Black Friday Debt, Flying Ads & Hologram ABBA vs Human Artists

On today’s episode of Filtered with TJ Walker, we start with the dark side of “treat yourself” culture. The New York Times profiles ordinary Americans buried under Black Friday bargains, one-click shopping, and buy-now-pay-later loans, and we dig into how tech and psychology are engineered to turn us into permanent debt machines.

Then we turn to Washington, where a National Guard soldier is killed near the White House, and Donald Trump uses one horrifying crime to argue for a sweeping crackdown on immigrants. We connect the dots from this tragedy to the long authoritarian playbook that turns chaos into “law and order” crackdowns.

In California, the sky itself is becoming an ad platform, as helicopter-borne LED “flying billboards” get ready to hover over the 2026 Super Bowl — and maybe your next election. We break down what it means when even the air above you is “unignorable” ad space.

Next, we examine Senator Ruben Gallego’s leaked texts roasting his own party as “not fun,” complaining that Democrats are “not allowing no men to men, women to be hot,” and saying “Dem women look like Dem men and Dem men look like women.” We unpack the sexism and culture-war signaling inside the supposed “just being honest” rant.

Finally, we look at New York City’s plan to shovel nearly $50 million in tax breaks at an ABBA hologram arena while AI “artists” climb the charts and tens of thousands of synthetic songs flood Spotify. Hologram nostalgia at the top, algorithms in the middle, and real working musicians trying to survive at the bottom, we ask what kind of music economy we’re building, and who gets left behind.