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'There is a gathering, a large gathering of people'

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'The FBI is investigating any and all monetary connections responsible for these riots'

'There’s clearly a lobby for war with Iran'

Featured Essays All You Need Is Death All You Need Is Death and the Art of Cutting Through Corporate Storytelling Paul Duane’s recent film puts the “folk” in folk horror By Leah Schnelbach | Published on June 10, 2025 Credit: XYZ FILMS Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: XYZ FILMS All You Need Is Death opens on a scene we’ve seen a thousand times before: a man is being interviewed about a dead girl. We watch his testimony through the lens of a video camera, we see the grainy footage of people in a bar—the kind of footage that often becomes a de facto Last Known Photograph. Then we cut back to the night in question, months earlier, and fall into an entirely different story, one of ancient songs, unbreakable curses, and tortured loves. By the time we’ve almost caught up with this opening scene, the girl’s death has become an uncanny, impossible act in an unknowable world. Along the way, each time it reaches a point where it might follow a well-worn path, the film veers in a wild new direction.    I’m fortunate enough to watch a lot of movies and television shows for work—and I’m certainly not going to complain about that—but there is a point where you wonder if you’ve seen everything. If a movie will ever make you really excited again, rather than just ticking off how well the story playing out in front of you is adhering to or subverting the exact plot points and emotional beats you’ve seen a dozen times this year. But if you’re really lucky, you’ll have a year like this one, where you’ve been genuinely surprised by not one, not two, but four separate films. One of them is Sinners, and the other three are recent independent Irish horrors—and of those, the one I’m imploring you to see as soon as possible (even if it means coming back later to this somewhat spoilery essay) is Paul Duane’s All You Need Is Death. Paul Duane is an Irish filmmaker, the director of a bunch of shorts and documentaries on a variety of topics, and his debut feature has come out at a time when there seems to be a wave of excellent Irish horror. I’ve been meaning to watch All You Need Is Death since it came to streaming last year (it’s on Shudder in the U.S.) but I finally made time last week, and I am so, so happy I did. I’m also glad I saw Sinners first. Ryan Coogler’s film has meant so much to Black nerds and horror fans in particular, and the Black community in general—but it was also cool that he included a bit of Irishness in the form of the vampire Remmick, a character bound up in the history of colonization and the importance of holding on to your culture. Coogler manages to simultaneously acknowledge that many Irish immigrants became colonizers and appropriators themselves once they got to America, and also remind the audience that there even was such a thing as “pre-Christian Ireland”. (And on a less serious note, I can’t tell you how much it’s brightened my social media feeds in this Mindflayer of an era to see people remixing “Rocky Road to Dublin”.) I kept thinking about Sinners while I watched All You Need is Death, which is also about the power of song to cross time—though it comes to a startlingly different endpoint. In a world where corporations are people and people are brands, where the movie I thought would be a toy commercial only surprised me by being a car commercial instead where comic book movies require you to do homework to understand them, where directors I used to like bludgeon their past masterpieces with meaningless sequels—this movie, this movie, that was made independently and often seems to have been shot on the sly during off-hours at a construction site, gave me the absolute joy of not knowing what would happen next. Of telling an original story and making me care about it. Of getting a song stuck in my head for days.   Smoking! At your OBGYN appointment! Credit: XYZ FILMS I was also put in mind of David Cronenberg—not in a way that chips at All You Need Is Death’s originality, but simply because its writer-director, Paul Duane, does a similar thing to Mr. Cronenberg. There is a line drawn around this film, and when you cross it you’re in his world, not ours. People use analog recording equipment but have cellphones, sometimes. They smoke everywhere—even in their OBGYN’s waiting room. A young man can be in Ireland as a refugee from Communism, but crossing the border from the Republic to the Northern bit of Ireland doesn’t seem to be a big deal… but also people are wary of being drawn into any form of political conversation. So it’s not exactly the 1980s, but it’s not exactly here and now, either. What makes it even more Cronenberg-y is the fact that there’s a secret, dangerous-feeling underworld, but what’s very much Duane’s is that the underworld is a network of incredibly intense folk song collectors. Song collectors are, of course, real, but in this film they seem desperate, and meet in little groups in otherwise-empty schools, hesitantly singing songs they’ve heard for a haughty woman named Agnes (Catherine Siggins) who seems to promise fame, or riches, or something if they can find a song no one’s recorded yet. As she says to the group: “The future is picked clean. Treasure lies in the past. We find beauty where others have overlooked it. then it’s up to you to find the places where a rose springs up from the corpse of times past.” They heard you singing folk tunes across the bar and the LOVE your vibe. Credit: XYZ FILMS Which sounds noble—if also kind of nihilistic—but then there’s one point where a character sells a song to a shadowy, clearly extremely wealthy collector in a dark parking lot. This is already hilariously weird, but also kind of implies that some of the people are in this not for nobility, but for that sweet, sweet forbidden folk music paper. The couple at the center of the film, Anna (Simone Collins) and Aleks (Charlie Maher) seem to have a concrete reason to look for songs—they’re in a decent but lackluster band, performing in echoey community centers. I get the sense that they have many weddings in their past and their future, and that they’d like to expand beyond “Whiskey in the Jar” if at all possible. The two of them want bigger things—whether that’s fame, or a connection to better, more authentic music is at first kind of vague. But aside from that: are they appropriating this music, two circling vultures picking the bones clean? Where is the line between preservation and exploitation? What is music’s inherent value? But they follow a chain of traditional singers (including Barry Gleeson, a highly regarded folk singer who’s also the brother of Brendan!) until they find Rita Concannon, a woman who supposedly had a song no one else knows. Credit: XYZ FILMS Did she learn it from her mother, who was known to have old songs? Is it really as ancient as the rumors claim? If it’s so precious, why has no one recorded it yet? Rita is played by Olwen Fouere, who was wasted in The Watchers, but here gets to do some great, terrifying work in a story that is, kind of, a successful version of what I think The Watchers was trying to be. Only after kicking Aleks out of the room (the song is not meant to be heard by men) and only after forbidding the two women to record it in any way (Anna makes a slow show of removing her jacket to show she isn’t wired, then taking the batteries out of her tape recorder; Agnes does neither) will Rita sing them the song. And it’s uncanny and fucking upsetting, even before you know what it’s about. Rita tells them that if it had a title, that tile would be “Love is a knife with a blade for a handle” which should give you an idea. It’s a story of a lovelorn Queen, a betrayed King, an unfortunate Lover, and a whole lot of torture, and it’s been passed from mother to daughter since a time before standardized Irish. Even Anna, who speaks Irish, has trouble deciphering it. Naturally, having heard the secret chord, their lives are dragged into a maelstrom of doom and supernatural powers. But what’s great about the film is that it doesn’t try to show us most of that, or explain it away, or invent a cosmology or a magic system. Rather than sucking all the mystery out of the film, it digs into its characters, and trusts the actors to show us their obsession and the havoc it’s wreaking on their lives. It’s this choice that takes what might have been a fun midnight movie and turns it into something much deeper. As with Sinners, a film about songs that make time irrelevant has to put it’s soundtrack where its mouth is. The score and songs for All You Need Is Death are by Ian Lynch of Lankum, who specialize in what I can only describe as gut-churning doom folk—honestly, the murder ballads are the more upbeat moments in the band’s catalogue—in collaboration with frequent Lankum collaborator John ‘Spud’ Murphy. Here’s Lankum’s take on “The Wild Rover”—close your eyes and listen to this sucker and tell me you haven’t just fallen through a wormhole and are now dying of liver failure on a blasted windswept heath somewhere in the 19th Century. Wait come back! You’re not really dying! (I mean, no more than usual.) I need you to read the rest of the essay, I worked hard on this one. The idea of intense folk song collectors is of course rooted in a reality: if you live in a rural area, and it gets dark early in the winter, and the woods and fields and seas are alive with the sounds of CREATURES, you need a way to create light and warmth. You need to remind yourself that you’re human, and that you’re not alone in the dark. Getting together in a group to sing becomes not just a pastime but a necessity. (We were reminded of this during the pandemic, yes? Or has everyone memory-holed that?) Having a new song, a new story, something no one’s ever heard before, becomes the most important thing in the world for a night… except. The only thing the might be even more important is if you have an old song, an ancient song, one that links you back to your community, to the time before the colonizers, the war, the famine, the flood, the fire, the plague, the drought—whatever catastrophe it is that marks a Before and an After for your community. Whatever it is that all of us are really looking for, underneath everything else. That thing, I think, is underneath everything else, a longing for a Before Time that can curdle into a desire for an impossible, uncomplicated past, that can lead people to embrace remakes and sequels and chase the lightning captured in a long-shattered childhood bottle, that sends people into echoes of the music that soundtracked their first loves. The reason I paid a man to embed a dead language into my skin with needles and ink. To be fair, that’s probably the only part of my life my ancestors would understand. This is the desire that gives folk horror its power. It’s the reason some of us like Ari Aster and Robert Eggers a whole lot, the reason I was entranced by The Devil’s Bath even though I hated actually watching it. If you really engage with it you have to acknowledge that the society we have now is a flimsy illusion. (And really it’s only an illusion for a vanishingly small number us, fewer every day.) Folk horror is a way to try to confront that illusion head on. What All You Need Is Death does masterfully is taking the connection to a remote past and collapsing any sense of distance. Love was a blade with a knife for a handle a thousand years ago, and it’s still cutting people to ribbons today. The central story of the song is re-enacted by the main characters. They ignore the warnings around the song without even the slightest protest, and the movie doesn’t point at their terrible choices and yell at us to pay attention. There are no ominous music cues, cheesy close-ups, or overhead shots of cars driving through impossibly vast forests. The rules are violated—almost causally—and then the story has them. Everything after that is as inevitable as the notes in a song. What the film does beautifully is how it plays with that inevitability. I tried to think through this a bit in my review of Bring Her Back—there’s a feeling of inevitability that works for me, and one that’s so overwhelming it deadens my feeling of connection. Which, some people like that precise tone, but for me, I want a sense of play and surprise to exist in conversation with the fates. Credit: XYZ FILMS By way of example: a tense scene between Rita’s son (who is named Breezeblock—a thing I have not stopped thinking about since I watched the movie—and is played by Nigel O’Neill) and Ron (Barry McKiernan), the man who led Anna and Aleks to Rita. Ron wakes tied to a bed. (Bad!) He’s right next to Rita’s corpse. (So much worse!) But what takes the scene to a new level is Breezeblock standing at the foot of the bed, talking in circles to Ron about the forbidden song, and the spirits that used to torment him for not being born a girl in order to carry it on as his mother had carried it on from hers. There’s a moment where this scene seems about to veer into sexual violence, but it goes in a completely different direction that’s kind of even worse—but still made me whoop with delight. In a sense the man was ensnared by the song the moment Anna approached him for directions, just as Breezeblock was ensnared by the accident of his birth. But along the way Ron gets a monologue on morality and power: “There’s nothin’ that’s not political, I’m telling you. Do you know what moral hazard is?” When she demurs that she does not, he explains: “A person doing something—you—decides how risky that particular something might be, but say you’re not the one who’s taking the risk? Say it’s the other fella—me—who’s taking the risk? And the other fella might not even know he’s taking a risk—but you decide that it’s worthwhile, without asking me? That’s moral hazard.” Breezeblock, who initially seems like a one-note sad sack, is the one who ends up with the best, most stirring line in the whole film. The story at the root of the song is as grim as it gets: the young queen and her lover were tortured for their affair, and finally starved until the lover resorted to eating their baby. But when Anna tries to use it as proof that love isn’t real, Breezeblock refuses her fatalism: “That’s just nature. That’s got nothing to do with love. The old king was trying to tell her that her love was made up, to punish her, I think. But to starve a body ‘til it goes mad—it proves nothing.” But even that isn’t the point of the film. This isn’t exactly a story of love conquering all, because in the end it goes in an even stranger direction, that opens up a whole other range of possibilities, and lets us know that the story we’ve been watching is only one tiny facet of something much larger and more fucked up—or more beautiful, depending on your point of view. Paul Duane wrote, directed, and produced this film, telling us a story around a fire, with a team of other artists. The writing and shot compositions and makeup effects and music were all made by human minds and hands doing what humans minds and hands have always done to keep the dark at bay. We’re living in a time made of razors; one wrong move and your humanity’ll be sliced clean off. And the only thing that gets me out of bed in the morning, the only thing that, I hope, keeps me human, is finding work like this that reminds me that art has gotten us this far, and that people still have stories to tell.[end-mark] The post <em>All You Need Is Death</em> and the Art of Cutting Through Corporate Storytelling appeared first on Reactor.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. removed all 17 members of a key committee that assesses and recommends vaccines. Kennedy wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal Monday saying he was “taking a bold step in restoring public trust by totally reconstituting the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices.” “We are retiring the 17 current members of the committee, some of whom were last-minute appointees of the Biden administration,” Kennedy wrote. “Without removing the current members, the current Trump administration would not have been able to appoint a majority of new members until 2028.” The Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices, or ACIP, evaluates the safety, efficacy, and clinical need of the vaccines and submits its findings to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The health secretary cited conflict-of-interest concerns as the reason for overhauling the board. “The committee has been plagued with persistent conflicts of interest and has become little more than a rubber stamp for any vaccine,” Kennedy wrote. “It has never recommended against a vaccine—even those later withdrawn for safety reasons. It has failed to scrutinize vaccine products given to babies and pregnant women.”To make matters worse, Kennedy said, the groups that inform the committee “meet behind closed doors, violating the legal and ethical principle of transparency crucial to maintaining public trust.” Many committee members have received funding from pharmaceutical companies, including companies marketing vaccines that the members are tasked with reviewing, Kennedy said, adding the problem isn’t necessarily that members are corrupt. “Most likely aim to serve the public interest as they understand it,” he wrote. “The problem is their immersion in a system of industry-aligned incentives and paradigms that enforce a narrow pro-industry orthodoxy.” The new members Kennedy plans to appoint “won’t directly work for the vaccine industry” but “will exercise independent judgment, refuse to serve as a rubber stamp, and foster a culture of critical inquiry.” Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, expressed concern about anti-vaccine sentiment taking hold at the advisory committee. The Louisiana Republican supplied the key vote for Kennedy’s confirmation after the former environmental lawyer promised not to change the advisory committee. “Of course, now the fear is that the ACIP will be filled up with people who know nothing about vaccines except suspicion,” Cassidy said on X. “I’ve just spoken with Secretary Kennedy, and I’ll continue to talk with him to ensure this is not the case.” The post RFK Jr. Removes All 17 Members of Vaccine Advisory Committee appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Anti-immigration enforcement protests that begun in Los Angeles on Friday have spread to more U.S. cities, including San Francisco, New York, Dallas and Austin, Texas.   Monday evening marked the fourth straight night of protesting and rioting against the Trump administration’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations in Los Angeles, and the first night of similar protests in Dallas.   Several dozen protesters gathered with flags and signs in the Texas city before the protests grew contentious and police declared the protests an “unlawful assembly,” according to Fox 4 News.   About 200 miles south, protesters gathered outside the Texas State Capitol in Austin to stand in “solidarity” with L.A. protesters, according to a flyer promoting the gathering on the Party for Socialism & Liberation Austin, TX Instagram account.   “ICE out of our cities! Stop the deportations,” the flyer reads in Spanish.   The initial planned march was peaceful, but the protest began to escalate later in the evening and police deployed tear gas to disperse the crowd. A federal building was vandalized during the rioting.   “Between the Austin Police Department and the Texas Department of Public Safety, more than a dozen protesters were arrested in Austin,” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, wrote on X early Tuesday morning. “Peaceful protesting is legal. But once you cross the line, you will be arrested.” Protesters in San Francisco took to the streets for a second night in a row on Monday. A group of the protesters started rioting and vandalizing businesses, according to the local Fox affiliate KTVU.   Arrests were made in San Francisco Monday night, according to Mayor Daniel Lurie.   “I understand why people are out in the streets, and I know there is fear in our communities,” Lurie wrote on X early Tuesday morning. “As mayor, I will always ensure we protect your right to protest peacefully—and your right to be safe.  On the East Coast, anti-immigration enforcement protests were held in New York City.   About two dozen people were arrested at a sit-in protest held at Trump Tower in the Big Apple Monday afternoon.   “Nonviolent protest will always be protected,” New York City Mayor Eric Adams wrote on X Monday. “But we will never allow violence or lawlessness. The NYPD is the best police department in the world, and they can handle anything that happens.”  The post Anti-ICE Protests Spread Coast to Coast appeared first on The Daily Signal.

House Speaker Mike Johnson responded Tuesday to a question of whether he thinks California Gov. Gavin Newsom should face legal consequences for his actions as Los Angeles is consumed by anti-deportation riots. “That’s not my lane, I’m not going to give you legal analysis on whether Gavin Newsom should be arrested, but he ought to be tarred and feathered, I’ll say that,” Johnson, R-La., said in response to The Daily Signal’s question. The question came as LA anti-ICE riots continued into Monday night and President Donald Trump doubled the National Guard presence. Newsom had criticized Trump for sending in the National Guard. White House border czar Tom Homan implied that Newsom may have committed a felony by protecting illegal aliens. Newsom responded with a taunting video, saying, “Arrest me. Let’s go.” Asked Monday if he thought Newsom should be arrested, President Donald Trump chuckled and said, “I would do it if I were Tom. I think it’s great. Gavin likes the publicity, but I think it would be a great thing.” SPEAKER MIKE JOHNSON: "?[Gov. Gavin Newsom] ought to be tarred and feathered."@SpeakerJohnson responds to The Daily Signal's @GCaldwell_news, who asked if he believes California Gov. Gavin Newsom should face legal consequences over his handling of the anti-ICE riots in Los… pic.twitter.com/UHrwb0ZCte— The Daily Signal (@DailySignal) June 10, 2025 After saying he would not provide a legal analysis, Johnson proceeded to accuse Newsom of being an “accomplice” in attacks on law enforcement. “I mean, look, he’s standing in the way of the administration and the carrying-out of federal law,” the speaker said. “He is applauding the bad guys, and standing in the way of the good guys.” “He is a participant, an accomplice in our federal law enforcement agents being not just disrespected, but assaulted,” Johnson added. “This is a serious problem and the governor is now filing a lawsuit against the president—what a joke. Do your job, man. ” Johnson concluded, “I don’t know what the ultimate measure will be there, but I know that in the interim time, the president of the United States is showing real leadership and we’re not going to allow LA to burn… If local and state officials are unwilling or unable to do their job, the president of the United States will do his.” “Tarring and feathering” refers to a form of public torture that goes back to the medieval era, in which authorities or a mob stripped a criminal naked, covered him or her with hot tar, and then added feathers as a form of humiliation. Mobs often engaged in this painful punishment during America’s colonial era. Bostonians tarred and feathered British loyalist John Malcolm in 1774, a notable foreshadowing of the American Revolution. The practice made a rare recurrence in 1918, when a crowd in Ashland, Wisconsin, tarred and feathered a German-American man as anti-German sentiments ran high during World War I. This is a breaking news story and will be updated. The post ‘Tarred and Feathered’: Johnson Talks Consequences for Newsom Amid LA Riots appeared first on The Daily Signal.

It’s well-documented that corporate America in recent years took a hard left turn, and The Heritage Foundation continues to battle back and depoliticize business. Heritage filed a lawsuit against Airbnb earlier this month after the company excluded a Heritage proposal from its annual shareholder meeting.  Heritage, an Airbnb shareholder, filed its proposal for the housing rental giant to reject politicized, antisemitic activist demands to divest from vendors in locations like Israel. Unfortunately, corporate America—even before the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attacks in Israel—started to fall captive to the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement. This lawsuit comes after a series of efforts in recent years by Heritage and other groups, including education, publicity and pressure campaigns, to highlight the risks corporations face when ideology overtakes accountability. Heritage reports in its filing that it followed all requirements and time stipulations for submitting its shareholder proposal. Airbnb claims it never received the shareholder proposal packet, despite Heritage receiving a FedEx delivery receipt with the signature of an Airbnb employee confirming delivery. Airbnb refuses all knowledge of the proposal and—shockingly—even suggested FedEx forged the signature of its own employee who confirmed delivery.  Heritage filed the lawsuit together with American Conservative Values ETF, another shareholder of Airbnb, which also submitted a proposal that Airbnb excluded. Heritage is represented by Boyden Gray and American Conservative Values ETF is represented by Alliance Defending Freedom.   “Airbnb broke the law—plain and simple. SEC rules require companies to notify shareholders and allow a response if a proposal is excluded,” Andrew Olivastro, chief advancement officer at The Heritage Foundation, said in a statement. “Airbnb ignored those rules and ignored the law. It makes you wonder what other legal corners Airbnb may have cut. Heritage and ADF are suing to make one thing clear: shareholder rights aren’t subject to mood or politics—they’re protected by law.”  Under SEC regulations, Airbnb is required to include proposals in its materials for its annual shareholder meeting—unless the company notifies those submitting the proposals that the materials will be excluded, provides reasons for its exclusion, and gives filing shareholders a chance to respond. Airbnb did not notify Heritage of its proposal’s exclusion or allow Heritage to take any action. Airbnb did, however, include a proposal from Connecticut Retirement Plans and Trust Funds, a liberal-leaning fund that openly supports initiatives like ESG, the environmental, social, and governance scorecard for “socially conscious” investing. This appears to be blatant viewpoint discrimination by Airbnb.  The December proposal submitted by Heritage highlighted the fact that Airbnb caved to antisemitic political demands in the past—including its announcement in 2018 to remove 200 “Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank,” noting strong views of “historic and intense disputes between Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank” from those who “believe companies should not profit on lands where people have been displaced.” While Airbnb reversed its decision a year later, the precedent for caving to political demands had been set.    When the exclusion of the proposals was brought to Airbnb’s attention in April, the company refused to include it in materials for its June meeting, nor would the company agree to include the proposal in materials for the 2026 meeting.   Heritage works closely with the State Financial Officers Foundation, where I previously served as an economic research fellow. Heritage awarded Innovation Prizes to the foundation and Alliance Defending Freedom and others, including Independent Women’s Forum, to fight woke capitalism. The State Financial Officers Foundation is a coalition of 28 state financial leaders. During the Biden administration, the group marshaled its market muscle—roughly $3 trillion in public assets under management—to force banks and other financial institutions to quit targeting conservatives and imposing far-left ideologies on taxpayers.  The goal of these efforts is to restore objectivity and neutrality to business. By calling for transparency and fairness, Heritage and its partners are rallying Americans to demand that businesses prioritize merit, ethics and unity over divisive, politicized agendas. Now it’s time for the court of law to enact justice toward this end. Carrie Sheffield is a senior policy analyst for the Center for Economic Opportunity at Independent Women’s Forum. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post Heritage Continues Battle Against Woke Corporations, Sues Airbnb for Excluding Proposal to Depoliticize Company appeared first on The Daily Signal.