Sinners Makes History With Most Oscar Nominations Ever

Ryan Coogler’s Sinners—a commercially and critically successful African American vampire film—has set an all-time Oscars record with 16 total nominations. These include best picture, Michael B. Jordan for best leading actor, Wunmi Mosaku for best supporting actress, and Delroy Lindo for best supporting actor.

The film follows hustling twin brothers who simultaneously fight back against Jim Crow racism and vampires who are attracted to the blues music coming from their juke joint. The box office hit is defined by Coogler’s respect for African American music and culture.

“There’s a firm argument to be made that this art form, the Delta blues, is our country’s most important contribution to global popular culture. You know, I think it’s probably [Black people’s] most important artistic contribution to the world,” Coogler told Democracy Now! last spring. “And it was such a profound discovery, that this music made by people who were, you know, for all intents and purposes, living under a backbreaking form of American apartheid, you know, denied their humanity on a daily basis, would create something so artistically excellent that it would affect global culture from that time forward.”

Sinners’s 16 nominations eclipse the record of 14 that All About Eve (1950), Titanic (1997), and La La Land (2016) all shared. Its costume designer, Ruth E. Carter, also becomes the most nominated Black woman in Oscars history after being named in five categories. Other best picture nominees, such as Paul Thomas Anderson’s audacious One Battle After Another, Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, and Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme, will offer Coogler some stiff competition.

Win or lose, Coogler has made history and continues to produce a robust catalog of Black blockbusters—from Black Panther to Fruitvale Station to Creed to Sinners—that will be appreciated for years to come.

View the full 2026 Oscar nominations here.

Donald Trump’s support has plummeted, with a new poll showing that he is underwater with all of the groups responsible for his 2024 election victory.

The poll from The New York Times and Siena University has Trump with a 56 percent disapproval rating, and when that is broken down by age and race, the results look similar to 2020, just before Trump’s election loss that year.

Overall, 49 percent of voters say that the country is worse off than it was last year, with 32 percent saying it was better. About 56 percent of respondents disapprove of Trump’s management of the federal government, 58 percent disapprove of his immigration policies, and 66 percent disapprove of his handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files. About 44 percent of people who have turned against the president cite economic issues, and 58 percent of all of the poll’s respondents disapprove of his handling of the economy.

Clearly, Americans don’t like Trump’s policies. Reports from across the country, most recently Minneapolis, show Border Patrol and ICE agents engaging in violence against not only suspected undocumented immigrants but also U.S. citizens protesting against them. Despite a new law requiring full disclosure of the government’s unclassified Epstein archives, only about a small amount has been released, with much of what has been published fully redacted. And the public isn’t seeing any benefits from the president’s incoherent economic policies.

With the midterm elections only months away, Trump and the Republican Party seem headed for massive losses. That’s probably why Trump keeps “joking” about canceling elections; if ICE keeps making the headlines for horrific actions, the president keeps flip-flopping on tariffs, and the administration continues to stall on the Epstein files, it’s safe to say that Trump is in trouble come November.

America’s latest and greatest threat, according to the White House, is the American people.

A leaked security threats assessment obtained by independent journalist Ken Klippenstein from the Department of Homeland Security reveals the department’s intention to shift the definition of domestic terrorism toward a new subset of individuals acting on “class-based or economic grievances.”

As Klippenstein points out in his Substack Wednesday, that could refer to any American, from an “angry MAGA Midwesterner” to a “Mamdani-supporting urban dweller.”

The report itself, which is marked for “official use” and has not yet been made publicly available, identifies extremism emerging from the American public as the country’s gravest threat.

“Of threat actors with ideological motivations, domestic violent extremists in recent years have been the most active plotters,” the report reads, according to screenshots shared by Klippenstein. “They are motivated to conduct attacks by a wide range of factors, including anti-government sentiment, racial and ethnic grievances, anti-Israel and anti-Semitic beliefs, and class-based or economic grievances.”

Part of the rise, according to DHS, has been fanned by the “ongoing Israel-HAMAS conflict and a resurgence in English-language terrorist media.”

The report appears to be a blatant slap in the face to the Constitution, which enshrined the public’s right to freedom of speech and protest within the folds of the First Amendment. And by all means, the American public has a lot to be incensed over when it comes to the federal government.

In Minnesota, thousands have participated in mass protests after ICE agents shot and killed Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother and U.S. citizen. DHS was quick to brand her a “domestic terrorist.”

Since Good’s death, federal officers have participated in myriad forms of overreach, including ripping people from their homes and families, pulling over school buses, attacking teachers and students at a Minneapolis high school, and even clashing with local law enforcement.

In an attempt to defend their own city from the state-sponsored violence, some Minneapolis residents have opted to openly carry their firearms through the city, brandishing their Second Amendment right to bear arms. Locals have formed neighborhood watches to follow ICE vehicles, banging pots and pans and screaming to alert others when agents enter their residential neighborhoods. But DHS’s latest definition could place an even more severe target on those resisting the government’s violent agenda.

The Department of Homeland Security is complaining that Minneapolis and St. Paul residents aren’t letting their masked, heavily armed agents pee in peace.

“Today, Border Patrol agents who were in Minneapolis–St. Paul as part of a targeted enforcement operation were repeatedly harassed and blocked by hostile crowds while simply trying to take bathroom breaks,” DHS wrote Wednesday on X. “At each gas station where the agents stopped to use the restroom, groups of agitators appeared, yelled at them, stalked them, and even tried to prevent law enforcement vehicles from leaving, creating unsafe conditions.”

The treatment that DHS is whining about here can be corroborated by footage captured by independent journalist Amanda Moore. Minneapolis residents can be seen surrounding Border Patrol Chief Greg Bovino and his masked deputies at a gas station, loudly rebuking them.

“ICE does not belong on this property at all, we do not support ICE,” one man said as the agents backed away. “Get off our property. Bye, bye, bye.”

That DHS post reads so indignantly you’d think they forgot about shooting and killing Renee Good in cold blood two weeks ago. People around the country were already horrified by the raids, aggression, and brutality shown by Border Patrol. Why would the city they’re currently occupying—after killing one of their own—respond positively to their presence?

ICE reportedly gave itself permission to violate the Fourth Amendment in order to accelerate President Donald Trump’s sweeping deportation campaign, according to a new whistleblower disclosure.

In a secret memo distributed in May 2025, ICE Director Todd Lyons gave ICE agents permission to forcibly enter homes without obtaining a judicial warrant. The memo told officers they could rely on a Warrant of Removal—an administrative warrant rather than a judicial one—to enter the residence of any target using “a necessary and reasonable amount of force.”

The memo noted that administrative warrants alone have not historically been used to make arrests at subjects’ homes, but the DHS Office of General Counsel apparently determined that the U.S. Constitution and other immigration laws “do not prohibit relying on administrative warrants for this purpose.”

For years, government officials, immigration advocates, and legal aid workers have instructed immigrants not to open their doors to officials unless the agents produce a judicial warrant, in alignment with U.S. Supreme Court decisions that uphold the U.S. Constitution’s protection against unlawful search and seizure. Congress has specifically outlined the Fourth Amendment as a constraint on federal immigration forces, who require “a judicial (as opposed to an administrative) warrant” to enter homes.

Rather than being distributed to all DHS employees, the memo was distributed to certain DHS officials who were instructed to verbally pass down permission to start breaking down doors, according to the whistleblower disclosure. Those who reviewed the memo were not permitted to take notes—which seems like a pretty damning sign of its dubious legal basis.

ICE instructors were reportedly told to teach new recruits that all they needed was a warrant of removal—in direct violation of Basic Immigration Enforcement Training materials, which state that “a warrant of removal/deportation does NOT alone authorize a 4th amendment search of any kind.” One instructor reportedly resigned rather than pass on the new guidance.

For months, the world has watched as Trump’s extrajudicial militia has made numerous warrantless arrests, and more recently started kicking down doors as part of its door-to-door campaign in Minnesota.

Somehow, ICE has also deployed even crueler tactics to pursue targets into their home: earlier this week, masked federal agents used a five-year-old boy as bait to try to lure his relative out of their home. They ended up detaining the boy and his father, and shipping them off to Texas for deportation.