The Great Resegregation Edition
Featured Players: Kathleen Kennedy, Stephen A Smith, Elon Musk, and Gene Hackman
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Kathleen Kennedy Exiting Lucasfilm
Matt Belloni, in his Puck newsletter, broke the news that Kathleen Kennedy is finally stepping down as president of Lucasfilm.
It’s happening: After years of speculation, and polite urging from observers like me, Kathleen Kennedy has informed Disney, as well as friends and associates, that she will exit as Lucasfilm president by the end of the year, per three sources. Disney and Kennedy’s personal publicist declined to comment.
Not a huge shock, of course. Kennedy will be 72 in June, and the legendary movie producer will have run Lucasfilm for 13 years as George Lucas’s handpicked steward under Disney. Kathy was actually planning to leave last year, I’m told, and had even set up an exit interview with a journalist, but she decided to stay for one more year.
She wasn’t going to leave unless it was on her terms, and no one was showing her the door. Alongside her husband, filmmaker Frank Marshall, she produced many of the most iconic films of all time and has strong relationships with Steven Spielberg and George Lucas.
For years, she was the scapegoat for any actual or perceived issues within the Star Wars franchise. She did oversee The Force Awakens, which was a massive hit. Whether you love or hate the sequel trilogy, the first movie was good. Not great, but good. My issue with Kennedy was her apparent lack of creative control over this new trilogy. Kennedy and the others in charge did not establish a creative timeline or strategy beyond the first film, which was a significant mistake. I admire Rian Johnson as a writer and director, but he failed to grasp what J.J. Abrams achieved in the first film, leading to a lack of overall direction and, you know, a cohesive story to guide them. Consequently, that complicated the third film, resulting in a poorly executed and, ahem, forced narrative.
On the flip side, she learned her lesson about having a singular visionary creator or director at the helm of projects that lead to success. People often forget that The Mandalorian was a massive risk as the first Star Wars streaming show. However, it benefited from a visionary creative director in Jon Favreau. The same can be said for Tony Gilroy with the Rogue One movie, which directly led to the best Star Wars streaming show, Andor.
No one bats 1.000, so Solo was a misstep, and turning the Obi-Wan Kenobi movie into a streaming show did it no favors, even though it features arguably one of the top three lightsaber duels. I liked Ahsoka and The Acolyte but didn’t love them. The Skeleton Crew was old-school Amblin fun.
Now, we are at the end of Kennedy’s presidency. I’ll be shocked if anyone other than Dave Filoni takes over. I doubt Kevin Feige is interested in the gig, even though many fans hope it comes to pass. If it’s Filoni, we will see more Ahsoka and maybe finally get the standalone Rey movie.
I can’t help but think this significant change indicates the Star Wars franchise is set to expand even further. The second season of Andor is coming soon, and next year, we’ll see Favreau’s The Mandalorian and Grogu. Prepare for even more “Baby Yoda” everywhere.
I’m sure Kathleen Kennedy will look back with pride.
UPDATE 2.28: It isn’t quite a done deal.
“The truth is, and I want to just say loud and clear, I am not retiring. I will never retire from movies. I will die making movies. That is the first thing that’s important to say. I am not retiring.” That’s what Kennedy told Deadline‘s Mike Fleming Jr. about the report she’s stepping down as the leader of the Star Wars franchise and Lucasfilm this year. Instead, she says she had long talks about who might take over.
This is utter bullshit. She did not like the cheering when Belloni broke the story. So now she’s backpedaling and saying she’s not retiring. I’m sure she will have her name on several projects through the next several years, but she’s not running Lucasfilm in 2026. I know this. She knows this. Everybody knows this.
Stephen A. Smith for President? Have We All Lost Our Minds?
Will Leitch, writing for New York Magazine, has a piece with a title that was precisely what I thought immediately after seeing the original story. I love how Leitch explains Trump’s and Smith’s style of discourse in easy-to-understand paragraphs. He then links to where this preposterous story gained traction: When Smith told CNBC’s Alex Sherman that he “wouldn’t mind being in office” and then going on Pod Save America and saying whatever he was doing there.
Leitch then explains everything in a way that even people who don’t know Stephen A. Smith can understand.
He has a shtick, and I do think this shtick has been corrosive to any sort of intelligent sports discourse, but I do not believe Smith is malevolent and, in the end, I do suspect his heart is generally in the right place, if it hasn’t been entirely consumed by his persona at this point. In an age of Barstool and Pat McAfee, Smith is hardly the worst guy on the lot. He does seem to have an occasional sense of humor about himself — you can sense an earnest, even kinda likably dopey guy in there somewhere, as evidenced by his ever-amusing appearances on General Hospital.
But in a world where expertise, rationality, and complexity are under constant assault by cartoonishly vile people foundationally motivated by willful and aggressive ignorance, the Stephen A. Smith political boomlet represents a deeply flawed kind of counterattack. The reasoning here is nothing more than “Hey, they have a bunch of people who don’t know anything, maybe we should get our own person who doesn’t know anything.” Stephen A. Smith for president — my God, I do not think I have ever written a more ridiculous phrase — is the result of giving up, of ceding everything that actually matters. If he is any sort of answer, then quite frankly we are not serious people.
Can we please get some serious people back in charge?
What DOGE is Doing
I do not want to spend a lot of time on this current administration and its goals, but I think it’s important to read articles about what’s happening. Over the weekend, an article appeared that outlines, with the receipts, what exactly is happening and not happening with Elon Musk’s quasi-governmental Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
It’s important to note that Musk is not a government employee. He’s not even an American citizen. I know everyone is tired of politics, and I am, too, but this is not good.
Writing in The New York Times, Aatish Bhatia, Emily Badger, David A. Fahrenthold, Josh Katz, Margot Sanger-Katz, and Ethan Singer conducted a complete investigative report on DOGE and found it lacking.
Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency say they have saved the federal government $55 billion through staff reductions, lease cancellations and a long list of terminated contracts published online this week as a “wall of receipts.”
President Trump has been celebrating the published savings, even musing about a proposal to mail checks to all Americans to reimburse them with a “DOGE dividend.”
But the math that could back up those checks is marred with accounting errors, incorrect assumptions, outdated data and other mistakes, according to a New York Times analysis of all the contracts listed. While the DOGE team has surely cut some number of billions of dollars, its slapdash accounting adds to a pattern of recklessness by the group, which has recently gained access to sensitive government payment systems.
Some contracts the group claims credit for were double- or triple-counted. Another initially contained an error that inflated the totals by billions of dollars. In at least one instance, the group claimed an entire contract had been canceled when only part of the work had been halted. In others, contracts the group said it had closed were actually ended under the Biden administration.
The canceled contracts listed on the website make up a small part of the $55 billion total that the group estimated it had found so far. It was not possible to independently verify that number or other totals on the site with the evidence provided. A senior White House official described how the office made its calculations on individual contracts, but did not respond to numerous questions about other aspects of the group’s accounting. But it is clear that every dollar the website claims credit for is not necessarily a dollar the federal government would have spent — or one that can now be returned to the public.
This whole process is illegal and unconstitutional. However, it’s easy to see that they are planning on just bulldozing, and then when they lose in court, the damage has already been done.
The Great Resegregation
Adam Serwer, writing in The Atlantic, has an alarming story about how this administration is promoting a racist, misogynistic agenda to destroy civil rights in this country.
In August, speaking with someone he believed to be a sympathetic donor, one of the Project 2025 architects, Russell Vought, said that a goal of the next Trump administration would be to “get us off of multiculturalism” in America. Now Vought is running Donald Trump’s Office of Management and Budget, and the plan to end multiculturalism is proceeding apace. Much of the chaos, lawlessness, and destruction of the past few weeks can be understood as part of the administration’s central ideological project: restoring America’s traditional hierarchies of race and gender. Call it the “Great Resegregation.”
Since taking office, Trump has rescinded decades-old orders ensuring equal opportunity in government contracts and vowed to purge DEI from the federal government, intending to lay off any federal worker whose job they associate with DEI. Yesterday evening, Trump fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Charles Q Brown, and replaced him with a lower ranking white official, a retired three-star Air Force officer named Dan Caine. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had previously attacked Brown as an unqualified diversity hire based on the fact that he is Black. Trump’s Department of Justice has implied that it will prosecute or sue companies that engage in diversity outreach. Elon Musk’s DOGE is attempting to purge federal workers “that protect employees’ civil rights and others that investigate complaints of employment discrimination in the federal workplace,” the Washington Post reported. Colleges and universities are being threatened with defunding for any programming related to DEI, which the free-speech organization PEN America has noted could include “everything from a panel on the Civil Rights Movement to a Lunar New Year celebration.”
Trump has also signed executive orders that threaten government funding for scientific research on inequality or on health issues that disproportionately affect nonwhite ethnic groups, and has imposed censorious gag orders that could block discussion of race or sex discrimination in American classrooms. During her confirmation hearing, Trump’s education-secretary nominee, Linda McMahon, said she did not know if schools could lose funding for teaching Black-history classes under the order. The legality of the order over K–12 curricula is unclear, but the chilling effects are real nonetheless.
Under the Trump administration, schools within the Department of Defense system that serve military families—American service members are disproportionately Black and Hispanic—have torn down pictures of Black historical figures and removed books from their libraries on subjects such as race and gender. This record, within a school system entirely under the administration’s control, offers an alarming preview—one in which a historical figure like Harriet Tubman is no longer a welcome subject in educational settings because she was a Black woman.
An OMB memo ordering a federal-funding freeze illustrates the ideological vision behind these decisions. The memo states that the administration seeks to prevent the use of “federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies,” Acting Director Matthew Vaeth wrote. Equal opportunity in employment is described here as “Marxist,” because it affirms what the desegregators see as an unnatural principle: that nonwhite people are equal to white people, that women are equal to men, and that LGBTQ people deserve the same rights as everyone else.
If the Great Resegregation proves successful, it will restore an America past where racial and ethnic minorities were the occasional token presence in an otherwise white-dominated landscape. It would repeal the gains of the civil-rights era in their entirety. What its advocates want is not a restoration of explicit Jim Crow segregation—that would shatter the illusion that their own achievements are based in a color-blind meritocracy. They want an arrangement that perpetuates racial inequality indefinitely while retaining some plausible deniability, a rigged system that maintains a mirage of equal opportunity while maintaining an unofficial racial hierarchy. Like elections in authoritarian countries where the autocrat is always reelected in a landslide, they want a system in which they never risk losing but can still pretend they won fairly.
These people are racists and misogynists. They absolutely want to reverse the civil rights movement. Like Critical Race Theory or Wokeness before it, DEI has become conservatives’ go-to cover for their discriminatory actions.
The term DEI, frequently invoked by the Trump administration, functions as a smoke screen. It allows people to think that the Trump administration’s anti-DEI purge is about removing pointless corporate symbolism or sensitivity trainings. Although it is easy to find examples of DEI efforts that are ill-conceived or ill-applied, some conservatives have leveraged those criticisms to pursue a much broader agenda that is really about tearing anti-discrimination laws out at the roots, so that businesses and governments are free to extend or deny opportunities based on race, gender, and sexual orientation if they so choose.
Pay attention.
Gene Hackman and Michelle Trachtenberg
Incredibly sad news. I’ve linked to the stories in Variety.
“Michelle Trachtenberg, ‘Gossip Girl’ and ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ Actor, Dies at 39.”
I never followed her social media, but it looks like Trachtenberg had complications after a liver transplant. It’s too bad she won’t be seen in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer revival.
Hackman was the Lex Luthor of my youth and the basketball coach of my dreams. He was incredible in Unforgiven. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen The French Connection. I should rectify that situation as soon as possible.
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