WATCH: Fox News host cuts off Tree of Life synagogue member for pinning rise of anti-Semitism on Trump
April 27, 2019
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Robin Wolfenden was practicing yoga on her balcony on a spring morning in Nashville when she heard the sirens -- the sound of first responders rushing to the scene of America's latest school shooting.
The next day she laid six stones -- a Jewish tradition -- for the victims at the entrance of the nearby Covenant School, where a 28-year-old former student broke in and stalked the halls, killing three staff and three young children.
"These kids are innocent children," Wolfenden told reporters, worried for her grandsons who are five and eight years old, only a few years younger than the students killed at the Covenant Presbyterian Church-affiliated elementary school on Monday.
Mass shootings are grimly frequent in the United States, and Nashville residents were in shock Tuesday after their city joined the nationwide roster of those that have experienced an armed assault on a school.
"It's just unimaginable to think that these beautiful kids are not going to come home again," Lisbeth Melgar, who brought her two children to see a growing memorial to the victims outside the school, told AFP as she gently tucked her daughter's hair behind her ear.
Melgar was among several parents who brought their young children among the stream of mourners visiting the memorial as the sun set on Tuesday, many of them in tears among the flowers, stuffed toys, and white crosses decorated with blue hearts.
Her daughter Alessandra, 11, said security had been tightened at her school Tuesday in the wake of the attack, with authorities only letting a few people at a time through the gate.
Her mother said there would be meetings this week with parents to discuss security, "because we do believe that we need to put more security in our schools."
"It definitely hits home for me today," said Stacie Wilford, a nurse at a local medical facility and mother to an eight-year-old at a nearby school.
"I live a mile and a half away so it's in your back door and it's so scary," she told AFP.
"You drop your kids off in the mornings and you don't think that you could get a call like this. It's just devastating. That just -- I can't even fathom."
Carolyn Lucas's children also attend a school just a 10-minute walk away from the scene of the shooting.
"I feel like our souls were shattered. It's unfathomable yet completely expected. You know, why wouldn't it happen to us?" she asked.
Despite the rate of gun violence in the country, Lucas said it's still easy to think it won't hit one's own community.
But, she said, "Of course it will. Gun violence sees no race or religion... it doesn't discriminate against anybody.
"We have to do better."
'Heartbreaking'
Kaylee Franzen, 22, who came with her 21-year-old friend Gabriella Massey to pay their respects, shares the same sentiment on gun violence.
"You hear about this happening all the time. And I don't think we've ever been somewhere where it's been so close and that in itself was really heartbreaking," said Franzen, a senior at the private Christian Belmont University in Nashville.
She said the shooting made the two women want to do something, even just by bringing flowers to the site of the makeshift memorial at the church property entrance, which was guarded by a police cruiser Tuesday.
"Even though this doesn't necessarily help anything, it sends a message that things need to change, and that thoughts and prayers alone aren't something that fixes or can aid the situation," she said.
That same message dominated a rally seeking more gun regulation that was held in Nashville on Tuesday. It had been planned before Monday's attack.
"It's horrifying to live in a world when we have to be afraid to educate our children," local mother Lisa Coffman told the rally.
To AFP she added: "You don't think it's going to happen in your city.
"And then when it does, you can't stop shaking."
© Agence France-Presse
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“If a child is on the verge of starvation, you must call CPS, not spend hundreds of millions on disproportionately unhealthy lunches, a huge percentage of which are discarded,” conservative pundit Ben Shapiro told California Congressman Ted Lieu on Twitter.
Shapiro is wrong. There’s a great deal of evidence that free school lunches reduce student hunger and improve children’s health.
Conservatives don’t necessarily care about good outcomes, though. That’s because they don’t want good outcomes. They want to police people.
The discourse around school lunches is a brutal, disturbing example of the broader carceral logic of rightwing politics.
Republicans and those on the right believe that government should be used not to help those in need, but to punish and discipline marginalized people.
School lunches have been studied extensively, and there’s little question that they improve health outcomes for children.
Contrary to Shapiro’s claim that school lunches are unhealthy, research finds that children who receive free school meals are more likely to receive daily adequate nutrition and more likely to eat fruits and vegetables, and drink milk.
Shapiro also argues that school lunches are economically inefficient. He believes poor families don’t really exist, and that if children are hungry, it’s because they’re being abused, and they should be taken away from their parents.
This is ludicrous. Real hunger and poverty do exist in the US. There are families that do not have money to afford both rent and food. There are families who want to care for their children but lack the resources to do so.
The US government estimates that 12.5 percent of households with children are food insecure, which means that there are times when they do not have enough food to feed everyone in the family.
In most cases, adults feed children first. But even given that, in 6.3 percent of households, children experienced food insecurity.
School meal programs are also incredibly efficient. One study found that every dollar spent on school meal programs saves two dollars in reduced health care costs and reduced poverty.
A study of Sweden found that free school lunch programs resulted in 3 percent higher lifetime earnings for children.
The greatest gains in earnings were among the poorest students. But even more affluent students benefited.
In contrast, when CPS removes children from their home, they are at great risk. Children in the foster care system have higher risk of learning disabilities, depression, asthma and obesity. They are less likely to go to college.
CPS investigations also disproportionately target Black students. More than 50 percent of Black children in the US are subject to child welfare investigations.
Discrimination is widespread. School officials are more likely to call child welfare about Black children. CPS is more likely to investigate Black families. Courts are more likely to remove Black children from homes.
Even if a family is not feeding their child as well as they could, school lunches are often a better option than removing children from the home.
Direct aid can help children in difficult situations, whereas the foster care system can be traumatic and make things worse even for children with neglectful parents.
School lunches reduce hunger, improve children’s lives, and reduce costs to society. Child welfare interventions are frequently racist and have negative health and education outcomes for children. They should be a last resort, not a substitute for aid.
So why does Shapiro prefer calling the authorities on poor families, rather than just helping them feed their children?
Dan McLaughlin, a writer at National Review, elucidated. He wrote a Twitter thread arguing that school lunches should be rolled back and child labor laws should be weakened.
“Literally, a ‘free lunch’ vs working,” he fulminated. “Perpetual childhood vs responsibility.”
McLaughlin and Shapiro see aid to hungry children as an assault on virtue. Having money is equated with work is equated with discipline and moral fiber.
Feeding your children is a test of character. Those who succeed are good, upstanding people, who need no help from the dangerous liberal state.
Those who fail are lazy and disreputable, and they should be policed by the virtuous conservative state.
Most people can see this logic is repulsive. Shapiro and McLaughlin think children should be denied food (and forced to work?!) in order to punish their parents for lack of discipline.
That’s obviously monstrous.
But these arguments undergird much of how we approach poverty and the social safety net.
One egregious example is from 2021. Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot took $281.5 million in covid relief funds — which could have been used on air filtration in schools, or to vaccinate underserved communities — and instead gave it to police.
Nationwide, since the 2008 recession, police budgets have rebounded, but education budgets have languished.
Spending money to help people in trouble — on schools, on health care, on libraries, on direct aid to children in poverty — is cost-effective and humane.
But instead, we often choose to disinvest and then to criminalize the hunger, poverty and desperation that results.
This is the argument of the much-demonized defund the police movement.
Activists and advocates argue that helping people in need is more equitable, more just, and ultimately more cost-effective than immiserating people and then sending law-enforcement after them to immiserate them further.
Do we want to pay to feed hungry children? Or would we rather pay law enforcement to harass them and their families?
Ben Shapiro, Dan McLaughlin and their ilk want to spend money on punitive authorities, because they dream of a world in which everyone is kept in their place by force.
They oppose school lunches and every policy that has the potential to make the US more equal and more free.
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Manhattan DA insiders fear Trump may skate if indicted for Stormy Daniels payments: report
March 29, 2023
Former President Donald Trump has still not been indicted by the Manhattan District Attorney's Office for making hush-money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels, but sources within the office tell The Daily Beast that they fear there won't be enough to convict him if they do bring charges in this case.
One source tells the publication that the Manhattan DA may have been better off wrapping the Stormy Daniels payments into a broader indictment of business fraud against Trump, but they acknowledged that either approach would carry risks.
“The Stormy case was the easiest, the most straightforward, but had the risk of being nothing more than a misdemeanor," they said. "The business fraud case had more heft, but was complex and sprawling, and much more difficult. There was never any discussion of breaking them apart."
Additionally, the publication writes the chances of the case being successful could also be hurt by the fact that the United States Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York had already declined to charge Trump for the Daniels payments even though it successfully charged former "fixer" Michael Cohen for making them.
READ MORE: Trump rages at the IRS in bizarre rant about a mysterious ‘deal’
Another insider source tells The Daily Beast that the Daniels payments were more tailormade for SDNY because it was clear that Cohen's actions constituted a federal crime.
“The hush money case had no exact state charge," they said. "It should have been the feds."
Nonetheless, Karen Agrifolo, a former top deputy for former Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance, argued that it would be wrong to dismiss the Daniels case as trivial.
"This was Donald Trump’s first attempt at interfering in an election," she said. "He did it in 2016 and again in 2020. In terms of what it represents, I think it’s significant."
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