Proof Vigilante Violence is Just Getting Started, Superman Signals Major Vibe Shift in Culture, College Professors Terrified of Their Students (The Five for 12/20/24)
Hey, welcome to The Five, a publication about the stories that matter.
This Culture & Commentary issue will be the final “regular” publication of 2024…but I will drop a “best of the year” list before the ball drops on 12/31, with my take on the top movies/TV/books/music/podcasts.
Have a safe and happy celebration. And get yourself to church, even if you haven’t darkened the door of one in years.
With that being said, let’s dive in one last time in 2024…
[one]
As people continue to cheer on the United Healthcare Killer (who appeared in court today), more copycats are popping up, as I predicted last week. Culturally, there is even more incentive for the unstable to go kill someone, as Luigi Mangione was greeted with the cheers of adoring female fans as he was ushered into the courthouse.
Another politically-left-of-center killer tried to take out far-right streamer Nick Fuentes last weekend. Fuentes is an open white supremacist, and I can’t stand the guy…but we can’t just murder people because they have bad ideas…for a lot of reasons, but one of those reasons people with bad ideas can be persuaded to change their minds. However, if we make a person like Fuentes a martyr, we only strengthen his movement.
The killer showed up to Fuentes’ home in Berwyn, IL with a pistol, a crossbow and three homemade bombs (side note…bro, pick a lane…your plan was far too complicated), and killed two dogs while trying to evade police. He was eventually shot and killed by local officers. Like Luigi, 24-year-old John Lyons…also has fans.
Finally, an illegal immigrant from Guatamala set a woman on fire in the New York Subway today…she died of her injuries. This is the rare case when I’m not even going to link to the video, it’s so horrific.
This horrible incident is only a few hours old, but my guess is that the arsonist/murderer will be praised by somebody for “standing up” for illegals.
We’re now in social contagion territory…every incident of senseless violence is going to inspire some other mentally unstable incel until something interrupts the process. For more on this, I highly reccomend Gaad Saad’s book The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas are Killing Common Sense.
[two]
The internet was set ablaze when the trailer for Superman was released to nearly universal praise…of a very old-fashioned, 1950’s style version of the character.
Paul Anleitner of the podcast Deep Talks predicted a pretty major vibe shift with this film, due to culture moving from postmodernism to metamodernism.
And it's instantly going to make the cynical, Dark Superman archetypes, you know, the Homelander types. It's going to instantly make those feel as passe as skinny jeans all of a sudden feel. Now, I really actually liked Man of Steel. I really liked Zack Snyder's Batman vs. Superman. I think it was really misunderstood.
When that movie came out, though, Popular culture in America wasn't ready for another Christopher Reeves esque truth, justice, and the American way Superman. We just weren't. That version of Superman couldn't be cast in that particular cultural climate back in 2016 because we weren't ready. We were still deeply enmeshed in this postmodern cynicism.
Postmodernism is a philosophical and ideological movement that challenges the legitimacy of overarching guiding stories or meta narratives. It challenges the Those stories and it calls into question universal notions of truth and justice. It calls into question views about God, especially those stories about God that are told by the cultures in power.
Clark and Lois's boss at the Daily Planet, Perry, he regularly tells Clark, you know, in Batman v Superman, he's regularly telling him, you know, those Smallville values of Honesty, integrity, hard work, truth, and justice. Those are ideas from the past. They don't fit in America anymore. And that was 2016, but things have changed since 2016.
I think you see a recurring pattern. That when we kill God, when we kill Superman, when Superman's no longer around, that vacuum of power isn't just left as an empty vacuum. Something else comes in to fill that void. I think what we've discovered since the 2014 to 2020 cycle of hyper deconstruction, intense deconstructions, activist culture, as I think we've discovered that the gods that have come to fill that vacuum of power are gods that we like way less than Superman, symbolically way less than the traditional religious stories, values, and morals that we've come accustomed to here in the West.
Keep in mind, this dropped BEFORE the trailer, which fulfilled his prediction almost perfectly.
Pop culture is created by individual people with their own ideas…but it also tends to follow cultural trends. This is a perfect example of that phenomenon…people are tired of the soulless irony of the 2010’s…and yearning for some kind of hope again.
If you find this interesting, I can’t recommend Paul’s podcast, Deep Talks, highly enough.
[three]
Well, this is crazy. Turns out professors are pretty afraid of upsetting their students, and are changing their academic work to avoid controversy.
87% of faculty reported finding it difficult to have an open and honest conversation on campus about at least one hot button political topic.
About 1 in 7 faculty members (14%) reported being disciplined or threatened with discipline for their teaching, research, academic discussions, or off-campus speech.
35% reported toning down their written work to avoid controversy. Shockingly, this is nearly four times the 9% of faculty who said this when the same question was asked of social scientists in the 1950s.
From the Foundation for Individual Rights (FIRE)
“The McCarthy era is considered a low point in the history of American academic freedom with witchhunts, loyalty tests, and blacklisting in universities across the country,” said FIRE’s Manager of Polling and Analytics Nathan Honeycutt. “That today’s scholars feel less free to speak their minds than in the 1950s is a blistering indictment of the current state of academic freedom and discourse.”
Faculty reported the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as the most challenging topic to have an open and honest discussion about, with 70% experiencing difficulty discussing it. Other hard-to-discuss issues include racial inequality (51%), transgender rights (49%), and affirmative action (47%). Only about 13% of faculty reported feeling comfortable discussing all 19 of the hot button issues asked about by FIRE.
Furthermore, most faculty said that a conservative would not fit in at their department:
So much for higher ed being all about free speech…
[four]
A movie about fictional abuse…has resulted in a lawsuit about real (alleged) abuse. Earlier this year, Blake Lively (Gossip Girl, The Town) starred in It Ends with Us, a movie about an abused woman. She has now filed a lawsuit for sexual harrassment against her co-star. Also, Lively’s friendship with Taylor Swift comes into play…it gets weird.
Amid the bombshell allegations made in Blake Lively's lawsuit against "It Ends With Us" co-star and director Justin Baldoni was a tidbit of information about how the actor allegedly planned to exploit Lively's close relationship with pop star Taylor Swift.
According to the lawsuit obtained by Fox News Digital, a "Scenario Planning Document" was sent from a hired crisis management team to Baldoni, producer of the film Jamey Heath and others, which laid out three likely scenarios that Lively and her team might utilize and, conversely, how Baldoni's team would respond if she chose to "make her grievances public."
Rumors of an on-set feud between Lively and Baldoni percolated for months, amplified during the film's press tour, although neither star ever said anything at the time.
Lively's attorney claims in the filing that Baldoni's hired crisis PR manager, Melissa Nathan, distributed the document on Aug. 2, 2024, "to advance misleading counternarratives."
One course of action the team could take, as written in the document, would be to "explore planting stories about the weaponization of feminism and how people in BL [Lively]'s circle, like Taylor Swift, have been accused of utilizing these tactics to ‘bully’ into getting what they want."
In a year full of very strange news stories…this still lands towards the top of the heap, as far as strangeness goes. Plan for this to stay into the headlines well into 2025…
[five]
As always, let’s head into the weekend with a pop culture roundup…
OFFICIAL RECCOMENDATION: If you’ve got littles or pre-teens, Sonic 3 is great. Go see it in theaters.
28 Years Later, the decades-in-the-making third movie in that zombie franchise…will get it’s own sequel less than a year after it hits theaters (next summer). 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is headed to the big screen in January 2026. Cool.
Of the three shows telling the story of the Dutton family, 1923 is my favorite. My own great-grandfather was cowboying in Montana in this era, and Harrison Ford (82) and Hellen Mirren (79) are absolutely brilliant as the leads. Now that they’re essentially a pair of Octogenarians, we might be looking at the last major role for each actor.
Season 2 kicks off February 23rd.
Well, Jenna Ortega (Wednesday, Finestkind) and Paul Rudd (Ant-Man, Only Murders in the Building) are driving across a nature preserve for endangered animals…and accidentally kill a unicorn on the highway. It gets weirder from there.
Death of a Unicorn hits theaters in the spring of 2025.
I fell off after a couple seasons of silliness on the Karate Kid spinoff Cobra Kai on Netflix, and didn’t think we needed ANOTHER chapter of the franchise that started as an 80’s cult classic…but bringing in Jackie Chan and the gravitas of traditional Kung-Fu films…this looks cool.
The sparse drums as the only sound affect in the trailer set up Karate Kid: Legends to have a very different tone than what’s come before in the trailer.
[new music]
I had never listened to Sabrina Carpenter before, as this class of Gen Z pop artists are mostly “industry plants,” singers who are essentially created in a lab by a record label, then given an “organic” rise to stardom that’s carefully curated industry execs.
But getting a Tiny Desk concert…typically is a badge of quality, and Sabrina wrote for the album with Jack Antonoff. Best known as a Taylor Swift collaborator, Antonoff’s own band, Bleachers, is one of the best outfits in pop at the moment, and he’s co-written hits with Lana Del Rey, Lorde, fun., Janelle Monae and more. I haven’t listened to any of Sabrina’s studio recordings…but this live set, which features a pretty impressive backing band, shows why Antonoff picked her to work with…Sabrina can sing live, and she apparently can write (or at least co-write) pretty memorable hooks and lyrics beyond the typical FM radio fodder…which is probably why she’s up for six Grammy Awards in 2025.
[read & learn]
Even if you don’t have someone with Borderline or Narcisistic Personality Disorder in your family…you do at work. Or church. Stop Caretaking The Borderline or Narcissist is a heck of a good book on dealing with…very difficult people. It’s a good read, particularly around the holidays when we’re jammed together with people who may have serious mental illness.
Until the next one,
-sth