So I want to start with two numbers that, I mean,
they just shouldn't exist in the same universe,
8 % and 99%. Right. You look at the critical
reception for this new Melania documentary, and
it's a dismal 8%. I was total bomb with the critics.
But then you flip over to the audience score
on Rotten Tomatoes, and it's at 99%. I mean,
how? How is that even possible? Well, it's not.
Not naturally, anyway. It's really the definition
of a broken metric. In statistics, you'd call
that an outlier and just, you know, toss the
data. But right now in our culture, that gap
isn't an error. It's the whole point. And that
is exactly where we're diving in today. We've
got this whole stack of sources that they really
paint a picture of two completely separate realities
just crashing into each other. We have the box
office numbers for the Melania documentary, this
culture war over the Super Bowl halftime show,
a national prayer breakfast that got really tense.
And then we've got some actual election data
from New Jersey and Texas that suggests the ground
is, well, it's shifting under everyone's feet.
It's a fascinating collection, because you're
right. We usually treat entertainment and hard
politics as separate things. Of course. But looking
at this stack, that distinction is just gone.
The way people review a movie is now identical
to how they approach an election. It's not about
quality or policy. It's just about signaling
which team you're on. Let's stick with the Melania
documentary for a second, because the money side
of this story is... Frankly even weirder than
the reviews. Oh, yeah, the headlines are trying
to spin it as a success You see things like strong
box office showing but you dig into the actual
numbers and the math is just It's horrifying
horrifying is exactly the right word for any
accountant looking at this. So the source material
puts the opening weekend somewhere between, what,
$7 and $10 million? Right. And look, if this
were a small indie doc, you'd be popping champagne.
That's a home run. But this is not a small production.
Not even close. The sources are indicating the
production and marketing budget was north of
$100 million. $100 million for a documentary.
They spent $35 million just on the ads. Wait,
hold on. Titanic cost $200 million, and they
literally built a ship and sank it. How do you
spend $100 million on a biography? That is the
$100 million question, isn't it? The source material
actually speculates about bribery or, you know,
money moving around in ways that you don't see
on screen, because you just can't put that much
money into a documentary. Not unless you're just
burning cash for sport. So, okay, if they made
$10 million on a $100 million investment in the
movie business... That's a catastrophe. Financially,
it's an absolute disaster. It's never going to
recoup its costs. But, and this is the big, but
what if the goal wasn't profit? What if it was
propaganda? Exactly. Or base mobilization. Then
maybe the money doesn't matter. The return on
investment might just be that 99 percent audience
score we were talking about. OK, so let's unpack
that score, because the sources are calling foul
play on that, too. It's not just that Trump supporters
liked the film. The data suggests these reviewers
aren't even real moviegoers. Right. This is the
biggest gap in the history of Rotten Tomatoes.
For context, a 99 % score puts this film above
The Godfather, and Citizen Kane, and Star Wars.
The analysis shows that the vast majority of
these perfect scores came from accounts that
had never reviewed a single film before. So people
created accounts just to give this one movie
five stars. Precisely. It's cooking the books.
It's an organized effort to create the perception
of popularity. It's a loyalty test. You log in,
you vote five stars, and you prove you're on
the team. Whether you saw the movie or not. It's
completely irrelevant. And on the flip side,
you have the actual credits. I have to share
a couple of these lines because they are blistering.
One called it an elaborate piece of designer
taxidermy. Ouch. Another called it a 40 million
dollar book report. Which is harsh, but I mean,
it lines up with the IMDB data. While Rotten
Tomatoes was getting flooded with perfect scores,
IMDB saw the exact opposite. The rating there
crashed to a 1 .3 out of 10. 1 .3? That's like
Plan 9 from outer space territory. It's tied
for the second worst rating in the site's history.
It's sitting right next to Kirk Cameron's Saving
Christmas. And IMDb actually had to flag the
page for unusual voting activity. So one platform
is screaming masterpiece and the other is screaming
garbage. And the reality of the film itself is
just completely lost in all that noise. The movie
is just a proxy war. And speaking of which, we're
seeing the exact same dynamic play out with the
Super Bowl. You can't just watch football anymore.
Nope. The war on screens continues. I mean, we've
seen boycotts before, but this year the grievance
is so specific. It's all about the halftime show
performer Bad Bunny. And the objection isn't
his music. The sources are pretty blunt here.
It's explicitly about identity. The complaints
cited in the reports just boil down to, he's
brown and he sings in Spanish. That seems to
be the disqualifying factor for that wing of
the audience. So the solution isn't just to turn
off the TV for 15 minutes. It's to tune into
a whole alternate reality halftime show. That's
right. Turning Point USA is providing counter
programming. If you don't want to watch a global
Latin superstar, you can stream their event featuring
inevitably. Kid Rock. It's uncanny how Kid Rock
became the official house band for a political
movement. But there's a detail in the ad for
this alternative show that really caught my eye.
They've also got Brantley Gilbert, the country
singer. And this is where it gets into visual
manipulation again. The source analysis points
out that in the promotional graphics, Brantley
Gilbert's skin tone appears to have been darkened.
Wait, what? They darkened a white country singer?
Why would they do that? The speculation is that
they wanted the lineup to seem more diverse than
it actually is without, you know, actually inviting
any diverse performers who might not align with
the message. It's a simulacrum of diversity.
That is just wild. And meanwhile, you've got
sitting senators weighing in. Tommy Tuberville
called the Super Bowl the woke bowl. Which is
confusing, right? He's a former football coach.
He's complaining he can't watch the game because
of work -ness, but the game itself is still just
football. It signals that the cultural contamination
is total. If the halftime show is work, then
the whole event is tainted. And the ultimate
sign of this split is Trump himself not going.
The official line is travel distance, which,
for a guy with a private jet, seems flimsy. Very
flimsy. The sources are suggesting the real reason
is image management. He's afraid of being booed.
We've seen it happen recently. JD Vance got booed
at the Olympics. A wrestler named Brody King
sparked an anti -ice chant in Vegas. The safe
spaces are shrinking. A Super Bowl stadium is
an uncontrolled environment. Exactly. You can't
filter that crowd like you can on Rotten Tomatoes.
If 50 ,000 people decide to boo you, that shatters
the whole narrative of universal adoration. So
he stays home. This theme of performative politics
versus this uncontrolled reality really came
to a head in Washington this week, too, at the
National Prayer Breakfast. This is usually the
most boring, scripted, bipartisan thing all year.
You sip coffee, you pray for unity, you go home.
Usually. But this year, someone threw out the
script. You had this incredible juxtaposition
of Trump giving the keynote, which the sources
describe as just his standard stump speech. Rambling,
attacking enemies, airing grievances. From a
pulpit. From a pulpit. But what happened next
was the real breach of protocol. Representative
Jonathan Jackson, who is Jesse Jackson's son,
had to give the closing prayer. And he's standing
feet away from Trump. Imagine that scene. He's
standing feet... from the man who just spent
20 minutes attacking half the country, and Jackson
doesn't give some generic bless our leaders prayer,
he goes surgical. I have the text here. He prayed
for protection from the inequities of evil. He
asked for greater clarity and greater courage.
Inequities of evil? That's not subtle language.
He's using the language of spiritual warfare,
but he's applying it to the governance of the
man standing right next to him. He even warned
about the power to turn the country into a cosmic
elegy of chaos. Wow. Cosmic elegy of chaos. It's
powerful stuff. And the visual was apparently
telling. Reports say Trump just had his eyes
closed. Was he praying? Was he sleeping? Was
he just seething? We don't know. But for a moment,
the bubble popped. It was a direct, face -to
-face moral confrontation. It's interesting you
mention the digital world, because that bubble
was also leaking this week. We have to talk about
that deleted video from Trump's social media
feed. Yeah, this is the much darker side of the
separate reality we're talking about. A video
gets posted to his official account, stays up
for about 12 hours. Most of it is, you know,
the standard conspiracy stuff about the 2020
election. But then what? Then, just spliced into
the middle, is a two -second clip depicting the
Obamas as apes. It's just shocking that in 2026,
we are still dealing with imagery that is so
explicitly violently racist. It wasn't a dog
whistle. It was a bullhorn. And the White House
response was just chaotic. First, they blamed
a staffer. Then, bizarrely, they claimed it was
a reference to the Lion King. They're the Lion
King. Yeah. The source notes, with some very
dry humor, that there are no apes in the Lion
King. There are lions. There are meerkats. No
apes. It was just a desperate, nonsensical excuse.
But unlike the Super Bowl stuff where everyone
kind of falls in line, the GOP actually flinched
at this one. They did. And the phrasing from
Senator Tim Scott is what I want to focus on.
He called it the most racist thing I've seen
out of this White House. The most racist thing.
Exactly. He didn't say this is racist and out
of character. He implied a hierarchy. He's basically
saying, I've seen a lot of racist things from
this administration, but this one finally crossed
a line. It suggests a fracture. A real fracture.
There is a line where even the Republican establishment
can't defend the anti -woke posturing anymore.
So OK, we have all this culture war, noise, movies,
football tweets. But underneath all of that,
the actual machinery of democracy is turning.
We had special elections this week, New Jersey
and Texas. And if you look at the data, the voters
seem to be telling a very different story from
the Internet. This is where we need to pay attention.
The noise says the country is deadlocked. The
signal from these elections says the electorate
is volatile and angry. Take a look at New Jersey's
11th district. Right. This was the primary to
replace a Democrat. It was framed as this classic
establishment versus progressive fight, Tom Malinowski
against Analei Mijia. And Mijia, the progressive,
surged late. The result is still too close to
call, but it's leaning her way. But the takeaway
isn't that New Jersey suddenly went socialist.
The source analysis argues this is about new
blood versus old blood. Voters are just tired
of the incumbents. Precisely. Malinowski is a
known quantity. Mejia is fresh. The voters are
signaling a throw the bums out mentality that
goes beyond ideology. They just want change.
But if New Jersey was a tremor, Texas was the
earthquake. Oh, yeah. Senate District 9 is a
deep red seat. And the Democrat, Taylor Remit,
didn't just win. He he destroyed the curve. A
32 point swing. In political science terms, that's
catastrophic for the incumbent party. Usually
fight over three or four points. Thirty two points
means the bottom just fell out. And for the last
few years, the narrative has been that Latino
voters are moving to the GOP. But in this race,
Remit won 80 percent of the Latino vote. That
is the number that should keep Republican strategists
awake at night. Eighty percent. It suggests that
this whole realignment we've been hearing about
is either a myth or it's highly reversible. So
what happened? Why did it flip back so hard?
It's likely a direct reaction to the specific
nativist turn the rhetoric has taken. I mean,
when you have the kind of discourse we saw with
Bad Bunny or with immigration, that registers
the source calls this a canary in the coal mine.
Because if the GOP loses the Latino vote by those
margins in the midterms, the whole map changes.
Texas isn't safe. Arizona isn't safe. And even
Nevada seems to be in play. We have representative
Marc Amode retiring from a safe Republican seat.
Another one of those signals. He's leaving a
safe seat. Publicly, he says he's passing the
torch. But the reading between the lines is that
the job just sucks now. It's become miserable.
And when you have safe incumbents quitting. It
creates open seats. And open seats invite chaos.
The GOP could lose that seat just because of
a messy primary. It feels like the political
professionals are finally realizing what the
voters already knew. The whole system is unstable.
Which brings us to the final real -world consequence
of all this. The government is about to run out
of money. Again. The DHS funding cliff. We are
a week away. And the fight is all about ICE.
The Democrats put forward this list of 10 demands
that's basically a total overhaul. No masks,
mandatory body cams, no enforcement at schools
or churches. It's a transparency and human rights
wish list. And naturally, the GOP response from
Senator Thune was to call it unrealistic and
just punt the whole thing to Trump. And what's
Trump's position on this? Well, this connects
right back to our separate realities theme. He
gave an interview right before the Super Bowl.
He was asked about migrants dying in custody,
specifically two cases, Renee Good and Alex Preti.
And his response wasn't about policy or safety.
He said the real tragedy of their deaths was
the bad publicity for IC. He said the bad PR
was the tragedy, not the deaths. Yes. And he
even qualified it by saying the deceased weren't
angels. So. Look at that negotiating gap. One
side is demanding body cameras to prevent death
and abuse. The other side sees those deaths primarily
as a public relations problem. How do you even
begin to compromise between human rights and
PR management? You don't. That's the conclusion.
The ideological gap is unbridgeable right now.
A shutdown seems almost inevitable because they
aren't arguing about numbers on a spreadsheet.
They're arguing about the fundamental value of
the people caught in the system. So it all comes
full circle from a movie review score that has
nothing to do with the movie. To a halftime show
that has nothing to do with football. To a budget
negotiation that has nothing to do with the actual
needs of the country. It's all the same phenomenon.
We're seeing the creation of these bespoke realities.
If you don't like the movie reviews, you buy
the score. If you don't like the halftime show,
you film your own. And if you don't like the
bad press about human rights abuses, you just
blame the victims. It's terrifying. But it's
also strangely clarifying. because those election
results in Texas and New Jersey suggest that
reality eventually crashes the party. You can
fake a Rotten Tomatoes score. You can't fake
a 32 -point swing in a voting booth. That's the
hope, right? The user score on the Internet might
be rigged, but the voter score in the precinct
is still, for now, the only metric that actually
shifts power. So here's the question for you
to chew on as we head toward the midterms. We're
seeing this massive effort to curate the world,
to fit a narrative. But when people actually
walk into that voting booth alone, are they voting
on that curated online reality? Or are they voting
on the reality they see in their own neighborhoods?
If Texas is any indication, the official narrative
might be in for a very rude awakening. We'll
be watching the numbers. Thanks for diving in
with us.