What Happened Today: May 11, 2022

Gun deaths breaks record; A hero for our time; Tesla recall

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The Big Story

Shireen Abu Aqleh, a Palestinian American journalist who had covered the West Bank for Al Jazeera since 1997 and had become a well-known journalist across the Middle East, was killed in Jenin on Wednesday morning while covering an Israeli counterterrorism raid in the city. A number of the suspected attackers involved in the recent terror wave that has killed 19 Israelis over the past six weeks hailed from the area around Jenin. The Palestinian Ministry of Health and journalists on the ground at the time of the killing claim that Israeli forces fired upon Abu Aqleh, who was reportedly wearing a bulletproof vest with Press printed across the chest when she was killed. An initial autopsy performed by Palestinian coroners confirms she died from a bullet that struck her head from close range but has not determined whether she was shot by Israeli or Palestinian forces. According to The Jerusalem Post, “Dr. Ryan al-Ali of the Pathological Institute at the a-Najah University in Nablus was quoted by al-Jarmak TV channel as saying that they could not determine who had shot her.” Israeli officials initially asserted that the journalists were hit by Palestinian gunfire but later revised their position, with the Israel Defense Forces’ chief of staff stating that “at the moment, it is not possible to determine from which fire Abu Aqleh was killed.” U.S. State Department spokesman Ned Price tweeted on Wednesday that the United States is “heartbroken by and strongly condemns the killing of American journalist Shireen Abu Aqleh in the West Bank. The investigation must be immediate and thorough, and those responsible must be held accountable.” The killing threatens to deepen the rift between the United States and Israel, which had already been growing ahead of a planned trip by President Biden to Israel in June. In The New York Sun, Benny Avni reports that Israeli officials are “irate” over rumors that President Biden might not only endorse a number of Arab political demands concerning control of the Temple Mount but also tour East Jerusalem unaccompanied by Israelis. 

Read it here: https://www.jpost.com/breaking-news/article-706387

In The Back Pages: PART II: The Musical Chairs Behind D.C.’s Abortion Protests

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The Rest

→ Inflation stayed near a four-decade high last month despite slowing slightly, according to new data from the U.S. Department of Labor. Inflation was at an 8.3% annual rate in April, down from 8.5% the previous month, largely due to a minor drop in the price of gasoline, which offset increases in the price of natural gas and electricity. Overall, prices were up across the economy, suggesting that, contrary to reports from the White House, inflation is not slowing down. “Shelter, food, airline fares, and new vehicles were the largest contributors,” according to the Financial Times. That’s bad news for ordinary Americans, obviously, but also for Democrats who are heading into elections in a few months as multiple polls show a majority of voters identify inflation as their top concern.

→ More than 45,000 people were killed by guns in the United States in 2020, according to a CDC report published Tuesday, breaking a record for the most Americans killed by guns in a single year. And while every kind of gun-related death increased in 2020, gun-related homicides surged by 35%, hitting its highest level since 1994. The increasing homicide rate has disproportionately harmed poor and minority communities. “Rates of firearm homicide were lowest and increased least at the lowest poverty level and were higher and showed larger increases at higher poverty levels,” the report found, and African Americans are 12 times more likely to be killed by guns than white Americans are. “One possible explanation is stressors associated with the COVID pandemic that could have played a role,” said Thomas Simon, associate director for science at the CDC’s division of violence prevention, “including changes and disruption to services and education, social isolation, housing instability, and difficulty covering daily expenses.” Other factors, which the CDC does not address, include the anti-policing movement that led to mass demonstrations and riots across a number of U.S. cities in the summer of 2020. While “defund the police” policies endorsed by some progressive politicians and activists were never popular with most Americans, including most minorities, according to numerous public polls, they did affect policies in some cities, such as related criminal justice reform initiatives, which might have contributed to the rise in violence. With homicides already at high levels for 2022, CDC officials are worried that this year will be yet another brutal year; the warmer months of summer tend to see gun deaths surge by 30%. 

Read it here: https://abcnews.go.com/Health/gun-homicides-spiked-35-year-pandemic-cdc/story

→ In Baltimore, at least 10 people were shot on Tuesday in three separate incidents. One of the shooting victims has already died from their injuries; the rest are expected to survive. There have now been 120 homicides in Baltimore so far in 2022, putting the city on track for what could be the deadliest year in its history.

→ The House of Representatives passed a bill on Tuesday night authorizing $40 billion in additional military aid to Ukraine. Passage of the bill had been delayed by President Biden’s efforts to link the Ukraine aid with $10 billion in funding for COVID-19 relief, but Biden decoupled the two proposals after congressional leaders argued that linking them “would slow down action on the urgently needed Ukrainian aid,” according to NBC’s Sahil Kapur. With the $40 billion in aid now poised to cross Biden’s desk, and the total tab for military aid for Ukraine clearing $53 billion, there has been little discussion about how much money the United States wants to pledge to this war, what the United States hopes to accomplish by intervening, or how top officials see the war ending. While some Republicans and a handful of Democrats have questioned the United States’s role in Ukraine, the aid money, which quickly cleared Congress by a 368-to-57 margin, signals little interest among most lawmakers to take part in that debate.

→ Here’s the list of equipment that the United States is sending to Ukraine.

Kaneki @bhall_2

Summary of $4.5 billion U.S assistance package to Ukraine. Source: defense.gov/News/Releases/…

→ A hero for our time! With no aviation experience but a stout heart, a passenger on a small Cessna aircraft flying out of the Bahamas safely landed a plane last week after a medical emergency incapacitated the pilot. “I have no idea how to fly the airplane,” the passenger radioed in to air traffic controllers. Robert Morgan, an air traffic controller and a certified flight instructor, overheard the call and stepped in, pulling up a picture of the cockpit’s instrument panel on his phone and guiding the passenger turned pilot in for a perfect landing. Experienced pilots watched in wonder from the ground as a man with no flying experience landed the Cessna safely—a skill that requires 20 hours of flight school to learn. “Did you say the passenger landed the airplane?” one American Airlines pilot asked, watching from his own cockpit. “Oh my God. Great job,” he said. Morgan was there to greet his new student, and the two men hugged before the passenger hurried home to his pregnant wife.

→ Lauren Pazienza, a 26-year-old New Yorker who confessed to shoving an 87-year-old Broadway vocal coach to her death, will be held without bail as she awaits her trial for assault and manslaughter. Pazienza had been celebrating with her fiancé in Chelsea when, drunk and irate, she shouted at a Parks Department employee and then, entirely unprovoked, shoved Barbara Meier Gustern from behind, causing the elderly woman to suffer traumatic brain injuries that, five days later, would end her life. Pazienza confessed to the crime on the same day Gustern passed away, and she’s now being held without bail after the judge determined that she poses a flight risk. Gustern was mourned by family and friends “as the grandmother who wore dominatrix gear to perform as a go-go dancer at a playwright’s birthday party; who left her friends in the dust as she ran to catch a subway; who danced on top of a table at the cabaret theater Joe’s Pub.”

→ Tesla has recalled 130,000 automobiles, citing issues with the central computer systems on several models that prevent their touchscreens from cooling adequately and cause them to go blank. Tesla discovered the problem during routine software checks, and no crashes or injuries have been reported due to the issue, which will be resolved by online software updates. Despite the popularity of Elon Musk’s electric vehicles, 2022 has been a tough year for Tesla; in the past six months alone, the company has issued 12 recalls, including one for half a million cars. Today’s recall drove Tesla’s stock price toward its lowest level since the start of the year.

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PART II: The Musical Chairs Behind D.C.’s Abortion Protests

Follow the trail of ShutDownDC, the group leading the protests outside the homes of conservative Supreme Court justices, and soon you’ll tumble down the rabbit hole of professional progressive politics, where things keep getting curiouser and curiouser.

Yesterday I noted that the protests were not “grassroots” opposition to the court’s plans to overturn Roe v. Wade, but rather the work of a well-established activist group that has been a fixture of dozens of protests in recent years. More curious, I thought, was that ShutDownDC was founded in 2019 as part of a climate action lobbying effort to target the opponents of the Green New Deal. Why, I wondered, with hundreds of established organizations that have spent years working on issues around abortion, would it be a climate action group leading the protests at the moment of truth when Roe is in jeopardy? But now I see that ShutDownDC has played a role in virtually every national political controversy of the past three years, since it was founded. 

ShutDownDC is helmed by two professional activists, Liz Butler and Patrick Young, who are veterans of both the “direct action” tactics of Antifa anarchist groups and the larger world of movement politics that is tapped into the hundreds of billions of dollars distributed annually through the complex of progressive NGOs. Butler organized protests against George W. Bush in 2001 and later the International Monetary Fund, while Young climbed the ranks in organizations such as the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the second largest labor union in the United States and the institutional backbone for much of the activist movement. (Scroll readers who followed the ideological takeover and implosion of the Women’s March will recall that the organization’s leaders had deep ties to SEIU.)

Butler and Young came together to form ShutDownDC in 2019. They constructed it out of a preexisting liberal activist organization called AlloutDC. According to its Twitter profile, AlloutDC in 2019 aimed to “Burn Down the American Plantation.” Aside from that, there is scant public information on the two groups. Neither lists a board of directors or reveals the sources of its funding, but one feature they clearly share is that both are essentially shell organizations. The groups have no set membership or obvious physical assets like real estate. What they provide is an all-important resource in the age of spectacle-driven digital politics: a website and social media presence that offer a recognizable but hollow brand identity that can be filled with the cause du jour. 

In 2020, ShutDownDC was at the forefront of the more militant plans for interfering in the electoral process in order to “protect” democracy and ensure the right candidate won. The group published a map shortly before election day, “showing the homes or business locations of people with some relation to the Republican National Committee and ‘Trump boosters,’ along with bridges they appear to be considering shutting down.” In other words, ShutDownDC—a group that appears to be everywhere yet remains shrouded in mystery—was the enforcement arm of the much larger and more powerful anti-Trump “resistance network,” which insisted that the only legitimate election would be one that Trump lost.

In a past era, these groups’ lack of a public profile might have equated to a lack of influence, but today suggests exactly the opposite. In the current political landscape, virtually all influence operations—not to mention every significant political debate in American life, from immigration policy to the war in Ukraine—are directed by dark money operations and run through professional political actors like Butler and Young whose job is to play the part of radicals while the real power brokers (those who fund their operations) stay in the shadows.

More to come as The Scroll continues following crumbs along the money trail …

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