Le Journal

Harry Styles is returning to the stage for the first time in four years as he announced a six-night London residency at Wembley Arena.

The star will now be facing off against Leonardo DiCaprio, Ethan Hawke, Michael B. Jordan, and Wagner Moura for the Best Actor award.

A major traffic nightmare was happening due to a police situation on I-80 westbound in Hercules; a multi-county chase ended in a police shooting Wednesday in San Jose; and SF's Compton's Cafeteria building goes before the Historic Preservation Commission.

LGBTQ+ rights in Venezuela have suffered under an oppressive government and widespread poverty.

For MAGA Americans, the only things more certain than death (possibly from measles) or taxes (effectively higher, thanks to Trump’s tariffs) is the inevitability of being taken advantage of by a vast constellation of grifters who have learned to exploit the country’s yawning partisan divide. Call it the Black Rifle Coffee effect, perhaps: Since 2014, those military fetishizing bean grinders have stood out as a model for creating a right-wing, culture war-fanning pander brand in the Trump era, although it apparently hasn’t actually helped them reach profitability, more than a decade in. Still, Black Rifle Coffee has at least one thing going for it that many of the other MAGA pander brands can’t match: They seem to actually send customers the products they order. One would hope this would be the bare minimum of business professionalism that could be expected from companies hawking products like conservative beer or MAGA bourbon: You order a product, and they send you that (probably crappy) product. This is technically, you know, “how business is done” and all. We’re talking day one business school stuff. But if you take a glance at the user feedback for these types of brands, the thing that immediately stands out is that the companies in question quite often seem to fail to hold up their “sending you the stuff you ordered” side of the bargain. Turns out the most profitable business plan is to just accept orders, and then never fill a lot of those orders, relying on your marks customers to be so culturally devoted to your stated MAGA cause that they’ll simply accept being ripped off rather than fight back in any real way. This is a tale as old as time, although one that has vastly expanded in the era of the Donald Trump presidencies. A flagbearer of the form has of course been the somehow still-in-business Conservative Dad’s Ultra Right Beer, which I first gawked at in disbelief back in 2023 when founder Seth Weathers began selling six-packs of not-yet-brewed beer that ultimately cost $35 to have shipped to your door. Weathers truly filled the role of the consummate MAGA charlatan and scam artist, having gone from proclaiming on Twitter that beer “increases estrogen and decreases testosterone” to beginning to hawk pre-sales of Ultra Right Beer less than two weeks later in an attempt to take advantage of Bud Light’s conservative backlash after they dared to partner with a transgender influencer for a single social media post. At the time, we spent weeks wondering who was even contract-brewing the stuff for Ultra Right Beer, before it was revealed as a Georgia brewery named Big Kettle Brewing … that is now listed as “permanently closed.” Lord only knows who is supplying the cheap lager these days, but Ultra Right Beer has since moved on to hawking distilled spirits in the form of “Tee Kee La,” among other things. One thing that hasn’t changed? That would be the constant customer complaints that no one is sending them the products they paid for, or responding to “What the fuck are you guys doing?” email queries. --> What’s worse: Waiting more than a year for a beer order to be filled, or ordering a case of tequila, only for them to send you two bottles before ceasing all communication? Both of those complaints are directly from the sales page for Ultra Right Beer, and there are plenty more just like them. I’m particularly partial to the post of another guy who complains he’s also been waiting for more than a year for a case of beer and two tee shirts to arrive, but still gives the brand five stars anyway because they did him the solid of sending the tequila he paid for. Sure, they also stole another $60 or so from him, but that’s not worth downgrading to only four stars, is it? I’m sure that beer is coming any day now. So what if the company is rocking an “F” rating from the Better Business Bureau? Here’s the thing about grifters in this mold: They truly don’t care who they’re stealing from, and the ideology they’re wearing ends…