TR.BIZ: 3.10.2026
From Timothee Chalamet's home drama to Donna Kelce's home renovation, this is your early-mid-week check-in ✨
Welcome to The Trend Report: Business Edition™, a midweek look at top stories, trends, and more of what’s happening online and off by Kyle of The Trend Report™. Today, we’re talking the war, propaganda posting, Timothee Chalamet’s war with opera, the rise in crow posting, and Donna Kelce’s viral home reno.
🏛️ Politicultural: World War VIIIbes
If you are reading this, you know how bad the world is right now. Like real bad, like a we-are-fucking-under-attack style beat that has cast a cloud over the world as conservative, religious men worldwide pee on each other with bombs, leaving many, many people and environments in ruin. The biggest fucked up breakout was the hallucinatory footage of toxic rain in Tehran following strikes on oil and gas facilities, a crime against humanity and against the planet that feels like an unfathomable low of people being alive. But is that just because we’re seeing footage of it in real time? Or because it really is “that bad”? The answer is irrelevant because anyone who has seen the footage can vouch for how awful it is to behold: a future where everywhere is Gaza, where every city and every person is a potential target. As if these horrors aren’t enough, there are big ways (Lebanon’s being attacked too?) and small ways (How much will gas cost?) ways this will seep into everyday life, all of which ratchets up the potential for the long awaited cross-sectional downfall. This naturally is amping up fears of nuclear wars, a fitting conclusion to this decade of unending torture. So. Why am I bringing any of this up? If you know this already? A few reasons —
This is our contemporary context, meaning any “work” environment or “cultural” environment — really much of anything in our lives — is floating above this. Not that things will be harder to break through but being meaningful in a deeply anti-human time will be hard. You will not breakthrough how you think so lower the bar. Also? Have some compassion for people (workers, audiences, friends, family, etc.) because all this is a lot. Now is a time for quiet.
I am not going to talk about this anymore, or at least I will share updates but I’m going to do my best to simply vomit up the-worse-things-I-saw because you likely saw them too. Or you don’t need to see them! I’m going to aim to answer the question of “War over?” with a simple yes or no week to week. No one needs my opinion on this. Follow Drop Site News or Zeteo for that. Not that I won’t deliver you the same old same Trend Report™ dispatches, but I’m going to challenge myself to reach out from the obvious, to hone culture mapping skills outside of such subjects. It will be hard but I will do it for you all!!
Take care of yourself and your community, looping both of these things together. This is a subject that came up in almost every Change Report™ story (RIP to that format.) but let this be yet another reminder to invest in those around you. How can you make your block or neighborhood or city or country resilient against “this”? How can you push back and coalition build? How can you show compassion? How can you avoid the bait of taking knives out? The heat is on high. Try to bring it down some, for your own wellbeing but also the world: be the change.
Now, back to regular scheduled programming. Be safe out there 🦋
💊 Hell Care: Paper straws to fight war
In the fog of war, a style of civilian post is emerging: people sharing their anger at having to use paper straws as governments commit ecocide, ruining the not just local communities but the planet in increasingly bold ways. I’ve talked about the dismantling of the climate change movement before but witnessing such disasters in Iran (among others) makes the known connections between military action and mass pollution more apparent — and a correct conclusion. This presents a huge opportunity that has always existed but hasn’t quite coalesced in recent years (at least not in the American imagination): anti-war and anti-fascism movements being intertwined and thrust forward by pro-environmental intersectionality. This is exactly why Greta Thunberg has pivoted! When we look at bombs and data centers, when we look at how Claude enables war, you see how these two terrible things are deeply anti-planet — and exactly why normies are starting to see that too. People just need to get angry enough to do something, which they will. As the tecno-war continues — and continues to be tied to environmental harm — we can expect this movement to grow into what may go beyond an Occupy Wall Street style push.
📲 Tech Talk: What is and what isn’t propaganda these days?
Given the above war vibes, there is so much talk of what is and what isn’t propaganda, that certain styles of posting are indeed state sponsored messages instead of normal peoples whose lives have taken political turns when expressed as “posts.” Technically, most are not-propaganda — and technically a lot are! I offer you a taxonomy of these types of posts, to hopefully help you understand where you fit in them so you can avoid the proppa P allegations.
Inadvertently Political Post-Throughs: A series of posts by military personnel sharing their lives have been popping given war time mobilization. Are posts like this and this and this propaganda? Not really as many are just people who have politically adjacent jobs posting through the politically charged situations they’re in. These are akin to the Staples Baddie but with people in the armed forces. However…
Jobbers: Like the Staples Baddie, there comes a point where one posts about their work so much that the apparatus of the company — be it Staples or Pete Hegseth’s Department of War — acknowledges and amplifies your work. That is then a form of propaganda more akin to a brand sponsored post. I wouldn’t call this technical propaganda but also: it technically is.
Content With An Agenda: Very similar to the Jobbers are people who have very obvious or subtle political affiliations. Joe Rogan, Aaron Parnas, Jake Paul, Hasan: these are people and posters with an agenda, which may be firm at points (A literal appearance at a state sponsored event.) or may be very loose (Talking about culture through a cultural lens.). While technically “entertainment,” this is a form of propaganda that puts powerful posters into political spaces without context or understanding of implications. Just ask Andrew “I didn’t vote for this!” Schulz!
Ideological Spon-Con: Some of the posters are literally coming through the state though, which has varying degrees of mattering, which can make it more or less propaganda. Some examples —
Kai Trump very much is propaganda, sponsored posts that are directly tied to the White House.
Steven Miller’s wife and her podcast are very much an extension of the state, a direct line in and out of the agenda.
Erika Kirk is both on the outside and inside. She is on the razor’s edge, removed by a step, making her technically propaganda but technically not.
All those people from that viral Wired “Democrat dark money” story? They’re like Erika, in that they’re in and out, technically tied and technically not.
Jack Schlossberg is a former someone who was more distant from all of this only to have gotten fully in the machine, making him technically not propaganda but someone posting to become tied to the machine.
Those cute nuns with a podcast? Very obviously propaganda, no matter how cute they are.
Political Clout Chasers: Nick Shirley and Nicki Minaj? They are not propaganda but political clout chasers, using political attention to get ahead. We could put Clavicular here and even the Rob Rausch here too.
State Sponsored Messaging — or DigiProp: Any post like this or this from an entity like the White House or Israel is direct propaganda. Obviously! But by political parties that aren’t in power? Technically yes and technically no, given they “don’t have the numbers” to enact ideology (or at least I’d say: the Democrats are so bad at social and messaging that nothing they do qualifies as propaganda). But AOC? She leans more technically yes than no at this point, in a position closely occupied by Gavin Newsom.
🤩 Hollyweird Insider: Timothee’s everyman theater
