College students have been booing commencement speakers who dare to mention artificial intelligence. The boos were heard at the University of Central Florida, when Gloria Caulfield, a real-estate executive, called AI “the next Industrial Revolution.” And at the University of Arizona, when former Google CEO Eric Schmidt mentioned “the architects of artificial intelligence,” last year’s Time people of the year. And also at Middle Tennessee State University, when Scott Borchetta, a Nashville record executive, told graduates that AI is “rewriting the production process.” Boos, audible enough to be captured on video.

Those videos spread quickly on social media. The posts first cited the fact of the booing, which is undeniable. As that fact spread, others drew conclusions. NBC News reported that the term artificial intelligence proved “wildly unpopular” because it was “striking a sore spot.” The Wall Street Journal cited the boos as evidence that “The American Rebellion Against AI Is Gaining Steam.” Fox News said the boos against Schmidt represented grads letting Schmidt know “exactly what they thought of AI.”

Watching the clips, and then the reactions, and then reading stories about the reactions, and then taking in blog-style, big-idea conclusions about what the reactions meant, I felt the internet drawing me toward an interpretation that was supposed to be obvious—that young people loathe AI, and that they hate AI because it and the power brokers who invented, wield, and praise it have stolen from them the last vestige of a future that those brokers had already stolen in large part before they did so by means of AI.

[Read: Greetings, class of 2026! Have you heard about AI? Wait, why are you booing?]

But as a university professor and administrator, I also know that new graduates by and large love AI. The technology has already changed college students forever, I wrote at the start of this academic year. My colleague Lila Shroff and I discussed how AI had broken high school as well. Three years ago, the first year of AI college ended in ruin, as students raced to see what AI could do—and what they could get away with by using it—while professors and universities found themselves ignorant and unprepared. Even students at small, elite liberal-arts colleges, such as Amherst and Vassar, have found themselves wrestling with AI’s ability to help them cheat their way out of the bespoke, high-touch, and expensive education that made attending a small college appealing.

The public seems to want these boos to mean something definitive and specific—the way an AI chatbot is supposed to provide a certain answer, right or wrong. To me, the booing sounds more like a cosmic howl.

Artificial intelligence exposed the wicked problems in higher education that long predated AI: bureaucratic universities, transactional students, overburdened faculty, risk-averse administrators, and a culture obsessed with achievement. From up close, the crisis was never a single failure but an accumulation of compromises. Students gamed the rules. Professors cut corners. Administrators chased mandates and opportunities. All of them were responding rationally to institutions that rewarded ambition, efficiency, and advancement over learning itself.

I thought of this knotty mess when I watched the clip of Borchetta, the record-label CEO, getting heckled at Middle Tennessee State University. “Deal with it,” Borchetta said after the boos began. “It’s a tool,” he said of AI. “Make it work for you.” Borchetta had given $15 million to name the university’s college of media and entertainment, making him one of the types of people whose wealth and influence now drives academic policy.

Watched in isolation, the clip suggests a tidy story. A rich guy who got his sneers at students whose theirs he now threatens to automate away, while also lecturing those very same students that they better accept this future as both inevitable and desirable. Borchetta’s label, Big Machine Records, signed a young Taylor Swift in 2005, an accomplishment that later devolved into a spectacle of creative credit, ownership, and control after Big Machine sold her masters to Scooter Braun. How much more symbolism does one require to cast AI as bad news, and people such as Borchetta as evil overlords for wielding it with so little thought?

But listening to Borchetta’s entire speech—which I had to scroll past a Google AI overview of the controversy it supposedly summarized to find—I felt as if I were visiting an alternate universe. Borchetta told, in brief, the story of Napster, whose 1999 appearance caused record executives to “lose their minds.” They saw only the threat, and for that reason, Borchetta said, they could not see the future—which was music streaming. And that future was not great for recording artists. Record executives like him, and the artists he distributed, went from wholesaling albums for $12 or so to “literally chasing fractions of pennies around the world,” he said. Borchetta presented streaming as a foreign invader that was unwelcome but too powerful to defeat.

Whether Borchetta deserves praise for how he navigated this situation is debatable. In addition to signing Swift and growing acts such as Tim McGraw and Rascal Flatts, Borchetta’s Big Machine also embraced digital marketing—including on Myspace—earlier than other labels, making him seem prescient. But the Swift dispute, which arose in 2019, during the $330 million sale of Big Machine, also made Borchetta seem like an executive who put his own interests ahead of the artists he also claimed to champion.

A conflict between an artist and a record label is not a new story (Prince versus Warner, George Michael versus Sony, and the Beatles versus Capitol are but a few precedents). But the Swift-Borchetta dispute took place at a moment of ambiguous and massive cultural change, when “creators” began overtaking artists as the owners and operators of their own work and catalog. And part of the change was the emergence of artists who advertised themselves as executives, which is exactly how Swift came out of the fiasco—as a billionaire who found the balance between label power and individual power.

“What will be the stories we tell from this turbulent moment in time?” Borchetta asked his audience. He leaned on commencement-safe aphorisms such as There is no limit to what you can do to encourage the graduates before him. He told them to “be fearless.” He urged them not to let the entertainment industry convince them that “there are no seats left at the table.”

It is always easy for a wealthy and successful person to present their own success as deliberate and replicable rather than accidental, and Borchetta certainly delivered that message. But on the whole, over the 15 minutes he spoke, Borchetta did the job he was assigned. He encouraged graduates to believe in themselves, to chase their dreams. The line that “AI is rewriting production” came at the end of this message, as the latest in a line of changes that had included streaming and social media as prior examples. When the time for the boos came, Borchetta’s unrehearsed response, “Deal with it,” seemed like a concurrence with the student view rather than a rebuke of it.

I wasn’t in the room, and I can’t speak to the intentions of the students who booed. But they may have been expressing dissatisfaction less against AI in particular than against the complex problem of how to be a creative person in the second quarter of the 21st century. “Then do something about it,” Borchetta finally said to the AI boos. In context, Borchetta was not a clueless AI booster hawking the tech to college graduates who can’t stand it. “Invest in the skill and the art of creation,” he said in conclusion. “AI is not going to change that.”

After watching the actual speech, rather than the clip extracted from it and posted to TikTok or broadcast on cable news, I felt a tug of discomfort. This pang has become familiar as I’ve thought, written, and lived in this new era of AI: that the harm the technology is accused of bringing about—a slurry of automated thought and expression built of approximated, statistical sentiment rather than considered, individual judgment—motivates AI detractors as much as proponents. That “AI thinking” is now all thinking, and that it amounts to not thinking much at all.

The whole notion of opposition to or support of AI has started to seem irrelevant. A host of conditions—among them handheld computers and social media, cable news and supermarket tabloids, technological opportunism and historical ignorance—produced a situation in which “The Class of 2026 Hates AI” emerged as a convenient headline, one compatible with the social-media music-discovery process that Borchetta accurately explained.  

[Read: The AI backlash could get very ugly]

And, you know, maybe the class of 2026 does hate AI. Surveys suggest that it is widely unpopular in the United States, and for good reason. AI is not yet responsible for the wholesale collapse of the job market, but companies have certainly used AI as an excuse to cut jobs or not fill new ones. The entry-level-job market is worse than it’s been in almost four decades, and those are the opportunities that today’s graduates were promised when they were coaxed to strive toward the accomplishments that got them into college in the first place.

Whatever pressure AI is exerting on opportunity seems doomed to make students even more focused on aspiration and success. That pressure will only worsen the state of affairs in colleges and universities, which are also beset by the financial chaos of the second Trump administration, a cascade that may threaten the very idea of American college life. The boos don’t mean nothing, but they probably don’t mean something easily summarized, either.

So an easy answer is: Just blame AI anyway. If the same forces of power and control that turned Napster into Spotify, and Google into Gemini, would stop turning the screws yet again, and even more tightly, on the torture machine that has been constricting us for years and decades, then we would be free. I suppose that is true, but it is also a fantasy. And the future is built not from a fantasy but from the present, and the present is given to us in its current form.

This is different from saying AI is here, so deal with it. In the ideal version of the college classrooms of 2026, a topic such as this would be given the time, space, and attention to unfold slowly, deliberately, and systematically. “It’s complicated!” the ideal version of a professor like me would say, and the student would want to learn more, and would exit the classroom and cross the quad talking about it, and would come to office hours and write a thoughtful paper and be inspired to pursue a calling or invent an idea or just reverberate inside the complexity of the question, and by extension the complexity of most questions, or most good ones, anyway. I wonder if such a future can still exist for college students (or professors, or writers), or if it has already been abandoned. I worry that this time, the answer is a simple one.

Is libertarianism cracking up? Pick almost any contested political issue of the moment, and you’ll find prominent self-identified libertarians on opposite sides of it. On immigration, the Cato Institute’s Ilya Somin has spent the last several years arguing that libertarian principles require something close to open borders. Lew Rockwell, founder of the Mises Institute, has spent the same years arguing that they require the opposite. On Israel and Gaza, Walter Block has been an unabashed defender of Israel’s military operations on libertarian grounds; Dave Smith, working from what he takes to be the same principles, has been an equally vocal critic.

On the larger question of whether libertarianism should renew its old fusionist alliance with cultural conservatism, Reason‘s Stephanie Slade has made a careful and sympathetic case for fusionism — including in a forthcoming book of that name; her colleague Elizabeth Nolan Brown has been a consistent voice for the more “libertine,” socially liberal version of the tradition. None of these disputes is between a “real” libertarian and an impostor. Each is between recognized, self-identified libertarians who reach opposite conclusions about what libertarian principles require. Are these still the same movement?

The instinctive answer, in each of these disputes, is to say no — that whichever side has reached the unfamiliar conclusion has stopped being libertarian in any meaningful sense. Each camp accuses the other of having abandoned the tradition’s true principles, each is sure it knows what those principles require, and each writes the other out of the family. I want to suggest a less satisfying but more honest answer: that the disputants on both sides of these arguments are continuous with the libertarian tradition, and the reason none of these disputes admit of clean resolution is that the tradition was never as philosophically coherent as libertarians have tended to assume.

Coalitions and Competing Creeds

The most useful lens I’ve found for thinking about this comes from a recent book by Hyrum and Verlan Lewis called The Myth of Left and Right. The Lewis brothers argue that “left” and “right” aren’t coherent ideologies. They’re tribes — coalitions whose positions shift across time and place because the tribes come first and the philosophies get reverse-engineered to fit. Conservatives went from being free traders to protectionists, hawks on Russia to doves, opponents of federal power to its champions, and the shifts only look puzzling if you assume there’s a fixed essence underneath the label. There isn’t. The Lewis brothers aren’t writing about libertarianism. But their framework predicts exactly the kind of fracturing libertarianism is now visibly going through.

As John Tomasi and I document in The Individualists, the history of the libertarian intellectual tradition bears this out. The term “libertarian” first emerged in the 1850s as a self-description for a French anarcho-communist who thought private property and the state were two sides of the same coin. By 1913, Charles Sprading was using it to describe a tent that included Republicans, Democrats, Socialists, Single-Taxers, Anarchists, and Women’s Rights advocates. By the mid-twentieth century, under the influence of Leonard Read and the Foundation for Economic Education, it had narrowed to mean support for free markets and limited government. By the 1970s, the Nozick-Rand-Rothbard synthesis had narrowed it further still — to a particular form of rationalist, rights-based, free-market absolutism. Then, in the 1990s and 2000s, the label fragmented again. Bleeding-heart libertarians, left-libertarians, paleolibertarians, neoreactionaries — all under the same tent, none in agreement about what the tent contains. The current crackup isn’t an aberration. It’s what libertarianism has always done.

This wouldn’t be possible if libertarian principles really did the work of generating definite political conclusions. They don’t. Consider property rights, the closest thing libertarianism has to a settled core. Libertarians who all claim to be defending property rights have disagreed radically about what those rights require. Spencer and Spooner thought intellectual property was a straightforward extension of property rights; Benjamin Tucker thought it was an affront to them. Henry George thought land was categorically different from other property, justly owned by the community; Rothbard called that view “intellectually and morally beneath contempt.” Benjamin Tucker thought legitimate property in land required ongoing occupancy and use; Nozick thought original appropriation generated permanent rights. The principles do some real work — they rule out, for example, the more extreme forms of state socialism. But they aren’t powerful enough to settle the contested questions of our politics. A commitment to property rights doesn’t tell you what property is, how it gets acquired, whether it’s inheritable, or what to do when property-based claims conflict.

A Faustian Bargain?

This indeterminacy is on vivid display in the live debate now consuming much of the libertarian world: whether libertarians can legitimately make use of illiberal means to advance liberal ends. One wing of the movement has rallied behind the administration’s assault on the administrative state. Randy Barnett — the constitutional scholar who led the legal challenge to Obamacare — has urged libertarians to take the methods on display seriously rather than dismiss them. On a February 2025 Reason podcast that posed the question directly — should libertarians celebrate or be concerned about DOGE? — Barnett’s answer was substantially the former: that the regulatory state has grown so insulated from democratic accountability that breaking it open by executive action is constitutionally defensible and strategically welcome. In a New York Times op-ed with Ilan Wurman the same month, he argued that Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship for the children of unlawful immigrants has “the better of the constitutional argument.” Behind these specific positions lies what Barnett has elsewhere called the need for a libertarian “theory of the second best” — a libertarianism better fitted to a nonideal world of competing nations and entrenched institutions, willing to take the imperfect openings that real politics offers rather than insist on a first-best that isn’t on the menu.

The other wing has reached the opposite conclusion. In a February 2026 New York Times op-ed titled “Libertarians: We Told You So,” Reason editor Katherine Mangu-Ward argued that Trump-era governance has “vindicated libertarian warnings about executive power, civil liberties, and the risks of trading principle for partisan advantage.” The accusation cuts both ways: the wing that has cheered DOGE has, in her telling, sold the libertarian commitment to limited and accountable government for a temporary regulatory victory. Writing in The Bulwark, UnPopulist editor Shikha Dalmia put it more bluntly. Libertarians, she argued, “have abdicated just when they were most needed” — and the movement is “becoming a zombie ideology, unable to draw fresh moral sustenance even as it uses up its existing reserves.”

Similar fault lines have opened up over tariffs, deportation, and the administration’s treatment of universities and law firms. Reason senior editor Brian Doherty wrote that Trump’s first year had been “a libertarian nightmare.” Jack Hunter, writing in AIER’s own Fusion, called the same year “a libertarian triumph.” Both sides cite libertarian principles. Both believe themselves to be the legitimate heirs of the tradition. The dispute isn’t a disagreement about whether liberty matters; it’s a disagreement about institutional pathways, empirical bets, and which sociological anchors a libertarian’s instincts should track.

That’s the live form of the indeterminacy. It can’t be resolved by appealing to first principles, because the first principles are exactly what both sides claim to be defending. It can only be resolved — to the extent it can be resolved — by careful argument about particular questions: what executive power actually does to constitutional order over time, what immigration restrictions actually do to economic and political freedom, what alliances with the cultural right actually do to the prospects of liberty in the long run. Those are empirical and prudential questions. They aren’t axiomatic ones, and treating them as if they were is what gives the current crackup its bitter, unproductive character.

The Case for Intellectual Humility

What does all this mean for those of us who still call ourselves libertarians? Not, I think, that we should give up the label. The libertarian tradition contains real philosophical insights and remains a powerful corrective to the centralizing instincts of modern politics.

It does mean, however, that we should hold our libertarian views in a somewhat different spirit — less as conclusions deduced from a single axiom, more as provisional positions arrived at through careful thinking about particular issues, with libertarian principles as one important input among others. On some questions that thinking will yield confident conclusions. On many it will yield humility. That, I’ve come to believe, is the stance that actually follows from taking libertarian principles seriously, once you see that they were never powerful enough to do the work that ideological certainty requires of them.

While watching this just-released, kid-targeted film on May Day — a day which socialists since 1886 have celebrated as “International Workers Day” — I knew already from promotional material that it would “flip the script” on George Orwell’s 1945 satirical allegorical novella. The approach was soft-pedaled by the movie’s distributor, Angel Studios (founded by Mormons in 2014), a Utah-based firm specializing in faith-based, Christian-themed content. Perhaps Angel Studios hopes parents will take the revised theme on sheer faith.

This movie recklessly inverts Orwell’s original theme even beyond the public relations billing. Like his more famous, later work — the novel 1984 (which appeared in 1948) — Animal Farm is anti-authoritarian. It vilifies not capitalists, but communists. This movie effectively reverses Orwell’s moral framework and vilifies not communists (or even collectivists) but capitalists.

When the animals arrive on the farm, they first sense fun upon seeing signage that reads “Laughterhouse,” but they soon realize the full sign reads “Slaughterhouse.” The antagonist is not the cruel and corrupt Napoleon, but a greedy billionaire and a corporation intent on shutting down the farm. It is a clever but not-too-subtle hint — carried throughout the film — that these animals, like workers, will not merely be corralled but exploited. Filmmaker Andy Serkis appears to view this as a good and peaceful message for kids.

Not only is the original (anti-communist) theme of Animal Farm clear to anyone who bothers to read it, but Orwell himself was clearer still in his 1947 preface to the Ukrainian version, that “its various episodes are taken from the actual history of the Russian Revolution.” Orwell also knew, of course, that the 1917 revolt in Russia was not of workers against capitalists but of Bolsheviks and disgruntled (because unpaid) soldiers against the royalist-Czarist regime. Although Bolsheviks were inspired by Marxism and Marx was anti-capitalist, it didn’t follow that the Bolshevik Revolution was an overturning of capitalism. Russia in 1917 was more feudal-agrarian than it was capitalist-industrial.

Other accounts of Animal Farm are clear about its meaning. Per Britannica, it’s:

a political fable based on the events of Russia’s Bolshevik revolution of 1917 and the betrayal of the cause by Joseph Stalin. The book concerns a group of barnyard animals who overthrow and chase off their exploitative human masters and set up an egalitarian society of their own, based on the founding principle ‘All animals are equal.’ Eventually, the animals’ intelligent and power-loving leaders, the pigs, subvert the revolution. Concluding that ‘all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others,’ the pigs form a dictatorship even more oppressive and heartless than that of their former human masters.

In his essay for the Times of London in 2023 — “Animal Farm is Still Horribly Relevant Today” — A.N. Wilson described the novella as an “incomparable masterpiece” that still “resonates today” and “not just as a terrible indictment of left-wing idealism and Communist tyranny” — as it illustrates “exactly what Lenin, and then Stalin, did to the population of the USSR” at the beginning of the last century — but because like many people still today, the characters exhibit “a pathetic weakness to believe political mantras.” Again, it’s an obvious indictment of socialism, not capitalism.

Orwell (a lifelong Englishman, born Eric Arthur Blair in 1903) said he was apolitical in his youth, then saw poverty and became a democratic socialist. This committed him to being anti-fascist, but he was also candid enough to criticize non-democratic, oppressive forms of socialism. His mistake was to believe that mere voting could soften socialism’s blows. In the 1930s German voters elected the National Socialist German Workers Party (Nazis) and soon got years of tyranny. Conveniently, Orwell blamed that not on the democratic or socialist part of the mix but the nationalist part. In 1998 (and a few times thereafter), Venezuelan voters elected democratic socialists and before long, also got tyranny. They still suffer it. What would Orwell say about that? Probably something close to what’s now said by the Democratic Socialists of America: Venezuela isn’t “genuine” socialism. As New York City mayor and democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani has said, an ideal, “genuine” socialism remains the goal, such that America must “replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.” Orwell warned of the “excesses” of collectivism, but being socialist surely undermined his message. 

Returning to Orwell’s preface to the 1947 Ukrainian edition of Animal Farm, we learn that he did, in fact, initially envision the novella as a parable about the evils of capitalism. He recalls that the “details of the story did not come to me for some time, until one day (I was then living in a small village) I saw a little boy, perhaps ten years old, driving a huge cart-horse along a narrow path, whipping it whenever it tried to turn. It struck me that if only such animals became aware of their strength, we should have no power over them, and that men exploit animals in much the same way as the rich exploit the proletariat.” How then did Animal Farm become instead a parable not about capitalist “exploitation” but about socialism gone awry? As mentioned, Orwell says the novella’s episodes were taken from the Russian Revolution and its disastrous aftermath. “Up to 1930, I did not look upon myself as a Socialist,” he recounts, as he had “no clearly defined political views.” He says he “became pro-Socialist more out of disgust with the way the poorer section of the industrial workers were oppressed and neglected than out of any theoretical admiration for a planned society.”

In 1936, Orwell raced to Spain to fight in its civil war — against the fascist regime and on the side of Trotskyites, who opposed Stalin for his “impure” (brutal) form of socialism. Then Orwell heard about Stalin’s gruesome, murderous purges of top military officials in 1936-38. “To experience all this was a valuable object lesson,” he recalled (in the 1947 preface), for “it taught me how easily totalitarian propaganda can control the opinion of enlightened people in democratic countries. I saw innocent people being thrown into prison merely because they were suspected of unorthodoxy.” “I understood, more clearly than ever, the negative influence of the Soviet myth upon the Western Socialist movement.” Notice how he refused to critique socialism per se. He insisted that its authoritarian versions should not be counted as genuine versions. Socialists have made this unsubstantiated assertion repeatedly since 1917. For some odd reason, Orwell didn’t consider such brazen, defensive, apologetic whitewashing as part of what he labeled “totalitarian propaganda to control opinion.”

It may be said that Orwell’s two main books weren’t really warnings about the dangers of socialism but rather attempts to salvage its terrible reputation, which he somehow presumed was unearned. In the 1930s, per Orwell, “it was of the utmost importance to me that people in western Europe should see the Soviet regime for what it really was. Since 1930 I had seen little evidence that the U.S.S.R. was progressing towards anything that one could truly call Socialism. On the contrary, I was struck by clear signs of its transformation into a hierarchical society, in which the rulers have no more reason to give up their power than any other ruling class.” Nevertheless, he recalled, “even if I had the power, I would not wish to interfere in Soviet domestic affairs” and “would not condemn Stalin and his associates merely for their barbaric and undemocratic methods. It is quite possible that, even with the best intentions, they could not have acted otherwise under the conditions prevailing there.”

The above passage is quite an ugly admission by Orwell. He “would not condemn barbaric and undemocratic methods” — even as a supposed democratic socialist — nor would he condemn socialism as necessitating such methods, especially given Marx’s distinctive expectation that revolution would launch with a mass expropriation of private property and a “dictatorship of the proletariat.” These were two crucial aspects of the original idea of socialism and they were actually instituted by Lenin and Stalin — socialism by revolution and bullets, not evolution and ballots. Orwell insisted that “nothing has contributed so much to the corruption of the original idea of Socialism as the belief that Russia is a Socialist country and that every act of its rulers must be excused, if not imitated.” But Orwell did excuse those acts. He told us he “would not condemn barbaric and undemocratic” acts. 

It’s fair to conclude that Orwell’s self-admitted motivation for writing his two anti-authoritarian books in 1945 and 1948 was a worry that socialism wouldn’t advance in his native Britain, where he lived from 1928 onward, as long as Stalin’s Soviet Union was seen as the role model. Again, from the 1947 preface, we find him declaring that “for the past ten years (1938-47) I have been convinced that the destruction of the Soviet myth was essential if we wanted a revival of the Socialist movement.” What is the “Soviet myth”? That the “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics” (USSR) was real socialism. 

How does Andy Serkis, the producer of the new animated film, explain his desecration of the classic satire? In a recent episode of the Reason Interview, “What Orwell Understood About Tyranny,” libertarian host Nick Gillespie praises him and lightly questions but doesn’t criticize him for bizarrely transforming the bad guys from socialists into capitalists. Serkis says it’s an innocent “adaptation” of the original story and claims he got approval from the Orwell Estate. Serkis insists that his version’s theme isn’t different from the original novella but merely “broader,” as it’s about the “corrupting nature of power.” What does he mean by “power?” As is common among socialists — Orwell included — Serkis improperly conflates opposites: economic power (the power to produce) and political power (the power to coerce). In effect, Henry Ford and Joseph Stalin are both deemed dangerous because “powerful.” If you can so easily conflate opposites, you can also easily invert story plots and characters, switch the good guys and bad guys. Serkis does both. On his account, capitalism is no less “dangerous” than socialism. Why then prefer the latter over the former? Each is supposedly constrained by democracy, by a majority vote of whoever for whatever. Anything goes. In fact, history teaches that unlimited democracy, devoid of any real protection of genuine rights (especially property rights), degrades capitalism’s inherent safety, security, and prosperity, while it also enables the rise and spread of socialism. Of course, that’s the aim of “democratic socialists.” Democracy for them is a way to get socialism, not confine it. They know the cocktail is both possible and dangerous.

For those interested in accuracy and fidelity to the original source material of Animal Farm, the only visual alternatives to the current film are the British-American animated version of 1954 and the live-action film from 1999, using the puppetry of the late, great Jim Henson.

Watching liberal stars fall for every Fake News story about President Donald Trump is sad.

It’s also expected.

If you only get your news from The New York Times, CNN or The Washington Post, you’d think Trump colluded with Russia and is one step away from putting his opponents in the gulag.

Common sense says that after five-plus years of President Trump, you’d know nothing of the kind is heading our way. Nor are the worst of the worst conspiracy theories (like Whoopi Goldberg saying the president will separate interracial marriages) likely to happen.

Echoing a lie she told during the 2024 presidential election trying to scare people into voting for Kamala, Whoopi claims Trump and conservatives are trying to outlaw interracial marriages.
Yet more incendiary rhetoric that could incite yet more assassination attempts against the… pic.twitter.com/ph6K7TYeI5

— Nicholas Fondacaro (@NickFondacaro) November 10, 2025

But no. Stars like Robert De Niro, Mark Ruffalo and Mark Hamill keep warning about the End of Democracy under President Trump.

This A-list talent just joined that sad group. And it couldn’t be more shocking.

He spent decades delivering hard-nosed comedy that took no prisoners. He skewered everyone from Paris Hilton to Michael Jackson, and he slammed politicians across the ideological spectrum.

It’s his brand, and a well-deserved one.

Yet Trey Parker of “South Park” fame has succumbed to Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS). And, boy, does it show.

Last year, the brilliantly fair and balanced “South Park” took a hard-Left pivot. The show skewered President Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance and GOP cabinet members without mercy.

Week after week after week.

There’s nothing wrong with poking fun at the current political leaders. Heck, that’s the American way. Two things were different, though, in this “new” approach.

One, “South Park” didn’t previously attack President Trump nearly as much as their Hollywood peers. That proved refreshing, further separating the Comedy Central series from its competition.

What else could a satirist say about Orange Man Bad at this point, anyway?

Two, the newest “South Park” episodes didn’t hit both sides as they’ve done for years. The Left has given us endless material to mock of late, from Democrats rallying behind the worst of the worst illegal immigrants to insisting trans women should compete against biological women.

The show once mocked the latter.

What changed? Why did “South Park” abandon its “both sides” mantra? We just got our answer.

Parker spoke this week at a TV Academy awards gala where he picked up a trophy – ““What took you so f***ing long?” he joked about the honor.

He used his podium time to praise his “fearless” staff. They’re putting their lives on the line, literally, to fight Orange Man Bad.

“There’s always groups telling you what you can and can’t say; now that group has a military and so it is scarier. They have to be fearless.”

It’s no accident that “South Park” is getting awards now, as Parker referenced. Once an artist attacks Trump, the awards spigot opens. Just ask Stephen Colbert, who won his first Emmy trophy in a decade for “The Late Show” weeks after his July 2025 cancellation, seen by the Left as driven by Trump.

The timing wasn’t accidental.

Now, it’s “South Park’s” turn for Hollywood honors, and Parker couldn’t be giddier. And he and fellow “South Park” creator Matt Stone are leaning into the Hollywood adulation.

Trey Parker and Matt Stone brought the foreskin of Donald Trump’s penis from South Park to Jimmy Kimmel Live.

Parker: “We did a deepfake of the president, and it kind of got famous….

“This was actually it — this is how we did Donald Trump’s weener. For the show, we put it… pic.twitter.com/wfZEuKW4ab

— CONSEQUENCE (@consequence) May 19, 2026

The worst part?

Parker knows he and his colleagues have nothing to fear for mocking Trump. Nothing.

How do we know? The pop culture landscape teems with artists doing just that. No drone strikes yet!

Plus, Parker and Stone just got a $1 billion deal from Paramount, the company that allegedly “silenced” Stephen Colbert for his Trump jokes.

What dictator would allow such a thing?

Plus, the average Hollywood dweller isn’t brave enough to share a subversive thought on social media. Nor do they ever defy or question the industry’s hard-Left groupthink. Do you think they’re literally risking their lives for a comedy series?

It’s pure Victim Mentality Syndrome (VMS), a condition that’s pervasive in La La Land.

TDS can be cured. Just ask Michael Rapaport, who hammered Trump early and often until he expanded the kind of news he consumes and saw the world differently.

Let’s hope Parker follows that path. We miss the old, subversive “South Park.”

What’s your favorite “South Park” episode … and why?

The post This Trump Derangement Victim Is Saddest Case of All appeared first on Hollywood in Toto.