Category: Breitbart
Jennifer Lawrence admits she can’t separate her politics from movies: ‘That’s how I’m digesting the world’
Actress Jennifer Lawrence says her creativity and politics are inherently intertwined.
Lawrence revealed her thoughts during a discussion with fellow Oscar-winning actor Leonardo DiCaprio.
‘Maybe she didn’t know that I was on an Ambien.’
Brain trust
Lawrence, 35, and DiCaprio, 51, appeared on Variety’s “Actors on Actors” segment, with the duo discussing their pasts as child actors, upcoming films, and briefly, politics as it pertains to their art.
DiCaprio was discussing his 2025 political film, “One Battle After Another,” when Lawrence asked about bringing politics into the movie industry.
“I think that the creative part of my brain and the political part of my brain are intrinsically linked,” Lawrence prefaced. “Like, I keep finding, like, every time I come up with, like, a movie or, like, it’s more often than not political.”
“I think it’s ’cause that’s how I’m, like, digesting the world. Are you like that?” she asked DiCaprio.
“No,” DiCaprio plainly replied.
Lawrence attempted to move on to another question, but the “Titanic” star was eager to explain why.
RELATED: Handmaid’s fail: Hillary stumps for Jennifer Lawrence’s new pro-abortion documentary
Photo by Taylor Hill/FilmMagic
Stating that his latest film feels “very topical,” DiCaprio said it is “very difficult to say something about the world we live in” on film.
“It has to have an element of irony or comedy to it; otherwise people — they’re not allowed in. … And it feels like, ‘Oh, I’m watching these people’s vocation and, you know, do I relate to them?'” he explained.
DiCaprio tacked on, “There’s all those political films of the ’70s: ‘The Parallax View,’ ‘Three Days of the Condor,’ ‘All the President’s Men.’ And they were taken very seriously. But nowadays, it feels like there’s such polarity and such extremism that if you pick a side, you’re alienating.”
Pillow talk
Later in the interview, Lawrence had more strange anecdotes that seemed to paralyze the veteran actor. She soon brought up the fact that both she and DiCaprio are “obsessive about sleep” when filming a movie, before reciting some of her on-set drug follies.
DiCaprio seemingly played along, smiling and laughing at times, but clearly had nothing to add.
“I took an Adderall instead of a sleeping pill,” Lawrence said, as DiCaprio smirked. “And then I didn’t sleep all night, and I was taking hot showers, panicking, because I am not somebody who can function without sleep. … I also once took an Ambien in the morning, thinking it was something else,” she continued.
“Wow. Those are key screwups,” the leading man laughed in response.
“Elizabeth Banks got really annoyed with me,” Lawrence said about her Ambien usage on the set of “Hunger Games.”
She continued, “Maybe she didn’t know that I was on an Ambien.”
DiCaprio simply put his head down and laughed, without responding.
RELATED: Jennifer Lawrence claims no women were action movie stars before her
Sigourney who?
Lawrence has made interesting claims during sit-downs on the same program before, including in December 2022 when she claimed she was the first female lead of an action movie.
Also on Variety’s “Actors on Actors,” Lawrence told Viola Davis:
“I remember when I was doing ‘Hunger Games,’ nobody had ever put a woman in the lead of an action movie because it wouldn’t work. We were told, girls and boys can both identify with a male lead, but boys cannot identify with a female lead.”
Sigourney Weaver (“Alien”), Uma Thurman (“Kill Bill”), and Milla Jovovich (countless “Resident Evil” films) could not be reached for comment.
Down the tubes: Flailing Oscars leaving ABC, moving online
And now … your Oscars host … Mr. Beast!
The Academy Awards, facing diminished ratings and cultural clout, is moving to YouTube starting in 2029. Yes, ABC didn’t fight hard enough to keep the once-mighty telecast on its airwaves, paving the door for the Google giant to take over.
If Marvel really wants to bring back disenchanted fans, just say Brie Larson’s Captain Marvel got lost in a black hole and can’t make the sequel.
And as one internet wag cheekily put it, calls to “smash that ‘like’ button” may blend with the boilerplate political speeches sooner than later.
It’s a sign of the times, of course, on two fronts. YouTube is a major part of the digital landscape, and ABC understands the Oscars’ cache isn’t what it used to be.
The funniest part? A Variety scribe cheered the news, hoping for an even longer Oscars telecast.
“The Oscars on YouTube could bring an unlimited runtime, unfiltered hosts, and the show we’ve always wanted” reads the hysterical headline.
Imagine enduring a three-and-a-half-hour celebrity lovefest and thinking, “More, please!”
Boulevard of memes
Hollywood could really use some good news at this point. Enter a spanking new study that shares a surprising take on Gen Z. Turns out the youthful demographic’s movie theater attendance climbed by 25% over the past year.
Video game-inspired films like “Five Nights at Freddy’s 2” and “A Minecraft Movie” certainly helped, but the image of phone-obsessed teens eschewing theaters for their comfy couches may come with a caveat.
Speak to us directly, and we’ll line up to see what you have to offer. Imagine the lines around the block to see “6-7: The Movie” …
‘Peanuts’ allergy
Coming soon: a reimagined take on the Red Baron where he’s the hero and that dastardly Snoopy is the heel.
Sound crazy? Well we just saw a movie greenlit based on the villainous Gaston character from “Beauty and the Beast.”
“Wicked: For Good,” which makes the Wicked Witch of the West our unfairly maligned heroine, is crushing the box office.
And another reimagined classic spun from “Cinderella” will make those nasty stepsisters the heroes. It’s called “Steps.” Really.
So why wouldn’t Snoopy’s archnemesis ever get a cinematic closeup? It feels inevitable, especially after Sony purchased the rights to the “Peanuts” franchise for a cool $457 million.
Rats.
Who will stop team Sony from following this corrosive trend? And should it draw a crowd, expect more re-imaginings, like Brad Pitt playing a spiffed-up Pig Pen and Lucy joining the NFL …
RELATED: ‘The Case for Miracles’: A stirring road trip into the heart of faith
Fathom Entertainment
Avengers: Payday
The MCU is in full course-correction mode. But is it too late?
The mega franchise has stumbled in recent years following the two-part “Avengers” saga against Thanos. That coaxed Disney suits to call in reinforcements — AKA Robert Downey Jr.
But wait? The charismatic star’s alter ego, Iron Man, died in “Avengers: Endgame.” Disney craved his sweet, sweet name recognition so badly it brought him back for next year’s “Avengers: Doomsday.”
Except this time, he’ll play the villainous Victor von Doom.
If that decision didn’t reek of flop sweat, the latest MCU news sure does. Chris Evans, who memorably played Captain America in nine MCU films, was given a poetic send-off in “Endgame.” The actor hung up his shield, eager to tackle roles where he doesn’t squeeze into unforgiving leotards.
Except he didn’t really go away. He’s back, according to the just-released “Avengers: Doomsday” teaser trailer. (Imagine the zeroes on the paycheck written to Mr. Evans.)
If Marvel really wants to bring back disenchanted fans, just say Brie Larson’s Captain Marvel got lost in a black hole and can’t make the sequel …
Kamala klarity
Kamala Harris may have been the most qualified person ever to run for the White House. Just ask her.
Yet the former vice president is still struggling to answer softball questions. During the campaign, she famously bungled a layup from Sunny Hostin of “The View.”
“How will you be different than President Biden?” Swiiiiiing and a miss.
This week, far-left “comedian” Jimmy Kimmel teed up another question for the ex-veep to swat out of the studio. Why didn’t the Biden-Harris administration release the Epstein files?
“To give you an answer that will not satisfy your curiosity, I will tell you, we, perhaps to our damage, but we strongly and rightly believed that there should be an absolute separation between what we wanted as an administration and what the Department of Justice did. We absolutely adhered to that, and it was right to do that,” Harris told Kimmel.
“The Justice Department would make its decisions independent of any political or personal vendetta or concern that we may have, and that’s the way it worked.”
Harris is rested and ready for the 2028 presidential campaign, no doubt.
Socialism didn’t win New York. Marketing did.
I oppose Zohran Mamdani’s Democratic Socialist agenda. But if Republicans are serious about winning elections next year and in 2028, they need to take a hard, unsentimental look at how he just won one of the most consequential mayoral races in the country.
This was not an ideological earthquake. New York did not suddenly “discover” socialism. What happened was a marketing and mobilization breakthrough. Mamdani’s campaign understood attention, simplicity, participation, and distribution better than anyone else in the race.
Republicans often confuse seriousness with stiffness. Mamdani showed that message discipline does not require lifelessness.
Joe Perello, the city of New York’s first chief marketing officer, noted in PRWeek after Mamdani’s victory that the campaign did more than communicate a message. It built an engine that converted online engagement into real-world turnout.
“For marketers and strategists alike, the implications are clear,” Perello wrote. “Growth hacking, iterative testing, and data-driven amplification can convert digital sentiment into real-world behavior. In Mamdani’s case, that meant converting hearts, clicks, and hashtags into ballots.”
Here is the part many on the right do not want to hear: Mamdani did not spend his time lecturing working-class voters about the virtues of socialism or defending failed economic theory. He focused on immediate, kitchen-table concerns and paired them with simple, slogan-ready answers.
Is halal food expensive? Make it cheaper. Struggling to get to work? Free buses. Grocery bills too high? Government-run grocery stores.
He took Bernie Sanders’ 2016-era talking points and filtered them through a polished, Obama-style optimism that voting-age New Yorkers were willing to engage with.
Most voters do not have the time — or patience — to think through how these promises would actually work. They just want to hear that someone intends to make their lives easier.
As Citizens Alliance CEO Cliff Maloney observed during Mamdani’s surge in the polls, the public’s lack of understanding about how government operates — and how socialism consistently fails — created the political environment Mamdani exploited. He did not create that environment. He mastered it.
Republicans’ digital blind spot
For years, Republican campaigns have treated digital media as messaging rather than infrastructure. Social platforms are used as megaphones for press releases, fundraising tools, or dumping grounds for cable-news clips. The underlying assumption is that persuasion happens elsewhere — on TV, at rallies, through mailers — and that digital simply amplifies those efforts.
Mamdani reversed that logic. Social media was not an accessory to his campaign. It was the campaign.
His approach drew praise even from outlets like the Guardian, where journalist Adam Gabbatt noted that Mamdani “has won social media with clips that are always fun — and resolutely on-message.”
His team treated TikTok and Instagram like serious growth channels. Short videos were not vanity content; they were experiments. Different neighborhoods, different faces, different tones, different pacing. What held attention? What sparked comments? What traveled across boroughs? Each post generated data, and each data point informed the next iteration.
This was politics run as a full-funnel acquisition strategy. Awareness led to engagement. Engagement led to identification. Identification led to turnout. Republicans can mock the aesthetics, but the mechanics work.
Energy is a signal
One of the most underrated elements of Mamdani’s campaign was how it looked. He was constantly in motion — walking Manhattan, running a marathon, bouncing between boroughs. Rarely behind a lectern. Rarely static. Always visible.
That energy communicated youth, optimism, and confidence in the same way John F. Kennedy outperformed Richard Nixon on television in 1960. A similar contrast appeared in 2024, when Donald Trump’s unscripted, high-visibility media strategy stood in sharp contrast to Joe Biden’s and Kamala Harris’ tightly controlled appearances.
The predictable response on the right is dismissal. ‘That’s just TikTok nonsense.’ ‘Our voters aren’t like that.’ Those excuses are comforting — and dangerously wrong.
In an age of low trust and low information, energy reads as competence. Movement suggests effort. Visibility substitutes for familiarity. Mamdani’s omnipresence created the impression — fair or not — that he was accessible and engaged with everyday life.
Republicans often confuse seriousness with stiffness. Mamdani showed that message discipline does not require lifelessness.
RELATED: When Bernie Sanders and I agree on AI, America had better pay attention
Photo by ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images
From supporters to fans
The most uncomfortable lesson for traditional campaigns is that Mamdani did not just mobilize voters. He activated fandom.
Much of the campaign content that flooded social media did not come from official accounts. It came from supporters remixing clips, creating fan art, cutting moments to music, and sharing them within their own networks. The campaign made Mamdani easy to clip, easy to celebrate, and then got out of the way.
Wired magazine described it as a rare case of participatory political culture usually reserved for celebrities.
This matters because peer-to-peer persuasion scales faster and carries more credibility than anything a campaign can manufacture. Fan-made content travels further, feels more authentic, and costs nothing. Republicans, by contrast, tend to over-police their messaging, choking off organic enthusiasm in the name of control.
Younger voters understand fandom instinctively. They grew up online. Mamdani did not lecture them about politics; he gave them something to belong to.
The wrong reaction
The predictable response on the right is dismissal. “That only works for Democrats.” “That’s just TikTok nonsense.” “Our voters aren’t like that.”
Those excuses are comforting — and dangerously wrong.
Trump understood this dynamic in 2024 when his campaign was largely shut out of legacy media. Figures like Charlie Kirk reached millions of Gen Z voters by blending serious political content with the humor and energy of youth activism.
Algorithms do not have ideologies. Participation is not a left-wing monopoly. Visibility, simplicity, and community are not progressive inventions. In a low-information, high-attention environment, the side that understands distribution wins.
The real danger is not Mamdani’s policies alone. It is a Republican Party that keeps confusing being correct with being effective.
RELATED: How anti-fascism became the West’s civil religion
Blaze Media Illustration
What Republicans should learn — now
First, treat digital as organizing, not advertising. Stop thinking in posts and start thinking in systems. How does attention become action?
Second, simplicity wins. Republicans often pride themselves on being right — and then lose because they are incomprehensible. Clarity scales. Long explanations do not.
Third, loosen control. Let supporters remix, clip, and share. Reach matters more than perfect phrasing.
Finally, build communities, not just campaigns. Email lists decay. Ad budgets run out. Communities endure.
The bottom line
I do not agree with Zohran Mamdani’s politics, and I do not want his policies implemented anywhere. But ignoring how he won would be malpractice.
He demonstrated how power is built today — not through party machinery or television dominance, but through attention, participation, and relentless simplicity. Republicans can learn from that reality, or they can keep losing to it.
Disagree with his ideology. But study his marketing. Ignore the lesson at your own risk.
Suspect in deadly Brown University shooting and fatal shooting of MIT professor found dead of self-inflicted gunshot wound
The suspect in the fatal shootings at Brown University last weekend and of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor just days later was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound Thursday night in Salem, New Hampshire, officials said.
The body of Claudio Neves Valente, 48 — a former Brown student and a Portuguese national — was found in a storage facility, WCVB-TV reported.
‘We don’t know why now, why Brown, why these students, and why this classroom.’
Earlier Thursday multiple reports indicated a person of interest had been identified in the Brown shooting, which took the lives of two students and wounded nine others Saturday at the Ivy League school in Providence, Rhode Island. Authorities also were investigating possible ties between the Brown shooting and the fatal shooting Monday of MIT professor Nuno Loureiro at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts.
Providence police released several images and videos of a person of interest in the days following the deadly Brown shooting with no apparent luck.
RELATED: Person of interest ID’d in deadly Brown U. shooting; warrant issued: Multiple reports
Image source: Providence (R.I.) Police
But police told WCVB a witness provided investigators with a key tip: He saw someone who looked like the person of interest with a Nissan sedan displaying Florida plates.
That bit of information led Providence police to dive into a network of more than 70 street cameras operated around the city by surveillance company Flock Safety, the station said, adding that those cameras track license plates and other vehicle details.
Providence officials said the suspect then placed a Maine license plate over the rental car’s plate to help conceal his identity after he left Rhode Island for Massachusetts, WCVB reported.
The station said in a separate story that surveillance video from MIT professor Loureiro’s Brookline neighborhood allegedly shows the gunman there days before the deadly shooting, according to Leah B. Foley, United States Attorney for the District of Massachusetts.
Investigators said video from inside Loureiro’s apartment shows Neves Valente wearing a specific set of clothes before shooting the professor in the lobby Monday, WCVB reported.
A neighbor said in a WBZ-TV video report that the fatal shooting of Loureiro was a “surprise … and a shooting in a state where it’s so hard to even have a gun?” The neighbor also said fellow neighbors noted a nearby car was “parked in the wrong direction” and “seemed to be waiting.”
Hours after the Loureiro shooting, Foley said surveillance video from a storage unit facility in Salem, New Hampshire, shows the gunman wearing the same clothes seen on the Brookline cameras, the station added. Neves Valente was found dead inside the storage facility Thursday night.
Brown University President Christina Paxson said Neves Valente was enrolled at the college from the fall of 2000 to the spring of 2001, the station said, adding that he was admitted to the graduate school to study physics beginning in September 2000. Paxson said he had “no current affiliation with the university,” WCVB reported.
Neves Valente had studied at Brown on a student visa and obtained legal permanent residence status in September 2017, the station said, adding that his last known residence was in Miami.
Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha told WCVB there are “a lot of unknowns” in regard to motive: “We don’t know why now, why Brown, why these students, and why this classroom.”
Foley said Neves Valente and Loureiro were former classmates at an academic program in Portugal between 1995 and 2000, the station noted.
Loureiro graduated in 2000 from the physics program at Instituto Superior Técnico, Portugal’s premier engineering school, WCVB reported, citing his MIT faculty page.
Neves Valente in 2000 was let go from a position at the Lisbon university, the station said, citing an archive of a termination notice from the school’s then-president in February 2000.
More from WCVB:
Loureiro, 47, who was married, joined MIT in 2016 and was named last year to lead the school’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, where he worked to advance clean energy technology and other research. The center, one of MIT’s largest labs, had more than 250 people working across seven buildings when he took the helm. He was a professor of physics and nuclear science and engineering.
Prior to the discovery of Neves Valente’s body, police in Providence said the DNA of the Brown University suspected shooter had been gathered, and images and video of the person of interest matched eyewitness descriptions.
A person of interest was initially detained last weekend before law enforcement determined they had the wrong individual.
The Brown University students who were killed and wounded Saturday were studying for a final in a first-floor classroom in an older section of the engineering building when the shooter walked in and opened fire, WCVB said.
Sophomore Ella Cook, 19, and freshman Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, 18, were killed in the shooting, the station said.
Cook, whose funeral is Monday, was active in her Alabama church and served as vice president of the Brown College Republicans, WCVB said, adding that Umurzokov’s family immigrated to the U.S. from Uzbekistan when he was a child and that he wanted to be a doctor.
The station added in regard to the wounded students, six were in stable condition Thursday, and the other three had been discharged.
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‘I’ll get the heat’: Milwaukee judge is now a convicted felon after violent illegal alien dodged ICE from her courtroom
Milwaukee County Judge Hannah Dugan tried her best to avoid consequence for her role in Eduardo Flores-Ruiz — an illegal alien from Mexico who later pled no contest to one count of battery and guilty to re-entering the U.S. — briefly evading U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Her best was evidently not good enough.
Dugan, relieved of her duties as a judge in April by the Supreme Court of Wisconsin, was found guilty on Thursday of obstructing federal agents — a felony. The jury did not, however, find Dugan guilty of the lesser misdemeanor charge of concealing a fugitive from justice.
‘Dugan’s actions to obstruct this violent criminal’s arrest take “activist judge” to a whole new meaning.’
“The defendant is certainly not evil nor is she a martyr for some greater cause,” Brad Schimel, the interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Wisconsin, told reporters after Dugan learned her fate. “We must all accept the verdict peacefully.”
Schimel emphasized that “experience and common sense as well as the evidence presented in this case” demonstrate that the safest place to execute an arrest warrant is within a public area of a courthouse that has security screening — and that the 66-year-old judge’s actions endangered multiple people.
“The defendant’s actions provided an opportunity for a wanted subject to flee outside that safe courthouse environment, which led to a dangerous foot chase through automobile traffic and eventually to an agent taking the subject to the ground, which is always hazardous for both the officer and the suspect,” said Schimel. “There was certainly potential for many other dangers as well.”
Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images
ICE agents accompanied by both FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration agents traveled to the Milwaukee County Courthouse on April 18, 2025, to arrest Flores-Ruiz, aware that the previously deported Mexican national was scheduled to attend a pre-trial hearing overseen by Dugan.
Upon learning of ICE’s presence from an attorney, the now-felonious judge “became visibly angry, commented that the situation was ‘absurd,’ left the bench, and entered chambers” while Flores-Ruiz was seated in the gallery of the courtroom, according to the original FBI charging document.
The indictment claimed that Dugan proceeded to commit several affirmative acts to aid the illegal alien in evading arrest, including:
- confronting members of the ICE task force and falsely telling them they needed a judicial warrant to effectuate the arrest;
- directing the federal agents to go to the chief judge’s office after she learned they had the required administrative warrant for Flores-Ruiz’s arrest;
- dealing with Flores-Ruiz’s criminal case off the record while the ICE task force was in the chief judge’s office;
- directing the illegal alien and his counsel to flee the courtroom via a non-public jury door; and
- advising the Mexican’s counsel that he could appear remotely for his next court date.
The judge’s actions were observed by multiple witnesses and captured on film.
With Dugan’s help, the Mexican national ran out of the building. Federal agents were, however, able to catch up with him.
Flores-Ruiz was ultimately deported on Nov. 13.
Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, noted at the time, “Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, a previously removed illegal alien, has a laundry list of violent criminal charges, including strangulation and suffocation, battery, and domestic abuse. Judge Hannah Dugan’s actions to obstruct this violent criminal’s arrest take ‘activist judge’ to a whole new meaning.”
In the lead-up to the trial, Dugan’s lawyers tried desperately to get her case dismissed, citing the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v. United States and claiming that the radical judge was immune from criminal prosecution for judicial acts, that her prosecution violates the limits of federal power under the 10th Amendment, and that her indictment should be dismissed under the canon of constitutional avoidance.
Such efforts proved fruitless.
The jury saw and heard plenty of damning evidence during the trial that began on Monday.
They heard, for instance, an audio recording where Dugan told a court reporter that Flores-Ruiz could escape through a side door, reported the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Although Dugan’s court reporter volunteered to walk the illegal alien out, Dugan said she instead would do it: “I’ll get the heat.”
The jury also heard from numerous witnesses, including Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Kristela Cervera, who testified, “Judges should not be helping defendants evade arrest.”
Cervera was the individual who escorted the federal agents to Chief Judge Carl Ashley’s office.
For her felony conviction, Dugan could face up to five years in prison and a maximum fine of $250,000.
The disgraced judge’s attorney, Steve Biskupic, indicated Dugan’s team will file a motion with the Clinton-appointed federal judge overseeing the case, U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman, asking to set aside the conviction.
“The case is a long way from over,” said Biskupic.
While Dugan has been on administrative leave for several months, the New York Times indicated she has continued to collect her $174,000 salary.
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COOLING FAST: Inflation Comes in Below Expectations, ‘Another Step in the Right Direction’ [WATCH]
![COOLING FAST: Inflation Comes in Below Expectations, ‘Another Step in the Right Direction’ [WATCH]](https://hannity.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/GettyImages-2234916774-300x200.jpg "President Trump Departs White House For New York")
Inflation blinked first.
Brown University Shooter Reportedly Found Dead From Self-Inflicted Gunshot Wound
Officials have not yet released the suspect’s identity
