The mother of Lola Daviet, a 12-year-old French girl who was kidnapped, raped, and beheaded by a migrant from Algeria, said her husband “died of grief” after their daughter’s murder. The horrific crime occurred in France in October 2022. Lola’s mother testified at trial last week that her husband, Johan, began drinking heavily after her killing and was tormented by “his demons.” Johan died in February 2024. Dhabia Benkired, 27, is the first woman in French history to receive a life sentence in prison. Benkired was working as a prostitute and had overstayed her student visa when she decided to commit murder after getting in a fight with her boyfriend. Benkired admitted that she told herself, “I’m going to hurt someone,” and picked Lola as her target. She lured the young girl into her apartment by having her help carry a suitcase. She proceeded to sexually assault her, saying the little girl begged, “Madam, please don’t hurt me,” and sounded “scared,” per The Daily Mail.  “All the hatred I had inside me, I took it out on her… Either way, I knew she was going to die,” Benkired said during her testimony. “It’s not that I wanted to kill her, but that I wanted to hurt someone. But since I had raped her, I might as well kill her.” Join us now during our exclusive Deal of the Decade. Get everything for $7 a month. Not as fans. As fighters. Go to DailyWire.com/Subscribe to join now. Lola had 38 stab wounds and was both vaginally and anally penetrated. Her cause of death was determined as asphyxia. Benkired stuffed Lola’s mutilated and partially decapitated body into a plastic trunk and walked around Paris with it, including taking it into a restaurant, before she abandoned it in the lobby of the apartment complex where it was discovered by a homeless man. The convicted murderer apologized for her “horrible actions” at the trial, saying, “I know I killed a baby, an angel.” Before he died, Johan had hung a letter on the door of Benkired’s apartment addressed to his murdered child. “My darling, I still don’t understand why there was so much cruelty and barbarity towards you, you who were so kind,” the letter said. “I can’t wait to see you again. Your dad, who loves you for life.”

After months of defending former President Joe Biden from criticisms — about his age, frailty, and obvious cognitive impairment — “The View” host Ana Navarro tore into President Donald Trump and claimed that he was beginning to show his age. Navarro, a self-described Republican who supported Biden and even spoke at the 2024 Democratic National Convention, weighed in on a conversation with her cohosts about whether or not Trump would attempt to run for a third term as President of the United States. Sunny Hostin claimed that Trump was clearly laying the groundwork to make himself a dictator for life, arguing that he would not be renovating anything at the White House — like so many previous presidents have — unless he planned to refuse to vacate the residence at the end of his term. “I have come to the conclusion that he is most definitely going to try to remain in power, because remember, that East Wing, it’s going to take a long time to build that. He is hooking up the White House because he doesn’t plan on leaving it! I don’t think he plans on leaving!” she insisted. WATCH: Ana Navarro who defended Biden’s cognitive now has an issue with Trump’s hands and ankles. She also claims Trump “has got authoritarian envy” because “he wants to be an emperor, he wants to be an authoritarian.” pic.twitter.com/hga3blAwfn — Nicholas Fondacaro (@NickFondacaro) October 27, 2025 Navarro followed that by agreeing, “He wants to be an emperor, he wants to be an authoritarian” — and then argued that he would be too old to do the job by then anyway. “The ironic thing though, is there were a lot of people who thought Joe Biden was too old to run,” she added. “Donald Trump is already the oldest president ever elected in history, he would be 82 in 2028. We’ve all seen the swollen ankles, we’ve all seen the bruises on his hands, you know, this is a man who is showing his age and the health issues that often come along with being elderly.” Join us now during our exclusive Deal of the Decade. Get everything for $7 a month. Not as fans. As fighters. Go to DailyWire.com/Subscribe to join now. Trump, who has previously hinted at the possibility of running for a third term, told NBC News anchor Kristen Welker in early May that he would not do so. “I’ll be an eight-year president, I’ll be a two-term president. I always thought that was very important,” he said.

A controversial statement by Chicago’s Mayor Brandon Johnson has sparked outrage, comparing “illegal aliens” to Black Americans being called “slaves.” See the video below Mayor Johnson’s Controversial Comparison During a recent press conference, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson sparked controversy by equating the term “illegal alien” to the historical dehumanization of Black Americans during slavery. This comment was made in response to a reporter’s question about the financial burden on Chicago’s taxpayers due to the influx of migrants. Johnson dismissed the term as fictional, sparking outrage among many who see this as a distortion of legal terminology. https://twitter.com/patriotmary4/status/1982103753156186590 Legal Terminology and Immigration Policy The term “illegal alien” is not a fictional construct but is embedded in U.S. law, specifically in Title 8 of the U.S. Code. It defines any foreign national present in the U.S. without lawful admission. Critics argue that Johnson’s attempt to rebrand this as “undocumented individuals” is a linguistic maneuver to obscure the realities of illegal immigration. This issue remains a core concern for conservatives, who emphasize the need for clear and enforceable immigration policies. Johnson’s statements have drawn attention to Chicago’s status as a sanctuary city. Under his leadership, the city has spent hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to support the migrant population, while crime and essential service cuts continue to affect legal residents. https://twitter.com/Likeshesays/status/1982262325756490110 Public Reaction and Criticism The public response to Johnson’s comparison was swift and critical. Social media platforms erupted with posts mocking and condemning his remarks. Many see this as another example of Democrat leaders manipulating language to shift focus away from the detrimental impacts of their policies, such as increased crime and strained public resources. The debate over immigration terminology continues to be a flashpoint in the broader discussion of national policy under the Trump administration, highlighting the tension between conservative values and progressive agendas.

America Is Running Out Of Weapons

Investigators believe the incidents are related

'The Trump Effect = UN COP FLOP'

Movies & TV It: Welcome to Derry It: Welcome To Derry’s Premiere Episode Ends Strong After a Bumpy Start If IT keeps this up, IT might be one of my favorITe things this year. By Leah Schnelbach | Published on October 27, 2025 Credit: HBO Max Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: HBO Max Welcome to It: Welcome to Derry! I’m going to be reviewing the latest Stephen King adaptation each week (I mean, latest as of this writing—I’m sure there will be at least five more adaptations before the show’s finale on December 14th) and I’ll give you a brief plot summary, point out any Easter eggs I catch, and sum up my thoughts. First things first: It: Welcome to Derry is a prequel to the two-part IT adaptation that came out in 2017 and 2019 respectively. The show is set in 1962 to reflect the updated timelines of the film, but it is drawing on events from the original novel, mostly stuff that took place in the mid-to-late 1950s by the novel’s timeline. The series has been developed by Andy Muschietti, Barbara Muschietti, and Jason Fuchs; Bill Skarsgård, who plays Pennywise in the films, is on as an executive producer in addition to reprising his role as the best clown ever. I am attempting to watch this show week-by-week without knowing anything beyond my memories of the book and films—but there is one character whose identity I already figured out—I’ll be coy about it below in case you’re also going in cold, and don’t want to be spoiled. As Brief a Recap as a King Adaptation Will Allow We open with the sad tale of Matty Clements (Miles Ekhardt). We meet the kid at the Capitol Theater, where he’s watching The Music Man and sucking on a pacifier. A strange thing for an older kid to do. The other thing to notice is the shiner fading around his right eye. A bully? Or a standard-issue Stephen King Terrible Father? A few minutes it’s suggested that his family situation is not great, so I’m guessing it’s the latter, and that they don’t care a bit that people might see evidence of their abuse. A weirdly vigilant usher catches Matty, who hasn’t paid for a movie ticket, and chases him over the objections of kindly projectionist Hank Grogan (Stephen Rider) and his daughter Veronica (Amanda Christine). Matty escapes into the snow of a January in Maine, and, to really drive home how sad and isolated this kid is, attempts to hitch a ride. The people who pick him up seem normal at first—a dad, a very pregnant mom, an older sister, a younger brother. But alarm bells ring pretty quickly when they ask Matty where home is, and he asks to be dropped “anywhere but there”—and they offer to bring him with them all the way to PORTLAND. Which is a whole-ass other town than Derry. But Matty’s fine with that. This turns out to be a mistake. Elder daughter takes out a Tupperware full of… organ meat? I think? dips her fingers into the blood the meat is swimming in, and then sticks her fingers in Matty’s face in a gruesome take on “I’m not touching you!” Mom encourages younger brother to practice his spelling with increasingly weird vocabulary. And soon enough Dad has driven the car back past the Welcome to Derry sign, rather than heading out toward Portland as promised. Matty begs to be let out, finally resorting to sucking his pacifier again out of panic, and then Mom gives birth to a mutant demon baby right there in the front seat. After a few minutes of the baby ricocheting around the car while Mom holds onto it by the umbilical cord, it crashes though the car window, taking Matty’s pacifier with it. We follow the pacifier down down down into the river, and into a sewer tunnel, where the title card rises from the water. Nice cold open, show. We cut to four months later, where we meet our season’s main characters. Phil Malkin (Jack Molloy Legault) is obsessed with UFOs and World War III. His BFF Teddy Uris (Mikkal Karim-Fidler) is mourning their friend Matty, and trying to balance his interest with comics with the demands of bar mitzvah studies. Classmate Lilly Bainbridge (Clara Stack) is an outcast because of her mental breakdown after her dad’s death a year earlier, and her BFF Margie (Matilda Lawler) is desperately trying to get her to act normal so they can get in with the “Patty Cakes”: the high school’s group of popular girls who orbit around a blonde named Patty. Given that someone in the school has decided to fill Lilly’s lockers with jars of pickles for some reason, this seems like a longshot. Meanwhile, Major Leroy Hanlon (Jovan Adepo) and his friend Captain Pauly Russo (Rudy Mancuso) report for duty at Derry’s Strategic Air Command base—an important site for potential Cold War conflicts. The Major is scarred from seeing action in Korea, and he’s eager to start a new life in Maine once his wife arrives. General Shaw (James Remar) tells him and Pauly: “If normal’s what you’re after, you two are going to love Derry.” Nice, show, nice. But Major Hanlon notices a sign that I think said Whites Only, and he and the driver, also a Black man (whom I recognize from somewhere… but where?) share a glance. Naturally, one of the Major’s new reports pulls some racist shit almost immediately, but the General reprimands the man and invites Major Hanlon to his office for a drink. Over the course of a couple afterschool hangouts with Phil and Teddy, we learn that they were the closest thing Matty had to friends. His mom tried to bribe them with candy to come to his birthday party, but they still didn’t go. Lilly’s getting ready to take a bath when she notices the turtle charm on her charm bracelet, which throws us into a flashback. She remembers New Years Eve, when Matty Clements took her up to going up to an abandoned tower over Derry. They each had a box of Cracker Jacks, and he traded her his turtle charm for the rocket ship she got. She opened up to him about the accident that killed her father. He was crushed in the gears of the canning factory where he worked, and Lilly blames herself because she’d asked him to go back into the factory to retrieve the mood ring she’d forgotten when she and her mom picked him up from work. Matty reassures her, and tells her that she’s not like the Patty Cakes and other girls at school. He tries to kiss her but she rebuffs him (not out of any meanness but because she thinks of them as friends) and he runs off in shame—and straight to the Capitol Theater, that horrifying car ride, and either death or something worse. But this is a Stephen King adaptation, and things can always get more awful, never fear. First, Lilly’s mom stands in the doorway to remind her daughter that she needs to have clothes ready to visit her dad’s grave, and when Lilly asks not to go because she’s still too upset, her mother replies: “You’re not the only person who’s had something bad happen to them. The sooner you realize that, the better.” Nice, mom. THEN Lilly hears Matty’s voice in the pipes (singing “Ya Got Trouble” from The Music Man, no less) and a bloody finger pokes up from the drain. She turns to the boys for help, but only Teddy is even slightly open to it. Phil, despite thinking aliens are infiltrating human society, draws the line at ghosts in sewers. Teddy tentatively tries to ask his father whether someone might kidnap a child and hold them in the sewers, but the man goes ballistic and yells at him about the real-life horrors of the Holocaust, rather than realizing that his son is worrying about the fate of his missing friend. Teddy’s older brother also scoffs at him. Later, Teddy has a waking nightmare that his lampshade is made of screaming human faces, and when he finally ends up cowering and crying on the floor it’s his brother who check on him, not either parent, and his brother looks at him in disgust and says “I can’t believe we’re related.” So, as expected, regular human family is the scariest part of the show so far. The kids meet up again. Phil’s now willing to believe that there’s something Wrong, but he also needs some kind of definitive proof. Lilly’s grief got her packed off to the Juniper Hill mental health facility, after all, and talking about hearing ghost children in the sewers of Derry isn’t going to go over well with the adults of the town. As Phil says: “I can’t go to the loony bin, Teddy! I couldn’t make it through goddamn sleepaway camp!” The kids go to the library to study microfiche together. Could we be witnessing the birth of a new (old) Losers Club? Phil has to bring kid sister Susie (Matilda Legault) along, and she clearly has an adorable crush on Teddy. The kids work well together, and almost immediately find an article about Matty’s disappearance, with Phil quipping the entire time like a proto-Richie Tozier. They notice the detail that the Capitol Theater’s projectionist’s daughter, Ronnie, was the last person who reported seeing Matty alive. They dutifully troop off to find her—only for Ronnie to tell them off and order them away from her house. Apparently the cops came around constantly at first, and tried to pin Matty’s disappearance on her father—who might have been the only adult who was ever nice to Matty. They start to leave, but then Ronnie overhears them mention voices coming from the sewers. She calls them back, and admits that she, too, has heard kids’ voices. Sometimes they laugh, sometimes they scream. When Lilly mentions the song she heard, Ronnie makes a decision. Credit: Brooke Palmer/HBO But first, let’s check in with Major Hanlon. He’s sleeping in the barracks when multiple men in gas masks show up. They beat him, pull a gun on him, and demand the specs for the experimental B-52 he’s meant to test. Just as he tells them to pull the trigger, Pauly bangs on the door. Hanlon manages to fight back, Pauly breaks the door down, and the two men fight the intruders until they flee. “How’s my hair?” Pauly asks. “Still greasy,” Hanlon replies. Meanwhile, across town, Ronnie sneaks the other kids into the Capitol. Maybe they really are our new Losers Club! She threads The Music Man into the projector, while the other four take seats in the theater. The three older kids start to cry as they think about how they’ve let Matty down. Phil insists that none of it was their fault, and that they’re going to fix it now. And then there’s Robert Preston singing “Ya Got Trouble”, and there’s Matty, in the movie, holding a bundle in his arms. He looks up at them, and the kids call him to come through the screen and back to life. They’re going to save him. But, well, no. No, Matty tells them that they’re the REASON he’s trapped now. His death, and his undeath, was their fault—they ignored and rejected him, and that’s what sent him off to the Capitol alone, and then to that demonic car. He drops his head and his face warps into an expression that looks awfully similar to a certain clown I could mention. “Matty” unwraps the bundle, and the Mutant Demon Baby from the cold open flies through the movie screen into the Capitol Theater. And here’s where the show, after some decent scares and bumpy character building, won my heart: the Mutant Demon Baby destroys them. As Ronnie watches in horror from the (now supernaturally locked) projectionist’s booth, it kills both Phil and Teddy. Ronnie breaks out, and gets to Lilly just as Lilly grabs little Susie’s hand—but by the time the girls run out to the lobby, little Susie’s hand is the ONLY part of Susie that Lilly’s still holding. The episode ends on Lilly, screaming and covered in blood. Do We All Float? Credit: Brooke Palmer/HBO …huh. Three of our five potential new protagonists are dead, and I’m guessing the fourth is headed back to Juniper Hill. Ronnie Grogan is now set up to be our young lead in the overtly supernatural plot, as I assume Major Leroy Hanlon is set to be our adult lead in whatever the military sci-fi plot turns out to be. I’ll admit that this was a rollercoaster for me. I loved the opening, but I found a lot of the middle of the episode a bit clunky. The actors playing the kids have great chemistry, but the characters themselves felt a bit underbaked, or even just annoying—Richie Tozier is one of my favorite characters in all of literature, because his awkwardness is balanced with the occasional legitimately funny line. Here, Phil was kind of just… irritating. Which is obviously more realistic than giving us an 11-year-old with sparkling wit, but it’s also a bit much to take. On the other hand, I thought the show did a good job of handling Lilly’s relentless depression, and the way none of the people in her life give a shit about it, and want her to move on already. Teddy’s family’s explosion at his questioning seemed a little over-the-top even by Stephen King standards, but the lampshade scene was excellent. Leroy Hanlon’s plot is a bit underbaked so far, but obviously we’re just starting out. And, obviously, I’m very interested to see what they do with the Major’s driver, who seems… familiar. (I also love Chris Chalk from the cancelled-too-soon Perry Mason reboot, so I’m glad to see him here on general principle.) As ever, the interesting stuff about King is the moments when supernatural horror intersects with real life horror. I was pleased to see that the show is realistic about the racism of 1962 Maine, about how much parents want their kids to be seen and not heard, about how society as a whole has no sense of trauma needing to be processed, of the way horrific details of the Holocaust are thrown in a kid’s face, and the way nuclear threat hangs over everything. Also, after the way Mike Hanlon got short shrift in the two IT movies, I’m pleased to see the seemingly bigger roles given to Leroy Hanlon, and, so far, Ronnie Grogan. Let’s hope she lasts at least a few more episodes. And, of course, that ending. That ending made the show for me, and if it can keep up that level of unadulterated, no-one-is-safe-no-really-we-MEAN-it horror, it will become one of the highlights of my year. I mean, it ends with eleven-year-old HOLDING THE DISEMBODIED HAND OF A LITTLE GIRL. A thousand heart-shaped red balloons, for you, show. #JustKingThings Credit: HBO Max There is precisely one (1) good parent in this whole first hour. Ronnie Grogan’s dad tries to protect Mattie from the power mad usher, and I have to assume he know Ronnie’s also lying to protect the kid. Once they think Matty’s escaped, the two make their way back up to the projection booth, Hank Grogan quizzing Ronnie on movie trivia on the way. It’s really sweet, and basically the only warm moment this hour gives us. Other than that: Lilly’s mom wants her to hurry up and get over her dad’s death; Teddy’s whole family blows up at the kid for asking about whether there might be a kidnapper in Derry, four months after his friend Matty vanished off the face of the Earth, and the show opens with Matty walking around with a fading black eye and implies it was doled out by his father. The other big King Thing in this opening hour weaves into the one I just mentioned: the extraordinary cruelty of bullies is shown when Lilly opens her locker only to find it full of jars of pickles. We later learn that her dad was crushed to death a jarring factory. Someone was enough of a shithead to spend actual US dollars on a locker’s worth of pickles just for an incredibly hateful prank? That’s King all over. And of course no adult sees this or corrects the behavior. One anti-King Thing I noticed: I didn’t hear a SINGLE over-the-top Maine accent—and this show’s set in the 1960s, when regional accents still roamed the land like megafauna. I’m deducting like 8,000 Maine points, television show. And one last thing: did young teens in 1962 really say “fuck” this often, and so casually? I did (I still do), but I was not around in 1962. Turtles all the Way Down The school’s sign features a message from Bertie the Turtle telling the kids to Duck and Cover, and once we’re inside we see a kid dressed in a Bertie costume handing out leaflets. These are almost immediately knocked out of his hands by a bully. Matty gives Lilly his turtle charm, and she says that “Turtles are lucky” as she adds it to her bracelet. Is that why she survived the massacre at the Capitol? Mike Hanlon’s Photo Album Credit: Brooke Palmer/HBO Someone wrote “Teddy Urine” on Teddy Uris’ locker—this was a common insult hurled at Stanley Uris in the novel. Clearly Teddy Uris in NOT Stan’s dad or grandad—maybe Teddy’s shitty older brother is? Which would explain why the elder Uris is so dead set against Stan’s own dalliances in fantasy a few decades later. We see Leroy Hanlon reading a newspaper with the headline: “City council presses forward with Paul Bunyan statue”—so Richie Tozier’s future nemesis is still on track. Ridiculous Alien Spider, or Generationally Terrifying Clown? A little of both this time. The mutant demon baby was not, in itself, terrifying, but the way the atmosphere in the demonic family’s car gradually curdled into horror was absolutely perfect. The birth scene itself was gross in the best way, and Mutant Demon Baby’s closing scene in the movie theater was amazing. But Mutant Demon Baby looks like a Garbage Pail Kid come to life—I don’t think it would be scary until it was actually eating you. On the other hand, the screaming lampshade was really, really upsetting.[end-mark] The post <em>It: Welcome To Derry</em>’s Premiere Episode Ends Strong After a Bumpy Start appeared first on Reactor.

Books book reviews Haunted Houses, Haunted Wombs: The Hunger We Pass Down by Jen Sookfong Lee A slow-burn horror novel about a haunting that causes so much suffering it turns demonic. By Mahvesh Murad | Published on October 27, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share Bestselling novelist Jen Sookfong Lee’s latest novel The Hunger We Pass Down is an emotional, dark look at intergenerational trauma, motherhood and the wounds we carry in our hearts and bodies that never quite heal, no matter how far we go, how fast we run, or how self aware we think we have become.  Vancouver, 2004: Alice is overwhelmed. By her cloth diaper start up, by her children, by her ex-husband, her mother and even by the bartender she’s having a secret relationship with. She’s drinking far too much and is now having blackout episodes in which she does not recall tidying the house, making up diaper packages for customers, preparing the kids’ meals or having important conversations with her boyfriend. She’s starting to see things that don’t make any sense, too.  Japanese occupied Hong Kong, 1938: Little Gigi routinely walks by Nam Koo Terrace, aware of the stories of a girl who died there, her ghost continuing to haunt the mansion. As a teenager, when she is kidnapped and imprisoned there as a “comfort woman” for Japanese soldiers during the war, she meets the ghosts of the house and is unable to escape them, even as she plans her own (and her newborn baby’s) escape from the mansion.  Gigi’s trauma passes from her to her daughter Bette, who emigrates to Canada, and from Bette to Judy, Alice, Luna—four generations of daughters who carry the trauma of rape and abuse, as they navigate life through the decades, as their worlds change around them. The narrative focuses mostly on Alice and Gigi, with chapters dedicated to each of the other characters too, providing a wide, all-encompassing view of the story. Not every perspective has as much worth (the two men’s POV chapters appear almost just to show us how they aren’t really all that important), but they do all add to the expanse of this multi-textural narrative.  Alice’s story is pivotal to the book, and while she is neither the first nor the last in the line of women who bear the horror, she is the most relatable, given her modern life as a single mother in a fast growing city. Alice lives in the house her parents lived in—the house in which she has seen her father die an early death, the house in which her own marriage fell apart and her children grew away from her as she dedicated her days to her business, and her nights to alcohol and her secret affair with a local bartender. But something else lives in the house too, a presence that is making itself increasingly felt, and not just in benevolent ways. Alice’s daughter Luna is also wary of what is going on, and as much as Alice wants to, she cannot be the “perfect” mother Luna is looking for. Is there another Alice present, a doppelgänger, an evil twin, some creature creeping out of an open wound in Alice? She considers “the hunger for survival that is passed down, repeated, and then passed down again, and wondered what she had already given to Luna without even knowing it. She wondered what trauma lay dormant in her body, what she had never felt because she didn’t know what to look for.” Buy the Book The Hunger We Pass Down Jen Sookfong Lee Buy Book The Hunger We Pass Down Jen Sookfong Lee Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget The thing that haunts Alice has everything to do with the cruelties Gigi had to bear at the hands of the occupying soldiers in Hong Kong during World War II, when she was enslaved as a comfort woman. With no agency, no chance at freedom and endless days of abuse at the hands of countless nameless men, Gigi would tell stories to the other girls to distract herself and them, stories she’d base on the ghosts of the women who lived in the house before the occupation, ghosts only she could see and hear. The daughter who committed suicide to avoid being married off as part of a business deal, the maid who was abused by her employer, the mistress was who mistreated: As one of the ghosts tells Gigi, “this house eats up all the women, all the girls. And then we are trapped here forever.” Their pain becomes her pain, their trauma, her trauma. It’s a horrific cycle that continues in the body and psyche of the daughter Gigi gives birth to, and carries on to her daughter Judy, who tries her best to run away from it. But when Alice is faced with a physical manifestation of that trauma and loss, Judy is forced to reveal the details of their lineage, and of the curse that “was just a rotten, tortured life” that has its claws in the Chow women. The Hunger We Pass Down doesn’t just contain ghosts and hauntings; it also features a fair bit of body horror, in that the curse takes on a physical manifestation in multiple different ways.  Judy recognises the curse when her parents die, as realisation that feels like “a cold shock, like being thrown into a lake without knowing how to swim—swift, frigid, inexorable, unforgiving. She knew how to spot a curse, how to recognise when it’s growing inside you. Her mother had taught her how her entire life.” Try as she might to escape it, it grows inside her until it becomes a part of Alice, who many years later is forced to “birth” it, when she finds something on “the lawn and between her knees… a pool of liquid, an impossible nothing of a colour, so thick and gelatinous, quivering on the grass,” it is a birth that leaves her “empty, as if her body was nothing more than skin and the thinnest layer of muscle.”  There is plenty of body horror and trauma in actual human birth, and in motherhood itself, of course, and Lee isn’t afraid to lean into that idea either. “Women carry everything with them,” we are told, as we see each woman struggle to bear that burden, uncertain where and how to release it when it clings to them with claws. The Hunger We Pass down is about the trauma that lives in our physical bodies—trauma that we inherit.  We know now that women’s bodies carry the DNA of their grandmothers through a process called foetal microchimerism, and so it makes sense for Lee to have used this as more than metaphor: Judy has literally carried the trauma in her womb, and Alice has inherited it, lived with it, shared her life with it and is trying desperately not to pass it down to Luna.  This isn’t a sweet, poignant story of a woman breaking the vicious cycle of trauma. This is a story of a haunting that causes so much suffering that it turns demonic. There are no fixes here. There is no healing for the women who “had been passing down their anger for generations.” The feeling of dread is heavy in this slow burn novel, as Lee takes a clear look at intergenerational trauma in the Chinese diaspora, at feminine rage and the immense grief that rage stands on.[end-mark] The Hunger We Pass Down is published by Erewhon Books. The post Haunted Houses, Haunted Wombs: <i>The Hunger We Pass Down</i> by Jen Sookfong Lee appeared first on Reactor.

Let the wailing and gnashing of teeth begin. Within the first two weeks of the ongoing government shutdown, agency heads reportedly sent permanent layoff notices to about 4,000 federal employees under the guidance of Director of the Office of Management and Budget Russ Vought. But compared to the private sector, this is a proverbial drop in the bucket. The partial lapse in government funding has dragged on for 27 days now as Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and 44 other senators continue to block the “clean” government funding measure that the House passed in September. As a result of the funding lapse, Vought says that 10,000 federal employees could ultimately face permanent layoffs. For context, a reduction in force of 10,000 would only amount to about 0.3% of the roughly 3-million-person federal civilian workforce. For further context, about 0.3% of the private sector workforce faces layoffs and discharges every week! The comparatively small size of the reductions in the federal workforce hasn’t stopped the legacy media from lamenting the supposed cruelty of these “mass layoffs.” The same media would take little notice if a construction firm laid off half of its workforce or if a small retailer went out of business and was forced to terminate all its employees. The press ignores these situations or treats them as commonplace because—well—they are quite common. Between 2001 and 2024, private-sector employers laid off or discharged employees a whopping 520 million times. Last year, private-sector layoffs and discharges occurred at a rate of about one for every seven workers. In contrast, the government laid off or discharged only about one out of every 47 federal workers. Bureau of Labor Statistics data show that no major private industry has anything like the job security that American taxpayers have provided federal workers. Workers in manufacturing were five times more likely to lose their jobs last year than federal workers. Workers in construction were 10 times more likely to lose their jobs. But even these statistics understate the level of job security of the more than 2 million federal civilian employees who comprise the protected civil services. The Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 created a massive bureaucracy to impede agency heads from firing or laying off these protected federal workers. Protected workers can only be demoted or removed with cause or if it’s established that such action would enhance agency efficiency. Federal workers must receive 60-day advance notice of such dismissals or adverse actions and can appeal to numerous boards that can overturn the actions. While these appeals are often unsuccessful, each case can take substantial time and energy, which makes managers less inclined to terminate civil servants’ employment except in the most egregious cases. The Office of Personnel and Management reports data on worker separations in most federal agencies, especially those that are heavily staffed with such career civil servants. Out of about 2.2 million federal employees who began fiscal year 2023 in those agencies, the Office of Personnel and Management reported that only 12,804 (0.6%) were terminated for disciplinary or performance reasons and only 51 were laid off (0.002%). Not only have federal workers enjoyed remarkable job security, they also receive generous compensation. The median annual salary of federal employees covered in the Office of Personnel and Management data is about $100,000—more than 60% higher than the median for full-time private sector workers. There are certainly some deserving civil servants helping the executive branch to fulfill constitutionally appropriate functions, but the current system treats almost everyone as though they are top performers. Given their job security and lucrative pay (and benefits), it’s no wonder that the average federal civil servant has worked for the government for 11.8 years, more than four times longer than the average job tenure for private sector employees. This imbalance between the work conditions of federal employees versus workers in the productive economy isn’t just unfair or an example of poor stewardship of taxpayer dollars. This imbalance—if unaddressed—spells trouble for the dynamism of the American economy. In his classic work “Democracy in America,” the insightful Alexis de Tocqueville spoke about the industriousness of the American people during his time visiting America in the 1830s. Tocqueville wrote that the American “either endeavors to get rich by commerce or industry or buys land in the bush and turns pioneer.” In contrast, Tocqueville said for Europeans of the period, “The first thing that occurs to him is to get some public employment.” In these centralized European monarchies where “the number of paid offices is immense, and the tenure of them tolerably secure,” Tocqueville wrote that “to relieve their own necessities at the cost of the public treasury appears to [Europeans] the easiest and most open, if not the only, way to rise above a condition which no longer contents them.” Countries where droves of young people aspire to a career in government are doomed to stagnation. America would never have risen from obscurity to become the most prosperous country on earth if Washington, Jefferson, and Madison had set up a political and economic system in which the populace viewed bountiful government jobs as the ticket to their success. Unlike most other administrations dating back to Franklin Roosevelt, the Trump administration hasn’t acted as though federal workers are entitled to comfortable employment on the taxpayer dime. But the legal and regulatory roadblocks the administration faces in restoring a proper balance to the federal workforce are substantial. To reduce the federal workforce without running afoul of America’s overly generous civil service protections, in February, the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency offered to pay many federal workers through the end of September if they would voluntarily resign. An estimated 154,000 federal workers ultimately took a buyout, and federal payrolls are now a little lighter as a result. But ultimately, Congress must follow through on what the administration started. It must reject efforts by the Left to increase appropriations beyond last year’s already-too-high levels. And Congress should pass legislation to unwind some of the excessive civil service protections that make federal jobs almost untouchable. In the private sector, workers must make themselves indispensable if they want job security. It’s time to expect the same of career federal workers, so that they are more like civil servants and less like civil overlords. The post Federal Employment Shouldn’t Be a Ticket to Lifetime Job Security appeared first on The Daily Signal.

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