As I watched Jon M. Chu’s “Wicked: For Good” last week, I kept thinking about another, very different filmmaker: David Lynch.

Specifically, the Lynch that emerges from Alexandre Philippe’s excellent 2022 documentary “Lynch/Oz,” wherein we discover just how deeply the infamously surreal filmmaker was influenced by one of cinema’s sweetest fantasy films: the original “Wizard of Oz.”

In the era of #WitchTok … a story like ‘Wicked’ has built-in appeal.

Philippe’s film includes footage from a 2001 Q and A in which Lynch confirms the extent of his devotion: “There is not a day that goes by that I don’t think about ‘The Wizard of Oz.'”

The logic of fairyland

And that shouldn’t be surprising given how much it shows up in his work. From Glinda the Good Witch making an appearance in “Wild at Heart,” to the hazy, dreamlike depiction of suburbia in “Blue Velvet,” his films exist in a dual state between the realm of fairyland and the underworld.

Indeed, Lynch doesn’t reject either. In proper Buddhist fashion, these two forces exist in balance, equally potent and true. There is both good and evil in his world. Neither negates the other’s existence. And when darkness spills over into the light, it may be tragic, but it is also just another part of the world. Like Dorothy, his protagonists find themselves walking deeper into unknown territory. The protagonists of his films truly “aren’t in Kansas anymore.”

“The Wizard of Oz” is potent because it captures the logic of fairyland better than almost any film ever made. Channeling the fairy stories of J.R.R. Tolkien, Lewis Carroll, and George MacDonald, it transports the mind to a realm that is more real than real, where even the most dire intrusion of evil can be set right according to simple moral rules.

As G.K. Chesterton famously puts it:

Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.

Wicked good

“Wicked” and its new sequel reject this comforting clarity for something altogether more “adult” and ambiguous. Instead of presenting good and evil as objective realities that can be discerned and defeated, the films show how political authorities manipulate those labels to scapegoat some and exalt others.

They do so by swapping the original’s heroes and villains. The Wonderful Wizard is a cruel tyrant. Glinda is foppish and self-obsessed. Dorothy is the unwitting tool of a corrupt regime. And Elphaba — the so-called Wicked Witch — is reimagined as a sympathetic underdog with a tragic backstory, a manufactured villain invented to keep Oz unified in ire and hatred.

Elphaba exudes a whiff of Milton’s Lucifer — an eternal rebel in a tragic quest to upend the moral order. But unlike “Paradise Lost,” “Wicked” presents rebellion against its all-powerful father figure not as a tragic self-deception, but as a justified response to systemic cruelty.

Witch way?

“Wicked: For Good” takes the ideas of its predecessor even further than mere rebellion. If “Wicked: Part One” is about awakening to the world’s realities and becoming radicalized by them, “Wicked: For Good” is about the cost of selling out — the temptation to compromise with a corrupt system and the soul-crushing despair that follows.

This is where the irony of the film’s title, “Wicked: For Good” comes in. Once a person sees the world for what it truly is, they can’t go back without compromising themselves. They’ve “changed for good.” They’ve awakened and can’t return to sleep.

It’s worth considering why the “Wicked” franchise is so wildly popular. Gregory Maguire’s original 1995 novel has sold 5 million copies. The 2003 stage show it inspired won three Tony Awards and recently became the fourth longest-running Broadway musical ever. And the first film grossed $759 million last winter, with the sequel poised to make even more money.

Perhaps it is no coincidence that this outsize success comes at a time when Wicca and paganism have grown into mainstream cultural forces. In the era of #WitchTok, in which self-proclaimed witches hex politicians and garner billions of views on social media, a story like “Wicked” has built-in appeal. It offers glamorous spell-casting and a romantic tale of resistance to authority.

RELATED: ‘Etsy witches’ reportedly placed curses on Charlie Kirk days before assassination

Photo by The Salt Lake Tribune / Contributor via Getty Images

A bittersweet moral

The temptation of witchcraft is one that always hovers over our enlightened and rationalistic society. Particularly for young women, witchcraft offers a specific form of autonomy and power — over body, spirit, and fate — that patriarchal societies often deny. Many view witchcraft as progressive and empowering; “witchy vibes” have become a badge of identity.

Thus the unsettling imagery of Robert Eggers’ 2015 film “The Witch” comes into focus: A satanic coven kidnaps and kills a Puritan baby, seduces a teenage girl, and gains the power to unsubtly “defy gravity” through a deal with the devil.

“Wicked” is all about this power to transcend. Even as its protagonist grows despairing in the second film and abandons her political quest for the freedom of the wastelands, the film presupposes that it is better to resist or escape a corrupt system than submit to it.

Ultimately, the two films leave their audience with a bittersweet moral: Society is dependent on scapegoats. The Platonic noble lie upon which all societies rest cannot be escaped — but it can be redirected. A new civic myth can be founded that avoids sacrificing the vulnerable and overthrows the demagogues atop Mount Olympus. And the witches play the central role in overturning the world of Oz. Their rebellion sets it free.

But because the films blur the clear, objective distinction between good and evil — even while acknowledging that real evil exists — the characters in “Wicked” often drift in moral grayness, defining themselves mainly in relation to power. The world becomes overbearing, radicalizing, and morally unstable.

Sad truth

This is far afield from the vision of Oz presented in the 1939 film, the one David Lynch venerated as vital to his understanding of the world. But it reflects how modern storytellers often grapple with Oz. Almost every sequel or spin-off struggles to recapture the sincerity of the original. The 1985 sequel “Return to Oz” reimagined the land with a dark-fantasy twist. 2013’s “Oz the Great and Powerful” comes closest to the original tone but centers on fraudulence and trickery.

“Wicked,” too, falls in line with the modern tendency to subvert and complicate traditional stories of good versus evil. “Frozen,” “The Shape of Water,” “Game of Thrones,” and “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” all explore morally conflicted worlds where bravery is futile or where Miltonian rebellion is celebrated.

Of course, seeing the stories of our childhood with a jaundiced adult eye can be quite entertaining; it’s perfectly understandable why even those not in covens love these films. They are well-made, well-performed, and especially irresistible to former theater kids (I am one).

Their popularity isn’t inherently bad either. They are perfectly fine in isolation. It is only when we contrast them with the clarity and beauty of the original — and place them within the context of our society — that a sad truth emerges: Finding fairyland is hard. Most of us prefer to live in the Lynchian underworld.

​Entertainment, Culture, Lifestyle, Witches, Witchtok, Paganism, Wicked, Wicked: for good, David lynch, Movies, Movie review, Review 

Let me explain what the New York Times just did to the Washington Post over Thanksgiving weekend. The Post tried to turn Secretary of War Pete Hegseth into a war criminal for blowing up maritime drug runners. But the attack didn’t gain traction — partly because Republicans are getting better at starving these narratives of oxygen.

So the New York Times read the room, climbed to the top rope, and elbow-dropped its own ideological ally to prevent serious blowback against the propaganda press. The Times wasn’t defending truth. It was defending future lies. The ability to run effective psyops in 2026 was on the line. And when the Times pretends to be an ombudsman, the calculus is always political.

You think sweating out one red-state special election against a hellish candidate who despises her own constituents is bad? Wait until November 2026.

Don’t kid yourself: No ethical journalism happened here. The Times simply concluded, “We will sell no psyop before its time.” They weren’t going to let DataRepublican or Steve Baker rack up millions of views muckraking the Post’s latest collapsing narrative. So the Gray Lady hit the panic button and aborted the mission.

What should we learn from this? The temptation on the right will be to ask why the corporate left-wing press broke ranks on the eve of maybe flipping a Tennessee district Donald Trump won by 22 points to a Democrat who is on tape saying she hates her own city and its constituents.

But that question misses a foundational truth I repeat constantly on my show: Worldview is destiny. And outside the biblical worldview, every worldview boils down to a will to power.

With that hermeneutic, you can see exactly what the Times leaders are doing. They’re thinking far past Tennessee. They’re signaling that they have an entire arsenal of new lies ready to deploy to steal the midterms. It’s that Don Draper meme — hands outstretched, smirking: “Lies … but better!”

Remember: The godless do not have limiting principles. Why wouldn’t they lie if lying helps them capture power? It doesn’t matter whether it’s godless atheism, godless occultism, or godless Islam. Where the one true God is absent, the father of lies dances to a raucous tune. Hell has denominations, too.

But in the biblical worldview, the hallmark of everything is repentance, redemption, and restoration. You know a tree by its fruit. So if you want to discern whether something reflects the kingdom of God or the spirit of the age, the first question isn’t “do I like this person?” or “is this how I would do it?” The first question is: Does it produce repentance, redemption, and restoration?

Look at the Charlie Kirk memorial. Several people spoke whom no one expected to have deep, serious thoughts about Christianity. Yet the event unmistakably pointed people toward repentance, redemption, and restoration. That’s the kingdom of God. Don’t focus on the proxy on the outside. Focus on what God is doing on the inside. That’s the through-line from Genesis to Revelation.

The spirit of the age rejects all of it. It is will to power, front to back. Which means you cannot analyze the opposition the same way you analyze our side.

RELATED: How GOP leadership can turn a midterm gift into a total disaster

rudall30 via iStock/Getty Images

Sure, Republicans won that Tennessee special election by nine points. But they lost the Nashville precinct — the same place the Democrat said she hated. That’s how cults behave. And that’s why political messaging on the right must account for the environment normie voters live in — the tension between two very different kingdoms vying for their attention.

The normie voter either doesn’t know about those kingdoms or doesn’t care. He just wants what he wants: an economy that boosts his bottom line and border and anti-crime policies that keep him safe. Voters want elections to be about them.

That’s why Hegseth taking out foreign drug traffickers instinctively sounds like a pretty good deal — something even the New York Times could grasp, if only for tactical reasons.

So here’s the math going forward: Leftists can lie all they want — and sometimes lie badly, as we just saw — but the GOP will still lose if it fails to fix the economy and security.

You think sweating out one red-state special election against a hellish candidate who despises her own constituents is bad? Wait until November 2026. With better lies behind her and normie voters feeling betrayed by lukewarm people in power, she — and people like her — will absolutely win.

​Opinion & analysis, 2026 midterms, Pete hegseth, Tennessee special election, Don draper, Biblical worldview, Spirit of the age, New york times, Washington post, Media bias, Lies, Propaganda, Donald trump 

Muneeb and Sohaib Akhter, a pair of convicted hackers based in Alexandria, Virginia, were arrested on Wednesday over an alleged conspiracy to destroy government databases and other crimes.

After doing prison time for wire fraud and conspiring to hack into the U.S. State Department, the Akhter twins, one of whom previously served as a cybersecurity contractor with the State Department, managed to secure jobs as federal contractors — working as engineers for Opexus.

‘Their actions jeopardized the security of government systems.’

Opexus, a company that handles sensitive data for most federal agencies and has received over $50 million in contracts from various agencies over the past decade, determined earlier this year that it had been compromised in February by two employees.

A Bloomberg investigation revealed in May that after one of the agencies with which Opexus was working, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, flagged the twins as possible threats on account of their criminal records, the duo were fired on Feb. 18.

The company later discovered that while being fired and immediately afterward, the twins allegedly accessed sensitive documents and compromised or scrubbed dozens of databases, including those containing data from the General Services Administration and the Internal Revenue Service.

The FBI, FDIC Office of Inspector General, Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General, and Homeland Security Investigations investigated the case.

The brothers were indicted on Nov. 13 for allegedly working to harm Opexus and its U.S. government clients “by accessing computers without authorization, issuing commands to prevent others from modifying the databases before deletion, deleting databases, stealing information, and destroying evidence of their unlawful activities,” the DOJ said in a release.

RELATED: Could hackers target your car’s tires?

Muneeb Akhter. Photo by Evelyn Hockstein/Washington Post via Getty Images

According to the indictment, Muneeb Akhter allegedly deleted approximately 96 databases storing U.S. government information — including databases containing records and documents related to Freedom of Information Act matters as well as sensitive federal investigative files.

Muneeb Akhter is also accused of asking an artificial intelligence tool how they could cover their tracks after deleting a DHS database.

After he got fired from Opexus, Muneeb Akhter allegedly obtained data from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and is accused further of stealing copies of IRS information including federal tax information and other identifying information for at least 450 individuals.

Opexus did not respond to a request for comment from Blaze News.

“These defendants abused their positions as federal contractors to attack government databases and steal sensitive government information,” said Matthew Galeotti, acting assistant attorney general at the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division, in a statement. “Their actions jeopardized the security of government systems and disrupted agencies’ ability to serve the American people.”

Muneeb Akhter has been charged with conspiracy to commit computer fraud and to destroy records, two counts of computer fraud, theft of federal records, and two counts of aggravated identity theft. His twin, Sohaib Akhter, was charged with conspiracy to commit computer fraud and to destroy records and computer fraud.

While Sohaib Akhter faces a maximum penalty of six years in prison, Muneeb Akhter faces a mandatory minimum penalty of two years of prison time for each aggravated identity theft count and a maximum penalty of 45 years for the other charges.

The duo pleaded guilty in 2015 to a different set of crimes.

Muneeb Akhter hacked into the website of a cosmetics company and stole thousands of customers’ credit card and personal information. He and his brother used the stolen data to pay for flights, hotel stays, various goods, and attendance at professional conferences. Muneeb Akhter proceeded to hand off the stolen data to a “dark net” operator who cut him in on the profits from the sales.

The other brother, meanwhile, used his contract position at the State Department in 2015 to steal personally identifiable data belonging to various people including co-workers and a federal law enforcement agent who was investigating him.

According to the Justice Department, Sohaib Akhter later hatched a scheme to ensure perpetual access to various State Department systems and, with the help of his twin, attempted to install an electronic collection device inside a State Department office, which would have enabled the hackers to remotely steal federal data.

Years earlier, Muneeb Akhter hacked into a Maryland-based private data aggregation company that he was performing contract work for, giving his brother access to a database of federal contract information to give their technology company an upper hand when bidding for contracts and clients.

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​Muneeb akhter, Sohaaib akhter, Diversity is our strength, Indian, State department, Hack, Hacker, Cybersecurity, Opexus, Department of homeland security, Fraud, Government database, Politics