Everyone keeps asking if we “won” Operation Epic Fury like it’s the Super Bowl, not a campaign inside a decades-long conflict.

It's crazy that Holiday and Moyer hold up Ted Lasso as a legit source of moral formation for secular parents. The assumption underneath is clear: religious people outsource their moral reasoning to priests and prophets. "If you're not going to church... where somebody else is doing that for you..." AKA Christians can't think for themselves. The superior secular humanist, by contrast, arrives at objective morality through pure enlightened reason. It's a condescending premise. And it's wrong. @andrewklavan has a great YouTube video on Ted Lasso. His takeaway: that specific brand of unshakeable American optimism, and belief the show is built on? It's historically rooted in faith. Pull the faith out, and there is no foundation. The show treats Ted's divorce as a mature, selfless act. Klavan calls it what it is: Hollywood's version of decency, where divorce is painless, sophisticated and normal, minimizing the true cost, particularly to children. Here's the real irony... Hollywood inherited the blueprint for a good man from a faith tradition it despises.

The Mandalorian and Grogu is projecting an 80M four-day opening. Solo, the franchise's previous worst, opened to 103M over the same Memorial Day window. That result restructured the entire studio's strategy. This is the first Star Wars movie in seven years. It is tracking below the floor. The marketing campaign ran for six months. It hit WrestleMania, the Super Bowl, American Idol, and the Oscars. After all of it, the audience skewing in tracking right now is men over 25, AKA the hardcore fans who were going regardless. The family/casual audience isn't there. Three weeks out.

Sat night, there were two DC parties one mile apart. At one, a gunman targeted the Trump administration. At the other, a former CNN anchor had a critic thrown out of an invite-only gallery party. I think these events are related in a strange way...