Watching Ed Sheeran’s career implode this week has been a delight. He dropped Macklemore from his tour due to pressure from known associate of Jeffery Epstein Robert Kraft regarding voicing support for Palestine on stage. The fallout from Sheeran’s spineless bending of the knee to billionaire Zionists has been wonderful. Everyone else performing (including his backing band) left the tour while Macklemore pledged $1 million of his earnings from the tour to Palestine Aid.

It’s unfortunate but the only way to really change things under capitalism is to fuck with Big Money. Though some some celebrity entertainers who remain ‘apolitical’ (Taylor Swift and Jay-Z come to mind) for the sake of their ticket sales are still kind of untouchable from public criticism, this fall-off for Sheeran suggests the protests against Israel have reached a new level in American discourse. The general public cares more about celebrities than most things, and this kind of attention will hopefully provoke those at the top to understand standing with Israel—or deciding to not comment on the matter and thus side with the genocide—could potentially lead to major losses in both income and legacy.

With the Trump administration agreeing to sell $2.8 billion in arms to Israel, Sheeran’s disaster is helping to increase the scope of debate about the United States’ position in funding genocide and protecting an apartheid state—and what it means to say, No Comment.

At this point I will not even speak to someone who supports Israel (except maybe to tell them to get fucked). There is no excuse for ‘not picking a side’ regarding (much less openly supporting) a genocidal apocalypse state that protects pedophiles while targeting children in Gaza. Over fifty percent of the population supports killing every Palestinian, while eighty-two percent support expelling them from Gaza using force. It is a depraved horror show of a country that should be dissolved immediately and left to the history books in a chapter titled Great Mistakes of International Governance.

I hope Ed Sheeran learns some kind of lesson from this and I hope every PR agency is in a state of panic as to how to handle their clients with this increasing public discontent for the wealthy supporting mass murder. Mostly, I hope this becomes the type of protest that begins to really interfere with the finances of people who only care about money and are OK with disregarding human life. They are the rot of humankind and the only reason I hope there’s a heaven is because that means there is a hell that they will all burn in for eternity.

There’s certainly a cynic in me that doubts most ‘philanthropic’ ventures by the wealthy as a dangling set of shiny keys to distract the public from ideas like hiking tax rates by 25%. And there’s even more of me that has a distaste for celebrity press releases about doing good in the world. But when it comes to the $10 million that Olivia Rodrigo’s festival donated to ten women’s-based non-profits—matched dollar-for-dollar by Melinda Gates—I have to set my cynicism aside for a moment.

I have no doubt that there’s an extensive team behind Rodrigo helping to maintain a very specific public image, but that doesn’t change the fact her audience is predominantly young women and girls—a demographic that is facing an increasingly precarious, if not outright dangerous, future. While $20 million isn’t going to realistically do much in the real world of social justice, what the entire festival represents—from being an all-female lineup to supporting organizations that exist to help women in one way or another—is that if you’re a part of a group the system is after, the best thing you can do is take care of each other.

The concert was a cool enough idea, and donations are a good thing, but to me, this was a chance to show an entire upcoming generation that the best weapon against institutional power is organizing and camaraderie. When I was younger, there were organizations like Rock The Vote, but stuff like that still had that undertone of, Believe in the System, believe in America. Rodrigo’s efforts voice a distinct split from that, as if to say, The entire political machine is after us right now. (Which, well, it is.)

I remember reading an interview with Mark of blink-182 when they were first getting big in the late 90s. He replied to a question about them being a ‘punk band’ by saying he thought of them as Fischer-Price Punk—a band that could be someone’s first punk band, an introduction to the genre. It’s not untrue. While for me it was Green Day, there’s always some mainstream influence that can lead people down a path into the subcultures where political activism really starts to take hold, and that’s what I kind of think of this. It won’t create an immediate wave of neo-Suffragettes, but it could be a step in that direction for a chunk of that audience, and in this day and age, that’s good enough.

I spent some time last week at LACMA with Christian Marclay’s The Clock—which I’ll write more about after tonight when I spend as much time as possible at the 24-hour screening—and was consistently annoyed by how many people felt perfectly fine to maintain ongoing conversations or take their phones out to text someone in the theater. But, much like most third spaces these days, art museums are not immune to the degrading notion of the social contract.

Since movie theaters re-opened after Covid-19 restrictions were lifted, I’d say about one-third of the films I see have had someone take out a phone for one reason or another during the show. (I will say most of these happen at AMC chain theaters.) This ranges from taking a photo of the screen (mostly the title card) to texting to scrolling a dating app or Instagram. I’ll always react in some ways—a glance to asking politely to saying, Turn your phone off aloud. The responses I get have varied from being ignored to having people tell me to fuck off.

(I was at the AMC Burbank 16 for a movie once and the guy next to me asked a woman in front of him who had been texting for five minutes straight to please put her phone away and she turned around and replied, “You talked all during the previews so why don’t you kiss my ass.” Absolutely bonkers response.)

These aren’t limited to corporate screenings, though. While it’s far less frequent than what happens at a chain like AMC, I’ve seen phones out at screenings for American Cinematheque or even Tarantino’s notoriously anti-phone theaters (the New Beverly and Vista). These people risk being kicked out, or even banned, from theaters just to check their Twitter feed.

Now, part of this could be just screen addiction and the fact humanity seems to have been consumed by an inability to leave the digital world for any meaningful amount of time. But I think one of the consequences of how Covid was both handled and politicized is that the country became divided on whether or not it really gave a shit about anyone else at an individual level. (We know now that any excuses about masks were bullshit as we see ICE agents and cops masked up all the time for their thuggish actions and that the entire conservative and fascist side of the population doesn’t have any central ideology other than to ‘win’ at whatever talking points are dominating the news at any given time.)

The increasing individualism that has been chipping away at how we treat others in social spaces, whatever the root causes may be, are reflective of a growing resentment toward one another while the country we share continues to decay in a storm of corruption, greed, and outright lies by those in positions of power. This is all by design, and sometimes I just want to escape the madness by going to the movies, and now there’s a constant reminder of what is happening in society as a whole.

We’re having a mayoral election in LA this year and like most of the political world right now, it’s incredibly stupid. It’s another of those popular races that take up the news these days—a progressive democratic socialist, Nithya Raman, against an establishment liberal incumbent, Karen Bass. The establishment does not like this (surprise, surprise). Meanwhile, every time there’s news about this thing, I want to slam my head into the wall in disbelief that Raman isn’t running away with it.

Just today, Bass came out in favor of the potential merger between Paramount and Warner Brothers, even though just yesterday it was reported that the merger would cost Los Angeles over 10,000 total jobs between entertainment and the businesses it supports—around $2.8 billion in the local economy, gone. The Writers Guild immediately issued a statement tearing Bass apart.

There was also a kind of insane warehouse fire in Boyle Heights this year that saw no city declarations for evacuation—only Bass, who spent the first two days of the fire out of the city, telling residents the air was not dangerous. (That ‘safe’ air caused hundreds to suffer health affects directly from exposure.)

Of course, this is all after Bass botched her oversight of the wildfires that burned the Palisades and Altadena to the ground in January of 2025. Los Angeles has also seen cuts to city service budgets in order to give the LAPD more cash. (The LAPD already had an annual budget of over three billion dollars.)

While the criticism could continue, the point is this: All over the United States, in governments local and national alike, establishment democrats are being called out for their decades of stalled policy, lack of ambition, and corporate interests being prioritized over serving the public. What makes me crazy is that the general public is somewhere between fearful of and hateful toward the label of socialism, even if policies like upgrading infrastructure or improving conditions for schools are wildly popular.

Red Scare tactics have proven very successful in the United States, where even ‘liberal’ cities like LA have a substantial population that doesn’t want to lean too far to the left. (What that political ideology actually looks like is beyond me—but I’m pretty sure it’s more in alignment with fascism than humanism.) As conditions continue to rapidly decay while wealth consolidates in the hands of a few, I wonder at what point people will come around to the idea of listening to voices from the left—or if by that time there’ll be anything left to actually govern.

Never trust a liberal. The whole Vote Blue No Matter Who schtick has always been a joke, as the DNC has always had more interest in keeping leftist interests at bay than actually defeating anyone on the right. As The New York Times outlines:

“We are preparing for the next war that is coming,” said Jonathan Cowan, the president of Third Way, a leading centrist Democratic group, revealing to The New York Times a new $15 million effort between now and 2028 to discredit democratic socialism.

Politics have been relatively mask-off since the second Trump election, even though the Democrats aligned in both 2016 and 2020 to stifle the campaigns of Bernie Sanders—those were never really discussed. Now, at least, they admit they fully consider anything to the left of market-based neoliberalism as big of a threat as the far-right.

Though this has been pretty common knowledge for anyone left of fascism for some time, I’m glad democrats are now openly admitting this type of political alignment so I can scoff at anyone who tells me that not voting for one of them in any future election is a wasted vote. Liberalism has always enabled this country’s drift into what it is now and there’s no way to have a conscience and support it any longer.