Inspire: A Performing Arts Festival by and for the Airborne Aware, a free Zoom festival running 15–19 April 2026, will bring together music, theater and comedy made by COVID-conscious artists for COVID-conscious audiences.

It is the first known event of its kind to assemble these different genres of COVID-conscious performance into a single airborne-aware program. The five-day program includes music showcases, theater performances and comedy. All events will be presented in a virtual format.

In recent years, individual artists and groups have been producing COVID-conscious art and creating airborne-aware performance spaces. In major cities like Chicago, New York and London, live COVID safer arts events have become more numerous. Inspire festival, organized by COVID-conscious creatives, gathers these individual, local creative labors into one international event.

The COVID-conscious theater ecosystem

In theater, the early years of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic briefly opened a wide field of digital and hybrid performances. However, with the removal of clean-air measures like masks and testing in live performance venues, the scaling back of online performances, and the widespread taboo of acknowledging the reality of the ongoing pandemic, it has fallen to COVID-conscious theater-makers to create their own spaces.

Two widely documented COVID-conscious theater performances in this emerging ecosystem both took place on 24 April 2025 in New York.

Wake Up and Smell the C*VID by the anonymous collective HEPA (Holy Erotic Propaganda Arson) was a hybrid monologue performance about the impact of COVID and Long COVID on the arts.

Anna RG’s AIR CHANGE PER HOUR was a mask-required Brooklyn performance structured around airborne safety, including testimony from artists living with Long COVID and accessibility measures like rest breaks and HEPA air purifiers.

Wake Up and Smell the C*VID returns at Inspire in an encore presentation on 18 April.

Another major COVID-conscious performance was comedian Guiness Pig’s A Covid Christmas Carol, an audio play performed in December 2025, which adapted the familiar Dickens story into a COVID-conscious satire. At Inspire, Guiness Pig returns with the reader’s theater piece How the Three Little Pigs Almost Learned to Live with the Big Bad Wolf, which reimagines the fairy tale through the normalization of mass infections. The play will be performed April 17.

Most recently was Serina Estrada’s A Pan***ic Play, first staged in January 2026 at The Art School in Glasgow as part of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland’s Emergence Festival. It was presented as a 50-minute work inspired by verbatim theatre, speaking the lived experiences of people navigating the ongoing pandemic. Inspire will feature an encore performance of the play on April 16.

Inspire’s theater program will also include scenes from The Left by Caridad Svich, a choral play about those left behind ‘when all systems and people have failed one another.’ Svich, a playwright and educator affiliated with Rutgers and the Lortel Theater, is a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow in Drama and Performance Art and a 2012 Obie Award winner for Lifetime Achievement in the theatre. Selections from the play will be broadcast on April 19.

Inspire will also premiere the first two episodes of Wayside, an audio drama by Mo Mora and narrated by Benjamin Liberman, set in a near-future sanctuary community where people still mask.

Airborne-aware musicians and performance spaces

The festival opens on 15 April with a music showcase featuring performances by COVID-conscious musicians.

Music venues, like theaters, have largely rolled back airborne illness-prevention measures, even as the effects of the ongoing pandemic continue to devastate the industry. Within the past few weeks, Lady Gaga canceled the final Montreal date of her tour because of a respiratory infection, and the Goo Goo Dolls canceled the remaining dates of their Canadian run after frontman John Rzeznik was diagnosed with pneumonia. At the same time, musicians like Dave Navarro have spoken publicly about managing Long COVID.

Against this backdrop, Inspire’s music lineup highlights artists who have helped create COVID-conscious performance spaces of their own. Among the featured acts is phytocene, a Paris-based ambient pop and ethereal artist whose work as moves through pop, trip-hop and electronica. She has become widely known in the airborne-aware community for organizing mask-required concerts in France.

Nina Wildflower, another performer in this ecology, is both a musician and a science teacher who advocates for clean air. He also hosts a weekly online open mic for COVID conscious performers.

The final musical act will be the The Long Covid Choir, which was formed in March 2021 by people with Long COVID and designed to be accessible to people living with Long COVID, including people who are housebound or bedridden. The Long COVID Kids Choir, profiled by the World Health Organization, similarly gives children and teenagers in multiple countries an online place to sing and write songs about their own lived experience. Both choirs are under the musical direction of Dutch musician Merel van der Knoop.

A comedy counter-public

In comedy, the ongoing pandemic continues to disrupt live performance and the health of working comics. In September 2025, Steve Martin canceled two tour dates after testing positive for COVID-19. This followed earlier cancellations on the same tour when Martin Short tested positive for SARS-CoV-2. In December 2025, Chevy Chase postponed an appearance at a live screening after being diagnosed with pneumonia.

At the same time, some establishment comedians with large national audiences have used their platforms to ridicule or erase continued COVID prevention. On the 11 December 2025 episode of The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart, Stewart joked about people still wearing masks in workplaces. This prompted public criticism from comedian Judah Friedlander, who responded on Instagram by asking why Stewart was ‘punching down’ on disabled and immunocompromised people. The social media backlash around the exchange generated the hashtag #oneofthetwo and calls for Jon Stewart to interview a public health expert and correct the record.

In November 2025, after actor Tom Hanks was photographed wearing a mask on the New York City subway, in his appearance on The Late Show, Stephen Colbert promoted the moment in the interview and on social media as a ‘subway disguise.’ Even though Hanks himself had explained on the show that he wears a mask for ‘health reasons’ and that he had been infected with COVID multiple times and did not want to get it again.

At the same time, COVID-conscious comedians have been building accessible alternatives. Judah Friedlander performs at recurring Zoom livestream stand-up shows, including a New Year’s Eve performance at the end of 2025.

Inspire’s comedy programming features two events. The festival’s Friday Night Open Mic will take place on 17 April, inviting artists to share original five-minute sets, including stand-up, music, poetry and theater, and will be hosted by writer and comedian Lauren Flans. On 18 April, the festival will present Ron Placone’s Anti-Fascist Pasta Night, a new one-hour stand-up special performed live with ASL interpretation. Placone is a comedian, writer and filmmaker who has toured across the United States, Canada and Australia and premiered a solo show at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2023.

Art, advocacy and mutual aid

Inspire will run 15 April through 19 April 2016 as a free, fully virtual Zoom festival featuring music, theater and comedy and community programming by COVID-conscious artists for COVID-conscious audiences.

To attend, audience members are asked to RSVP through the festival form, selecting the events they want to join. Zoom links will be sent the day of each event. Because capacity is limited, some events may move to a waitlist if demand exceeds available space.

Attendees only need a free Zoom account. Events are scheduled at multiple times across the day to accommodate different time zones. Except for the open mic, audience cameras and microphones will remain off during performances while the chat stays open for conversation. The costs for the festival were shared amongst the organizers, including licensing and subscription fees, so a tip jar will be circulated which will help cover the costs, with the rest distributed to COVID-conscious charities and mutual aid for the wider community.

The festival marks the point at which COVID-conscious arts has matured into its own counter-public with a networked multi-genre ecosystem, as well as relationships to airborne-aware mutual aid and advocacy.

On 12 April, the people of Hungary voted out the loathsome Viktor Orbán. As we reported, the man who’s replacing him is another right-wing Zionist. What he’s not, however, is a member of the same network of would-be-despots as Nigel Farage.

Increasingly, then, it’s looking like the global right-wing uprising that Farage was relying on has stalled:

Nigel Farage, Reform UK and advisors including James Orr and Matt Goodwin are incredibly intertwined with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.@Nigel_Farage even described him as a model leader and the “future of Europe”.

After 20 years of authoritarian rule, he’s conceded… pic.twitter.com/YNnXZYJPHK

— Reform Party UK Exposed 🇬🇧 (@reformexposed) April 12, 2026

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Farage and international nationalists

Trump ally Steve Bannon made a tour of Europe in 2018 in which he sought to create a “pan-European far-right movement”. Speaking on this movement, Byline Times wrote:

Anyone who’s seen Alison Klayman’s 2019 documentary The Brink will remember the scenes where Steve Bannon and Nigel Farage sit together discussing a pan-European nationalist populist “Movement” – with Bannon calling Farage “the face” of Brexit while they talk about stitching together far-right parties across the EU. Bannon tells Farage that he’ll “fund it somehow”.

What those scenes didn’t show is that the Brussels vehicle Bannon was about to claim as his own – The Movement – had actually been created out of Farage’s network and that, in the background, Jeffrey Epstein was quietly helping Bannon plan, protect, and track his “European revolution”.

The bed @Nigel_Farage has made. pic.twitter.com/zf7viwdS1W

— Reform Party UK Exposed 🇬🇧 (@reformexposed) April 12, 2026

The far right have grown in Europe and America since then, but the cracks are starting to show. This is obvious in how these parties exist in their own countries and how they interact with their global bedfellows.

Farage himself has made a big deal of his relationship with Donald Trump – the world’s most successful right-winger. He’s made less of a big deal about it lately, of course, because the Epstein-associate Trump and his wars are incredibly unpopular in Britain:

67% of Britons describe themselves as anti-Trump, with Reform UK voters the only group more likely to be pro-Trump than anti

By 2024 vote
Lib Dem: 89% anti-Trump / 2% pro-Trump
Labour: 85% / 3%
Green: 82% / 4%
Conservative: 61% / 19%
Reform UK: 24% / 46%https://t.co/9p6MjkSVbb pic.twitter.com/2k93DnOoTN

— YouGov (@YouGov) March 9, 2026

Farage has long attached himself to Trump, hoping that the president’s success would rub off on him. It’s become increasingly difficult for Farage to ride on his coattails, however, because it’s now obvious to everyone that the Emperor has no clothes.

Farage and other European right-wingers have distanced themselves from Trump following his threats to annex Greenland, as TLDR News EU covered:

When the German and French far right turned on Trump, Hungary’s Orban did not. In fact, Orban enjoyed considerable support from the Trump regime in his election. The problem is, Trump’s support is now poison:

So after being offered an in-person appearance from JD Vance and a promise by Don Jr. for “a direct line” to his dad if they support Viktor Orban, Hungarians decided instead to vote for a possible supermajority of seats against Orban pic.twitter.com/yImHGyNwES

— Prem Thakker (@prem_thakker) April 12, 2026

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Bringing down the Nigel project

This is what Farage said about Orban in 2011:

Just thanked Viktor Orban at the end of the Hungarian Presidency for being our secret weapon and helping us bring down the EU project.

— Nigel Farage MP (@Nigel_Farage) July 5, 2011

It would be interesting to get an update on how he thinks this is going.

The current situation for Farage is that:

Nigel Farage on Milei “Doing all the things he’s done, that’s leadership, he is amazing”

Kemi Badenoch “Javier Milei would be ‘template’ for my government”

He just cut holiday days to 0, employers can pay in food and 12 hour work days. The result: pic.twitter.com/WgoFxN9EX9

— Jake 🌹🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 (@ToryWipeout) February 14, 2026

With the next election three years out, it’s hard to see how Farage can do anything besides bleed support.

Featured image via X

Help and support:

However, it seems she may have spoken too soon.

Reacting to headlines claiming she’d “turned down” an offer to host Strictly, she told Metro: “Do you think I would turn down Strictly if Strictly came along? Who would turn down Strictly! They’d be absolutely crazy.”

She claimed: “I was trying to back them off because ultimately everyone keeps putting my name in the mix and they’re ruining my chances of even getting on to Strictly, d’you know what I mean?”

“You all need to stop talking about it because I need to get in,” Alison added, before insisting: “I’m not too busy, I’m fitter than I’ve ever been before. I can do Strictly. I can do it all.”

After confirming last week that she’d been approached about hosting Strictly, Alison explained to Radio Times: “I’m so busy, babes, that I’m not sure it’s going to happen. It’s unrealistic. I’m so happy they considered me but, like Traitors, I can’t do it because everything clashes.

“I would have loved to have done it – anybody that gets it, they’re going to land the perfect job. But I’m so happy with everything I’ve got. What would I drop, to do Strictly?”

In the lexicon of modern warfare, ‘connectivity’ is a target. In 2026, the Israeli Air Force has turned this concept into a grim reality along the banks of the Litani River in southern Lebanon. Through a terrorizing and systematic campaign of infrastructure destruction, the southern third of Lebanon is being physically detached from the rest of the sovereign state. 

Isolating southern Lebanon

Every bridge, from the historic stone arches to modern highway spans, has been reduced to rubble, creating a ‘de facto’ island of the south. While Israel claims this as a tactical necessity to ‘freeze the movement’ of resistance groups, the sheer permanence of the destruction suggests a deeper metamorphosis.

By severing the veins that connect Beirut to the south, the Israeli military is performing a geopolitical amputation, turning a 170km waterway into a moat of isolation. As the concrete falls, a haunting question arises: Is Israel simply clearing a path for victory, or is it permanently carving a new map into the Lebanese landscape?

The Litani River

For readers unfamiliar with the geography of the Levant, the Litani River is the most significant waterway in Lebanon, flowing entirely within its borders for roughly 170 kilometers. Originating in the fertile Bekaa Valley in the east, it winds south before making a sharp, westward turn toward the Mediterranean Sea, just north of the city of Tyre.

This ‘elbow’ in the river creates a natural geographic line that sits approximately 20-to-30 kilometers north of the Palestinian border. Because of this strategic position, the Litani has long served as a geopolitical yardstick: it is the boundary line established by the United Nations in 2006 to separate Israeli occupational forces from Lebanon, and its waters remain a vital, yet contested, artery for the country’s agricultural heartland and hydroelectric power. In the context of conflict, to cross the Litani is to enter the most volatile ‘buffer zone’ in the Middle East.

Israel wants to implement its plan of re-occupying southern Lebanon, as its officials have stated since the announcement of the UN 1701 decree. While the Lebanese government in Beirut remains trapped in a state of diplomatic paralysis, unable to ‘bridge’ even its own internal political divides, the Litani is being transformed from a Lebanese river into a hard, unilateral frontier.

We are on the verge of witnessing the birth of a new border, written not in ink, but in broken rebar and isolation. 

The ultimate ‘red line’

For Israel, the Litani River represents the ultimate ‘red line’ where military strategy meets geography. 

Historically viewed as a potential water source, the Litani’s primary importance in 2026 is as a permanent security buffer. By pushing Lebanese armed forces north of this 170km line, Israel seeks to create a so-called ‘sterile zone’ that extends its occupation north of the Palestinian lands and protect its mercenaries from short-range missiles and anti-tank fire.

The systematic destruction of the river’s bridges serves a dual purpose: it creates a tactical ‘moat’ that asphyxiates southern supply lines and serves as a geopolitical tool to physically decouple the region from Beirut. 

The Litani River is a ghost that has long dictated the rhythm of Lebanese-Israeli warfare, serving as a recurring milestone for invasion and withdrawal. In 1978, the IOF launched Operation Litani, a clear signal that Israel viewed the river as an ‘acceptable boundary’ for Lebanese sovereignty. This fixation was codified further in 1982 and again in 2006 through UN Resolution 1701, which attempted to turn the river into a diplomatic shield by mandating it as a zone ‘free of non-state armed groups’, as per the UN.

However, these historical attempts at ‘cleansing’ the area south of the river have never achieved permanence. Instead, the Litani has become a cyclical graveyard of diplomacy; every time the “ghost” is supposedly laid to rest by a ceasefire, the failure to address the underlying territorial tension ensures that the river eventually rises again as the frontline of a new, more destructive generation of conflict.

A state of agonizing paradox

The Lebanese state in 2026 exists in a state of agonizing paradox: it’s trying to push to assert its sovereignty as demanded by the US and Israel, only to have the physical means of doing so systematically dismantled. While the government officially banned Hezbollah’s military activity in March and moved to deploy the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) southward – only to retreat later, once Israel moved its troops northward – the severed bridges of the Litani have turned these mandates into hollow gestures.

Beirut is effectively presiding over a ‘truncated’ nation, where the southern third of the country has become a logistical island. Despite a flurry of diplomatic protests to the UN and desperate attempts by the Ministry of Public Works to patch together temporary crossings, the government remains paralyzed. It is unable to defend its borders, reconnect its people, stand by its resistance forces, or prevent the Litani from hardening into a permanent, unilateral frontier that ignores the state’s very existence.

The destruction of the Litani bridges may well be the final act in transforming a temporary military ‘moat’ into a permanent, unilateral frontier. If these crossings are not restored, the ‘amputation’ of southern Lebanon risks becoming a settled geographic reality, echoing the “Gaza-fication” of the borderlands where separation is enforced by rubble and isolation.

This is no longer just a battle over security zones; it is the physical redrawing of the Levant’s map. As the smoke clears in 2026, the haunting question remains whether the Litani will ever again be a Lebanese river, or if it has been successfully rebranded as a hard, impassable limit – a ghost that has finally stopped haunting the conflict and started defining the peace.

Featured image via Associated Press

Job interviews are a game, but the rules aren’t clear for everyone

Conversations are brewing on social media

If you had to compare one living person to Jesus Christ, it would not be Donald Trump.

You might actually say Trump is the polar opposite of Christ – a sort of ‘anti-Christ’, if you will.

One person who disagrees, however, is the man himself:

Good lord

Jesus was famous for kicking the money lenders out of the temple. Donald Trump is famous for not paying back money he owes. These are not the same thing.

Lest we forget, Jesus said:

It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God

To be fair to him, Trump might actually believe with this, because he said the following in October 2025:

I don’t think there’s anything going to get me in heaven. I think I’m not maybe heaven-bound. I’m not sure I’m going to be able to make heaven.

The benefit of knowing your eternal soul is damned is that you don’t have to worry about being a good person. This frees Trump to commit clearly sinful acts like waging war and depicting himself as the Christ.

While the warmongering president may made his peace with evil, however, many of his supporters have not:

Truth Social is revolting on Trump, BIGLY! I have never seen it this bad! It goes on and on! pic.twitter.com/cjOT74KihT

— Knoxie (@KnoxieLuv) April 13, 2026

Among those criticising Trump is former loyalist Marjorie Taylor Greene, who said:

It’s more than blasphemy.

It’s an Antichrist spirit.

Commentator Harry Sisson, meanwhile, suggested that Trump appears to be healing an old friend of his:

Trump is now posting AI images of himself as Jesus Christ healing, what appears to be, a young Jeffrey Epstein. pic.twitter.com/zG2OQKbP9s

— Harry Sisson (@harryjsisson) April 13, 2026

Another thing people are noting is that the image Trump shared seems to be more demonic than the original:

Turns out the original photo was posted by @NickAdamsinUSA but someone in the Trump camp decided it would be wise to alter it to add a demon and repost. 👀

Credit to: @mend_alyn for the find! pic.twitter.com/oMQExSN2Qq

— Based Millennial Mommy 🇺🇸 (@MaRy_JaNe1209) April 13, 2026

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Did Team Trump alter the image?

Or did the demon simply manifest as a result of the image’s proximity to Trump?

Trump VS the Pope

As many have pointed out, Trump’s latest deadly sin came after he tangoed with the current Pope. In recent weeks, Pope Leo has been putting out fire like the following:

War divides; hope unites. Arrogance tramples upon others; love lifts up. Idolatry blinds us; the living God enlightens. All it takes is a little faith, a mere “crumb” of faith, in order to face this dramatic hour in history together — as humanity and alongside humanity. #Peace

‘Idolatry’, by the way, is when a person worships things like money, fame, or hotel chains over God.

Hard to guess who he might be referring to there.

He doesn’t believe in building libraries or museums, only hotels.

That should be his epitaph, signed off by him.

A rare non-lie from Trump. https://t.co/4aqxsoGMTL

— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) March 31, 2026

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Leo also said:

Hundreds of millions of people throughout the world are immersed in extreme poverty. Yet, disproportionate wealth remains in the hands of a few. It is an unjust scenario, in the face of which we cannot fail to question ourselves and commit to change things. There is no lack of resources at the root of disparities, but the need to address solvable problems related to a more equitable distribution of wealth, to be achieved with moral sense and honesty.

According to convicted criminal Donald, the Pope has been critical of Western wars because he “likes crime”:

He’s attacking the Pope.
He. Is. Attacking. The. Pope. https://t.co/DbveAIyBhw

— Jo (@JoJoFromJerz) April 13, 2026

And, the president also said all of the following, which you’re free to read if you have a spare ten minutes and don’t respect your own time:

This will end well.

Some genius in Trumpland decided, “Hey, the best thing we can do now is to go to war with the Holy Father.” pic.twitter.com/zYG3IuNivB

— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) April 13, 2026

Of course, Trump has form when it comes to attacking Popes/the concept of basic human decency:

I just remembered Trump posted this after Francis died. pic.twitter.com/FLcGziYs0a

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) April 13, 2026

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Pope Leo has now responded, saying:

I don’t ‌think that the message of the Gospel is meant to be abused in ‌the way that some people are doing.

I will continue to speak out loudly against war, looking to promote peace, ⁠promoting dialogue and multilateral ​relationships among the states to look ​for just solutions to problems.

This sicko really loves crime, doesn’t he?

The Pope isn’t the only religious figure who’s been critical of the American president’s blatant wickedness either:

Trump’s post comes after @60Minutes aired interview with three American cardinals https://t.co/xVGHSeG8eD

— David Shepardson (@davidshepardson) April 13, 2026

End times

As one commenter noted, it does feel like we’re living through the end times:

The Book of Revelation really made all this sound like it was going to be more poetic and less stupid. https://t.co/wZenwg0aos

— one dozen rats at a keyboard (@PanasonicDX4500) April 13, 2026

This isn’t for nothing.

The US evangelicals who support Trump and Israel do so because they think they’re going to usher in the end of the world. This is why they support endless hostilities and expansionism in the Middle East.

As we reported on 21 February:

Many American evangelicals support Israel, but not because they like Israelis. In actuality, they think the creation of Israel is a signifier that the end times are approaching, and that Israel will trigger the Rapture.

If you’re unfamiliar with the term, the ‘Rapture’ is the time when God calls his faithful back to heaven. Said ‘faithful’ will not include the Jewish men and women who live in Israel, even if they do play an instrumental role in jump starting the Armageddon.

We’re not facing down the end of the world because it was foretold; we’re facing it down because wealthy freaks believe it was foretold.

Trump may not be the literal anti-Christ, but that isn’t stopping his donors from positioning him to perform the same function.

Featured image via Donald Trump