What Happened Today: May 27, 2022

Conflicting accounts of Texas school shooting; China’s new security bloc; Ray Liotta dead at 67

May 27, 2022

The Big Story

At a press conference today, Texas officials contradicted previous statements by law enforcement officers about the decision by the on-site commander to hold back some 20 officers outside the classroom where a mass shooting was taking place, in which 19 children and 2 teachers were murdered. “He was convinced at the time that there was no more threat to the children and that the subject was barricaded and that they had time to organize [a response],” said Steven McCraw, the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety. “Of course it was not the right decision. It was the wrong decision.” Texas officials are coming under intense scrutiny about lapses in the response to the shooting on Tuesday, with questions still to be answered about what happened over the course of the 90 minutes between when the gunman crashed his truck near the school and when he was ultimately shot and killed by officers who breached the classroom with a key given to them by a janitor. Since the shooting, several statements from officials have been revised, notably that agents from U.S. Border Patrol—who arrived on the scene much earlier than previously stated—were told by local police to not go after the gunman. As news about the shooting spread through the community in Uvalde, Texas, hundreds of local residents made their way to the school, including family members of students. In videos from the scene, family members can be seen confronting police, questioning why there wasn’t a more aggressive attempt to enter the room where students were making phone calls to 911 pleading for help. One student, 11-year-old Miah Cerrillo, survived after she smeared the blood of a slain classmate on herself and played dead when the gunman briefly stepped away. One mother and at least one off-duty police officer circumvented the police barriers and entered the school themselves to find their children and get them out of the school. While most political leaders on the left have focused on gun control in the wake of the Uvalde massacre, the botched performance by law enforcement has emboldened police critics, with some “police abolitionists,” like New York City Council member Tiffany Cabán, pointing to it as proof that “police don’t prevent crime.” Those arguments, which enjoyed a burst of popularity in elite institutions during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020—despite remaining unpopular with the general public—had fallen out of favor over the past two years due to dramatic, nationwide spikes in violent crime, but the Texas shooting put the Defund the Police agenda back in the spotlight. On the right, commentators have mostly avoided discussing gun control legislation and pointed to the shooting as evidence of poor school security and a national crisis of mental health.

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→ While President Joe Biden was on his first major diplomatic trip to court new U.S. economic and security partners, China’s President Xi Jinping began pursuing his own new foreign relations strategy. Xi’s initiative aims to form bonds with other nations, not through trade policies that would enrich their coffers, but rather through a security relationship that would strengthen Beijing’s position against the U.S.-led West. Deemed the Global Security Initiative (GSI), President Xi presented the new security bloc officials from South Africa, India, Brazil, and Russia in a video address, as part of the effort to “strengthen political mutual trust and security cooperation” while opposing the hegemonic Cold War mentality of the West, he said, emphasizing the need to “work together to build a global community of security for all.” Now, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi is out on the road, soliciting participation in GSI from several other Pacific Island nations. In Washington, D.C., yesterday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken suggested the U.S. coalition that has formed against Russia following its invasion of Ukraine will be able to apply lessons learned against the more formidable foe later in China, which Blinken described as the “most serious, long-term challenge” to the the current world order.

→ Minority Leader of the New York City Council Joe Borelli called into question a new advertisement appearing on the city’s public transportation advocating that heroin would be safer if people “avoid using alone and take turns” and that overdoses are avoidable if users “start with a small dose and go slowly.” As a response to the drug-overdose epidemic that shows no sign of abating nationwide, the ad is a growing trend of the so-called harm reduction movement that critics say does little to reduce drug abuse and essentially endorses addiction as a lifestyle choice.

Joe Borelli @JoeBorelliNYC

No, @nycHealthy, heroin addiction is not empowering This is the opposite of “harm reduction.” This normalizes injecting deadly life-changing drugs “avoid using alone” 🤔 “Start w small doses” 👀 “Using safely” 😳 This is twisted Did you approve this @NYCHealthCommr?

→ The Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education published its review of the Boston Public School (BPS) system on Monday and concluded that the city’s education system is suffering from “entrenched dysfunction” that is leaving its 54,000 students languishing in failing programs. Particularly scathing in its critique of BPS’s treatment of its most disadvantaged students, the report found a myriad of issues, including egregiously late—or missing—buses, decrepit facilities, segregated school districts, and an English as Second Language program so inadequate that it might be illegal. The report is sure to raise the stakes on the heated debate about the future of BPS altogether, with some parents angrily calling for a state takeover and others insisting that the BPS’s independence is the best way forward.

→ Last October, Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen seized the U.S. embassy in the capital, Sanaa, and kept 11 embassy staff members as hostages; this past week, one of those hostages, Abdulhameed Al-Ajami, a former employee of the U.S. Agency for International Development, died in their custody, leading to renewed calls from the United States to release the remaining prisoners. “We grieve for retired USAID employee Abdulhameed Al-Ajami, who died in Houthi captivity,” the U.S. embassy in Yemen tweeted, calling “on the Houthis to end this injustice and release every single current and former U.S. embassy employee now.” Since 2014, the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels have controlled Sanaa, which they seized after forcing Yemen’s legitimate government into exile; this instigated a savage proxy war in the region between Iran and Saudi Arabia (with U.S. support). There is presently a cease-fire in the country, halting the fighting that has devastated the country and killed roughly 350,000 people, according to the United Nations. That cease-fire is set to expire next week.

→ On Tuesday, New York State education officials called off the U.S. History and Government Regents Examinations amid concerns that some of the exam’s content “has the potential to compound student trauma caused by the recent violence in Buffalo.” The exam had already been printed for the June 1 test day when Betty Rosa, the state’s education commissioner, sent a letter to school leaders announcing the cancellation. All New York City high school students are required to pass the Regents exam in order to graduate, and it is now likely that students will be waived from this requirement, leading to speculation that this cancellation might have been motivated by state leaders “simply trying to avoid scrutiny for academic gaps during the pandemic by doing away with measures of student learning,” according to Chalkbeat New York, a publication that covers education in the state. Educators, meanwhile, want to know more details. The U.S. History and Government Regents typically tests students on topics like the Holocaust, mass incarceration, and the history of slavery. “That’s the nature of the course. That’s the nature of our country’s history,” Will Ehrenfeld, a teacher in Brooklyn, told Chalkbeat, wondering what exactly led to the cancellation. “It has been a stressful year for a lot of reasons, and more uncertainty added to the mix doesn’t help,” he added.

→ Nancy Brophy, the author of romance thrillers and a blog titled “How to Murder Your Husband,” went ahead and did just that: She was convicted in court on Wednesday of killing her partner of 25 years with a gun she purchased online. A murderer, sure, but a woman of her word, it seems. Daniel Brophy’s body had been discovered on the floor of the Oregon Culinary Institute by his students—a location noteworthy for its lack of cameras. Several days after his death, Ms. Brophy moved to collect on her late husband’s life insurance—this being the motive, according to prosecutors. “She had the plan in place,” the state’s lawyers said during closing arguments this week. “She had the opportunity to carry out this murder. She was the only person who had the motive.” The writer, however, found the story line ludicrous. “An editor would laugh and say, ‘I think you need to work harder on this story. You have kind of a big hole in it,’” she said. She now awaits sentencing and faces the possibility of spending the rest of her life in prison—a suitably sordid ending.

→ More than 40 Democratic lawmakers have signed a letter to Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, asking the company to stop archiving the location and search data of its users, which the legislators suggest could be weaponized by “far-right extremists” and government officials who want to locate and bring criminal charges against women who travel for abortions. The letter is at once a disconcerting harbinger of post-Roe America as well as an odd artifact of Washington’s relationship to Big Tech. The lawmakers are concerned “because Google stores historical location information about hundreds of millions of smartphone users, which it routinely shares with government agencies.” Routinely, you say? The lawmakers go on to note that a quarter of the requests that Google gets from law enforcement officials are for “dragnet geofence orders,” which are requests for the data of anyone and everyone in the vicinity of a target. “Google received 11,554 geofence warrants in 2020,” the letter states. The lawmakers don’t mention the outrageous practice of such dragnet warrants—which violate the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition against unreasonable search and seizure, as they sweep up and seize the data of any citizen who happens by a place of interest—even ending their letter with some laudatory words for the tech company: “While Google deserves credit for being one of the first companies in America to insist on a warrant before disclosing location data to law enforcement, that is not enough.”

→ Ray Liotta, who performed the New York City wiseguy in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990) as easily as he did the earnest Shoeless Joe Jackson in Field of Dreams (1989) died in his sleep on Wednesday night in Puerto Rico at the age of 67. “He is way too young to have left us,” Robert De Niro said in a statement. Liotta was born in 1954 in Newark, New Jersey, and raised in the area by adoptive parents. He chanced into acting in grade school, when he was booted off the basketball team and, in need of something to do, joined the drama club. Liotta’s breakout role was on the soap opera Another World, before he worked in film. When asked how he researched the part of a divorce lawyer for Noah Baumbach’s 2019 film Marriage Story, Liotta deadpanned, “I got divorced.”

→ Programming note: The Scroll will be off next Monday and Tuesday and return on Wednesday, June 1st.

Additional reporting and writing provided by The Scroll’s associate editor, David Sugarman

In the Back Pages: Your Weekend Reads

→ On the occasion of a new book made up of three decades of short journalism and other small pieces by the French novelist Michel Houellebecq, Justin E.H. Smith unpacks how the new collection of nonfiction “underscores what has long been evident in his novels: that to appreciate him is hardly to think of him as a novelist or an intellectual at all. Houellebecq’s central form is public prophecy, performed in a mode that seems less inspired by French literature than American popular music.” As Smith writes, Houellebecq isn’t a writer one reads for the enjoyment of his prose, which isn’t much of a priority, it seems, for the author himself: “Houellebecq himself likes to cite Arthur Schopenhauer’s observation that “[t]he first—and practically the only—condition of good style is having something to say.” Though many of the pieces in the collection reveal the French author’s limitations, they also underscore that Houellebecq in both his fiction and nonfiction has made some of his most valuable efforts when he “gives voice to the fears of an epoch.”

→ Speaking of era-defining fears, Chris Hedges, writing in his eponymous Substack, runs down the myriad reasons one might be kept up late at night:

The United States, as the near unanimous vote to provide nearly $40 billion in aid to Ukraine illustrates, is trapped in the death spiral of unchecked militarism. No high-speed trains. No universal health care. No viable Covid relief program. No respite from 8.3 percent inflation. No infrastructure programs to repair decaying roads and bridges, which require $41.8 billion to fix the 43,586 structurally deficient bridges, on average 68 years old. No forgiveness of $1.7 trillion in student debt. No addressing income inequality. No program to feed the 17 million children who go to bed each night hungry. No rational gun control or curbing of the epidemic of nihilistic violence and mass shootings. No help for the 100,000 Americans who die each year of drug overdoses. No minimum wage of $15 an hour to counter 44 years of wage stagnation. No respite from gas prices that are projected to hit $6 a gallon.
The permanent war economy, implanted since the end of World War II, has destroyed the private economy, bankrupted the nation, and squandered trillions of dollars of taxpayer money.

A bracing read, the newsletter by Hedges dives into the vulgarities of a society in which he says “war is the raison d'état of the state.”

→ “Let us celebrate the falling bodies and rising statues as a demonstration of our fealty, our bondage, to the great god Gun,” Garry Wills wrote the week of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012. For Wills, a historian and journalist, the United States’ unique relationship to the gun has evolved into a guarantee that “crazed man after crazed man will have a flood of killing power readily supplied to him.” The provocative, hyperbolic screed has found a new audience receptive to its underlying anger this week following the shooting at an elementary school in Texas. Here, Wills argues that such shootings will continue because “we have to make that offering, out of devotion to our Moloch, our god. The gun is our Moloch. We sacrifice children to him daily.”

The gun is not a mere tool, a bit of technology, a political issue, a point of debate. It is an object of reverence. Devotion to it precludes interruption with the sacrifices it entails. Like most gods, it does what it will, and cannot be questioned. Its acolytes think it is capable only of good things. It guarantees life and safety and freedom. It even guarantees law. Law grows from it. Then how can law question it?
Its power to do good is matched by its incapacity to do anything wrong. It cannot kill. Thwarting the god is what kills.

The Scroll

What Happened Today: May 27, 2022

Conflicting accounts of Texas school shooting; China’s new security bloc; Ray Liotta dead at 67

The Big Story

The Rest

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