Trump's Social Network Launches in March? Taylor Swift Plans Secret Album for 5 Years? Canadian Genocide Proved to be Completely Fake. "The Office" Leads Re-Unite. (The Five for 01/28/22)
Hey, welcome to The Five.
It’s Friday, so let’s dive into Culture & Commentary.
[one]
Former President Donald Trump's upcoming social network, TRUTH Social, will see the light of day soon…and there may be a fair bit of censorship built in.
When TRUTH Social launches later this quarter, the Trump Media & Technology Group social media platform will already have stringent content moderation practices in place to ensure it is a "family-friendly" online community, company CEO Devin Nunes told Fox Business.
Both Nunes and former President Donald Trump separately have told Fox Business that TRUTH Social is expected to be up and running by the end of the first quarter of 2022. Nunes told Fox Business that the company is on track
Despite the accusations of Trump’s detractors, the man’s ability to gain and hold attention is…well, it’s The Donald, Kanye and Taylor Swift in a league of their own (more on those two in story 3).
If Trump conquered TV (both as a host, and by driving ratings to cable news during his time in the White House) and almost singlehandedly brought Twitter back to life (Fortune makes a pretty good case for this), I don’t doubt he has the star power to launch a successful social network—distrust of Facebook is exceptionally high, and millions of people miss reading (and/or hate reading) DJT’s legendary/infamous tweets.
Truth Social has a real shot, but this early report feels like more of the same.
In the beginning, Jack Dorsey described Twitter as “the free speech wing of the free speech party.”
This new Trump network’s bots may censor content I don’t like…but I still don’t believe in censoring speech.
The site claims to be aiming to be the most “family friendly” social network…but who gets to decide? Who watches the Watchmen?
I keep hoping for places online where free speech is still protected…but Truth Social doesn’t appear to be built around that goal.
But Web3 is coming (can’t explain here, check out this very deep dive).
[two]
This is a crazy one, strap in.
Last year, the story broke of a mass grave outside of a former Catholic School for Canadian First Nations children…allegedly containing the remains of 200 Native minors.
This was all based on a child’s rib being found in the area in the 90’s, and a tooth in a dig in the 2000’s.
A child’s death is horrible…but a single bone does not constitute evidence for mass murder. Anthropologist Sara Bealieu claimed to have “proof” of 200 child graves (a theory quickly debunked, because there were no corpses at all).
But as Winston Churhill said…the lie is halfway around the world before the truth can get it’s pants on.
Nonetheless, on the strength of Beaulieu’s unconfirmed theory, media and government chose to unleash a wave of violence, anti-Catholic sentiment and national shaming that lasted from the beginning of June through fall of 2021, damaging the reputations of both Canada and the Catholic Church.
Both the government and the media took for granted that the soil disturbances picked up by Beaulieu’s radar were graves. They assumed the potential graves contained the bodies of children. They assumed that these children had been buried in a clandestine manner, they assumed their deaths were caused by abuse or other criminal behavior, and they concluded — without any evidence whatsoever — that the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, who had run the school since 1893, were complicit in 200 deaths and covered them up.
What followed was completely irrational. Media began describing the site as a “mass grave”, evoking horrific images of heaped bodies. But Beaulieu said she had detected 200 separate “targets,” indicating individual excavations!
Sixty-five churches were vandalized, burned or desecrated in what many applauded outright as acts of justified protest — “Burn them all!” — while politicians shrugged off the anti-Christian violence as “understandable.”
Despite the fact that Sara Bealieu is a professional who clearly lied to the public, she’s faced no consequences, which is a cultural hallmark of Wokeness, long before the term was coined. One of the most blatant examples is the Crown Height riot of 1991, in which 29-year-old Yankel Rosenbaum was killed by a mob, simply for being a religious Jew at the wrong place and time.
According to sworn testimony of Efraim Lipkind, Sharpton screamed “kill Jews” more than once, and led the mob that flipped cars and attacked bystanders, resulting in the death of Rosenbaum.
Wokeness causes real harm…like anti-Catholic violence, anti-Semitic riots and outright murder…and all too often gets a hall pass in the modern legal system.
(Worth Noting: The New York Times reported on this false story, and still hasn’t issued a correction).
[three]
A screengrab from a 2020 music video from Taylor Swift. The graffiti includes the names of all of her albums, plus the word “Karma” written twice.
Has Taylor Swift been hinting at a secret album…for five years…and also lost her ever-loving mind…in the same week?
Two things can be true at once. In my opinion, Taylor Swift is the best songwriter of my generation (Millennial) and also a complete narcissist.
She gave us further evidence to the latter by unloading both barrels on Damon Albern (Blur, Gorillaz), over something he didn't actually say…
Albarn was quoted out-of-context in a tweet that implied Swift doesn’t write her own songs, and Taylor lost it…apparently without actually reading the source material.
It’s a bummer that’s the headline that dominated headlines this week, as news broke that Swift is allegedly planning to release a shelved album from 2016, that she's been hunting at for years, allegedly put on hold after Swift's high profile feud with Kanye West and Kim Kardashian.
(Swift seems to have a burning hatred for West…which is somewhat ironic, given that the pair share off-the-charts musical talent…and a similar mental instability).
There’s no reason for me to re-cap what Buzzfeed has already written, but the short version is that Taylor allegedly shelved her sixth album, Karma, to write the revenge-fantasy diatribe Reputation (in my opinion, the only Taylor Swift album that’s not worth listening to).
If Swift really has been dropping hints for a half decade on an album that does release this year…it will be one of the all time best hat tricks in music history.
[four]
Public support for labor unions is at a 40 year high, but fewer laborers want to join, due to the overt political nature many modern unions have adopted being at odds with their would-be members.
The Washington Examiner reports:
Just go to the AFL-CIO’s website, and you’ll see web pages devoted to climate change, immigration amnesty, and racial justice. Higher wages and better working conditions are no longer the top priority for the AFL-CIO anymore. Drag queen happy hours and delta smelt are now equally important.
Workers have noticed this. Asked to identify the top reason why they don’t want to join a union, 75% of non-union workers identified “union political involvement” as the top reason they did not want to join.
According to the Pew Research Center, just 6% of adults identify with the “Progressive Left” wing of the Democratic Party.
[five]
As always, let’s head into the weekend with a pop culture roundup
John Krazinski and Steve Carrell of The Office fame are reuniting for a movie Krazinski is directing entitled IF. Phoebe Waller-Bridge (Fleabag, No Time to Die), Fiona Shaw (Harry Potter, True Detective), Cailey Fleming (The Walking Dead, Star Wars: The Force Awakens) and Louis Gosset Jr. (Roots, Boardwalk Empire). Details on the plot are TBD, but that’s a heck of a cast.
Netflix is picking up where the history channel left off with Vikings: Valhalla, set roughly 100 years after the original show, and will follow legendary explorer Lief Erickson as a lead character. The original show (on the History Channel, ironically) played more fast and loose with the facts, but Netflix promises to stick closer to the historical record.
From the official synopsis: “As tensions between the Vikings and the English royals reach a bloody breaking point and as the Vikings themselves clash over their conflicting Christian and pagan beliefs, these three Vikings begin an epic journey that will take them across oceans and through battlefields, from Kattegat to England and beyond, as they fight for survival and glory.”
Check out the first trailer here. Season 1 drops Tuesday, February 25th.
Director Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth, Pacific Rim) will debut a new animated version of Pinnochio.
Cate Blanchett (Lord of the Rings, The Aviator), Finn Wolfhard (Stranger Things, It Part 1), David Bradley (Algus Finch in Harry Potter), Ewan McGregor (Trainspotting, Moulin Rouge!), Ron Pearlman (Sons of Anarchy, Hellboy) and Tilda Swinton (The Chronicles of Narnia, Michael Clayton) lead a talent-packed cast list.
Catch it on Netflix this December. See the very short (but amazing) teaser.
Worth noting that Peacemaker, an action/comedy about a guy who’s so in love with peace he’s willing to butcher everyone to attain it, now has the highest Rotten Tomatoes score of any DCEU property (the loosely linked series of characters based on DC Comics). I haven’t seen it yet, but unseating Wonder Woman is no small feat.
Peacemaker is also, unbelievably, a bigger streaming show than the latest Disney+ Star Wars offering Boba Fett (which I am watching…and is amazing).
A sequel to the hit Star Wars game Jedi: Fallen Order is on the way, as well as two additional Star Wars games in the works (both first person shooters). For the most part, Star Wars games have been panned as cheap schlock to make an extra buck off a blockbuster franchise. If you’re looking for 80’s nostalgia with a controller in your hands…the Indiana Jones game on XBOX may still hit this year, but the exact release date is TBD.
MUSIC NEWS: Whatever your opinion is of Kanye West…the man is impossible to ignore. In the month of February, a three-part documentary on West’s life will hit Netflix (mired in it’s own controversy over Kanye demanding editing rights—for someone else’s film), along with a new album, Donda 2 (a sequel to the original Donda, released in August, and the expanded edition—released in November), which will drop on 02/22/22.
The album will release in conjunction with Kanye’s fashion line Yeezy x Skid Row, a fashion brand that employs the homeless in L.A. The fashion show will feature the homeless modeling the clothing they’re making.
Finally, West is up for five awards at the Grammy’s, also in February.
The Chicago native will pack all that into the shortest month of the year.
MUSIC/MY PICK: I was 18 when the planes hit the Twin Towers, and I was more than willing to enter military service at that time.
However, a birth defect (an extra rib) made me in eligible to put on a military uniform.
Not something I could control (obviously), but I’ve never quite recovered from the sense of guilt that I didn’t follow my grandfather and great uncles path straight to boot camp after an attack hit American soil.
Kyle Nix (best known as the violinist in The Turnpike Troubadours) reflects on a similar conundrum in “Manifesto,” in which he wrestles the service of his grandfather (WWII) and father (Vietnam), compared with his own life as a touring fiddle player.
“Granddad saw the Nazis fall
In 1945, France
They went back to Germany when the prisoners were free
And made the townsfolk tour the camps
I played Amazing Grace at the First Baptist Church
On a fiddle he built from spare parts
The vets blew taps and they lowered him down
Then I broke into "Old Joe Clark"
Hell, what have I ever done?
My Grandpa fought the Nazis and won
All I do is bow bluegrass & blues
I hope you like it some.”
The song ends with Kyle talking to a recruiter after 9/11, and his dad swiping the phone away and hanging up, telling Kyle “your family’s done it’s time.”
On one hand, I’ve got nothing to feel guilty about…my fate was sealed when I was born with that extra rib.
On the other, it’s tough to avoid the twinge of mental anguish that results in being from the lineage of the men who saved the world in 1945, and not following in their footsteps.
Never heard anybody sing about that until Kyle Nix.
Until the next one,
-sth