the center of the controversy. The flyer didn’t say “modesty required”, instead, it said “Muslim only.” When promotional materials for a public facility’s use communicate exclusion on the basis of religious identity, the language matters.

Public Ownership Creates Different Obligations

Epic Waters is a city-owned water park funded by taxpayers, though operated by a third-party company. Knight had rented the facility as a private event and paid associated fees. But private rental doesn’t eliminate the obligations that come with public ownership.

The governor’s office argued that Grand Prairie’s acceptance of state grants created compliance obligations with civil rights and nondiscrimination laws. Abbott’s letter warned that violating these rules could result in grant cancellation, repayment demands, and loss of future funding.

In his letter to Mayor Ron Jensen, the governor’s office drew a direct analogy:

“An event at a city-owned pool that was publicly and indiscriminately advertised as ‘Whites only’ would surely violate the Constitution... The same must be true here.”

Abbott posted on X: “Facilities funded by ALL taxpayers are not just for a subset of Texans.”

The comparison is legally instructive. Equal protection principles operate regardless of which group seeks preferential access to public resources.

How Accommodation Can Function as Exclusion

The event’s revised framing emphasized modesty rather than religion, but the practical effect merits examination. Burkinis are not standard American swimwear. They are religiously specific attire designed to meet Islamic modesty standards. Requiring them, along with swim shirts for men, creates what functions as a religious filter, even if technically open to anyone willing to comply.

Knight held a similar event in 2024 without incident. She told WCNC that she was “sad that something that was being done with such good intention, just for joy, has been turned into something that it’s not.” She called conservative pushback hypocritical, noting that “most Muslims are conservative” and that modest dress codes are “pretty conservative.”

The Line Between Liberty and Exclusion

Governor Abbott referenced a Texas law banning “Sharia Law” when addressing the celebration, and has previously targeted Muslim-related projects, including threatening funding for a Muslim-centric housing development.

But the core principle that public facilities funded by all cannot be reserved for some, operates independently of who enforces it or against whom. When cities accept state money, they accept the constraints that come with it, including nondiscrimination requirements in public accommodations.

The city issued a statement after Abbott’s ultimatum: “After further review and in the best interest of the City of Grand Prairie, the June 1 Eid event at Epic Waters Indoor Waterpark has been canceled.” The decision came hours after the deadline, ending what would have been a private rental that tested the boundaries of religious accommodation at taxpayer-funded facilities.

Palantir Technologies posted a 22-point manifesto to X this week, excerpted from CEO Alex Karp’s book The Technological Republic. It wasn’t a product launch or an earnings call. It was a philosophical defense of building AI weapons systems, complete with arguments about cultural decline, elite intolerance of religion, and why “some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive.”

The document states flatly that Silicon Valley engineers have a “moral debt” to build military software. That free societies need “hard power” to survive, and “hard power in this century will be built on software.” That adversaries won’t pause for “theatrical debates” about AI ethics while racing to deploy autonomous weapons.

Five years ago, this would have been corporate suicide. Today, it’s a #1 New York Times bestseller.

The Google Walkout Is Ancient History

In 2018, thousands of Google employees staged walkouts protesting Project Maven, a Pentagon contract using AI to analyze drone footage. The backlash was so intense that Google didn’t renew the deal and published AI ethics principles committing not to develop weapons systems.

That same year, Palantir was essentially a pariah. The company worked with ICE, built surveillance tools for intelligence agencies, and cheerfully took the defense contracts other companies rejected. Former employees told NPR they signed non-disparagement agreements to avoid retaliation for criticizing the company’s work after leaving.

The cultural shift since then has been dramatic. In the past six months alone: OpenAI signed major Pentagon contracts (then faced backlash and added “more guardrails than any previous agreement”). Anthropic landed a $200 million defense deal, then terminated it after internal conflicts. Defense Secretary Hegseth publicly warned Anthropic to “let the military use company’s AI tech as it sees fit.” Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Oracle now share a $9 billion military cloud computing contract.

The debate isn’t whether tech companies should work with the military anymore. It’s which ones will, how much they’ll charge, and whether they’ll admit it publicly.

What Changed

Two things happened simultaneously: the technology became militarily decisive, and the geopolitical situation stopped feeling theoretical.

Ukraine demonstrated what happens when one side has better software. Drones coordinated through AI systems, real-time battlefield intelligence, encrypted communications- the country’s survival has depended partly on which tech companies were willing to provide tools and which weren’t. It’s hard to maintain that military contracts are morally suspect when you’ve watched them keep a democracy alive on live television for three years.

Meanwhile, the race with China went from abstract concern to concrete competition. When the Pentagon started warning that AI superiority would determine the next century’s balance of power, it became difficult for engineers to claim their work had nothing to do with national security. Palantir’s manifesto hammers this point relentlessly: “Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications. They will proceed.”

The framing is deliberate- it treats the question as already settled. Not should AI weapons be built, but who will build them and for whom. Democratic societies or authoritarian ones. That’s not an argument designed to convince skeptics; it’s one designed to make skepticism look naive.

The Manifesto’s Actual Claims

Beyond the headline-grabbing stuff about moral debts and cultural superiority, the document makes several specific arguments worth examining:

• On deterrence: “The atomic age is ending. One age of deterrence, the atomic age, is ending, and a new era of deterrence built on A.I. is set to begin.” This treats AI weapons as the logical successor to nuclear arsenals, tools that prevent wars by making them unthinkable.

• On peace: “American power has made possible an extraordinarily long peace. Too many have forgotten or perhaps take for granted that nearly a century of some version of peace has prevailed in the world without a great power military conflict.” The claim is that three generations have avoided World War III because of American military dominance, and maintaining that requires staying ahead technologically.

• On duty: “If a U.S. Marine asks for a better rifle, we should build it; and the same goes for software.” This reframes military contracts as supporting troops rather than enabling war- a subtle but significant shift in how the work is justified.

• On Germany and Japan: “The postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone. The defanging of Germany was an overcorrection for which Europe is now paying a heavy price.” This isn’t just about AI, it’s arguing that decades of enforced pacifism in former Axis powers has created security vacuums that adversaries are exploiting.

The document also includes genuinely odd inclusions: criticism of iPhone culture (”Is the iPhone our greatest creative if not crowning achievement as a civilization?”), complaints about public servants’ compensation, arguments for universal national service, and defenses of religious belief against elite intolerance. It reads less like a corporate mission statement and more like a comprehensive diagnosis of Western civilizational decline.

Who This Is Actually For

The manifesto isn’t aimed at activists who already think Palantir is evil. Those replies; calling it fascist, Straussian manipulation, techno-authoritarianism—were written before the document posted. The audience is engineers who feel uncomfortable with Silicon Valley’s traditional pacifism but haven’t had sophisticated language for that discomfort.

By wrapping defense contracts in the language of duty, historical precedent, and democratic survival, it offers what amounts to a permission structure. It tells talented engineers that building military software isn’t a betrayal of progressive values but their fullest expression because American power underwrites the long peace that makes those values possible.

Whether that argument works depends entirely on what happens next geopolitically. If AI-driven military competition intensifies and democracies find themselves desperate for technical talent, Palantir’s manifesto will look prescient. If the conflicts don’t materialize, it’ll read like expensive justification for surveillance capitalism with better branding.

What’s undeniable is that the ground has shifted. When a defense contractor can publish a bestselling book arguing that elite culture is too secular, too pluralistic, and too pacifist and the controversy is muted compared to what it would have been in 2018- something fundamental has changed about which arguments are sayable in public and which institutions get to say them.

The real question isn’t whether Palantir is right. It’s whether the speed of this shift suggests clarity finally emerging, or whether we’re moving too fast to notice what we’re leaving behind.

Republican National Committee researchers and GOP Rep. Randy Fine circulated clips this week showing left-wing Twitch streamer Hasan Piker calling the fall of the Soviet Union “one of the greatest catastrophes of the 20th century” during a debate at a Yale University event.

The comment came Tuesday during a Yale Political Union debate on the resolution “End the American Empire,” where Piker argued that after the USSR’s collapse, America had “no more big enemies left” to beat and turned “the gun on itself.” The RNC Research account wrote: “This is who Democrats are embracing.”

The remarks have intensified an already heated intra-Democratic fight over whether candidates should campaign alongside the 33-year-old Turkish-American streamer, who commands over three million followers and has become an unlikely surrogate in the 2026 midterms.

Piker has been barnstorming Michigan with Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive running in the state’s Democratic Senate primary. The two drew roughly 1,200 people combined at Michigan State University and the University of Michigan last week. El-Sayed is endorsed by Bernie Sanders and Rep. Ro Khanna. He’s also trailing in polls against Rep. Haley Stevens, who has AIPAC backing, and state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, who also opposes Israel’s conduct in Gaza but has condemned El-Sayed’s decision to appear with Piker.

The fight is ostensibly about Piker’s record: he’s said America “deserved 9/11” (later walked back as “inappropriate”), defended Hamas as “a thousand times better than the fascist settler colonial apartheid state” of Israel, recently told Pod Save America that “the Republican Party is the biggest domestic terrorist” organization in the country, and said last year that Florida Sen. Rick Scott should be killed over Medicare fraud. The USSR comments add Cold War revisionism to the list.

But the structure underneath is simpler: Democrats are sorting over how much distance candidates need to keep from figures who animate young, left-wing voters but make party moderates and pro-Israel groups recoil.

El-Sayed declined to disavow any of Piker’s statements when pressed by Politico. “This whole gotcha game, platform policing, cancel culture- I thought we were over it,” he said. The Third Way, a center-left Democratic group, has called Piker a “Jew-hater.” McMorrow compared him to white nationalist Nick Fuentes, saying both “say extremely offensive things in order to generate clicks.”

Piker told the Michigan State crowd that Stevens and McMorrow had spent two weeks “repeat[ing] what corporate donors and foreign lobbyists had told themselves” instead of focusing on Trump’s threats against Iran. (Trump announced a temporary ceasefire hours after threatening that “a whole civilization will die tonight.”)

Michigan is useful terrain for testing this fight. The state has the largest Arab, Muslim, and Palestinian American population in the U.S. Biden won Dearborn—an Arab-majority city—with 69% in 2020. Harris took 36% in 2024. Progressive Rep. Rashida Tlaib and moderate Rep. Debbie Dingell both attended the Ann Arbor event.

Several attendees told CBS News they wouldn’t support candidates taking AIPAC money and appreciated that El-Sayed was willing to appear with someone controversial. Others said the Democratic establishment’s discomfort with Piker, compared to its openness to Democratic candidates appearing on conservative podcasts like Joe Rogan’s, revealed the party’s unwillingness to court its own left flank.

At Yale, the resolution “End the American Empire” passed 54–31. Sen. Rick Scott had called for Yale’s federal funding to be revoked over the invitation. Piker joked from the podium: “I’m especially sad that Senator Rick Scott couldn’t make it.”

What to watch: The August primary will test whether energy around Gaza and anti-establishment politics translates into votes, or whether the blowback from Piker’s associations functions as a ceiling. Either way, the argument isn’t really about Piker—it’s about which coalitional pressures Democrats treat as constraints and which they ignore.

Four astronauts returned to Earth last Friday after traveling farther from home than any humans in history. The Artemis II mission was a nearly 10-day test flight that took Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen 252,756 miles from Earth, breaking Apollo 13’s 1970 distance record. The Space Launch System rocket performed flawlessly. Orion’s life support systems worked in deep space. Reentry at 25,000 miles per hour went exactly as designed.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman framed the achievement clearly: “With Artemis II complete, focus now turns confidently toward assembling Artemis III and preparing to return to the lunar surface, build the base, and never give up the Moon again.”

That last part, “never give up the Moon again,” is where the real work begins.

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The Difference Between Visiting and Staying

Apollo was flags and footprints, demonstrate capability, collect samples, come home. The entire program from Kennedy’s speech to the last lunar landing spanned eleven years. Artemis is attempting something fundamentally different, permanent infrastructure that requires institutional commitment measured in decades, not presidential terms.

Consider what “permanent” actually means. The International Space Station receives resupply missions roughly every two months. That’s with launch facilities on Earth, established supply chains, and orbital mechanics that allow regular access windows. A lunar base at the South Pole introduces problems an order of magnitude harder, radiation shielding, thermal management across 300-degree temperature swings, toxic dust mitigation, closed-loop life support without regular resupply, and resource extraction from water ice deposits whose abundance remains uncertain.

NASA’s base camp plans include surface habitats, pressurized rovers, power generation systems, communication networks, and construction equipment capable of building landing pads and roads in one-sixth gravity. The agency projects spending roughly $20-30 billion over the next seven years on base infrastructure alone, separate from launch costs.

Each SLS launch currently runs between $2-4 billion when including spacecraft and ground operations. The base requires not just crew rotations but cargo missions delivering habitation modules, construction equipment, fuel, spare parts, food, and scientific instruments. The ISS required hundreds of launches over two decades to assemble. Lunar construction operates under harsher constraints with longer supply lines.

How Multi-Decade Programs Actually Survive

Here’s what’s remarkable about Artemis II, it happened at all. The program began in 2004 under President Bush as Constellation, survived Obama’s restructuring in 2010, continued through the Trump and Biden administrations, and delivered under the current government. That represents sustained institutional focus across five presidencies and multiple Congressional compositions, precisely the kind of continuity that contemporary discourse insists American governance can no longer achieve.

This wasn’t inevitable. NASA officials explicitly lobbied for program continuity during each transition, arguing against the pattern where new administrations cancel predecessors’ space initiatives. The fact that Artemis survived repeated budget scrutiny, schedule delays, and cost overruns reveals something about how legacy programs maintain momentum, they create sufficient stakeholder investment, contractors across fourteen countries, Congressional districts with jobs dependent on the program, international partnerships with binding agreements, that cancellation becomes politically costlier than continuation.

This is not inspirational. It’s bureaucratic ballast that prevents course changes. But it’s also the mechanism that allows civilizational-scale projects to outlast election cycles.

The Boring Stuff Nobody Photographs

Artemis III, scheduled for 2028, will attempt the first lunar landing in over fifty years. If it succeeds, astronauts will spend perhaps a week on the surface testing equipment and procedures. Then comes the tedious part nobody makes documentaries about, iterative construction missions, systems integration, redundancy testing, supply chain establishment, emergency protocol development, crew rotation logistics.

The crew on Artemis II captured striking images of earthrise and documented lunar topography around the South Pole landing zone. Future missions will photograph foundation pours and power cable installations. The difference between visiting the Moon and maintaining permanent presence is the difference between a summit expedition and building a research station in Antarctica, one generates awe, the other requires plumbing.

What made Artemis II notable wasn’t the distance record or the imagery. It was the demonstration that the institutions responsible could deliver on two decades of accumulated promises despite everything working against sustained focus. The harder test is whether those same institutions can maintain attention through the unglamorous phase, the fourteenth cargo mission, the third habitat module, the supply chain for replacement parts nobody thinks about until they fail.

Fifty-three years after we last reached lunar distance, four people traveled farther than anyone before and returned safely. The impressive part wasn’t the flight. It was that the systems existed to attempt it, and that they worked. Whether similar institutional persistence can turn that capability into enduring presence depends entirely on our willingness to fund the boring parts.

When the 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer landed in January, most commentary focused on the predictable findings about institutional decline. Government trust remains low, media credibility continues eroding, the usual diagnoses for a fractured age. But buried in the data was something more unsettling than another year of disappointing scores for Congress or CNN.

The new crisis isn’t that people distrust the powerful. It’s that they’ve stopped trusting each other.

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Seven in ten respondents across 28 countries reported unwillingness or hesitance to trust someone with different values, different approaches to social issues, different backgrounds, or different information sources. In Japan, that figure reached 90 percent. In Germany, 81 percent. In Canada, 73 percent. The insularity cuts across income levels, age groups, and geographies. This isn’t polarization, which at least implies engagement across a divide. This is retreat.

What Insularity Actually Means

The researchers at Edelman are careful with terminology. They’ve tracked trust for 26 years now, and they distinguish between phases. Polarization characterized the 2010s—people on opposite sides shouting at each other. Grievance marked the early 2020s—shouting turned to resentment, a belief that the other side was not just wrong but deliberately destructive.

Insularity is qualitatively different. When people feel aggrieved by those who disagree, they at least acknowledge the other camp’s existence. Insularity means checking out entirely. It’s not “I don’t trust what they say”—it’s “I’m unwilling to engage with them at all.”

You can see it in where trust has migrated. Over the past five years, trust in national government leaders has declined by 16 points, major news organizations by 11 points. Meanwhile, trust in “my neighbors, family and friends” rose by 11 points, “my coworkers” by 11 points, “my CEO” by 9 points.

The pattern is unmistakable: trust is becoming hyper-local, retreating from the abstract and institutional toward the immediate and familiar. People trust those they can see and know personally. Everyone else is suspect.

The Collapse of Optimism

What makes insularity particularly alarming is what accompanies it. Globally, only 32 percent of respondents believe the next generation will be better off than today. But averages obscure the extremes. In France, just 6 percent of people think the future will improve for their children. In Germany, 8 percent. In Canada, 16 percent. In the United States, 21 percent.

These aren’t developing economies wracked by instability. These are wealthy, stable democracies with centuries of institutional continuity, and their citizens have essentially stopped believing in the future. When asked whether tomorrow’s generation will fare better, nine out of ten French respondents essentially said no.

Robert Putnam spent the 1990s documenting the decline of social capital in America—the erosion of civic groups, bowling leagues, church attendance, neighborly interaction. His work in Bowling Alone demonstrated that interpersonal trust had been falling since the 1970s. The share of Americans who believe “most people can be trusted” dropped from 46 percent in 1972 to 34 percent by 2018. What’s happening now is that decline reaching terminal velocity, crossing into a regime where the question isn’t whether you trust strangers but whether you’re willing to interact with anyone outside your immediate circle.

The Forces Driving the Retreat

Four dynamics are fueling insularity, according to the research. Economic anxiety tops the list—two-thirds of employees worry that trade policies and tariffs will harm their employer, while more than half of low-income respondents believe they’ll be left behind by generative AI.

The collapse in optimism is the second force. Third is institutional distrust with a widening class dimension—low-income respondents see institutions as 18 points less competent than high-income respondents rate them. The trust gap between rich and poor has more than doubled since 2012, from six points to 15 points globally.

Fourth is the information crisis. Sixty-five percent of respondents worry that foreign actors are injecting falsehoods into national media to inflame divisions. Only 39 percent seek out news from ideologically different sources even weekly. People aren’t just siloing themselves physically—they’re doing it informationally, constructing epistemological bubbles where existing beliefs never encounter friction.

What the Pattern Suggests

This moment feels different from previous cycles of distrust. The 1960s and 1970s saw massive institutional skepticism—government, corporations, universities all faced legitimacy crises. But that era’s distrust was accompanied by civic engagement, by protests and movements and attempts to build alternative structures. People didn’t trust the establishment, but they trusted each other enough to organize.

What’s distinct now is the passivity of the retreat. Insularity doesn’t generate mass movements because it’s fundamentally individualistic. When you don’t trust people with different values, you don’t build coalitions. You withdraw. The energy goes into curating your immediate environment—your neighborhood, your workplace, your friend group—to minimize exposure to difference.

This creates a reinforcing loop. The less you interact with people unlike yourself, the less you trust them. The less you trust them, the less you’re willing to engage. Meanwhile, economic and technological forces driving division—algorithm-sorted information feeds, geographic sorting by education and income, the decline of shared institutions like churches and unions—continue operating, making the next interaction with difference even less likely.

High-trust societies and low-trust societies function differently at a structural level. In high-trust environments, people cooperate with strangers, institutions operate with lighter enforcement mechanisms, economic transactions happen more efficiently. When trust erodes, you get more surveillance, higher transaction costs, less cooperation. But you also get volatility.

Researchers studying civil conflict note that social fragmentation doesn’t cause violence directly, but it removes the buffers that prevent escalation. In a high-trust society, disagreements get mediated by shared institutions, by people who know each other personally, by norms that assume good faith. In an insular society, those mechanisms don’t exist. Conflict has nowhere to go but up.

The Question Worth Sitting With

There is nothing inevitable about where this leads. Patterns are not prophecies. But ignoring the pattern because you don’t like the precedents isn’t a strategy either.

What the data describes is a society—many societies, actually—losing the capacity for dialogue across difference. That capacity isn’t a luxury. It’s infrastructure. The question worth sitting with is what institutions can actually function when seven in ten people are unwilling to trust anyone with different values. How do democracies make collective decisions? How do markets operate when parties assume bad faith? How do you maintain rule of law when different groups stop recognizing shared rules?

These aren’t rhetorical questions. They’re practical ones that societies throughout history have had to answer, usually under worse conditions than we face now. But the starting point is recognizing what’s actually happening. This isn’t another round of complaints about media bias or government dysfunction. This is a shift in the basic architecture of social trust, from the institutional and abstract toward the local and interpersonal.

And that shift, historically, has tended to precede something rather than resolve it.

This morning, millions of Americans will attend church for Easter Sunday. Church attendance today will be two to three times higher than an average Sunday, filling sanctuaries from coast to coast. Many dioceses are reporting record-breaking conversions at this year’s Easter Vigil. Newark saw 1,701 people join the Catholic Church, a 30% jump from last year. Oklahoma City recorded a 57% increase. Philadelphia’s cathedral overflowed with new catechumens.

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Yet if you walked through most of America yesterday, you wouldn’t have known Easter was approaching. No Easter movies dominated streaming services. No Easter music filled retail spaces. No multi-week cultural buildup. Americans will spend an estimated $24.9 billion on Easter this year, which sounds substantial until you realize Christmas retail spending surpassed $1 trillion for the first time in 2025. That’s a 40-to-1 ratio.

For Christianity’s most theologically significant holiday, Easter commands almost zero secular cultural real estate compared to Christmas. The contrast raises an interesting question about what happens when holidays follow different paths.

When Both Holidays Were Suspect

The divergence wasn’t inevitable. Christmas and Easter held roughly equal cultural weight for much of Christian history. But America’s early Puritan settlers objected to both holidays with equal suspicion. They saw feast days as dangerous times when social codes could be violated. Cotton Mather lamented how “the feast of Christ’s nativity is spent in reveling, dicing, carding, masking, and in all licentious liberty.”

Easter faced similar objections. For Puritans and similar Protestant groups, religious holidays smacked of Catholic ritual. The solution was treating all days as equally sacred rather than elevating specific feast days.

So what changed? In the 19th century, Christmas got reinvented as a domestic, family-centered celebration. Easter didn’t.

The Victorian Reinvention

The Christmas we recognize today is largely a Victorian creation. As historian Stephen Nissenbaum documented, the holiday was transformed into a bourgeois celebration centered on childhood and family. Popular writers created the modern template through what amounted to a cultural marketing campaign. Washington Irving’s 1822 Bracebridge Hall referenced “ancient” Christmas traditions that were actually Irving’s inventions. Clement Clarke Moore’s “The Night Before Christmas” appeared the same year. Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol followed in 1843.

These works reimagined Christmas as respectable and family-friendly. The holiday became accessible to people with varying levels of religious commitment. You didn’t need to believe in the virgin birth to enjoy a story about gift-giving and childhood wonder. The Nativity scene translated easily into celebrations of family. Nearly everything we associate with Christmas today comes from this 19th-century cultural renovation.

Easter received no such transformation. While it acquired some family-friendly additions like Easter eggs and bunnies, no equivalent cultural movement emerged. Historical analysis shows that at the dawn of the 19th century, English books referenced Christmas and Easter roughly equally. By the 1860s, Easter references had dropped to half that of Christmas. By 2000, Christmas was referenced almost four times as often.

Why Easter Resisted

The divergence reflects structural differences between the holidays. Christmas celebrates a birth, which translates smoothly into broader celebration. The story requires minimal theological commitment. Whether you believe in the virgin birth or not, you can appreciate that a person named Jesus was probably born, and births are worth celebrating. The imagery of mothers and infants works perfectly for a child-centered holiday.

Easter is about an adult man who was executed, then rose from the dead. The supernatural elements sit front and center. You either believe a man conquered death or you don’t. There’s less comfortable middle ground for casual participation.

The mechanics reinforce this. Easter is a moveable feast, varying within a 35-day range depending on lunar calculations. Retailers struggle to build sustained campaigns when the target date shifts annually. Christmas sits fixed on December 25, allowing multi-week buildups and predictable planning.

Gift-giving creates another difference. Christmas became synonymous with presents, which drove commercial investment. Easter has no equivalent gift-giving tradition. Without that engine, retailers had less incentive to invest in Easter’s cultural expansion.

The Paradox of Preservation

Here’s what’s interesting about Easter’s commercial failure. By resisting secularization, the holiday may have preserved something valuable. Father Dennis Gill, who oversees conversion programs for the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, told the National Catholic Register that recent converts show unusual commitment. “I have noticed over the last several years that there is a greater commitment to conversion, a greater commitment to the Church, when they arrive.”

The record conversion numbers suggest Easter retains serious appeal precisely because it hasn’t been culturally diluted. While surveys show more people leaving the Catholic Church than entering overall, the conversion data reveals something else happening. “While we may see a decrease in cultural Catholicism, we see an increase in people becoming Catholics by personal choice,” said Father Juan Ochoa of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, which expects a 54% increase in converts this Easter.

Easter’s cultural invisibility creates a different dynamic. If you’re celebrating Easter, you’re probably doing so intentionally. The broader culture isn’t pulling you along. There are no Easter bonuses at work, no monthlong marketing blitz making participation feel expected. The holiday exists for those who seek it out.

Edward Trendowski, director of the Office of Faith Formation for the Diocese of Providence, described unusual spiritual openness among people coming to the Church. “People seem to be more spiritually open,” he observed. “We know deep down that there’s something more. People are looking for something deeper.”

Multiple dioceses report that new converts skew younger, often in their twenties and thirties. Barbara Ferreris, director of faith formation at Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Tampa, explained the pattern simply. “They have the career. They have the home, the car. They’re searching for more.”

These aren’t people who grew up with Easter as ambient cultural background. They’re coming to it deliberately, often after trying what secular culture offers and finding it insufficient.

Different Paths, Different Outcomes

Christmas demonstrates what happens when a religious holiday gets thoroughly adapted for broad cultural participation. The culture embraced it, retailers invested in it, and it became a massive shared experience that accommodates everyone from devout believers to casual celebrants.

Easter shows what happens when a holiday remains primarily religious. The culture largely ignores it, which means the holiday stays weird, supernatural, and unavoidably theological. You can’t celebrate Easter casually the way you can Christmas. The resurrection is either true or it isn’t.

This makes Easter a different kind of test. The people filling churches this morning made deliberate choices. The converts joining the Church at Easter Vigils yesterday chose something the broader culture neither validates nor particularly notices.

As Americans return to work tomorrow, most won’t notice Easter has passed. The culture will move on without Easter parties or Easter retail analysis. But for those who marked today deliberately, that cultural indifference might be precisely the point. The holiday that never got commercialized retained the strangeness that makes religious claims compelling in the first place.

Both paths have value. Christmas reaches millions through cultural accessibility. Easter reaches fewer but demands more. The contrast reveals less about which approach is better than about what different holidays can accomplish when they take different routes through American culture.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops released a video on March 18 warning Catholics against antisemitic conspiracies and falsehoods. Archbishop Alexander Sample, chairman of the USCCB’s religious liberty commission, did not name any organization directly. He did not need to.

Less than 24 hours later, Catholics for Catholics, a Phoenix-based 501(c)(4) advocacy group, held its third annual “Catholic Prayer for America Gala” in Washington. The event featured a lineup including Candace Owens, Michael Flynn, Carrie Prejean Boller, and Joe Kent, a combination that brought renewed scrutiny to the group’s role in elevating figures accused of trafficking in antisemitic rhetoric or adjacent conspiracy politics under explicitly Catholic branding.

That sequence matters far more than the usual culture-war controversy. It illustrates a deeper institutional problem for the Catholic Church: organizations that present themselves as Catholic can operate outside formal ecclesiastical control, use opaque political funding structures, and platform speakers the bishops would never endorse, while still borrowing the authority and symbolism of the faith for their own purposes.

The Structural Problem

Catholics for Catholics operates as a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization, a designation that allows unlimited political activity and keeps donor identities private. Founded in 2022 and based in Phoenix, the group describes itself as “supporting frontline culture warriors who love God and the USA.” Their website features testimonials from President Trump (”your love of God and Country is evident in everything you do”) and Bishop Joseph Strickland, the Tyler, Texas bishop removed by Pope Francis in 2023.

The 501(c)(4) structure matters because it exists in regulatory space the Catholic hierarchy cannot directly control. Unlike a parish or diocesan organization that operates under clear ecclesiastical authority, Catholics for Catholics can claim Catholic identity while remaining financially opaque and institutionally untethered. The organization doesn’t need diocesan approval for its activities, doesn’t submit to USCCB oversight, and can platform speakers the institutional Church would never endorse—all while wrapping itself in explicitly Catholic branding.

This creates what one longtime observer of Catholic institutional politics called “scandal without remedy”: the Church’s canonical definition of scandal (leading the faithful into sin through public example) applies, but its traditional mechanisms for addressing scandal (episcopal authority, ecclesiastical censure) do not.

The Speaker List as Provocation

The March 20 gala featured Candace Owens, who nine months after converting to Catholicism told interviewer Tristan Tate that Judaism is a “pedophile-centric religion that believes in demons.” Also speaking: former Trump national security advisor Michael Flynn, former beauty pageant contestant Carrie Prejean Boller (removed from the White House Religious Liberty Commission in February after an anti-Zionist tirade at an antisemitism hearing), and Joe Kent, who resigned as director of the National Counterterrorism Center days earlier claiming the U.S. was driven to war by “Israel and its powerful American lobby.”

Dennis Prager, founder of PragerU and Owens’ former employer, wrote her a 15-page letter in September 2024: “Whatever your motives, I cannot think of anyone in public life engendering as much suspicion of Jews, Zionism, and Israel as are you.” Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire parted ways with Owens in March 2024 after she queried on air whether “a very small ring of specific people” in Hollywood were “using the fact they are Jewish to shield themselves from any criticism.”

The Catholic Speakers Organization—which also represents Bishop Robert Barron and theologian Scott Hahn—added Owens to its roster after her conversion. When Canadian pro-life activist Amanda Achtman, herself Jewish-Catholic, expressed concern about sharing even a virtual platform with Owens, CSO founder Joe Condit declined Achtman’s application. The organization claims all speakers are “rigorously screened and vetted” and “diocesan approved.” The Diocese of Nashville, where Owens resides, confirmed to Catholic World Report it has no record of being contacted by CSO and has issued no letter of recommendation.

The Institutional Response

Archbishop Sample’s video was surgical in its implications without naming targets. “The Jewish community is attacked at a far higher rate than any other religious group in the United States,” he noted. “As Catholics, we are called to walk in the truth and so to reject the conspiracies and lies that lead to harassment and even violence against our Jewish brothers and sisters.”

The next morning, at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast (a different event), White House Domestic Policy Council director Vince Haley—a Catholic—closed his remarks with similar language: “Hatred toward Jewish people is ugly, despicable, an affront to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and surely an occasion of terrible grief for our Jewish mother, Mary.”

Neither man mentioned Catholics for Catholics. But Nathan Diament, executive director of public policy for the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations, made the connection explicit to EWTN News: “The statement by Archbishop Sample on behalf of the USCCB could not come at a more important time with bad actors weaponizing Catholicism to spread antisemitic views.”

Here’s what makes this fascinating: the institutional Church is now reduced to issuing timed theological reminders because it cannot directly discipline lay organizations operating under 501(c)(4) structures. Sample cited the Council of Trent catechism (1566), which states that Christians bear greater guilt for Christ’s death than first-century Jews, and Nostra Aetate (1965), Vatican II’s declaration that “the Church... decries hatred, persecutions, displays of antisemitism directed against Jews at any time and by anyone.”

This is defensive catechesis—teaching doctrine not to form the faithful but to create distance from those claiming to speak for them.

The Historical Precedent Catholics Aren’t Mentioning

The closest parallel is 1930s Catholic social movements in Europe that merged nationalist politics with selective Catholic identity, operating just outside formal Church structures while claiming to represent authentic Catholicism. Pope Pius XI addressed this in his 1937 encyclical Mit brennender Sorge, which was smuggled into Germany and read from pulpits: “Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State... and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God.”

The difference is that Pius XI could command every German Catholic pulpit simultaneously. The USCCB cannot command a 501(c)(4)’s donor disclosure, event cancellation, or speaker replacement. It can only clarify doctrine and hope the distinction registers.

What the Church Can’t Say Directly

The institutional Catholic response has been notably careful about how it condemns antisemitism—citing antisemitism’s threat to religious freedom generally rather than naming Catholics for Catholics as a scandal specifically. This is strategic ambiguity born of structural constraint: the USCCB cannot formally discipline a 501(c)(4), but it also cannot afford to be seen as impotent when organizations traffic in what Sample called “conspiracies and lies.”

What Sample and Haley achieved was creating a paper trail. When Catholics for Catholics hosts future events or when Owens speaks at Catholic venues, bishops can now point to explicit, timestamped statements of Church teaching issued the day before a controversial gala. It’s ecclesiastical documentation for future use—not immediate remedy, but evidence for the record.

The question is whether that’s sufficient when the scandal is ongoing, well-funded, and structurally immune to the usual mechanisms of Church discipline. Catholics for Catholics isn’t going anywhere. Neither is its 501(c)(4) status, which guarantees the USCCB will keep issuing carefully worded videos while the organization keeps hosting galas.

The ancient problem of scandal has met the modern problem of tax-exempt political advocacy. The Church has doctrine. It does not, apparently, have jurisdiction.

The passing of Chuck Norris on March 19, 2026, at the age of 86, has triggered a predictable wave of digital nostalgia, from viral “fact” memes to retrospectives of his 1980s filmography. Yet the reported death of the martial artist and actor marks more than the end of a Hollywood career; it signals the final closing of a specific American archetype: the analog hero.

Norris, alongside peers like Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger, defined a “Golden Age” of American action cinema that thrived on a foundation of moral and physical certainty. In films like Missing in Action and Lone Wolf McQuade, the conflict was rarely structural or systemic. It was personal, physical, and resolved through individual competence. Unlike the protagonists of contemporary cinema, Norris’s characters didn’t rely on multiversal resets or high-tech exoskeletons. The resolution to any given crisis was located entirely within the hero’s physical discipline.

This “pre-ambiguity” era of heroism reflected a world where threats were understood as external and legible. In the 1980s, the “bad guy” was a recognizable silhouette—often a Cold War proxy or a cartoonish criminal syndicate. Norris represented a stabilizing myth: the idea that a single, disciplined individual could restore order to a chaotic map through sheer force of will and a roundhouse kick.

This onscreen persona eventually merged with a distinct political identity that positioned Norris as a Hollywood outsider. Though he began his career as a Democrat, he famously argued that the party had strayed “off the trail” of American values, leading him to become a foundational figure in a burgeoning conservative movement.

His close personal friendships with leaders like Ronald Reagan were an extension of his personal “Code of Ethics,” which emphasized loyalty to country and respect for authority. For Norris, these values weren’t just for the screen; they were essential for a republic he believed was built on the “God of our Founding Fathers” and the preservation of individual liberties.

The shift in American storytelling over the last two decades reveals a deepening discomfort with this model. Today’s cinematic heroes are increasingly specialized, tech-reliant, or burdened by “deconstruction.” From the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s reliance on nanotech and magic to the tortured interiority of modern “prestige” action, the hero has moved from being a pillar of certainty to a node in a complex system. We no longer trust the lone individual to fix the world; we expect the hero to be as confused by the system as we are.

This transition mirrors a broader institutional shift. The 1980s action star was a proxy for an era of high institutional confidence, where the “rules” of reality felt fixed. As that confidence has eroded, replaced by the fragmented information environment of the 2020s, the “analog” hero has become an impossibility. A hero who is “always right” now feels to many audiences like a relic—or worse, a provocation.

What we are mourning in the wake of Norris’s death is not just a celebrity, but the legibility he represented. He was a symbol of a time when the path from problem to solution was a straight line, and the tools required were ones a human being could actually master.

Something shifted in 2025, though you’d be forgiven for missing it. The most significant cultural movement of the year wasn’t on social media, it was the departure from it.

Not the dramatic kind. No manifestos, no announced Digital Sabbaths, no “I’m taking a break for my mental health” Instagram stories. Just… withdrawal. The kind where someone you used to follow posts less frequently, then barely at all, then you realize you haven’t seen their content in months. When you check, their account still exists, technically active, but abandoned in every way that matters.

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I’ve been trying to understand why this feels different from previous waves of social media fatigue. The answer, I think, is who’s leaving, and what that signals about where cultural authority actually lives now.

The Numbers Hide What’s Actually Happening

The aggregate figures look stable, global social media users increased by 259 million between October 2024 and October 2025, reaching 5.66 billion identities. But that 4.9% annual growth rate represents a dramatic deceleration from the double-digit surges of the early 2010s. More revealing is what’s happening beneath the surface.

Engagement is collapsing. Average interaction rates on Facebook and X now hover around 0.15%. Instagram’s engagement dropped 24% year-over-year. Even TikTok, the platform that seemed immune to gravity, is plateauing. Roughly half of American adults now rate information on social media as unreliable, down from two-thirds a decade ago, yet they continue scrolling, not because they trust what they see, but because the alternative feels like exile.

That’s the key tension, social media has achieved something more elegant than addiction. It’s made non-participation a form of social illegitimacy, available only to those who can afford its costs. The worker who deletes LinkedIn excludes themselves from professional networks that exist nowhere else. The small business without Instagram watches customers drift toward competitors. The teenager who refuses TikTok can’t parse the vernacular that constitutes their peers’ shared language.

But here’s what the raw user numbers miss, while total adoption remains high, who uses these platforms and how they use them is changing. The American Psychiatric Association found that among 18-34 year olds, a significant proportion deliberately stepped away from social media in 2024, citing mental health. Newsletter platforms reported median time-to-first-dollar for new creators dropping to just 66 days, suggesting real money is flowing toward depth over virality. Substack and Beehiiv aren’t just growing, they’re attracting precisely the knowledge workers and tastemakers who made social media culturally mandatory in the first place.

Status Has Reversed Polarity

Twenty years ago, social media presence signaled cultural relevance. By 2026, absence increasingly signals the opposite, that you have better things to do than perform for algorithms.

This isn’t a moral judgment, it’s an observation about how status markers evolve. The people setting this pattern aren’t retirees or Luddites but precisely the class whose approval once made platforms valuable, writers, academics, professionals whose attention constituted endorsement. When they retreat to newsletters, podcasts, and private Discord servers, they take their cultural authority with them.

What remains is an increasingly bot-mediated wasteland. Research shows tens of thousands of AI-generated accounts flooding major platforms with engagement-optimized slop, vague inspirational quotes, AI-generated images like “Shrimp Jesus,” affiliate marketing disguised as advice. Average interaction rates fall while content volume explodes because what counts as “content” has fundamentally changed. It no longer means human expression, it means anything that generates clicks.

The feed has become a mood-regulation device, not an information source or social space. Scrolling is ambient dissociation, half-conscious scratching of an itch you can’t name. People know it’s fake, they just don’t care enough to stop.

Where the Conversation Moved

The successor to mass social media isn’t another platform, it’s a thousand micro-communities. Group chats. Paywalled newsletters. Discord servers. Federated instances of Mastodon and Bluesky where moderation happens through shared norms rather than algorithmic enforcement.

These spaces share a characteristic, they’re opt-in, not ambient. You choose to be there, and that choice creates accountability absent from algorithmic feeds. A writer with 10,000 devoted newsletter subscribers can earn more and burn out less than someone with a million passive Instagram followers because the relationship isn’t mediated by a black box optimizing for engagement over everything else.

Even major platforms sense the shift. Instagram emphasizes DMs now. X is pushing subscriber-only circles. TikTok experiments with private communities. Behind these moves sits an acknowledgment, the infinite scroll, stuffed with synthetic content, approaches the limit of what humans will tolerate.

What Comes After

Social media isn’t dying because we lack content, we’re drowning in it. It’s dying because the attention economy has exhausted our capacity to care. Novelty became noise. Outrage fatigues. Even virality cannibalizes itself.

The quiet exodus isn’t about rejection. It’s about rediscovery, that meaningful conversation requires shared context, that trust emerges from continuity, that some things worth having don’t scale. The people leaving aren’t giving up connection, they’re looking for it in places where it might actually exist.

When the White House posted a video mixing SpongeBob SquarePants with footage of U.S. military strikes during the ongoing Operation Epic Fury on Thursday, the response was intense and divided. But buried beneath the debate about taste and propriety is a number that tells a different story: the White House’s meme videos about the operation have been viewed over 160 million times on X alone.

One video alone—featuring Call of Duty game footage mixed with real strike footage—pulled over 50 million impressions on X. A SpongeBob mashup cleared 9 million across X and TikTok. For context, State of the Union addresses have been steadily losing viewers, with Trump's 2026 address drawing 32.6 million viewers—down from the roughly 36 million that tuned in to last year's address to a joint session of Congress.

The White House didn’t stumble into a controversy. It solved a problem that’s been plaguing government communications for two decades: nobody under 40 is paying attention anymore.

The civic engagement crisis didn’t start with memes. Presidential addresses have been bleeding viewers since the 1990s. Press briefings are clipped into 15-second segments for social media, stripped of context. Policy white papers might as well not exist—when’s the last time you read one? When the Pew Research Center surveyed Americans under 30 about where they get political information in 2024, traditional government channels didn’t crack the top ten. TikTok ranked third.

This is the problem the White House communications team inherited, whether we like their solution or not. Steven Cheung and Kaelan Dorr didn’t invent short attention spans or platform algorithms. They just acknowledged that competing for attention in 2026 means playing by rules that didn’t exist during the Obama administration, much less the Bush years.

The strategy follows a brutal logic—if you can’t beat the algorithm, become the algorithm. Memes generate engagement (shares, comments, quote-tweets) that platforms interpret as importance, pushing content to more feeds. Outrage from opponents actually helps by increasing distribution. Every news article about the White House videos extends their reach. The criticism becomes part of the marketing.

White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly made this explicit, saying the administration would “continue showcasing” military successes “in real time” despite objections. The phrasing is telling—”showcasing” is creator language, not government language. They’re not informing the public; they’re producing content that performs well on platforms designed for entertainment.

This isn’t the first time a president has been accused of degrading the office by adapting to new media. Franklin Roosevelt’s “fireside chats” horrified critics who thought radio was too informal, too commercial, too intimate for presidential communication. John F. Kennedy’s mastery of television sparked similar concerns—were we electing leaders based on camera presence rather than substance? Ronald Reagan’s background as an actor raised questions about whether politics had become performance art.

Each time, the answer turned out to be yes, sort of, and it didn’t matter because the medium had already won. Television presidents replaced radio presidents replaced print presidents.

But there's a difference this time. Previous medium shifts expanded the audience—more people could access presidential communication via radio than print, via television than radio. The meme strategy fragments it. It reaches certain demographics extraordinarily well—internet-minded people who grew up on gaming culture and meme literacy, who might otherwise tune out entirely.

The White House isn't trying to speak to everyone anymore. They're optimizing for specific audiences on specific platforms, potentially getting young people more interested in politics and world events than traditional addresses ever could.

You can see this in the choice of references: Halo, Top Gun, Dragon Ball Z, Call of Duty. The White House isn’t building a national consensus; they’re building a coalition of people who speak the same internet dialect.

The shift raises questions about what government communication looks like when traditional channels no longer reach most citizens. The veteran who posted on X that “war isn’t a video game” is right. The White House communications director who knows video game aesthetics will reach more potential recruits than somber Pentagon briefings is also right. The fact that both things are true simultaneously reveals the tension at the heart of modern governance.

We're left with a choice that isn't really a choice—a government that speaks in memes and reaches millions, or a government that speaks with formal gravity and reaches a fraction of that audience. The republic wasn’t designed for this trade-off. But here we are, watching SpongeBob explode over footage from Operation Epic Fury, trying to figure out whether 150 million views constitute effective adaptation or something else entirely.

The Sound of Music spent four-and-a-half years in continuous theatrical release before leaving cinemas on Labor Day 1969. Not sporadic re-releases across decades, like Gone With the Wind. Not a limited “classic screening” series. The same movie, in the same theaters, week after week, for longer than an undergraduate degree.

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To understand how strange this is: in 2024, the average theatrical window was 32 days. A film that opens in March is streaming, on a platform you already subscribe to, watchable in bed, by April. The Sound of Music opened exactly 61 years ago today, March 2, 1965, and you could still buy a ticket to see it in a theater in September 1969. The movie outlasted the Johnson presidency.

This wasn’t an accident. It was infrastructure.

The Roadshow Model

Fox released The Sound of Music as a roadshow presentation — reserved seats, advance tickets, premium pricing, two performances daily. The 174-minute runtime included an intermission, like a stage production. Theaters installed six-track stereophonic sound systems specifically for 70mm prints. You didn’t “catch” The Sound of Music. You planned for it.

The roadshow format meant fewer daily screenings, but each screening was an event. This sounds inefficient until you realize the film topped the box office for 30 of 43 weeks and sold nearly 142 million tickets when the U.S. population was 194 million. The statistical impossibility suggests extraordinary repeat viewing, audiences returning not for plot twists they’d missed, but for ritual.

In some cities, ticket sales exceeded the entire local population.

What Gets Built When Movies Stay

Here’s what I’ve been trying to understand: What kind of shared culture emerges when the same artistic experience occupies the same physical space for four consecutive years?

Modern distribution optimizes for velocity, maximum revenue extraction before content disappears into the streaming catalog. Films don’t stay anywhere long enough to become destinations. They appear on Netflix, get watched (or added to lists that never get cleared), then sink beneath algorithm-surfaced recommendations for the next thing.

The 1960s roadshow model optimized for presence. A film wasn’t content to consume; it was a destination to revisit. Theaters became pilgrimage sites. This created something streaming architecturally cannot: true cultural commons. When a movie stays visible in physical space for years, it becomes infrastructure itself, a known landmark, a reliable gathering place, a conversation everyone can enter because everyone has had time to arrive. Streaming offers infinite choice and zero shared coordinates.

The Collapse

The roadshow model died with the 1970s multiplex revolution. Why hold one theater hostage to a single film when you could split the building into six screens? The math made sense. Revenue per square foot increased. Consumer choice expanded.

But we traded depth for breadth. The four-year movie became impossible not because audiences lost interest, but because the infrastructure that supported sustained attention — reserved seating, premium formats, event-style exhibition — gave way to throughput optimization.

The Sound of Music didn’t just occupy theaters for four years. It was allowed to, by an exhibition system that believed some things deserved to stay.

In the main square of Cortina d’Ampezzo, where the 2026 Winter Olympics just concluded, there stands a sculpture of an elegant woman clutching a Dior handbag and skis. She appears carved from ice, translucent and wintry. Touch her, and you discover the truth: She is plastic.

Walk beyond the square, and the metaphor deepens. Ski lifts ascend mountainsides of bare rock and brown grass, servicing narrow white strips—the only snow visible against the Dolomites’ winter landscape. Generators growl near the Boite River, where black pipes siphon 25 gallons per second to feed snow cannons roaring upslope. The stench of diesel mingles with mountain air. This is what 380 Olympic swimming pools worth of water looks like when converted into the appearance of winter.

The Milan Cortina Games required roughly 250 million gallons of water for artificial snow production alone—enough to supply 1.3 million people for a year. Around 95% of Italian ski resorts now depend on snowmaking technology, with more than 70% of slopes covered entirely by manufactured snow. The system works brilliantly. Fan-like cannons spray atomized water into cold air; droplets freeze mid-flight and fall as snow; grooming vehicles compress it into competition-grade surfaces indistinguishable from nature’s version. The International Ski Federation has refined this into “technical snow”—data-driven, tablet-controlled, optimized to exploit the coldest weather windows with adjustable density and quality.

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This technological triumph raises an uncomfortable question: When reality becomes unreliable, should we manufacture it?

The physics are straightforward. The implications less so. Cortina’s 500 ancient larch trees survived two world wars but not Olympic preparations—felled to clear space for a bobsled track that Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini insisted must remain on Italian soil rather than using Austria’s existing facility. When chainsaws arrived, Italian cellist Mario Brunello sat on a stool playing classical music while the forest crashed down behind him, creating what one witness described as “dramatic and extraordinary contrast.”

Environmental assessments were skipped for more than 60% of the 98 Olympic construction projects. Water is extracted from Alpine rivers at rates that may deplete mountain aquifers. Snowmaking accounts for 30-40% of total energy consumption at Italian resorts—annual costs between €50 million and €100 million, roughly equivalent to Milan’s entire domestic electricity use for a year. Across the Alps, artificial snow production demands around 2,100 gigawatt-hours per winter season.

These costs could be justified as necessary adaptations to climate change. The Italian Alps have experienced a 10% decrease in cold days and cold spells over three decades. Resorts around 1,000 meters elevation have largely abandoned consistent operations. Skiing in the Apennines—once central Italy’s winter destination—has effectively shut down. Technology provides a bridge until conditions improve or alternatives emerge.

But that framing assumes adaptation rather than something more concerning: the normalization of manufactured reality as superior to natural variability.

Consider what “technical snow” actually achieves. Modern systems produce surfaces more controllable and durable than natural snowfall. Operators adjust quality and density via tablet, creating conditions better than authentic winter. This isn’t making do with second-best—it’s engineering improvements that eliminate weather’s inconvenient unpredictability. The artificial becomes preferable.

This logic extends far beyond Alpine slopes. We’ve become civilizations that instinctively reach for technical solutions to maintain desired experiences rather than adapting expectations to changing realities. Social media curates identities more compelling than messy authenticity. AI-generated content replicates creative output without the friction of human limitation. Deepfakes manufacture events indistinguishable from documentation. The plastic ice sculpture isn’t an aberration—it’s emblematic.

The danger isn’t that these interventions fail. It’s that they succeed so completely they delay recognition of underlying unsustainability. Economists call this “lock-in effect”—each successful adaptation justifies continued investment in the same trajectory, making alternative paths progressively harder to pursue. Italian ski pass prices have increased 40% since 2021, transforming winter sports into luxury experiences requiring constant capital infusion to maintain the illusion.

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Some manufacturers now demonstrate snow production at ambient temperatures up to 20°C—a technological breakthrough that reinforces the narrative that innovation alone solves fundamental limits. This mindset treats climate change as an engineering problem rather than a signal requiring different frameworks entirely. The slopes stay white, bookings remain strong, and winter tourism continues generating €11 billion annually to Italy’s economy. Why question a system that appears to work?

Because metre by metre, the slope is getting steeper. When artificial snow eventually becomes unviable at certain altitudes—not tomorrow, but within foreseeable horizons—the transition will be abrupt. Resorts will face stranded assets, communities will experience sudden economic shocks, and regions will discover they’ve spent decades and billions optimizing a system with a climate-driven expiration date instead of developing alternatives.

This isn’t about condemning technology or romanticizing natural snowfall. It’s recognizing that successful short-term adaptation can masquerade as viable long-term strategy. The plastic sculpture captures something true: We’ve grown comfortable inhabiting spaces where the real and the manufactured become indistinguishable, where maintaining appearances feels more achievable than accepting changed circumstances.

Cortina’s elegant Dior lady stands in the square, translucent and beautiful, fooling nobody who touches her. The snow on the mountainsides above works differently—white and pristine, perfect for racing, sustained by infrastructure most visitors never see. That difference matters. One announces itself as representation. The other succeeds so completely that questioning it feels unnecessary.

Until someone checks the water bill.

Today marks the first day of Lent, which means roughly three-quarters of Americans won’t notice. Only 26% of U.S. adults observe the season anymore, a figure that has barely budged since 2016 but represents a dramatic collapse from the 1970s, when Lenten practice was culturally ubiquitous across much of the country. What’s curious isn’t just the decline—it’s what emerged to fill the space.

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The same Americans who skip Ash Wednesday are increasingly likely to participate in “Dry January,” a month-long alcohol abstinence challenge that has exploded from 15% participation in 2023 to 33% in 2025. They’re purchasing products from a global “detox” industry projected to reach $95 billion by 2030, growing at over 6% annually. They’re joining the 43% of adults who’ve intentionally reduced screen time in the past six months, often describing it as a “digital detox.” They’re booking wellness retreats specifically advertised as technology-free zones, a trend significant enough that 27% of travelers now say they plan to reduce social media use during trips.

The pattern is striking: structured periods of self-denial, reset rituals, and purification practices haven’t disappeared. They’ve been rebranded, stripped of their theological context, and sold back as lifestyle optimization.

Consider the shape of what remains. Dry January mirrors Lent’s temporal structure almost exactly—a defined season of abstinence bracketed by normal life, typically lasting between 28 and 40 days. The detox industry’s language echoes pre-modern humoral medicine and Christian ideas of bodily purification, now repackaged as “removing toxins” and “cleansing.” Digital detox retreats function like secular monasteries, temporary withdrawals from the overstimulating world. Even the marketing sounds liturgical: “reset,” “renewal,” “starting fresh,” “cleansing your body and mind.”

What these secular substitutes preserve is Lent’s fundamental anthropological insight: humans periodically need structured breaks from their habitual consumption patterns. The 40-day framework wasn’t arbitrary. It emerged from centuries of observation about how long behavioral interruption requires to feel meaningful without becoming unsustainable. Modern “detox” programs seem to be rediscovering this timeline through trial and error—most Dry January participants complete the month successfully (72%), but those who fail typically quit in weeks one or two, suggesting the practice is calibrated correctly for habit disruption.

But notice what’s missing in translation. Traditional Lenten practice wasn’t primarily about self-improvement or optimization. Fasting from meat on Fridays or giving up luxuries for 40 days wasn’t marketed as a path to better sleep, clearer skin, or improved productivity. The discomfort was the point—a deliberate identification with suffering, an acknowledgment of mortality and dependence, a recognition that humans aren’t the center of their own story. The fast ended with a feast celebrating resurrection, not with Instagram posts celebrating your “glowing” complexion.

The modern substitutes, by contrast, are relentlessly instrumental. You detox for better health metrics. You do Dry January to sleep better, save money, or “prove you can.” You digital detox because screen time makes you less productive. The self remains at the center; the practice serves the self’s flourishing. There’s no corresponding feast, no narrative arc beyond personal optimization. January ends and you… resume normal life, perhaps with marginal improvements.

This shift reveals something about what we’ve preserved and what we’ve lost. The wellness industry has correctly identified that humans need periodic resets, structured self-denial, and temporary withdrawal from consumption. The $95 billion market exists because these are genuine human needs, not invented ones. The explosion of “Damp January” (reducing rather than eliminating alcohol) suggests people are hungry for frameworks that acknowledge they’re consuming too much of something, even if they’re not ready for total abstinence.

But frameworks for periodic self-denial without an animating purpose beyond the self tend to collapse into either consumerism (buying your way to detox) or neurotic self-monitoring. Which might explain why Lenten observance has remained stable at 26% despite massive cultural change—those who’ve retained the practice may have something the substitutes can’t quite replicate.

The most telling data point might be this: 48% of Americans say they plan to drink less alcohol in 2025 following their Dry January experiment, and 47% believe alcohol will be viewed more negatively over the next two decades, similar to cigarettes. These secular reset rituals are changing behavior. They work, up to a point. The question is whether frameworks for human flourishing designed without reference to anything beyond human flourishing can sustain themselves—or whether they’re borrowing capital from older structures while slowly discovering why those structures looked the way they did.

Yesterday marked Galileo’s birthday, and somewhere on the internet, someone deployed him in an argument. They always do. He’s become the perfect projectile—hurl him at your opponent and claim the mantle of persecuted truth-teller. Flat-earthers cite him as proof that consensus can be wrong. New Atheists invoke him as science’s martyr to religious obscurantism. Catholics claim him as a faithful son of the Church who was technically correct all along. Political dissidents of every stripe see themselves in his story.

The strange thing is that almost none of them know what actually happened.

I’ve been trying to understand why the Galileo myth persists with such tenacity, and I think I’ve found the answer: the real story is so much weirder than the myth that our brains reject it. We want heroes and villains, science versus superstition, a clear narrative arc. What we get instead is ecclesiastical politics, philosophy of science disputes, and a man who probably didn’t believe what he was prosecuted for disbelieving.

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Let’s start with what didn’t happen. Galileo was not tortured. He was not imprisoned in a dungeon. He spent exactly one day in actual custody before being moved to villa arrest in his comfortable home outside Florence, where he continued his scientific work until his death nine years later. The legendary moment when he muttered “And yet it moves” after renouncing heliocentrism? A romantic invention. If he’d actually said that, the automatic penalty would have been death. Galileo, whatever else he was, wasn’t suicidal.

The trial itself lasted a single day. One day. This supposed 17-year persecution that’s become shorthand for religion crushing science? It was a non-event in 1616—just a warning, no charges—followed by 16 years of silence, then a one-day proceeding in 1633. The sentence was deliberately light: a regimen of penance and house arrest that was commuted almost immediately. For a heresy trial during the Counter-Reformation, this is roughly equivalent to getting a parking ticket.

But here’s where it gets genuinely interesting: Galileo was prosecuted for violating an agreement not to teach heliocentrism as proven fact, and at his trial, he insisted—under oath, with the threat of torture hanging over him—that he didn’t actually believe in heliocentrism. He claimed he’d simply been showing off his rhetorical skills by making the stronger argument for a position he personally rejected.

Was he lying to save his skin? Probably. But we don’t actually know. Henry Kelly, who spent years examining the trial transcripts, notes that “we can only guess at what he really believed.” Galileo in his later years continued to publicly affirm geocentrism. The Church made a point of announcing that he’d always been orthodox. Everyone involved had reasons to obscure the truth.

This is not the tidy morality play we’ve been sold.

The deeper puzzle is why the Church prosecuted him at all. The standard answer—that religion fears science—collapses under scrutiny. Copernicus published his heliocentric theory in 1543, and for 73 years the Church... did nothing. It was taught in Catholic universities. Clergy read it. When the Church finally banned it in 1616, the prohibition was temporary and required only minor edits presenting heliocentrism as hypothetical rather than proven. By 1620 it was allowed again.

The Church’s objection wasn’t that heliocentrism was scientific. The objection was that Galileo was claiming it was proven when the scientific evidence of the era didn’t support that conclusion.

This sounds absurd to us, but it wasn’t absurd then. The heliocentric model contradicted the only comprehensive physics that existed: Aristotle’s. It required believing the Earth hurtled through space at enormous speed without anyone feeling the motion—a genuine conceptual problem before Newton’s laws of motion. Most damningly, no one had observed stellar parallax, the apparent shift in star positions that a moving Earth should produce. Tycho Brahe, the greatest observational astronomer of the 16th century, looked for parallax and couldn’t find it. That’s why he rejected heliocentrism.

The scientific consensus of Galileo’s era treated Copernicus as a useful calculating device, not a description of physical reality. When the Church examined heliocentrism in 1616 and deemed it “foolish and absurd in philosophy,” they were essentially endorsing the scientific mainstream. Historian David Lindberg puts it bluntly: “Those astronomers and natural philosophers who rejected heliocentrism did so not because of blind conservatism or religious intolerance, but because of their commitment to widely held scientific principles and theories.”

So what changed by 1633? Politics and philosophy, not astronomy.

Cardinal Maffeo Barberini—a Galileo fan who’d praised his work—became Pope Urban VIII in 1623. He gave Galileo permission to write about heliocentrism with one condition: treat it as hypothesis, not established fact. The Pope’s reasoning was philosophically sophisticated, anticipating what’s now called the underdetermination thesis in philosophy of science. Any given set of observations could be explained by multiple theories. Tycho Brahe’s geo-heliocentric model accounted for Galileo’s telescope discoveries without requiring a moving Earth. How could Galileo claim certainty?

Galileo proceeded to publish a book that clearly—though not explicitly—argued for heliocentrism as physical truth, while making his opponents sound like idiots. Worse, he put the Pope’s own philosophical argument into the mouth of a character named Simplicio, which in Italian sounds exactly like “simpleton.” Whether this was deliberate mockery or catastrophic misjudgment, the effect was the same: a personal insult to a Pope whose power was already diminished by the Reformation and who was fighting the Thirty Years’ War. The trial of Galileo was launched at the exact moment the war reached crisis point. Coincidence?

The trial focused not on whether heliocentrism was true, but on whether Galileo had violated his agreement with the Church. It was, in essence, a breach of contract case. And because this was the Counter-Reformation, it had a subtext about authority that matters more than the astronomy: who gets to interpret Scripture? Galileo, in his 1613 letter defending heliocentrism, had used standard Augustinian arguments about scriptural accommodation—God spoke in ways ancient peoples could understand, so the Bible shouldn’t be read as a physics textbook.

This was orthodox theology. But Galileo was a layman instructing the Church how to read the Bible, and that looked uncomfortably Protestant. The conflict wasn’t science versus religion. It was Catholic versus Catholic, in an era when that distinction could get you killed.

Here’s what’s genuinely worth understanding about the Galileo affair: it reveals how institutions process disruptive information. The Church had interpretive tools for reconciling Scripture with natural philosophy—the doctrine of accommodation, the distinction between saving appearances and physical truth. It had procedures for updating when evidence became overwhelming. What it didn’t have was a mechanism for handling a charismatic figure who claimed certainty before the evidence warranted it, while simultaneously appearing to challenge institutional authority during an existential crisis.

The Church’s error wasn’t rejecting science. It was demanding certainty about the wrong things—demanding Galileo prove heliocentrism to a standard the evidence couldn’t yet meet, while simultaneously demanding he defer to institutional authority about matters where evidence should have been determinative. The framework was sophisticated; the application was catastrophic.

Three centuries later, in 1992, Pope John Paul II acknowledged the Church had persecuted Galileo unfairly. The books were removed from the Index of Forbidden Works in 1835. Heliocentrism was officially acceptable in Rome by 1822. The gears of institutional error-correction turn slowly, but in the West, they do turn.

The real Galileo story isn’t about religion suppressing science. It’s about what happens when personal politics, institutional anxiety, and premature certainty collide during a civilizational crisis. Which, come to think of it, might be why everyone keeps invoking him.