'The crime of just being Jewish'

'Why the fuck is this happening?'

Movies & TV Spooky Season Celebrate Spooky Season Without the Jumpscares in Ten Horror Documentaries These in-depth documentaries will give you the movie trivia and references you’ll need to get through Halloween… By Leah Schnelbach | Published on October 23, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share Are you a person who wants to get into horror but can’t quite stomach gore? A person who longs for a haunted house movie, but hates the sense of dread they inspire? I have two solutions for you! First, you can read Emily C. Hughes’ excellent book Horror for Weenies (here’s a sample chapter!) because it was literally written for you. But second, you can sample this fine list post, wherein you’ll find documentaries about horror that, for the most part, don’t get horrific themselves, but that will give you the movie trivia and references you’ll need to get through Halloween. Chain Reactions Chain Reactions is an appreciation of the all-time horror classic Texas Chainsaw Massacre from Alexandre O. Phillipe. Phillipe also directed Lynch/Oz, which I wrote about in an appreciation of David Lynch after his passing. Where Lynch/Oz gathered several artists and critics together to dig into the influence The Wizard of Oz had on the work of David Lynch, Chain Reactions brings us five artists who discuss their personal journeys with Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre, along with some connective tissue about Hooper’s career. The interviewees include Patton Oswalt, Takashi Miike, Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Karyn Kusama, and Stephen King, and they go in a LOT of different directions over the course of this film. Oswalt talks about his personal encounters with Texas Chainsaw Massacre, then discusses Gone with the Wind and The Quiet Man, two films that he says “sold rape as romance”, contrasting that with Massacre’s utter emotional honesty in a startling connection that sets the tone for how far afield the artists are willing to go in this discussion—which, to be clear, is why I loved this documentary. (And Oswalt’s dead on about Gone with the Wind and The Quiet Man, by the way.) Takashi Miike, in probably my favorite segment, relates how he went out planning to see a VERY different movie—which I shall not spoil for anyone who wants to watch this doc, cause it’s fucking hilarious—but  ended up at Texas Chainsaw Massacre instead. He says that he doesn’t think he’d be a film director without its influence, and says “I think of it as a role model”. This probably explains a lot about Miike, and the universe, and everything. Alexandra Heller-Nicholas puts it in conversation with Australian cinema, especially Wake in Fright and Picnic at Hanging Rock, to talk about the burned out yellow-brown aesthetic of the film, and the relentless, almost evil, heat of the sun, while Karyn Kusama ties the film to the cultural upheaval of the 1970s. Stephen King talks about the film as dark Americana—the idea that Leatherface and his family are what happens when the working class of the country are rendered obsolete and abandoned.   To put my own cards on the table: I’ve seen Texas Chainsaw Massacre twice, I really love it, but I’ll probably never watch it again—but I think that final shot of Leatherface and the chainsaw in the sun is one of the most beautiful ever put on film. I’ve never had the pull toward the film like these five interviewees have, but I loved getting to hear their thoughts on why this film is so important to them. I think even if you don’t like Texas Chainsaw Massacre you’ll enjoy this—Phillipe’s film really ends up interrogating what art is, and what it can do, more than just being a movie about another movie. Chain Reactions pulls up a chair at the totally normal American dinner table of video-on-demand this week! Birth of the Living Dead Birth of the Living Dead is a look at the making of Night of the Living Dead put together by Larry Fessenden, and it won my heart instantaneously by opening with a pan over the Pittsburgh skyline set to the theme from Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. The doc spends the first few minutes centering the story of Night of the Living Dead as a quintessentially Pittsburgh story—many people from the community came together, and there’s a certain pride in a working class steel town producing a film. The film turned out to be a work of art—but the people making it were just trying to make a good entertaining movie. Duane Jones was cast as Ben not because Romero wanted to make a blatant political statement, but because he was best actor who auditioned. At the same time, Romero didn’t change anything to appease white audiences, not even the seen where Ben slaps Barbara to try to break her out of her panic. (For context: In The Heat of the Night, a serious film about race that caused controversy when it showed Sidney Poitier backhanding a racist white man who hit him, had only come out the year before.) Romero also didn’t shy away from the ways his film echoed the real footage of assaults on Black civil rights protesters, or the footage of the carnage in Vietnam, both of which were broadcast into people homes on the news every night.   Romero, like a lot of people in Pittsburgh, learned his trade working for Fred Rogers. If you worked in film or TV at the time, you probably worked on that show. He’s kind of a Three Rivers Roger Corman, if you will, an Iron City Lloyd Kauffman. But this highlights something I found moving about this documentary. For all that most of society was worse in the ‘50s and ‘60s, there was also the fact that people with a cool story could come together, learn their craft on the job, pool resources, and make enough money to fund a creative project like this while still making rent and putting food on the table—it wasn’t easy, but it was doable. Night of the Living Dead was a community project. Even the cops came out and brought K-9 units in to play the police force in the film. The newscaster in the movie is a real Pittsburgh newscaster. The traffic reporters let Romero use their helicopter for overhead shots. Locals who helped finance the film played zombies. One guy allowed himself to be set on fire for a scene, with the caveat that if he started to get too hot, he’d roll on the ground and put himself out. When Romero needed a shot of zombies eating human flesh, a local meatpacking business brought in a bag of spare entrails for the actors to gnaw on. One of the best lines in the movie—“Yeah, they’re dead… they’re all messed up”—was ad-libbed on the spot by George Kosana, a man who worked on the crew and put his own money into the movie, all while holding down a day job as a steelworker. This, this is what humanity is capable of, given a chance, a little stability, and a little good faith. Birth of the Living Dead is shambling along on Tubi! Jaws at 50: The Definitive Inside Story “The film was 100 days behind schedule, and 80% of the time the shark didn’t work.” Admittedly, Laurent Bouzereau’s anniversary celebration of Jaws is somewhat fluffy, and at times almost a commercial for Jaws—but then Jaws is one of the greatest films ever made, so for once I’m OK with watching a commercial. Bouzereau interviews Steven Spielberg, of course, but it also gives plenty of space to members of Peter Benchley’s family, who talk about the book’s publication history; Robert Shaw’s son, Ian (who also deals with this topic in his play, The Shark is Broken); lots of crew members; and fellow filmmakers and commentators including Jordan Peele, Stephen Soderbergh, Guillermo del Toro, and George Lucas. It’s always fun to talk about Bruce, the mechanical shark that made everyone’s life miserable, because in the end Jaws became a classic. But what I think this documentary does better than other behind-the-scenes stuff I’ve seen is get into just how terrifying this experience was for young Steven Spielberg. He had his career in TV behind him, an excellent TV movie in Duel, and a breakout debut feature in Sugarland Express—but he realized very early that Jaws might snuff his career when it was just getting started. The terror of being fired from the film, of delivering a dud, of losing the dream he’d worked for since he was a tiny child, resulted in nightmares and anxiety attacks that plagued him for years. It was also really sweet to learn that the, ahem, ocean-averse Martin Scorsese would run up to Martha’s Vineyard from New York to keep him company during his panic attacks. Jaws at 50: The Definitive Inside Story will clear the beaches on Disney+! Queer for Fear Queer for Fear is a four-part series looking at queer themes and symbolism in horror, produced and directed by Bryan Fuller and Steak House. The show has a fabulously deep bench of creators, including Fuller himself, Kevin Williamson, Carmen Maria Machado, Karyn Kusama, Emily St. James, Alonso Duralde, Kimberley Pierce, Justin Simien, Mark Gatiss, Don Mancini, Tommy Pico, and Leslye Headland, among many more. It allows for moments of depth, emotion, and deep insight, but it’s also just a joy to watch—what other documentary would give like five minutes of screentime to a debate over whether Mrs. Danvers is a top or a bottom? I love the whole series, but my favorite is probably Episode 2, where the interviewees dig into the work of James Whale and Alfred Hitchcock. Any discussion of Whale’s life—openly gay at a time when that was unheard of—and career—he made Frankenstein, The Bride of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, AND The Old Dark House, come ON—is welcome, but where the segment really takes flight for me is the consideration of Frankenstein as a trans narrative. As Emily St. James says: “Frankenstein is about the idea that science might subvert the ways that god has set up the universe… [T]here’s this element of science helping you find your true form that’s not NOT trans, but also society regards that science as ghoulish… every day trans people are playing god for themselves, they’re saying: ‘I am going to reanimate the parts of myself that everyone has told me should be dead.’” The second half of the episode confronts some of Alfred Hitchcock’s choices. Don Mancini talks about Hitchcock’s decision to hire a closeted queer man to play the monster male figure in Psycho, which leads into a long section with Anthony Perkins’ son, filmmaker Osgood Perkins, discussing the way Psycho uses queer coding, especially in regards to his father’s casting (“Hitchcock is too much of a trickster… not to want to add that really vital edge.”) and talks about his dad’s life under the shadow of Norman Bates, and how he expressed some of that stress through the rest of the Psycho series, especially when he directed Psycho III from Charles Edward Pogue’s script. It’s such a lovely, empathetic reading of a shitty situation, and it felt fucking generous of Perkins to invite the audience into his thoughts about it. Queer for Fear will make the subtext glorious text on Shudder! Cursed Films Cursed Films is a two-season series on Shudder that, as you might expect from the title, explores the making of ten films that have since been declared “cursed” by the culture at large—whether because of on-set mishaps, abusive behavior by cast or crew, or a sense that terrible fortune followed the artists involved. The show talks about some obvious films like The Wizard of Oz (the rumors about ghosts on film, the wild, exaggerated stories about the actors who played the Lollipop Guild, the abuse of Judy Garland), Poltergeist (the horrific murder of Dominique Dunne, and tragic death of Heather O’Rourke), The Crow (the terrible on-set accident that killed Brandon Lee), and The Exorcist (on-set accidents, deaths during filming, general out-of-pocket behavior by Mr. Friedkin)—but each episode does a good job of tempering the wilder stories with real explorations of filming conditions, and asks why people seem to need to create these stories to explain accidents, negligence, or human behavior. My personal favorite of the series is the episode on Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, which looks at the tragic deaths that were quite possibly caused by toxic filming locations (it was literally filmed at Chernobyl) and also explores the recent rise of real-life Stalkers, people who lead tourists through the grounds around Chernobyl into a landscape that looks eerily similar to The Zone of the film. I don’t know if I love or hate what this episode says about the human spirit, but I hope these guys are all OK. Cursed Films will explain that, “No, for the last time, that is NOT a ‘real ghost’ in the background of that scene, ffs” on Shudder! Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror Horror Noire is an epic work of reclamation, based on a book by Robin R. Means Coleman, and it goes beyond the “Black Guy/Girl Dies First” trope (which, come to think of it, Dr. Coleman has a book about that, too) to trace the history of Black actors, writers, directors, and general cultural influence on the genre. The documentary series works its way chronologically from the early days of film, celebrating pioneers like Oscar Micheaux and Spencer Williams, up to modern creators like Ernest Dickerson and Jordan Peele. It features interviews with creators including author Tananarive Due, Jordan Peele, Keith David, Rachel True, and Tony Todd. But where I thought it was particularly brilliant was in the opening, where it announces its point of view by naming D.W. Griffith’s “classic” Birth of a Nation as the first true Black horror film. For anyone who doesn’t know, Birth of a Nation, which for decades was taught as kind of an alpha point for U.S. filmmaking, is a film where a white actor in blackface attacks a white woman and is subsequently lynched by the Ku Klux Klan—the film was one of the first ever screened in the White house, was lauded by then-president Woodrow Wilson, and led directly to a resurgence of Klan-led white supremacist terrorism across America. As Tananarive Due puts it: “Black history IS Black horror.” With that as the framing, the series carries us through all the years of servant roles, “Voodoo” exploitation movies, and then the utter lack of Black characters or actors in the ‘50s and ‘60s (while monsters like King Kong and the Creature from the Black Lagoon are coded as “others” that could easily be read as Black) before the cultural upheavals of the 1970s brought us work like Blacula and Ganja and Hess, and up into the ‘80s and ‘90s, where Black actors and creators were finally able to carve out larger spaces in the genre. Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror will educate you on how to avoid The Sunken Place on AMC+, Shudder, and Apple TV! The J Horror Virus If you’ve read my stuff on this site, you might have run across my insistence that nothing scares me. And that is big fat LIE, because one thing absolutely scares me, and it’s a particular era of Japanese horror. The wave of gut-churning Japanese films of the late 90s and early 00s: The Ring, Pulse, Ju-On: The Grudge, Dark Water, etc.—I needed to watch the suckers, but they’d stick in my brain and come back in my dreams. I suspect it’s because, as Ju-On: Black Ghost director Mari Asato mentions in the documentary, Japanese horror tends to commit to an utter, irrevocable upending of reality. One you’re cursed, you’re done. The curses are usually random, but there’s no undoing it once it happens, and that pale black-haired child will appear under your table at a restaurant, and he will be at your feet in bed, and he will somehow have his hand tangled in your hair in the shower. You’re done. Give up now. Anyway, the documentary is great, and goes back to the 1980s to look at the first underground hits in the subgenre, up through the classics of the ‘90s and ‘00s, and features interviews with creators including Hiroshi Takahashi, writer of The Ring, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, director of Pulse and Cure, and Shinya Tsukamoto, creator of Tetsuo: The Iron Man, the only one of these films I can watch with unalloyed glee. But I watched this doc through my fingers. Just in case. The J-Horror Virus will crawl out of your screen on Shudder! (Goddammit I shouldn’t have said that…) Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy You want four hours of in-depth conversation about Freddy Krueger? (If the answer is “no” you should examine your heart.) This documentary from Thommy Hutson, Daniel Farrands, and Andrew Kasch, is a very detailed look at the making of the first A Nightmare on Elm Street, followed with hours tracing the film’s success and the fanbase that built around the sequels. It was fun tracking the gentle digs at Friday the 13th (Wes Craven got his start working with Friday’s eventual director Sean S. Cunningham on the soft-core satire Together and the rape-revenge film Last House on the Left) and learning that the original concept was for Freddy Krueger to be an ancient man, before they decided the more nimble, quippy Robert Englund was the way to go. And the documentary is stuffed with fun trivia: the makeup effects artist discovered Freddy’s face by literally rearranging pepperoni on a slice of pizza, then augmented that by using medical textbooks; Englund based his movements on Klaus Kinski’s take on Nosferatu, and also… Jimmy Cagney (???). And as with a lot of Craven’s films, there’s a deeper thought process under what might have been a basic slasher: is it ever morally justifiable to end someone’s life? Even if that person is a serial abuser? Where is the line between justice and vengeance? How does trauma spill forward into the future? If you need even more lengthy treatises on modern horror icons, various configurations of these filmmakers also made Crystal Lake Memories and Doc of Chucky, which cover Sean S. Cunningham’s Friday the 13th franchise and Don Mancini’s Chucky series respectively, which are also available on Shudder and feature a literal murderers row of cast members, writers, and fans to answer every question you could possible have. Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy hangs out with the Hat Man on Tubi! Pennywise: The Story of It This documentary isn’t about the writing of Stephen King’s massive, maximalist, life-changing, perfectly structured novel, It. It is, instead, about the making of the groundbreaking 1990 two-night television miniseries that gave us Tim Curry as Pennywise. For the younger readers: a miniseries is what “prestige TV” used to be. It was when a network poured a lot of money into a “television event” for anywhere between two nights and two weeks, and an enormous amount of the US population would plunk in front of their televisions and watch the thing all at the same time, and talk about it the next day. Kind of like Sunday-night HBO Max programming is now, but with fewer zombies. It was the first time a work from the horror genre was treated as this kind of event on mainstream TV, and a lot of the documentary covers the struggles of bringing that kind of work to television without watering it down too much—but also without traumatizing a generation of kids who happened to be in front of the TV at the wrong/right time. …they managed the first half. The doc features interview with the director, writer, special effects crew, cast, including Tim Curry and Seth Green (who both have some especially fun reminiscences). It spends a gratifying amount of runtime on the art of adapting the script from the book, and it addresses both the orgy and the cheesy alien spider in the room, but somehow keeps the tone nostalgic and fun despite that. Pennywise: The Story of It floats on Tubi! Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched Are you ready for three-and-half hours of FOLK HORROR? To be fair, some of the documentaries on this list are even longer, but this might be the most wide-ranging. Writer/director/co-producer Kier-La Janisse turns Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched into a global tour of folk horror, dropping in on dozens of countries and eras to look at how different cultures define the subgenre. The first hour digs into English work, films like Witchfinder General, Blood on Satan’s Claw, and The Wicker Man that for many people are the absolute definition—or maybe even the only folk horror they’ve seen. But it goes beyond that to look at many different films, both those theatrically released and TV movies that, in some cases, became more influential than the features. The documentary spends the next two-and-a-half hours expanding across Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, Russia, Japan, Brazil, Australia, and different regions of North America to give a comprehensive look at how folk horror has expressed the obsessions and traumas of people from all around the world. My only real quibble with the film is that there’s no Irish folk horror represented (given the cornucopia of excellent Irish horror, that seems really weird), and there wasn’t enough attention paid to work in Eastern Europe and Russia. And yes, I’m asking for the very long movie to be even longer, but this is an inexhaustible field (often in England) and I love it and will always want more. Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched haunts the endless forests of Tubi and Shudder![end-mark] The post Celebrate Spooky Season Without the Jumpscares in Ten Horror Documentaries appeared first on Reactor.

How close is the race for Virginia’s next governor? We could cite polls (Democrat Abigail Spanberger leads by more than five points in the two that were released in the past week) or go over campaign contributions (Spanberger raised $12.6 million in September while Republican Winsome Earle-Sears raised $9.1 million), but it doesn’t appear that those statistics are telling the whole story. For the first time since 2021, President Barack Obama will be coming to campaign in Virginia. The Nov. 1 event in Hampton Roads is his first visit to that region since 2012 during his own reelection campaign. As poker players refer to it, that’s the “tell.” >>> Sign up for our Virginia email newsletter Despite Republican gains in Northern Virginia counties like Loudoun and Fairfax in 2021, it was the Republican ticket’s strength in the Hampton Roads region that pushed the ticket to victory in 2021. The three Republican statewide candidates all lived in the area, and then-lieutenant governor candidate Earle-Sears and then-attorney general candidate Jason Miyares both represented districts there in the House of Delegates. On Sunday, President Donald Trump was asked why he had not endorsed Earle-Sears this year, to which he responded, “I think the Republican candidate is very good, and she should win because the Democratic candidate is a disaster.” In the ads Obama recently recorded for Spanberger, he said, “Virginia’s elections are some of the most important in the country this year.” Why would he say that? For a couple of reasons. The first is money. The direst issue to the Democratic Party—and more importantly, to those that give Democrats money, like climate venture capitalist Tom Steyer and the specter-like George Soros—would be the end of the Virginia Clean Economy Act. The Democratic Party Leadership is already facing several Democrat legislators admitting that they are open to rewriting the act. It’s also facing voters railing against the dire rhetoric of Dominion Energy telling them that rate hikes and brownouts are coming while saying that it has to build the inefficient renewable energy production facilities because of the law. The stakes in this race are the billions of dollars in government subsidies that support these programs, according to data from the Conveners Network, an organization that helps companies find subsidies for renewable energy. If another Republican governor is elected who has a Republican House of Delegates ready to cut that money flow, you can imagine the urgency of wanting to stop that. The second reason is normalization. Faster than you can say “Overton Window,” a new GOP majority in the House of Delegates in 2026 could stop a proposed Virginia constitutional amendment that would permit abortion up until the moment of birth. Make no mistake, the logistics of Obama’s visit to Hampton Roads are also meant to boost the fortunes of vulnerable Democrat delegates in the region who the Democrats need to win in November to prevent a GOP majority in the House. Delegates like 97th District Del. Michael Feggans. It’s a district Republican Glenn Youngkin carried in 2021 on his way to the Governor’s Mansion and Feggans won with just 51% in 2023. A few photos with Obama holding Feggans’ hand aloft could be just the ticket to defeating popular Republican Tim Anderson (who will be our guest in our election-primer podcasts coming up this week). If the Democrats keep the House majority, they will be able to pass the constitutional amendment on abortion and send it to the voters next year for approval. What hope can pro-lifers have to pass abortion restrictions in their states if the abortion lobby can point to the precedent-setting amendment enacted in the former home of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington? We are at the point where polls will feel like they are being released every hour through November—with the results designed to tell conservatives, “Abandon all hope.” Before you fall prey to that emotion, you need to ask yourself, if that were true, why is the president of “Hope and Change” back out on the campaign trail again? The post Why Is Obama Returning to Campaign in This Virginia Region for First Time in 13 Years? appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Americans spend billions of dollars to combat homelessness, through donations and taxpayer funding, but the “Homeless Industrial Complex” uses this money for political activism that actually demonizes the policies more likely to solve the crisis, according to a new report. “Fringe groups in the Homeless Industrial Complex like to characterize homelessness as a symptom of societal injustices, such as systemic racism, police violence, or capitalism,” Scott Walter, president of the Capital Research Center, which released the report, told The Daily Signal in a statement Tuesday. “Anyone who disagrees with their tried-and-not-true policy recommendations is called uncompassionate or greedy.” The report, “Infiltrated: The Ideological Capture of Homelessness Advocacy,” focuses on the 759 organizations that filed amicus briefs in the Supreme Court case Grants Pass v. Johnson (2024), arguing that laws against camping on the sidewalk violate the Eighth Amendment prohibition on “cruel and unusual punishment.” The Supreme Court disagreed, but the nonprofit support for this claim illustrates how organizations founded to help solve the homelessness crisis engage in activism that arguably exacerbates it. The Capital Research Center report finds that the nonprofits collectively have $9.1 billion in total revenues, and received at least $2.9 billion in government grants (32% of their revenues), according to IRS filings. Attacking Trump and Conservatives The Southern Poverty Law Center, a left-wing nonprofit that puts mainstream conservative and Christian groups on a “hate map” alongside the Ku Klux Klan and has an endowment of more than $700 million, was the second largest nonprofit to sign an amicus brief in the Grants Pass case. The SPLC’s involvement “illustrates the disconnect between those charities that provide genuine services to the needy, and those that use their resources to advance a left-wing ideological agenda,” Walter said. “When President [Donald] Trump signed a series of commonsensical executive orders in 2025 to protect public safety and address the root causes of homelessness, the SPLC and other allied groups accused him of human rights violations,” he noted. Trump’s order “Ending Crime and Disorder on American Streets” notes that America hit a grim milestone when 274,224 people lived on the streets on a single night in January 2024, and that most of the homeless “are addicted to drugs, have a mental health condition, or both.” His order directs the federal government to enforce bans on open illicit drug use and on urban camping and shifting the homeless into “long-term institutional settings for humane treatment.” In response, SPLC Deputy Legal Director Kristen Anderson accused Trump of “resurrecting unlawful and outdated approaches to housing that are rooted in racist stereotypes and bias against people with disabilities.” The Homeless Industrial Complex The SPLC may have been the second wealthiest group to sign an amicus brief in the Grants Pass case, but it was far from alone. The Capital Research Center report delves into a vast network of “nonprofits sustained with taxpayer dollars” that “often double as litigants and lobbyists, opposing enforcement measures that many communities see as essential to restoring public order.” While many of these nonprofits, such as the Chief Seattle Club, began as service providers, helping to find housing for the homeless, many now engage in “high visibility advocacy,” as well. They advocate for “housing first,” the idea that housing programs should accept people regardless of their drug use status; “harm reduction,” the idea that housing programs cannot prevent drug use and therefore should normalize it; or “housing justice,” the amalgamation of left-wing activist causes on race, transgender ideology, and other issues with housing. Some organizations, such as the Western Regional Advocacy Project, frame policing itself as “a structural enemy of housing justice,” the report notes. Radical Ties The report also notes that the Homeless Industrial Complex has ties to groups that celebrated the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attacks, along with connections to the Black Lives Matter movement and Antifa anarchists. Alicia Garza, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter, was elected as board chair of Right to the City Alliance in 2021, for example. In 2023, the alliance posted on Instagram, “From Palestine to Mexico, all borders and militarized violence have got to go!” The Sunrise Movement, which helped organize the “No Kings” protests this month, integrates universal access to housing into its Green New Deal proposal and endorsed the “Stop Cop City” movement that included riots in Atlanta. “Our research shows that some radical elements of the Homeless Industrial Complex care more about rhetoric than results,” Walter told The Daily Signal. He criticized policies that “ignore or even encourage the homeless population to continue the abuse of drugs and alcohol.” “The result is a self-serving cycle that wastes government funding, alienates potential allies in the fight against homelessness, and leaves vulnerable people without the direct services they need,” he explained. That’s how nonprofits with billions in revenue and receiving billions in tax dollars end up fighting at the Supreme Court for the idea that laws to clean the streets may violate the Constitution. “Bad actors in the Homeless Industrial Complex appear to be spending taxpayer dollars on everything but real solutions to America’s homelessness crisis,” Walter told The Daily Signal. “The Homeless Industrial Complex treats homeless people as pawns in ideological wars. They deserve better.” The Daily Signal reached out to the SPLC, the Chief Seattle Club, the Western Regional Advocacy Project, the Right to the City Alliance, and the Sunrise Movement for comment. Homeless Industrial Complex ReportDownload The post REPORT: ‘Homeless Industrial Complex’ Demonizes the Policies Most Likely to Actually Help the Homeless appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Senate Democrats have blocked paying essential federal workers as the government shutdown continues into its fourth week.  In a vote of X to Y, a bill sponsored by Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., to pay essential federal workers, including active-duty members of the U.S. military, failed to clear the Senate’s 60-vote threshold to become law. Democrat Sens. Z and H voted for the measure. Fetterman in particular has criticized his Democrat colleagues for continuing the government shutdown.  “Shut our government down and America loses. 2 MILLION Pennsylvanians depend on SNAP to feed their families. For me, it’s hungry Americans over party. Paying our military over party. Paying Capitol Police and federal workers over party. I choose country over party,” the Pennsylvania senator posted on the social media platform X on Wednesday.  Shut our government down and America loses.2 MILLION Pennsylvanians depend on SNAP to feed their families. For me, it’s hungry Americans over party.Paying our military over party.Paying Capitol Police and federal workers over party.I choose country over party. pic.twitter.com/JQbGkzYdw8— U.S. Senator John Fetterman (@SenFettermanPA) October 22, 2025 Meanwhile, over the weekend, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., visited California to gin up support for the Proposition 50 ballot measure, which would allow Democrats to gerrymander congressional maps in the Golden State. The measure comes after the Republican efforts to redistrict in Texas and Missouri. The Wisconsin senator’s bill would have paid all federal employees who are working during the government shutdown because they have been determined to be essential. It also would have compensated certain federal contractors who are critical to supporting the federal government during a shutdown.  Republicans have made clear through repeated efforts to pass their stopgap spending continuing resolution and an attempt to fund the Department of War individually that they want what has become the second-longest federal government shutdown in history to end.  Those efforts have been thwarted by Senate Democrats, ostensibly over extending the temporary COVID-era Obamacare enhanced subsidies. The subsidies have been criticized for subsidizing abortion and transgender procedures as well as likely leading to tens of billions of dollars in fraud against American taxpayers.  In total, Democrats are demanding $1.5 trillion in additional spending through extending the temporary subsidies, as well as other demands, such as ending the savings from the One Big, Beautiful Bill. This new spending would have been taken out as additional national debt over the course of the next 10 years, even as the national debt has surpassed $38 trillion.  Democrats are admitting that they’re using the American families as leverage. They need to stop playing sick, partisan games with people’s lives and reopen the government. https://t.co/bAIuj7Gggl— Senator Ron Johnson (@SenRonJohnson) October 22, 2025 Thousands of federal workers have been furloughed during the shutdown, which has also led to the closure of the Smithsonian museums and the National Zoo. Federal employees by law will receive back pay for the furloughed time once the government shutdown ends if they are not compensated before then. The post BREAKING: Senate Democrats Block Bill to Pay Essential Federal Workers appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Philly's Despicable Soros DA, a Murder, and the NJ Governor's Race

Algorithms pretending to be therapists may be putting people in danger.

"Right now, the existence of live saolas can neither be proven nor disproven."

Reduced blood supply to the brain may result in tunnel vision and other unusual geometries.