The Dictatorship

‘Stranger Things’ is ending. Or is it?

Published

6 months ago

December 31, 2025

Dec. 31, 2025, 12:34 PM EST

The conclusion of “Stranger Things,” the Netflix phenomenon and ’80s throwback whose series finale drops this New Year’s Eve, feels like the end of an era. That’s partly because production delays, the Covid-19 pandemic and the 2023 actors’ and writers’ strikes caused the rollout of its five seasons to last nearly 10 years, a whole lifetime to people who started watching in elementary or middle school. When “Stranger Things” debuted, Barack Obama was president. That’s how long it’s been.

It’s tempting to go a step further and assume that the finale of “Stranger Things” will loosen the chokehold that 1980s nostalgia has maintained on modern pop culture for multiple decades. But it won’t. A collective passion for bygone eras used to run in 20-year cycles — the 1960s made a comeback in the 1980s, the ’70s got hot again in the ’90s, etc. The ’80s returned to the zeitgeist in the 2000sas scheduled. Then they never left. I wrote an essay about this for Vulture in 2016, shortly after “Stranger Things” was released. Now, in 2025, it’s just as easy to see evidence of the influence of the period that gave us Pac-Man as well as He-Man, and not just because our current president is also obsessed with it.

The ’80s returned to the zeitgeist in the 2000s. Then they never left.

This is hardly a new observation, but it nevertheless remains true: We are more culturally fixated on recycling works of entertainment than we ever have been, largely because studio executives want guaranteed returns on their investments and frequently assume that any existing piece of intellectual property can attract an audience again with the proper makeover. They are often wrong about this. That still has not stopped them and probably won’t for the foreseeable future. Evidence: In 2026, we are getting a Netflix reboot of “Star Search” as well as remakes or reboots of “Youngblood,” “Highlander” and, yes, “He-Man” (“Masters of the Universe”) at the movies, along with “The ’Burbs” is TV.

Before you point out that there also has been a long-existing interest in ’90s culture, you’re right and I agree. The fondness for both reflects the sensibilities of Gen Xers and millennials who associate those time periods with their coming of age. Not coincidentally, people that age are the ones largely developing projects in Hollywood these days.

While the deep affection for the ’80s in “Stranger Things” certainly accounts for its appeal to adults who actually remember being alive back then, it doesn’t as obviously explain why Gen Z has embraced it with equal fervor over its five seasons. Except that it kind of does. Like the baby boomers who came before us, we Xers and millennials have gone out of our way to jam the pop culture of our childhoods down our own children’s throats. We are even worse about this than boomers, mainly because we consumed so much more pop culture from such a young age. TV was our primary babysitter in a way it wasn’t for a majority of boomers. Our favorite shows and the movies we rewatched until the VHS tapes eroded became part of our molecular makeup. We wanted to pass that along to our kids as much as our actual family heirlooms.

Some of the “Stranger Things” references to “Back to the Future” or “E.T.” are just as recognizable to today’s young people because, in a sense, they too have grown up on these films.

Consequently, some of the “Stranger Things” references to “Back to the Future” or “E.T.” are just as recognizable to today’s young people because, in a sense, they too have grown up on these films. When I interviewed “Stranger Things” star Millie Bobby Brown in 2016, back when she was just 12 years old, she expressed not only an impressive knowledge of horror fare from the era, but she also said she wished she could live back then. “I love the ’80s,” she said. “I’m obsessed with it. I love the hair and the people.” Nine years later, she is now the wife of Jon Bon Jovi’s son. The ’80s can become central to your life even if you didn’t live through them.

What was unique about “Stranger Things,” though, is that it wasn’t just some old thing that somehow became popular again. “Stranger Things” belongs to Gen Z as much as, if not more than, those of us raising them. This was an original series, created to be consumed the way that Gen Z consumes everything: by streaming it on whatever device is within closest reach. Even though the show took place over the course of several years in the 1980s, it was viewed by contemporary preteens and teens dealing with the same timeless issues and anxieties that the main characters on the show faced (albeit within the heightened context of a sci-fi/horror narrative).

When Gen Zers get nostalgic for what reminds them of when they were young, “Stranger Things” will unquestionably be a big part of that. They’ll be nostalgic for a thing that was already nostalgic for something that came before it, which is the secret sauce that makes it possible to appeal to as many overlapping Venn diagram circles as possible.

And that’s why the ’80s, and nostalgia-motivated entertainment in general, will never die. “Stranger Things” itself won’t even die after its finale. A Broadway show written as a prequel to the television series is still actively runningand an animated spin-off is expected on Netflix in 2026. There’s also a seemingly unending stream of merch inspired by the inhabitants of Hawkins, Indiana, that will likely continue for decades. The end of “Stranger Things” may feel like the end of an era. But it isn’t the end of “Stranger Things” because in a culture that loves to recycle, nothing ever really ends.

Jen Chaney is a freelance TV and film critic whose work has been published in The New York Times, TV Guide and other outlets.

The Dictatorship

Rep. Julia Letlow wins Louisiana GOP Senate primary runoff

Published

7 hours ago

June 28, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Rep. Julia Letlow wins Louisiana GOP Senate primary runoff

Jun. 27, 2026, 9:51 PM EDT

Rep. Julia Letlow won Louisiana’s Republican Senate primary runoff Saturday, defeating former Rep. John Fleming.

Her win comes as a victory for President Donald Trump, who has endorsed her repeatedly throughout the race — including before she was even officially running.

Letlow made history in 2021 when she became the first Republican woman to represent Louisiana in Congress. In that special election, she won the seat that her late husband, Luke Letlow, had won prior to dying of complications related to Covid-19 in December 2020.

Letlow had no political experience prior to running for her late husband’s seat. She holds a doctorate in communication from the University of South Florida and worked as an administrator for Tulane University and the University of Louisiana, according to her LinkedIn page. Nonetheless, she won the special election House race with nearly 65% of the vote.

In Congress, she has served on the appropriations and education committees, and has been a reliably MAGA Republican.

Letlow’s win also comes as a rebuke to Fleming, who loaned himself more than $11 million, according to the Federal Election Commission, and tried running for the same seat in 2016 only to finish in fifth place in the nonpartisan primary. (Letlow did not loan her campaign any money, and took in more than $5.35 million compared to Fleming’s more than $12.1 million, FEC filings show.)

Trump has played a key role in the race. In addition to backing Letlow early on, the president also helped tank Republican incumbent Sen. Bill Cassidy’s re-election campaign in last month’s primary, based on the senator’s record of bucking his party and voting in favor of Trump’s second impeachment. In the primaryLetlow earned nearly 45% of the vote, giving her a healthy lead over both Fleming, who received about 28% of the vote, and Cassidy, who earned nearly 25%.

Ahead of Saturday’s runoff, polling showed Letlow and Fleming in a close race, with Letlow retaining a small lead in several polls.

Letlow will now proceed to the November general election to face off against the Democratic nominee, farmer Jamie Davis, who came out on top in tonight’s Democratic primary runoff.

The state has not sent a Democrat to the Senate since 2008, when Mary Landrieu won her last term in office.

Julianne McShane is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW who also covers the politics of abortion and reproductive rights. You can send her tips from a non-work device on Signal at jmcshane.19 or follow her on X or Bluesky.

The Dictatorship

‘Horrifying’: Pulte’s choice for top spy aide stokes fears of Trump vote tampering

Published

7 hours ago

June 28, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

‘Horrifying’: Pulte’s choice for top spy aide stokes fears of Trump vote tampering

Jun. 28, 2026, 1:36 PM EDT

Bill Pulte, the acting director of national intelligencehas stirred fear by choosing as his chief of staff a GOP election lawyer who oversaw a poll watching program that included Jack Posobiec and other conservative conspiracy theorists. The lawyer, Christina Norton, also appears to have no experience working in the intelligence community.

“It is horrifying,” a former senior U.S. intelligence official told MS NOW Saturday. “Not only does Norton have absolutely no background, experience or expertise in national security or intelligence, but her principal qualifications appear to be loyalty to Pulte and an embrace of absurd election-interference conspiracies.”

Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., who has been a vocal critic of Pulte, also raised concerns about election integrity on Sunday while taking shots at the director of national intelligence and the office itself.

“We should eliminate the DNI, and we should eliminate Pulte from the DNI until that happens,” he said on BLN, adding, “I am concerned that we’re gonna continue to cast doubt on elections in November and erode what has been a 250-year tradition of a peaceful transition of power.”

Pulte’s choice of Norton is also likely to increase concerns among Democrats that President Donald Trump intends to use the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to interfere in the midterm elections. Pulte, a loyalist with no intelligence experience, has used his current position as head of federal mortgage agencies to refer political rivals of the president for federal criminal prosecution.

Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., told MS NOW on Sunday that the choice “just confirms” that the “only job qualification is absolute political loyalty and devotion to Donald Trump.” But he expressed faith in the judicial system during an appearance on “The Weekend,” noting that “right now we have federal courts across the land that are rejecting their various attempts to take over the election process. Nine different federal courts have rejected the claim that the president, by executive order, can compel the states in the union to turn over all of their voter lists to Donald Trump and to the White House.”

The New York Times first reported Norton’s appointment.

The former senior intelligence official, who requested anonymity due to concerns of retaliation, told MS NOW the choice also “signals as clearly as could be that Pulte has been put at ODNI to misuse the awesome power of the U.S. intelligence community to interfere in the upcoming midterm elections.”

Norton, reached by MS NOW by telephone, declined to comment and referred questions to an ODNI spokesperson. The spokesperson declined to comment on Norton but defended Pulte’s tenure.

“Acting Director Pulte and his team are focused on carrying out President Trump’s national security priorities while faithfully executing ODNI’s statutory mission,” the spokesperson told MS NOW. “We are leading the Intelligence Community to provide President Trump with elite, apolitical intelligence that keeps America safe.”

Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., appearing on CBS News’ “Face the Nation” Sunday, said his objection to Pulte is “that he used personal information to target a political enemy of the president,” a reference to New York Attorney General Letitia James.

“You should not be using the force of government to crash upon somebody just because the person in charge does not like them or finds them inconvenient. The fact that Bill did that is disqualifying for someone to be the director of national intelligence,” Cassidy said.

Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said on Friday that Congress would ensure that the ODNI under Pulte will “report on legitimate foreign threats to elections, not Donald Trump’s imaginary ones.”

Himes warned that, “Trump was explicit when he appointed Bill Pulte to a job he had no qualifications for that he had elections in mind.”

Trump has said in interviews with the news media that he would like to see Pulte shrink the size of the ODNI and investigate election fraud. Pulte’s predecessor, Tulsi Gabbard, participated in investigations in Georgia and Puerto Rico to find proof of Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.

Democrats and some former intelligence officials say they worry that Pulte may try to falsely claim that his office has found evidence that foreign governments are secretly funding Democratic candidates in the midterms.

Pulte could falsely claim foreign actors have hacked U.S. voting machines, they say, and altered vote totals in favor of Democrats during the midterms. Or Trump could instruct Pulte to be present if FBI agents seize ballots and election records in November as they did earlier this year in Fulton County, Georgia.

Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, warned in a statement on Friday that Pulte should not use his position to spread Trump’s false election conspiracy theories.

“The mission of ODNI is to identify and counter foreign threats, not to import election denialism into the Intelligence Community,” Warner said. “Americans have every reason to fear that this administration is once again eroding the wall between our intelligence agencies and domestic elections.”

David Rohde is the senior national security reporter for MS NOW and a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. Previously he was the senior executive editor for national security and law for NBC News.

The Dictatorship

In Springfield, Ohio, Trump’s rhetoric becomes a grim reality

Published

7 hours ago

June 28, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

In Springfield, Ohio, Trump’s rhetoric becomes a grim reality

Jun. 27, 2026, 4:07 PM EDT

Having lived with Donald Trump’s infamous and baseless insult against them — “they’re eating the dogs … they’re eating the cats” — Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are bracing for a far bigger injury.

More than 10,000 Haitians across Ohio and hundreds of thousands more around the country who had Temporary Protected Status now face the imminent prospect of deportation. The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the Trump administration can halt those legal protections for Haitians and Syrians and resume forcing them to leave.

Justice Samuel Alito’s opinionfor the court’s Republican-appointed majority curbed the power of courts to review government decisions to terminate protections under the TPS program.

“They side with him on everything that he says or everything that he does, which means there is no check and balance,” said Viles Dorsainvil, a Haitian TPS holder and executive director of the Haitian Support Center in Springfield, a town Trump catapulted into a maelstrom of misinformation about immigrants when he was running to retake the White House in 2024.

“The president has that freeway in front of him to do whatever he wants to do, unfortunately, and most of the time to a minority group of people,” added Dorsainvil, who has lived in the United States since 2020.

In a country rife with political and economic instability, Haitians returning from the U.S. are in danger of being killed or kidnapped, said Dorsainvil’s colleague at the Haitian Support Center, Rose Thamar Joseph.

“There is this perception in Haiti that if you are living here in the United States, you have money, so you are living your good life, so sending people back to Haiti will put them in real danger,” Joseph said.

Staying in the U.S. without legal status creates a different crisis.

“We received calls this morning from people saying that, unfortunately, starting on July 1, they won’t be able to go to work anymore,” Joseph said Friday.

Joseph predicted that families would be separated during the deportation process.

“We know that there will be separation,” she said. “A lot of those parents with TPS … they have kids who were born in the United States, so we know that it will happen, not for everybody, not for all the families, but it will happen,” she said.

The oncoming nightmare for the Haitian community in Springfield was, in many ways, predictable after Trump notoriously targeted them on the debate stage against then-Vice President Kamala Harris in the fall of 2024.

“They are eating the dogs. The people that came in, they are eating the cats. They’re eating – they are eating the pets of the people that live there,” Trump said without a shred of evidence, greatly amplifying an unfounded rumor that had been confined to smaller corners of social media.

That rhetoric continued Trump’s track record of racist languageparticularly when it comes to immigration, including during his first White House stint when he referred during his first to Haiti and other majority non-white nations as “shithole” countries.

Dorsainvil argued that the Supreme Court’s decision Thursday proved his beliefs are institutionalized, calling it “a validation of all those bad rhetorics of the president against us.”

Asked by MS NOW if those with TPS should expect to be deported, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said, “Well, of course. If you no longer have status in this country, then you’re supposed to be deported.”

Miller, the architect of the administration’s immigration policy, went on to single out the Haitian population by name.

But the outcry against the court’s ruling blurs party lines in Ohio.

“Changing the immigration status of these individuals is not in the best interest of the United States nor Ohio,” Republican Gov. Mike DeWine said.

Springfield’s Republican mayorRob Rue, has denounced Trump’s misinformation about his community as dangerous from the start.

“Many of the individuals affected by this decision are our neighbors, coworkers, business owners, taxpayers, and parents,” Rue said in a statement after the ruling came down. “They contribute to our local economy, support our schools, strengthen our neighborhoods, and have become part of the fabric of Springfield.”

Alex Tabet is a reporter for MS NOW.