It all started with a tabloid leak. A Daily Mail article dropped a scoop from No Time to Die: James Bond is retired in Jamaica, so MI6 assigns the vacant 007 number to a new agent, played by Lynch.
The leak was actually 100% accurate to the plot. But accuracy doesn't buy a third vacation home for clickbait grifters.
Naturally, engagement-starved blogs and culture-war YouTube channels intentionally stripped away all context. "Lashana Lynch is the new 007" instantly mutated into "They are replacing James Bond with a Black woman!"
It became one of the earliest, most toxic templates for the modern "anti-woke" entertainment grift. Media literacy dropped to zero as people completely ignored the glaringly obvious distinction between a character's actual name (James Bond) and a corporate employee ID number (007).
To make matters worse, the pandemic hit right after, delaying the movie for a year and a half. That created a massive content vacuum. With no movie in theaters to prove them wrong, the rage-bait ecosystem spent nearly two years feeding people pure fiction just to farm views and manufacture outrage.
Then the movie finally came out in 2021, and the entire narrative evaporated in five minutes.
Daniel Craig was still very much the star, Lynch’s character Nomi was a great foil who earned her spot, and she literally asks M to give the 007 number back to Bond for the finale. The actual film completely contradicted the doom-and-gloom slop people had been fed for 24 months.
It’s a textbook reminder of how the outrage machine functions: invent a fake scenario, milk it for millions of views, and then quietly move on to the next target when reality catches up.
Stranger Things S5 really amplifying the widening gap between which young cast members have developed into good actors and which ones are Noah Schnapp.
This is not a film. This is a commercial disguised as a film and the Marvel fanbase somehow ate it up.
Zero narrative intent, zero artistic humanity, just full on corporate attempts to sell more tickets to Disneyland.
Hey @theovon - I used to run humanitarian assistance and disaster relief at @USAID.
The @VP is flat-out lying to you about this.
I'd be happy to come on your show and tell your audience the truth about @USAID's work.
Liverpool in a significant show of operating from a position of strength. It’s quite a start to the summer to follow an agile deal for Jeremie Frimpong (after banking £10m to release Trent Alexander-Arnold a month early), with a club-record drive to get Florian Wirtz.
This while also targeting Milos Kerkez, and being in a healthy position with plenty of options to sell well and offset costs.
Sources in Germany say by May 18, Wirtz was already very strongly leaning towards Liverpool, which was communicated to Manchester City at the time, and later to Bayern Munich. The Bundesliga side publicly admitted LFC were his preference on May 24, but I’m told they were made aware days earlier. The discussion in 🇩🇪 is about *when* not *if* he’ll complete a switch to Anfield.
LFC having a great relationship with Bayer is helpful, as is their signing of his friend Frimpong, but the club’s measured business over the past few windows (Darwin Nunez who wasn’t recruitment-led being the anomaly) meant they could pull the trigger if the opportunity to get a gamechanger arose.
It highlights the benefit of having a solid, aligned set-up between ownership - sporting director - head coach - recruitment - analytics.