Global Ascension Studios Partners with We Identifi to Revolutionize Streaming Content in 2025
LOS ANGELES, April 10, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Global Ascension Studios (GAS) is making waves in the entertainment industry with a bold new partnership with We Identifi, an innovative streaming platform redefining digital content distribution. This collaboration marks a giant leap forward in empowering creator-driven media, promising fresh opportunities for top-tier talent to reach new heights and transformative storytelling in 2025.
Image by Global Ascension Studios
Global Ascension Studios has rapidly emerged as a powerhouse in film and television production, gaining widespread recognition with The Man You Don't Know, a documentary that captivated over 60 million viewers on X and premiered on WeIdentifi in November 2024. Building on this success, GAS is expanding its reach by developing an ambitious slate of projects across multiple formats—including films, scripted series, podcasts, live talk shows, and interactive live media—with handpicked projects exclusively for We Identifi.
'2024 was just the beginning,' said Joshua Macciello, CEO of Global Ascension Studios. 'By partnering with We Identifi, we are bringing A-list talent, including actors, musicians, athletes, comedians and influencers/podcasters, into a creator-first ecosystem where they can craft authentic content and receive the best deals possible. This is about giving artists control, embracing innovation, and ensuring We Identifi becomes the premier destination for uncensored, high-impact entertainment.'
We Identifi's groundbreaking self-serve streaming platform allows content creators to own their network and set their own monetization models using their own mix of video-on-demand, monthly subscription models, livestreaming, pay-per-view, advertising and sponsorship. Unlike traditional streaming giants that impose rigid creative and financial restrictions, We Identifi enables direct connection and engagement with audiences all in one place. This alignment with GAS's mission to challenge conventional industry norms makes the partnership a natural fit.
'Teaming up with Global Ascension Studios is a game-changer,' said Spencer Gordon, CEO of We Identifi. 'Their speed in delivering high-quality productions, combined with our commitment to creator independence, is reshaping the power and potential of streaming. The GAS-We Identifi alliance liberates all creators from the shackles of social media algorithms and the mandates of antiquated film studios and TV networks. Together, we are building a home for artists who make the content they want to make and connect with audiences on their terms—while fiercely upholding our First Amendment rights as the foundation of true creative freedom.'
The We Identifi platform, with the moniker, 'WE IDENTIFI' can be accessed for free by creators and fans on its website, weidentifi.com, and mobile app is now available for download on the Apple iOS App Store. We Identifi's website is now live in beta mode and currently undergoing improvements to enhance viewing and user experience.
The success of The Man You Don't Know, featuring exclusive interviews with Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, Hulk Hogan, and key figures from Trump's inner circle, was just the first step in this partnership. Moving forward, GAS and We Identifi will develop a diverse array of programming that includes blockbuster films, thought-provoking documentaries, music specials, athletic events, and groundbreaking digital-first experiences.
With innovative industry heavyweights like director Christopher Martini and producer Frank Torchia already onboard, 2025 is set to be a landmark year. As audiences demand content that is both authentic and unfiltered, Global Ascension Studios and We Identifi are poised to lead the next evolution in entertainment.
About Global Ascension Studios
Global Ascension Studios is a trailblazing production company dedicated to producing bold, high-impact films and series that challenge the status quo. By fostering creative freedom and innovation, GAS continues to redefine the entertainment landscape.
About We Identifi
We Identifi is a cutting-edge streaming platform designed for content creators, offering full ownership rights, flexible monetization, and direct audience engagement. Built for the modern content era, We Identifi empowers artists to take control of their work, truly own their audience and own their destiny.
How to find We Identifi:
www.weidentifi.comWe Identifi Mobile AppFor media inquiries, please contact: Ophelia SoumekhOphelia.soumekh@globalascensionstudios.com818 726-6761
A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/6ec1a493-4de2-4163-a1c8-6d7574503db1
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12 hours ago
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Sean 'Diddy' Combs' request for acquittal or new trial should be rejected, prosecutors say
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Atlantic
a day ago
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Who's Afraid of Gay Penguins?
A decade ago, when the government of Singapore announced its decision to pulp every copy of our picture book, And Tango Makes Three, in the nation's libraries, we felt profoundly lucky. Not for the pulping—that was alarming—but for the fact that the First Amendment guaranteed that this could never happen in America. We're not feeling quite so lucky anymore. In 2023, our book was one of thousands pulled from library shelves around the country, and as we write, an evolving legal strategy being used to defend many such bans threatens to upend decades of precedent preserving the right to read. The danger this doctrine poses to free speech should worry us all—even those who would rather their children not learn about gay penguins. In Tango, a pair of male chinstrap penguins in the Central Park Zoo become parents when a kindhearted zookeeper gives them an egg to hatch. (The story is both true and personal to us; when we wrote it, we were also trying to have a child.) Tango turned 20 in June, and for many of its years in print, it has been one of the most frequently challenged books in America. But until recently, it had never actually been removed from the collection of a public-school library, or any public library for that matter. That's because of a 1982 Supreme Court decision establishing that freedom of speech includes the right to access the speech of others through their books. Every challenge to a public-library book since has been subject to the Court's ruling that officials may not remove a book simply because they disagree with its viewpoint. Things started to change for us when a teacher in Escambia County, Florida, complained that the goal of Tango was the 'indoctrination' of students through an 'LGBTQ agenda using penguins.' A committee responsible for reviewing educational materials for the county disagreed, concluding that the story teaches valuable lessons about science and tolerance and is appropriate for students of all ages. But the school board balked at the book's message of acceptance. As one board member put it, 'The fascination is still on that it's two male penguins raising a chick.' Escambia pulled Tango from its school libraries, which serve roughly 40,000 children. We sued Escambia in federal court for viewpoint discrimination (the case is ongoing). In casting about for a way to defend the ban, the school board landed on the theory that library books represent 'government speech.' The government, the board explained, has its own First Amendment rights and must be allowed to speak as it wishes. Thus, it can remove any library book it finds objectionable for any reason. When we first heard this argument, we thought it was absurd. But government-speech doctrine is not new. It was invoked by the Supreme Court in 2009, for example, to allow a Utah town to refuse to install a religious monument in a public park, and again in 2015 to permit the state of Texas to refuse to issue certain specialty license plates. Roughly speaking, the doctrine holds that any action deemed 'government speech' is immune to the First Amendment claims of those whose speech is being censored. No court had ever found that library books represent government speech before May of this year, when the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit swept aside decades of precedent, including its own previous decisions, to allow the removal of 17 books—Isabel Wilkerson's Caste, Maurice Sendak's In the Night Kitchen, and Jazz Jennings's Being Jazz, among others—from the public libraries of Llano County, Texas. Seven judges in the majority agreed that 'a library's collection decisions are government speech and therefore not subject to Free Speech challenge.' And with that, the books were gone. The ruling will likely be appealed, and many expect that the Supreme Court will eventually have to decide whether the welter of books and opinions found in every public-library collection represents private speech that the government cannot suppress or government speech that it can censor as it wishes. Imagine the implications if the Court decides the latter. With each new school board, town council, or presidential election, a new set of books deemed out of step with the winner's political agenda could be swept off the shelves. The government could choose with impunity to destroy any book it dislikes, whether On the Origin of Species or the Bible. The censorship of other forms of speech in public settings could soon follow. Concern over the expanding use of government-speech claims is not limited to liberals. No less a conservative than Justice Samuel Alito has warned that the doctrine 'is susceptible to dangerous misuse.' When the Supreme Court decided that Texas could censor specialty license plates, Alito issued a stinging dissent decrying what he saw as the doctrine's encroachment on individual liberties. 'Here is a test,' he offered: Imagine yourself next to a highway watching the license plates pass—plates variously honoring colleges, clubs, athletes, and cheeseburgers. 'As you sat there watching these plates speed by, would you really think that the sentiments reflected in these specialty plates are the views of the State of Texas and not those of the owners of the cars?' And what if you walked into your child's school library and saw on its shelves Harry Potter, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Captain Underpants; the writings of James Baldwin and William F. Buckley Jr., Karl Marx and Adam Smith, Philip Roth, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and Alison Bechdel? Would you really think that each of these books expressed the views of your government? Read: Read the books that schools want to ban We are not legal scholars. We are a playwright and a psychiatrist who wrote a children's book about penguins. We cannot know how the justices of the Supreme Court might parse the precedents and the details of a case like ours if and when it reaches their bench. But we know where library books come from, and we know what they are for. They are not made by the government. They do not speak the government's mind. Even small elementary-school collections speak in hundreds of disparate voices offering a wealth of perspectives on our children's lives and their world—perspectives that all children deserve to hear. Our daughter is one of them. Bans such as the one on Tango have marched for the past few years under the banner of 'parents' rights.' We're parents too. And as the fathers of a now-16-year-old girl, we are determined to defend our daughter's right to read and write and say what she wishes. Eleven years ago, we followed the Singapore ban from a distant position of privilege that we now find embarrassing. Today, we hope Americans can learn from that example. In a nation where public demonstrations are tightly policed, hundreds of parents stood up to the government's threat to destroy our book. On a July afternoon, they brought their young children—some in strollers, others holding their stuffies—along with copies of our book and others like it, to the steps of the National Library Building. They sat down and read to their kids. Their quietly powerful protest made international news, and the Singapore government backed down. As we await decisions in our case and others like it across the country, we would do well to remember the value of putting our own voices to use, even or especially when the government would speak over us.


Vox
2 days ago
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A federal court took 2 years to figure out that gay people have First Amendment rights
is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he focuses on the Supreme Court, the Constitution, and the decline of liberal democracy in the United States. He received a JD from Duke University and is the author of two books on the Supreme Court. Drag queens engage in a performance that is obviously protected by the First Amendment. Photo byfor Tryst Hospitality Spectrum WT v. Wendler is one of the easiest First Amendment cases the federal courts heard this year — or in any other year. The question is whether a government official can ban drag shows. The obvious answer to this question is no. The government cannot ban drag for the same reason it cannot ban stand-up comedy, musical theatre, kabuki, noh, opera, koothu, or mime. If you really need an explainer on why the First Amendment doesn't permit the government to ban an entire theatrical style, I wrote that piece here. SCOTUS, Explained Get the latest developments on the US Supreme Court from senior correspondent Ian Millhiser. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. As the Supreme Court said in Southeastern Promotions v. Conrad (1975), a strikingly similar case about a municipal government's attempt to bar performance of the musical 'Hair,' 'only if we were to conclude that live drama is unprotected by the First Amendment — or subject to a totally different standard from that applied to other forms of expression — could we possibly find no [constitutional violation] here.' The good news for proponents of free speech is that, on Monday, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit handed down its decision in Spectrum WT, and that decision reached the correct conclusion that no, the government may not ban drag shows. But for the drag performers at the heart of the Spectrum WT case, this victory must taste like ash. Though the courts eventually got around to ruling that the First Amendment protects gay people, it took them more than two years to do so. The government succeeded in barring a performance that is protected by the First Amendment for more than half of an entire presidential term. Most of the reason why can be summarized in two words: 'Matthew Kacsmaryk.' Spectrum WT arises out of the president of a public university near Amarillo, Texas's attempt to ban drag shows at that school. And the only federal trial judge in Amarillo is Kacsmaryk, a notorious social conservative and prude who is best known for his failed attempt to ban the abortion drug mifepristone. There are other villains in this story as well. Though the Fifth Circuit eventually got around to saying that gay people have free speech rights, too, it rejected multiple requests to expedite the case or to temporarily block Kacsmaryk's decision allowing the drag ban while this litigation was ongoing. The Supreme Court also refused to intervene in a May 2024 decision. Related The edgelord of the federal judiciary And it's not even clear that this saga is over. Judge James Ho, a professional troll that President Donald Trump appointed to the Fifth Circuit in 2018, dissented from the decision in Spectrum WT. The university president who lost this case may appeal to the full Fifth Circuit, which has a MAGA majority. He may also ask the Supreme Court, which is frequently hostile toward LGBTQ+ people, to hear this case. It remains to be seen, in other words, whether the courts will eventually conclude that gay people have the right to free speech — and, if they do, how long it will take for them to reach that conclusion. Courts can weaponize their own calendars to benefit favored litigants and delay justice for disfavored ones Because any lawsuit filed in Amarillo will wind up before Kacsmaryk, right-wing litigants will often file their suits in that Texas city to ensure that their case is heard by a sympathetic judge. In August 2021, for example, Texas' Republican attorney general obtained an order from Kacsmaryk requiring the Biden administration to reinstate a Trump border policy that required many migrants to remain in Mexico while their immigration cases were being processed by US officials. Kacsmaryk's order was clearly illegal, and the Supreme Court eventually reversed him in an opinion warning that he 'imposed a significant burden upon the Executive's ability to conduct diplomatic relations with Mexico.' But the Court sat on the case until late June 2022 — effectively making Kacsmaryk the US border czar for nearly an entire year. But that's not how the Court, which has a 6-3 Republican majority, operates when Trump's lawyers ask them to intervene. When a lower court blocked Trump's plan to fire nearly half of the Department of Education's employees, the Republican justices gave Trump the power to do so a little more than a month after he asked them to get involved. When a lower court ordered Trump to comply with the Convention Against Torture, a treaty that the United States agreed to abide by, the Republican justices waited a little less than a month before they effectively withdrew America from that treaty. Indeed, the Court gave Trump full or partial relief in 16 of the past 16 Trump-related cases that arrived on the Court's 'shadow docket,' expedited matters that the justices often decide very quickly and without full briefing or an oral argument. Even when courts ultimately reach the correct legal conclusion, in other words, they can often reward litigants that they favor — and sabotage litigants that they don't — by manipulating when they hand down their decision. In shadow docket cases, for example, the Supreme Court is only supposed to intervene early in a case when the party seeking to block a lower court decision can show that they will be 'irreparably injured' without the Court's intervention. But the Republican justices appear to have exempted the Trump administration from this requirement, even though they applied this rule to Biden. Related Justice Kavanaugh just revealed an unfortunate truth about the Supreme Court This practice, where courts can delay suits brought by disfavored parties and expedite matters brought by others, was front and center in Spectrum WT. The case arose after West Texas A&M president Walter Wendler prohibited drag shows on campus, cancelling a planned event by a campus LGBTQ+ group in the process. Because West Texas A&M is within Kacsmaryk's jurisdiction, the student group had no chance of winning at the trial level. Kacsmaryk is a longtime anti-LGBTQ+ activist who has claimed that being transgender is a 'mental disorder' and that gay people are 'disordered.' As Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer said during Kacsmaryk's confirmation fight, 'Mr. Kacsmaryk has demonstrated a hostility to the LGBTQ bordering on paranoia.' The courts' decision to sit on this case for so long is particularly jarring, because this case involves a public university student group. As the Fifth Circuit acknowledged in its Monday decision, the Supreme Court has long held that 'the loss of First Amendment freedoms, for even minimal periods of time, unquestionably constitutes irreparable injury,' so any case denying First Amendment rights to a litigant is a strong candidate for an expedited decision restoring those rights. But the argument for expedited relief is particularly strong when student groups are denied First Amendment rights, because many of those students may graduate before the courts restore those rights. In the more than two years since Wendler unconstitutionally banned drag shows on campus, about half of the undergraduates at his school have finished their degrees. That means that they were permanently denied their right to organize a drag show, or to perform in drag on campus, during their junior and senior years. The Fifth Circuit might have reversed Kacsmaryk's decision, but it cannot turn back time to give these graduates an experience that they may have cherished. Wendler and Kacsmaryk, in other words, irreparably injured these students. And one of the central questions when a party asks an appellate court to swiftly block a lower court decision is supposed to be whether that party will be irreparably injured. But both the Fifth Circuit and the Supreme Court sat on their hands, nonetheless. The legal arguments supporting drag bans are risible If you don't get the fact that the First Amendment prohibits government officials, including public university presidents, from banning an entire style of dramatic performance, then 'judge' is not the right job for you. Nevertheless, Judge Ho did dissent in the Spectrum WT. His argument is…unusual. The crux of Ho's argument is that courts should defer to Wendler's conclusion that drag shows are inherently sexist. In a letter justifying his decision to ban drag, Wendler claimed that drag denigrates women in the same way that blackface performances denigrate African Americans. 'As a university president, I would not support 'blackface' performances on our campus,' Wendler wrote. 'I do not support any show, performance or artistic expression which denigrates others—in this case, women—for any reason.' There are so many problems with this argument that it is hard to know where to begin. Drag shows and blackface are superficially similar in that one involves people who are not Black masquerading as Black people, and the other typically involves people who are not women dressing as if they were. But the similarities end there. Blackface exists to degrade Black people. Drag shows exist to lampoon gender roles, not to convey that women are inferior to men. But none of that matters for a very simple reason: Blackface is protected by the Constitution, as is all kinds of offensive speech. In Snyder v. Phelps (2011), for example, the Supreme Court held that members of an anti-gay church have a First Amendment right to protest military funerals with signs displaying anti-gay slurs and messages like 'Thank God for Dead Soldiers.' Racial slurs, racist or sexist performances, and all kinds of other despicable speech are all protected by the First Amendment. Thus, even if Wendler were correct that drag is akin to blackface, it wouldn't matter. The First Amendment protects blackface. That said, the Supreme Court has held that public schools may sanction speech that 'materially disrupts classwork or involves substantial disorder or invasion of the rights of others.' This is why public school teachers may put a student who interrupts their lessons in detention. So, a public university president might be able to bar a blackface performance if they can show that it would so offend the student body that it would disrupt the school's ability to educate. But there's no evidence that West Texas A&M classrooms would be disrupted because of a drag show. Ho attempts to get around all of this law by pointing to the Supreme Court's decision in Christian Legal Society v. Martinez (2010), which held that public universities may require campus groups to adopt an 'all-comers' policy — meaning that they must allow any student who wants to join the group to join — if those groups want to receive certain benefits and subsidies from the university. The plaintiff in Christian Legal Society, a campus group that wished to bar students who engage in 'unrepentant homosexual conduct,' claimed that this policy violated their First Amendment right to free association. Ho appears to argue that, because the anti-gay group in Christian Legal Society could not rely on the First Amendment to overcome the all-comers policy, it follows that the student group at issue in Spectrum WT also cannot invoke its First Amendment rights. But it is well-established that anti-discrimination laws can overcome the right to free association. If they couldn't, then all such laws would be unconstitutional. A law barring race discrimination in hiring, for example, forces white supremacist employers to associate with non-white workers. Christian Legal Society would apply to the student group in Spectrum WT if it tried to bar straight students from joining (assuming, of course, that West Texas A&M has an all-comers policy), and it might apply if they attempted to exclude some students from attending the drag performance. But it has nothing to say about whether a public university president may ban certain performances on campus. Ho's opinion, in other words, is quite wrong. But it should stand as a warning to anyone who hopes to invoke their constitutional rights in the future. Ho is widely viewed as a leading candidate for promotion to the Supreme Court in Trump's second term. And the more time Trump spends in office, the more judges like Kacsmaryk and Ho he can appoint to the bench.