“They Will Kill You” sounds harsh, but the horror-comedy’s real target isn’t snowflake viewers.

It’s the rich.

Again.

You know, the people we see on Oscar night, endless red carpet galas and US Weekly spreads. No, it’s not just the oil barons and legal eagles making all the money.

A-list movie stars do quite well, thank you.

Yet Hollywood keeps force feeding us “eat the rich” tales, hoping we’ll revive that Occupy Wall Street vibe or perhaps turn on the Mogul in Chief?

Not so fast.

The critical and financial results have been mixed, at best. The standouts include 2019’s “Parasite” and 2022’s “The Menu,” tall tales that took the affluent to task without sacrificing creativity.

“The Menu” grossed a respectable $38 million stateside and told a wildly original tale brimming with danger and mystery. The Oscar-winning “Parasite” scored $53 million at US theaters, but it had tremendous awards season publicity at its back.

Lately, we’re growing bored of the genre. The 2023 film “Saltburn” had a buzzy cast, including Jacob Elordi and Barry Keoghan, but it still netted just $11 million stateside. The celebrated 2022 satire “Triangle of Sadness” laid on the “eat the rich” motifs with glee.

And, once again, the U.S. film receipts proved paltry – $4.6 million (versus $21 million internationally)

More recent “eat the rich” films have fared just as poorly.

The 2025 misfire “Opus” followed a wealthy, reclusive singer (John Malkovich) who uses his fame to bend the wills of everyone around him. It skewers celebrityhood, wealth and journalistic ethics (or lack thereof). Once again, audiences stayed away (an anemic $2 million bounty).

“Death of a Unicorn,” a genre mashup featuring two prime players – Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega – crashed last year with a $12 million haul. The story found the stars fighting a billionaire eager to leverage unicorn blood for profit.

The films in question pulled nary a punch against their hoity-toity targets. My, aren’t those uber-rich types the worst? And we just got two more of ’em.

The 2019 surprise “Ready or Not,” featuring a bride getting to know her wealthy in-laws, made $28 million in 2019. The sequel, “Ready or Not 2: Here I Come,” couldn’t build on that film’s goodwill and will be lucky to match that total in a more horror-friendly landscape.

Those films imagine a society of Satan-worshipping elites eager to conquer the world.

Need even more jabs at the rich and wealthy? Try “They Will Kill You,” which opened against little new competition on Friday. The film is limping to a $5 million haul on nearly 2,800 screens.

The story? A young woman (Zazie Beetz) applies to be a housekeeper at a swanky building only to run into a Satanic cult oozing with cash and cruelty.

The Hollywood Reporter shares a line uttered at the very end of the film by a survivor of the melee … “Rich people.”

Rich people, indeed, in an industry where an actor fresh off his Oscar win will demand a bigger payday, and movies like “The Adventures of Cliff Booth” strain under the salaries of its high-profile talent.

We used to admire rich and glamorous movie stars. Now, they often tell tales meant to mock the 1 percent. Can somebody get them a mirror, stat?

Someone should make a movie about those Hollywood-sized egos cashing huge paychecks. Maybe that would bring people back to theaters.

The post Are Audiences Sick of ‘Eat the Rich’ Movies? appeared first on Hollywood in Toto.

“I hunted for, and stole, a source of fire … and it has shown itself to be mortals’ great resource and their teacher of every skill.”

So says Prometheus, the Titan of Greek mythology, in Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound, explaining why he suffers in chains. For giving fire to mankind, he was condemned to eternal torment, bound to a rock while an eagle fed upon him each day. Fire was not merely warmth. It was power, independence, production, protection, and the first great escape from literal and figurative darkness. The human story began to change not when mankind learned restraint, but when it learned mastery. Civilization began not with renunciation, but with defiance.

Atop this civilization rests an odd, yet revealing modern ritual: Earth Hour. Today, Saturday, March 28, 2026, at 8:30 p.m. local time, people around the world will again be asked to switch off their non-essential lights for one hour. Organized by the World Wildlife Fund, or WWF, which was founded in 1961, Earth Hour is meant to dramatize concern for nature and the conservation of the planet’s resources. The campaign now marks 20 years and includes landmarks such as Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro, the Sydney Opera House in Sydney, and the Empire State Building in New York City.

Originally a grassroots movement, Earth Hour now presents itself as “a symbol of hope for nature and climate.” Lofty appeals to help nature and wildlife recover, reduce deforestation, and protect future generations now accompany the annual ritual of switching off the lights on an otherwise unremarkable Saturday in March. Yet even on its own terms, the story is less straightforward than the rhetoric suggests. As Song et al. wrote in a 2018 Nature study, “contrary to the prevailing view that forest area has declined globally—tree cover has increased by 2.24 million km2 (+7.1% relative to the 1982 level).”

The point is not that every environmental problem has vanished, but that global improvement does not always depend on a mass movement of symbolic austerity. Earth Hour’s gesture remains simple enough: dim the world briefly to express concern for the planet. But that symbolism points, perhaps unintentionally, to a deeper truth. Turning the lights off is easy. The true achievement of civilization was learning how to turn them on in the first place. If future generations are to inherit a better world, they will need more than rituals of restraint. They will need the abundance, safety, and human progress that only widespread access to energy can provide.

That is where rugged individualism shines most brightly in history. Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla were not men of managed consensus, however they both belonged to the same civilizational current: the transformation of electricity from scientific possibility into mass reality. Their fierce competition in the 19th century sparked invention after invention. Edison’s incandescent lamp patent, US Patent No. 223,898, was issued on January 27, 1880; two years later, his Pearl Street Station began selling electricity in lower Manhattan. Tesla’s great leap came in 1888, when George Westinghouse purchased the rights to his polyphase alternating-current system, helping launch the battle of the currents and laying the groundwork for long-distance power transmission. 

The true genius of capitalism was not merely generating power, but to conduct it outward until light, warmth, and safety ceased to be luxuries for the few and became ordinary facts of life for the many. More than a century later, we still live inside the world that this rivalry charged into existence.

Electricity did not merely give cities more light. It gave them more order. In New York City, added street lighting has been associated with significant reductions in nighttime crime, including assaults, homicides, and weapons offenses. It also gave them greater protection from the elements. The Health Department reports that more than 500 New Yorkers die prematurely each year because of hot weather, with lack of air conditioning being the clearest risk factor for heat-stress death. Furthermore, electricity made cities more productive, not less. Research on US manufacturing shows that electrification raised labor productivity by reorganizing production around more efficient machinery and factory layouts. Light, warmth, safety, and output, these were the real gifts of electrification.

It is precisely this history that makes today’s sneers at rugged individualism sound so hollow, especially in New York City. For example, in his inaugural address on January 1, 2026, Mayor Zohran Mamdani promised to replace “the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.” But in the very city where Edison’s Pearl Street Station began selling electricity in 1882, that line reverses cause and effect. After a winter that brought one of New York City’s longest freezing stretches since 1963, the real source of warmth was not collectivist poetry, but the electric infrastructure that competition, capital, and invention made possible. If collectivism had accomplished even half of what competition did, New Yorkers might still be warming themselves by candlelight while calling it moral progress. 

For one hour each year, Earth Hour asks the world to rehearse darkness. But from Prometheus onward, the human story has been one of escaping it. Fire, then electricity, enlarged human freedom. The achievement worth honoring is not symbolic dimness, but the civilizational brilliance that made light ordinary.

If the avatar of the alt-right movement was Pepe the Frog, its equivalent for today's far-right youths is a corpulent cartoon toad called Groyper. That character has become so associated with the antisemitic influencer Nick Fuentes and his legions of fanboys that its name now does double duty as a label for their online community.

In broad strokes, Groypers are aggrieved Gen Z men who spend too much time on the internet. Some self-identify as incels, short for involuntary celibates—those who despair of ever receiving the sexual attentions of a woman. Many claim the mantle of traditional Christianity, though without the imprimatur of any church.

Following their leader's example, Groypers generally adopt an ironic posture and winking delivery intended to make onlookers feel unsure whether to be horrified by their unabashed racism and misogyny or to laugh it all off as performance art. Since transgressiveness is their main source of in-group social capital, a status competition has emerged to see who can be most inflammatory and offensive. Thus Fuentes has gleefully described Adolf Hitler as "really fucking cool" and once declared with a grin that "a lot of women want to be raped….There's like a lot of women who really want a guy to beat the shit out of them, but also, they have to pretend that they don't."

In 2019, Fuentes launched what he called the Groyper War, dispatching his followers to attend Turning Point USA events and use the question-and-answer sessions to lambast the group's celebrity founder, Charlie Kirk, for supporting Israel, tolerating homosexuality, and otherwise supposedly selling out conservatism. Before Kirk's assassination, Fuentes frequently mocked him and boasted of having "impregnated" Turning Point with Fuentes' ideas.

The influence and relevance of Groyperism to right-wing politics is increasingly hard to deny. "When I began my career in 2017, I was considered radioactive in the American Right for my White Identitarian, race realist, 'Jewish aware,' counter-Zionist, authoritarian, traditional Catholic views," Fuentes wrote in 2023. Six years later, "on almost every count, our previously radioactive views are pounding on the door of the political mainstream."

In October 2025, the former Fox News star Tucker Carlson posted a chummy two-hour conversation with Fuentes to his social media channels. Kevin Roberts, president of the conservative Heritage Foundation, defended the interview, sparking a dramatic revolt among the think tank's donors and staff.

Fuentes responded with a video celebrating the fracas as evidence of the "ascendancy" of Groyperism. "I get recognized everywhere I go, and it's all young guys high-fiving me, [saying] 'Keep talking about the Jews!'" he said. "Infiltration is not a pipe dream. It's not talk. It's happening. We did it."

The post What Exactly Is a Groyper? appeared first on Reason.com.

“Governments controlling prices? It has long been unthinkable – but may now be inevitable” is the headline of an article by Andy Beckett in the Guardian.

He writes,

Politicians are not supposed to meddle with prices. Even though much of politics is about whether voters can afford things – especially in an era of recurring inflationary shocks – ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union’s planned economy four decades ago, the orthodoxy across much of the world has been that only markets should decide what things cost.

As the hugely influential Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek argued, in a complex modern society, information is too dispersed among potential sellers and buyers of goods or services for government to make informed and correct decisions about the prices of those goods. Hence, his disciples say, the inefficiency of state-run economies, from post-colonial Africa to the eastern bloc.

Yet as the 21st century has gone on, and market economies have proved ever less able to provide essentials such as energy and housing at an affordable cost – while also generating their own huge inefficiencies, such as soaring salaries for failing executives, and privatised utilities that don’t provide a functional service – so interest in the state regulating and even setting prices has started to grow again. Sudden bursts of inflation from wars, the pandemic and agriculture’s disruption by the climate crisis have prompted governments to make economic interventions that would until recently have been considered hopelessly old-fashioned, unnatural and even immoral. Even the Tories, one of the most stubbornly pro-market parties in the world, introduced the energy price cap, having previously called this Labour policy “Marxist”.

Hey, at least he’s heard of Hayek, and he is not wrong to say that the Tories introducing the energy price cap was a betrayal of their previous beliefs. Same goes for Michael Gove’s abolition of “no fault” evictions. I had thought better of Gove. I note that neither of these anti-free market moves did much to help the Conservatives at the subsequent election. Yet Mr Beckett is also right to say when left wing governments introduce price controls and rent freezes they are almost always immensely popular. It is not really a paradox. Human beings are good at spotting opportunism and hypocrisy on the part of other humans, but they are proverbially bad at weighing short term pleasure against long term harm.

The suffering of Gaza, the death and destruction, is undeniable. You can make a legitimate criticism of Israel’s tactics in the conduct of the war. Many Jews around the world make exactly those critiques.

But you cannot engage in such criticism legitimately if you do not also condemn the terrorism of October 7. You cannot pretend that Israel does not face a substantial terrorist threat from Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, the Iranian regime, and other groups that do not recognize Israel’s right to exist.

You cannot complain about the restrictions on goods and material going in and out of Gaza unless you also reference the reasons for the restrictions: the fear in Israel that such materials will be used for the purpose of building a terrorist infrastructure, which is precisely what nearly 300 miles of tunnels underneath Gaza represent.

– Tony Blair, who is not someone often quoted favourably in this particular parish (£)

Tucker Carlson did not arrive at "this is Israel's war" through serious engagement with American foreign policy. He arrived there because the audience that would reward him for saying it became larger than the audience that would punish him. He read the room. He adjusted the message.