The future of homeless encampments at the center of US Supreme Court case

Justices are considering whether cities can ban unhoused people from sleeping outdoors and issue fines or arrest them for doing so.

People living in homeless camps say they shouldn’t be punished just for sleeping outside. 

(Scripps News Tampa)


By: Scripps News Tampa
Posted, May 05, 2024

Homelessness is a growing issue across America and now it is a focus of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Deep in the woods outside of Winterhaven, Florida, are a cluster of tents and tarps. There are 46 people that live in this homeless encampment, including Brandy C., who has been there for five years.

“I just made a mistake and I've been stuck here since. I'm trying to fix it and I can’t,” Brandy told Scripps News Tampa.

The 32-year-old said the homeless camp is not the safest environment, but it is somewhere she can lay her head at night. However, it could soon be taken away.

“They tell us, ‘y'all know y'all fixing to have to leave,'" Brandy said. "We’re like, 'so where do we go?'

”
Homelessness reached a record in 2023, and it could get worse

The Supreme Court is considering whether cities can ban unhoused people from sleeping outside and issue fines or arrest them for doing so. It’s the most significant case dealing with homelessness before the high court in decades.


It comes amid a rise in homelessness in the U.S. and a growing number of encampments. People living in homeless camps say they shouldn’t be punished just for sleeping outside.

“What if they was in the same position? They don't think that way," said Patty Gregory, who is also a resident of the homeless camp. "The way I see it, as long as you’re sleeping somewhere and you’re not robbing the place and busting their windows, they should be left alone."

Supporters of the ban said encampments are unsafe and unsanitary.

Staff from Talbot House Ministries visit the village of homeless people every other week to pass out water, food and toiletries. Angelina Ligon is the case management supervisor at Talbot House and she said the homeless shelter is over capacity.

“They have nowhere to go," she said. "As far as them having to leave the encampment, the question is where can they go from here? We have emergency shelter at our place where we’ve offered them to come to."

$7,500 cash transfers have major impact in reducing homelessness

Advocacy groups like the Homeless Coalition of Polk County argue that public sleeping bans will criminalize homelessness and ultimately make the crisis worse.

“Housing instead of handcuffs," said Bridget Engleman, executive director of Homeless Coalition of Polk County. "We need more affordable housing and we’re not going to win it by having our homeless individuals arrested or fined."

The Supreme Court is expected to decide the case by the end of June. Meanwhile, people experiencing homelessness can't help but feel discarded.

“We just don't matter? That hurts and it makes us feel like trash and we’re not,” said Brandy.

This story was originally published by Rebecca Petit at Scripps News Tampa.

REAL FAKE NEWS

Google BANS Trump Ad Showing Life Worse Under Biden.

2024-05-05 
The National Pulse
Summary： Google has censored an advertisement by President Donald Trump’s campaign, citing a policy violation as the reason for removal. The ad was initially

Google has censored an advertisement by President Donald Trump’s campaign, citing a policy violation as the reason for removal. The ad was initially flagged by NBC News reporter Andrew Arenge, who shared screenshots of it being taken down from Google’s search results.

The campaign advertisement, sponsored by Make America Great Again Super PAC, focused on a conversation between a remorseful Biden voter and a Biden campaign worker. The voter highlighted concerns over the rising cost of living under Biden’s regime and the allegedly preferential treatment given to illegal immigrants. The ad was strategically targeted at specific Georgia localities.

https://twitter.com/DonaldJTrumpJr/status/1786747122739528026?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1786747122739528026%7Ctwgr%5E1a0d53a7ab17c6c75ef0143d1d2fc21b73ba5498%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fthenationalpulse.com%2F2024%2F05%2F05%2Fgoogle-bans-trump-ad-showing-life-worse-under-biden%2F

Notable within the ad was the mention of Trump’s burgeoning popularity among minority and young voters, a fact corroborated by a USA Today report referred to in the ad and a recent CNN poll. The latter revealed that 55 percent of Americans retrospectively view Trump’s presidency as a success, an increase from his approval rating when he exited the office.

Donald Trump Jr.

@DonaldJTrumpJr

Google is censoring this pro-Trump ad to protect Biden. Let's make it go viral.

7:18 AM · May 4, 2024

·

3M

Views

Google reversed its decision on Saturday, allowing the ad to run, though further information has not yet been forthcoming.

Reference links：https://thenationalpulse.com/2024/05/05/google-bans-trump-ad-showing-life-worse-under-biden/

Maersk: Shipping capacity down as much as 20% due to Red Sea attacks

dpa
2024/05/06

A container ship of the Maersk shipping company is handled at Eurogate Container Terminal. Marcus Brandt/dpa

Due to the difficult security situation in the Red Sea, Danish shipping giant Maersk is expecting an industry-wide loss in freight capacity on routes from eastern Asia to Europe of 15% to 20% in the second quarter.

Maersk released the estimates on Monday, citing attacks by Iranian-backed Houthi militants on merchant shipping in the Red Sea. The Houthi militants have said the attacks are intended to support the Palestinian militant group Hamas by making it more difficult for cargo ships to reach Israel.

The attacks have forced several major commercial shipping firms, including Maersk, to indefinitely cancel voyages through the critical Red Sea shipping corridor that connects to the Mediterranean through the Suez Canal.

That has forced shipping firms to route cargo around the southern tip of Africa, a far longer route that adds both time and additional expense to voyages.

According to Maersk, the situation in the Red Sea is causing ship congestion, delays and capacity bottlenecks. To counteract this, Maersk has increased the speed of its ships and leased more than 125,000 additional containers, according to Monday's announcement.

The added costs are passed onto customers, the company said.

Maersk is the world's second-largest container shipping company behind MSC.

dpa

Far-right parties wage disinfo war ahead of EU vote

Agence France-Presse
May 6, 2024 

Jordan Bardella and Marine Le Pen (JULIEN DE ROSA AFP)

Far-right populist parties are way ahead of their traditional rivals in the race for voter attention on social media, where disinformation is stirring fear and rage around key issues in June's European elections, experts say.

Platforms like Facebook, X, Instagram and others have been used by populist parties to spread misleading or false claims on hot topics such as the war in Ukraine, migration and regulations intended to protect the environment, as AFP's fact-checkers have found.

"Populist parties are masters of a new type of propaganda. Disinformation is at the core of (their) communication strategies," said consultant Johannes Hillje, who advises parties and politicians in Berlin and Brussels.

And the right-leaning parties have a lead in the quest for views and likes.

According to research by Politico magazine in March, the far-right Identity and Democracy (ID) group in the European parliament -- which includes France's National Rally (RN), AfD in Germany and PVV in the Netherlands -- has 1.3 million followers on TikTok.

The centre-right European People's Party (EPP), the largest and oldest parliamentary grouping, has a paltry 167,000.

- 'Scapegoating immigrants' -

A key issue for online misinformation is migration.

With the economy an overriding concern, "opportunistic politicians... are scapegoating immigrants for society's ills," said Natalia Banulescu-Bogdan, deputy director of Washington-based think tank Migration Policy Institute.

"Dis/misinformation about migrants and migration has long been used to foment fear and mobilise voters in Europe," she said.

In March, for example, a false claim on X that immigration cost France 40 billion euros per year was repeated by the lead FN candidate, Jordan Bardella. Economists involved in the research cited as the source for the figure told AFP this was a "misleading interpretation".

Another battleground for the right is the EU's Green Deal measures to stem climate change. In April, a number of AfD politicians shared false claims that France had banned the construction and operation of wind power turbines. In fact, a court had merely issued a ruling regarding the noise levels of such turbines.

Social media is "handy for... organized right-wing populist political parties to impose their lies, conspiracies and frames", said Ayhan Kaya, chair of European Politics of Interculturalism at Istanbul Bilgi University.

Many election issues are complicated, making them easy targets for disinformation. People wanted simple black and white answers "to the complexities of today's globalised world", he told AFP.

Far-right politicians such as the AfD's top candidate Maximilian Krah have become veritable TikTok stars, garnering millions of likes for their videos.

In March, however, Krah was forced to deny allegations he accepted money to spread pro-Russian positions on a Moscow-financed news website. Since then, German prosecutors have launched an investigation against him for suspicious links to Russia and China.

The average number of views for AfD's TikTok videos in 2022 and 2023 was 435,394, way ahead of Germany's conservative CDU/CSU parties with an average of 90,583 views, said Hillje.

The gap was also substantial on YouTube, he said.


- 'Major threat' -

Already last October, the EU's Agency for Cybersecurity called for vigilance ahead of the June 6-9 vote for the European Parliament, saying "information manipulation campaigns are considered to be a major threat to election processes".

In a bid for votes, Bulgarian far-right party leader Kostadin Kostadinov in March falsely claimed on Facebook that an EU report listed his country as having the third most asylum applications from illegal migrants.

In Romania, the lead candidate for the SOS party, Diana Sosoaca, has veered into deep conspiracy, repeatedly spreading material related to the widely rejected chemtrails theory, that condensation trails in the sky from aircraft are actually from biological agents.

In Hungary, "one of the major sources of disinformation is the government itself," according to EU DisinfoLab.

Nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban was scolded by Brussels last year for a series of misleading claims on Facebook, including that Brussels wanted to establish migrant ghettos in Hungary.

Populist parties are "animating their electoral successes" by painting the migration issue as an existential one, said Banulescu-Bogdan.

They "benefit from multiple crises by exploiting the fear of people," said Hillje. "The main problem is that disinformation spreads faster and wider than information," he said.

France warns that forcing civilians from Rafah may be a war crime

2024/05/06

Palestinians inspect damaged houses after Israeli warplanes bombed a home for the Al-Shaer family, leading to widespread destruction in the Al-Salam neighbourhood, east of the city of Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip.

 Abed Rahim Khatib/dpa

The French Foreign Ministry has emphasized its "firm opposition" to Israeli plans to launch a military ground offensive against the city of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip.

"France also recalls that the forced displacement of a civilian population constitutes a war crime under international law," the ministry said in a statement on Monday.

The French government demanded that the Palestinian militant group Hamas immediately release all hostages, and that parties to the conflict agree to a permanent ceasefire that protects the needs of the civilian population.

French President Emmanuel Macron had already made a similar statement on Sunday.

Israel's military began evacuating Rafah on Monday and demanded that the inhabitants of the eastern part of the city to move to the al-Mawasi camp on the Mediterranean.

WAR IS RAPE
'Taboo': French women speak out on rapes by U.S. soldiers during WWII

Agence France-Presse
May 6, 2024 


Aimee Dupre had always kept silent about the rape of her mother by two American soldiers after the Normandy landings in June 1944.

But 80 years after the brutal assault, she finally felt it was time to speak out.

Nearly a million U.S., British, Canadian and French soldiers landed on the Normandy coast in the weeks after D-Day in an operation that was to herald the end of Nazi Germany's grip on Europe.

Aimee was 19, living in Montours, a village in Brittany, and delighted to see the "liberators" arrive, as was everybody around her.

But then her joy evaporated. On the evening of August 10, two U.S. soldiers -- often called GIs -- arrived at the family's farm.

"They were drunk and they wanted a woman," Aimee, now 99, told AFP, producing a letter that her mother, also called Aimee, wrote "so nothing is forgotten".

In her neat handwriting, Aimee Helaudais Honore described the events of that night. How the soldiers fired their guns in the direction of her husband, ripping holes in his cap, and how they menacingly approached her daughter Aimee.

To protect her daughter, she agreed to leave the house with the GIs, she wrote. "They took me to a field and took turns raping me, four times each."

Aimee's voice broke as she read from the letter. "Oh mother, how you suffered, and me too, I think about this every day," she said.

"My mother sacrificed herself to protect me," she said. "While they raped her in the night, we waited, not knowing whether she would come back alive or whether they would shoot her dead."

The events of that night were not isolated. In October 1944, after the battle for Normandy was won, US military authorities put 152 soldiers on trial for raping French women.

In truth, hundreds or even thousands of rapes between 1944 and the departure of the GIs in 1946 went unreported, said American historian Mary Louise Roberts, one of only a handful to research what she called "a taboo" of World War II.

"Many women decided to remain silent," she said. "There was the shame, as often with rape."

She said the stark contrast of their experience with the joy felt everywhere over the American victory made it especially hard to speak up.

- 'Easy to get' -


Roberts also blames the army leadership who, she said, promised soldiers a country with women that were "easy to get" to add to their motivation to fight.

The US Army newspaper Stars and Stripes was full of pictures showing French women kissing victorious Americans.

"Here's What We're Fighting For," read a headline on September 9, 1944, alongside a picture of cheering French women and the caption: "The French are nuts about the Yanks."


The incentive of sex "was to motivate American soldiers", Roberts said.

"Sex, and I mean prostitution and rape, was a way for Americans to show domination over France, dominating French men, as they had been unable to protect their country and their women from the Germans," she added.

In Plabennec, near Brest on the westernmost tip of Britanny, Jeanne Pengam, nee Tournellec, remembers "as if it was yesterday" how her sister Catherine was raped and their father murdered by a GI.


"The black American wanted to rape my older sister. My father stood in his way and he shot him dead. The guy managed to break down the door and enter the house," 89-year-old Jeanne told AFP.

Nine at the time, she ran to a nearby U.S. garrison to alert them.

"I told them he was German, but I was wrong. When they examined the bullets the next day, they immediately understood that he was American," she said.


Her sister Catherine kept the terrible secret "that poisoned her whole life" until shortly before her death, said one of her daughters, Jeannine Plassard.

"Lying on her hospital bed she told me, 'I was raped during the war, during the Liberation,'" Plassard told AFP.

Asked whether she ever told anybody, her mother replied: "Tell anybody? It was the Liberation, everybody was happy, I was not going to talk about something like this, that would have been cruel," she said.


French writer Louis Guilloux worked as a translator for US troops after the landings, an experience he described in his 1976 novel "OK Joe!", including the trials of GIs for rape in military courts.

"Those sentenced to death were almost all black," said Philippe Baron, who made a documentary about the book.

- 'Shameful secret' -


Those found guilty, including the rapists of Aimee Helaudais Honore and Catherine Tournellec, were hanged publicly in French villages.

"Behind the taboo surrounding rapes by the liberators, there was the shameful secret of a segregationist American army," said Baron.

"Once a black soldier was brought to trial, he had practically no chance of acquittal," he said.

This, said Roberts, allowed the military hierarchy to protect the reputation of white Americans by "scapegoating many African-American soldiers".

Of the 29 soldiers sentenced to death for rape in 1944 and 1945, 25 were black GIs, she said.

Racial stereotypes on sexuality facilitated the condemnation of blacks for rape. White soldiers, meanwhile, often belonged to mobile units, making them harder to track down than their black comrades who were mostly stationary.

"If a French woman accused a white American soldier of rape, he could easily get away with it because he never stayed near the rape scene. The next morning, he was gone," Roberts said.

After her book "What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France" appeared in 2013, Roberts said the reaction in the US was so hostile that the police would have to regularly check on her.

"People were angry at my book because they didn't want to lose this ideal of the good war, of the good GI," she said. "Even if it means we have to keep on lying."

AFP was unable to obtain any official comment from the US Department of Defense on the subject.

Frauenkultur.co.ukfrauenkultur.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Against-Our-Will.pdf

Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape - Frauenkultur

... Against. Our Will. Men, Women and Rape. SUSAN BROWNMILLER. Fawcett Columbine • New York. Page 5. Sale of this book without a front cover may be unauthorized. If ...

Unravelling life’s origin: five key breakthroughs from the past five years

The Conversation
May 6, 2024 

Origin of the Earth (MisFluffy/Shutterstock)

There is still so much we don’t understand about the origin of life on Earth.

The definition of life itself is a source of debate among scientists, but most researchers agree on the fundamental ingredients of a living cell. Water, energy, and a few essential elements are the prerequisites for cells to emerge. However, the exact details of how this happens remain a mystery.

Recent research has focused on trying to recreate in the lab the chemical reactions that constitute life as we know it, in conditions plausible for early Earth (around 4 billion years ago). Experiments have grown in complexity, thanks to technological progress and a better understanding of what early Earth conditions were like.

However, far from bringing scientists together and settling the debate, the rise of experimental work has led to many contradictory theories. Some scientists think that life emerged in deep-sea hydrothermal vents, where the conditions provided the necessary energy. Others argue that hot springs on land would have provided a better setting because they are more likely to hold organic molecules from meteorites. These are just two possibilities which are being investigated.

Here are five of the most remarkable discoveries over the last five years.

Reactions in early cells

What energy source drove the chemical reactions at the origin of life? This is the mystery that a research team in Germany has sought to unravel. The team delved into the feasibility of 402 reactions known to create some of the essential components of life, such as nucleotides (a building block of DNA and RNA). They did this using some of the most common elements that could have been found on the early Earth.

These reactions, present in modern cells, are also believed to be the core metabolism of LUCA, the last universal common ancestor, a single-cell, bacterium-like organism.

For each reaction, they calculated the changes in free energy, which determines if a reaction can go forward without other external sources of energy. What is fascinating is that many of these reactions were independent of external influences like adenosine triphosphate, a universal source of energy in living cells.

The synthesis of life’s fundamental building blocks didn’t need an external energy boost: it was self-sustaining.

Volcanic glass

Life relies on molecules to store and convey information. Scientists think that RNA (ribonucleic acid) strands were precursors to DNA in fulfilling this role, since their structure is more simple.

The emergence of RNA on our planet has long confused researchers. However, some progress has been made recently. In 2022, a team of collaborators in the US generated stable RNA strands in the lab. They did it by passing nucleotides through volcanic glass. The strands they made were long enough to store and transfer information.

Volcanic glass was present on the early Earth, thanks to frequent meteorite impacts coupled with a high volcanic activity. The nucleotides used in the study are also believed to have been present at that time in Earth’s history. Volcanic rocks could have facilitated the chemical reactions that assembled nucleotides into RNA chains.

Hydrothermal vents

Carbon fixation is a process in which CO₂ gains electrons. It is necessary to build the molecules that form the basis of life.

An electron donor is necessary to drive this reaction. On the early Earth, H₂ could have been the electron donor. In 2020, a team of collaborators showed that this reaction could spontaneously occur and be fueled by environmental conditions similar to deep-sea alkaline hydrothermal vents in the early ocean. They did this using microfluidic technology, devices that manipulate tiny volumes of liquids to perform experiments by simulating alkaline vents.


This pathway is strikingly similar to how many modern bacterial and archaeal cells (single-cell organisms without a nucleas) operate.

The Krebs Cycle

In modern cells, carbon fixation is followed by a cascade of chemical reactions that assemble or break down molecules, in intricate metabolic networks that are driven by enzymes.

But scientists are still debating how metabolic reactions unfolded before the emergence and evolution of those enzymes. In 2019, a team from the University of Strasbourg in France made a breakthrough. They showed that ferrous iron, a type of iron that was abundant in early Earth’s crust and ocean, could drive nine out of 11 steps of the Krebs Cycle. The Krebs Cycle is a biological pathway present in many living cells.

Here, ferrous iron acted as the electron donor for carbon fixation, which drove the cascade of reactions. The reactions produced all five of the universal metabolic precursors – five molecules that are fundamental across various metabolic pathways in all living organisms.

Building blocks of ancient cell membranes

Understanding the formation of life’s building blocks and their intricate reactions is a big step forward in comprehending the emergence of life.

However, whether they unfolded in hot springs on land or in the deep sea, these reactions would not have gone far without a cell membrane. Cell membranes play an active role in the biochemistry of a primitive cell and its connection with the environment.

Modern cell membranes are mostly composed of compounds called phospholipids, which contain a hydrophilic head and two hydrophobic tails. They are structured in bilayers, with the hydrophilic heads pointing outward and the hydrophobic tails pointing inward.

Research has shown that some components of phospholipids, such as the fatty acids that constitute the tails, can self-assemble into those bilayer membranes in a range of environmental conditions. But were these fatty acids present on the early Earth? Recent research from Newcastle University, UK gives an interesting answer. Researchers recreated the spontaneous formation of these molecules by combining H₂-rich fluids, likely present in ancient alkaline hydrothermal vents, with CO₂-rich water resembling the early ocean.

This breakthrough aligns with the hypothesis that stable fatty acid membranes could have originated in alkaline hydrothermal vents, potentially progressing into living cells. The authors speculated that similar chemical reactions might unfold in the subsurface oceans of icy moons, which are thought to have hydrothermal vents similar to terrestrial ones.

Each of these discoveries adds a new piece to the puzzle of the origin of life. Regardless of which ones are proved correct, contrasting theories are fuelling the search for answers. As Charles Darwin wrote:

False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science for they often long endure: but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for everyone takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness; and when this is done, one path towards error is closed and the road to truth is often at the same time opened.


Seán Jordan, Associate professor, Dublin City University and Louise Gillet de Chalonge, PhD Student in Astrobiology, Dublin City University

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

Crime is not on the rise — so why do so many Americans think it is?

Claire Bond Potter, 

Alternet
May 6, 2024

Donald Trump at a rally in Virginia last month. (Win McNamee / Getty Images)

As we approach the 2024 election, crime is all over the media. Sure, it’s the media’s job to report crime. But if you are a devoted listener of 1010-WINS radio (which covers New York, New Jersey and Long Island), you will notice that other than weather and traffic, crime and policing are key aspects of the broadcast. Out of the top six news headlines on the WINS site today, five were violent crimes and the sixth was the ongoing student protest at Columbia. And if there aren’t enough crimes in the New York metropolitan area (oh, for the days of “Headless Body in Topless Bar”), reporters detail unusual and often grisly crimes that have happened hundreds or thousands of miles away. In the past week, the station has reported a gun battle in Louisiana that left three police wounded and one suspect dead; a fugitive former Oregon police officer accused of murder and kidnapping taking his own life; a robbery and carjacking in suburban West Haven, Connecticut.

Given that crime is a staple element of tabloid news, coverage of local tragedies, rather than seeming to occur at a distance, brings the specter of mayhem into communities that experience little or no crime. As Gideon Taffe of Media Matters reported in January 2023, Fox produced “a misleading narrative” about the United States being in the grip of a crime wave in 2022, devoted 11 percent of its reporting to the topic in advance of the midterm election. But that crime wave was “largely created by its own relentless coverage,” Taffe writes. “By focusing on racist stereotypes, smearing progressive prosecutors and pushing conspiracy theories, Fox made crime one of the biggest perceived ailments in the country and pushed far-right policy prescriptions ahead of the election.”

The only sane policy responses, Fox hosts proclaimed, were those embraced by the Party of Trump. And these “draconian solutions” meant a return to policies forcibly ended in the courts as civil rights violations:

Fox personalities began arguing for a return to “Broken Windows” policing, which involves aggressive enforcement and harsher sentences for lower level crimes. In reality, there is no evidence that this strategy works as a deterrent to reduce crime, and other heavy-handed policing tactics based on the broken windows theory have been found to significantly discriminate against Black Americans and other minority groups.

But as Taffe also pointed out, crime in the United States has dramatically decreased — 73 percent, to be precise — over the last thirty years. 2023 saw the biggest national drop in murder rates ever recorded (6 percent) and murders in cities dropped 12 percent. Yes, there are periodic crime spikes. (There was one during the pandemic). But overall, the trend is towards less crime.

The Atlantic’s crime reporter, Jeff Asher, pointed out that less crime doesn’t mean no crime. Yet “declining murder does not mean there were not thousands upon thousands of these tragedies this year,” he wrote on his Substack:

Nor does it mean that there was an acceptable level of gun violence, even in places seeing rapid declines. It simply means that the overall trend was extraordinarily positive and should be recognized as such.
Detroit is on pace to have the fewest murders since 1966 and Baltimore and St Louis are on pace for the fewest murders in each city in nearly a decade. Other cities that saw huge increases in murder between 2020 and 2022, like Milwaukee, New Orleans and Houston, are seeing sizable declines in 2023. There are still cities like Memphis and Washington, DC, that are seeing increasing murders in 2023, but those cities are especially notable because they are the outliers this year, not the norm.

Yet Americans don’t seem to believe that their world is safer than ever.

In February 2024, the Pew Research Center took the American electorate’s temperature. This nonpartisan, nonprofit research group identified 20 issues that will be priorities when voters decide between President Joe Biden and Unindicted Co-conspirator Number One in November. (Israel-Palestine didn’t even make the list, although perhaps it might now, amidst the campus demonstrations that are in the news around the country.) A whopping 73 percent saw the economy as the top priority for any president, outstripping the next item (defending against terrorism) by a good 10 points.

“Reducing crime” was in the seven spot, at 58 percent, which may seem like OK news on the surface. But in fact, concern about personal safety, up 11 points in a little more than three years, is trending in the opposite direction of actual crimes. While the big shift has been among Republicans and “Republican leaners” — from 38 percent to 68 percent since Joe Biden was inaugurated in 2021 — 47 percent of Democrats also think crime should be a priority.

Here’s the puzzle: analysis of crime statistics — also by Pew — argue that there are fewer crimes committed in the United States today than there have been in any year since the early 1990s. Then you may recall, politicians “solved” the crime problem, not through full employment, education or welfare, but with harsh sentences, incarcerating a whole generation of mostly Black men for decades. Things peaked at about 2 million people incarcerated and pending trial in 2010 and has since fallen by about 400,000 souls.

So the fact that public opinion is so out of synch with crime statistics puts Democrats in a tricky position for November: they must defend policies that are working, but that large numbers of Americans, including Democrats, believe are failing. But trying to counter the narrative on the right is difficult, because these policies are counterintuitive to what Americans have believed for generations. For example, if the prison population is dropping, and the United States is becoming safer, that might mean that crime rates and incarceration rates are independent variables in determining overall rates of crime. Or it might mean that incarceration causes crime. Some policymakers did believe that prison transformed petty criminals into hardened, violent felons — hence the creation of a separate prison system for juvenile offenders beginning at the turn of the 20th century in Illinois and Colorado.

Here’s what I would do if I were the Democrats.

Instead of allowing Republicans to take over the narrative, I would look for the programs that work and that have contributed to reducing crime. I would create a series of advertisements featuring police officers talking about why community policing methods work; mothers talking about how “second chance” diversion programs turned their kids around; programs that support students in graduating from high school and going on to college; men and women who finished technical training, or high school and college degrees, while incarcerated started afresh; and formerly incarcerated men working as violence interrupters.

These are just a few of programs that produce thousands of success stories—and reductions in crime. That story is happening now, and American voters need to know it.

The Met Gala’s Opulence Is Always Gross. This Year, It’s Obscene.

WHILE ROME BURNS…

Dead civilians, poverty, and chaos take a back seat at the annual event seemingly designed to make us all loathe the rich and privileged.


Kali Holloway

OPINION
Updated May 06, 2024

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty

Once again, the first Monday in May is fast approaching, the moment we annually find ourselves beset by the Met Gala.

It’s going to be the gala to end all galas, so expect an endless procession of fashion hot-takes, celebrity spectacle, drunken after-party video leaks and breathless Rihanna anticipation, all wrapped up in a lexicological bow of co-opted slang Black gays stopped using two years ago, HUNTY!

Over the past few days, no fewer than 10 articles fretting about Met Gala co-chair Zendaya’s as-yet unfinished dress have been posted, the most distressed of which notes that “this news has sent ripples through the fashion community, leaving everyone wondering why and how this could happen.”

Even in an era filled with the horrors of late-stage capitalism run amok—bipartisan support for genocide; rolling back of reproductive, civil, and voting rights; a threadbare social safety net; decades of wage stagnation; tax cuts for the the rich; the crushing of unions and labor rights; expansion of the militarized police surveillance state; creeping techno-authoritarianism; untested, unregulated, and unchecked A.I.; entrenched racial inequality and injustice; right-wing and white supremacist extremist violence; and Boeing jet parts falling from the sky like so many dead whistleblowers—that kind of frivolous urgency promises that this year’s event nonetheless will stand out as a vainglorious display of self-congratulatory decadence and tone-deaf extravagance. (Sidenote: the other co-chairs are J. Lo, Bad Bunny, and Chris Hemsworth—which, huh?)


But let us get back on topic. The theme of this year’s gala is “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion,” also the name of the exhibition at the Met’s Costume Institute fashion archive, which funds itself each year with proceeds from the gala.

Zendaya during the Met Gala in 2019.
Mario Anzuoni/Reuters

The titular sleeping beauties, Vogue has noted, are not princesses from “Brothers Grimm or Disney,” but instead some 250 pieces from the museum’s permanent collection that can never be worn again because they are so very old and fragile. (Low-key shout out to President Joe Biden.) Those items will be “displayed via video animation, light projection, AI, CGI, and other forms of sensory stimulation.”

The gala dress code, “The Garden of Time,” is based on J.G. Ballard’s 1962 short story. It is a tale of aristocrats, living ensconced in a walled-off estate, who each day must stave off an ever-advancing “immense rabble” of plebes.

Completely unrelated, entry to this year’s (invite-only, as always) gala is $75,000 per ticket—up $25,000 over last year’s price—a cost celebrities needn’t pay themselves because various brands cover it for them. Tables, by the way, start somewhere around $350,000. Anna Wintour hates you.

And of course, it all takes place at the Met Museum of Art, an institution filled with items straight-up boosted or otherwise coercively extracted from countries we condescendingly regard as somehow lesser—while we marvel at their priceless cultural artifacts in Manhattan. But alas, it is too late to change the theme to “Irony.”


“I suppose we should, though only fleetingly, all sit back and take in the Marie Antoinette of it all.”

All this begs so many questions.

Will Kylie Jenner’s big reveal be that she is, indeed, pregnant, not with Timothée Chalamet’s baby—but with a baby that is Timothée Chalamet? (Poor Things realness? Baybée? Am I doing this right?)

Timothée Chalamet attends the Met Gala in 2021.
Theo Wargo/Getty Images

In a space where people can finally get a break from so much incessant chatter over dead children in Gaza, will there be a moment of silence to mourn the campus buildings being so cruelly occupied and vandalized? Will Megyn Kelly, fresh off complaining about the unattractiveness of students protesting genocide, finally be given the masturbation material she so openly craves?

Should we expect New York City Mayor Eric Adams to make a repeat appearance and, if so, will he again be wearing an item bedazzled with some bullshit platitude about gun violence while he floods every cranny of the city with cops playing random shoot ‘em up games? Also, can we get somebody to make sure Olayemi Olurin is always somewhere in his sightline?

New York City Mayor Eric Adams and Tracey Collins at the Met Gala in 2022.
Chris Polk/WWD/Penske Media via Getty Images

Was the cockroach who showed up last year invited back, and will she at least stick to the theme this time? What time can we expect the countdown for the annual Derulo Fall to begin? And is it true, as Page Six reports, that Queen Wintour will use the Gala to coronate as “America’s New Royalty” Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchezzzzzzzzzzzz…

Oh, sorry. Not sure how long I fogged out there.

Now, as much as this might seem like one long grouse-fest, even I think the Met Gala offers some moments for fun to interrupt the endless doom-scroll that is our times. I hope Ayo Edibiri turns up, in all the ways that term applies. Rooting for everybody Black. Hope Pedro Pascal, Lil Nas X, and Taika Waititi—as individual people, I mean—get as weird as they wanna be.

The headlines, for the night, will crowd out the somber images for just a few hours—offering instead thoughts on who ate and left no crumbs and who is just… crummy. I suppose we should, though only fleetingly, all sit back and take in the Marie Antoinette of it all.

All tea, no shade.



Kali Holloway
@kalihollowayftw