Entertainment
Commentary: The DHS keeps poaching music for ICE recruitment ads. Musicians keep demanding it back
Another week, another pop star angry that their song was used without their permission in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement recruitment ad.
Singer Sabrina Carpenter’s song “Juno” appeared as the soundtrack for a Department of Homeland Security promotional video posted on the official X account of the White House. It featured a montage of clips appearing to show ICE officers chasing down, tackling and handcuffing people in what looks to be the city of Chicago. The lyrics — “Wanna try out some freaky positions? Have you ever tried this one?” — from the song play atop the footage.
“[T]his video is evil and disgusting,” Carpenter posted on Tuesday. “Do not ever involve me or my music to benefit your inhumane agenda.”
Too late, since the DHS had already done it without her knowledge.
Using the work of pop music performers minus their consent is the only way the White House can score their ICE campaign with music clips that actually appeal to people younger than 50.
The list of luminaries who have condemned the agency’s actions or filed legal copyright removal requests (Jay-Z had his song “Public Service Announcement” struck from a DHS social media post) reads like a sold-out Coachella lineup: Jay-Z, Olivia Rodrigo, MGMT, Zach Bryan, The Cure, Usher, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. It also includes the estates and companies that represent Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down,” Pokémon’s original theme song “Gotta Catch ’Em All” and the “Wicked” soundtrack’s “Defying Gravity” as sung by Cynthia Erivo.
As for the catalog of bona fide stars and meme-made celebs who have expressed gratitude for hearing their work in an ICE detainment video? There is no such list.
From the Stones to Springsteen to Swift, GOP campaigns, rallies and election-year ads have featured the music of performers who didn’t want their songs associated with Reagan’s trickle-down economics, either Bush administration’s Gulf war, or Trump’s scorched-earth policies. There wasn’t, and still isn’t, a wealth of popular artists who openly embrace right-wing ideals. Kid Rock and Lee Greenwood, the latter of whom teamed up with Trump to release a “God Bless the USA” bible, can’t do it all.
The right’s strategy has been to use a song once, knowing that a copyright infringement complaint will likely follow, then avoid further legal action by moving on to another artist’s work. Call it poach and run.
But the DHS, like Trump’s White House, has added another element to its grift by capitalizing on the complaints that follow its theft of popular songs.
Carpenter’s response to her song being used without her consent was met with a trolling retort from the DHS. The department weaponized the singer’s own lyrics against her to capitalize on the negative attention (a hallmark of MAGA’s winning strategy in gaming the attention economy).
“Here’s a Short n’ Sweet message for Sabrina Carpenter: we won’t apologize for deporting dangerous criminal illegal murderers, rapists, and pedophiles from our country. Anyone who would defend these sick monsters must be stupid, or is it slow?” said White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson in a statement, referencing Carpenter’s recent single “Manchild” and the title of her 2024 album, “Short n’ Sweet.”
Crazy idea: The administration might also catch pedophiles and rapists by releasing unredacted copies of the Epstein files. But how to turn that ugliness into a “fun” video with a quippy caption?
The DHS was forced to remove MGMT’s “Little Dark Age” from an ICE recruitment ad after the band issued a takedown request. The video, posted in October, showed agents arresting protesters outside an ICE facility in Portland, Ore. It was captioned: “End of the Dark Age, beginning of the Golden Age.”
The White House also used British singer Jess Glynne’s 2015 single “Hold My Hand,” a song that recently made a comeback in a viral Jet2 holiday ad, to promote its deportation operation over the summer. The DHS posted the song clip to its official social media channels, along with the caption: “When ICE books you a one-way Jet2 holiday to deportation. Nothing beats it!”
Glynne and the airline company condemned the ad. But by then, the DHS was on to the next song by an artist who wanted nothing to do with them.
Movie Reviews
Miyamoto says he was surprised Mario Galaxy Movie reviews were even harsher than the first | VGC
Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto says he’s surprised at the negative critical reception to the Super Mario Galaxy Movie.
As reported by Famitsu, Miyamoto conducted a group interview with Japanese media to mark the local release of The Super Mario Galaxy Movie.
During the interview, Miyamoto was asked for his views on the critical reception to the film in the West, where critics’ reviews have been mostly negative.
Miyamoto replied that while he understood some of the negative points aimed at The Super Mario Bros Movie, he thought the reception would be better for the sequel.
“It’s true: the situation is indeed very similar,” he said. “Actually, regarding the previous film, I felt that the critics’ opinions did hold some validity. “However, I thought things would be different this time around—only to find that the criticism is even harsher than it was before.
“It really is quite baffling: here we are—having crossed over from a different field—working hard with the specific aim of helping to revitalize the film industry, yet the very people who ought to be championing that cause seem to be the ones taking a passive stance.”
As was the case with the first film, opinion is divided between critics and the public on The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. On review aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes, the film currently has a critics’ score of 43% , while its audience score is 89%.
While this is down from the first film’s scores (which were 59% critics and 95% public) it does still appear to imply that the film’s target audience is generally enjoying it despite critical negativity.
The negative reception is unlikely to bother Universal and Illumination too much, considering the film currently has a global box office of $752 million before even releasing in Japan, meaning a $1 billion global gross is becoming increasingly likely.
Elsewhere in the interview, Miyamoto said he hoped the film would perform well in Japan, especially because it has a unique script rather than a simple localization as in other regions.
“The Japanese version is a bit unique,” he said. “Normally, we create an English version and then localize it for each country, but for the first film, we developed the English and Japanese scripts simultaneously. For this film, we didn’t simply localize the completed English version – instead, we rewrote it entirely in Japanese to create a special Japanese version.
“So, if this doesn’t become a hit in Japan, I feel a sense of pressure – as the person in charge of the Japanese version – to not let [Illumination CEO and film co-producer] Chris [Meledandri] down.
“However, judging by the reactions of the audience members who’ve seen it, I feel that Mario fans are really embracing it. I also believe we’ve created a film that people can enjoy even if they haven’t seen the previous one, so I’m hopeful about that as well.”
Book Review
Dear Monica Lewinsky
By Julia Langbein
Doubleday: 320 pages, $30
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First loves can be beautiful or traumatic, sometimes both. They are almost always intense, with emotions on speed dial and hormones running amok. Nothing like the durable consolations of late-life romance, but headier, more exciting and, in the worst cases, far more damaging.
Even decades later, Jean Dornan, the protagonist of Julia Langbein’s smart, poignant and involving novel “Dear Monica Lewinsky,” can’t recollect her own first love in tranquility. Its after-effects have derailed her life, and an unexpected email invitation to attend a retirement party in France honoring her former lover sends her into a tailspin.
An agitated Jean finds herself praying to none other than Monica Lewinsky, the patron saint of bad romantic choices, or as Langbein puts it, “of those who suffer venal public shaming and patriarchal cruelty.” In Langbein’s comic, but also deadly serious, imagination, this is no mere metaphor. The martyred Monica has literally been transfigured into a saint. And why not? Surely, she has suffered enough to qualify.
Jean and Monica have in common a disastrous liaison with an attractive, powerful, married older man. Monica was humiliated, reviled, then merely defined by her missteps. Meanwhile, her arguably more culpable sexual partner survived impeachment, retained both his political popularity and his marriage and enjoyed a lucrative post-presidency.
Jean’s brief fling during the summer of 1998 coincided with the public airing of Monica’s doomed romance. Jean’s passion took a more private toll, but she still lives with what Monica calls “this deepening suspicion that your existence is a remnant of an event long since concluded.”
Though framed by a fantastical conceit, “Dear Monica Lewinsky” is at its core a realist novel, influenced by the feminism of #MeToo and precise in its delineation of character and place. Langbein’s Monica — having finally transcended her past and ascended to spiritual omniscience — becomes Jean’s interlocutor. Together, they relive the fateful weeks that Jean spent studying the Romanesque churches of medieval France and charming David Harwell, the Rutgers University medieval art professor co-leading the summer program.
Every now and again, Monica, as much savvy therapist as all-knowing seer, interrupts Jean’s first-person account to offer guidance. Threaded through the narrative, as contrast and commentary, is a martyrology of female saints. These colloquially rendered portraits, reflecting a punitive, patriarchal morality, describe girls and women who would rather endure torture or even death than sully their sexual purity — stories so extreme that they seem satirical.
The portraits play off the novel’s milieu: a series of churches, as well as the medieval French castle that is home to an eccentric and mostly absent prince. The utility of religious doctrine and practice is another of the book’s themes. One graduate student, Patrick, is a devoted Roman Catholic, unquestioning in his faith. Others are merely devout enthusiasts of medieval architecture. Judith, a doctoral candidate at Harvard, has an addiction of her own: an eating disorder that threatens to disable her.
A rising junior at Rutgers, Jean is one of just two undergraduates in the program. Her initial dull, daunting task involves measuring and otherwise assessing the churches’ “apertures” — windows and doors. Later, she is assigned to collaborate on a guidebook and write a term paper.
A language major unversed in art, architecture or medieval history, Jean feels overwhelmed at times. But she does have useful talents: fluent French and the ability to conjure delicious Sunday dinners for her bedazzled colleagues. (The author of the 2023 novel “American Mermaid,” Langbein has both a doctorate in art history and a James Beard Foundation Journalism Award for food writing, and her expertise in both fields is evident.)
As the summer wanes, Jean’s fixation on David grows. Langbein excels at depicting the obsessive nature of illicit, unfulfilled desire — how it swamps judgment and just about everything else. A quarter-century Jean’s senior, David is trying to finish a stalled book project, laboring in the shadow of his more prolific and successful wife, Ann. An expert on the erotically charged religious life of nuns and the art it produced, she shows up briefly in the story and then conveniently disappears.
David is smooth, seductive and, to 19-year-old Jean, far more appealing than the fumbling schoolboys she has known. But he turns out to be no more grown-up or emotionally mature. After the flirtation and its consummation, David beats a hasty (and unsurprising) retreat. Then he does something worse: He allows his guilt to shred his integrity.
In the aftermath of that summer, a wounded Jean stumbles through her last two years of college, “berserk, unfocused, humiliating.” She abandons her academic and career ambitions, takes a job as a court interpreter, and marries Michael, an affable nurse who has little idea of her emotional burdens.
Then that invitation, inspiring “a racy heat,” arrives, and Jean must decide whether to confront her past or keep running from it. Is there really much of a choice? Fortunately, she has the saintly Monica as her guide. More clear-eyed now, Jean must reject her martyrdom and reclaim her own truth and agency. If she does, David, at least in the realm of the imagination, may finally get his comeuppance.
Klein, a three-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, is a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia.
The sixth outing in the director’s chair for filmmaker Kirk Jones, I Swear dramatizes the real-life story of touretter John Davidson (played by Robert Aramayo). Tourette’s Syndrome, for those unfamiliar with the condition, is a nervous system disorder that causes various tics, the most prolific being erratic and explicit language. However, as I Swear expertly showcases, the syndrome is far more than ill-timed outbursts of curse words. Davidson’s story is one of societal frustration, finding your people (both with and without the condition), and using your voice to help others rise. The subject and subject matter are handled with absolute care and understanding under Kirk’s measured vision and Robert Aramayo’s BAFTA-winning performance.
The film kicks off with the greatest exclamation to democracy ever uttered (*%#! the Queen!), as a nervous John Davidson prepares himself before entering an awards ceremony hosted by Britain’s royal family. Right away, the film tells us what it is: a triumph over adversity that blends humor and human drama with education. It’s an important setup, as the film flashes back to Davidson’s 1980s youth, where we see his time as a star soccer recruit flatline as his condition takes hold. Davidson’s life spirals from there. Some aspects, like school bullying and accidental run-ins with authority figures, are expected but important to empathizing with young Davidson’s (young version, played with heart by Scott Ellis Watson) new everyday life. The more tragic, a complete meltdown of his family system, is unsettling if quick. His father (Steven Cree) is never given enough screen time to explore his alcohol coping tendencies. However, his mother Heather’s descent into easy fixes and blaming is crushing and convincing. Harry Potter series actress Shirley Henderson (Moaning Myrtle) gives a layered performance as Heather. Someone who loves her son, but also feels cursed by him as the entire family exits the picture. It’s bitter, she’s tired, and fills each conversation with ‘only medication and your mother can save you’ energy.
From there, the viewer and Davidson find refuge in a host of characters. Maxine Peake plays Dottie, the mother of a childhood friend and a retired mental health nurse. Screen vet Peter Mullan plays maintenance man Tommy Trotter. Together, they help Davidson build a life and an understanding of himself that carries the film forward into its second half. After that, the film is primarily a 3-actor show as director Kirk fills the screen with these tour-de-force performances. Peake and Mullan are great vessels to get the film’s main message across: patience, love, and a shared responsibility between the diagnosed and those who understand their struggle can help change the path for people quickly left behind by a normative world. Together, they are the soul of the movie, with the filmmakers clearly hoping the audience will follow their lead after they exit the theater (in my case, the beautiful Oriental Theater for the Milwaukee Film Festival). Both performances are perfectly warm and reflective and shouldn’t be left out in discussions of I Swear.
I say this because the movie is anchored by The Rings of Power actor Robert Aramayo, who leaves Elrond’s elf ears behind to bring an acute naturalism to his performance of main character John Davidson. Aramayo’s physicality and timing of the fitful Tourettes Syndrome never feel out of place or overplayed. In fact, the movie as a whole does an amazing job of never veering into sentimentality. While many moviegoers left with tissues dabbing their eyes, the filmmaking never felt like it was forcing that reaction out of audiences. It straddles the line between feel-good and reality with every story beat and lands squarely on the side of letting the real inform our feelings. Anyone with an ounce of empathy will grasp the film’s message and hopefully take it with them into life.
I Swear continues at the Milwaukee Film Festival on Tuesday, April 21st, and releases nationwide April 24th, 2026, courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.
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