A series of movies based on sympathizing with indigenous cultures is allegedly set on the backdrop of hypocritical practices, a new lawsuit is claiming.

James Cameron’s billion-dollar “Avatar” franchise has clear messages surrounding protecting native peoples and their environments, but according to a recent legal filing, he has actually been taking advantage of an aboriginal woman over the course of the 16-year lifespan of the films.

‘A hugely lucrative film franchise that presented itself as sympathetic to Indigenous struggles.’

Actress Q’orianka Kilcher said that when she played Pocahontas across from Colin Farrell and Christian Bale in 2005’s “The New World,” director Cameron was so enthralled by her “beauty” that he used her likeness.

Kilcher, who has a native Peruvian background, was allegedly the inspiration for Neytiri, the female lead played by Zoe Saldana.

Face off

As NBC News reported, Kilcher said she had no idea her face was being used until she saw Cameron at an event in 2010 after the first “Avatar” movie was released. She said Cameron invited her to his office and gave her the gift of a sketch drawn and signed by him.

The gift allegedly included a note that said: “Your beauty was my early inspiration for Neytiri. Too bad you were shooting another movie. Next time.”

Kilcher was just 14 years old when she played Pocahontas.

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AaronP/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images/Getty Images

Scan scam?

According to Variety, the legal complaint filed in California said Kilcher’s likeness was later replicated in production sketches, sculpted into 3D models, and laser-scanned into digital models to be distributed to visual effects companies. The lawsuit further alleged that Kilcher’s likeness was used not only in movies but in posters and promotions across the world.

An interview with Cameron from 2024 was also noted in the filing, in which the director stood in front of the “Avatar” sketch and specifically identified Kilcher.

“The source for this was a photograph that was in the L.A. Times as part of the promotion for ‘The New World.’ It’s a young actress named Q’orianka Kilcher, who played Pocahontas in ‘The New World,'” Cameron explained. “So this is actually her lower face. She had a very interesting face, and I wound up meeting her years later, and I gave her a signed print of this.”

Don’t look back

After this, Cameron specifically told the interviewer that Kilcher was not the true inspiration for Neytiri and that Zoe Saldana — an American from New Jersey with a Dominican and Puerto Rican background — was actually who the character looked like.

“Not that she was the inspiration for the character,” Cameron said about Kilcher. “But I just wanted to show how a specific person’s look could come through in the character, and that was important, because then the second we cast Zoe, we started, you know, Neytiri suddenly looked like Zoe. So, you know, the question is how did we get to that point.”

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2005. Gregg DeGuire/WireImage/Getty Images

‘Silently exploiting’

Lawyers for Kilcher said, however, that “what Cameron did was not inspiration; it was extraction.”

“[Cameron] took the unique biometric facial features of a 14-year-old indigenous girl, ran them through an industrial production process, and generated billions of dollars in profit without ever once asking her permission. That is not filmmaking. That is theft,” said Arnold P. Peter of Peter Law Group.

The lawsuit added, “The result was a hugely lucrative film franchise that presented itself as sympathetic to Indigenous struggles, all while silently exploiting a real Indigenous youth behind the scenes.”

Neither Disney nor Lightstorm Entertainment, both of which were named in the lawsuit, responded to Align’s request for comment.

Representatives for Cameron did not respond to requests from outlets like NBC News or People, either.

The “Avatar” trilogy has grossed over $1.8 billion at the box office. Two more movies are planned for 2029 and 2031.

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​Aboriginal, Align, Box office, Exploitation, Indian, Indigenous, Native, Progressive, Indigenous cultures, James cameron, Avatar, Entertainment 

I recently had a minor health issue, and while talking to my doctor, he mentioned that “stress and anxiety” might be contributing to my problem.

Probably a lot of patients at doctors’ offices hear this. Unless you have a broken leg or tennis elbow, doctors can probably link your health problems to “stress and anxiety.”

Did I ever think: ‘The steering wheel of my car has too many buttons. I should probably just kill myself’?

These days, this is probably a reasonable assumption. You’re constipated. You have headaches. Your stomach hurts. Stress and anxiety probably play a part.

When my doctor first suggested I contact the mental health department, I politely declined.

But when my health issue persisted, he mentioned it again, and this time, I agreed to check it out. Who knows? Maybe he’s right.

Head case highway

At my health care provider, it sometimes takes several weeks before you can see someone. But if you have mental health concerns, they get you right on the phone with a mental health specialist.

It seems like health care providers currently put an emphasis on getting everyone signed up for some kind of mental health regimen.

You let a dentist inspect and clean your teeth twice a year. Why not let a mental health expert have a regular look at your brain? And maybe suggest some tweaks and adjustments?

To be or not to be

I spent an hour on the phone with different people as I did my mental health intake. During these phone calls, I was asked repeatedly if I wanted to kill myself.

Had I ever imagined killing myself? Had I ever made plans to kill myself? Did I think about killing myself with a knife? Or a gun? Or by hanging?

Did I ever think: “The steering wheel of my car has too many buttons. I should probably just kill myself”?

I assumed this was done for legal reasons. But it was alarming how thorough the questioning was. And how many times I had to go through it.

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Gilbert Uzan/Getty Images

Brain candy

And then came the moment of truth: I was asked which kind of mental health care I sought. There were two choices: 1) therapy, or 2) drugs.

They didn’t say it quite so bluntly. It was more like “counseling” or “psychiatry.” And of course, my primary care doctor would be consulted as well.

But ultimately, this was my personal choice. Did I want to talk? Or did I want to take drugs?

I opted for talking since I don’t know anything about the drugs and was told as a child to “just say no” to them.

No, I played it safe and chose “therapy.” An appointment was made for me right away — with a therapist who had a Vietnamese name, which I think is female. (But I’m not sure.)

Positive feelings

By now, I felt good about this plan. I felt a sense of relief just admitting to the intake people that I might have a problem with stress and anxiety.

Of course, I had a problem with it. I’m an intelligent person living in a once great country that seems determined to ruin itself.

Forget about me committing suicide. My whole country was committing suicide! Why wouldn’t I be a little stressed and anxious?

The great therapy problem

Then, I thought about my new female Vietnamese therapist who I’d be visiting next week. What would I talk to her about?

That’s when I remembered the great therapy problem, which is that 90% of therapists are woke. The whole field is woke. Sitting around, discussing how you feel about things — instead of acknowledging how things actually are — is essentially the basis of all wokeness.

The publication’s own Josh Slocum has talked about this. What if you’re a Republican and your therapist is a democratic socialist? To that therapist, everything you think or say might be hate speech. If you were outside the office, this person would want you arrested.

OK, I thought. I’ll just be careful what I say. And make sure to avoid certain subjects. We’ll probably be talking about “therapy topics” anyway. Like my family. My upbringing. What parts of my life cause my anxiety.

This way to the rubber room

BUT ALL OF THOSE THINGS ARE POLITICAL!!! At least nowadays they are. My family? Split by politics. My upbringing? I grew up conservative, and now I’m stuck in a blue city. The cause of my stress and anxiety? The insanity of present-day society!

I’m trying to visualize my first session with the Vietnamese therapist. She’ll probably be very young. Everyone at my health care facility looks to me like they’re in high school.

What on earth am I going to say to this woman? I have no idea. This might be a bad idea. Maybe I should have just gone for the drugs. Drugs don’t care who you voted for.

​Drugs, Lifestyle, Men’s health, Mental health, Stress and anxiety, Therapy, Blake’s progress 

Recent experiments in quantum physics suggest time travel exists — but it’s not what we see in the movies with flashing machines and meet-ups with past or future people.

In reality, what scientists found is that at the most micro levels, the laws of physics don’t really care if time goes forward or backward. Some processes look the same either way.

Glenn Beck explains it like this: “Time is not a straight railroad track marching only forward. It’s like a long ribbon — flexible. And under the right conditions, at the tiniest invisible scales, the ribbon can twist and loop back so the end connects with the beginning.”

How this plays out practically is complex. While humans cannot send their physical bodies back in time, they may be able to send “information” backward.

Glenn gives the following hypothetical: A concerned father gets a gut feeling that something bad is about to happen to his daughter. He listens to it, warns, and she makes a different, safer decision.

What research is suggesting is that that gut feeling might actually be a quiet “nudge” or whisper of information sent back from the dad’s future self — who has already seen (or lived through) the near-disaster with his daughter. The future dad desperately wants to protect her, so he slips a hidden message backward in time. It arrives as intuition or a “something feels off” feeling. She acts on it, stays safe, and the loop stays consistent.

But even though this research is new, it reveals something Christians already know, Glenn says: God, being altogether outside of time, speaks to us through promptings and nudges.

“A godwink — that’s what they’re saying can be sent back through time,” he says.

“Something feels off before a bad decision is made or an unexplained urge to call a loved one right when they need it, … sudden clarity that steers us away from trouble” — these common scenarios that quantum scientists are calling “tiny echoes of information traveling backward” are really just proof that God and His connection to (and affection for) His people are real.

“Science dismisses all of this stuff. Or they’ll say, ‘Well, that is your subconscious mind rapidly processing clues,”’ Glenn says.

But what if both are simultaneously true?

“This new thinking about time loops opens a pretty wondrous door,” Glenn says. “What if the promptings, what if these godwinks are all, get this, part of the God-designed cosmos itself and our entangled connection to it?”

“Science doesn’t describe it this way, but science also doesn’t understand if God exists, then he’s the greatest scientist of all time,” he continues. “To me, it’s only logical the entire universe has a grand design … and if there is a grand design, then there has to be a designer.”

To hear more, watch the video above.

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​Blaze media, Blazetv, Glenn beck, Godwink, Laws of physics, Quantum physics, Quantum physics experiments, The glenn beck program, Time travel 

Democrats have an extremism problem, and it’s not clear how they can solve it.

After yet another gunman allegedly tried to assassinate President Donald Trump at last weekend’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner, liberals nobly renewed their commitment to moderation. “We need LESS violence in America, not MORE violence in America,” wrote CNN’s Van Jones.

Quite right. But the American left has not exactly put itself in a good position to calm down its radicals.

You can court bloodthirsty Marxists, or you can build a wide-ranging coalition of the sensible, but it’s hard to do both at once.

Consider: In April, the New York Times hosted superstar streamer Hasan Piker for a podcast with writer Jia Tolentino. Piker has fantasized on camera about murdering landlords and once told his viewers, “If you cared about Medicare fraud or Medicaid fraud, you would kill [Florida Republican Sen.] Rick Scott.”

He joked with Tolentino about “micro-looting” — that is, shoplifting — and equivocated about whether UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson deserved to die at the hands of his alleged murderer, Luigi Mangione.

Thompson “was engaging in a tremendous amount of social murder,” said Piker, citing Friedrich Engels to suggest that the killing was retribution for “systematized forms of violence” in the health care system.

Piker is just one online celebrity, but the problem is that he represents a significant portion of the base that Democrats must now cater to. One survey found that 41% of young voters, and 22% of Democrats, considered Mangione’s actions “acceptable.”

This will make it hard for mainstream politicians to tack toward the center without alienating their most youthful, energetic supporters — especially since many Democrats have been enthusiastically courting those supporters since 2020.

That June, following the death of George Floyd, then-California Democratic Sen. Kamala Harris solicited donations to cover bail for rioters and looters in Minnesota. Sen. Chuck Schumer (N.Y.), Rep. Nancy Pelosi (Calif.), and other congressional Democrats donned Ghanaian Kente-cloth stoles and knelt in a display of solidarity with protesters as they proposed unworkable and dangerous police reform.

For a good long while, it was not only encouraged but almost compulsory on the left to side with criminals in the name of social justice. None of this was a secret; all of it was put proudly on record.

Not only that, but to dissent from the maximalist position in these matters, even slightly, was portrayed as a ghastly betrayal that could only be motivated by rank prejudice. “All this anti-woke stuff is just anti-black. Period. Full stop,” said California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) just last year.

If that’s the case, then it’s hard to see how 2028 presidential hopefuls like Newsom can moderate in any meaningful way without falling into the jaws of their own logic: Either you’re woke, or you’re a cretin. That is not the sort of stance one can gracefully adjust or walk back without considerable awkwardness.

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Blaze Media illustration

And so, as William Voegeli observed in the Claremont Review of Books, “Even when moderates do emerge from the Democrats’ process of selecting nominees, a correlation of forces within the party combines with shrewd politicians’ flexibility of conviction to accelerate the leftward shift.”

The Hasan-ization of the party, in other words, may be hard to resist. Try as they might to avoid it, Democrats might be forced to swallow the Piker Pill.

For instance, last November, Ezra Klein of the New York Times was lamenting that “the Democratic Party has made room on its left and closed down on its right,” suggesting a more balanced approach would be effective against the polarizing force of Trumpism.

But by April of this year, Klein was making qualified excuses for Piker in a column initially headlined “Hasan Piker is not the enemy.” The Tolentino podcast followed shortly thereafter.

You can court bloodthirsty Marxists, or you can build a wide-ranging coalition of the sensible, but it’s hard to do both at once.

Democrats might like to recast themselves as the cool-headed alternatives to Trump’s reckless villainy. But all the momentum and media clout are with Piker — and with young celebrity politicians who feel comfortable making high-profile public appearances alongside him, like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D).

Regrettably, this could be what peak Democrat performance looks like from now on: callow, clickable, and aggressively extreme on social and economic issues.

That’s not obviously a winning brand. But it could be the only viable one going. If so, then Democrats don’t actually get to choose whether to court the far left or recast themselves as sensible centrists. They already chose back in 2020, and they chose peak woke.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in the American Mind.

​Brian thompson, Democrats, Ezra klein, Luigi mangione, Rick scott, Shoplifting, Trumpism, Unitedhealthcare ceo, White house correspondents dinner, Zohran mamdani, Young voters, Hasan piker, Radical left, Opinion & analysis