TR.BIZ: 7.23.2026

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 a great political reckoning, why the new Avengers will get reshoot again, drag queens who don’t do drag anymore, and a TikTok woman’s curious Spongebobical lexicon.

In Barcelona tomorrow evening? Come out and say hello! For the local launch of Culture Slop, we’re doing a talk/drinks/hang at Terranova. More info here!

If you read my Q1 or Q2 Report™, you’ll recall a key discussion in the findings are about realizations that things must change. That’s a somewhat evergreen statement, but something is shifting. In April, I put it like this —

We’re on the edge of something, or at least there is a hope that the wind is pushing us somewhere else. A new operating system? A new way to think? A new direction? As if Sleeping Beauty starting to blink her eyes after decades of forced sleep, we’re recognizing it’s time for a new mindset to rise — and this is the moment before such a radical shift happens.

By July, this feeling evolved to —

This moment builds on 2025’s Gen Z revolutions worldwide and the Target DEI boycott, which build on wider movements like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter: whereas those movements were wider in the 2010s, the 2020s has been about increasingly specific and localized dissent. People are noticing that the big problems of something like AI or healthcare injustices aren’t happening in far off places or to distant bodies but in neighbors, at scale, which is an empowering realization.

Now, as we face shitty lettuce after months of extreme heat and political domestic terrorism, a realization that the present is an increasingly terrible evolution of bad choices is being had — and we’re getting tired of it. The refrain for the past week has been some variation of this, as people lament the combination of the vegetables being unsafe as the air is unsafe. Like the war in Iran teaching us about energy supply chains months ago, we’re now being forced to understand food supply chains and the mechanics of forest fires. This is why people are sneaking in political news into show credits on TikTok as we’ve reached an apoplectic — not apathetic — helplessness, an anger at attempted wool pulled as the excuses yield greater and greater assolhery, as water wars emerge thanks due to data centers and drought, a tired-of-winning feeling setting in because we are clearly not. No one anywhere is! Ironically — or rightfully — this feeling of a shift isn’t just happening by the dissenters: those on the right are feeling the heat too. “They’re the ones in despair, fearful and losing hope,” Sally Quinn wrote in a recent New York Times op-ed, of MAGA Republicans in Washington realizing the check they wrote will be cashed soon. “Even the true believers are questioning the MAGA theology.” A judge in Hawaii has vocally dissented that the Supreme Court is dismantling democratic safeguards. The mother on the often viral cross-party podcast The Necessary Conversation is starting to become deprogrammed! The majority of people across parties are linking the current heat with climate change. Something is shifting, the blowing of butterfly wings from something as recent as January’s ICE murders to something a bit further removed like Occupy Wall Street to something even further removed like Marxism. This could be why the Democrats are scrambling, as radical realizations will require a radical response, hence the DSA picking up wins. This is an angry moment, one that started a decade ago that continues to stew. Something will change, due to Barbault’s basket or other forces known unknown to us. Keep an eye on what’s steeping because we’re deep in a brew and we’re far from the finish.

Wanna read more about things like the above? Download the latest Q2 Report™ here. If you have a paid subscription, DM for your free copy.

To the point of DSA winners! From the New York City mayor’s very viral statement on the Israeli president visiting his city in the coming weeks —

Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal, the architect of a horific genocide against the Palestinian people. He is responsible for the killing of more than 73,000 people, for the maiming of tens of thousands of children as those who survive undergo amputation without anesthesia. For the targeting of neonatal hospitals and maternity care centers, denying newborns even the chance to live. For the countless people he starved, as he blocked food and humanitarian aid from reaching them. For the gunning down of hundreds of aid workers and journalists…The list goes on and on all as we, as Americans, pay for the bombs that do the killing.

An incredible statement, which Trump pushed back on given Zohran’s calls for his arrest. Talk about leadership — biblical, even! Talk about reckonings.