The Nike sportswear company has lost so much value that it’s getting tossed out of the S&P 100 stock index charting the top 100 U.S. businesses.

The company was mocked by many on the right over its marketing campaigns featuring controversial quarterback Colin Kaepernick and transgender activist Dylan McDermott.

‘NIKE filled its executive positions with feminists and woke ideology advocates. … Companies that embrace femicentric ideologies and DEI buls**t will always suffer.’

Nike has lost about $200 billion in market valuation since reaching its highest value in 2021.

The company’s CEO, Elliott Hill, said that he was confident the company could reverse the downturn in a recent earnings call with investors.

“Overall, the results aren’t there yet,” he admitted.

Many on the right called for a boycott of Nike products after the company signed up Kaepernick to promote the brand while he continued to bash police and support the “Black Lives Matter” movement.

The company also partnered with McDermott to push the transgender agenda.

“Well, Nike sure owned the floor. And busted right through it. Get woke, go broke,” wrote Spencer Pratt about one of the company’s ads.

“Bye Bye Nike. Your WOKE arrogance caught up with you and you will not be missed. Please share the hard learned message with your NFL, NBA, MLB brethren and WNBA sisters,” responded Rep. Burgess Owens (R-Utah).

“NIKE filled its executive positions with feminists and woke ideology advocates. Its stock has been plummeting. Companies that embrace femicentric ideologies and DEI buls**t will always suffer,” said another critic on X.

“I’ve said many times: I will never buy another Nike product again in my lifetime after they shoved that anti-American a**hole Kaepernick in our faces,” said one detractor.

Nike had been included among the S&P 100 for 18 years.

RELATED: Mike Rowe speaks out about Nike’s Kaepernick ad, and it’s powerful

Others pin Nike’s implosion on the shift in sales strategy to sell shoes directly to the consumer. That campaign was orchestrated by the previous CEO, John Donahoe.

The company’s stock has slid 53% since Hill took over after Donahoe.

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

​Colin kaepernick, Nike, Black lives matter, Stock market, Go woke go broke, Politics 

The United States armed forces are often parodied or serve as the inspiration for many Hollywood films, but it’s typically not the other way around.

With the Space Force, for example, the entity saw a near-immediate parody after its founding in 2019, with actors like Steve Carell and John Malkovich tapped to do the deed.

‘It’s afraid.’

Verhoeven-core

Five months after President Donald Trump and his administration founded the Space Force in December 2019, Netflix launched a comedy series based on the new agency.

Although “Space Force” portrayed members with their own unique dark-blue dress uniforms, this was a bit of creative license. In reality, Guardians have worn “modified Air Force uniform[s]” since the Space Force was established.

That has been changing. The Space Force unveiled a prototype of its own service dress uniform in 2021 and spent the following years refining the design. In January, the service formally introduced the finished uniform and outlined plans for its rollout.

Now Trump appears to have something else in mind.

On Sunday, the president posted an image to Truth Social depicting a proposed “next generation” Space Force dress uniform.

“Inspired by the discipline and functionality of the Starship Trooper uniform,” the image read, “modernized for the Guardians of the Space Domain.” Its colors were identified as Space Gray, Midnight Black, Silver Gray, and Satin Black.

But the apparent inspiration for the design quickly attracted attention.

The reference is to “Starship Troopers,” Paul Verhoeven’s 1997 science-fiction satire, whose futuristic military aesthetic deliberately borrowed from Nazi imagery. Verhoeven has said he intended the film to depict a fascist society whose inhabitants did not recognize themselves as fascists.

Forbes was among the outlets to note the resemblance, calling the style “Sci-Fi Fascist.”

RELATED: Deceptive slop is now junking up our favorite map apps. Don’t be fooled.

Cult following

“Starship Troopers” has developed a cult following, thanks in part to its bizarre humor, memorable lines, bloody action sequences, and hordes of giant alien bugs.

The film takes place in a distant future in which Earth is controlled by a single government known as the Terran Federation. Full citizenship — including the right to vote — is reserved for those who complete a term of federal service, which for the film’s main characters means joining the military.

Citizenship also carries other privileges. At one point, a character says she wants to serve because it will make it easier for her to obtain a license to have children.

The society is deliberately depicted as an outwardly prosperous and harmonious but deeply militaristic regime, complete with government propaganda, constant appeals to sacrifice, and an enemy — the alien “bugs” — against which humanity can unite.

Director Paul Verhoeven told Interview magazine in 2017 that he “wanted these people to be like proto-Nazis, proto-Aryans.”

A year later, Verhoeven told the Guardian that he had deliberately borrowed imagery from Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda films, including “Triumph of the Will,” while filming the movie’s propaganda sequences.

“I was using Riefenstahl to point out, or so I thought, that these heroes and heroines were straight out of Nazi propaganda,” Verhoeven said. “No one saw it at the time.”

“I thought Neil Patrick Harris arriving on the set in an SS uniform might clear it up.”

RELATED: Worse than Flock: Josh Hawley expands ‘unprecedented national surveillance’ investigation

Clothes call

Despite that satirical intent, the movie is perhaps best remembered by fans for its gleefully over-the-top propaganda sequences and endlessly quotable lines, including “I’m doing my part!” and “It’s afraid!” For many, the film has become a beloved sci-fi action comedy whose militaristic excess is part of the joke.

The Space Force, meanwhile, continues with its years-in-development uniform roll out. An Honor Guard version, featuring distinctive light-blue accents, made its public debut last month.

It remains unclear where Trump’s “Starship Troopers”-inspired design fits into those plans. While the president’s post described it as a “next generation” uniform, it did not say when it would be introduced or whether it would replace the service dress uniform already being rolled out.

“Our service dress uniform represents the unique identity of Guardians, blending heritage with a modern design that reflects our unity and mission,” then-Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman said in January. “From the start, Guardian feedback shaped its design and fit. I know the force will wear it with pride.”

​Space force, Starship troopers, Donald trump, Nazis, Entertainment 

Various businesses are cutting ties with a brewery in Tacoma, Washington, after it was discovered that the owners made a donation to political action group opposed to liberal policies.

The backlash against the E9 Brewing Co. & Taproom began after a socialist political activist outed the organizations that had backed the Let’s Go Washington PAC.

‘After learning of their donation to Let’s Go Washington, we will no longer be carrying E9 beers.’

The PAC raised money to oppose transgender athletes in women’s sports and the millionaire’s tax, as well as to support a parental bill of rights.

The brewery owners, brothers John and Lucas Xitco, said that they had donated to the PAC to oppose the tax.

Zev Cook, the activist who exposed the Xitcos’ donations, had been a Tacoma City Council candidate and also a co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America in Tacoma. Cook also identifies as a transgender woman.

Some of the restaurants are pledging to stop selling the brewery’s offerings.

“We are an anti-fascist restaurant, we support trans kids, we believe in a progressive tax system. Therefore, after learning of their donation to Let’s Go Washington, we will no longer be carrying E9 beers,” read a statement from Corbeau restaurant on Instagram.

Dusty’s Hideaway said it would sell its remaining inventory of E9 beers and donate the proceeds to help a transgender employee receive top surgery.

John Xitco vehemently denied that the donations had anything to do with the transgender issues and provided evidence supporting his claim to the Bellingham Herald.

“We supported the tax initiative. We didn’t even know about the other initiatives,” he said.

RELATED: Female wrestler alleging sex assault by trans-identifying male during match sues high school

Xitco also posted a statement saying he would donate to LGBTQ+ centers in the wake of the outrage.

“We have long supported the LGBTQ+ community,” he wrote. “Many of those affected by the recent posts are our friends, colleagues, employees, and customers. We are especially sorry that our employees were drawn into a matter with which they had absolutely no involvement.”

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

​Washington state, Brewery, Transgender agenda, Politics 

For years, television series have beat audiences over the head with progressive messaging. Many attempts to counter-produce alternatives with traditional and faith-centered themes either died before production or failed to break through.

But that trend hasn’t reached Daily Wire co-founder Jeremy Boreing’s fantasy series “The Pendragon Cycle: Rise of the Merlin” — an explicitly Christian adaptation of Stephen R. Lawhead’s novels about the origins of Merlin and early Arthurian legends.

The series debuted on DailyWire+ in January and later became the No. 1 fantasy series in the U.K., Ireland, Spain, and Portugal after hitting Prime Video overseas; it arrived on Prime in the U.S. on September 1 and has continued to climb.

Now Boreing joins Christopher Rufo and Jonathan Keeperman, co-hosts of “Rufo and Lomez,” to discuss why conservatives keep underperforming in entertainment — and how “Pendragon” successfully broke the pattern.

“You’ve managed to do the impossible,” Keeperman tells Boreing, “which is make something that looks great, it’s slick, it’s professional, it’s well acted, it’s well written, it looks like a high production TV show ought to look, and you’ve done it within the conservative ecosystem.”

“And moreover, it’s a show that’s not about politics, per se. It’s just good storytelling,” he adds.

He inquires about how Boreing was able to “pull this rabbit out the hat.”

“The hard way, of course,” Boreing quips.

“Art is very ambitious, and a show like ‘The Pendragon Cycle’ requires an awful lot of risk to be taken by an awful lot of people,” he continues, highlighting the Daily Wire, executive producer Dallas Sonnier, and “the cast and crew” as the primary risk-takers who saw the lofty project from idea to reality.

As for the actors, Boreing praises them as “the greatest ensemble of relatively unknown actors maybe ever assembled.”

“I’m so proud of this cast,” he adds, “but it’s a risk for them to associate with what they feared would be a really political operation. Of course, it didn’t turn out to be because that wasn’t what we were chasing. We were chasing true entertainment and true art.”

Entertainment, Boreing notes, is an area conservatives tend to underachieve.

“We think that the audience will only accept a polemic, but that isn’t true,” he says. “Our audience engages with entertainment and art just as much as any other audience.”

The problem, he says, is that conservative audiences haven’t “had any instruction” on what “good art with [conservative] values” looks like because it’s “so rare.”

“What we’re left with is what I call the ‘want to want to’s’ … movies that nobody actually wants to see, but … they want to support it,” Boreing explains, noting that these conservatives usually end up “[watching] the exact same television as everyone else” despite progressive themes and values.

This is deeply problematic, he argues, because as “Will and Grace” demonstrated with public attitudes toward homosexuality in the late 1990s and early 2000s, television can “actually [change] how an entire generation” views political issues.

“That’s the power of actual entertainment,” says Boreing. “[‘Will and Grace’] did that not leading with its politics; it did it by completely immersing an audience into the lives of a set of characters who had a particular point of view, and it drew you into that point of view, and we tried to do the same with ‘Pendragon.’”

To hear more about the series, watch the episode above.

Want more from Rufo & Lomez?

To enjoy more of the news through the anthropological lens of Christopher Rufo and Lomez, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Christopher rufo, Conservative entertainment, Daily wire, Jonathan keeperman, Merlin, Conservative values, Jeremy boreing, Blazetv show, Pendragon 

It’s been a long time since Branson, Missouri, has been the town to talk about, but that’s where one comedian has been making people laugh for more than 30 years.

‘Beautiful, cold Russian eyes.’

Comedy comrades

Beloved formet-Soviet comic Yakov Smirnoff has had a quiet residency at Yakov’s Theatre since the early 1990s, and now at 75 years young, he has been launched back into the spotlight for longtime fans and a new generation.

Smirnoff appeared on Monday night’s episode of “Kill Tony,” cracking jokes alongside host Tony Hinchcliffe and Estonian comedian Ari Matti.

The comedian told hilarious stories about his career status when the Soviet Union collapsed, sharing with the audience how he found himself on the outs in the entertainment industry. He referenced David Letterman making a Top 10 list of things that would change after the fall of the USSR; Smirnoff being out of work was No. 1.

Smirnoff said he moved to Missouri because he was looking for a place that didn’t know about the end of the Soviet Union and settled on Branson, where “they still don’t know.”

The punchline master also recited a joke about a communist party leader asking a factory worker whether he could work after one glass of vodka, then two, then three.

The worker replied, “I’m here aren’t I?”

RELATED: Masculinity is back — and it’s coming from the most unlikely source

No ‘country’ for young comics

While Smirnoff declined to deploy his signature line, “What a country,” during the stand-up comedy podcast, that didn’t stop resident wildcard Matti from deploying it on several occasions on his behalf.

Matti yelled the phrase when an audience member came onto the stage to give a comedian his first kiss and did so again when he was purposely embarrassing another rookie comedian by getting uncomfortably close and wrapping his legs around him.

“What a country!” Matti yelled, to awkward applause.

The show reached nearly one million views in 12 hours on YouTube, with Smirnoff and Matti connecting over the proximity of their home countries and a mutual hate between neighboring allies.

One comedian who appeared on the show said he was adopted from Russia, with Smirnoff saying he could recognize his “beautiful, cold Russian eyes.”

The comedian was forced to take off his glasses and look at a camera, like a villain from “Die Hard.”

RELATED: When Labor Day meant 21 hours of anything-goes TV — and millions raised for charity

Paul Slaughter /American Broadcasting Companies/Getty Images

Bump and grind

Smirnoff isn’t the first comedian to get the “Kill Tony” boost after years on the sidelines.

Former huge names like Roseanne, Pauly Shore, and Andrew Dice Clay have walked through the halls of Joe Rogan’s Mothership comedy venue and received what is known as the “Kill Tony” bump, which equates to an immediate boost in popularity.

Smirnoff is branching out from his Missouri residency and going on a countrywide tour, and things are likely to pick up even more after the appearance.

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

​Stand-up comedy, Kill tony, Yakov smirnoff, Branson, Entertainment 

The trial of Lindsay Clancy has become a boiling point in the national debate over mental illness, motherhood, and criminal responsibility — and while BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey doesn’t dispute that the mother was struggling psychologically, she doesn’t agree that it should excuse such an alleged horrific crime.

Especially considering almost no one who commits murder is mentally sound.

“Jeffrey Dahmer, probably not super sane. Ted Bundy, probably not the most mentally composed guy,” Stuckey says.

“If you are going on a[n] [alleged] killing rampage, especially one as relentless as this one, you probably are not firing on all cylinders mentally, of course,” she explains. “But if we were to dismiss every person who had some kind of mental illness as not being criminally liable, then most of our prisons would be empty, and that wouldn’t be a good thing.”

The world, she notes, would “be a lot less safe.”

“So this case is really not about whether Lindsay Clancy was suffering mentally. Nearly everyone agrees that she was. I agree that she was,” Stuckey says.

“This case is not about our mental health system or how it treats women or what’s in the DSM5 and what’s not. That’s a distraction to get you angry and passionate about an important issue, but an issue that’s not on trial here,” prosecutor Jennifer Sprague said at the trial.

However, none of this has stopped women from voicing their support for Clancy — which prompts Stuckey to address them with a question.

“Would you show the same mercy to Lindsay if she had killed your children? Would you feel the same deep empathy for her mental struggles? Would you opt for keeping her out of prison because, well, she was having a hard time mentally and she had been taking pills on and off?” she asks.

“Hopefully not,” she continues. “I’m just afraid that too many women left and right think justice is dictated by how deeply we can relate to the people involved. Because some of you can see yourself in Lindsay’s depression or anxiety and can’t relate to her children, you feel compelled to defend her.”

But if these women ask themselves these questions and remain steadfast in their belief, Stuckey explains that’s “beyond” where she can reach them.

“Empathy-based justice is not justice at all,” she says. “Again, it’s partiality, which God calls evil.”

“We don’t make these decisions based on whether or not we can relate to someone,” she adds.

Want more from Allie Beth Stuckey?

To enjoy more of Allie’s upbeat and in-depth coverage of culture, news, and theology from a Christian, conservative perspective, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Allie beth stuckey, Mental illness, Motherhood, Justice, Lindsay clancy, Blazetv show 

Democrat New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is under fire after a bizarre decision he made that many took as an insult to 9/11 victims.

The Muslim mayor signed a 9/11 remembrance declaration on Friday, just ahead of the 25th anniversary of the horrific terror attacks that claimed 2,977 American lives.

‘The families who lost loved ones on 9/11 have every right to be outraged. On the 25th anniversary, City Hall should be honoring their sacrifice with dignity, not forcing those families to endure yet another insult.’

While no one took issue with the declaration, many were offended when he handed a ceremonial pen to the NYPD commissioner to give to chief counsel Ramzi Kassem.

Kassem had previously acted as legal counsel for Ahmed al-Darbi, a convicted al-Qaeda terrorist whose brother-in-law hijacked the plane that crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11.

New Yorkers and others expressed their anger on social media.

“I sincerely hope the rest of the country understands just how hard it is to be in New York City with this mayor, and especially as we’re approaching this most serious and solemn day for NYC: 9/11,” responded Maria Danzilo, a former state Senate candidate.

“He’s laughing at every American patriot who lost someone that day. He’s pissing on everyone who went in to try to save people in the towers. He hates you all,” replied one user on the X platform.

“Mamdani handed that guy that pen very f**kin intentionally,” said another critic. “It wasn’t an oversight or a gaffe, it was a totally intentional signal to the whole city that the worst event in its history doesn’t matter to him. He doesn’t give a f**k about survivors and he wants everyone to know it.”

“It shows exactly where his loyalties truly lie,” said Republican Council Member Joann Ariola of the “breathtakingly tone-deaf and disrespectful” stunt.

“The families who lost loved ones on 9/11 have every right to be outraged,” she added. “On the 25th anniversary, City Hall should be honoring their sacrifice with dignity, not forcing those families to endure yet another insult.”

RELATED: Prominent professor supported Mamdani’s socialist scheme — until he became a target

City Hall told Fox News Digital that Kassem was at the ceremony because his team drafted the declaration as Mamdani’s legal counsel.

Al-Darbi was sent to Guantanamo Bay on terror charges. He was convicted in 2017 and sent to Saudi Arabia a year later.

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

​Zohran mamdani, 9/11, Islam, Muslim, Online outrage, Politics