VEEP TV: JD slays in 'View' ratings coup



Vice President JD Vance gave “The View” plenty to chew on last week. Facts. Knowledge. Arguments that didn’t require a tinfoil hat.

The Republican did something else during his trip to the far, far-left showcase. He gave the gals a ratings boost. The show’s 3.3 million viewers represented the highest “View” tally since 2024.

81-year-old Rod Stewart recently canceled a few shows due to illness. When he returned to the stage, he needed oxygen to get through a Utah performance.

That makes sense, since the ABC showcase rarely offers opposing views from the right and Vance has a reputation for being a thoughtful guest.

Even “View” haters wanted to see what went down.

So will this open the floodgates for more right-leaning guests on the show?

Of course not. In fact, co-host Joy Behar took heat from her fellow panelists for being friendly with Vance. Plus, a steady stream of smart, thoughtful conservatives would expose “The View” audience to sane opinions that clash with the show’s conspiratorial blather.

That ratings boost sure was nice, but you can bet ABC won’t let it happen again …

Super stupor

You can’t say Milly Alcock isn’t committed to “the bit.” And by that, we mean being as woke as possible while promoting her new film, “Supergirl.”

She previously trashed Christian dads and played the victim card over viewers who allegedly objectify her physique. That drew swift comparisons to Rachel Zegler, whose woke musings in the run-up to “Snow White’s” release built enough bad buzz that the film never recovered.

The live-action update lost a reported $170 million for Team Disney.

Alcock is walking, nay running, in Zegler’s footsteps, even as box office predictions suggest “Supergirl” will lose millions, too. This week, she did it again.

“I think that [Supergirl is] a really great representation of what a modern woman can be. She can be strong, she can be tough, she can be messy. And I love how this film doesn’t center around any sort of love or romance or anything like that at all. She has such resilience — and I think that [the LGBTQ+] community is so, so resilient. I’m really honored that they can connect to her.”

She later declared that her Supergirl would be bisexual.

That sound you hear is Zegler’s agent popping open a bottle of champagne ...

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Mandel Ngan/Scott Olson/Anadolu/Getty Images

Bourne that way

Wait, did Kathleen Kennedy get a new job?

The woman many blame for the demise of the “Star Wars” franchise is no longer with Lucasfilm or Disney. She still set a curious standard for woke storytelling, from her “the force is female” mantra to trashing iconic characters like Luke Skywalker.

Even “South Park” mocked her “Star Wars” reign: “Put a chick in it! Make her lame and gay!”

Kennedy is not attached to the “Bourne” franchise, but that popular saga may be taking a very Kennedy-like approach to its future.

The InSneider reports that Zendaya is in play to replace franchise star Matt Damon in the saga. It wouldn’t be the first “Bourne” film sans Damon. Jeremy Renner starred in “The Bourne Legacy,” a 2012 film that didn’t light up the box office as expected ($113 million stateside).

It’s a potential gender AND race swap, two staples of the woke Hollywood era. Zendaya is a young, talented star, but physically she looks like she would struggle to open an aspirin bottle, let alone tackle an army of thugs.

We’ll have to see if this is a trial balloon of a story or signs that the Kennedy-ization of Hollywood continues …

Rock till you drop

The Who sang, “Hope I die before I get old” on “My Generation” back in 1965. Now, some aging singers are proving how hard it is to keep rocking into their golden years.

First, 81-year-old Rod Stewart recently canceled a few shows due to illness. When he returned to the stage, he needed oxygen to get through a Utah performance. Then, Lionel Ritchie, 77, left the stage early on the first stop of his current tour in St. Paul, Minnesota, after feeling dizzy on stage.

Some stars simply refuse to retire. Others love performing so much they can’t imagine calling it a career. There’s something noble about older stars giving their all to the fans, especially those who are roughly the same age as them.

We want them to be forever young, but their mortality is a stark reminder of our own. Perhaps that’s why the Who’s 2025 North American tour, the band’s farewell, was called “This Song Is Over.”

REVIEW: 'Supergirl'

Movie genres run out of steam. It has ever been thus. So many Westerns were made in the first half-century of the American cinema that they still outnumber any other genre, but they're a footnote now. Gangster movies were all the rage in the 1930s, films noir in the late 1940s, musicals from the Depression to the swinging '60s, and teen comedies in the 1980s and '90s. They seem to settle in forever… and then they fade. So too with the dominant genre of the 21st century, the superhero picture.

The post REVIEW: 'Supergirl' appeared first on .

Give He-Man credit for mocking the unmockable



When I first heard Hollywood was making a new He-Man movie, I posted on X: “No one ever at any time: We need a movie about the origins of He-Man.”

Having now seen it, I owe He-Man an apology.

Unlike Skeletor, who openly embraces being the bad guy, the petty tyrants of institutional DEI culture believe they are heroes. That self-righteousness makes them funny.

What I did not realize was that America did not need another superhero origin story. It needed a movie willing to mock woke HR departments, DEI workshops, and the corporate language-police culture that has made millions of office workers stare quietly at the clock while wondering what a lobotomy feels like.

On that front, He-Man delivers.

If that were all the movie did, it would deserve some recognition. For years, Americans have been subjected to endless lectures about privilege, bias, microaggressions, decolonization, anti-racism, allyship, and whatever new buzzword somebody invented during a three-day corporate leadership retreat. Entire industries sprang up around teaching normal people how dangerous normal people are.

For years, almost nobody was allowed to make fun of it.

Then along came He-Man.

“Masters of the Universe” gave me flashbacks to the glory days of “The Office,” when Michael Scott stumbled through diversity training sessions while desperately trying to impress Mr. Brown. Back then, workplace comedy could still recognize that HR departments were ridiculous.

In the two decades since “The Office” debuted, much of that humor disappeared. The joke was no longer that corporate bureaucracy was absurd. The joke became us.

Employees learned to speak in carefully rehearsed phrases. Meetings became exercises in virtue-signaling. Every disagreement became a “learning opportunity.” Every awkward interaction became a possible microaggression. White men were told they were simultaneously responsible for every historical injustice and forbidden from speaking too much during discussions about them.

Then enters Adam.

Yes, He-Man himself.

A blond, tanned, muscular hero — the kind of character Hollywood spent years assuring us could never again carry a movie without apologizing for existing.

RELATED: ‘Citizen Vigilante’: Outlaw director takes unflinching look at migrant violence

Uwe Boll Films

The movie also does something modern writers often seem incapable of doing: It gives us a villain who admits he is a villain.

At one point, Adam offers Skeletor what modern audiences have come to expect: an opportunity to explain his evil through childhood trauma, systemic oppression, bullying, or some tragic backstory.

Skeletor’s response is essentially: Nope. I’m just bad.

Imagine that.

A bad guy who does not blame society. A villain who does not attribute his choices to historical forces, generational trauma, or someone else’s privilege. Just an old-fashioned villain who enjoys being evil.

Hollywood has not given us many of those lately, maybe not since Edmund in “King Lear.” Sorry. I could not help myself.

But the funniest parts of the movie are not the battles. They are Adam’s experiences working in HR.

One scene features Adam listening to a woman explain that “her truth” conflicts with another person’s “truth.” Adam’s solution is the vague, therapeutic language now standard in modern workplaces: less talking, more listening.

Anyone who has survived mandatory workplace training recognizes the environment immediately.

Then we meet Suzie.

Suzie is Adam’s boss on Earth, and she may be the most accurate movie villain of the past decade.

On the surface, she is cheerful, supportive, and endlessly concerned about feelings. Beneath that surface, she is manipulative, controlling, and ruthless.

We first see her leading what appears to be a DEI-style workshop about consensual listening and emotional safety. Like Adam, the audience immediately begins fighting off sleep.

Later, after catching him looking for his magical sword online during work hours, she summons him to her office.

Not asks. Commands.

During their conversation, she speaks to him with the patronizing tone many corporate managers have perfected. Everything is framed around feelings. Conflict makes her uncomfortable. The workplace must be safe. Communication matters.

Then, for a brief moment, the mask slips. The threat appears. Power reveals itself.

Almost immediately, it disappears beneath another avalanche of therapeutic jargon.

Anyone who has worked in a large corporation, government office, or university has met some version of Suzie.

RELATED: The left’s icons keep face-planting in public

Scott Kowalchyk/CBS/Getty Images

Most of us have never fought a skeleton warrior bent on conquering the universe. Many of us, however, have sat through meetings where nonsense slogans are presented as profound wisdom. We have endured meetings where employees are told not to judge people by race while being instructed to interpret every interaction through race and blame it all on “whiteness.” We have watched everyone pretend the emperor’s new DEI initiative is fully clothed.

What makes these scenes work is that they expose something deeper than bureaucratic absurdity: hypocrisy.

Unlike Skeletor, who openly embraces being the bad guy, the petty tyrants of institutional DEI culture believe they are heroes. They imagine themselves correcting history, advancing justice, and educating the unenlightened through mandatory workshops, safe-space discussions, and land acknowledgments.

That self-righteousness makes them funny.

A philosophical essay can explain why hypocrisy is dangerous. A policy paper can document its effects. Comedy can do something neither can accomplish.

Comedy teaches people to laugh at it with scorn.

And once people start laughing, the spell begins to break.

The movie ends with what appears to be a setup for a sequel. Fine. Give us “He-Man 2.”

But let’s hope America never gets a sequel to the DEI-decolonization-anti-racism regime that dominated so much of public life over the last decade.

Let’s laugh it into history.

And then, if there is time, let’s talk about how the entire He-Man story is really just another version of the mono-myth hero’s journey.

Sorry. That is the religious studies professor in me.

'Citizen Vigilante': Outlaw director takes unflinching look at migrant violence



You can’t accuse director Uwe Boll of having thin skin.

Film critics have been brutal to the German filmmaker behind “Rampage,” “House of the Dead,” and “Postal.” He once challenged his harshest critics to a boxing match to settle the score.

‘If I have six neo-Nazis raping a migrant girl, there would be no issues. Unfortunately, the criminal statistics show the [opposite].’

He knows he’ll never be an awards season darling, so when a reviewer dubbed him a “right-wing fascist” over his latest film, he shook it off like a glancing uppercut.

He saw those comments coming a mile away.

Culture war TKO

Even by Boll’s pugnacious standards, “Citizen Vigilante” is a culture war TKO. Armie Hammer, working his way back after personal revelations crushed his career, stars as a man fed up with migrant violence in Europe.

So he decides to do something about it. Think “Death Wish” with an agenda no Hollywood studio would touch.

Boll tells Blaze Lifestyle the aforementioned reviewer has every right to dislike “Citizen Vigilante,” out in the U.S. today, but he takes issue with that political slam.

“What is right-wing in saying rapists should not get off the hook?” Boll asked. Critics of unfettered illegal immigration point to high-profile cases where violent migrant offenders were spared harsh sentences.

Pardoning predators

The zeitgeist is in Boll’s corner in more ways than one.

“Citizen Vigilante” arrives days after a shocking U.K. rape gang inquiry report detailed chronic abuse across Great Britain. Migrant crime isn’t relegated to the U.K., an issue Boll explores in his violent, politically incorrect film.

For Boll, hearing stories of sexual predators getting slaps on the wrist proved bad enough. Reading reports of judges excusing the violence based on a perpetrator’s brutal youth enraged him.

“Newspapers called them poor, traumatized people who grew up with violence ... but who gives a s**t? ... Maybe they’re traumatized. Why are we importing them?” he asked.

“I have nothing against migrants — if they follow the rules and the law,” he added, accusing European news outlets of diminishing statistics tied to migrant crime.

“I have no words for it. ... It’s the most absurd thing in my lifetime,” the 60-year-old filmmaker said.

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swiftboatproject.com/x.com/weekend_bidens

Unflinching violence

“Citizen Vigilante” lets Boll respond to those heartbreaking news stories sans filter. Hammer’s character seeks justice when the courts fail to dole out what he thinks is sufficient punishment.

The on-screen violence is unflinching.

“It’s the only movie out there that shows brutally the situation,” he said, noting that he included a shocking murder in the film’s opening scene to highlight the security concerns citizens face.

He’s also angry that his home country refused to rate his film and, more recently, banned it from theaters for allegedly promoting vigilante behavior. The ratings decision boils down to politics, he alleged.

“If I have six neo-Nazis raping a migrant girl, there would be no issues. Unfortunately, the criminal statistics show the [opposite],” he said.

He said he appealed the ratings decision to three separate guilds — directors, writers, and producers.

“I’m a member for 30 years. ... Nobody even answered. Dead silence,” he said.

As for promoting violence, Boll said the film’s context drew his homeland’s ire, not the on-screen mayhem.

“Any Jason Statham movie would incite violence [too],” he argued, noting the action star’s penchant for heroes who take the law into their own hands.

“If [British Prime Minister] Keir Starmer sees ["Citizen Vigilante"] he will maybe put an arrest warrant out on me,” Boll said, perhaps tongue in cheek. Perhaps not.

Boll’s blacklist

Germany’s banishment wasn’t the only obstacle he faced while preparing “Citizen Vigilante” for its theatrical run. The film’s director of photography refused to be credited on the project, saying it might cost him future jobs.

Boll said Croatian officials offered him tax rebates to shoot “Citizen Vigilante” in the country, but the rebates were rescinded mid-production.

Hollywood has been abuzz with talk of free speech and alleged censorship by the Trump administration. Boll said he hasn’t gotten support from any Hollywood artists, and his fellow citizens aren’t much better.

“In Germany they’re all hanging onto [film] subsidies. ... They’re all very careful,” he said, noting that a few actors reached out privately.

“You’re totally right, but don’t name me,” he recalled of their messages.

Blind casting

Boll isn’t just critical of the migration issue. He’s that rare storyteller who doesn’t pledge allegiance to DEI policies in the arts.

“I cast the way I should cast, not like I need X amount of Asians or X amount of blacks. ... I hire people based on their qualifications, ... not based if you’re a lesbian transgender Asian. ... That’s how it has to be.”

Hammer’s character in “Citizen Vigilante” may reflect a cinematic antihero that dates back to Clint Eastwood’s “Dirty Harry” days in the early 1970s. Boll had little interest in deifying his film’s judge, jury, and executioner.

“He’s not this white knight guy. ... He’s a loner. He’s also able to do the actions he’s doing ... to execute them properly. ... That’s a more realistic approach,” he said. “Audiences should discuss it for themselves. ... Is he going too far?”

The Audacity: Obama Slams America's Fixation on Wealth and Fame Ahead of Star-Studded Launch Party for $850M Shrine to Himself

Barack Obama wants the American people to stop caring so much about personal wealth and celebrity status. Speaking at a private stakeholder reception for the $850 million Obama Presidential Center, which opens to the public on Friday, the former president complained that "salt-of-the-earth, bedrock people" were being screwed over by nefarious elites consumed by greed and vanity.

The post The Audacity: Obama Slams America's Fixation on Wealth and Fame Ahead of Star-Studded Launch Party for $850M Shrine to Himself appeared first on .

Masters Of The Universe Is A Fun Throwback To When Good Guys Were Good And Bad Guys Were Bad

Besides its anti-woke themes, Masters of the Universe is one of the few modern movies that seems to actually be having fun. It understands what kind of movie it is and embraces it.

The left’s icons keep face-planting in public



As their cultural icons fall, leftists cannot accept reality or responsibility. The reality is simple: The market for their increasingly radical beliefs is shrinking. The responsibility is theirs. They moved far away from the American public and then blamed the public for refusing to follow.

So the left does what it always does. It refuses to blame its fallen icons. It refuses to change its beliefs. Instead, it turns its icons into martyrs.

The left makes martyrs of the people and institutions falling from their pedestals. That is easier than admitting the left was wrong.

The latest martyr is Scott Pelley, a former correspondent for CBS’ “60 Minutes.” According to the Associated Press, Pelley accused one of his bosses of “murdering” the show and said “she has no qualifications for her job.” He then reportedly turned on others, saying, “You have slender qualifications for this job.”

Page Six’s Hollywood section put the episode more bluntly: “‘Poison Pelley’: Scott Pelley’s tirade against new ‘60 Minutes’ boss latest example of respected CBS journo’s ‘diva’ behavior.”

Pelley told the New York Times on Sunday that CBS News had lost its way.

“We have people who’ve been installed in these jobs who, through no fault of their own, have no experience in television,” he said. “They don’t know what they’re doing. And there’s a subtle political bias that I’ve never seen at ‘60 Minutes’ before, or at CBS News before. So that is my hope: a return to sanity.”

Pelley is right about one thing. CBS News has never had a “subtle political bias.” The bias has always been obvious and leftward, as AllSides’ media bias rating makes clear.

His elevation to martyr status joins a long and growing list.

Network news did not need Scott Pelley to damage itself. It was already doing that quite well. According to Gallup polling in 2025, only 28% of Americans had a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in mass media. In February, Pew Research found that 57% of Americans had low confidence in journalists to act in the public’s best interest.

That helps explain why NBC News cut loose MSNBC, why MSNBC tried a major rebrand and cut salaries and staff, and why CNN underwent another major overhaul in 2025. These outlets did not suffer because America suddenly became too stupid to appreciate them. They suffered because Americans understood them too well.

Hollywood tells the same story. “Supergirl” is a super flop, another link in the industry’s chain of progressive pandering. It was short on plot and long on marketing budget. The marketing could not overcome the product. And if the force-feeding of ideology were not enough, the film’s star insulted the prospective audience before viewers had a chance to walk out.

“Supergirl” is symptomatic of Hollywood’s superhero genre and of the larger industry. Both now treat entertainment as beneath them. A movie is no longer a movie. It is a vehicle for indoctrinating supposedly backward Americans who can absorb the left coast’s “higher values” only through metaphor and spandex.

RELATED: ‘Supergirl’ Milly Alcock's most fearsome foe? Christian dads

David Jon/Getty Images/Warner Bros. Pictures

Late-night television offers the same lesson through Stephen Colbert. Or rather, it did. Colbert is no longer on television and for good reason. He was not funny. His show was too expensive. Like Pelley, he repeatedly insulted his bosses. Now, the left lionizes him as a brave man who stood up to President Trump.

Colbert was to late night what “Supergirl” is to Hollywood: a symptom of a larger disease. What was true of him individually is true of late-night television generally. It became another forum for the left to talk to itself while demanding that the rest of America listen.

Print media is no better. The Washington Post is suffering the same fate as its brethren in film and television: declining readership, mounting financial losses, and staff cuts. As with TV, what can be said of the Post can be said of newspapers generally. Their audience shrank because their contempt grew.

In all these cases, the left has transformed icons into martyrs because it refuses to accept reality. In Pelley’s case, the reality is especially obvious. Publicly lashing out at your bosses is showboating stupidity. Everyone knows this. Everyone follows that basic rule except the left, which believes its heroes deserve a different standard.

In the other cases, the left refuses to accept the market’s verdict. Life does not operate as a charity or a government program. Charities can treat losses as proof of need. Governments can tax and borrow their way around failure. Markets are less sentimental. When audiences stop watching, buying, reading, or subscribing, the message is clear.

RELATED: Propagandist Stephen Colbert gets final jab from Trump on the way out

Kent NISHIMURA/AFP/Getty Images

The left hates that message because it hates markets. Markets reveal what people actually want. They do not care what cultural elites believe people should want.

That is why the left prefers government and bureaucracy. Regulation can soften market verdicts. Subsidies can delay them. Institutional capture can disguise them. But none of it can make Americans love products they have already rejected.

The left also refuses to accept responsibility for the collapse of its icons. America’s left has become more radical, and the rest of the country has not followed. To admit that would require admitting failure.

So the left makes martyrs of the people and institutions falling from their pedestals. That is easier than admitting the left was wrong. It is less painful than asking why so many Americans stopped listening.

But the answer is not hard to find. The icons fell because the public fell away.

Joy-less 'View' doing just fine; will Behar-besting Swisher go from temp to perm?



Better 30-plus years late than never?

Ted Danson committed one of the most outrageous blackface routines ever in 1993. The “Cheers” star was dating Whoopi Goldberg at the time, and the two appeared at the New York Friars Club, a comedians’ hangout.

The tour’s stage visuals included the group’s crow logo dressed as Uncle Sam. The crowd spontaneously began chanting, ‘USA, USA!’

His mission? Roast Goldberg, then a legitimate star and recent Oscar winner for “Ghost.” Except Danson wasn’t, and still isn’t, a stand-up comic. So he went for “performance artist,” dressing in full blackface to riff on interracial couples and related themes.

Regrets, Danson has a few, even though Goldberg helped write his jokes.

“Your intentions do not matter. The impact you have on people is what matters,” he told super woke comic W. Kamau Bell on the latter’s podcast.

The moment never rose to the level of career cancellation. Few stars have worked more than Danson over the decades. He keeps finding long-running TV shows like “The Good Place,” “Becker,” and, most recently, “A Man on the Inside.”

Now, if we can only get Jimmy “Karl Malone” Kimmel canceled ...

No Joy in ‘View’-ville

Did Joy Behar just get Wally Pipped?

Pipp famously played first base for the New York Yankees in the 1920s, but he took a day off to battle a headache issue. His replacement? Lou Gehrig, the “Iron Man” who went on to play 2,130 straight games for the team.

Joy Behar voluntarily stepped aside from “The View” this week to work on her play, “My First Ex-Husband,” set to bow on the West End.

Behar’s blend of ugly banter, misinformation, and ignorance seems impossible to replace, even temporarily.

Enter Kara Swisher, a far-left journalist known for covering the tech beat. And, boy, did she bring it during her “View” debut. She compared Secretary of War Pete Hegseth to a talk show host, suggesting he lacked combat experience.

That ignored Hegseth’s decorated military career, including two Bronze Star Medals, two Army Commendation Medals, and the Joint Commendation Medal.

Later, Swisher said Scott Pelley’s dismissal from “60 Minutes” was an attack on the media, not the fallout from publicly blasting his bosses. Finally, she ran to senatorial hopeful Graham Platner’s defense after the Maine resident’s wife had to bail him out of a gross sexting scandal.

Watch your back, Joy. Swisher is swinging a hot bat in the on-deck circle ...

RELATED: D-Day drama ‘Pressure’ celebrates forgotten values

Alex Bailey/Focus Features

Nothing to Crowe about

You’d think peaking in the 1990s would bring a bit of humility to a band.

Not for the Black Crowes, who broke out in a big way with songs like “She Talks to Angels” and “Jealous Again.” The band is back on the road, but a recent Florida tour stop became a prime example of rake stepping.

The tour’s stage visuals included the group’s crow logo dressed as Uncle Sam. The crowd spontaneously began chanting, “USA, USA!”

Rather than lean into the sentiment or simply smile over fans having a blast, lead singer Chris Robinson lectured them, according to TMZ. From the stage he snarked, “Thanks for the geography lesson. ... I don’t know what you have to be so proud of right now.”

That landed poorly with the crowd, so he doubled down amid the boos and walkouts.

“For those of you f**king booing us, some of us are not afraid. And we most assuredly are not f**king ignorant.”

Here’s guessing his band won’t be playing that Freedom 250 concert, either ...

Quentin unchained

This former video store clerk has had enough of Hollywood dreck, thank you. Except he’s so stuck on his 10th and “final” film that he’s not personally helping matters.

Quentin Tarantino penned a blistering essay this week on the current state of the Hollywood movie. Spoiler alert — it stinks, to paraphrase Jon Lovitz’s “Critic” character.

Since the pandemic, for me anyway, it seems almost impossible for a new movie to come out that I don’t pick to death. Flaws, implausibilities, audience pandering, miscast performers, or just plain stupid s**t usually torpedoes every new movie coming out of the flavorless sausage factory that used to call itself Hollywood.

Yikes.

Tarantino has pledged to stop making movies after he completes his 10th film. He seems stuck on number nine, following the roaring success of 2019’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.”

His planned final film, “The Movie Critic,” got scrapped in 2024. He’s gotten plenty of criticism for overusing the “N-word” on-screen and featuring too many feet close-ups over the years. Maybe penning a screenplay without his signature tics is proving harder than he thought.

‘Backrooms’ is horror for a self-justifying age



“Backrooms” came out of internet lore to take down “The Mandalorian.” Perhaps audiences are turning on Disney. The film is now a smash hit theatrical release, but its story began online, where it grew from a 2019 4chan image and creepypasta into one of the most recognizable examples of liminal horror: familiar spaces that somehow make no sense.

The idea began on 4chan’s paranormal board, where a discussion about “disquieting spaces that just feel off” led to a user defining the Backrooms as spaces where you “noclip” out of reality. The term comes from video games, where a player slips outside the designed bounds of the game into unintended space. The Backrooms are marked by yellow wallpaper, buzzing lights, and seemingly infinite rooms.

‘Backrooms’ asks a question more terrifying than anything hiding under the fluorescent lights: What are you doing with your guilt?

These spaces are liminal, meaning they should function as transitions. Hallways, corridors, and waiting rooms are meant to have an entry point and a destination. What makes the Backrooms terrifying is that they do not go anywhere. The hallway has no destination. That is not merely inconvenient. It is a picture of purpose removed.

The movement, then, runs from liminal horror to cosmic horror. Liminal horror unsettles us because a familiar space no longer performs its purpose. Cosmic horror goes further. It asks whether all of reality is like that. The terror is not merely that something bad may happen inside reality. The terror is that reality itself may not make sense.

On the surface, life seems familiar and coherent. But as we move through it, life often becomes stranger and harder to explain. It does not turn out as we hoped. Our efforts fail. Our goals recede. Our explanations collapse. That is the fear beneath the fluorescent lights: not monsters, but meaninglessness.

We assume reality can be understood. When failure comes, we think we need more information, more self-help, more discipline, or a better method. Then we try again. We expect success. But we fail again. The failures accumulate. And life gets shorter.

That makes this horror different from a standard slasher or zombie film. In those stories, the threat is physical and animal-like. You cannot reason with the monster. You simply have to survive it. Cosmic horror raises the stakes. It asks: What if rationality is not built into reality at all? What if reason is merely man’s frantic attempt to impose order on chaos?

Clark, the film’s protagonist, embodies that question. He enters the Backrooms already looking for an explanation that will let him escape responsibility. His failures have left him with a ruined marriage and a failed career. He wants to be told that none of this is his fault. He refuses to see his obvious flaws as the cause of what happened to him. That makes him a perfect fit for the irrationality of the Backrooms.

Guilt is the bridge between the film’s horror and its spiritual meaning. Clark does not simply want to survive the Backrooms. He wants the Backrooms to explain him. He wants the maze to tell him that his failures were not really his fault.

RELATED: Indiana Jones found the lost ark of campus clichés

Jon Kopaloff/Getty Images for Paramount+

In that sense, the Backrooms can be read as an image of the unconscious mind. As in a dream, things feel familiar but not quite right. The spaces are recognizable and impossible at the same time. Clark searches there for something that will excuse him, but he cannot find anything intelligible. He wants the maze to justify him. Instead, it exposes him. He is trapped in the Backrooms because he is already trapped inside himself.

Director Kane Parsons has said the Backrooms are not purgatory or hell. In a literal sense, he is right. They are not presented as divine judgment according to a moral order. But that is exactly why they work as an image of a different terror: existence without moral order at all.

Christianity gives a name to this terror. It is life severed from the God who made reality intelligible. Hell is terrifying not merely because of punishment, but because those in hell have cut off communion with God the Creator. God made the world with wisdom. The world makes sense because God created it and gave man a rational soul by which to understand his creation.

When human beings reject God, they cut themselves off from the source of rationality and meaning. They then try to create their own smaller rationalities and meanings. All of them collapse because human beings cannot be God.

The person who has lost communion with God occupies a dreadful liminal space. He senses that he was created for a purpose, but he can no longer grasp that purpose. Reality feels familiar, but something is wrong. It has become unintelligible.

To be handed over to final meaninglessness while still possessing a mind that longs to understand is the greatest terror imaginable. You cannot understand reality. You cannot understand yourself. All lesser terrors frighten us because they echo this one.

One word often used to describe the Backrooms and their occupants is “deformity.” That’s key. Deformity is the attempted creation of someone who cannot create rightly. It is Lucifer’s counterfeit of what God made, and it turns out wrong. When man follows Lucifer by believing he can be his own god, he ends up in the Backrooms of his own unintelligible mind.

God created through the Logos. Lucifer deforms creation through the anti-Logos.

RELATED: When ‘be nice’ becomes the whole ethic, we’re in trouble

akinbostanci via iStock/Getty Images

The movement of the film is clear: A man burdened by guilt enters a world without meaning, seeks self-justification, and is destroyed by the irrationality he hoped would excuse him. That gives us good reason to consider our own guilt before God. Clark is gripped by guilt, but his solution is self-justification. He deceives himself about his failures and wants others to join the deception.

If we do not deal with guilt by turning in repentance to God through Christ, we are left with the same self-deception and the same liminal space of meaninglessness.

The Christian answer is not self-justification but repentance and reconciliation. In Christ, guilt is not hidden in a maze, explained away by trauma, or dissolved into meaninglessness. It is forgiven. Communion with God is restored. Reality becomes intelligible again because we are reconciled to the One who made it.

In the end, “Backrooms” asks a question more terrifying than anything hiding under the fluorescent lights: What are you doing with your guilt?

Democrats unleash ‘secret weapon’ to go after Spencer Pratt in a last-ditch effort to end his campaign



Hollywood is ramping up its criticism of Spencer Pratt, and BlazeTV host Liz Wheeler believes it’s a sign that his Los Angeles mayoral campaign is gaining real traction.

“The Democrats are so scared of Spencer Pratt’s strategy. And you combine that with the most recent fundraising numbers — in the last month, Spencer Pratt has raised 10 times as much money as Karen Bass,” Wheeler explains.

Pratt has raised $2.72 million in the last month, while Mayor Bass (D) raised $283,000.

“The tide has turned towards Spencer Pratt. That amount of money combined with this strategy, this brilliant political strategy that Spencer Pratt is now engaging in — giving Democrats in L.A. this off-ramp to vote for him,” Wheeler says.


And the Democrats are so scared that they have “unleashed their big guns,” which is Hollywood.

“Hollywood is the Democrats' secret weapon,” she explains, recalling that “very cringey video that celebrities put together during COVID.”

“Celebrities are what the Democrats think are their most effective influential tool. You saw this with the Kamala Harris campaign,” she adds, before playing a clip of reality star Lisa Rinna telling a reporter she doesn’t want a “reality star” to be mayor.

“We’ve already done that. We’re not going to do that again,” Rinna said.

“Listen, I’m a reality person,” she continued. “You wouldn’t want me as mayor. … I just think we did that. Let’s have somebody that’s already been mayor. The mayor of San Jose or whoever. I don’t even know.”

“This is what the Democrats think their big guns are,” Wheeler comments. “You know, their move of desperation.”

Drew Carey also threw out an opinion on Pratt, writing in a post on social media: “Anyone who votes for, or endorses Spencer Prattfall for Mayor of LA needs to get their head out of their ass. I understand being angry/unsatisfied, but at least get behind someone competent and not some serial scammer without a soul or moral compass. F**k this guy already.”

Pratt responded in his own post on X: “Isn't it weird how the two comedians histrionically lashing out against me are both in the 'Epstein files'? What are the odds?”

He attached a screenshot of an email mentioning Carey from the files.

“Let me tell you what is happening here. The Democrats are so scared. They’re so desperate because they can’t run on any policy. They can’t run on Karen Bass’ record. They can’t run on Nithya Raman’s ideology,” Wheeler says.

"So what they do instead, as their sort of final move — this is one week before the election … they try to use famous people to invoke groupthink among voters,” she adds.

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