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'I’ve done a lot of damage to the body'

'Heartbreaking statements'

News Dream Productions Making Dreams Is No Picnic in Dream Productions Trailer By Vanessa Armstrong | Published on November 20, 2024 Credit: Disney/Pixar Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Disney/Pixar Pixar just released the first trailer for Dream Productions, the Inside Out spinoff series. In it, we meet the characters who make young Riley’s dreams come alive at night. (Note, this takes place between Inside Out and Inside Out 2, so Riley is in her early tweens.) We also get a glimpse of the mockumentary style of the four-episode series, which includes a moving camera lens that sometimes struggles to stay in focus. Based on this trailer, the show looks cute! Here’s the full official synopsis to give you more details on what the story entails: Riley is growing up and when her memories need some extra processing, Joy and the rest of the Core Emotions send them to Dream Productions. Acclaimed director Paula Persimmon (voice of Paula Pell) faces a nightmare of her own: Trying to create the next hit dream after being paired up with Xeni (voice of Richard Ayoade), a smug daydream director looking to step up into the big leagues of night dreams. In addition to Pell and Ayoade, Dream Productions features the voice talents of Amy Poehler, Maya Rudolph, Ally Maki, Kensington Tallman, Liza Lapira, Tony Hale, Lewis Black, and Phyllis Smith. It’s written and directed by Mike Jones, whose previous credits include penning the screenplays for Pixar’s Luca and Soul. All four episodes of Dream Productions are available to stream on Disney+ starting on December 11, 2024. Check out the trailer below. [end-mark] The post Making Dreams Is No Picnic in <i>Dream Productions</i> Trailer appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV Red One There’s Not Enough Coal In The World For Red One There are four things I takes seriously in this life, and two of them are Christmas movies, and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. By Leah Schnelbach | Published on November 20, 2024 Screenshot: Amazon MGM Studios Comment 0 Share New Share Screenshot: Amazon MGM Studios I wasn’t planning to review Red One. I was going to ignore it. but then Dwayne Johnson went and said this, out loud, in public: “I watch Oppenheimer. It was amazing, but I was thinking: ‘Holy shit. Red One on this screen and with this technology could be game over.’ I remember texting [director Jake Kasdan] a picture of my bare chest and a picture of the screen and we realized how cool [Imax] would be.” And I’m sorry, but my boy Bobby Oppenheimer did not build a bomb as big as a damn bus, and my boy Christopher Nolan did not make an epic deconstruction of a Great Man Biopic, and my eternal beloved Cillian Murphy did not turn in one of the greatest performances of the century so far, to be mentioned in the same fucking breath with a two-hour-and-two-minute long slab of joyless Gowanus Canal-water-looking content that essentially tells a story that The Tick cartoon told in the ’90s, in 23 minutes, better. OK, plot: A cynical ne’er-do-well black-hat (hahaha) hacker mercenary named (heavy sigh) Jack O’Malley takes a job that crashes the North Pole security dome, thus allowing Santa, in whom he does not believe, to be kidnapped. Then he has to open his heart to whimsy, recant his Santatheism, and believe in the Spirit of Christmas in order to save—wait, that never actually happens. He’s whisked away to the North Pole, meets some mythological creatures and a sentient polar bear, learns that he’s been on the Naughty List—which is a real thing—for most of his life, and accepts this new reality almost instantaneously. He helps save Santa because a secret government agency pays him a shitload of money to do so. OK, let’s try this one: the head of Santa’s security detail, (heavier sigh) Enforcement Logistics and Fortification (E.L.F., you see), an inhuman creature of indeterminate strength named Callum Drift, is having a crisis of faith. It’s only by risking his own life to save Santa that he rekindles his belief in the Spirit of Christmas, and saves—hmm, hang on, that kind of happens, but the rekindling of faith part gets jammed into the last five minutes of the movie and doesn’t really land? And happens after he’s already helped save Santa with his giant, indeterminately powerful fists. All right, how about: An extremely powerful magical nemesis of Santa’s attempts to hijack Christmas (with the help of Santa’s estranged brother) in order to punish the Naughty and terrify humanity into being Nice, but Santa’s kindness and compassion eventually win the day—oh, actually never mind. That does sort of happen, but we never really know why the old nemesis is doing this, we never know why she’s doing it right now, or get a sense of how terrifying the plot actually is. Santa and his brother reconcile over like two lines of dialogue after the Big End-Of-Movie Battle, and it’s Cal, Jack, and the brother who defeat the nemesis while Santa’s unconscious. OK, what about: the whole film is a meditation on the very concept of Nice and Naughty, the eternal struggle between humanity’s better and baser natures. The filmmakers use Christmas as a unique and festive platform to ask Big Questions about free will, faith, gift-giving, and the state of the world in 2024. Hahahahaha no. No, there are repeated interminable conversations about Nice-ness and Naughty-ness that wheeze along like an asthmatic reindeer pulling an overburdened sleigh, but there’s never any sense that Santa’s given this shit real thought, and the act that supposedly moves Jack into Nice-ness after lifetime on the Naughty List is tiny, arguably self-serving—and the magical nemesis still punishes him anyway. (And the idea that maybe people who don’t believe in Santa shouldn’t be on his list in the first place is never really broached.)   Oh but perhaps you’re saying “Let people enjoy things”? That it’s a film for children? Is it? It’s a slog of blurry, unnecessarily brutal fight scenes, treacly speeches about choice, and characters saying “Holy Shit!” every time a new mythological creature shows up. Paddington is for children, but I could always tell what was happening in that movie, and I cared about the characters, and when there were speeches they sounded like things people might actually say to each other, and no one cursed for no reason. (And yeah, believe me, I’m also surprised at my annoyance at the cursing, but I write my reviews and essays with an at-least-9th-grade audience in mind. I don’t think eight-year-olds need to watch scenes where characters threaten to slap each other to death while another character says “shit” every ten minutes to tell the audience they should be having an emotional reaction to what they’re seeing.) And also children deserve better. We all deserve better, but children especially. It’s not their fault they were born after the MCU and the need for constant streaming “content” turned every movie and TV show into washed out grey sludge with no stakes and terrible writing. Screenshot: Amazon MGM Studios If for some reason you’re concerned about spoilers—don’t be, you’ve seen everything in this movie many times before—you should board your sleigh and jingle hop off to a different movie review now. But hang on, maybe I should lay my bonafides on the table. To paraphrase Crow T. Robot, I absolutely believe that a good action sequence belongs in Christmas. Die Hard is one of my favorite movies of all time, Christmas or no Christmas. I love Lethal Weapon (aside from the slurs), I love Iron Man 3 and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, and, ok, seriously, Shane Black might be my own personal Santa. I love Dark Weird Christmas. Less Than Zero is a Christmas movie. So is Carol. So is Eyes Wide Shut. So is Trading Places. So is William Burrough’s A Junky’s Christmas. So is In Bruges. So, to my utter delight, is Small Things Like These. I love that the internet seems to discover a New Terrifying European Christmas tradition each year. ranking list tk? I love Deconstruction Christmas because irony is the air that I breathe, and I love the gap between the hyper-sincerity of Christmas and something like Invader Zim or The Tick or South Park or AD/BC or Gremlins or Batman Returns or, or, or. I love Poignant Christmas, “River”, The Boondocks, The Snowman, The Apartment, the “Seven Fishes” episode of The Bear, 3/4s of Sufjan Stevens’ Christmas catalogue.  So please, please understand, this movie should have been my mulled cranberry jam. Our film opens on an overstuffed suburban house (presumably just down the road from the McCallister’s) where a comically huge family has gathered for the holiday. But one boy, a Non-Believer, lifts his uncle’s keyring to unlock the closet where the toys are hidden and convince his cousins there’s no Santa Claus. The uncle catches them, explains that all Jack, because of course this is Young Jack, has found is the gifts the family bought for the kids—Santa is still coming with more stuff, never fear. Oh and also Jack’s dad is AWOL, his mother isn’t mentioned or seen, our Jack is a troubled lad, all right. As character introductions for a Christmas film go, it’s not terrible, just predictable. But there’s plenty to work with here! And given that the film comes down to a debate over the efficacy of Nice and Naughty lists, the idea that Jack will later be placed on the Naughty List by an objectively real Santa, and have to grapple with the consequences of that, is a great conflict to start with. Screenshot: Amazon MGM Studios Unfortunately we get a second introduction, to Adult Jack, where he orchestrates an elaborate heist that doesn’t really work or make any sense, but that’s meant to show us how little he cares about society or other people, and then to really drive the point home he literally steals candy from a baby. Remember when Chris Evans gave a hilarious performance in Knives Out, and people like me were ecstatic because he was throwing off the metaphorical cape of Captain America and having fun playing a total asshole? This is like that, except it’s exhausting and makes me sad. The heist also shows him being good at literally everything he would need to be good at to pull it off, and later he turns out to be as good at movie fighting as someone who played a superhero would be. Except, again, he’s playing a computer hacker. Did I mention yet that at one point, to really drive home how much he doesn’t care about anything, man, the movie’s writers have him wake up in a bathtub with a slice of pizza on his chest? Placed at a perfect jaunty angle on his otherwise clean shirt, to try to convince us that he cares so little about anything, man, that he fell asleep eating pizza in a bathtub even though his living room is two feet away and there is no grease on the shirt? Full disclosure: I mention this because I, too, once had a character wake up in a bathtub to indicate that she didn’t care about anything, man. But I wrote that scene when I WAS NINETEEN YEARS OLD AND I WAS NOT CHARGING $25 PER IMAX TICKET FOR PEOPLE TO SEE IT. Sorry. Let me take a breath. I could forgive all of this, honestly, hand to Santa, if only the whole thing where Jack rejected Christmas and all of its works paid off. But it doesn’t. Once he’s brought to the North Pole, and told Santa is a) real and b) in trouble, he doesn’t wrestle with his concept of reality. He doesn’t have a breakdown or even go through a comic montage of refusing to believe the evidence of his eyes, he just accepts that his entire worldview is wrong and mythological creatures are real in the space of like two conversations with The Rock. Interminable hours later, when he finally meets Santa, it’s completely anticlimactic because it happens during the Big End-Of-Movie Battle, and, oh yeah, Santa’s unconscious. Then there’s Dwayne Johnson’s character, who’s named Callum Drift for some reason. We never learn what he is. And look, I don’t mean to sound species-ist, but in a movie about mythological holiday people we shouldn’t we learn what Cal’s background is, why he works for Santa, why he’s hundreds of years old and super strong, how strong he actually is? Because there are a couple points in the movie where he’s explicitly threatened with death (Merry Christmas, everybody!) and I never knew if I was supposed to be worried because as far as I could tell he was invulnerable! How can I invest in this dude when all I know about him is that he wants to quit being Santa’s head of security because he “can’t see it anymore”—but even this is just told to us, directly, over multiple conversations, and we aren’t shown what that phrase means until the last five minutes of the movie. All right, sorry again, let me try to get this in hand. Does Red One want to be edgy Deconstruction Christmas? The North Pole is not a quaint Northern European village, but a bustling metropolis full of towering glass buildings that are just begging for Tom Cruise to free climb them in a better movie. Oh and don’t worry, all those people bustling around handily disappear when the Big End-Of-Movie Battle happens, I wouldn’t want you to worry, or have any sort of emotional investment in what happens in this film. Screenshot: Amazon MGM Studios. Do Androids Dream of Electric Reindeer? You tell me, Red One As I mentioned at the start, Santa isn’t assisted by elves but by E.L.F., a giant bureaucracy of non-humans with jobs ranging from “Ribbons” to “Security”. That’s pretty edgy, right? Well, we never get to see any of the E.L.F. inner workings after the introduction scene, so don’t get too excited. There’s also M.O.R.A. the (heaviest sigh) Mythological Oversight and Restoration Authority, an organization that manages mythological creatures just like in Hellboy or Cabin in the Woods, except not as good, because you only get to see one mythological figure. I try not to harp about film budgets cause it’s not like it’s MY money, but for over 200 million dollars maybe they could have at least given us more mythological folks than The Nightmare Before Christmas did back in 1993? Oh, there’s an Embiggening Ray (I’m calling it that, I can’t remember if they ever say the name of the thing) that you can use to make things BIG? Cool! Well kind of cool—the Rock uses it repeatedly during fights to shrink and grow himself, but it’s never funny or interesting because the green screen choreography is too boring for it to make a difference. They use it to make a car big—you saw that scene in the trailer right? Well, you will believe they can make a second car big in exactly the same way so it’s boring now. And then later they make some Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots big, but they don’t look real at all, and they’re destroyed within seconds, so here again, not much of a pay off. OK, so maybe the makers of Red One are going for Dark Weird Euro Christmas? Screenshot: Amazon MGM Studios Well, Grýla is here… um, occasionally. In our world, Grýla is a giant Icelandic Ogress who wanders around demanding tribute from people—especially tribute in the form of naughty children to boile alive and eat. In Red One, she’s Santa’s ancient magical enemy who I mentioned up top, and boy is she underused, and then used badly when she’s onscreen. They introduce her Lore incredibly quickly in a conversation between Cal, Jack, and Nick Kroll’s character, not in a flashback to anything she did, or a storybook, or an actual Icelandic person talking about the havoc she wreaked. When we see her, all she does is yell at people in that I AM A PISSED OFF GIRLBOSS voice that women use in action movies, until its time for her to become her final, blurry, CGI form for the badly lit Big End-Of-Movie Battle, which happens at night, in the dark. (…Gaslight, Gatekeep, Grýlaboss? Is that anything?) Grýla’s thirteen sons, the Yule Lads, but they do nothing. What the hell kind of a Christmas movie wastes not just one, but all thirteen Yule Lads. Screenshot: Amazon MGM Studios Krampus is Santa’s brother, and Grýla’s ex, and it’s all predictable unresolved anger and grievance, with the only surprising thing being that this Krampus is nowhere near as scary as the cartoon version that appeared on The Venture Brothers. Cal and Jack crash his Krampusnacht party, which is a teeming room of ogres and trolls and hot goth girls who cheer and love violence, because that’s unique and interesting in 2024. This wouldn’t be as bad, except that this is the pivotal scene where Jack makes a choice that gets him off the Naughty List—but the choice comes out of nowhere, and is overwhelmed by the bland, inconsequential violence of the party. When Cal inevitably challenges Krampus, since we don’t know what Cal’s strengths and weaknesses are, there’s no real sense of stakes, just the same endless plateau of meaningless violence as in every other fight scene. You know how the good thing about A Very Shane Black Christmas is the juxtaposition of violence and Christmassy stuff? Yeah, there’s no juxtaposition here, because even when Jack and Cal are walking through a Christkindlmarkt in Germany it never feels like Christmas, it feels like a backlot somewhere outside Atlanta. OK, perhaps that’s too subjective, so let me also say: you know how the great thing about Die Hard is the juxtaposition between a) Christmas!, b) the high-end slick, Euro-violence of Hans Gruber and his men, and c) the street-level, sarcastic, barefoot, terrified, ordinary guy-ness of John McClane? Chris Evans’ fully human character should die at least twenty different times over the course of the film, but just, doesn’t. He is trapped in terrifying situations that he is utterly unprepared for, he is literally thrown through walls by magical evil snowman, but somehow he can just jump back up and shake it off, and toss off a quip. Maybe that’s the true meaning of Christmas? The climactic fight (of course it’s a fight, and not anything more interesting) happens at night, in the dark, and is once again the blurry, sludgy CGI action that is the true legacy of the MCU. The villain is seemingly defeated and rises again. A character that seemed like an antagonist suddenly switches sides. Normal human hacker Jack is given Batman-v-Bane level injuries, and just keeps quippin’. Screenshot: Amazon MGM Studios. I hope you like this face Chris Evans is making, cause it’s just this or the SMIRK for two hours. All right, fine, Leah, you hated the movie. But as you keep complaining that this film doesn’t pay any of its ideas off, are you planning to come back around to that stuff about Oppenheimer from the opening paragraph? I am! Right now in fact! You see, Dwayne Johnson chose to call Oppenheimer out specifically as a touchstone for his movie. And on the one hand, I get it, you’re trying to encourage people to see the thing you spent time on, and naturally you name check a project that was successful. I get it, I do, but here’s the thing: a cursory glance through the way the two movies approach their stories shows just how much more seriously Oppenheimer took the idea of crafting a film. Most of the important conversations and exposition (there’s enough exposition to fill Santa’s infinite bag) take place in a car. Cal and Jack either stare stoically ahead, or smirk, or attempt to make eye contact when they ought to be watching the road. Cal lectures Jack about the importance of making choices, or Jack grudgingly or smirkingly admits to being Naughty. A pivotal conversation between Cal and Santa happens in Santa’s gym, with the joke being, I think, that Dwayne Johnson is spotting Santa Claus. But it’s just a normal-looking bland room with some weights in it. It could be a gym in any movie. The lighting is ordinary overhead lighting. Screenshot: Amazon MGM Studios In Oppenheimer, a few of the most important conversations take place on trains. These are shot with the characters facing each other, listening to each other, responding to each other, and all the exposition is intercut with scenes that either deepen what the characters are saying, or act as counterpoints to the lies they’re telling each other. One pivotal conversation takes place between Oppenheimer and Jean Tatlock while they’re both sitting naked in a hotel room immediately after sex. Another takes place between Oppenheimer and his wife Kitty while they’re on horseback, galloping over a New Mexican mesa. Hell, come to think of it, Oppenheimer says his most famous catchphrase during sex with Jean. Screenshot: Universal Pictures. Light and shadow! Texture! Depth! The attention to detail people paying IMAX prices deserve! Now I’m not saying that we needed Cal and Santa to hook up while they talked about Nice-ness and Naughty-ness and the choices people make, but I am saying that this conversation could have happened, I don’t know, under a Christmas tree? Or in front of a conveyor belt of ornaments? Or, you know what, you want to go for the gag that Santa’s a gym rat because delivering the toys is incredibly taxing—fabulous! Then make the gym Christmassy! Gingerbread Gym! Candy Cane Gains! Anything to underscore what they’re saying, or at least to make Red One feel like a Christmas movie. In Oppenheimer the worldbuilding is very clear. and it is worldbuilding. we see that Robert has the intelligence and privilege to hop all over Europe as he pursues a rarefied education. We see that he chooses the company of intellectuals and communists. We see him attend classes and cocktail parties, we see him attract intelligent, gorgeous women, we see him gather devoted students. We also see that he’s depressive, that he had a breakdown in college, that he is attracted to communism but won’t commit, but also refuses to believe that this dalliance might ever mess up his future under a conservative U.S. government. He juggles women. He makes truly horrifying choices, that then lead to terrible consequences not just for him, but for all of us, forever. Screenshot: Universal Pictures. Human emotion! Real lighting! A pivotal scene that add to the overall narrative of the film! You know, worldbuilding. We know Oppy’s world, very early in the film. We know his friends, his lovers, his enemies, his strengths, his weaknesses. We learn all of this very quickly, so as the three-hour runtime unspools, we know all the characters were dealing with. We can watch the Q clearance hearings, and think back to his youthful nervous breakdown. We can look at Kitty, coiled like a cobra in the corner during the hearings, and think back to Jean Tatlock sobbing on a hotel floor. We can see hale and blustery Colonel Groves, largely ignored by the Q Clearance committee, and remember the power the man wielded at an earlier point in his life. In Red One we never know what Cal is. He’s the head of security for E.L.F., he isn’t human, and he’s hundreds of years old. We don’t know what his powers are. We don’t know why he gets to wield the Embiggener, or who made it, or if anyone else has one. We never know if we should be afraid for him. We never know how he came to work for Santa, how he rose through the ranks, what he’ll do after he quits, nothing. We never see Grýla or the Yule Lads do… anything, really. We don’t get a flashback of Santa and Krampus together, we’re just told about their rift (in a car conversation, iirc) a few minutes before we need to know who Krampus is for the next scene to work. We don’t know why the reindeer love Cal especially, or if they have any other loyalties, powers beyond flight, more than basic sentience, anything. Santa is referred to by his saint’s name—Nicholas of Myra—but the fact that he’s a real, canonized-in-our-world saint, from a particular religious tradition, is not dealt with. Why is he immortal? Why is he able to deliver the presents? We see how, sure, but why? How did he and Mrs. Claus meet? Is she human? Why is there one (1) sentient polar bear? What about all the kids on earth who aren’t Christian? (And I’m not even going to mention that other Christmas figurehead.) But even aside from all that. Red One‘stheme, as its characters remind us again and again (and again and again), is that humans have to make a choice between being Nice and being Naughty. Which is also what Oppenheimer is about. Screenshot: Universal Pictures. Notice how this shot is blurry FOR A REASON. Grýla wants to punish the Naughty, no matter how tiny their crimes, to force the world to be Nice. Essentially that’s undoing free will, which I guess means that in the universe of this movie free will is real, but that’s never really discussed either. (I mention it because who knows if it’s real in our world? It might be, it might not be. But if it’s an objective reality in the world of the film, that’s a thing we should know.) Oppenheimer is about choice. it’s about a person with great talents and knowledge, who has to make an enormous decision to use his knowledge to create something that has the power to destroy all life as we know it, or to refuse to use the knowledge for that and to campaign for others to likewise refuse. We see that Oppy is a great organizer, blisteringly charismatic, able to talk people into almost anything. we see that there are multiple points in the project where he could have said no or stalled or obfuscated or straight up lied to keep the invention of the bomb at bay. At the point when the math tells them that they might set the atmosphere alight the first time they test, he could have backed off and said it wasn’t worth the risk, and the others would have followed. Even as the day of the Trinity test dawn, the last possible shot, the weather turns against him, but instead of throwing up his hands and throwing in the towel, he pushes to go thru with it, insisting that the weather will change by the time of the test. he’s right; he knows the desert. but that’s just it: he’s the one who knows the desert. If he’d said, aw shucks, this weather will ruin the test lets call the whole thing off, they might have. they would have missed the deadline that Truman had set, and maybe at that point they would have given up the idea as a folly, given the the Nazis were already defeated, and the Japanese were running out of resources and may have given up. would it have been brutal, still? Yeah, probably, it is after all war. but would it have meant that all the rest of us wouldn’t have to live under the threat of nuclear armageddon, forever? Would that have been “worth it”? Has the concept of “worth it” become meaningless in the face of this much death and horror?    But we won’t ever know, because in this world he decided to run with it, and in the world of the film he decided to run with it because he was so turned on by the power of creating this bomb that he trampled over every single obstacle to get to Trinity. Again, I only bring all of this up because Dwayne Johnson did. Oppenheimer is about choices all the way down. Robert chooses to try to poison his teacher. He chooses to juggle different relationships with women. He chooses to prioritize his work over his family, but also to abandon his wife to the work of mothering and homemaking even though she doesn’t enjoy either thing. He chooses to organize students and flirt with communism, and then chooses to abandon that flirtation to become a warmonger. He chooses to go through with the project. He chooses to advocate for arms control later, at great personal and professional cost, despite the futility of his protests. Screenshot: Universal Pictures. I don’t know, guys. I think he might still be on the Naughty List. The movie, like Red One, is about action and consequence, choice and regret, free will and futility. Red One gives us a “black-hat” hacker mercenary who decides to be Nice in a split second, after a lifetime on the Naughty List, and acts like it’s the easiest thing in the world. It gives us Cal the good soldier, giving up his career because of a serious existential crisis, a real rift in how he views the world, who can also regain his old belief system in the blink of an eye, and go on like nothing ever happened. It gives us a Santa who spends the majority of the film asleep, and a Gryla who wants to punish the Naughty, without ever defining what Naughty means, or seeing that her own choice is itself Naughty. Did J. Robert Oppenheimer do enough, in those later years, to get off humanity’s Naughty list? I don’t feel qualified to answer that, but at least Nolan takes the central question of his film seriously. [end-mark] The post There’s Not Enough Coal In The World For <em>Red One</em> appeared first on Reactor.

House Speaker Mike Johnson signaled support for banning incoming Rep. Tim McBride, who identifies as a woman and wishes to be called Sarah, from women’s spaces in the Capitol, in comments Wednesday. “All single-sex facilities in the Capitol and House Office Buildings—such as restrooms, changing rooms, and locker rooms—are reserved for individuals of that biological sex,” Johnson said in a statement. Johnson, who had commented Tuesday that he wanted to “treat everybody with dignity” even as he believes that “a man cannot become a woman,” stressed in his remarks that McBride would have options besides using the men’s bathrooms. “It is important to note that each Member office has its own private restroom, and unisex restrooms are available throughout the Capitol,” the speaker added. “Women deserve women’s only spaces,” Johnson concluded Johnson’s remarks come after Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., had announced a resolution that would have limited House members and staffers to using bathrooms matching their birth sex. McBride, a Delaware Democrat, has previously posted a photograph of himself in a women’s bathroom in 2016 amid a North Carolina political fight over bathrooms and transgender people’s access to single-sex spaces of the opposite sex. Here I am in a NC women's restroom that I'm barred from being in. Stop this. We are good people. #ThisIsTransgender pic.twitter.com/7AEykwZfUW— Sarah McBride (@SarahEMcBride) August 31, 2016 “If someone with a penis is in a women’s locker room that’s not OK,” Mace told reporters earlier this week. “I’m a victim of abuse myself. I’m a rape survivor. I have PTSD from the abuse I’ve suffered at the hands of a man, and I know how vulnerable women and girls are in private spaces.” “I’m absolutely 100% gonna stand in the way of any man who wants to be in a women’s restroom, in our locker rooms, in our changing rooms. I will be there fighting you every step of the way,” the congresswoman added. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., has also spoken out against McBride receiving access to women’s spaces. “He’s a man,” Greene said, according to the New York Times. “He’s a biological male. So he is not allowed to use our women’s restrooms, our women’s gym, our locker rooms. He’s a biological male. He has plenty of places he can go.” A 2022 Pew Research Center survey found that 41% of Americans agreed that trans people should use the bathroom that matched their birth sex, while 31% opposed. Twenty-eight percent of Americans were undecided on the issue.  Democrats continue to advocate for McBride to have access to women’s bathrooms in the Capitol. “The notion that this incoming small House Republican Conference majority is beginning to transition to the new Congress by bullying a member of Congress, this is what we’re doing? This is the lesson that you’ve drawn from the election in November?” said House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., according to CNN. The post ‘Women Deserve Women’s Only Spaces’: Johnson Says Capitol Bathroom Access Should Be Based on Biological Sex appeared first on The Daily Signal.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Colorado’s government has consented to a settlement requiring it to disburse more than $1.5 million in attorney fees to Lorie Smith, a graphic designer who won in a First Amendment challenge against the state’s anti-discrimination law. This legal resolution, announced on Tuesday, follows a definitive Supreme Court verdict that Colorado’s attempt to coerce Smith into designing wedding websites for same-sex couples violated her free speech rights, in conflict with her religious beliefs. We obtained a copy of the final judgement for you here. The case, known as 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, which we first covered back in 2022, was decisively settled earlier this year when a federal district court ruled that Colorado must stop mandating Smith to engage in speech that contradicts her convictions. “After enduring Colorado’s censorship for nearly seven years, I’m incredibly grateful for the work of my attorneys at Alliance Defending Freedom to bring my case to victory,” Smith stated, in a press release sent to Reclaim The Net, appreciating the efforts of her legal team. She added, “As the Supreme Court said, I’m free to create art consistent with my beliefs without fear of Colorado punishing me anymore.” The Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision last June reinforced this stance, stating that Colorado’s enforcement of public accommodations law to compel Smith amounted to forced speech. Justice Neil Gorsuch, authoring the opinion for the majority, pointed out that the law was an attempt by Colorado “to force an individual to speak in ways that align with its views but defy her conscience about a matter of major significance.” If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Colorado Agrees to Settlement in First Amendment Case Where Designer Was Coerced into Same-Sex Wedding Website Design appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Texas Representative Steve Toth of The Woodlands, a Republican, has proposed a legislative measure known as the Women and Child Safety Act. This bill includes a mix of criminal and civil mandates, targeting a wide range of activities associated with abortion. If enacted, the law would restrict online conversations surrounding the topic. We obtained a copy of the bill for you here. The act stipulates serious legal consequences for anyone involved in manufacturing, distributing, or even discussing abortion-inducing drugs. It goes as far as to outlaw the hosting or facilitating of online speech that could assist in obtaining these medications. Additionally, the legislation seeks to prevent the dissemination of information about accessing abortion pills. This includes creating or managing websites and applications that might facilitate such access. It would also expose a wide array of tech companies to civil lawsuits if they fail to block Texas residents from accessing certain abortion-related content. The bill states: “Except as provided by Subsection (b), a person may not… provide information on how to obtain an abortion-inducing drug;” and “create, edit, upload, publish, host, maintain, or register a domain name for an Internet website, platform, or other interactive computer service that assists or facilitates a person’s effort in obtaining an abortion-inducing drug.”​ The bill further states: “Civil action against interactive computer service provider… a person… has standing to bring and may bring a civil action against a person who provides or maintains: an interactive computer service that allows residents of this state to access information or material that assists or facilitates efforts to obtain elective abortions or abortion-inducing drugs.” This could force platforms to block all accounts associated with abortion discussions or restrict access to Texas residents entirely—an approach that might be unworkable given current technological limitations. The implications for free speech are profound, as blocking access to legal content based on location undermines the fundamental principles of free expression upheld by the First Amendment. The act also contains peculiar provisions regarding legal defenses. It states that reliance on a court ruling that may later be overturned is no defense for actions taken under the bill. This eliminates the ability to argue that one was complying with the law at the time of the alleged violation, setting a precarious legal precedent. The bill clearly rubs up against the First Amendment by enabling private lawsuits to enforce provisions that might otherwise be deemed unconstitutional. The act’s disclaimer, which asserts that it does not prohibit speech protected by the First Amendment, is merely nominal, doing little to mitigate the broader implications of censorship. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Texas Bill Would Restrict Online Conversation Surrounding Abortion appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games, the company behind one of the world’s most popular games, Fortnite, has been vocal in his support for the principles that Brendan Carr, President-Elect Trump’s new chair pick for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), stands for, particularly regarding free speech and the fight against excessive control by tech monopolies. In a series of tweets, Sweeney emphasized the chilling effects of gatekeeper censorship and lauded the actions that counter such restrictive measures, indirectly aligning his views with those championed by Carr. On Sunday, Carr, currently the senior Republican member of the FCC and a nominee of President-elect Trump from 2017, was designated as the next Chairman of the FCC, to take office in January. Trump lauded Carr’s extensive service in a statement, pointing out that Carr had been unanimously confirmed by the Senate three times and his term would extend until 2029. The president-elect expressed his confidence in Carr’s leadership, stating, “His current term runs through 2029 and, because of his great work, I will now be designating him as permanent Chairman.” Supporting Carr, Tim Sweeney expressed his concerns about large tech companies, like Apple and Google, that have threatened to block apps like X from their platforms and have engaged in what he describes as purges of privacy apps in certain countries. “Gatekeeper censorship and chilling of speech is very real. Apple tried to silence me and ban my company, Epic Games, from competing with Apple under Europe’s Digital Markets Act on account of my speech criticizing Apple and their practices,” Sweeney wrote. “American freedom of speech will exist in name only if private monopolies have free rein to censor or shadowban the opinions of Americans they dislike or disagree with.” Moreover, Sweeney highlighted how entities like the European Commission have had to intervene to protect competition and free speech, steps that he suggests should be a model for US policy. These comments reinforce a shared stance with Carr, who has also been vocal about ensuring fair competition and guarding against the monopolistic tendencies of Big Tech firms. Sweeney added: “What this is really about is a simple principle: We can’t allow companies that are adjudicated monopolists over search, social media, or app distribution to use their power to gain monopolies over ideas. Their services are, in a very real sense, public commons in which billions of free citizens engage in public discourse. These channels must remain open and free.” If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney Backs Brendan Carr’s Fight to Curb Big Tech Power appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

Will Democrats Ever Get Tired of Losing?