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Gone Girl: The Musical would be darkthats a given. It would be violent, bleak, and blood-splattered, with the apex of the night occurring when the voice of cool, calculating Amy Dunne soars all the way to the cheap seats during a bring-down-the-house eleven oclock number. Adapted from Gillian Flynns runaway bestseller, it would undoubtedly pack seats for months, with legions of Flynn fanatics turning out to watch their favorite anti-heroine belt her way through the novels familiar twists and turns. Theres just one problem: Gone Girl: The Musical isnt happening anytime soon, even if Flynn has thought about it.

I think it would be a rock operaa deep, dark rock opera, Flynn said. Id love it. Im the biggest musical lover in the world.

Flynn had a chance to contemplate Gone Girl: The Musical during the making of Utopia, her new Amazon Studios series (and her first outing as a television showrunner), in which eagle-eyed fans can catch a glimpse of the would-be musical on a Chicago marquee. Adapted from a 2013 British television series by the same name, Utopia centers on a tightly-knit group of uber-knowledgeable superfans, who are shocked to learn that their favorite comic isnt just real, but it holds the secrets to the public health conspiracy of the century. In an early episode of the series, Flynn had an empty marquee to fill, with The Chicago Theaters landmark lights gleaming in the background of a scene where two characters stumble down North State Street. Flynn hoped to fill the space with an easter egg, maybe even a cheeky nod to her beloved city of Chicago, but landing the rights to other pop culture properties proved challenginguntil she had a breakthrough.

As it turns out, getting rights is so complicated, Flynn said, of her quest to get the name of an existing musical on the marquee. I threw out about twenty possibilities, and I got rejected over and over. Eventually we were getting down to the wire, and I finally said, Hey, I know who will give us rights. I will.

There you have it: Ms. Flynn said she would give the rights herself, and Gone Girl: The Musical landed on the marquee. What may seem on its surface like winky, self-referential fan service is in fact a fitting grace note for Utopia, a conspiracy thriller about a band of comic book superfans tasked with saving the world. For Flynn, a self-described professional fan whose career has taken her from beat journalism at toilet seat conventions to the highest echelons of literary Hollywood, Utopia is something of a creative homecoming. After all, Flynns enduring love for fan culture is a family affair. Flynns father, a professor of film studies, made part of his living by finding and selling rare comic books, meaning that Flynn was steeped in fandom from a young age.

That was what we did on weekendspile into the family station wagon, then go to flea markets and comic conventions, Flynn said. In Kansas City, theres a great convention called Fool Con. That was always the highlight of my year.

Flynn first came aboard Utopia in 2014, when David Fincher, who directed the film adaptation of Gone Girl, tapped her to write the scripts. Budget disputes tanked Utopias future at HBO, with Fincher departing from the project, but Flynn salvaged the bones for a second life at Amazon Studios, stepping in to carry her writing over the finish line as showrunner and executive producer. Flynn, who ate, slept, and breathed fandom as Entertainment Weeklys television critic during the early aughts, came to the project deeply fluent in the language of fans.

Elizabeth Morris

Having literally made my living as a fan for awhile, I love fans, because I love people who have passion for anything, whether it's comic books or model trains, Flynn said. I love people who love their stuff, because I don't think there's a lot of unbridled and genuine passion in the world.

Flynn herself is a woman of unbridled and genuine passionfor musical theater, for feminist literature, for comic books (she wrote one, called Masks, in 2015), and, believe it or not, for dressing up in Renaissance-era garb.

Im a big Renaissance fair person, Flynn said. I get dressed up every year. Even my kids have outfits, and every once in awhile, my husband will be a good sport and wear his Henry VIII outfit. We go to a great Ren Fest outside of Chicago every year. Theres another one in Kansas City that I grew up going to, so Im very much steeped in that.

But fandom, for all its dizzying highs, has staggering lows. Much ink has been spilled about toxic fandom, while the dismal precedents established during Gamergate still continue to animate todays online culture wars. In Utopia, Flynn doesnt shy away from the dark side of fandom, highlighting the tendency of her unlikely heroes to devolve into uncritical hero worship, as well as a dangerous myopia. Jessica Hyde, the comic book heroine who proves to exist as a real person rather than just a fiction, criticizes Utopias band of geeks for living what she perceives as meaningless lives, characterized by small jobs and tiny apartments and phone screens with texts always chirping. She goes on to shout, Your only passion is sitting in your bedrooms, talking about a world I was actually living in. For Flynn, this narrow-minded tunnel vision is fandoms chief danger.

Elizabeth Morris

As much intellectual power and passion as you can put into things that you love, theres still a really big world out there, Flynn said. There are a lot of things to learn and explore and expose yourself to. You can get overly focused on certain things and make judgments about people who love one thing and not the other, to a degree where its exclusionary. Its about finding that moderation. Enjoy the stuff you enjoy, but leave that room in your life to find new things to love, too.

Though inhabiting fan culture was treading familiar ground for Flynn, stepping into the drivers seat on Utopia was a bold new adventure. Credited as the showrunner and executive producer of Utopia, as well as the scribe behind all eight episodes, Flynn was tasked with an unprecedented amount of ownership over this project.

It felt very big and challenging, Flynn said. I didn't entirely know what running a show entailed, having never done it before. I didnt get into TV in the usual manner that most people do, where youre used to being in the writers room and on set, seeing a showrunner in action. For me, it was trial by fire.

Despite the challenge of learning on the job, Flynn took to one element of showrunning right away: the visuals. Flynn, who has written three novels (Gone Girl, Sharp Objects, and Dark Places) brought her novelists toolkit to location scouting and prop selection, so much so that, in her next life, she believes shell come back as a prop master. Her painterly touch is evident throughout the series, with each set constructed from a colorful phantasmagoria of telling details.

In my writing, each character will notice certain things, whether its something in the room behind a person or a certain visual aesthetic, Flynn said. I realized that this was exactly what Id be doing on screentelling the story through more than just dialogue and action, but through visuals, which really further a characters personality. Do they have family photos behind them? What kind of art do they like? What kind of house do they live in?

Yet one thing Flynn couldnt prepare for was the shock of releasing Utopia, a show about a comic book that predicts global epidemics, into a world ravaged by COVID-19.

I remember when I was selling the show, and everyone was trying to wrap their brains around the idea of this world-shaking virus, Flynn said. "They kept asking, Will people believe it? And, Is this pure science fiction?

Elizabeth Morris

Filming on Utopia wrapped in October 2019. In the five months to follow, Flynn regularly commuted from Chicago to Los Angeles to work through the editing process. In January, with COVID-19 beginning to make international headlines, the editing bay was often filled with what Flynn describes as uncomfortable, uneasy laughter. Come March, with cities across the nation shutting down and life as we knew it grinding to a halt, Flynn finished the show from her laptop in Chicago, where life was mired in a miasma of confusion and misinformation.

We had the news on 24/7, trying to see if we had to microwave our children or whatever it was we were supposed to be doing, Flynn said. I would look away from the scene I was editing, over at the TV screen, and see something disturbingly similar on the screen. I remember telling my husband, Its strange that we now have to differentiate between the real pandemic and the show pandemic. It got so confusing.

Flynn insists that Utopias harrowing themes arent the stuff of fiction, but rather, the inevitable consequences of global sins that have come home to roost. In fact, Flynn argues, the conspiracy-riddled, truth-muddled world of Utopia has been long in the making.

Elizabeth Morris

I cant believe that we live in this time period where truth has become debatable, or where your opinion is as good as fact, Flynn said. Were getting into very unsettled ground, because if we believe that you can have an opinion on whether or not theres gravity, and leave it at You cant prove it, or, I dont believe in it, thats so dangerous. Unless theres some basic reality we can all agree on, we put ourselves as a global society in a very vulnerable place, where we can be manipulated by politics, by money, by bad actors.

With Utopia launching into this tormented world after a long, circuitous path to the finish line, Flynn can at last return to her next project: her unfinished fourth novel. She, like everyone in the United States, is struggling to stitch her professional and creative life together with the challenging realities of living at a socially distant remove.

For me, the challenge of writing hasnt been the lack of creativity, but the lack of time, Flynn said. Rather than working downstairs in my office, plotting the remainder of my book, Ive been trying to remember long division and teach my daughter how to read.

Conventional COVID-19 wisdom has been to take this new way of life day by day. As for Flynn, shes taking it night by night.

Ive always been a night owl, so the best time for me to write tends to be when everyone else is asleep, because Im usually still awake, Flynn said. Email gets quiet, the world gets quiet, and I can get a couple hours there when my brains working well. I get on my treadmill desk and get going.

Yet even as Flynn charts a new creative course, she remains as bound to this new reality as any of us, with the hotly-anticipated Utopia tethering her to our present nightmare. Owing at least in part to its shocking verisimilitude and its sociopolitical ambitions, Utopia will enter into the zeitgeist as a subject of heated discussion, with fans drawing startling connections between reality and fiction, not unlike the tinfoil hat-wearing characters of Utopia diagramming conspiracies with red string. Longtime Flynn fans and science-fiction fanatics alike will discuss Utopia as passionately as they always discuss Flynns charged, arresting stories of crime, punishment, and women on the brink, which never land without inciting conversation. In fact, Flynn, ever the professional fan, is counting on it.

I'd rather have someone actively dislike what I wrote, but have a good conversation about it, than shrug their shoulders and say, I liked it, but never think about it again, Flynn said. That, to me, is the absolute worst. I just hope that this show enables people to have interesting conversations about what we value.

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In 'Utopia,' Gillian Flynn's New Show, Being a Fan Could Save the World - Esquire

President Trump has declared himself the "president of law and order." Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

President Trump has declared himself the "president of law and order."

Nearly a month after the killing of George Floyd while in police custody and the launch of massive protests against police brutality across the country, President Trump was asked what part of his response would he have handled differently.

"I think that tone is a very important thing and I try to have a very good tone, a very moderate tone, a very sympathetic in some cases tone, but it's a very important tone," Trump said.

Though when pressed on what he would change, the president said, "I would say if I could, I would do tone."

No modern president has been as aggressive a culture warrior as Donald Trump.

He announced his candidacy by accusing Mexican immigrants of being rapists. He criticized Black athletes who knelt during the national anthem. He championed police officers but promoted rough policing, telling law enforcement officers in a 2017 speech, "please don't be too nice" when making an arrest. Recently, he announced over Twitter that he would never consider removing the name of Confederate generals from military bases.

Trump has also fixated on the historic phrase "law and order."

"I will fight to protect you I am your president of law and order and an ally of all peaceful protesters," Trump said in the Rose Garden on June 1, as law enforcement began firing pepper spray on peaceful protesters in nearby Lafayette Park.

"Our nation has been gripped by professional anarchists, violent mobs, arsonists, looters, criminals, rioters, Antifa and others," Trump said.

Culture wars have been part of American politics for decades. Hot-button issues like immigration, family values and respect for the American flag can get a more powerful reaction from voters than dry debates over taxes or Medicare.

But at a time when the country continues to deal with the COVID-19 crisis, an economic recession and, above all, heightened levels of racial unrest, the culture wars are changing, and Trump, who has always relished a fight over white identity and culture is struggling to adjust.

Many of Trump's culture war allies are defecting NASCAR decided to ban the Confederate flag and the NFL apologized for punishing its athletes who knelt to protest police brutality.

According to David Axelrod, a Democratic strategist and former senior adviser to President Barack Obama, the most notable rift came when military leaders, whom Trump likes to call " my generals," broke with him. Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley said they would not only consider renaming military bases but also rejected Trump's threat to use the U.S. military against protesters.

"That was a seminal, I think, development in this story," Axelrod said, who is also a CNN senior political commentator and host of the Axe Files and Hacks on Tap podcasts.

Axelrod added that Trump also faced opposition from retired Marine Gen. Jim Mattis, his former defense secretary, and several prominent military leaders who criticized his decision to take a photo in front of St. John's Church following the removal of protesters on June 1.

"Trump has so tried to cleave himself to the military and claim the military as his own. And what the military was saying there is that 'No. We're not yours. We belong to the Constitution. We have principles and rules and norms and laws that we're going to follow.' And that was an incredible rebuke for him." Axelrod said.

Despite a visible push away from Trump on many of the culture war issues, not every part of the conservative coalition is ready to call a truce. There has even been a backlash to the new positions of institutions like the NFL.

Former U.S. Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich says kneeling athletes will still be a cultural flashpoint and disagrees with the NFL's decision.

"Refusing to stand for the national anthem is an insult to America. It's not protesting racism. It's protesting the United States of America, and that's what the divide is going to become. If you want to be anti-American, you've got a party eager to be with you," Gingrich said.

"I can tell you I probably won't watch the NFL this year, and I'm a big Green Bay fan," he said.

Gingrich, an experienced culture warrior in his own right, argues that Trump will be able to find new issues to push as his Democratic opponents find new ways to overreach. And that's why he believes the culture wars are not over.

"The nice thing in my entire career about dealing with the left is they can't contain themselves," Gingrich said, adding, "so they go from very legitimate demand to reform the police, to defund the police because they just can't help themselves."

Specific culture war issues can also come and go. In 2004, Republican strategist Karl Rove harnessed the backlash to gay marriage during President George W. Bush's 2004 campaign to help get him reelected. Although, less than a decade later, the same issue faded following the Supreme Court's decision to legalize gay marriage in 2015.

Now, Rove says the same thing is happening, especially following the recent Supreme Court ruling that protects LGBTQ people against workplace discrimination under the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

"They'll be some concern in some quarters about the latest decision by the court. But, yeah, that's the interesting thing about Supreme Court decisions. Not always, but many times, they tend to sort of diminish the controversy," Rove said.

Another more fundamental reason why culture wars are shifting is that most modern cultural battles are racial.

Democratic strategist Jamal Simmons says that white voters have started to think differently in the wake of George Floyd's killing.

"The video of Black men being killed on television is much like the 1950s and '60s when Martin Luther King had even children marching in Alabama, and being attacked by fire hoses and dogs. That kind of thing really does speak to the morality that I think most Americans hold," Simmons said.

Simmons, who also hosts #ThisisFYI on Instagram, says the events of the past month have changed how many Americans respond to and deal with acts of racism and, adding, "They can't just sit by quietly and let it happen."

"It's raised the stakes on these questions of racial harmony and our ability to get past our history," Simmons said, adding, "and what it seems like as afraid as people may be of rioters and looters they may be more afraid of a president who is not against racism and who's not trying to bring the country together."

Trump was originally set to hold his first campaign rally since the COVID-19 pandemic on June 19 in Tulsa, Okla. After receiving criticism for scheduling the event on the holiday Juneteenth, in a city that experienced a racist massacre of black people in June 1921, Trump changed the date to June 20.

"Certainly in the television era, it's the first time that we've had a president who's been so willing to embrace a racially exclusive perspective on American politics, and that may be turning the tide against him," Simmons added.

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As The Culture Wars Shift, President Trump Struggles To ...

Prime minister Boris Johnson stirs culture war over Churchill statue. So ran a recent New York Times headline. The Washington Post agreed. As counter protesters took to the streets to protect statues and as controversy erupted over foreign secretary Dominic Raabs comments on taking the knee, many British commentators, too, saw a nation divided and a prime minister stoking the flames of a culture war.

Yet an Ipsos Mori poll, published last week, paints a different picture. Nine out of 10 Britons, it showed, would be happy for their child to marry someone of another ethnic group. Just 3% thought someone had to be white to be truly British. The British public, the pollsters observed, have become avowedly more open minded in their attitudes towards race.

There is a similar puzzle in America. Two months ago, had you asked academics or commentators about the consequences of American cities burning in the wake of protests over the killing of a black man by a white policeman, most would probably have agreed that polarisation would be exacerbated and Donald Trump strengthened. The opposite has happened. The president seems more politically isolated and even demographic groups seen as significant to the Trump base, those without higher education, for instance, show sympathy towards Black Lives Matter.

How do we explain this paradox? Why are societies both fractured by culture wars and yet, Britain certainly more than America, united, and unitedly liberal, over some of the most fractious aspects of those wars?

From one perspective, liberals have already won the culture wars. Attitudes on race, gender and sexuality have changed so much over the past 40 years that weve almost become blind to that transformation. Between 1989 and 2019, the proportion of the population that thought that gay relationships were wrong fell from 40% to 13%; the numbers opposed to abortions halved, as did those who thought it wrong to have a child outside of marriage. When the first British Social Attitudes Survey was published in 1983, more than 50% of whites would not countenance a spouse of a difference race, a figure that barely declined throughout that decade.

Britain in the 1980s was another country. Racism was vicious and visceral and woven into the fabric of British society in a way difficult to imagine now.

Racism has not disappeared, but the context is very different. Racist attacks or workplace discrimination today take place in a society in which virtually no one, unlike 40 years ago, views them as acceptable. (The major caveat is that attitudes to Muslims remain illiberal.)

At the same time, though, the traditional left/right divide has eroded, so the ways in which we view ourselves and our social affiliations has changed and not necessarily for the better. Culture and identity play a bigger role in how we define ourselves politically. The frameworks through which we make sense of the world are as often white or Muslim or European as they are liberal or conservative or socialist. And when people talk of liberal or conservative or Remain or Leave these are seen as cultural identities as much as political viewpoints.

The coincidence of these two trends has created societies more liberal and yet more fractious. Consider attitudes towards immigration. Most polls show that Britain has become more relaxed about the issue, leading some commentators to suggest that Brexit has made people less worried about immigration. The reality is more complicated. The shift in attitudes began well before the Brexit debate. And polls show that almost half of Leave voters think immigration has a negative impact compared with 12% of Remain voters; fewer than a third of Leave voters think immigration has a positive impact. A majority of the public still wants numbers reduced.

The complexity of the response is not surprising. The public has become more liberal and less racist. Immigration has, however, also become symbolic of unacceptable change. Working-class lives have in recent decades been made more precarious through the stagnation of wages, the rise of the gig economy and the imposition of austerity. The power of labour movement organisations has eroded, the Labour party has drifted away from its traditional constituencies.

Immigrants are not responsible for these changes. But the very decline of the economic and political power of the working class has helped obscure the economic and political roots of social problems. As the language of culture has become an important means through which to understand ones place in society, so many in the working class have come to see their marginalisation as a cultural loss. Immigration, viewed as a key reason for cultural change, has come to bear responsibility for that loss.

Those challenging racism similarly often view their problems through the lens of identity politics and their targets, too, are frequently symbolic. Debates about racism in recent years have often revolved around issues such as language and cultural appropriation. What began as protests about police brutality has, for some, morphed into a campaign against racist statues and controversy over an English rugby anthem.

The cultural turn of recent years has encouraged people to repose political problems as issues of culture or identity. Rather than ask What are the policy reasons for the lack of housing and stagnating wages? or What are the social roots of racism and what structural changes are required to combat it?, we look to blame the Other, demand recognition for our particular identity and tussle over symbols.

Many white working-class people accuse immigrants of stealing jobs and scamming the benefits system, while anti-racists often deride Karens and gammons and finger working-class people as bigots. The growth of liberal social attitudes, far from being a base from which to build a movement to tackle both racism and the marginalisation of the working class, itself becomes lost in the social fractures. We should beware that we dont get trapped in our own blindness.

Kenan Malik is an Observer columnist

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Culture wars risk blinding us to just how liberal we've ...

Speaker safety is something that we've had to worry about for a lot, a lot longer than just Covid times where people have, you know, tried to assault our speakers and throw things at them and everything else, said YAFs Brown. So thankfully, we have a pretty good plan for that.

Groups are also considering gathering an audience to a speaker beamed in over Zoom, the default pandemic conferencing app.

The students on that campus can still experience [an] in-person event, but the guests might be remote just via Zoom and take questions that way, Bryan Bernys, the Leadership Institute's vice president of campus programs.

The Leadership Institute has similarly transitioned its activist lecture events to Zoom conferencing. In addition to the normal slate of seminars, the group has also integrated programs and events teaching how to hold socially-distanced events during the pandemic.

The biggest obstacle, however, might not have anything to do with social distancing but how to keep students engaged in activism, or even in the local chapters, when theyre studying from home. Across the country, many students are opting to take time off school to wait out the pandemic, and conservative students arent immune.

That does have an impact on your activist base and cultivating relationships, said Bowyer, of Students for Trump. If the bodies that were there one semester aren't the same ones that come back the next semester, it's like kind of retraining and reorganizing.

The situation for every conservative activist group, from local chapter to nationwide organization based out of Northern Virginia, remains fluid. But Brown argued that such a situation appeals to conservative ideology.

I think it's one of those things that actually kind of fits into what we would be [doing when] advancing ideas on campus, which is this idea that a universal plan is not going to work well for everybody, said Brown. We obviously as conservatives prefer smaller units of decision making and more localized control.

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The pandemic hasnt ended the campus culture wars - POLITICO

President TrumpDonald John TrumpTwo 'The Apprentice' producers helping with Republican National Convention About 70,000 lives could be saved in near future if people wear masks: researchers Trump issues disaster declaration for California as wildfires rage MORE on Saturday hit Democrats over the Pledge of Allegiance, leaning deeper into the culture wars he hopes will elevate his reelection bid.

Trump took to Twitter to accuse Democrats of not uttering the word God in the pledge at this weeks Democratic National Convention. While the word was featured in the pledge at the convention every night for each of the four days, some of the speakers did not say it duringtheMuslim Delegates and Allies Assemblyand theLGBTQ Caucus meeting, which were not part of the main programming,according to The Associated Press.

The Democrats took the word GOD out of the Pledge of Allegiance at the Democrat National Convention. At first I thought they made a mistake, but it wasnt. It was done on purpose. Remember Evangelical Christians, and ALL, this is where they are coming from-its done. Vote Nov 3! Trump tweeted.

The Democrats took the word GOD out of the Pledge of Allegiance at the Democrat National Convention. At first I thought they made a mistake, but it wasnt. It was done on purpose. Remember Evangelical Christians, and ALL, this is where they are coming from-its done. Vote Nov 3!

The Trump campaign doubled down, tweeting out a video compiling comments from meeting speakerswho were critical of the government.

Watch: pic.twitter.com/2sSrtbhdgt

The controversy over the Pledge of Allegiance was sparked by a story on the Trump-friendly Christian Broadcasting Networkthatwas then picked up by Fox News.

The tweet led to a flood of posts fact-checking the president, with users posting videos compiling all the times under God was said during the convention.

We need not agree with the @TheDemocrats platform to speak simple truth when @realDonaldTrump lies. Heres the pledge from all four nights of the DNC. https://t.co/sHes8QEp2Y

The Saturday morning tweet represents just the latest attempt by Trump to tap into hot-button issues he hopes will rile up his base and propel his reelection campaign as polls show him trailing former Vice President Joe BidenJoe BidenHouse passes B bill to boost Postal Service Trump seeks to overcome eroding support among women Here are the states where Kanye West is on the ballot MORE, the Democratic Partys 2020 nominee, both nationally and in key swing states.

The president in speeches and online has highlighted various fronts of the culture wars to boost support among critical demographicssuch as evangelicals and suburbanites.

We moved the capital of Israel to Jerusalem. That's for the evangelicals, he said this week.

Trump has also warned that Democratic policies will lead to a spike in crime in suburbs, citing ongoing protests in some cities over systemic racism, amid signals the GOP is shedding support in such areas after the president won the vote in suburbs in 2016.

Why would Suburban Women vote for Biden and the Democrats when Democrat run cities are now rampant with crime (and they arent asking the Federal Government for help) which could easily spread to the suburbs, and they will reconstitute, on steroids, their low income suburbs plan! Trump tweeted Saturday.

Why would Suburban Women vote for Biden and the Democrats when Democrat run cities are now rampant with crime (and they arent asking the Federal Government for help) which could easily spread to the suburbs, and they will reconstitute, on steroids, their low income suburbs plan!

The remarks as of yet have failed to make a sizable dent in Bidens polling lead.

Updated: 12:37 p.m.

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Trump targets Democrats over Pledge of Allegiance | TheHill - The Hill