Donald Trump’s Great American State Fair was widely mocked as a great American flop: overpriced, uncomfortable and, above all, dull.

Well, bad news for fans of fun: Trump’s billionaire buddies, Larry and David Ellison, are about to bring MAGA-ified misery to the rest of entertainment with their proposed merger of Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery, which will likely make movie theaters, cable TV and other entertainment products a lot more MAGA — and a lot more boring. 

Larry and David Ellison are the father-and-son duo behind Paramount’s attempted purchase of Warner Bros., a move that would consolidate most of Hollywood into a few hands and dramatically reduce free market competition in the entertainment industry. The two often present, especially in court documents, as simple businessmen just trying to make money. But in reality, Larry Ellison was called a “shadow president” by a Trump adviser speaking to Wired last year. The Ellisons aren’t just in this for money. They are in it for power — and their vision of remaking the country and even world in their MAGA-centric image.

Whether they succeed in the long run remains to be seen, but in the process, they are going to make your movie-going and likely TV-viewing experiences more tiresome. Above all, MAGA is bad at culture, too strapped to their narrow interests and bigotries to understand what makes entertainment actually entertaining.

Last week, the attorneys general of a dozen states, along with the Writers Guild of America West and East, filed suit to stop the merger, which has unsurprisingly been approved by Trump’s corrupt Justice Department. (Full disclosure: I’m a member of WGAE.) Labor and economic concerns fuel these lawsuits, but the consumer experience is front and center. On Monday afternoon, the merger was frozen by a federal judge’s temporary restraining order. 

“The unlawful merger of these two entertainment behemoths would lead to higher prices, lower quality, and less content for film and television, harming movie theaters, basic cable distributors, and ultimately, audiences on every sofa and movie theater seat in the U.S.,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said at a press conference on Wednesday.

On the podcast “The Town with Matthew Belloni,” he argued that the quality of movie theaters themselves will decline even more if the merger goes through. “You won’t have comfortable seating,” Bonta said. “You won’t have the same quality and variety at concession stands.”

Under the Ellisons, the future of the movies stands to echo the Great American State Fair, where consumers had the pleasure of paying $25 for an overcooked drumstick while they stood in an empty plaza on the National Mall in Washington waiting for the elderly Lee Greenwood to sing “God Bless the USA” for the billionth time.

Experts I talked to explained that such decline is the economic result of consolidation, which reduces competition and therefore removes incentives for movie studios to take creative risks. Miranda Banks, a professor at Loyola Marymount University who has conducted extensive research on media mergers, contrasted this low-competition era with the 1970s, when Hollywood was full of “creative workers” and “a lot of independent companies,” which created “an open market of bidding for good quality programming.” Now companies avoid originality in favor of “churning out more films within franchises,” which is cheaper and easier than developing original products with independent creators. 

But it is also about power and political ideology, explained James Schamus, a screenwriter who once ran Focus Features and is now a Columbia University professor. He argued that the Ellisons are building a “techno fascist project” that is far more interested in waging “war on democracy” than old school Hollywood concerns like selling movie tickets. “Short-term profit is happily sacrificed to long-term domination,” Schamus said.

Chief among these goals is mass surveillance of the population through many means, which includes making sure people can’t watch a movie or TV show without having to hand all their data over to Oracle, the another Larry Ellison-owned company. The elder Ellison isn’t exactly coy about his dystopian scheme: At an Oracle financial analyst meeting in 2024, he promised his company would pave the path to mass social control.

“Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on,” he said. Unsurprisingly, both Larry and David Ellison are big fans of artificial intelligence, seeing it as a way to streamline their surveillance operations, and for what David Ellison euphemistically calls “cost efficiencies and synergies.” 

That’s just code for “firing thousands, if not tens of thousands, of creative people,” Schamus said, and replacing good work with dreck “made for the cheapest price” for the “lowest common denominator.” 

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Anyone who spends time on X or Truth Social knows that, while most Americans loathe empty A.I. slop, there is one audience that eats it up: MAGA folks. Trump himself loves it. He constantly posts A.I. videos that are as tedious as they are uncanny, and his cultural tastes are mirrored by the bulk of right-wing audiences, who artistic discernment is too clouded by bitterness and ideological obsession to engage with the more human emotions that make movies, TV and music engaging to other people. The MAGA capture of Hollywood behemoths like Paramount and Warner Bros. threatens to gut the ability of smart, creative people to make good things, and replace it with mind-numbing rubbish.

“Once upon a time, in Hollywood,” Banks said, movie studios were run by people whose “goal was to get people into the theater.” They were “not good guys or kind guys,” she explained, but ultimately, they saw their job as “making money to make more movies.” However cynical — and largely straight, white and male — some old-school operators were, they helped to build a Hollywood that was centered around giving the people what they wanted. This seems like paradise compared to what the Ellisons and their kind envision.

“For these guys,” Banks said, the goal “is extraction,” and “what they’re extracting is not just our money, but our data.” For years, movie ticket sales have been declining, because of this shift from seeing the consumer not as a customer to please, but a mark to suck dry. In some ways, the Ellisons don’t care that much if you ever go back to the movies.

“They all think they should be the techno-fascist philosopher king at the end of the day,” Schamus said, referring not just to the Ellisons, but also to similar megalomaniacal MAGA billionaires like tech investors Peter Thiel and Elon Musk (who recently lost his trillionaire status). At a certain point, these men have amassed so much money that it’s meaningless. The next hill to conquer is social control.

Making media more MAGA will make it dumber, but that’s by design. Truly creative and inspiring art undermines that goal, because it provokes responses like empathy and critical thinking in audiences — which gets in the way of authoritarian domination.

UPDATE: This article has been updating to reflect a federal judge’s temporary restraining order against the merger on July 20.

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The most efficient campaign finance vehicle in American history is tax-exempt, requires no donor disclosure and is available in virtually every zip code in the country. For 70 years, it has operated under one rule: It cannot endorse a political candidate.

The Religious Liberty Commission, which delivered its report to President Donald Trump on June 26, would like to remove that rule. They’re calling it religious freedom.

As a Christian minister of an American Baptist congregation, I’ve spent more than 20 years in a pulpit — long enough to know the difference between protecting a church and conscripting one. A government that wants to free the church, to borrow Trump’s language, is usually trying to use it. 

Since 1954, the Johnson Amendment has restricted churches, religious organizations and other tax-exempt nonprofits from endorsing political candidates or funneling tax-deductible donations into partisan campaigns. Pastors and faith leaders can preach on any moral or social issue, including justice, poverty, immigration, war. The only line is at the intersection of tax-exempt status and candidate endorsements. In other words, the amendment is the last structural barrier between the American church and full absorption into the machinery of partisan politics. 

The claim that this constitutes religious suppression is the oldest con in the game. Every American pastor has the same First Amendment rights as any other citizen. What the Johnson Amendment restricts is tax-exempt dollars in partisan politics. Churches pay no federal taxes. In exchange, they stay out of the candidate-endorsement business. Void it, and that deal ends — and every church in America becomes a PAC with better branding and transparency requirements and endorsed by a divine mandate.

Here is how the mechanism would work — and in some places, already does. A donor writes a check to their congregation. Takes the full federal tax deduction. The church endorses the candidate of their choice, bundles contributions, runs voter registration drives for one party — and does all of it without the disclosure requirements that apply to actual political action committees. This is tax-exempt political spending, passed through the offering plate and invisible to the public record.

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Since Trump promised at the 2017 National Prayer Breakfast to “totally destroy” the Johnson Amendment, churches that went all in on the MAGA model have provided a nine-year case study in what happens when a religious institution trades independence for political access. The flags of the nation and party beside the cross. The candidate’s name from the pulpit. The congregation sorted by loyalty to the pastor’s politics rather than anything resembling a common good. 

Church attendance has collapsed at a pace that would have seemed impossible just a generation ago. According to a 2024 Pew Research study, the fastest-growing religious identity in America is “none.” The research on why people leave does not point to boredom or busyness. It points to disgust at what organized religion has become.

The Christian right has spent five decades getting closer to power and losing the one thing it cannot buy back: The credibility to speak to anyone outside its own coalition. 

The commission is not discouraged by any of this data. And their report does not even stop at the Johnson Amendment. It proposes replacing the principle of separation of church and state with what it calls “bridges between church and state.” In Trump’s Washington, “bridge” is apparently the new euphemism for “merger.”

The separation has existed because both institutions require protection from each other. When such safeguards are removed, the bridge comes with a toll booth, and the commission is waving one side through.  

This is state power reinforcing evangelical Christianity, and evangelical Christianity legitimizing state power. The commission calls it “partnership.” History calls it a state church. 

The stakes here are not merely theological. They are democratic. A fully politicized American church — operating tax-free, endorsing candidates, bundling political donations without disclosure — is not a more faithful institution. It is a more powerful one. Unchecked religious power fused to political authority, and with no structural wall left between them, is a problem for anyone who votes, pays taxes or prefers their government to represent the whole country rather than the congregation of whoever raised the most money last Sunday. Without the Johnson Amendment, every offering plate in America becomes a campaign contribution box.

Jesus was not being clever when he said in Matthew 22:21 “Give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” That verse has been cited in American political arguments for more than two centuries — usually by whoever needs it to mean something different. Christ was cornered — pay taxes to Rome, or be branded a traitor — and so he turned the trap into a statement about the limits of power. Caesar’s name is on the coin; give him the coin. 

But not everything belongs to Caesar. Jesus was not brokering a deal between two powers. He was drawing the line past which no empire’s authority can reach. Empires have always wanted everything, including the sacred — especially the sacred — because religion is the oldest instrument for making political power look like it came from God. The commission has proposed erasing that line, rebranding the erasure as religious liberty and consecrating it in the Oval Office.

The commission’s report had a lot of words for this: “bridges,” “liberty,” “partnership.” The legal word is laundering.

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Pete Hegseth has once again decided to humiliate the American military, this time by claiming the troops need more testosterone. But the defense secretary, armed with his perfectly coiffed hair and alleged makeup studio, is ready to restore their manhood. In a video released Wednesday, Hegseth discovered spoke of how “the modern battlefield is brutal and unrelenting” and “demands maximum psychological and mental readiness.”

His solution? “High-T,” as he put it. Despite his loathing of “beardos,” Hegseth is excited about “fixing” those he deems falling short in the manhood-measurement department. Since he can’t actually pull out a ruler and demand his “warfighters” drop trou, the former Fox News host is doing the next best thing: making testosterone level testing mandatory for all service members over 30. 

The move is just the latest example of a paradox that plagues MAGA men, from Donald Trump down to the everyday Joe Rogan fan posting workout videos in his Oakley sunglasses. Efforts to prove their masculinity are so over-the-top that they inevitably read more as anxious than tough, revealing the deep well of insecurity fueling the movement.

Hegseth is an especially cringeworthy example, with an attitude toward the troops that is less of a leader and closer to a third-grade boy dressing up his G.I. Joes. He’s fixated entirely on superficial indicators of “manliness,” which gets in the way of the concerns that any normal adult would have in the job, such as how to avoid causing wars and proceeding to losing them.

“There is no magic formula that can tell us what level of testosterone best prepares someone to serve in the United States military,” Dr. Emile Redwood, a urologist with Physicians for Reproductive Health, told me. While “there are broad physiologic parameters of estrogen and testosterone that support our overall endocrine system function,” he said, they don’t correlate to “our mental readiness to be a clear and cogent member of a team.”

“Testosterone levels have no place as a proxy for a myriad of physical and mental readiness tests, where capacity and readiness is directly measured,” Redwood concluded.

But it’s unlikely Hegseth understands or even cares about what the actual medical science says. This is the same man who declared in 2019 that he doesn’t wash his hands because “germs are not a real thing.” He later tried to write his germ denialism off as a joke, but at the Pentagon he has ended flu vaccine mandates for service members, calling them “absurd.” This decision is likely rooted in nothing more than a childish understanding of biology, which equates testosterone with being “manly” and therefore assumes the more “T”, the manlier the man. In reality, artificially boosting testosterone, especially if not medically indicated, can shrink testicles, lower sperm counts and even make it harder to urinate. 

According to the New York Times, women will also be tested, even though women typically have much lower testosterone rates than men, which is not a medical problem. But again, this isn’t about science or health. Hegseth’s hostility to women in the military is well-documented. In his book “The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free,” Hegseth declared that women aren’t tough enough for “the military, especially in combat units.” As defense secretary, he has a pattern of blocking military promotions for both women and people of color. His new insistence that high testosterone levels are necessary to do the job sends an unmistakable message: that women are categorically unable to serve as “warfighters.”

Women have been serving for decades now, including in front line roles, even if they were only legally recognized as combat soldiers in 2013. But Hegseth can’t seem to accept this reality, which speaks to his immaturity and eagerness to bury himself in reactionary fantasies. He’s not alone, either. This juvenile “no girls allowed” attitude has been growing more toxic in recent years, and has been propelled by Republican leaders, from Donald Trump down to the party’s grassroots, who encourage men to believe it’s somehow more “manly” to play-act being tough guys rather than growing up and living in the real world. The vibes are childish, more like those of 11-year-old boys pretending they’re in an action cartoon than adult men who read books and enjoy the company of women.

Hegseth may believe the military has a “low T” problem, but in fact it’s just the opposite. There have been numerous reports of health problems, and apparently even the 2022 death of a new recruit, due to soldiers taking performance-enhancing drugs, including testosterone and human growth hormone. In response, the Navy SEALS instituted random drug testing in 2023.

Hegseth insists his testosterone push is “not about artificial enhancement,” but the disclaimer is an empty caveat. Young men are bombarded by advertisers and social media influencers selling shady supplements and drugs that promise to give them an edge. Now, the head of the military hyping testosterone like it’s a magical elixir will only enhance the appeal of dangerous performance-enhancing drugs. 

Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times noted on Bluesky that Hegseth “cares more about his 1950s aesthetics than a functional and competent armed forces,” right down to micromanaging facial hair and his unscientific assumptions about hormone levels. The disastrous Iran war suggests that Hegseth is not capable of the real work of a defense secretary, which was entirely predictable considering his only previous management experience was in running two non-profits into the ground. The fixation on appearances, especially on facile and exaggerated gender performance, is an obvious attempt at compensating for his own impotence in the job. 

But Hegseth isn’t alone in this. MAGA loves nothing more than a Potemkin village, and Trump has gotten as far as he has because he’s very good at using TV tricks to create the illusion of strength and competence, especially for those who aren’t looking very closely. The belief that reality doesn’t matter if the facade is showy enough reaches into every corner of modern right-wing culture, especially when it comes to gender. The pervasive plague of MAGA men hope to deflect attention from their myriad flaws with ostentatious but empty pantomimes of alleged manliness. From barbed wire tattoos to oversized pickup trucks to yelling “Michelle Obama is a man” at a UFC fight, there are millions of men like Pete Hegseth, hoping their theatrics will hide the anxious little boy inside them.

Not that any of them deserve pity. There is a way to get off this hamster wheel of trying and failing to prove you’re man enough, and it’s not through testosterone injections. It’s through growing the hell up already, and maybe even doing something as “feminine” as getting therapy. By chasing these silly ideas about manhood, MAGA men are ignoring the more realistic and worthwhile goal of being a functional adult, someone who garners love and respect by being decent to other people and handling their own responsibilities.

Granted, that’s also what mature womanhood looks like, but so what? Only insecure boys need women to be inferior to feel good about themselves anyway. Hegseth proves this every day. He wants you to believe he’s a big tough guy, when in fact he can’t even handle the idea that women, people of color, queer people and even “low T” men are just as capable as he ever was at being soldiers.

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