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Comic book content is largely dead in Hollywood.  Not because audiences don't want to see it anymore (Spider-Man: Brand New Day brought in nearly $2.4 billion in global box office, absolutely crushing Christopher Nolan's Odyssey film), but because the studios have turned most of these franchises radioactive with woke politics.  

James Gunn's DCU projects for Warner Bros. have proven this over and over again.  His girl-boss version of Supergirl was an abject failure largely because of the woke undertones of the film.  One would think these people would learn their lesson, or at least care enough about making money to change their behavior.  There are two problems, though...

First, activists always double down.  They do not learn.  They can be forced to shut up and do their jobs properly if studios apply pressure, but left to their own devices they will inevitably inject everything they touch with propaganda.  They can't help themselves, they're ideological fanatics.

Second, sometimes studios want to change course and steer away from DEI cultism because it rarely makes any money.  But, a lot of the projects in their line-up started production years ago when Hollywood still thought that every American was going to be reeducated into the woke fold.  Meaning, they now have all this content slated for release which started development back in 2022-2023.

Such is the case with the Warner/HBO series "Lanterns", a modern take on the comic book series "Green Lantern".  The show went into development in 2022...and it's obvious.  The crux of the story?  A black man (John Stewart) is set up to replace a white guy (Hal Jordan) as the great hero.  Stewart's family was essentially ruined by Hal Jordan when Stewart's father failed a test of fear for the Lantern's powerful ring.  Hal Jordan ends up taking the ring instead. 

The Lanterns interviews are just hilarious. Just say you hate white people and be done with it already?? pic.twitter.com/DymaS3pWWt

— Steph Anie (@mynerdyhome) September 2, 2026

You see, the fear that prevented John Stewart's black father from earning the ring of a heroic Green Lantern was not his fault.  He grew up with constant fear because of "white supremacy".  In other words, the black community's failures are once again deflected and foisted upon a nefarious white conspiracy to hold them back from greatness.  It's all the ridiculous 2016 to 2020 BLM talking points packed into a 2026 comic book show.

So Hal Jordan was only chosen to be Green Lantern after John Stewart's father failed the test... pic.twitter.com/jp0pcykIXZ

— DCU Brief (@DCUBrief) August 31, 2026

The story is apparently meant to be a combination of the legacy comic and the gritty True Detective series (yes, right off the bat we're entering low IQ narrative territory with this idea).  The comic book setting aside, the writers and creators of the series have been very vocal about their intentions with the story and they openly admit - This is about the black man finally taking back what is "rightfully his" after the white man "stole it" from him. 

Showrunner Chris Mundy described the series as being “about replacement,” with Hal as the aging figure who should “step aside” and out of the way of the younger and more competent John Stewart.

We knew the #lanterns creators hated hal Jordan

But damn.... pic.twitter.com/KOgmbOp2ig

— SyL ? #SyLgorithm (@sylabdul) September 2, 2026

"As a black person, being in an interview, that's one of our worst nightmares, being in a position where you're being judged by a white person."

-HBO Max's official "Lanterns" podcast pic.twitter.com/rJEM59K0cV

— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) September 1, 2026

Keep in mind, many studios are cleaning house today and kicking a lot of their DEI hires to the curb, but this process is slow and there's no guarantees that they will ever be able to return to decent storytelling anytime soon.  So, in the meantime they're still stuck with a bunch of talentless minority and LGBT writers they hired to gain virtue points and ESG loans. 

Most of the middle-aged white guys with imagination and merit were cast out. 

It is therefore ironic that the entire basis for the Lanterns series is the fallacy that minorities are rejected because of their skin color and "cultural experiences", rather than a lack of merit.  When, in Hollywood, this has been the exact case with DEI hiring pushing out white male actors and writers with talent for the past decade (unless they are gay).  

The inferiority complex of activist writers is apparent in the stories they obsessively tell - Build up a popular white hero into a washed up strawman who is then easy to tear down.  They can't surpass their pale skin peers in the real world without outside help, so they have to beat up artificial white men in artificial worlds.    

At bottom, minority groups in the west have been hand fed, enjoying promotions and positions of influence within politics, the corporate world and entertainment media.  Many of these people where hired despite not having the ability or intelligence to do the job.  They were hired to fill an ethnic quota, and that is all.  And, this trend shows in the steady decline of media and numerous other sectors of western society.  

Lanterns may be nothing more than a meaningless superhero show being used as a vehicle for black leftists to cry about not being good enough, but it gives us another window into the warped mind of the opposition.  What do we see in through that window?  A group that will never take responsibility for themselves and their own problems.  They will always blame someone else.  Which means, there's no reason to hold their hand anymore.  It's a waste of time.   

Authored by Connor O'Keeffe via Mises Institute,

The rising popularity of politicians on the American left who either explicitly identify as socialist or, at least, don't shy away from or disavow the term appears to be causing genuine concern within the Washington establishment.

That is, of course, entirely justified. Socialism is profoundly unjust and destructive.

These days, the socialists like to present their entire ideology as nothing more than having a bit of empathy for those in need or an interest in seeing everyone "have" access to services like modern healthcare.

Look any deeper, though, or ask some follow-up questions, and the truth will eventually surface. What the socialists actually want is a massive increase in government interventionism that would see nearly every aspect of life politicized and the remaining productive components of the economy hollowed out into a zero-sum lobbying battle to claim some of the diminishing loot of a much larger, more powerful, and tax-happy federal government.

Any step towards socialism needs to be energetically opposed by everyone who cares about the rights and material well-being of everyday Americans.

However, the concern we're seeing from the neoliberal and neoconservative establishment is frustrating. Because the political order that they have built and preserved over the last half century has made the growing popularity of this kind of "democratic socialism" all but inevitable.

Scholars like Gabriel Kolko, Murray Rothbard, and Patrick Newman have written extensively about how the powerful, centralized federal government that we live under today originated in the so-called Progressive Era in the late 1800s and early 1900s. And, importantly, it was not grassroots reformers who spurred the growth of the federal government at the time, but well-connected business interests.

The narrative many of us were taught in school of government officials reluctantly giving themselves more power over the economy at the turn of the century to placate a public demanding an end to laissez-faire capitalism is merely a convenient creation myth to justify what has always been a scheme to use state power to redistribute wealth from the broader public to a small caste of well-connected families and firms.

As nearly all of human history makes clear, these sorts of crony, state-empowered redistributive schemes tend to be rather unstable.

That's in part because people typically aren't all that pleased when it starts to become clear that the government is transferring some of their wealth to people that are already far wealthier - requiring the opinion molders of the political class to frequently scramble to find some new way to excuse the policies making up the racket.

But also, the government doing things like warping credit markets to benefit certain industries or launching unnecessary wars to enrich weapons companies and empower foreign leaders who are good at lobbying has plunged the country into several economic and geopolitical crises.

So far, the American political class has done a remarkable job using these crises to greatly expand and accelerate their self-enriching redistributive rackets. But every crisis is unique. Different situations have required different responses.

Which brings us to the rise of what's often called the neoliberal "Washington consensus."

The political establishment's well-known embrace of neoliberalism in the 1980s was primarily a response to the events of the 1970s. For much of that decade, the country was forced to endure a prolonged period of high price inflation that was caused by the Federal Reserve's extensive money printing in the 60s and early 70s to help finance the Vietnam War and Johnson's Great Society programs. That economic chaos was then intensified by the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, the OPEC oil shocks, and Nixon's wage and price controls.

As we've seen in the past few years, inflation alone is more than enough to create strong public demand for political change. But in the 70s, previous credit expansion combined with the government's persistent unwillingness to allow the economy to correct itself also resulted in a stagnant economy. And that combination of high inflation and stagnant economic growth, or "stagflation" as it's come to be known, was considered economically impossible by Keynesian economists.

So the high inflation, low economic growth, and real-time collapse of Keynesianism - the school of thought the political class had been using to justify its economic interventionism - meant change was coming. Also, by the mid-to-late 1970s, the so-called New Left movement, which had started as student protests against the Vietnam War in the 60s, had descended into a highly disturbing mix of lethargic drug use and outright terrorism.

Into that vacuum stepped Milton Friedman.

The nerdy, quick-witted, suit-sporting economist was a perfect foil to the radical, convention-flouting far left much of the country was growing tired of. Friedman's ability to quickly, thoroughly, and politely eviscerate left-wing economic arguments in a highly entertaining fashion made him a star on the talk shows of the day. And, unlike the Keynesians, Friedman's monetarism seemed vindicated by the stagflation.

Thanks in large part to Friedman, the neoliberals took hold of the culture enough to prompt the left-leaning Carter administration to deregulate many parts of the economy including the railroad, airline and trucking industries.

And then, of course, came Ronald Reagan.

Together with Friedman and his fellow Chicago School economists and foreign leaders like Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and his political successors supposedly rolled back all the reforms made since the Progressive Era, ushering in an age of "market fundamentalism," or unfettered capitalism. They helped bring about the modern "Washington consensus" that the government ought not meddle in the economy at all, which we're told is only just now - four decades later - starting to face some pressure from figures like Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.

At least, that is the narrative that both neoliberals and their opponents have settled on. But it is a lie.

The rise of neoliberalism in the 70s and 80s was, to be sure, a real ideological shift. The Friedmanites did come to dominate the economics discipline and political culture in very much the same way Keynesians had decades before.

However, the actual implementation of those free-market ideas was nowhere even close to what the establishment's narrative would have us believe.

Virtually all the deregulation that occurred during the Reagan presidency had actually been passed during the Carter administration. It was only because the changes were phased in during the Reagan administration that made it seem like the new president was deregulating the economy. In fact, he was doing no such thing.

The same goes for tax cuts. As Murray Rothbard explained, the much-heralded Reagan tax cuts that were passed in 1981 were more than offset by tax increases that same year. The administration then spent years raising taxes even more in the name of "closing loopholes."

And all of that was necessary to help fund the massive increase in government spending that took place throughout the Reagan years. The so-called Reagan revolution was truly, to paraphrase Rothbard, an acceleration of statist intervention, rolled out under the cover of free-market rhetoric.

There was, however, one area where the Friedmanites did see their policy prescriptions implemented in a genuine and lasting way: monetary policy.

Unfortunately, when it comes to monetary policy, the Friedmanites entirely abandon their support for markets and instead advocate for government central planning. These new establishment-approved neoliberal economists believed - not only in a fiat monetary system controlled entirely by a government central bank - but in a highly active, inflationist central bank.

Friedman himself even wrote a famous book with Anna Schwartz that used questionable econometric methods to argue that the Great Depression happened because the Federal Reserve had not been printing enough money.

Unsurprisingly, the political class was a lot more than willing to implement a Friedmanite program that gave them more power over the economy rather than less. And so, it was in the realm of monetary policy that the largest expansions of both state power and the crony rackets it's utilized for took place under the new neoliberal paradigm.

First, the Fed was leaned on to print money to help pay for the hawkish foreign policy of the post-1980 Republican Party. And then, especially under the Chairmanship of the late Alan Greenspan, the central bank began to directly prop up the financial sector.

The evolution of Wall Street from one of many options for investing one's savings to essentially being the nerve center of the entire economy was not the result of some natural change in saver preferences; it was the consequence of government policy. Specifically, Greenspan's Fed helped prop up Wall Street with a steady supply of easy money and cheap credit to artificially boost the sector, paired with extensive bailouts for these firms whenever the good times ran out.

This was, in effect, a major escalation of the kinds of crony rackets the federal government had been carrying out since the Progressive Era - all justified by Friedman's monetarist apologia for government money printing.

And that gets to the core of it. The Friedmanite, Reagan-led neoliberal revolution did not end economic interventionism, it rebranded it. And the financialized economy was that new brand. Getting rich on Wall Street became the epitome of capitalism. The rising stock market was the new metric for economic strength. And the Fed's money printing became the economy's lifeblood.

In the decades since, that Fed-enabled racket has expanded dramatically and has seeped far beyond the financial sector. It has allowed the political class to supercharge the rackets built up over the last century - which, remember, the neoliberals never did away with - transferring far more of our wealth to that small caste of well-connected cronies.

And yet, thanks in large part to the neoliberals of the past and present, this highly-interventionist system where the government is actively warping the market to benefit those already on top is called - and truly considered by many to be - genuine, free-market capitalism.

That isn't true. It's a trick - a trick meant to mislead us so that whenever a new economic crisis strikes, we reflexively conclude the crisis happened only because the government isn't involved enough in the economy. And that is the mindset that has made so many normal, everyday, non-ideological people open to the arguments of these self-described democratic socialists.

The neoliberal and neoconservative establishment has done much to carry out this trick. They shouldn't be surprised that it's working.

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of ZeroHedge.

Emmanuel Sharef, who oversees Pacific Investment Management Co.'s flagship Balanced Income and Growth Fund, spoke with Bloomberg about how the next leg of the artificial-intelligence boom could be concentrated in Asian stocks and beyond. 

Wealthy clients in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and mainland China have been piling into the $19 billion fund, which has outperformed 97% of its peers during the past three years.

The fund is underweight most hyperscalers and members of the Magnificent Seven as soaring AI capital expenditures increase debt loads, pressure free cash flow, spark credit concerns, and make already eye-popping valuations much harder to justify. 

"We're underweight the majority of hyperscalers at the moment and we're underweight the majority of the Mag seven just given their high valuations," Sharef told the outlet earlier this week.

He continued, "You don't necessarily need to own the most expensive stocks to capture a particular theme or a particular market trend."

The 60/40 Balanced Income and Growth Fund has been moving further down the supply chain toward companies that build data center components and has become overweight in Asia, where it sees stronger earnings growth, cheaper valuations, and greater exposure to the companies that should be viewed as the building blocks of a data center.

That infrastructure includes semiconductor components, cooling systems, cable interconnects, optical equipment, power supplies, construction machinery, and industrial metals.

"The AI capex build-out is enormous," he said. "It would imply significant demand for semiconductor components for chips, cooling equipment, cable interconnects, optical equipment, power supplies, construction equipment, metals, all of the things that go into building a data center."

The fund's 60% stock allocation gained exposure to AI last year by plowing billions of dollars into firms such as Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing.

Sharef also highlighted a theme we've been developing: the importance of exposure to mining and materials companies tied to data-center construction and global rare-earth supply chains.

"Chinese resource extraction and materials companies are quite significant, not just for the data center buildup, but also for rare earths," he added.

Sharef's call to gain exposure to rare earths and critical materials reinforces a theme we have been developing: the AI trade is ultimately constrained by access to the physical inputs required to build chips, data centers, and power infrastructure. Rare earths and other critical materials are becoming a crucial component of the next AI trade as Chinese suppliers restrict some shipments to the US and US companies accelerate efforts to secure alternative sources beyond Beijing's reach. 

The takeaway from Sharef's conversation with Bloomberg is that the next AI winners will be on an ex-US basis, mostly in Asia. 

Authored by Bruce Thompson via RealClearMarkets,

President Ronald Reagan famously described Washington politicians' solutions to every problem as "if it moves, tax it." That is exactly what many in Washington today want to do with artificial intelligence.

As Wall Street Journal chief economic commentator Greg IP wrote recently, a growing number of experts believe there is "a simple answer to AI job losses." Tax it. His column described a petition signed by 1,000 economists, including 17 Nobel laureates, pleading for higher taxes on AI to prevent "large scale" job losses.

Reagan knew what he was talking about. He grew up in the Midwest in a small town surrounded by farms, and he surely remembered a time when politicians wanted to tax tractors, a new technology driving change. In the early 1900s, the tractor was revolutionizing farming, and politicians were pushing proposals to tax the tractor and prevent the loss of farm jobs. Rep. Willian Connery, a Massachusetts Democrat and Chairman of the House Labor Committee, was a leading advocate of taxing tractors and other labor-saving machines to stop mass unemployment.

The introduction of tractors was the most revolutionary change in our history, affecting millions of jobs and driving millions off the farm. Between 1910 and 1960, nearly 10 million farm workers lost their jobs and 25 million people left their farms for the city. The benefits of the tractor were enormous. Farm production soared, food prices dropped, and the U.S. provided enough food to feed people around the world.

The farm revolution transformed the American economy, creating growth, and increasing prosperity. Millions of farm workers were freed from back-breaking labor and found better jobs in the city. An NBER study called tractors the "engine of growth" and estimated they doubled per-capita GDP and created millions of jobs.

AI promises a bright future of technological and scientific progress, increased productivity, and a more prosperous economy. Like many changes in the past, there are concerns about the impact on jobs. But taxing AI would be just like taxing tractors, a futile knee jerk reaction to change.

Not surprisingly, there is no shortage of terrible tax ideas floating around Washington. Senator Bernie Sanders has proposed a 50% tax on the equity of AI companies. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Ron Wyden have proposed new taxes on data centers. House Democrats have proposed a new tax on AI computing powers, and others have proposed a tax on robots. If it moves, they want to tax it.

None of these tax increases are a good idea. Raising taxes on AI would slow investment, curb innovation, and only help our foreign competitors. Just like a tractor tax, a new AI tax would only slow new technological advances that will benefit everyone.

Rather than taxing AI, Washington should focus on assisting those jobs which have been most affected by automation, such as entry-level jobs. Congress should consider targeted tax incentives for entry-level employment, including payroll tax relief and job training for junior workers. Helping young workers get started is a much better response to the AI revolution than trying to stop it with a tax increase.

Bruce Thompson was a U.S. Senate aide, assistant secretary of Treasury for legislative affairs, and the director of government relations for Merrill Lynch for 22 years.

Online betting is off to the races - and this summer the adoption curve started looking like a hockey stick.

According to a new analysis by Bank of America - which can see every ACH, debit and credit card payment its customers make to and from sportsbooks, horse-racing platforms and prediction markets their own customers make: 

• Roughly 5% of BofA customers sent money to an online betting platform in July.
• The number of online bettors is up 40% since the start of the year.
• The number of first-time bettors in June and July was more than triple the January level.

The bank credits the summer spike to the World Cup and "promotions and buzz" around prediction markets, and fair enough: every adoption curve has a catalyst. What matters is what the base looks like once the catalyst passes, and here the seasonal pattern is instructive. First-time users jump with every major sports season, and the 2025 football season - which the bank defines as September through February, so it sweeps in the NFL, college ball and most of the NBA and NHL - produced 22% more first-timers than the year before. Each season enrolls a larger freshman class. The class that enrolled this summer was three times the size of January's, and it arrived right before the busiest stretch of the calendar.

Nor is this something people try once and forget. Per a CivicScience survey cited in the note, 34% of online sports bettors wager weekly and 23% bet daily; fewer than one in five are the several-times-a-year Super Bowl crowd. That is the engagement profile of a social app, not a lottery ticket.

The turning point

By generation, Gen Z (48%) and Millennials (40%) accounted for 88% of online betting activity in July. Gen X managed 9%; Baby Boomers, 3%. And as recently as this spring, Millennials were the larger group. Gen Z overtook them this summer - a shift BofA describes as a "turning point" in the composition of online bettors.

BofA defines Gen Z as anyone born after 1995, which means the oldest members are turning 30 this year and the cohort came of age alongside legal, app-based sports betting. BofA points out that younger consumers have consistently been first to adopt every emerging digital platform - crypto, BNPL, online marketplaces - and that betting appears to be following the same script.

When it comes to income - betting activity is split almost evenly across terciles - 37% lower, 34% middle, 29% higher.

Oh it's investing!

According to a BofA survey conducted in March, 20% of respondents said they consider sports betting a form of investing, with Gen Z twice as likely as everyone else to say so. Across every generation, buying event contracts on a prediction market was more likely to be classified as investing than placing a sportsbook wager.

Prediction markets have listed contracts on almost anything - whether a politician sips water on camera during a speech, how many flu cases the year will bring - dressed in the language of derivatives: standardized, exchange-traded, resolved at a point in time. BofA notes that prediction markets, crypto, retail trading and sports betting all share "community participation and real-time pricing," which is a polite way of saying they share a user interface. To a generation raised on the Fed put, zero-day options and a community tab, a football game is simply another underlying.

And then there's  the red tape...

Naturally, the regulators have noticed - and, naturally, their first move is a jurisdictional fight. The CFTC's position, per BofA's public-policy team, is that certain event contracts traded on federally regulated exchanges are derivatives under the Commodity Exchange Act and therefore federal turf. State and tribal regulators counter that contracts tied to sports and entertainment are gambling with extra steps and belong under existing state gaming, licensing and consumer-protection law. Lawmakers from both parties and both chambers have filed bills. The CFTC has also opened a rulemaking on perpetual futures and issued an advisory warning event-contract venues away from sweepstakes-style rewards and prizes "based on pure chance" - the sort of promotional program that helped fill the summer's freshman class - and, per BofA Global Research, is trying to draw a brighter line between prediction markets and sportsbooks by targeting in-house market making, incentive programs and "casino style odds."

None of it slows adoption. Arguing over whether a contract is a "derivative" or a "wager" is an argument over who gets to regulate and tax the growth, not whether the growth happens. By the time the rulebook is written, the users will already be there. Most of them already are.

And it's not even football season yet...