Yet another outstanding week in the Phetaverse. Link to all the content below, including all the shows you love and Bridget’s appearances on Will Cain Country and The Glenn Beck Program. And for those interested, here are my three favorite cultural experiences this week.
“Is It Still You in There?” by Alex G - The entire album is beautiful, one of the best releases this year.
Zone of Interest (2023) - Steven Spielberg hailed it as the best movie about the Holocaust since Schindler’s List (1993). The opening sequence alone is paralyzing. Have you ever visited a place where lots of people had been murdered? It’s haunting. You can feel it. That sensation leaps off the screen at you. But indirectly. You don’t really see anything horrific—lots of beautiful imagery of flowers and decadent wallpaper and Poland in springtime. But underneath it, behind the veil of dialogue, you can hear screams and gunshots from the other side of the wall.
Zone of Interest captures the horrors of the Holocaust from the half-closed eyelids of the family home of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz. Höss has been described as the most deadly mass murderer in human history. Throughout the movie, Höss remains soft-spoken and gentle. But the few times you hear him screaming, off-camera, his voice is completely different, and his words are hauntingly vile. It’s a cinematic interpretation of Hannah Arendt’s examination into “the banality of evil,” that, when you probe into the mechanics of totalitarian violence, you’ll find that the perpetrators of atrocities are often “terribly and terrifyingly normal.”
In yet another impressive UNO move, with its own brand of “the banality of evil,” the Left co-opted the film’s message as proof that we should “FREE PALESTINE!” That is some shocking creativity: Using a film about Auschwitz to proclaim: “This is all of us now in the shadow of the mass murders committed in Gaza, living in cultures that have banalized evil.” Director Jonathan Glazer clumsily worsened the situation.
The Sora App - I got an invite code for OpenAI’s Sora app and, wow. The text-to-video model now produces videos with synchronized audio. Minimal prompting required. I immediately began harvesting coal for some high-quality coal posting.
DUMPSTER FIRE - EPISODE #250
JK Rowling Has Had Enough
The NHS says you should marry your first cousin, JK Rowling has had enough of the Harry Potter kids’ bullshit, but don’t worry because AI is replacing all the actors anyway.
REAL AMERICA WITH BRIDGET PHETASY
What Does “Mainstream Media” Even Mean Anymore?
Michael Malice joined Real America this week and, like all things Malice, it was wild, fun, and enlightening. People are always talking about the “mainstream media” “mainstream media” what does that actually mean? If it’s based on numbers, the “mainstream media” is no longer mainstream, many podcasts numbers dwarf and average mainstream show. As new media has eclipsed the old guard, what is mainstream media today? What does that term mean to you? Are you biased against it? Do you believe it’s biased against you? Do you think it even exists anymore?
WALK-INS WELCOME - EPISODE #358
While Israel Slept: How Hamas Surprised the Most Powerful Military in the Middle East - Yaakov Katz
This week, Bridget welcomes journalist Yaakov Katz for an in-depth conversation about his book While Israel Slept: How Hamas Surprised the Most Powerful Military in the Middle East. He and Bridget tackle the intelligence and strategic failures that enabled Hamas’s surprise attack on October 7th, 2023. They cover a brief history of the conflict in the region, Israel’s misguided policy of containment, the misunderstandings caused by the application of a Western mindset to a completely different ideology, becoming complacent in their reliance on technology, misunderstanding the motives of terrorist organizations, why no one wondered what Hamas had done with the billions of dollars in aid money it had received, whether or not Israel knew about the tunnel system being built in Gaza, how key warnings were missed, and the global rise of antisemitism that has followed.
DUMPSTER FIRE - EPISODE #251
The Left Can’t Meme
The government is shut down and President Trump’s reaction is to meme about it yet somehow Democrats are still losing the argument because the left can’t meme. Harvard hires drag queen LaWhore Vagistan as a visiting professor and Kim Jong Un wants to throw ladies in prison camps for getting fake t*ts.
THE GLENN BECK PROGRAM
WILL CAIN COUNTRY
Why Are Top Comedians Taking Saudi Money?
Bridget sat down with FoxNews cool guy Will Cain to talk about all the comedians who are snail-crawling into the salt mines of Saudi Arabia.
THE SPECTATOR
“I’m done with default illiberalism”
Most Americans have more in common with Charlie Kirk than with the alleged shooter or the elites making excuses
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Thumbnail artwork by Lara Cullen.
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Beyond Parody with Bridget Phetasy is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Beyond Parody with Bridget Phetasy is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
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