Now the right-wing media ecosystem appears ready for the next phase of the project. If Black political gains are to be rolled back, then the historical basis for those gains must also be discredited. The Civil Rights Movement cannot remain a sacred democratic triumph if modern conservatives hope to argue that anti-discrimination laws represented a constitutional mistake. 

In the trailer for a new Daily Wire series titled “The Real History of the Civil Rights Movement,” the voice of right-wing podcaster Matt Walsh drips with the practiced solemnity of a whistleblower exposed a grand conspiracy. “Since the 1990s, America’s classrooms have turned Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks into sacred Civil Rights icons,” he says. “But what if almost everything you were taught about them was wrong?” Promising to unveil a history lesson hidden from public school textbooks, Walsh ominously suggests that the mid-century crusade to dismantle Jim Crow apartheid did not merely fulfill the promise of America’s founding but fundamentally rewrote the Constitution “in ways we’re still paying for.”

Walsh treats well-documented, widely accessible historical facts as if they were buried state secrets, weaponizing the baseline historical illiteracy of his audience to construct a narrative of deception. He declares with dramatic flair that the Parks story taught in schools is “fake,” asserting that she was not just a tired seamstress who spontaneously refused to surrender her seat on a Montgomery bus on Dec. 1, 1955. Instead, Walsh informs his viewers that Parks was a longtime National Association for the Advancement of Colored People volunteer instructed by civil rights leaders to “create a situation where she’d be arrested.” He points to the iconic, globally recognized photograph of Parks sitting serenely on an integrated bus, looking out the window while a white man sits directly behind her, and reveals with a flourish that the image was staged months after the event and that the man was actually a journalist.

In reality, this information has been widely known for decades. Historians and Black activists have discussed it openly for generations. The “bombshell” here is conservative audiences discovering that history classes occasionally extend beyond elementary-school simplifications.

On its surface, the controversy appears like absurd clickbait — a grown man breathlessly informing audiences that activists sometimes engage in activism. But beneath the farce lies a serious political ambition.

For years, Ben Shapiro’s digital media empire has raged against “wokeness,” mocked academic language about systemic racism and denounced any attempt to complicate America’s preferred civil rights mythology as left-wing indoctrination. Yet now the Daily Wire finds itself engaged in an unmistakably “woke” project of its own — except this supposedly comprehensive revision of the Parks story is designed not to deepen public understanding of racism, but to erode the moral legitimacy of the Civil Rights Movement.

Parks, in fact, was a longtime activist with the NAACP. Local organizers understood the strategic importance of finding a sympathetic plaintiff to challenge bus segregation in the Deep South. They had previously considered other plaintiffs — including fifteen-year-old Claudette Colvin — and ultimately concluded that Parks, a mature, married woman of sterling reputation, would present more effectively to white juries and the white press. The famous image of Parks seated on the integrated bus was staged on the historic day Montgomery’s buses were officially integrated following a Supreme Court ruling. None of this is controversial.

But Walsh smuggles in an entirely different claim beneath these factual details: that Parks was effectively a political actress participating in a manufactured hoax. He strongly implies she was instructed to orchestrate her own arrest in order to create propaganda for the movement. That is the leap for which there is no evidence. What Walsh is doing is treating the political sophistication of the Civil Rights Movement as evidence of its corruption. 

This is a recurring pattern in right-wing media. Conservatives routinely encounter long-established scholarship and react as though they have uncovered a conspiracy. The assumption underlying this behavior is revealing: If they themselves did not know something, then nobody else did. Their unfamiliarity becomes proof of censorship. As Salon’s Alex Galbraith recently explained in his daily newsletter, Crash Course, Walsh assumes his viewers “weren’t paying attention when their history classes got slightly more complicated.” The entire performance depends on presenting basic historical literacy as forbidden knowledge.

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The irony of the Daily Wire’s historical excursion is that Walsh has stumbled into an approximation of the very historical critique that critical race theorists have advanced for decades. By transforming Parks into a meek, accidental activist whose only deficit was physical fatigue, the dominant cultural narrative effectively stripped her of her radicalism. The sanitized myth suggests that American racism was cured by a series of polite, spontaneous misunderstandings that magically dissolved when white society was gently reminded of its own conscience. Progressive critique has long demanded that students learn the truth: that dismantling Jim Crow required sophisticated, institutional organizing at the grassroots level. 

But there is a darker political function here as well.

The goal is not merely to reinterpret Rosa Parks. It is to redefine the boundaries of legitimate racial discourse. The broader right-wing media landscape is locked in an escalating cycle of radicalization and rewards whoever can most aggressively push the boundaries of what is permissible to say about Black people and their struggle for equality. Walsh wants audiences to stop asking whether segregation was unjust and start asking whether anti-discrimination laws themselves represented government overreach. If Parks was merely a strategically deployed prop, if the Montgomery Bus Boycott was political theater, if the Civil Rights Act was constitutional sabotage — then why should private companies be compelled to serve customers regardless of race? Once civil-rights victories are reframed as manipulative media spectacles, the legal and moral framework built upon them becomes vulnerable. This is why Walsh’s trailer focuses so heavily on whether the Civil Rights Act “rewrote the Constitution.” 

This broader assault on the historical truth is becoming increasingly explicit across the American right. In April, conservative media figures attempted to whitewash the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally violence after the Department of Justice indicted leaders connected to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche accused the SPLC of “manufacturing extremism,” and right-wing commentators immediately seized on the claim as validation of long-standing conspiracies about anti-racist organizations.

Meanwhile, the Justice Department just set up a $1.776 billion slush fund for the president to provide reparations to the Jan. 6 rioters who tried to overturn the 2020 election on his behalf —  before any reparations have been paid to the descendants of slaves. 

The throughline is unmistakable: The right increasingly seeks to invert the moral architecture of American racial politics. Anti-racist institutions become the real extremists. Civil-rights activists become propagandists. White grievance becomes the nation’s primary injustice. The right wants Americans to stop seeing the Civil Rights Movement as a democratic triumph and start viewing it as the moment the country went wrong.

This is right-wing wokeness.

The post Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire goes woke with Rosa Parks revisionism appeared first on Salon.com.

He had gotten a laugh a moment before when he mocked President James Madison for not having a ballroom when the White House was burned by the British during the War of 1812. But when Metaxas praised Donald Trump and claimed that God’s providence is on the president and his ballooning ballroom project, the crowd’s cheering was loud — and serious.

“For God so loved the world that he sent his only son into the world to build a ballroom,” liberal Christian comedian April Ajoy wrote on X, one of many online commenters who responded by showing Metaxas what actual humor looks like. That’s when he fell back on the old “just joking” defense of his Trump-fluffing blasphemy.

“Can you IMAGINE not getting that this was a joke?” Metaxas posted on Sunday evening. “OUCH. It’s almost painful to consider that these folks are SO bitter that they can’t ever laugh.”

Moments later, he weighed in again: “If ever you wanted to know whether bitterness can blind you to the joy of HUMOR and JOKES, here is the evidence.”

But Metaxas still wasn’t done. “Is ANYTHING more hilarious than TDS liberals taking the bait on my insane joke,” he posted a few hours later. This continued for days — in tweet after tweet, over and over and over again, he claimed he was kidding. Because nothing says you’re good at comedy like having to tell people more than a dozen times that the thing they did not laugh at was, in fact, a joke.

Metaxas’s sad attempt to rewrite recent history is fitting. Trump’s ballroom is also a ham-fisted effort to conceal his inevitable legacy as the worst president the nation has ever seen. But like Metaxas’ tweet-a-thon, the president’s hope of gaslighting Americans into forgetting the past will backfire. Whether the garish spectacle Trump envisions is actually built — or, more likely, stays unfinished — it will be a testament to his true spot in history, as an epic failure.

It can sometimes seem like Trump, who is constitutionally barred from running for president again, has ceased caring about his reputation. “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody,” the president told reporters on May 12, accidentally doing what he rarely does: tell the truth. Republican tried to clean up his comments by claiming the context — he was asked about the Iran war’s impact on people back home — exonerated his rhetoric. But Trump, who will turn 80 in June and is displaying increasing levels of disinhibition, declined his own chance to walk back his words when it was offered by Fox News’ Bret Baier. 

“That’s a perfect statement. I’d make it again,” Trump said, before insisting that the 50% spike in gas prices isn’t so bad. 

The president followed up his display of indifference to Americans by openly picking their collective pockets by agreeing to settle his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS in exchange for setting up a $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization fund” to pay for legal bills for people facing consequences for illegal actions on Trump’s behalf. As Paul Krugman wrote in his newsletter, the deal “is a new nadir in self-dealing, further revealing Trump’s utter contempt for the American people.” 

The White House ballroom illustrates how Trump has destroyed the Republican Party by turning it into a cult devoted to himself. After Elizabeth MacDonough, the Senate parliamentarian, ruled that a provision to give Trump $1 billion of taxpayer money for the project could not be included in an immigration enforcement funding bill, one would think Republicans would have been relieved. The ballroom is wildly unpopular, and MacDonough’s decision could have saved the GOP from insulting already aggrieved voters. Instead, Senate Republicans are reportedly trying to find another way to restore the funding. According to a report published by NOTUS, the president is pressuring Senate Majority Leader John Thune to fire MacDonough. The ballroom could end up as a testament to how Republicans will torch their own political careers to appease their leader’s greed. 

Decades of public displays of narcissism have thoroughly demonstrated that Trump does, in fact, care what people think. Perversely, the White House ballroom appears to be an effort to create a positive historical memory of his presidency. If that seems dumb, well, it’s worth remembering that Trump was never the brightest individual, even before his recent mercurial behavior and comments raised increasing alarms about his mental fitness for office. He probably does think slapping his name on a gaudy structure will be enough to overcome the historical record of his failures. Putting “Trump” on a bunch of buildings in New York City fooled people into thinking he’s a competent businessman, so why wouldn’t it work this time around?

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What’s more likely to happen, though, is that the White House ballroom becomes a monument to Trump’s failed presidency. There’s a strong chance it will never get finished. Democrats are likely to take the House — and quite possibly the Senate — in the November midterms, giving them power to delay construction until Trump is out of the White House. But even if he were to somehow manage to overcome legal hurdles and inevitable delays to get a ballroom built, it promises to be a tasteless extravaganza, despite the expense — a gilded eyesore in the middle of Washington that, like him, only purports to be great. The only object that could better symbolize his time in office is the gold toilet erected as an art installation in D.C. by a mysterious collective called the Secret Handshake. 

Meanwhile, the latest New York Times/Siena poll shows Trump is setting records for presidential unpopularity. It’s not just that his abysmal 37% approval rating means he’s lost everyone except diehards who simply can’t admit liberals were right all along. But when asked about specific issues, there are signs that even many among the MAGA faithful are getting shaky. According to the poll, only 28% of Americans say they approve of Trump on cost-of-living issues, which were a core part of his reelection campaign’s message. Only 30% are willing to say that starting a war with Iran was a good decision. He does slightly better on immigration. But at only 41% approval, he is still underwater.

These are the defining issues of his presidency. Putting his name on an ugly ballroom won’t erase this legacy of failure. On the contrary, it will only reinforce Trump’s reputation as someone who is only good at doing terrible things.

Trump has been enriching himself in corrupt, and possibly illegal, ways the second he returned to the White House. On top of the $1.8 billion slush fund, in January the New Yorker’s David Kirkpatrick uncovered $4 billion in Trump’s self-dealing and grifting, which has only grown worse since then. On Monday, Popular Info published an exposé of the president’s unusually active stock trading that showed how carefully timed public praise has often temporarily inflated companies impacted by his policies. Worse, this is all going on while ordinary Americans are being hammered financially by Trump’s agenda, with the costs of energy, food and healthcare increasing for millions.

The abstract nature of most of Trump’s grifting, which reportedly includes cryptocurrency, makes it hard to illustrate how he’s enriching himself and his allies at the expense of the American people. Large numbers tend to wash over people, even if they understand they’re supposed to care.

This is where the White House ballroom, if it ever gets built, will land especially hard. It will be a huge, hideous, expensive gift to himself, handily standing in as a very visible display of his corruption and contempt for ordinary people.

There is a sea of people calling on the next Democrat in the White House to simply bulldoze the atrocity if it is built, a move that is probably the right call. But it might be more useful to let it stand, keeping it empty and letting it fall into disrepair as a living reminder to voters of the foolishness that comes from voting for a greedy con artist as president.

The post White House ballroom is turning into a symbol of Trump’s failures appeared first on Salon.com.

Ahead of the initial March 3 primary, when Paxton and Cornyn first faced off and Talarico defeated Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, there was significant debate over which potential matchup gave Democrats their best chance to flip the Senate seat, which will be crucial to Democrats’ plans to retake control of the Senate come November. 

Now, however, it seems like whoever prevails in the GOP runoff will have their work cut out for them. 

New polling indicated that Paxton and Cornyn perform statistically identically when facing off against Talarico. A recent Barbara Jordan Public Policy Research and Survey Center and Texas Southern University poll found that in a matchup against Talarico, Cornyn would lead him 45% to 44%, and Paxton would be tied, with both at 45%. Both results are well within the poll’s plus or minus 2.8% margin of error. 

Polling from the Hobby School of Public Affairs at the University of Houston also found that Republican primary voters see both candidates as equally strong for the general election context. When asked which candidate they believed was a stronger candidate for the general election, 43% said Paxton and 43% said Cornyn, with another 14% saying neither one was stronger than the other. 

This is a subtle but notable shift from earlier in the cycle, when it seemed like a Talarico versus Paxton matchup would be the Democrats’ best chance. A January Emerson College poll, for example, found that Cornyn led Talarico by 3 points, 47% to 44%, whereas Paxton and Talarico were tied at 46% support.

Chuck Rocha, a Democratic strategist working on Talarico’s campaign, told Salon that he thinks this shift is the result of at least two trends. The first is that the national environment for Republicans has become far less favorable, even since the initial primary, and certainly since the beginning of the year. 

This trend is demonstrated by the change in the generic ballot. At the beginning of March, Democrats led in the generic ballot by about 5 points, according to DecisionDeskHQ’s polling average. Now, that lead is 7 points, and growing. 

The second factor, according to Rocha, is that this GOP primary has been damaging to both candidates. 

“They both have exposed each other’s Achilles heel. In my world, even when I go and talk to my Republican counterparts, the old adage is, ‘Steel sharpens steel,’ which means the best of the best makes the best better,” Rocha said. “But in this case, they used the best research against each other — research that Democrats would have used — to beat the teetotal shit out of each other, and that is not good when you run tens of millions of dollars of advertising.  There’s nobody in the state who doesn’t know the rampant faults of both of these candidates, because the other Republican has told all of us.”

For context, the Texas GOP Senate primary has become the most expensive Senate primary in U.S. history, with more than $122 million spent just ahead of the initial primary, with $95 million of that spending being on the GOP side, according to AdImpact, an ad spending tracking firm. Another $21 million has been spent on the GOP runoff. 

The ads have gotten personal, not to mention overwhelmingly negative, with anti-Paxton ads painting him as an incompetent and corrupt adulterer and anti-Cornyn ads painting him as a failed and a Republican in name only or “RINO,”. The upshot of all of this for Democrats is that Republicans have deployed significant resources in tearing down both of their potential nominees, making easy work for the other party.

Joshua Blank, the research director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin, told Salon the intraparty attacks probably carry more weight with more voters than the same attacks would coming from Democrats. He also pointed out that at this juncture, there is an asymmetry in terms of how unified the party-aligned voters are.

“Democratic support is much more unified behind Talarico at this point in time than Republican support is unified behind either of those candidates, which is translated into the trial ballots showing Talarico in some cases in the lead,” Blank said. “That’s largely because Democrats know who their candidate is, and Democrats are also largely unified in this election cycle because of Trump.”

The key metric to watch out for, in Blank’s analysis, was what portion of Cornyn or Paxton voters would refuse to vote for the other candidate if they did become the nominee. In survey data from the Texas Politics Project poll from May, 10% of Republicans said they would support Cornyn over Talarico but not Paxton, while 13% said they would support Paxton versus Talarico, but not Cornyn. 

If this trend holds, Blank said, this means that Paxton is probably the better general election candidate instead of Cornyn, despite the conventional wisdom that Cornyn would be more palatable in the general election.

Blank tied this to another point, which is that, in his view, Paxton has a better chance of tapping into Trump’s base of infrequent voters than Cornyn does. While both have been loyal Republicans, Paxton has branded himself as a diehard Trump loyalist and pitched his own impeachments and legal troubles in the same way that Trump branded his own impeachments as political persecution. This is despite the fact that the vast majority of Texas state House Republicans voted to impeach Paxton. Paxton’s Trumpian appeal, Blank noted, is only underscored by Trump’s late-in-the-race endorsement of Paxton.

“I think there’s a case to be made that Paxton is closer to the modern-day Republican party, and may be the better vessel to generate mobilization among base voters that Republicans will desperately need in order to maintain their advantage in this cycle,” Blank said. “Most elections in the modern era are not about persuasion; they’re about mobilization. Democrats don’t have enough voters in the state to mobilize all their voters and rely on that alone. They need an election cycle like this, in which they can count on a significant share of independent support, but also some share of Republicans staying home.”

The post Texas GOP civil war gives Democrats an opening appeared first on Salon.com.

In recent months, some prominent conservatives and erstwhile allies of President Donald Trump – former U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and journalist Megyn Kelly, for example – have voiced their displeasure with him on several issues. They range from Trump’s handling of the Iran war and the economy to the release of information concerning his relationship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Most notably, political commentator Tucker Carlson, once one of Trump’s most stalwart loyalists, expressed remorse for his previous support for the president, declaring in April 2026, “It’s not enough to say, well, I changed my mind – or like, oh, this is bad, I’m out.” Carlson said he will be “tormented” by his support for Trump “for a long time” and that he is “sorry for misleading people.”

Growing unease with the Trump administration among these former allies comes amid some of the worst polling of Trump’s career. According to data compiled by pollster G. Elliott Morris, Trump’s popularity has been steadily declining over the past year. Americans are seriously questioning his handling of key issues, such as inflation, immigration, jobs and foreign affairs.

But beyond former prominent Trump allies, are there other Trump supporters having second thoughts about their votes in the 2024 presidential election? To answer this question, we conducted a nationally representative poll of 1,000 U.S. adults who were recruited from an online panel maintained by YouGov, a survey research firm.

We asked self-identified Trump voters about their votes in the 2024 election. Our results suggest that a growing number of them – especially moderates, African Americans and young people – are experiencing voter’s remorse.

Support for Trump remains strong

To be clear, our survey shows that most Trump voters remain in the president’s camp.

We found that 84% of 2024 Trump voters say they would vote for Trump if given the chance to vote again in the 2024 election. That’s down 2 percentage points since we previously asked this question in July 2025.

Over 90% of members of Trump’s core base of voters – including 93% of self-identified Republican Trump voters, 95% of self-identified conservative Trump voters and 92% of Trump voters over age 55 – said they would vote for Trump as they did in 2024 if given a second chance.

Regretful Trump voters

But some groups of Trump voters are having second thoughts. The most regretful are those with whom Trump made significant gains in 2024. They include political independents, African Americans, younger people and those with more education.

Roughly 3 in 10 2024 Trump voters who identify as political moderates and African Americans said they would vote differently if the election were held again. And roughly a quarter of young and middle-aged Trump voters also suggested they would not vote for Trump if they could redo their 2024 vote.

Twenty percent of Trump supporters with postgraduate degrees expressed a reluctance to vote for Trump if given a second opportunity. Voters with some college experience and those making less than $40,000 annually reported the same sentiment in similar percentages.

Perhaps most politically perilous, 31% of independents who voted for Trump in 2024 would not vote for him again in an election do-over.

Cracks in the coalition

What is pushing Trump voters away from the president?

There is no single cause, but our results suggest that negative perceptions of Trump’s performance on high-profile issues are playing a big role. A substantial portion of Trump voters who give the president a negative grade on the economy (22%), the Epstein files (37%) and the Iran war (49%) say they would not vote for him in an election redo.

Our results suggest that cracks are forming in the Trump coalition and that they are concentrated among the groups that before 2024 were less likely to vote for the president.

Trump may take solace in the continued loyalty of his strongest supporters. But in a close election every vote counts, and lingering dissatisfaction could undermine Republicans’ ability to mobilize key swing voters.

As Republicans face the electorate in upcoming midterms, Trump and the GOP will have to work to reclaim the support of regretful voters. Failure to do so could cost Republicans Congress in 2026 and, ultimately, the presidency in 2028.

Tatishe Nteta, Provost Professor of Political Science, UMass Amherst; Adam Eichen, Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science, UMass Amherst, and Jesse Rhodes, Associate Professor of Political Science, UMass Amherst

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The post Why a growing number of Trump supporters are experiencing voter’s remorse appeared first on Salon.com.

The Tenet-owned hospitals want Leapfrog to pay $10.5 million in legal fees after a judge agreed that the nonprofit unfairly deflated their ratings. The penalty would “cast a specter of financial ruin” over the nonprofit, Leapfrog said.

The Catholic nonprofit giant’s expenses well outstripped revenue in the most recent financial quarter. Though the outcome was mostly due to one-time items, CommonSpirit also continues to struggle with boosting core operations.

Instead, the Bible mentions twins only a few times, most prominently in the Book of Genesis, where brothers Jacob and Esau battle for power and inheritance after the younger twin, Jacob, tricks Esau into handing over his birthright. Jacob’s deception causes a lifelong rift between the two brothers, but, as with all these ancient stories, fate is preordained by God. “Two nations are in your womb,” God tells Jacob and Esau’s mother, Rebekah, “and two peoples from within you will be separated; one people will be stronger than the other, and the older will serve the younger.”

Conversely, the Bible contains countless references to revenge. One could read the entire scripture — both the Old and New Testaments — as an allegory for humanity’s penchant for payback, and God’s many warnings against it. The stories frame the all-consuming desire for retaliation as an integral aspect of our mortal lives; no one gets out without hankering for a bit of vengeance. The Book of Exodus famously renders this principle as “an eye for an eye,” making revenge anatomical, as if it were as natural as we are.

Aleshea Harris’ debut feature, “Is God Is,” sees revenge as a similarly organic, fundamental part of our being. Based on her hit 2018 stage play of the same name, Harris’ film is a road movie meeting a spaghetti western, with a dash of “Set It Off” gone Tarantino. This amalgamation of excessive style is a favorite at the multiplex these days, typically to lackluster effect. But a narrative throughline hellbent on retribution neatly threads Harris’ fiery aesthetic choices together, giving “Is God Is” far more substance — and much more thematic intrigue — than its contemporaries.

Twin sisters Racine (Kara Young) and Anaia (Mallori Johnson) have been marked with visible burn scars across their bodies, the result of a violent attack on them and their mother (Vivica A. Fox) by their estranged father (Sterling K. Brown) in their youth. When their mother — whom the twins refer to as “God,” because she made them — unexpectedly summons the twins to her home, she tasks her daughters with an epic quest for vengeance: Kill their father, and everyone around him. The ensuing violence is both joyous and cruel, predictable in a way that doesn’t exactly feel conventional, but rather biblically preordained. In its mercilessness, “Is God Is” taps the feeling of discontent lingering inside the weary viewer, like a sleeper cell awakening to remember that the origin of every present, contemporary evil has roots centuries in the past.

That Anaia and Racine’s journey is born in flames is no accident. Fire and the byproducts of its blaze appear as frequently in religious texts as they do in more colloquial language. Back in Genesis, God tells Adam, “For you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” That verse has transformed into the funereal recitation “ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” and can be traced all the way to the present day, when Mark Wahlberg and other MAGA stars rub ashes on their forehead to offer 20% off the Hallow app’s subscription price.

While “Is God Is” makes no overt references to modern politics or social mores, Harris’ writing is in constant conversation with our uniquely infernal times. In her story, we’re all at the mercy of each other’s whims. Prosperity is not earned; it’s taken through violent means. Casual malevolence lurks around every corner. Hellfire can creep under your door while you sleep, so imperceptible that you won’t notice the soot on your walls and smoke in your lungs until you wake up to greet the new day and witness the surrounding damage. As two Black women burned by the fire and forced to live in its flames, Racine and Anaia are understandably fatigued.

What sets their story apart from other revenge-laden tales of late is Harris’ remarkable knack for unvarnished realism. Films like “They Will Kill You” and those in the “Ready or Not” franchise incorporate visual elements of the divine and satanic to distract from their mediocre screenplays and recycled ideas. But “Is God Is” refuses to gussy up its allegories with too many special effects or gratuitous gore. It’s straightforward and uncomplicated, but replete with stylistic choices that add a memorable flair to the filmmaking, without losing its practical edge. Harris’ film wields religious subtext in the same ways lawmakers and political figureheads do. Her screenplay is an interpretation of the text, a strong-armed reminder that anyone can use scripture to make a convincing case for their actions, no matter how violent or marginalizing they may be.

The same goes for the twins, who see their revenge as a spiritual rite. Early in the film, Racine, whose burn scars only cover her left arm, reminds Anaia, whose scars are much more severe and difficult to hide, of the cards they were dealt. “Ain’t you mad, twin?” Racine asks. Young delivers the line more like a statement than a question. At the precipice of an odyssey that will challenge the half-lives they’ve lived so far, the sisters’ anger is palpable. Why shouldn’t they right this wrong? If a monster like their father can disfigure God, doesn’t his existence pose a threat to a world already under siege? His happiness is an affront to their own chronic displeasure. It’s as if God herself handed them a free pass to strike down the demon who’s plagued their dreams all their lives.

Once the sisters hit the road, Harris deftly balances comedy with cultural observations and the occasional burst of vicious brutality, courtesy of a boulder stuffed inside a tube sock. Her theatrically minded screenplay is one of the best examples I’ve seen of modifying a stage play for the big screen. “Is God Is” is rarely hindered by the obstacles so many stage adaptations run into. The film is wide and expansive, but moves smoothly between narrative guardrails. It doesn’t lose its way, yet doesn’t feel entirely confined to one place — a critical component that allows “Is God Is” to play like a modern biblical fable.

Along the way, Anaia and Racine contend with evergreen notions of morality and sinfulness. The sisters wonder if their violence, like fire, is purifying. They grapple with the knotted concept of complicity, trying to ascertain just how evil the characters they meet — those who were also left in their father’s wicked wake — really are, and whether they’re deserving of the rock in the sock. As it turns out, these questions don’t have simple answers. The people Racine and Anaia come across are as put-upon and exhausted as they are. Even those with lives, careers and families are fundamentally lost, snared between their pursuit of personal justice and instinctual self-preservation. That’s exactly how the world’s villains want us to be: angry and afraid, trying to wriggle free from the spider’s web while they laugh and plot our demise.

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Making vengeance look human again is Harris’ great strength. For as long as we’ve been going to the movies, there’s been no shortage of revenge films. But somewhere along the way, these movies became bigger, more outrageous. Retribution can be simple and straightforward, but of late, protagonists of these kinds of movies have to cut through armies of people with a katana or battle criminal syndicates for their narratives to be deemed commercially viable.

While “Is God Is” borrows from some of those films, it’s not trying to show off. Harris’ debut is reliably story-driven. And though it boasts excellent character work, one gets the sense that Harris wrote this as a means to an end. This is a Bible story updated for today, when the Bible might as well contain the nuclear launch codes. “Is God Is” is deceptively simple. It’s about good versus evil, gods versus monsters — the fables we’ve been telling since the beginning of time, and why they will be with us until the end. How appropriate that its bittersweet final act is so steeped in scripture, echoing God’s words to Rebekah about Jacob and Esau’s destiny. Maybe all the answers have already been written, and we’re just characters in a story, trying to outwit fate. If that’s true, “Is God Is” presents a compelling reason to keep trying to rewrite the ending.  If there’s one thing centuries of God-fearing living have taught us, it’s that the Bible is open to interpretation.

The post “Is God Is” makes revenge a religion appeared first on Salon.com.

Nathan Frank discusses how the insurer is using AI to engage members, how the company thinks about risks, and the importance of monitoring the tools and soliciting feedback.

The Trump administration continues to open the doors to the cheap, high-deductible coverage, to the worry of insurance experts and stakeholders in the healthcare industry.

Providers are reaping high award amounts, and arbiters have “structural conflicts of interest” that incentivize a high volume of disputes, driving up healthcare costs for employers and patients, the groups wrote.