I remember casting my ballot for the first time as a newly-minted 18-year-old growing up in Northern New Jersey. I was a senior in High School who was filled with so much enthusiasm for the process of voting. I had binged several episodes of the show The West Wing the night before, and I incessantly couldn’t stop quoting lines from the sequel to Legally Blonde — Legally Blonde 2: Red, White, & Blonde.

As Elle Woods would say, “I was there to speak up!” I had researched all the positions beforehand, and I knew exactly who and what I would…

The hateful comics of StoneToss, Hedgewik, MadebyJimBob, and more.

For the longest time, the Internet has been a place for comic book artists to get their start. Comics such as xkcd and Homestuck inspired cult followings and fandoms. Artists such as Alex Woolfson of The Young Protectors fame proved that indie creators with marginalized identities could successfully express themselves — free of the barriers that plagued more intensive media such as TV shows, movies, and video games.

And yet, the Internet has always had a dark underbelly, where creators use their platforms to spread hatred and misinformation. While increased moderation…

Loki was a show that tried to cover a lot of things in its six-episode run-time: as with any Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) property, it continued the larger cinematic narrative, specifically the fallout following the end of Avengers: Endgame (2019); it introduced the concept of multiverses; forecasted our next big bad; on top of having a philosophical conversation about if free will even exist alongside nonlinear time. There is a ton to parse, here and not all of these concepts play nicely with one another.

Underneath all of this bluster, however, there is a rather interesting conversation about fascism. The…

Bro, if you have ever been in a heated conversation online, you’ve probably had a cringe-worthy debate defining political terms like socialism or capitalism. “[Socialism] Who’s Behind It, Why It’s Evil, and How To Stop It” reads the subheader for Dinesh D’Souza’s 2020 book United States of Socialism. “Socialism is when the government does stuff,” academic Richard D. Wolff infamously said at a talk. People have a lot of opinions on how we should structure our government, and as we can see, they can get very rough.

However, it quickly becomes apparent that most people simply do not know what…

The political satire about liberals hunting conservatives has more to say than culture war shenanigans.

The movie The Hunt (2020) was controversial before it even aired. The social commentary about liberals hunting conservatives garnered criticism from far-right pundits like former president Donald Trump. It was pulled from its initial release in 2019 following the mass shootings in Gilroy, Calif., El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, and then aired during the pandemic when we all had more to worry about than a movie being insensitive.

As political satire, The Hunt is a story that, from start to finish, cautions against “political…

Gettr launched in the public eye on July 4th to much fanfare. The press immediately picked up on the story with gusto. “Team Trump quietly launches new social media platform,” wrote Politico on July 1st. The initial welcome post on the site has over 150,000 comments, and the Gettr app has quickly been downloaded millions of times the world over.

Immediately, however, it was clear that there were problems. The product that rolled out was confusing and eerily similar to Twitter. It was plagued with trolls and lax security easily exploited by said trolls. …

If you have been on YouTube recently, you might have noticed a very peculiar ad. “Political elites from the radical left want to overthrow the Supreme Court,” an imposing voice booms. “The cost would not only be our founding principles but our civil liberties as we know them.” The ad claims that a Supreme Court “coup” is underway and that Americans must be vigilant to stop radical leftists from overtaking the country.

This hysteria is very clearly not true on multiple levels that we will go into in more detail later on. The left is nowhere near capturing any federal…

The queer community deserves more than subtext.

Disney released the animated film Luca around the world in late June during the height of Pride month. It’s a movie that features two prepubescent boys in the Italian countryside. They have an incident that prompts them to leave home, sending them on a journey of self-discovery. The film is fairly standard in the coming-of-age genre. You are probably well familiar with the drill at this point.

Since some of the themes in the film focus on hiding your identity and accepting who you are, a lot of queer viewers have picked up…