Mark Carney helped write the playbook that just sank Keir Starmer

Mark Carney helped write the playbook that just sank Keir Starmer

Keir Starmer resigned as British prime minister on June 22, the worst-polling Labour leader on record, undone by a program of tax rises, paternalism, and managed decline. Mark Carney endorsed the chancellor who built that program, sat on the task force that delivered its centrepiece, and is now running a version of it in Canada.

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Keir Starmer resigned as prime minister of the United Kingdom on Monday, less than two years after winning a political landslide. His favourability rating sits among the lowest YouGov has recorded for any prime minister, beaten only by Liz Truss in her final days. His party lost roughly 1,500 council seats and 35 councils in May, surrendered the Welsh Senedd after a century of Labour control, and watched Reform UK turn a protest vote into a governing threat. Andy Burnham will likely take the keys to a government that has nowhere left to fall.

The British press is writing the story as a personal failure: a dour lawyer who could not communicate, outflanked by populists he did not understand. That account misses the part Canadians have a direct stake in. The program Starmer governed by — the assumptions about taxation, the climate planning, the digital paternalism, the reorientation of an economy by ministerial direction — was not improvised in Downing Street. Mark Carney helped assemble it, blessed the people who ran it, and is now governing Canada from the same blueprint.

How Mark Carney helped build Labour's economic program

In October 2023, with Labour still in opposition, Carney appeared by video at the party conference in Liverpool to endorse Rachel Reeves as the next chancellor of the exchequer. He called her "a serious economist" who "understands the big picture," and the endorsement did real work: it rubber-stamped Reeves's "iron chancellor" pitch with the authority of a former Bank of England governor. The month before, Carney had met Starmer in Montreal at a progressive summit to discuss economic policy. After Labour won, he joined the task force that produced the government's National Wealth Fund, the state-capital vehicle meant to direct money into politically chosen industries. By early 2026, British government sources were citing Carney's worldview as a template for Starmer himself.

The relevance for a Canadian voter is direct. The man now running Canada vouched for the British experiment's architects and helped lay one of its foundation stones. When it collapsed, it collapsed on policies he had endorsed in public.

Starmer's hollow majority and Carney's floor-crossing majority

Starmer's 2024 victory looked overwhelming at 412 seats, but it rested on 33.7% of the vote, the lowest share ever to produce a Commons majority. Two-thirds of the people who voted had backed another party. Labour kept its 412 seats, but within eighteen months the public support behind the government had collapsed.

Carney's mandate is thinner still, and cynically assembled. The Liberals won 169 seats in April 2025, three short of a majority. Rather than govern as a minority answerable to the House, the government went shopping for the votes it had failed to win. Five opposition members crossed the floor in what the CBC called a wave "unmatched by other recent minority governments": four Conservatives in Chris d'Entremont, Michael Ma, Matt Jeneroux, and Marilyn Gladu, plus New Democrat Lori Idlout. Conservative members have said the Liberals were working on them too, one of them caught admitting it on a hot mic. Asked about it, Carney offered that he is "often the last to know."

Starmer's supermajority was hollow because voters never really gave it. Carney's majority is synthetic because voters never consented to it — it was stitched together after the election from members elected under other banners. Both rest on the same presumption. Each man is sure he already has the right answers, which makes a real mandate feel optional: get the votes however you can, then govern as planned. Britain has just shown how that ends when voters disagree.

Carney's "build big" agenda and Starmer's tax-and-spend record

Rachel Reeves, Starmer's chancellor of the exchequer, was the figure Carney had endorsed for the job a year earlier. Her first budget, in October 2024, delivered the largest tax rises at a single fiscal event since 1993, roughly £40 billion, and pushed Britain's tax burden to the highest level in its recorded history. The centrepiece was a rise in employers' National Insurance, a tax on the act of hiring, sold as a way to protect "working people" that fell on the firms that employ them. Weeks earlier the government had stripped the winter fuel payment from around ten million pensioners with no warning, a £1.4-billion saving announced out of the blue that it later reversed after the damage was done. The pattern was constant: extract revenue, direct it from the centre, retreat under pressure, and call the whole arrangement a plan for growth.

Carney's Canadian program works the same way under a more appealing name. The British National Wealth Fund he helped design has a Canadian twin: the $25-billion Canada Strong Fund, which he unveiled as the country's first sovereign wealth fund and said was modelled on Norway. As I argued when he announced it, the label does not hold up. A sovereign wealth fund saves a surplus; Ottawa was, at the time, running a $78-billion deficit, so the Canada Strong Fund is borrowed money dressed up as national savings. The rest of the pitch is "build big": major projects greenlit from Ottawa and a promise to double exports to non-American markets within a decade. The assumption is identical to the one that sank Reeves: that a sufficiently clever centre can allocate capital better than the people who earned it, and that the bill can be deferred indefinitely. The Globe's John Rapley, no conservative, warned Carney directly to learn from Starmer — that promising better services, more spending, and no painful taxes at once is the contradiction that hollowed out the British government from the inside. Britain's reward for trying was government borrowing costs that became the most expensive in the G7.

Carney's net-zero central banking and carbon-price agenda

Where Carney's worldview is most fully his own is climate. Long before Canada, as governor of the Bank of England, he used the central bank to enlist the financial system in net-zero planning. His 2015 Lloyd's speech recast climate change as a threat to financial stability that justified central-bank action — climate disclosure rules, climate stress tests, and a call for governments to set a carbon-price "corridor" with floors and ceilings. It was the founding text of a movement to govern emissions through unelected financial authorities rather than through voters. Not everyone in Britain was persuaded that the governor was even minding his actual job; Jacob Rees-Mogg's verdict on his monetary record was that he was "hopeless".

The same instinct now shapes Canadian industrial policy. Carbon pricing raises costs that voters would reject if they were asked directly. They are not asked: the decisions sit with officials and regulators no one can vote out, and the targets are dated so far ahead that no election can assess whether they will be met. In Britain, high energy costs and a stagnant economy were exactly the conditions Reform UK fed on. The assumption that citizens can be planned toward a target they did not choose does not become more popular for being administered by a man with a Davos pedigree.

Bill C-34 and the UK's under-16 social media ban

The clearest evidence that this is one program in two countries arrived this month, and it was not a coincidence of timing. On June 10, Carney's government tabled Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act, barring Canadians under sixteen from social media, requiring platforms to verify the age of every user, and creating a new Digital Safety Commission to police the regime, on penalty of fines up to 3% of global revenue. Five days later, on June 15, Starmer announced the British equivalent — an under-16 ban covering the same platforms, enforced by age checks on all users. Carney and Starmer weren't operating in silos. Starmer said he expected to raise online safety with other leaders at the G7 summit in France, and Carney noted that countries would be on the same page about acting on artificial intelligence and child safety. The bans are one front in a coordinated push among like-minded governments: Australia first, then Canada, Britain, France, Spain, and the European Commission's coming Digital Fairness Act, each lending the others the cover of consensus. The point of coordinating is precisely that no single electorate gets to weigh the measure on its own; by the time it reaches any one Parliament, it arrives as what everyone is already doing.

The British version drew a warning Canadians should read before C-34 reaches committee. Verifying that a user is over sixteen requires verifying everyone, which means submitting identification to open an account and ending anonymous use of the internet. Big Brother Watch called it the imposition of ID checks as "the price of admission to the internet," a step "authoritarian regimes can only dream of," and 438 security and privacy researchers from 32 countries signed a joint statement calling for a moratorium on age-assurance technology. Starmer defended it as a parent rather than a prime minister — the tell of every government-knows-best measure, the appeal to emotion that excuses the reach for control. C-34 carries the same architecture and will require the same surveillance to enforce. It arrives in a Parliament whose government is already advancing a lawful-access bill to lower the threshold for police to obtain Canadians' subscriber data, Bill C-22.

Canada is importing the EU's digital regulation rulebook

The model Canada is importing is European in origin and design — the architecture of the EU's Digital Services Act, the same age-assurance regime, the same standing regulator. The countries adopting it did not arrive at it independently; they took a common template off the shelf. Bill C-34 creates a Digital Safety Commission, a Brussels-style permanent bureaucracy with the power to police speech and access on an ongoing basis, and the European Commission's coming Digital Fairness Act is the next template in the queue. Carney's broader posture has been a deliberate tilt toward Europe and away from the United States. Digital regulation is a clear example of it, with Canada adopting the European rulebook clause by clause.

The rulebook reaches well beyond children. The EU's digital regime doubles as industrial policy by other means. In 2025, every euro of the bloc's €3.77 billion in Big Tech fines fell on American firms, Google, Apple, Meta, and X, because Europe builds almost no large platforms of its own to fine. Across 2024 and 2025 the penalties topped $7 billion, all of it levied on companies headquartered in the United States. Europe regulates the industry it could not create, and the rules are written so the bill lands on the Americans.

For Canada the sovereignty cost runs in two directions at once. Adopting a regime authored in Brussels, for European purposes, subordinates Canadian regulatory judgment to an agenda set by a bloc Canadians do not vote in. And aiming that regime at the platforms Canadians actually use means picking a regulatory fight with the country's largest trading partner at the precise moment a trade war with Washington is counterproductive to say the least. A government that markets itself as the defender of Canadian sovereignty is busy outsourcing the country's internet governance to a foreign capital — and importing that capital's quarrel with American technology as though it were Canada's own.

Why Carney's popularity won't outlast the Starmer playbook

The obvious objection is that Carney is popular, around 62% approval where Starmer was radioactive, so the comparison must be wrong. Starmer also began with positive numbers and a landslide. What separates the two leaders is timing and circumstance; their governing substance is the same. Anxiety about Donald Trump has bought Carney a long honeymoon and given voters a reason to look past the contradictions in the plan, which is more than Starmer ever had. Honeymoons end when the bills arrive.

Look to Britain for the receipt of what this program costs. The same assumptions — that the centre allocates capital better than citizens, that climate targets justify reaching around the electorate, that adults require the state's permission to use the internet, that a mandate is a technicality — were tested in a comparable Western democracy and rejected within two years. Mark Carney helped write that program and endorsed the people who ran it. He is now running it here, with a majority the voters never granted him. The only open question is whether it will be sooner or later that Canadians see the tab, and the democratic debt, that Carney is racking up on this side of the Atlantic.

 

 

 

Links - 16th August 2026 (1 - Jason Arday)

Two more taxpayer-funded projects Jason Arday is listed as "co-investigator" on - "Arday is listed as a co-investigator on two more studies funded by taxpayers totalling £4,412,501 - in addition to Arday being a co-investigator on an EDI caucus that received £3,676,371 from taxpayers"

Jason Arday says he was an illiterate, mute child. His schoolmates remember it differently - "Several people who grew up with Arday allege he was never, in fact, non-verbal. “I lived next door [to him] for 24 years from when he was born… he spoke all the time,” says a childhood neighbour. She did not wish to be named but is of a similar age to Arday, who became Cambridge’s youngest-ever black professor in 2023.  “He was quiet but he still spoke and he played with us,” the former neighbour says. “I used to have conversations with him every day.”  Fellow pupils at Heathbrook Primary School in Nine Elms, south-west London, which Arday attended from the age of four to 11 between 1989 and 1996, also contest this claim.  Nadia Elawahabi, 42, was in the year above Arday and in the same class as Joseph, one of his brothers. “We had children who couldn’t speak English in our class at that time,” she says, and everybody knew who they were. “There was nothing like [a mute pupil]. It would have stood out.” Another student from Arday’s year, who did not wish to be named, recalls speaking to him directly. “I know he definitely wasn’t mute,” he says. However “he was quiet, quiet in himself… [in fact] the whole family kept to themselves”.  Yet far from being a silent, struggling child who was considered an academic lost cause, this schoolfriend remembers him as “well-mannered… intelligent and polite”. In his memoir, which is due to be published in the UK later this month, Arday also claims that he was “always put in bottom set” as he was illiterate. The schoolfriend counters this. “I don’t think that’s true at all,” he says. “I know full well because I was in the [bottom] class.”  Elawahabi says there were only two classes in each year group... YouTuber Jonathan Stewart, 40, was in the year below Arday at primary school and said that he “knew it was fraud” as soon as he heard that he had claimed he was mute.  In fact, Stewart claimed Arday, who resigned from his Cambridge post last week, was something of a “class clown”. He told The Guardian newspaper that Arday would put on voices to make his classmates laugh and sing on the minibus to Sunday school. Arday, for his part, arranged for The Guardian to be sent a statement from two school friends who said his memoir was accurate... But under Stewart’s video, multiple commenters corroborated his version of events. “I can verify this claim… I was there too,” wrote one. Another comment reads: “The funniest thing I still remember is how he used to talk… And yeah he was a bit quiet at times but around us lot he was very vocal.” With adults, he appears to have been quieter. Samuel Ojoye, 71, has lived on the Heath Road estate in Clapham, where Arday grew up, since 1986. “I have known Jason from when he was very little, practically [since] birth,” he says. “The whole family was quiet and reserved. Jason didn’t talk much but I wouldn’t say he was non-verbal, just very quiet… Although he would always wave and greet you, he was very polite.”... These claims about Arday’s school days are perhaps among the last in his house of cards to collapse... His childhood neighbour describes the school-age Arday as “just normal”. Not extraordinary, just normal: for Arday, that is surely the most damning claim of all."

Cambridge took advice from pro-BLM group before hiring Arday - "An “equality and inclusion” working group was tasked with “updating hiring practices” within the university’s faculty of education to improve its recruitment of black and ethnic minority staff.  The group, which supported the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 and attacked “racial inequalities” within the faculty, was still advising the department on hiring policies shortly before Mr Arday was appointed in 2022.  The revelation will raise further questions for the department, which has been accused of lowering its standards to hire Mr Arday as a professor to improve its diversity, equality and inclusion credentials... Prof Deborah Prentice, the university’s vice-chancellor, called Mr Arday’s appointment an “aberration” and appeared to shift blame on to the faculty for its decision to appoint him.  The faculty launched the Equality and Inclusion Working Group (EIWG) in 2018 in response to concerns from graduate students about racism and cultural insensitivity within the faculty.  An account of the working group’s creation is detailed on the website of the Faculty of Education Research Student Association (FERSA), a student-run organisation for graduate research students within the faculty. According to FERSA, graduate students had been raising concerns about racism and cultural insensitivity within the faculty for years by 2018. This included claims that the texts that made up its curricula for graduate courses were “overwhelmingly white and Western”.  In response, the faculty agreed to hold an open meeting with students and staff in November 2018 to discuss how it could take action on issues such as inclusion, diversity, gender and decolonising the curriculum, the student association claimed.  The “main and possibly only result of this meeting”, according to FERSA, was the establishment of the EIWG. Its purpose was to work on various initiatives to improve inclusion across the faculty. One of the group’s primary objectives was staff training. In February 2020, it set up “race awareness training” for the faculty’s staff, according to FERSA, although no further information was given about what this involved.  Another of its priorities was reforming recruitment within the faculty. By 2021, the group was actively “updating hiring practices” within the faculty, according to a departmental review by the UK’s Research Excellence Framework at the time.  The group said the university’s race equality charter – a university-wide framework partly focused on improving the recruitment of black and ethnic minority staff – was “central to our agenda”.  Particular scrutiny will be placed on the group’s influence on the hiring process, given its strong public support for the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. In June 2020, as protesters in the UK were marching and defacing statues following the death of George Floyd in the US, it released a statement saying: “We... stand in solidarity with #BlackLivesMatter and other global communities calling attention to systemic racism.”  The group added that “we support and are inspired by protests in the US and around the world” and hoped they would “make people, particularly white communities, think about the human impact of discrimination”.  It said there were “racial inequalities” within the faculty and acknowledged the “disproportionate labour of BIPOC [black, indigenous, and people of colour] colleagues and students in educating white colleagues and students”.  “We stand shoulder to shoulder with marginalised groups across our faculty and university community and pledge to drive for change,” the statement added. The faculty will face questions about whether the working group was advising on its recruitment policies in November 2022 when Mr Arday was hired, despite his relative lack of qualifications and published academic work."

Professors who hired Arday attacked ‘whiteness’ in education - "Michalinos Zembylas, professor of educational theory at the Open University of Cyprus, and Prof Anoop Nayak, of Newcastle University, were among four external academics chosen to sit on the nine-member panel that unanimously selected Mr Arday in 2022.  Academic articles reviewed by The Telegraph show that one professor called for the “re-education of Whites”, while another condemned “neo-liberal whiteness” in UK and US universities... In a 2023 paper, Prof Zembylas and his co-author, Prof Cheryl Matias, a race consultant and academic coach, argued that “whiteness” – which they distinguished from white people and described as an oppressive ideology – persisted “perniciously” in teacher education and should be held “accountable and culpable”.  The critical race theorists argued that teacher education must stop “emotionally deflecting anti-racist critiques” by merely appearing to say the right things about anti-racism, because this “only ignores, and diverts attention away from the hegemonic presence of whiteness”.  In an earlier paper with a UC Berkeley academic, Prof Zembylas argued that white people should become critical of “whiteness” to create a more equal society, insisting this would not cause white people to hate themselves.  The authors wrote: “Contrary to the impression that this move promotes self-loathing, a politics of anti-whiteness is precisely the re-education of Whites for a world shared with the other.” The second external elector, Prof Nayak, published a paper last year outlining how to remove colonialism from the field of geography, in which he suggested that charging international students higher tuition fees could be racist. He wrote: “The neo-liberal whiteness of Anglo-American universities is exemplified in the practice [of] charging international students often over double the degree fees of domicile students and doing little to mitigate punitive visa restrictions.”  Prof Nayak added that, in other sectors, the practice “could appear a discriminatory act, tantamount to institutional racism”. The paper also praised Black Lives Matter and pro-Gaza student encampments for giving momentum to calls to “decolonise the curriculum from the ground up”, and described a scheme to ring-fence funded PhD places for black and minority ethnic candidates as “necessary”... academics turned their fire on the appointments committee, accusing it of allowing “political correctness” to supersede academic standards.  Prof Sir Partha Dasgupta, a Cambridge economist, told The Telegraph: “If, as is now clear even to outsiders like me, Arday’s appointment short-circuited academic standards, it was not because the university procedures are deficient, it is because members of the appointments committee permitted ‘political correctness’ to override all else.  “And they permitted that to happen either because they themselves are second-rate or because they represent the university administration and want an easy life.” Ritwick Sawarkar, a biologist and Cambridge fellow, said it would be “a big scandal” if standards were found to have been lowered so the university could win “brownie points on the EDI scale”.  He said it was possible that the education faculty had chosen certain academics to interview candidates for the professorship “because they had an agenda and they knew these people would help them”.  But Mr Sawarkar said that it was impossible to know what was in the minds of those who appointed the committee, and suggested that the problem could have started with wording of the job advert which could have “already pre-selected or pre-deselected people”.  When the professorship was advertised, Cambridge told candidates: “The following groups are currently under-represented in our community: women, those with a Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic background and those with disabilities.”  The advert also listed “a demonstrated ability to support equality, diversity and inclusion in education within the faculty and university” as an “essential” criterion... The concerns of these academics were echoed on Saturday by Laura Trott, the shadow education secretary, who accused Cambridge of an “obsession” with diversity targets which she said had left the university “failing students”.  Ms Trott told The Telegraph: “I am concerned that by obsessing with DEI quotas, Cambridge has ended up failing students. We need to put an end to this nonsense.”  She said that Prof Deborah Prentice, Cambridge’s vice-chancellor, had “serious questions to answer”.  “The response so far has been woefully inadequate. It’s right that they are reviewing their appointments process, but that is nowhere near enough,” Ms Trott said.  She added: “The university must establish how alleged fabrications of this scale were not identified, whether concerns were raised and ignored, and who was responsible for those failures. If warning signs were missed or dismissed, those responsible should be held accountable.”"
Whiteness is about having standards and not plagiarising, apparently

A PhD is no longer a sign of brilliance – take it from Dr Arday - "I met an old school friend who is a professor at a prestigious UK university. When I told him about my work on PhD appeals, he said that he occasionally examines PhDs but never fails them, no matter how awful. When I asked him why, he said that failed students inevitably appeal and that life was too short to waste time responding to complaints...   Then there are those candidates who cheat in their PhDs, whether through plagiarism or, in more extreme cases, having others write it for them. Again, investigating suspected misconduct can take months of academic and administrative time, with multiple hearings and appeals. There is an institutional incentive to avoid rigorous investigation.  In a recent case, I criticised a university for doing precisely that. My client had engaged in academic misconduct in his PhD but the university turned a blind eye and allowed him to continue despite his evident difficulties. The student incurred tens of thousands of pounds in tuition fees when he should have been withdrawn much earlier. Examiners are usually nominated by the PhD candidate’s supervisors, and so personal and professional relationships can play a role in assessment decisions. Supervisors will tend to select examiners favourably disposed to their student’s approach or intellectual outlook. Examiners who fail a colleague’s PhD student, especially if that colleague carries a strong reputation, may worry about the repercussions on their own career and reputation. Academia is a small world, and professional relationships may influence judgment.  Universities care about the integrity of their academic qualifications, as they so often tell students, but only up to a point. Having a PhD is no guarantee of academic excellence or intellectual ability. As any academic will tell you, there are plenty of mediocre PhDs. Similarly, there are capable candidates who fail their PhDs due to examiners who, for whatever reason, have taken a dislike to their work"

There’s nothing good about Jolyon Maugham’s Good Law Project - "One of the more curious aspects of the Jason Arday affair is that the allegedly plagiarist professor chose to announce his resignation from Cambridge University on the website of the Good Law Project.  The GLP – as most readers will recall – is an organisation (not a charity but a Jersey-based “purpose trust”, enabling it to sidestep English charity law) which seems to exist primarily to promote the pet legal projects of its founder and executive director, Jolyon Maugham KC.   Its record of success can politely be described as patchy. Along with others, the GLP was active in the Brexit “lawfare” of the late 2010s, doing nothing to prevent Brexit but arguably helping to establish some important legal principles.  But over the years the GLP has gained an unfortunate reputation for claiming victories even when it has lost.  For example, in a 2022 case brought against the prime minister and health secretary over Covid appointments, the Administrative Court ruled that the GLP had no standing to bring the case and consequently “the claim brought by Good Law Project fails in its entirety”. This abject defeat – towards which GLP contributors had donated hundreds of thousands of pounds – was initially spun by the GLP as “We won!”  Another claimant, The Runnymede Trust, had in fact achieved a minor win in the same case (while losing on both its main points), but their consolation prize owed nothing to the GLP. In February this year, the GLP suffered a further defeat after it tried and failed to persuade the Administrative Court that guidance issued by the Equality and Human Rights Commission in relation to the provision of single-sex workplace toilets was unlawful.  The GLP’s reaction prompted 30 barristers, KCs and legal academics to write to the Equalities Minister, Bridget Phillipson, complaining about its “straightforwardly false” attempt to spin the defeat, adding “we are aware of no other organisation that has ever published such egregiously false material about the judgment in a case that it has lost.” If the GLP were a private individual spending its own money this sort of thing would be of rather less concern. But although it is not a charity, the GLP constantly wraps itself in the clothing of sanctimonious moral rectitude to solicit, and to receive, millions of pounds – well over £4m in 2024-2025 – from the public every year.  If well-meaning and credulous people are persuaded to donate on the basis of false or puffed-up claims, that is difficult to reconcile with its claim that “everything we do in connection with our work at Good Law Project will be, and should be, measured against the highest possible standards of ethical conduct”.  Exactly what the GLP’s involvement with Prof Arday was before he announced his resignation is a little unclear. When did that involvement begin?  Did he choose the GLP because of its reputation for demanding “the highest possible standards of ethical conduct”? Or did the GLP reach out to Prof Arday, choosing to stake its reputation, such as it was, on his integrity?  Did the GLP have any part in persuading him that one way of dealing with what it still calls “a smear campaign” was to set the police on the journalist who tried to obtain honest answers?  Perhaps unsurprisingly given its record of support for dubious causes the GLP continues to promote its petition in support of Arday, although some of the big names who originally signed – notably Prof Baron-Cohen, Dame Ijeoma Uchegbu, President of Wolfson College, and Sonita Alleyne, Master of Jesus College, – have quietly had their signatures removed in the last few days. Its description of the allegations as a campaign against a man with a “distinguished record of charitable and community service”, is entirely characteristic of the way in which the GLP tends to distort truth and reality in its campaigns. Despite the overwhelming evidence that Arday’s record is considerably less distinguished than once appeared, the petition continues to gather signatures, over 18,000 to date. Every signatory must supply the GLP with a name, email address and postcode, information which it will use, according to the organisation’s privacy policy, in “offering you ways to fund our work” and “inviting you to campaign with us”. Even if the petition itself has had no effect whatsoever, the personal data gathered will help generate the cash needed to keep the GLP lawfare show on the road... Those who sought to use him for their own purposes deserve at least some of the opprobrium that he has brought on himself. Amongst those still doing so, the Good Law Project is prominent."

James Martin Charlton on X - "An extraordinary paragraph from Afua Hirsch in which she admits that many black sociologists and she herself had doubts about Arday but sat on them because “he would be unlikely to be treated fairly and we would all be damaged in the process.” Did they not consider that students were doubtlessly being damaged and - when it eventually came out - so would sociology and the reputation of black academics? It seems second and third order consequences weren’t their strong points."
Jason Arday is now the stick the right will use to beat back racial equality. Don’t let that happen - "I have lost count of the number of emails, text messages, DMs and WhatsApps I received asking me to condemn the allegations against Arday. Not one of these messages asked me first if I know him, what my opinion about the allegations is or whether I actually agree with their assertion that they are baseless... I am unequivocal about condemning the media pile-on, which ranges from overt to dog-whistle racism, and which is completely disproportionate... Black academics, and black people in general, have never and – it’s my confident prediction – will never demand the right to plagiarise, lie or fabricate our credentials. What we have been demanding is to be treated equally. To be appointed to the levels commensurate with our actual credentials, to have our work taken seriously by intellectual peers, and to be paid fairly and on equal terms for our labour. To not have opportunities taken away because of our race. To have our work, performance and legacy held to the same standards as everyone else’s.  We are very far from anything resembling this"
Damn internalised racism! How dare they doubt him!
I love how left wingers always hyperventilate over trivial bullshit, but all the media who criticised Arday are responsible of, at the very least, dog-whistle racism
It's rich how Arday and other DEI hires like Claudine Gay got special treatment, but this somehow doesn't count

The Worst Academic Scandal in 817 Years! - "This is, quite likely, the worst academic scandal of all time. There have been other academic scandals over the centuries, but nothing quite like this one. It’s the worst academic scandal not only because it indicts one of the greatest universities in the world, but because it indicts all higher education in the English-speaking world! The Arday case is the symbol and culmination of the kind of intellectual and moral rot that has been seeping into higher education for sixty-plus years.  If Cambridge University—an 817-year-old institution—is to be saved (and it’s an open question as to whether it can or even should be saved), all those administrators and faculty involved in hiring, promoting, and defending Jason Arday should be fired immediately. Nothing less will do if Cambridge is to survive.  The great tragedy of the L’Affaire Arday is that there may very well be scores if not hundreds of similar cases around the English-speaking world... Watch Professor Hilary Cremin, Head of the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge, fawn all over Arday and say to him: “You are the best in the world in terms of the research that you do!!!!!!!” I’ve never seen anything so cringeworthy in my life. It’s just so pathetic... the Jason Arday scandal is one of the best possible things to happen to higher education in my lifetime.  But let’s make this clear: the Arday scandal is not primarily about Jason Arday; it’s about the corruption of Cambridge University and indeed of all higher education. Arday is, to be sure, a fraudster and a grifter, but his crime is to have exploited a totally corrupt system. The “system”—the system of DEI welfarism—is the greater crime. The faculty and administrators who hired and promoted him are intellectual and moral malefactors who have stolen something important from us. They deserve to be fired. They do not belong in the hallowed halls of academia.  I’m not at all confident that Cambridge will fix the problem. They will appoint a “committee” or a “commission” to investigate and two-years later the committee will bury the report and do nothing. It’s all a charade.  Let’s be clear: there is NO systemic racism in higher education, at least not the kind that they want you to think exists. Quite the opposite. There is, instead, a kind of fawning, sycophantic but ultimately demeaning treatment of black scholars that is, as black scholar John McWhorter put it, “a symptom of academia’s dehumanization of black scholars and willingness to accept intellectual mediocrity in its self-seeking pursuit of virtue.” Just so! So yes, there is racism at Cambridge, just not the kind they want you to think exists. It’s the racism of low expectations, the racism of guilt, and the racism of revenge. But the new, systemic racism is more than about the pursuit of some form of perverted virtue as McWhorter suggests. Hilary Cremin, the Chair of the Education School at Cambridge and Arday’s chief promoter (she’s the fawning woman in the BBC documentary above who said Arday “was the best in the world”), was clearly looking for redemption—the kind of redemption that relieves one of an overwhelming sense of guilt. You can see it in her eyes and hear it in her voice when she tells Arday that he is the “best in the world.” Jason Arday was hired and sanctified by racists, who are morally responsible for his rise, decline, and fall. They nailed him to the cross... we should all say “thank you” to Jason Arday. We owe him a debt of gratitude for exposing the intellectual and moral rot not only at Cambridge University, but in all higher education in the English-speaking world."

Eric Hendriks on X - "Now the Guardian is obsessively delving into the backstory of the Arday saga, to reinforce the ‘one bad apple’ theme and quietly obscure the structural problem of which the paper is itself a part: the ideological capture of culture and intellectual life."

Why would 'Professor Plagiarism' make such outlandish claims? DR MAX PEMBERTON has been a psychiatrist for 20 years. Here he examines the questions facing Jason Arday and says there's one condition that could explain everything - "Why lie? I don’t mean the small, social lies that keep things running smoothly, but what appear to be enormous ones – invented academic posts, fabricated childhood, feats of endurance that never happened. And having decided to lie, why choose stories so extravagant that they invite disbelief, and so specific that anybody with a spare afternoon and an internet connection can take them apart?... There is an old descriptive psychiatric term, pseudologia fantastica, coined in the 1890s for people whose lies are elaborate, sustained and built around a fantasised version of themselves rather than for obvious material gain. You may think that hardly fits here, given this story apparently brought Jason Arday a professorial chair, several honorary doctorates and, he claimed, a 1.4million book deal. But the gain is usually a by-product of this pattern of behaviour rather than the object, and you can usually tell this from the type of lies. Someone who, for instance, wants a certain job often embroiders their qualifications. But they stop there, as anything beyond that is pure risk, and tall tales about marathons they’ve run, funds they’ve raised and the desperate childhood they’ve endured do little for a selection panel except draw questions that up the chance of being caught out. The people I’ve met who fit the description of pseudologia fantastica tend not to stop lying. They are seldom cold or calculating. They tend to be charming and, perhaps most importantly, fragile underneath. What strikes me most is how often they appear to half-believe the story they’ve invented. The lie is not really being told to the listener at all, it is being told to the ego of the person telling it. The listener is only there to confirm it... The stories are hardly ever straightforward boasts of success either, because someone who simply claims to be clever or rich invites envy – and envy is not what these people are looking for. Instead the tales are about suffering that has been overcome, odds that were insurmountable, the diagnosis nobody believed, the childhood that should not have been survived, and then the triumph over all this. It is a far more effective structure for any fantasy, because it makes doubting it feel like an act of cruelty. It is also the structure our whole culture of aspiration is built on, the one that fills memoirs and TED talks and the back-stories on TV talent shows. This is why anyone constructing an identity out of borrowed material will reach for the template. It’s the stuff of fairytales and legends, the struggle in the face of adversity, a struggle that demonstrates positive things about an individual’s personality and inner character... Every fantasist I’ve known kept going with their stories long past the point where anybody was still convinced, because the alternative was to confess it was a sham and allow people to destroy the false identity they had built for themselves, so become a nobody. Which is why I don’t feel triumphant about Jason Arday’s downfall. When a world collapses it is a terrible thing to live through, and no less terrible for having been constructed of tissue paper. He built it and must answer for it. But he did not build it on his own, and the institutions – not least Cambridge University and the diversity, equality and inclusion industry – that made him their poster boy and handed him the bricks have gone very quiet. For that they bear considerable responsibility in this sorry saga and should reflect on it in shame."

Links - 15th August 2026 (2 - Nolan's The Odyssey)

Rex Churchill on X - "Repeat after me: "The Odyssey is fiction, not history.""
The Medieval Scholar on X - "Lord of the rings is fiction and look at the exceptional armor WETA Workshop made. The odyssey takes place within an age of human history that is very much real. Trying to refute the criticism of bad looking costumes by just saying it’s fictional falls flat"
Mark Howard on X - "The costumes in Nolan's film aren't just aesthetically displeasing, but they also look cheap and anachronistic even within the film's setting."

Aɴᴛ on X - "Christopher Nolan has built such a strong reputation that, if he wanted to, he could have given Greece and its people not only an epic masterpiece, but also one that showcased Greek acting talent by hiring several actors who aren't internationally known, adding a huge degree of authenticity while celebrating Greek culture.  He wouldn't have had to bow to studio pressure to make it "woke." He's one of the few directors in Hollywood who could pretty much do whatever he wanted, and the movie still would have received all the funding it needed.  Instead, he chose the coward's route by capitulating to the Hollywood hive mind. It also comes across as a calculated move to maximise the film's chances of picking up multiple Oscar nominations.  Yes, The Odyssey is a work of fiction, but it's built on the foundations of Greek history, mythology and culture. It's something Greeks hold close to their hearts, something they're immensely proud of and fiercely protective of.  Instead, Nolan chose casting decisions that many Greeks see as insulting, forcing a modern ideological narrative onto one of the most important stories in Greek culture."

Jon Root on X - "John Leguizamo complains about the lack of Latino representation in Hollywood, while on the red carpet for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey where he stole the role from a Greek/European actor… What a hypocrite."
Josh Innes on X - "He stole that one role from mustachioed Italian plumbers…"

Meme - "VISION. LEADERSHIP. LEGACY. HISTORY tS WRITTEN BY THOSE WHO DARE TO DREAM
ELLIOT PAGE as MICHELLE OBAMA
ZENDAYA as BARACK OBAMA
WHOOPI GOLDBERG as JOE BIDEN
A CHRISTOPHER NOLAN FILM
OBAMA. THE MAN. THE PRESIDENT. THE LEGEND"

Nolan’s Odyssey cast angers Greek film fans - "Over the course of The Odyssey’s production, Greek and Greek Cypriot media platforms wrote open letters to Sir Christopher’s team and Hollywood, stating that Greek people “did not vanish” and were “still here” as “a living people whose story has never stopped being written”.  “We are not asking for exclusion or limitation,” wrote one such letter in Greek City Times. “We are not arguing against diversity, nor against reinterpretation. Greek culture itself has always been shaped by exchange, migration, and encounter across centuries.  “What we are asking is something simpler and more human. That, when Greek stories are retold on a global stage, Greek people are not rendered invisible within them.”  There is one Greek actor, Yannis Kokiasmenos, listed among the cast. He plays a coastal villager. Yannis Smaragdis, a filmmaker, said it would be “despicable” if Sir Christopher made the decision to cast Nyong’o to meet Academy Award diversity requirements... Lina Mendoni, the Greek culture minister, was forced to address calls for state intervention during production after it was revealed that the ministry of culture had granted The Odyssey a reported €6.5m (£5.6m) in subsidies.  She maintained that the Greek government’s approach since 2019 had been to treat culture as a strategic national investment and that “art cannot be censored”... After July 6, The Odyssey will be screened for critics only, in a move by Universal and Sir Christopher that bucks the trend of studios inviting fan-site bloggers and influencers to post enthusiastic reviews on social media in advance of a film’s general release in an attempt to pre-empt bad reviews."
Representation is not for white people
Apparently if you subsidise something and have conditions for your money, that's "censorship"

Meme - "Progressive Director *Christopher Nolan*
- Makes a film set in Ancient Greece
- Doesnt cast a single Greek
- The cast is as diverse as downtown L.A.
Racist Director *Mel Gibosn*
- Makes a film set in pre-colonial Mexico
- Only hires indigenous actors
- has them all speak Mayan"

Eren Bali on X - "Lupita Nyong’o role as Helen of Troy in Odyssey has already started a war, so in a way she has been a very historically accurate pick."

Fandom Pulse on X - "Christopher Nolan says his version of The Odyssey is for modern audiences: “When you look at the ancient world… there’s a lot of cultural prejudice….I want to make it feel very fresh for modern audiences.” Is this the final blow for the movie?"
Brandon Morse on X - "Let me translate this for you.   When they say "modern audience" they don't actually mean they're making this for those with modern sentiments. There aren't that many people with those sentiments to keep a movie studio afloat. Box office numbers have crashed and burned for films.   The point isn't to make films for you, or those small groups of people who like the message (and often still don't see it anyway), the "modern audience" is the youth. Teenagers and children.   The point is to redefine and restructure a story so that it loses it's intent and the value it serves to larger concepts like reinforcing Western civilization's values. The chief virtues it wants to push to replacement are things you often see repeated ad nauseum. "Inclusion" and "found family" are often held over actual family. You see a lot of moral ambiguity and nihilism as wisdom ("He sees the good in people, I see the truth" - James Gunn's Supergirl) and incredible amount of identity-based hierarchies.   So these "remakes" that continue to fail aren't cash grabs. The dice roll on them comes up snake eyes way too often, but the point isn't to make money, it's to take a story or characters that helped define the attitudes, morality, and virtues of the Western world and corrupt them so that they become the "updated" version for young sponges to consume and be influenced by."

Roman Helmet Guy on X - "It might seem hypocritical that Variety praises Moana for respecting Polynesian culture while attacking you for wanting Nolan’s Odyssey to respect Greek culture. But there’s actually a consistent moral through-line: They just hate White people."

Meme - "LOOK AT ME. I AM THE HELEN OF TROY NOW" *Lupita Nyong'o to Diane Kruger in Somali ship hijacking meme*

Fandom Pulse | Facebook - "Lupita Nyong'o, in a separate interview with DC Film Girl ahead of The Odyssey's July 17 release, on why she believes Homer's original epic needed correcting: "When you read The Iliad and The Odyssey, very little time is spent on the female perspective. The story is told from a very masculine point of view. But this film takes the time to really look at things from the women's point of view." Penelope holds Ithaca together for twenty years. Athena drives the entire plot. Circe turns men into pigs. Is Nyong'o describing Homer's Odyssey or a different book entirely?"

Austin Petersen | Facebook - "There's only one Greek cast member in the Odyssey. When Black Panther was made, Lupita Nyong'o praised it for drawing carefully from real African cultures and avoiding cultural misrepresentation.  Then they asked her to defend playing Helen of Troy and her answer was that it was a mythological story.  So was Wakanda.  When it came time to build that fictional space of Wakanda, fidelity was sacred. But when the myth was Greek suddenly we should all relax.  There are two rulebooks the left plays by. One for their protected cultures which are holy, and one for European civilization which should be considered open source."
Comment: "Unlike Wakanda, Troy was real."
Of course, left wingers are continuing to claim the Odyssey is fiction, so anything goes.

Nicholas Piff Peterson | Facebook - "It’s genuinely terrifying that Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey trailer has more dislikes than the Snow White trailer did, and a lot of people did not like the Snow White movie with Rachel Zegler. It’s concerning that so many Christopher Nolan fans seem to be turning on him just based on a few characters being cast that are literally great actors in what is a massive ensemble. Nolan has put together a stacked cast of talented performers, and the backlash feels way overblown for a mythic story like The Odyssey. Fans are acting like one or two casting choices are going to ruin everything, ignoring that he has a proven track record of elevating actors and delivering incredible movies regardless of initial skepticism. I honestly believe that when the movie comes out, if the reviews are great similar to Oppenheimer — which was widely praised and a huge success — people are gonna go out regardless of what they think of his casting decisions. The story, visuals, and Nolan’s signature style are what ultimately drive audiences to theaters. All of the nonsense over the casting is actually so ridiculous to me. Nolan isn’t trying to troll anyone; he’s making an ambitious epic with the actors he believes will serve the vision best. Let’s wait for the actual film instead of judging a masterpiece in the making based on trailer reactions. Here’s hoping the positive word of mouth wins out like it has for so many of his previous projects. Nolan deserves better than this premature pile-on."
This guy is "terrified" by everything

Nolan's Odyssey Review: Beautiful but Dreary - "What is missing from Nolan’s film is the “rare excitement” that “stirs your spirit and your body.” The Odyssey is, to put it bluntly, a three-hour downer. In Nolan’s screenplay, Odysseus (Matt Damon), is not “the man of many tropes”, as Homer described him (andra...polytropon)—the wily king of Ithaca who leads his men in and out of trouble as they sail around the Mediterranean for years after Troy’s fall. Rather, he is a man of only one trope: guilt... After that confession, Odysseus’ rout of the suitors, drawn out and overproduced, feels like an anticlimax. We next see him abdicating his throne as a self-imposed punishment, leaving son Telemachus (Tom Holland) to rule over Ithaca while he sails off into mysterious exile with a veiled Penelope at his side. I had to ask: “What did she do to deserve this fate?” In Homer’s epic, by contrast, the ever-helpful Athena, goddess of wisdom, prolongs the night and signals rosy-fingered Dawn to take her time arriving so that Penelope and Odysseus can enjoy hours of love-making and he can regale her with the tales of his adventures. Watching the couple’s decidedly un-erotic exit in Nolan’s movie, I wondered if Odysseus would ever forgive himself long enough to realise that Penelope might be in the same room (or boat). This is not to say that The Odyssey doesn’t have admirable aspects, mostly in regard to its special effects... Nolan used next to no CGI... The effect is of a satisfyingly tangible reality that computer generation simply cannot produce.  Still, the sets are mostly dreary. The fall of Troy, if it occurred historically, took place around 1190 B.C., at the height of Greece’s Late Bronze Age civilisation. But the structures in Nolan’s movie, modelled after the Palace of Mycenae on the Peloponnesus and similar ruins, look already faded and decrepit. Nolan is notorious for his greyed-out cinematic palettes, and here the brilliantly sunny Mediterranean beach-scapes that enthral visitors to modern Greece and its islands look more like the fog-beset English Channel in his Dunkirk (2017). Odysseus and his men dress almost entirely in Batman black in this film, with dingy leather armour that has been criticised for bearing little resemblance to the colourful and brightly polished battle-wear of archaic Greeks. It’s supposed to be the Bronze Age, we’re told again and again, but where’s the bronze?... Lupita Nyong’o works out fine as Helen. Her beauty does not rise to the level of immortal perfection imagined by Homer. (What woman’s does?) But she is a skilled enough actress to convey Helen’s arresting glamour in her very brief scene. (She is less successful playing Helen’s half-sister, Clytemnestra, who, as she is murdering her husband, Agamemnon, glares in the banal fashion of a mother hectoring her children about housework.) The real diversity flop in Nolan’s movie is Elliot Page as Sinon, a character from Virgil’s Aeneid who has somehow wandered into Homer’s world. The 5’1” Sinon is supposed to be a warrior, yet cannot hit voice notes lower than what Tom Wolfe called the 'King Sano croak' of chain-smoking Upper East Side society ladies... The main problem is lacklustre acting in general"

Homeric Society - "The values of this society are quite different from those which many modern readers bring to the poem, as is evidenced by the tendency of today's students to dismiss Homer's heroes, especially Achilles, as childish, selfish, arrogant, testosterone-driven brats... The Iliad, like Beowulf and the other poems cited above, celebrates the achievements of the aristocratic warrior class who earn their privileged position in this society through their prowess in battle. The focus is on the adult male hero, whose martial exploits are celebrated as the acme of human achievement... The heroes of these poems display an overriding concern for personal glory and its external trappings, with relatively little concern for the common good or other moral issues... In describing societies such as that portrayed in the Iliad, anthropologists employ the term *Shame Culture (in contrast to the *Guilt Culture found in most of today's western societies). Individuals in a guilt culture tend to hold themselves up to a set of personal moral standards.... In a shame culture, by contrast, the focus is not on a set of personal standards but on one's public standing. The overriding concern is to save face... As in war, success is everything in such a society: good intentions, high moral standards, fairness, a peaceful conscience — none of these count in the face of public disgrace. The competition for public honors is often intense and takes the form of what is known as a zero-sum game: that is, honor is won only at someone else's expense. Thus the notion that winning or losing might be less important than how one plays the game is utterly foreign to such a culture. Winning is everything: results are much more important than means. The crucial thing is to prove one's superiority and to have that superiority publicly acknowledged by one's peers. This intense competition inevitably leads to factionalism. The Greeks divide the world very clearly into "friends" and "enemies," with the understanding that one should do everything in one's power to aid one's friends and to harm one's enemies; failure to do so results in disgrace. Thus the Greek equivalent of the Golden Rule ("Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.") is, "Help your friends, harm your enemies." The contrast between these two aphorisms nicely captures the gulf that separates a guilt culture, with its cooperative values, from the competitive values of a shame culture. In Greek, the innate quality that renders one superior to others is called *aretê; (often translated "excellence" or, less happily, "virtue." The masculine, aggressive connotations of the word can be seen in its etymological connection to the name Ares; compare the English "virtue," which derives from the Latin vir ["man"] and originally meant "courage" or "manliness.") For the Homeric hero, war provides the occasion for the display of aretê; and the winning of glory (or *kleos). In a shame culture, however, mere success is not sufficient (it is not enough, for example, to know in your own mind that you are the best); public acknowledgment of one's superiority is essential. The Greek term for such acknowledgment is *timê. Timê refers to the public, concrete acknowledgment of aretê by means of prizes. In a pre-monetary society like that of the Iliad, such prizes are not financial in nature but symbolic: they represent, not income, but honor. As such, they have a strong emotional significance that is difficult for the modern reader to appreciate. (Students often think of the contract disputes of professional athletes.) You must remember: the hero's position in society is based upon his aretê; the surest sign of that aretê is the timê offered to the hero. Modern readers would prefer a hero who was "above" such concerns, but it is clear that the Greeks did not. Even as late as the 4th century (when cooperative values have sprung to greater prominence in Greek society) the philosopher Aristotle is able to describe the megalopsychos or "great-spirited man" as one who is innately superior to others and demands to be treated accordingly. For Aristotle, humility on the part of such an individual is a character flaw, a sign of some defect in his (note the masculine pronoun) personality."
Someone suggested that Achilles and Odysseus were anti-heroes. But that's because modern ideas of heroism have changed and Christian morality is not the same as Classical. Ergo why Nolan's portrayal of Odysseus as wracked with guilt is anachronistic. An imperfect hero is not a anti-hero

On the Iliad and Excellence - "Much of the Iliad celebrates the competitive, toxic pursuit of excellence and perfection. Heroes strive for glory over survival, with the risk of being a detriment to their family legacy... Achilles is later pushed into battle by the death of Patroclus, and ultimately fulfills his destiny and kills Hector, solidifying his legacy. To the ancient Greeks, these events proved that no one was able to escape destiny, and portrayed the glory of their predecessors... It wasn’t until I analyzed the Iliad in an academic setting that I began to realize that the ancient Greek ideal of a hero should not be idolized. It was in the analysis of the aristeiai that I learned of the flaws of both Achilles and the Homeric concept of heroism. The aristeia was the climax of the ancient hero’s greatness, when he demonstrated his power in battle and destroyed his enemy, and was often what solidified his legacy. Achilles’ aristeia, for example, was him killing Hector. However, these feats of greatness were often war crimes in disguise. Achilles’ aristeia continued after the death of Hector, when he proceeded to mutilate the body of the hero, dragging him behind his chariot around the walls of Troy. These demonstrations of so-called greatness show an alternative side to perfection, demonstrating the toxic nature of the expectation of excellence."

Odysseus vs. Achilles: The Two Faces of Ancient Greek Heroism - "Achilles is the kind of hero who charges into battle, sword in hand, ready to face any foe. His entire existence revolves around kleos, the Greek concept of glory that ensures his name will live on forever. He is nearly invincible, and his physical prowess is unmatched. In Homer’s Iliad, Achilles is described as “the greatest warrior of the Greeks,” a title he earns through sheer force and bravery. His mother, Thetis, tells him that he faces two fates: a short, glorious life or a long, obscure one... In ancient Greece, Achilles was the hero everyone admired. His physical prowess and relentless pursuit of glory made him the ideal warrior. Cities like Sparta revered Achilles for his martial excellence, which aligned with their values of military might. The Iliad was a staple in Greek education, and Achilles’ heroism was something every young Greek boy was taught to emulate. His valor and tragic death became the gold standard for heroism in a society that prized martial prowess... Odysseus, while respected, was viewed differently. In Athens, a city that valued intelligence and strategy, Odysseus was admired for his cunning and adaptability. The Odyssey was cherished not just for its adventure but for its portrayal of human resilience. However, Odysseus’s reliance on deception made his heroism more complex and, at times, controversial. Some city-states preferred Achilles’ straightforward heroism, while others appreciated Odysseus’s more nuanced, cerebral qualities."

Odysseus and the Genus ‘Hero’ - "The presence of 'unheroic' features in the character of Homeric Odysseus was noticed long ago, and since the time of the ancient commentators it has become habitual to gloss those features by predicating them on Odysseus' metis, 'cunning', as opposed to the bie, 'might', of other Homeric heroes, first and foremost Achilles... The last labour of Odysseus is remarkable in that it is regarded as a crowning achievement in his life, an achievement which, in accordance with the view of labours outlined above, will guarantee him the approporiate reward. Indeed, according to the prophecy of Teiresias, only upon accomplishing this mission will Odysseus be able to return home, where he will live happily and die of old age: 'And from the sea shall thine own death come, the gentlest death that may be, which shall end thee foredone with smooth old age, and the folk shall dwell happily around thee.' This promise seems to be a clear indication of the fact that the Odyssey is not only aware of the popular notion of heroism as outlined above but also deliberately models its hero to fit into this notion... In full conformity with popular Greek ethics, Odysseus is represented as contented with his lot and preferring to immortality his own life even if it is a life of toil and suffering. In this, he proves as exemplary a hero as only a Greek hero can be... To sum up, either Homeric poem offers its own version of heroism. In the Iliad being a hero amounts to readiness to meet death on the battlefield: the sense in which the words 'heroism' and 'hero' are used today ultimately descends from this concept. According to the Odyssey a hero is one who is prepared to go through life enduring toil and suffering. Whatever the reasons for this difference, there can be no doubt that it is the Odyssey's version of heroism that conforms to the popular Greek attitude to the phenomenon of hero-worship."

The Smithsonian Forgot the One Job It Had

Taxpayer dollars only come with taxpayer accountability (not to mention, doing the job you're supposed to do on paper) when that pushes the left wing agenda. 

@amuse on X

The Smithsonian Forgot the One Job It Had

On July 4, as the country marked its 250th birthday, the White House released a 162-page report from the Domestic Policy Council titled Saving America's Story. The report, which follows President Trump's March 2025 executive order directing Vice President JD Vance and the Office of Management and Budget to steer the Smithsonian away from what the order called improper ideology, focuses on the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. Its findings deserve a wider audience than a holiday news cycle will give them, because they document something more troubling than a few tendentious wall placards. They document a museum that has forgotten the one job it had.

Start with what that job is, because the museum's founders were not shy about stating it. When Smithsonian leadership made its case to Congress in 1953, it argued that a main reason to build the museum was to place before the millions who visit the capital a permanent exposition commemorating our heritage of freedom. In 1955, Secretary Leon Carmichael testified that the museum would tell the story of American national progress and instill in each citizen a deepened faith in the country's destiny as a champion of individual dignity and enterprise. Congress believed him and appropriated $36 million to build it. At the dedication in January 1964, President Lyndon Johnson expressed his hope that children would come to the building and see with their own eyes the ripe fruit of America's historical harvest, Whitney's cotton gin, Edison's phonograph, Bell's telephone, the victory of freedom and the genius of the country. The mandate was never subtle. The museum exists to tell the American story in full, sins included, but with gratitude for the civilization, liberty, prosperity, and constitutional order Americans inherited.

 

Now consider what the report found. A visitor walking through the National Museum of American History during the semiquincentennial of the American Founding will find no exhibit dedicated to George Washington. None dedicated to Thomas Jefferson. None to the Second Continental Congress, the Mayflower, the Pilgrims, the Puritans, or Washington crossing the Delaware. Read that again slowly. The flagship history museum of the United States entered the 250th anniversary of the Revolution without a single exhibit, new or existing, devoted to the Founders or the pivotal events of the Founding. The Declaration and Constitution appear selectively. The constructive role of Christian belief in shaping American liberty receives scant attention. According to the report, the museum scheduled no special programming for Independence Day itself in either 2025 or 2026, despite being open on both days. 

 

Is this not simply an oversight, the kind of curatorial gap that afflicts any large institution? The report's most damning contribution is to show that it is not. The omissions trace directly to stated intent. Anthea Hartig, the museum's director since 2019, has described history as a prime tool of social justice and her role as connecting research and scholarship to activism and advocacy. She has said the museum works to reframe the traditional celebratory narrative of US history. Most remarkably, she told her profession that it had to figure out how it was going to problematize the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Problematize is a term of art in critical theory. It means to surface alleged oppressions within a subject in order to deconstruct and discredit the prevailing narrative about it. The nation asked for a birthday. The curators planned an intervention.

 

The institutional evidence runs deeper than one director's rhetoric. Under current leadership, the museum rewrote its mission statement, removing the phrase American history itself and replacing it with language about empowering people to create a more just and compassionate future. Hartig explained the change candidly: the goal was to get out of the America First mentality when telling history. Think about what that means in practice. The National Museum of American History deleted American history from its mission. If a bank removed the word deposits from its charter, depositors would be entitled to some alarm.

 

The museum's Interpretive Plan converts that mission into marching orders. It directs staff, whatever the topic, to tie exhibits back to seven core issues of our time: race and identity, gender and sexuality, climate change, immigration, economic inequality, technological change, and nationalism versus globalism. The complaint here is not that these subjects are off limits. A serious history museum should address race, immigration, and inequality, because a serious history of America must. The complaint is that every subject, whether democracy, entertainment, childhood, women's labor, or sports, is now routed through the same ideological grid, one that treats American institutions chiefly as instruments of oppression and treats visitors as recruits. When Alexander Hamilton appears, he is an influential and flawed founding father who owned slaves, with no mention that he helped found the New York Manumission Society in 1785 or that its African Free Schools educated more than 1,400 students. When Benjamin Franklin appears in the Many Voices, One Nation exhibit, he appears once, not as a Founder but as a Philadelphian with allegedly ambivalent views of immigrants. The Pilgrims are framed as colonial oppressors and Thanksgiving as a National Day of Mourning. This is not history with the hard parts included. It is prosecution with the exculpatory evidence excluded.

 

Why should the federal government care what a museum's curators believe? Because this is not a private gallery in Brooklyn spending donor money. The Smithsonian is a trust instrumentality of the United States, overseen by a Board of Regents currently led by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and populated by senior federal officials and congressional appointees. It received $1,080,500,000 in appropriations for Fiscal Year 2026, and federal money has covered roughly two thirds of its expenditures over the past two decades. Taxpayers are not being asked to tolerate a point of view they dislike in someone else's institution. They are being compelled to finance, in their own institution, a systematic campaign against the story that institution was chartered and funded to tell. Congress bought a museum of American history. It is entitled to receive one.

 

Defenders of the museum, including the American Historical Association, argue that the White House is trying to sanitize history and that political pressure threatens institutional independence. But notice what this objection must assume to succeed. It must assume that the only alternative to grievance curation is whitewash, that a museum which centers the Founding must therefore hide slavery, and that honoring Washington requires forgetting the enslaved people at Mount Vernon. Nothing in the report demands any such thing. Its own framework insists the museum should document the failures of the nation alongside its achievements, should tell the story of 750,000 dead in the Civil War, and should explain how Americans came to reject Jim Crow by appealing to the colorblind promise of the founding documents themselves. Telling history honestly is not the same as teaching contempt, and a curriculum of contempt is precisley what the current museum delivers. As for independence, no one proposes that curators take orders on individual label copy; the proposal is that a publicly chartered, publicly governed, publicly funded trust be held to its charter, which is what boards of regents and congressional oversight exist to do, and the notion that an institution can take more than $1 billion a year from the public while remaining accountable to no one but its own staff is not independence, it is capture, and calling capture independence does not make it so.

 

For decades, complaints about institutional bias in museums, universities, and cultural agencies produced columns and conference panels and little else, a pattern scholars at the Heritage Foundation have long described as conservatives funding their own marginalization. The Smithsonian report models a different approach: read the documents, quote the leadership, follow the money, and then use the legitimate levers of governance, budgets, appointments, and oversight, to restore an institution to its purpose. The report does not order exhibits torn down. It establishes a factual record and invites the Board of Regents, the Chancellor, and Congress to act on it. That is not a culture war stunt. That is what stewardship of a public trust looks like.

 

The deeper stakes are generational. Parents bring children to the National Museum of American History for the reason President Johnson named at the dedication, so that the young can touch the inheritance and understand the meaning of the past. A child who leaves that building never having encountered Washington's character, Jefferson's pen, Franklin's genius, or the improbable miracle of a republic conceived in liberty has been cheated of a birthright, and no amount of programming about the seven core issues of our time compensates for the theft. A nation that cannot explain to its children why it deserves their gratitude will eventually raise children who feel none. The prediction market currently gives strong odds that the Smithsonian fight becomes a defining cultural story of 2026, and it should, because memory is the ground on which every other political battle is fought.

 

The museum forgot the one job it had. On America's 250th birthday, the country noticed. The task now is not to burn the institution down but to hand it back its charter, point to the words American history, and insist that it do the job the American people built it, funded it, and trusted it to do.  

 

 

 

 

 

Links - 15th August 2026 (1 - Star Wars)

Meme - *Hutt*
Ahsoka: "STINKY? MY GOODNESS, YOU'VE GROWN!"
Hutt: "SO HAVE YOU. GROWN MORE BEAUTIFUL. FOR A JEDI, I MEAN."
Ahsoka: "STINKY, YOU'LL ALWAYS BE THAT LITTLE WORM I DROPPED OFF ON TATOOINE."

Meme - "Luke Skywalker. Anakin Skywalker. Rey
Overpowered - no, yes, yes
Unexplained power level - no, no, yes
Perfectly good - yes, no, yes
No personality - yes, no, yes
Instantly liked - no, kinda, yes
Feels like wish fulfillment - no, no, yes
Not embarrassed / fails - no, no, yes"
MaRey Sue strikes again. Of course if you think Rey is a Mary Sue you're a misogynist

Meme - "KNOW THE WORK RULES
APPROPRIATE
Princess Leia: I'm leading a rebellion & fight against a corrupt government.
You're a hero.
INAPPROPRIATE
General Grievous: I'm leading a rebellion & fight against a corrupt government.
Monster! War criminal!"

Meme - "Disney's creative decisions with Star Wars will never cease to baffle me. Choosing from the beginning to have the sequel trilogy swap each movie with the intention of having them all do completely separate things. Creating a release schedule to have a Star Wars film out every holiday season then abandoning it after 3 years to for some reason release a movie 5 months after the last one which also happens to be the same month as what will easily be the biggest film of the year. Then abandon making movies after that one flops, and instead of thinking that audiences might be getting tired of Star Wars they decide to start pumping out constant live action series. Then deciding to rework a movie that's essentially Star Wars Episode 3.5 into a series but take what's essentially a filler episode of their longest running series that's already lost steam and release it as a movie. These mistakes are so obvious it's insane."

Meme - Anakin Skywalker: "You can't! He must stand trial!"
Mace Windu: "Nute Gunray was once tried. He remained Viceroy of the Trade Federation and organized, probably together with this bastard, the assassination attempt on Senator Amidala. Any other objections?"

Meme - ""open minded freedom fighter" *Padme*
her friends: *Qui-Gon Jinn* human *Anakin Skywalker* human *Obi-Wan Kenobi* human *Captain Panaka* human *Bail Organa* human
"racist humanocentrist" *Count Dooku*
his friends: *General Grievous* kaleesh *Nute Gunray* neimoidian *Wat Tambor* skakoan *Admiral Trench* harch *Poggle the Lesser* geonosian *Shu Mai* gossam  *Passel Argente?* koorivar"

RUMOR: Disney to Remove Star Wars Sequel Trilogy From Timeline to Resume Focus on Original Characters - "The future of Star Wars may be heading toward a massive course correction—and if a new insider report is accurate, Disney could be preparing to split the controversial Star Wars Sequel Trilogy off into its own isolated timeline and remove it from the mainline Star Wars storyline.  According to an exclusive report from That Park Place’s WDW Pro, a source close to Lucasfilm claims internal discussions are underway to “branch off” the Star Wars sequel trilogy to effectively remove it from the primary continuity and allow future storytelling to pivot back toward legacy characters from the original films.  If true, this would be one of the most dramatic franchise shifts in modern Hollywood history. A recent focus group conducted by Matthew Belloni of Puck News paints a bleak picture of where younger audiences stand with Star Wars. When teens were asked about the franchise, the response wasn’t passionate debate or excitement. It wasn't even hate or anger.  It was indifference.  “I like the old stuff, but the new stuff… nah. I’m not too excited for The Mandalorian. I never watched it, personally,” one teen said. Another claimed: “Anything that came out after I was born isn’t that great.”   The only bright spot mentioned was Andor—and even that came with a shrug before the conversation moved on.  That’s the nightmare scenario for Disney.  The sequel trilogy wasn’t just meant to revive Star Wars. It was supposed to create a new generation of fans. Instead, that generation appears largely disconnected from it.  And the box office outlook isn’t helping. The Mandalorian and Grogu is currently tracking for around an $80 million domestic opening over Memorial Day weekend—a number that would make it the lowest debut in Star Wars theatrical history. Even accounting for a reportedly smaller budget, that’s a glaring warning sign for a franchise that once defined blockbuster dominance... At Disneyland’s Galaxy’s Edge, cast members portraying Ahsoka have reportedly been giving a very specific, very consistent explanation when guests ask why characters from different eras are appearing together.  The answer? The “World Between Worlds” has been "shattered" and disrupted. That concept, introduced in Star Wars Rebels, is essentially a dimension that connects all points in time and space—making it a perfect narrative tool for timeline manipulation.  Disney Parks performers don’t improvise lore like this... Even beyond the parks, there are signs Disney has been slowly backing away from the sequel era.  Recent merchandising campaigns for May the 4th heavily favored the original trilogy. The Fortnite crossover event leaned in the same direction. Galaxy’s Edge itself has begun shifting its in-universe timeline, allowing characters like Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and Princess Leia to appear more prominently.  Meanwhile, sequel-era elements have been noticeably reduced. Rey—once positioned as the future face of the franchise—is increasingly absent from major promotional pushes. Her long-announced standalone film remains stalled, with little visible progress since its reveal.  And then there’s the Galactic Starcruiser.  The now-defunct hotel was built entirely around the sequel trilogy timeline. It lasted barely a year before shutting down, becoming one of the most high-profile misfires in Disney Parks history... For years, talk of resetting the sequel trilogy has been dismissed as wishful thinking from frustrated fans.  But the situation has changed.  Between declining engagement, weak box office projections, stalled projects, and failed investments tied directly to the sequel era, the financial incentive to pivot is stronger than ever. This isn’t just about fan complaints anymore. It’s about viability.  Disney doesn’t need to erase the sequel trilogy to move on from it. They just need to make it… optional."
Damn toxic entitled incel fanboys! Star Wars needs to be further feminised to own the chuds!

Aakash Gupta on X - "Disney is about to delete five years of canon because Rey doesn't move toys.  The sequel trilogy did $4.47B at the box office. Force Awakens $2.07B, Last Jedi $1.33B, Rise of Skywalker $1.07B. The merchandise tells a different story.  Star Wars merchandise peaked at $700M in 2015 when Force Awakens launched. By 2019, the year Rise of Skywalker shipped with a billion-dollar marketing push as the supposed finale of the Skywalker Saga, Hasbro's Star Wars line was doing roughly $150M. A 70%+ collapse during the trilogy's own theatrical run.  Then 2020 happened. No new movies. A streaming show legally unavailable in most international markets. Hasbro's Star Wars revenue grew 70% year-over-year. One character named Grogu outsold three years of sequel-trilogy merchandise.  The sequel cast specifically can't move inventory at any price point. Rey, Finn, Poe, Rose, Holdo: Walmart clearance for years. Diamond Select's president said sales on TFA and TLJ products "were not too strong." Hasbro silently stopped producing Rise of Skywalker figures mid-line. There is no mass-market action figure for Poe, Finn, Lando, unmasked Kylo, Palpatine, or Leia from that movie. The licensees gave up before the trilogy finished releasing.  The Lucasfilm acquisition was a $4.05B bet on the merchandise flywheel that built modern Hollywood toy licensing. Kenner's best year selling Original Trilogy toys, adjusted for inflation, outperformed the entire Disney era combined. That's the asset Disney bought.  Galaxy's Edge runs the same play. Over $1B per park to build a Star Wars land set on a sequel-era planet nobody cared about. Both parks underperformed projections. The Mandalorian-themed expansion now under construction is the admission.  If the rumor lands, this is the most expensive retcon in entertainment history. Five years of IP development written off because the licensees voted with their order books. Luke, Han, Leia, Vader, Boba, Mando, Grogu, Ahsoka generate revenue. The sequel cast generates returns."
Left wingers still insist that the sequel trilogy was a massive success, because they ignore George Lucas's key insight: it's not about the movie revenue, but the toy sales

Bizlet on X - "What’s hilarious about this whole fiasco is that Disney specifically bought Star Wars because they lacked a brand that appealed to boys. They had tons of merch sales to girls but had almost nothing for boys. So they bought it for billions and the creative dept feminized it defeating the entire purpose of buying it to begin with."

Zcure1 on X - "New footage The Mandalorian and Grogu promo spot . #TheMandalorianandGrogu #StarWars"
Duchess of Darksaber Light on X - ""The Empire will keep coming for us" is a brain-dead line. Just like with the sequel trilogy, the writers can't imagine a world where characters are anything other than Rebels against the Empire. An Empire that has been gone for more than 5 years."

'It's felt like homework': Why Star Wars went so wrong - "The Mandalorian & Grogu is released this week and is set for the lowest opening weekend of any Star Wars film ever. With the TV shows also struggling, here's why interest is waning.  It's been seven years since the Star Wars franchise visited a galaxy far, far away on the big screen. In December 2019, The Rise of Skywalker, the third and final film in the franchise's sequel trilogy, was released, earning $1.077bn (£806m) worldwide. It pulled in only around half what the first film in the trilogy, 2015's The Force Awakens had made. This disappointing amount reflected the increasingly poor audience and critical response to the three films. A year earlier, in 2018, the standalone film Solo: A Star Wars Story had also bombed hard, earning just $393m (£294m) globally. Since then, the film series has been on a lengthy hiatus, while Lucasfilm, bought by Disney for $4.05bn (£3.03bn) in 2012, has been busy expanding the Star Wars universe on TV with a whole host of live-action shows, starting with hit The Mandalorian. However, interest in these has declined as they have proliferated: the most recent new series, 2025's Skeleton Crew, recorded the lowest opening ratings for a Star Wars show yet, while 2024's The Acolyte was cancelled after one season... Prerelease tracking suggests it will score just $80 million domestically during its opening weekend – the lowest opening for a Star Wars film ever. So what exactly has gone wrong with the Star Wars universe?... Clarisse Loughrey, chief film critic for The Independent, agrees, pointing by contrast to Tony Gilroy's critically-acclaimed series Andor, which consistently grew its viewership through its two season run, as a standalone Star Wars show you could enjoy on its own: "That could be your first piece of Star Wars that you've ever seen, and you're not going to feel like you've been thrown in the deep end."   Andor also stood out from the other series as a defiantly prescient critique of authoritarianism, offered "in terms you could legibly graft on to the world right outside your door", wrote Vulture's Nicholas Quah. It was a Star Wars saga that didn't require a single lightsaber, Jedi-Sith battle, or an abundance of fan service to entice viewers but instead wielded characters that "felt like flesh-and-blood beings whose lives extended beyond their service to the story", as he put it. Yet where Andor succeeded, others have failed to capture its rejuvenating appeal. The Book of Boba Fett was criticised for being too much of a Mandalorian-linked mini-series, and reducing the beloved eponymous bounty hunter, who appeared in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, from a mysterious antagonist to what critics have described as a "superfluous bystander" in his own story. Meanwhile, critics suggested that Ahsoka, while visually appealing, relied too much on backstory from the two animated series Clone Wars and Rebels, in which its ex-Jedi lead character was a firm fixture.   The female-centric Acolyte series, set approximately 100 years before The Phantom Menace and costing $187m (£140m) to make, earned generally favourable reviews from critics, comparing it to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and calling it "bold," "fun", and a "breath of fresh air".  However, it was cancelled due to low viewership, according to Lucasfilm, while actress Amandla Stenberg publicly called out the "intolerable racism" she said she'd been subject to in the wake of starring in the show. "Had it been given more time and resource, maybe it would have been more successful," says Harrison. "If it wasn't part of this huge glut of other shows that you're somehow meant to keep up with."  Then there was Obi-Wan Kenobi's solo series which was an enjoyable enough return for Ewan McGregor's Jedi Knight. But also one that was indicative of post-George Lucas Star Wars, wrote The Guardian's Stuart Heritage, which "exists almost exclusively to bulk out thin gruel, joining various dots that didn’t need to be joined, for the delight of a quickly ageing fanbase."... the film cost approximately $165m (£123m) to make – the smallest amount spent on any big-screen Star Wars instalment, which certainly puts its box-office prediction in a healthier light. Lucasfilm managed to keep costs low by shooting entirely in California rather than the far-flung locations used on previous, very expensive Star Wars films."

Meme - "FUCK ICE"
"The SW Geek Hub
Love Star Wars? Want News but sick of Clickbait and Ragebait? Don't look in Alderaan places. Welcome to The SW Geek Hub, successor to The Star Wars Hub. Your go to place for Daily Star Wars News. A Star Wars Page for Star Wars Fans that want News & Memes"
The SW Geek Hub: "The World's a Stage..."
"The attempt on my life has left me in need of a ballroom"
Obi-Wan Kenobi: "You have become the very thing you swore to destroy"

Meme - Cara Dune: "WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING AT? DOES THAT HELMET HAVE X-RAY VISION?"
Din Djarin: "UMM. UHH. OF COURSE NOT"
Cara Dune: "OK MANDO. I FEEL I CAN TRUST YOU." *X-ray view of guns behind walls and Cara Dune with nipple stickers and frilly underwear*

Hail the Empire | Facebook - "The Hosnian system getting wiped out in The Force Awakens is a good example of how bigger stakes don’t always hit harder. In A New Hope, Alderaan’s destruction worked because the story made it personal. Tarkin didn’t just blow up a planet; he forced Leia to watch her home disappear, with around two billion people gone in one brutal display of Imperial power. Decades later, Starkiller Base tried to top that by destroying five New Republic planets at once, with the death toll pushed to an almost impossible scale of about 155 billion lives. The problem is that the larger number somehow made the moment feel smaller. Alderaan had Leia as the emotional anchor, so the audience understood the loss through someone who actually belonged to that world. Hosnian Prime and the other planets barely had that kind of connection. We mostly see strangers looking up as the red beam tears through the sky, which is horrifying in concept but strangely distant on screen. As some critics pointed out, the sequel trilogy looked at the original planet-destruction scene and “decided to multiply it by five,” turning what should have been devastating into something more like “distressing stuff.” That’s the trap of trying to raise the stakes by simply making the disaster bigger. When a whole capital system can vanish in seconds but the story barely stops to feel it, the tragedy becomes harder to process, not more powerful. Instead of landing like Alderaan, the Hosnian Cataclysm ends up feeling more like a massive plot button being pressed. By PDA01"

Box Office: 'Backrooms' $81M U.S, $118MWW Opening Is An A24 Record - "Disney/Lucasfilm’s Mandalorian and Grogu is taking a big fall, -69%, maybe steeper, with $25M in weekend 2. That’s a bigger crash than Solo: A Star Wars Story which -65% in weekend 2, likely the worst drop for a Star Wars movie. The argument per distribution sources is that the Jon Favreau movie didn’t lose audiences to Backrooms and Obsession, it’s just that the core Star Wars subset fandom for this IP is finite. One distribution source says, “Six weeks from now, it will be interesting to see the following: Mandalorian and Grogu will be at $180M, and Obsession and Backrooms not too far behind, if not ahead.”...   Disney/Lucasfilm’s Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu, despite the force of Imax, is eyeing third with a second weekend of $24M after a $6.5M Friday at 4,300. If those numbers stick, that’s a 69% second-weekend drop, steeper than Solo: A Star Wars Story‘s second weekend, which was down by 65% with $29.3M."
One cope is people don't watch movies anymore, but that is contradicted by data

Kevin Winslow's answer to Why have the Star Wars prequels aged well and the sequels aged worse? - Quora - "Well, the Prequels had a lot going for them and a ton of great ideas, it just could have used a little more editing. The “Sequel” trilogy is made by an entirely different group of people with no coherent vision: it’s mostly bad ideas strung together. Even though the Prequel trilogy didn’t measure up well against the Original Trilogy when they came out, they look like Rembrandts compared to the incoherent, depressing, pointless mess that is the “Fan Fiction Trilogy” Disney put together.
The Prequel Trilogy continued George Lucas’ tradition of making each Star Wars entry a slightly different type of film. Star Wars (A New Hope) was a throwback to serials he grew up with. The Empire Strikes Back is more of a space opera. The Return of the Jedi is a heroic war movie.  So the Prequel Trilogy starts with The Phantom Menace, which is basically one long prologue in a big novel. The Attack of the Clones is an attempt at a political thriller, and The Revenge of the Sith is basically a Greek tragedy where the hero is given a prediction of a horrible event and becomes the mechanism that fulfills it through his lack of patience and character. Each movie actually has a great set of bones in terms of plot, setting, and character. The problem was the pacing and the direction: Lucas made some bold choices that ended up hurting the overall work. He overexplained the Force (midichlorians), he tried to foreshadow with a prophecy that only muddied up the story, and he chose to cast Anakin as a really young boy which created production issues.  Still: the Phantom Menace (with some cleanup) is a solid prologue that hits a lot of the right plot beats but needed a central protagonist and a better character arc for that protagonist. The Attack of the Clones needed less heavy handed direction and better dialogue. The Revenge of the Sith is the best of the three, but could have used some clean up with the acting direction and story.
The “Sequel Trilogy”, (and I use that term loosely), is visually stunning, but has zero heart and terrible, terrible bones: “Plot, setting, and character” are our tripod of a good story. The people putting these films together didn’t really know where they wanted the story to go even in a loose outline (so the plot is a mess), they didn’t care about the older characters and didn’t make firm decisions on character relationships, (so there goes character), and ran rampant over all aspects of the setting in favor of meeting immediate plot needs, so it has no consistency with Lucas’ work.
I’ve written a lot about these films, but what it really boils down to is…
1) There was no plan
2) There was no united vision
Say what you will about Lucas, but he has a plan and a vision. Whether you agree with it or not is usually up for debate, but there’s no question he had big goals in mind and had at least worked out some of the major story beats in advance. Not all of them… but some of them. Enough that “Return of the Jedi” is a damn-fine trilogy conclusion and “Revenge of the Sith” does manage to bring the prequels to about the right spot to set up the Original Trilogy.  The “Sequel Trilogy” is more of loose collection of competing ideas. The Force Awakens shows our old heroes broken and tries to introduce new, inferior replacements. The Last Jedi tries to further piss on EVERYTHING: the old characters like Luke and Yoda are torn apart completely and the new characters like Finn and Poe get hit with the reset button or changed completely. The plot went nowhere, and things were in such bad shape by “The Rise of Skywalker”, villains were resurrected with no warning and the entire film is basically, “get the _______ to get to the _______” over and over again.
What does this all mean?  Well, the Disney Trilogy is pretty much a, “I watched it once and never felt like watching it again” type of film. The Prequel Trilogy, even if you didn’t love it like the Original Trilogy, still had stand out music, fights, visuals, and plot elements that make it worth coming back to. Watching this fight with this music in trailers and the big screen? It’s a highlight of my Star Wars fandom. I loved this soundtrack and I used to work out and run to “Duel of the Fates” and “Across the Stars”. I still have those plus all the entire prequel and sequel soundtracks on my phone, and “Sail Barge Assault” (renamed “Return of the Jedi” in later album versions on streaming platforms), is still my favorite Star Wars track of all time and I’ve listened to it more times than I’ll ever be able to count.  THAT is the power Lucas’ work. The attention to detail, the emotional punch of what we’re watching, the investment into the characters, and even if his direction of the actors and his written dialogue weren’t always on point, he had a unified story that was cohesive and very enjoyable.  The Sequel Trilogy, even with John Williams doing the score again, is completely lifeless because nothing is really happening on screen. There is no romance. There is no true tension. There are no true stakes. There are no true consequences. That’s why the “Sequel Trilogy” soundtrack doesn’t have nearly the impact of tracks like, “The Asteroid Field”, “Princess Leia’s Theme”, “Yoda’s Theme”, or “The Imperial March”. Even if a piece is good, (like, “The March of the Resistance” or “Rey’s Theme”) it doesn’t hit nearly as hard because we don’t really care about the Resistance and Rey is poorly written. We’ve been given no real reason to care about what happens to these characters because they’re floating through the story. The Sequels have already aged terribly because they’re not really re-watchable. You don’t go in and feel tingly when you leave. You don’t hum the tunes, imagine being those characters, you don’t daydream about fighting alongside Obi-Wan Kenobi as a stand-in brother or friend, or kissing Padme, and you don’t imagine yourself as a Jedi Knight in the Clone Wars or as a dashing pilot.  The Sequels were very lifeless and even their heroes didn’t really get a chance to do, (or be) very much. And with that… what’s really the point of rewatching them?  Visually, they look great, but they’ve aged like bad milk: they leave a terribly sour after taste and it’s not something anyone really enjoys in the moment or wants to think about going back to."

Jake Lloyd's Personal Saga: New Focus Is Helping Determine His Current Reality - "Jake Lloyd wants his fans to know something.  Years into dealing with a schizophrenia diagnosis that has largely hijacked his post-Star Wars acting life— he’s finally feeling “pretty good”."
Mother of 'Star Wars' child actor details his mental health struggles - "his mother, Lisa Lloyd, provided a glimpse into Jake’s personal saga in the years since appearing in that galaxy far, far away — sharing her son’s turbulent struggle with mental illness, family tragedy and the reasons she’s more hopeful today than she’s been in years.  She also wanted to set the record straight about what her son really thinks about "Star Wars."  Lisa noted that her son is aware that she is speaking out to tell his story.    “Jake started having some trouble in high school,” Lisa said, recalling the time she first noticed her son’s personality changing. “He started talking about ‘realities.’ He didn't know if he was in this reality, or a different reality. I didn't really know exactly what to say to that.”... Lisa is also eager to dispel what she says is a common misconception: that an avalanche of negative reaction to "The Phantom Menace" drove Jake to quit acting and contributed to his mental illness.  “It would have happened anyway,” Lisa insists, pointing to a history of schizophrenia on his biological father’s side of the family. “I believe that it was genetic. And his psychiatrist also agrees that Jake was going to become schizophrenic.” She also insists that in 1999, Jake was largely shielded from the toxic vitriol swirling around the prequel film.  “I protected him from the backlash. He was just riding his bike outside, playing with his friends. He didn't know. He didn't care,” Lisa said. “Everybody makes such a big deal about that. And it's rather annoying to me because Jake was a little kid when that came out, and he didn't really feel all that stuff because I didn't let him online.”"
Damn toxic fans bullying him! The cope is going to be that the bullying caused the schizophrenia, even though it's highly heritable