Movies & TV The Substance The Substance is a Satirical Body Horror Picture of Dorian Gray Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley sabotage each other’s right to exist in Coralie Fargeat’s Hollywood horror satire By Natalie Zutter | Published on September 24, 2024 Comment 0 Share New Share Writer-director Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance is devastatingly funny—or comically devastating, take your pick. Like the two entities who compete for control over their shared life, the satire seesaws between black humor about Hollywood’s unattainable standards for youth and cutting commentary on how aging transforms women into something beastly to be hidden away or obliterated entirely. Thanks to a career-best performance from Demi Moore, there are countless shriek-out-loud moments at how unflinchingly far the film pushes the thought experiment of, what if you could reinvent yourself and how much would you hurt yourself to hold on to that youth? After decades in the business, former starlet Elisabeth Sparkle (Moore) has plateaued as the face and body of a retro aerobics morning show. Despite appearing far more taut than any other sixtysomething, not to mention clearly having a warm rapport with both her backup dancers and her viewers, Elisabeth is deemed passé by network head Harvey—who, the film makes sure to express through Dennis Quaid’s revolting performance, is a slurping, smacking soup of machismo sloshing around in lurid suits. While he won’t say what “it” is that she’s lost after 50, it’s clear that he thinks Elisabeth has long passed her last fuckable day. And so, her incredibly successful, long-running series is canceled. That it happens to be her birthday is the rotten cherry on top of a shit sundae that would send anyone spiraling. Throw in a nearly-fatal car crash from which Elisabeth miraculously emerges without a scratch, and she is perfectly primed to receive a sales pitch from a beautiful stranger about The Substance, a black-market drug that promises to transform Elisabeth into her more perfect (read: younger) self. What follows is a grotesque fable that both builds upon and then outrageously deconstructs its body-horror premise, as the revitalizing Substance pits Elisabeth against a gorgeous, lithe, dewy creature who christens herself Sue (Margaret Qualley)—a Frankenstein’s monster, but also Frankenstein herself, as The Substance constantly reminds its users to REMEMBER YOU ARE ONE. The Substance at first sounds like a cult; Elisabeth keeps pinned to her fridge the stranger’s message proclaiming that IT CHANGED MY LIFE. (As she will learn too late, this statement is more bleakly matter-of-fact than ringing endorsement.) The kit is delivered to a remote storage locker in the frictionless manner of online shopping; each box contains hilariously minimalistic packaging, as if to say, You have to figure it out yourself. What is actually supertext are the all-caps instructions, to be strictly followed: You must trade off one week at a time, with whoever is out in the world making sure that the other inert body is fed via IV. You must switch off at the one-week mark. The comparisons to Ozempic and other radical weight-loss drugs cannot be ignored, especially when Sue must stabilize her freshly hatched body by withdrawing spinal fluid from Elisabeth’s unconscious form every day. Moore’s casting is pitch-perfect, considering that nearly any viewer older than Qualley will remember how the iconic actress embodied key body-positive moments in the 1990s, from posing naked and pregnant for Vanity Fair to bulking up and shaving her head for GI Jane. It also makes it all the more difficult to watch along with Elisabeth as she scrutinizes her reflections for flaws, both before and especially after she starts using The Substance. The camera trains us early on to call out any ugliness in her, long before the film’s brilliant prosthetics actually drag said monstrosity to the surface. It makes you wonder if any of Moore’s daughters were ever up for consideration for the part of Sue, or if that would have been far too surreal. Regardless, Qualley (herself a Hollywood baby, the daughter of Andie MacDowell) gamely takes to the role, proudly flaunting her cellulite-free form in body-hugging unitards and playing up the doe eyes and lip bites for the lecherous Harvey, who adores his new toy. As the subtly cruel opening sequence swiftly informs us, Elisabeth Sparkle got her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame early on in her career, even garnering some Oscar love, but became embedded in the collective consciousness as an aerobics superstar—like Jane Fonda’s Workout, except that Elisabeth never returned to acting afterwards. It’s telling that Sue doesn’t try to restart her career on the silver screen, that she seeks only to replace herself in her current persona. Elisabeth has been humiliated, which makes her need painfully myopic: to claw back her one bit of relevance, even if it means erasing her own legacy that much more quickly. But being the flavor of the week brings exclusive party invites and hot dates, and Sue can’t resist siphoning off a few more hours. When the careful balance is thrown off, it’s Elisabeth who wakes up late with a withered finger, the years literally sucked out of her. Suddenly the aging isn’t just in her head; it’s on her body, for everyone else to see. The sequences in which the two trade off consciousness is a perfect encapsulation of the film’s deft juggling of humor and darkness. Watching Elisabeth sequester herself in her apartment all week binge-watching TV and binge-eating food is so difficult, yet there’s a sly satisfaction in her sabotaging Sue’s waking hours with all the cleanup she’s left her like a bad roommate. Despite The Substance’s constant refrains to REMEMBER YOU ARE ONE, it is far too easy to regard Elisabeth and Sue as two separate people. It becomes increasingly difficult to reconcile these two into one identity, in the way that we might not recognize our younger or older selves. It doesn’t take long for Sue’s early tenderness for her older self to slide into revulsion, which then morphs into self-righteous greed borne out of its own gnawing insecurity. Elisabeth’s is the decaying body hidden away à la Dorian Gray’s portrait, but her lavish Hollywood home also features a massive photograph of Elisabeth in her prime—which is to say, probably her 30s, so younger than Elisabeth but older than Sue—that taunts both women with her taut pose and steely stare. Far too late does either persona realize that their shared accusations of what have you done? actually means what have I done to myself? but by then they are on a collision course as these new and old stars go supernova. One of the biggest criticisms of the film is that despite the specificity of Elisabeth and Sue’s nightmarish forays into self-perfection, the actual arc of their shared career is Ozempic-level thin. All of the Hollywood scaffolding is as flimsy as backlot facades: despite the (single) TV network’s rebranding, it’s the same aerobics program; Sue’s big late-night debut is on The Show; the coveted New Year’s Eve spot is just her leading some showgirls on a soundstage. The movie favors repetition of singular images, like Sue’s gyrating posterior, over what could have been screen time devoted to other details of Elisabeth’s lifetime, like whether she had frequent collaborators other than Harvey, or if she had a “brand” before fitness instructor, or if she had any friends (or rivals) or lovers in the limelight. Instead, these broad archetypes hold up well enough to the scathing commentary, with Fargeat electing to add texture by paying homage to famous Hollywood scores. I didn’t catch all of the references (like Bernard Herrmann’s Vertigo score), but the usage of Richard Strauss’ “Thus Spake Zarathustra” took me out of the action in a distracting way—though the subsequent sequence that one-upped Carrie was a bloody delight.Like its titular drug, The Substance is not for the faint of heart. It takes audacious swings, and while its effect may not stick with you once you leave the theater, every single artist involved fully commits in a manner that deserves your attention, even if only for a few hours. [end-mark] The post <i>The Substance</i> is a Satirical Body Horror <i>Picture of Dorian Gray</i> appeared first on Reactor.

Books Dissecting The Dark Descent The Guilt Keeps Us Human: “You Can Go Now” by Dennis Etchison An unnerving psychological portrait of a mind absolving itself of (well-deserved) guilt. By Sam Reader | Published on September 24, 2024 Comment 0 Share New Share Welcome back to Dissecting The Dark Descent, where we lovingly delve into the guts of David Hartwell’s seminal 1987 anthology story by story, and in the process, explore the underpinnings of a genre we all love. For an in-depth introduction, here’s the intro post. More than any other horror writer, Dennis Etchison is the best at the heightened mundane. A versatile writer whose works span crime, science fiction, fantasy, and horror, Etchison’s best stories (my personal favorites include “The Late Shift” and “The Dog Park,” among others) take a relatively low-key situation featuring average people and then inject an element of the surreal or supernatural—for instance, low-income zombies working for a convenience store chain, or a man’s nested dreams of death helping him process an unusual event. The juxtaposition creates an unusual liminal space, one where the intrusion of the unnatural (as Hartwell and Lovecraft claimed horror was) barely pierces into the natural, a world much like ours but with some unnerving differences unique to Etchison’s horror fiction. “You Can Go Now” applies this approach in the psychological vein, painting an unnerving psychological portrait as Etchison peels away the layers of his unnamed protagonist’s dreams and memory to get to the rotten core. An unnamed protagonist dies on the way to the airport, only to wake up on a plane. He then dies on the plane during a midair explosion, only to wake up on a boat. The further he travels, the more questions start to arise: What is the mysterious long envelope he carries with him? Why does he keep dying over and over again? Why does he seem so desperate to get away? And most of all, why is it that every time, before he dies, he seems to hear the words “you can go now?” Unfortunately, to discuss this one, we also have to rip the central mystery to shreds. There are no supernatural elements in “You Can Go Now,” or at least no obvious ones. Instead, Etchison uses his sense of heightened mundanity to slowly crank up the surreal as the story’s main character navigates a series of nested dreams, eventually ending with the revelation that he killed his wife Shelley during a fight, and this was all his attempt to process his guilt over the act and move on. The “You can go now” refrain is the title of a poem one of them wrote to the other, and also (more horrifyingly) his brain telling him that he’s ready to move on from his own monstrous act. The meaning of “you can go now” changes with each layer of the dream, the context going from death to moving on from the past, to finally going “it’s okay, you can leave now that she’s dead.” The individual dreams don’t get unnatural, but it’s clear there’s more to them, whether it’s the impressionistic qualities of the river voyage (where no legible words appear, cleverly highlighting the cliché that you can’t read in a dream) or the fragmented way the opening layer (where the protagonist, mirroring the climax, rushes to the airport) proceeds quickly until the car crash. “Liminal” is a word with many meanings in horror these days, everything from “a creepy empty hallway where a presence waits in the full quiet” to “someplace where you find yourself caught between dream and waking.” “You Can Go Now” is closer to the latter sense of liminality, mostly mundane situations that then become more and more heightened the deeper the dreamer gets into the dream. To Etchison’s credit, he handles this liminality with deftness, with the fragmented car journey leading to the unnerving plane explosion where the dreamer sees his own doppelganger, leading to the eerily pleasant boat trip. The way the scenes are arranged, each one seems gentler and less distressing, finally leading to the main character waking up to find the horrors he left behind in the last section of the piece. It’s ambiguous whether it’s the dreamer attempting to escape into more pleasant dreamscapes each time, or whether it’s meant to lull him and relax him so he can finally confront the murder scene revealed at the end of the story, but there’s a clear progression in the transitions as he slips deeper and deeper through his sleep. The menace is entirely in the context—why him, why these dreams specifically, and why the voice? As the dreams become more pleasant and the concept of death more abstract, that menace only lingers, a subtle room tone in the background of the dreams, waiting to strike. That strike is the final reveal—the protagonist just experienced a series of nested dreams that eventually deposited him in the real world next to the body of the wife he accidentally killed during a fight, still on the phone with the airline he took a call from at the beginning of the story. He disassociated while unconscious and his brain was merely attempting to process the trauma and the guilt. And this is what makes that haunting refrain, the title of the story and its last line, so utterly terrifying. It’s not someone attempting to move on, or someone refusing to accept their death, or something melancholic but ultimately positive, it’s his brain justifying the guilt by sending him hurtling through violent catastrophe and then calming him down with pleasant memories. By the time he wakes up, he’s already been through the worst of it, and the trauma is partially assuaged. Guilt isn’t an emotion people deal with particularly well. It hurts to know that we’ve hurt someone, that we’ve done something wrong, that something has, through either our witting or unwitting actions, made a situation worse. It’s the job of our subconscious to help mitigate those feelings, to help make things easier to deal with. Guilt in horror is usually unresolved, a psychological pressure that grinds and gnaws at a person, another force to act on them. Here, the horror comes from that pressure being relieved, the guilt resolved. The murderer, through his dreams of peaceful rivers and violent car crashes, absolves himself. He still won’t take responsibility—he vehemently claims he “didn’t mean to”—but it’s clear he’s moved on from the initial shock and horror of the act. His brain has given him the out he needs, and as the poem he’s been carrying around through every single dream tells him, “You can go now.” It’s unnerving that such a simple line carries a complete discarding of humanity, but that’s sort of the point—everything is working exactly as intended to carry the dreamer to a monstrous conclusion. It’s that acceptance of inhumanity, the way the dreamer shrugs off his wife’s death, that ties the heightened mundane, the dreams, and that mysterious long envelope all together. In a twisted way, he’s accepting a death (maybe even two, depending on if you count the death of his sense of empathy and humanity), it’s just not his own. At the end of all this complexity is someone accepting his monsterhood, because he was able to offload his guilt through his traumatic nested dreams. Etchison’s twisted little character study ends with things that are all normally psychologically positive, but add up to something horrifying. Because some of us need the negative to remind us what it means to be human. And now to turn it over to you: Does the inception model work? Is there still hope for the narrator’s humanity? Do you share poems with your loved ones? And what was your first brush with Etchison’s work? And please join us next week for New Mexico’s favorite houseguest D.H. Lawrence and “The Rocking-Horse Winner.”[end-mark] The post The Guilt Keeps Us Human: “You Can Go Now” by Dennis Etchison appeared first on Reactor.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The United Nation’s Summit of the Future 2024 held ahead of this year’s UN General Assembly has revealed that the world organization is moving toward adding more initiatives to its existing, and upcoming, “power grab portfolio.” This time it’s the Pact for the Future (with the Global Digital Compact as an annex), that has just been adopted. The main component of this scheme is the “action-oriented outcome” document, the other being an international agreement, and the implementation of both, driven by the UN, is expected to start after the summit. We obtained a copy of the document for you here. The summary of the purpose of two deals is to put a positive spin and push for immediate and as wide as possible adoption of such controversial policies as censorship (“disinformation” crackdown), surveillance, and the so-called digital public infrastructure (DPI) with digital IDs as its component. There is also the UN’s sustainable development goals (SDGs) – in itself an agenda endorsed by major countries that, among other things, looks to usher in digital IDs, as well as new tools, and justifications, for censorship. The Global Digital Compact and the Declaration on Future Generations are a part of the Pact for the Future, whose adoption concludes several years of negotiations between countries and various stakeholders. Those who pushed for the document to be adopted, both among politicians and the media, say it is the most significant of its kind in decades, and a necessary adjustment of the old rules to what is all but referred to as the new world order – the actual quote from the president of the UN General assembly is that this “lays the foundations for a sustainable, just, and peaceful global order.” It ranges from peace and security, climate, financing for development, and sustainable development, to “digital cooperation,” as well as “human rights and gender” and, supposedly, “more meaningful opportunities for young people” – as far as decision-making is concerned. The pact is divided into five segments and two annexes (Global Digital Compact and Declaration on Future Generations), and a total of 56 points are referred to as “actions.” One of the key ones is Action 1, which speaks about accelerating steps toward the universal and far-reaching 2030 Agenda while achieving sustainable development goals (SDG), and “leaving no one behind.” Action 4 is dedicated to financing SDGs, and how to close “the gap” in developing countries. With action Action 8, countries-signatories commit to gender equality, and the empowerment of “all” women and girls, again as a key part of the SDGs. Action 12 is another dedicated to finding the most efficient ways (“turbocharge the full implementation”) to push SDGs and manage to do that by 2023, the consequences of which will, naturally, continue in the years beyond. 14 “actions” fall under the international peace and security segment of the document, where the UN reaffirms its actual role and reason for existing. This covers issues such as building peace, protecting civilians, and moving toward a nuclear weapons-free world. In the last draft, Action 28 (which is in the science, technology, innovation, and digital cooperation category), it reads that the signatories will address the potential risks and seize the opportunities associated with new and emerging technologies. In the adopted document, this “action” states, “We will seize the opportunities presented by science, technology, and innovation for the benefit of people and the planet.” It then adds that those implementing the pact will promote “ethical and responsible” use of science, technology, and innovation. Global Digital Compact goes into the details of combating “disinformation.” Under “Digital Trust and Safety,” this annex to the pact speaks about the need for the signatories to “urgently counter” things considered disinformation, misinformation, hate speech, and cyberbullying, while child sexual exploitation is thrown into the same sentence. The annex further talks about “information integrity” where that and “tolerance and respect” will be promoted in the digital space, which will (unavoidably and/or declaratively) be inclusive, open, safe, and secure. While a lot of the document might read like a big compilation of usual platitudes associated mostly with liberal policies, it does provide a formal platform for nation-states of various “persuasions,” including authoritarian ones, to mold the pact to suit their purpose, impose new policies and enforce new, or more rules. One of the “urgent” measures that the Global Digital Compact calls for and commits is found under “Information Integrity” and wants social media platforms to “provide researchers access to data” with the obligatory mention of hazy “safeguards for user privacy.” The purpose of providing this data would be “to ensure transparency and accountability to build an evidence base on how to address misinformation and disinformation and hate speech that can inform government and industry policies, standards and best practices.” If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post UN Pushes for Global Control With New Pact: Digital IDs, Censorship, and Surveillance at the Core appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

NEW: Son of Would-Be Trump Assassin Arrested By Feds, Too

Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart is not a military or foreign policy genius, but he does play on TV. After 11 months of rocket fire from Hezbollah that has seen 60,000 Israelis become refugees in their own country, Israel has started to hit Hezbollah hard in recent days, leading Stewart to ask, “What did Lebanon do?” on Monday’s edition of The Daily Show. Most of the segment was designed to hit President Joe Biden from the left for failing to secure a ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas. After a montage of Biden saying how important the issue was to him, including one of him at an ice cream shop, Stewart set up a clip of Fox News’s Bill Hemmer, “I'm going to take a big bite of my ice cream cone as I find out how our ceasefire efforts are paying off.”     In the clip, Hemmer reported, “Israel launching an all-out assault on Hezbollah in Lebanon over the weekend.” After a spit-take, Stewart replied, “What?... Wait, we've been working tirelessly for a ceasefire in Gaza and then [bleep] Lebanon? The whole point was we're going to downgrade Hamas, we're going to attack the terrorists there, we’re going to get the hostages home. What did Lebanon do?” Nobody forced Hezbollah to join the war after October 7. It made a choice to do that so that it could wax poetic about “unified resistance” and burnish its “resistance” credentials as a clip of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu highlighted, “No country can accept the wanton rocketing of its cities. We can't accept it either.” Stewart didn’t care, “But you've also been wanton rocketing! What kind of rocketing are you doing in Gaza, if not wanton? And by the way, that’s how little criticism they face. By the way, Lebanon is also a country. What makes you think they're going to accept your rocketing or whatever other James Bond shit you've been up to?” Later in his monologue, Stewart teed up a clip of Axios’s Barak Ravid on CNN, “If you really want to experience the full cognitive dissonance and language calisthenics that have to be deployed to describe the Middle East over the last, I don't know, four, five, six, 10,000 years, we're describing, I give you: the golden soundbite, brought down from Sinai to explain how [bleep] convoluted this has to be.” In the clip, Ravid reported, “What the Israeli government has said, and the Biden administration has, in many ways, subscribed to this idea—is deescalation through escalation.”     A confused Stewart exclaimed, "Or, as that is sometimes called: war!… I mean, do you even hear yourself?” It’s a rather simple concept. For 11 months, Israel and Hezbollah exchanged fire based on the so-called “rules of the game,” but Hezbollah miscalculated just how seriously Israel takes the situation. The fact that tens of thousands of Jews may not be able to live freely in the Jewish state is untenable. However, for various political and practical reasons, Israel held back and even now would still prefer not to launch a ground invasion, so it is intensifying its air efforts to try to convince Hezbollah their support for Hamas isn’t worth it. For his part, Stewart brought out multiple books, including 1984, Slaughterhouse-Five, and Garfield comics, to suggest the idea was absurd and worse than Orwellian. Finally, Stewart tried to push back against the idea that favoring an end to the Gaza war makes one pro-Hamas or anti-Semitic and played clips of several former high-ranking Israeli security officials to prove his point. One was former Defense Minister Benny Gantz, who left the war cabinet after he accused Netanyahu of not having a strategy. In the clip, an interpreter quotes Gantz as saying, “The prime minister did not look the public in the eye and tell the truth: That he won't bring the hostages alive.” However, Stewart omitted Gantz has said he would back a ground invasion of Lebanon should it come to that because the American political spectrum cannot be easily applied to Israel. If Stewart wants to argue that invading Lebanon in order to allow displaced Israelis to return home will fail because the war will be so devastating that they may not have homes to return to, he can try to argue that point. Speaking of 1984, what he cannot do is demand to be taken seriously as a commentator while memory holing the fact that the geopolitical situation is what it is because Hezbollah has been waging a war of choice on Israel for the last 11 months. Here is a transcript for the September 23 show: Comedy Central The Daily Show 9/23/2024 11:02 PM ET STEWART: I'm going to take a big bite of my ice cream cone as I find out how our ceasefire efforts are paying off. BILL HEMMER: Israel launching an all-out assault on Hezbollah in Lebanon over the weekend. STEWART: [Spit-take] What? So worth it. Wait, we've been working tirelessly for a ceasefire in Gaza and then [bleep] Lebanon? The whole point was we're going to downgrade Hamas, we're going to attack the terrorists there, we’re going to get the hostages home. What did Lebanon do? BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: No country can accept the wanton rocketing of its cities. We can't accept it either. STEWART: But you've also been wanton rocketing! What kind of rocketing are you doing in Gaza, if not wanton? And by the way, that’s how little criticism they face. By the way, Lebanon is also a country. What makes you think they're going to accept your rocketing or whatever other James Bond shit you've been up to? … STEWART: What if you really want to experience the full cognitive dissonance and language calisthenics that have to be deployed to describe the Middle East over the last, I don't know, four, five, six, 10,000 years, we're describing, I give you: the golden soundbite, brought down from Sinai to explain how [bleep] convoluted this has to be. BARAK RAVID: What the Israeli government has said, and the Biden administration has, in many ways, subscribed to this idea — is deescalation through escalation. STEWART: Or, as that is sometimes called: war! That is -- World War II, look at the subhead! Deescalation through escalation. I mean, do you even hear yourself? My god, that -- deescalation through escalation. That phrase is right out of, hold on a second, let me see if I can find it. Hold on, no, it's not in here, hold on, let me see if I can find. No, it's not in there. Let me see if I can find --  … STEWART: I'm sorry? Criticism of the war is shameful and it gives comfort to Hamas? You know who might be surprised to hear that? The Israelis, who are unbelievably critical of the war and Netanyahu. BENNY GANTZ: [Speaking Hebrew]. STEWART: What are you going to say now, mother[bleep]? Get off my back! You heard what he said! He said... [Attempts to speak in Hebrew] Does anyone have a Google translate on what he said? GANTZ [VIA INTERPRETER]: The prime minister did not look the public in the eye and tell the truth: That he won't bring the hostages alive.

There's one thing you must say for Vivek Ramaswamy: he's unafraid to go into the center of controversy. Ramaswamy waded into the pro-Hamas fray in Chicago outside the Democrat convention. And appearing on today's CNN This Morning, Ramaswamy described his experiences in holding a town hall in Springfield, Ohio in the midst of the controversy over Haitian immigration there. You might even say that appearing on CNN took some courage, too. Though it should be said that while host Kasie Hunt challenged Ramaswamy on a number of points, it wasn't the kind of antagonistic confrontation that her CNN colleague Dana Bash recently launched against JD Vance. The segment opened with a clip from the town hall in which a participant described himself as a half-black, lifelong resident of Springfield, and said that he has received more racial slurs in just the last two weeks than he had in his entire life before then. Ohio native Ramaswamy was able to describe a constructive dialogue he had with the man, and also mentioned meeting with leaders of the Haitian community in Springfield.  Hunt tried to get Ramaswamy to say that Trump's recent comments about Haitians eating pets have led to the outbreak of tensions. She also cited Laura Loomer's comments that if Harris wins, the White House will smell like curry. Ramaswamy responded by saying that rather than "airlifting" a word that Trump or a supporter says, we should focus on the bigger issues surrounding immigration.  While Hunt wanted to focus on Trump and Loomer's words, Ramaswamy rightfully insisted: "We can't sweep under the rug, in a town of 50,000 people, you had an influx of 20,000 Haitian migrants to a community that was unprepared to actually integrate them. Migrants who are unprepared to integrate themselves." Let's go out on a limb and surmise that few if any members of the liberal media have experienced that kind of drastic demographic change in their neighborhoods. Ramaswamy proposed a simple policy on the matter: the US should only accept immigrants who can speak English and who will not become reliant on welfare. He described a "tough" conversation with Haitians on the policy, but that ended with them acknowledging that it was fair. Hunt made the usual counterpoint that most migrants are coming to work, not to draw welfare. Ramaswamy then made a sly suggestion: "If people believe that we should admit migrants who are going to be reliant on Medicaid or welfare, then they could represent that view." Looking at you, Kamala! Indeed, Harris has gone an egregious step further, saying that illegal immigrants should receive free gender-transition surgery. Funny how the liberal media has largely buried that story—though credit CNN for reporting it, along with Harris' desire to "end" immigrant detention. Here's the transcript. CNN This Morning 9/24/24 6:46 am EDT SPRINGFIELD TOWN HALL PARTICIPANT: Since this story leads, and this is something that everyone needs to hear, the hateful language in this community has spiked. It's really, really bad. I'm half black, I'm half Hungarian, half, like, whatever you want to say.  I've become a target on the hate. I can probably count on my hand, both hands, how many times a racial slur has been said in my whole life. I've been called the n-word twice this week by just people who group me, friends of mine, friends of friends, and say like, get out of here. You're, Haitian, we don't want you here. Even with a six-month-old baby at a grocery store. . . .  KASIE HUNT: That was one lifelong resident of Springfield, Ohio last week, telling former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy during a local town hall what he has experienced in the wake of Donald Trump's false claims about Haitian migrants eating pets in his home town.  . . .  But I want to ask you about that moment in Springfield, Ohio from someone who has lived there their whole life, and who says they've not experienced this kind of racially motivated animosity from the members of their community before this past week. Is President trump's rhetoric contributing to what happened to that man? And do you think it's right? VIVEK RAMASWAMY: So look, the reason I went to Springfield is I wanted to have open dialogue with the citizens of that community -- close to where I grew up as well. That was important to me. And I want to be precise about what that man said because I think it was actually really important and insightful. He didn't say it was in the last week, you heard in that clip, he said it was in the last year. And I did, I'll tell you what I told him to his face, which I believe is true, is a big part of the uptick we are seeing in anti-black racism and anti-minority racism -- and we are seeing that uptick in the country. And it worries me. Is a response to the anti-racist policies that have increased race consciousness in this country over the last several years.  I say this, I'm releasing a new book today. I wrote a book about three to four years ago called Woke Inc, predicting exactly this trend. And that's my concern with race-conscious policies. There is no better way to create racial animus in this country than to take something else of value from somebody else based on the color of their skin. That's a prediction I made my first book several years ago. And I'm sad to say that has come to transpire.  And that man and I had a great exchange. I also think we need more of that in this country. . . .  HUNT: You say you're making this argument about raising race consciousness from the left. And that's one way you put it in your book. But I do want to kind of circle back to some of the things that we're hearing from your party, from your Republican presidential nominee who has been traveling, for example, with Laura Loomer, who wrote on Twitter, quote, if Kamala Harris wins, the White House will smell like curry and White House speeches will be facilitated via a call center. Marjorie Taylor Greene came out and said that that was racist. Do you agree with her? RAMASWAMY: Look, I'm against identity politics in all of its forms. Whether it comes from the left or from the right. I've been crystal clear on that. I think we need to revive our shared American identity. That being said, I do think we've gotten into a bad habit, where Donald Trump says some word, or a supporter of Donald Trump says some word. That gets airlifted out becomes the story, rather than focusing on the substance of the actual underlying issue. . . .  Look, I met went and met with many of those Haitian community leaders during that trip myself. I think it's important to get all perspectives. What I will say is this, I think this debate about immigration is in the long run going to be a good thing for the country. We can't sweep under the rug, in a town of 50,000 people, you had an influx of 20,000 Haitian migrants to a community that was unprepared to actually integrate them. Migrants who are unprepared to integrate themselves. That's a tough conversation. But it's one that we actually need to be having in this country. And we weren't before.  It's one of the things I talk about in this book, is how do we actually get to solutions on this issue? People skirt around this issue of legal immigration. I'll tell you what I told those Haitian migrants. It was a tough exchange, but one where we actually came out stronger for it. I said, it's my view that if anybody enters this country, the United States generally should not admit somebody who's going to be a client of the welfare state, somebody who is going to be a recipient of government assistance. I don't think the U.S. policy should admit those immigrants, legally or not, into the United States of America. And in that exchange, the people on the other side, they thought about it, they said, you know what? That's a fair policy. That's constructive. And I think we need to think about immigration -- HUNT: Well, a lot of these migrants came for jobs, right? I mean, people that are working in manufacturing roles in the city of Springfield. Which is why they're there, not, are not what you just described there. RAMASWAMY: Well, actually, actually respectfully disagree with you. When you look at the rates of usage of welfare, Medicaid, etc., I think it's a reasonable immigration policy for the U.S. to set, that if you're going to come to this country, we want people who are able to speak the English language, broadly used in the United States, and able to stand independently without relying on government assistance or the welfare state.  That's the kind of debate we need to be having. If people believe that we should admit migrants who are going to be reliant on Medicaid or welfare, then they could represent that view. But we haven't been having that debate today. 

“In the time of smart cities, digital crypto, AI, Neuralink, hackable humans, zero privacy, deepmind, internal body data harvesting, and indiscriminate tracking surveillance, mind data mining, social media overload, augmented reality, social credit system, virtual dystopian mindfield, we bring you the revolutionary future of fashion.” This is what you’ll read when you visit the OHMNI website. Founded by Grammy-winning British rapper M.I.A., OHMNI claims its truly revolutionary products protect people from Big Tech. From hats to tote bags to all varieties of clothing, OHMNI makes “the armor of the modern knight in the age of modern technological warfare.” M.I.A. recently joined “Zero Hour’s” James Poulos to discuss her newest venture into the niche world where technology meets fashion. - YouTube www.youtube.com “What does [your clothing line] keep out?” asks Poulos. While a simple shirt looks and “feels just like any T-shirt you'd buy from Zara,” the silver embedded in the fabric protects against “any kind of high-level radiation or frequency that could be harmful,” M.I.A. explains, adding that the silver in the clothing is concentrated around where your vital organs are located, especially your heart, reproductive organs, and brain. “It’s literally the silver lining to fashion,” she laughs. Some of the company's products, however, are “Faraday-lined,” meaning they block all electromagnetic fields and radio frequencies. While it might seem like OHMNI is a brand that fights back against technological development, it’s actually not. “It's not that we're shunning technology; we're trying to find out how to coexist but still keeping yourself yourself,” says M.I.A. While OHMNI products protect the person wearing them, the clothing can also be used in other interesting ways. “You can wear the maternity dress, and it helps you protect your features, and then you can also wrap your router in it and it completely blocks out all the signals,” M.I.A. explains, adding that “you can actually get off grid in your home with OHMNI.” “If you can’t bring yourself to the countryside, you can always bring [OHMNI] to your city apartment,” she tells James. To learn more about OHMNI and to hear about M.I.A.’s thoughts regarding therapy addiction in the West, the tyranny in the U.K., how Elon Musk's SpaceX is contributing to the rise of technology, and how modern music is becoming less and less organic, watch the episode above. Want more from James Poulos?To enjoy more of James's visionary commentary on politics, tech, ideas, and culture, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

Remnant 2 has managed to improve on its predecessor in just about every way, moving out of the shadow of the various games that inspired it to establish the series as something more than just a spin on Dark Souls-inspired exploration and combat and The Division or Borderlands-style co-op looting and shooting. It's done so, in part, by continuing to expand upon its design framework and fictional setting through downloadable content — an effort that's now come to an end with the launch of Dark Horizon, the game's final DLC, out today. Continue reading Beloved co-op game Remnant 2 receives final DLC and huge update MORE FROM PCGAMESN: Best co-op games, Remnant 2 review, Best action-adventure games

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