Thousands of Protesters Demand Gun Control at Tennessee State Capitol After Nashville Shooting

Thousands of people rallied Thursday morning at the Tennessee state Capitol building to demand stronger gun control laws, as Nashville still reels from a school shooting earlier in the week.

A shooter opened fire at the Covenant School on Monday, killing at least three children and three adults and wounding several others. State Republicans have insisted that there is nothing they could have done or could do differently to prevent such a tragedy.

Protesters gathered at the Capitol and marched inside ahead of the House and Senate regular floor sessions. People called for gun control and for lawmakers to “protect our kids!”

Inside, demonstrators were packed so tightly that highway patrol officers had to clear a path for lawmakers to enter the gallery.

Protesters continued to call for gun control and began singing songs they had adapted into protest anthems.

Lawmakers, however, appeared to stick to their preset agenda. When Democratic Representative Justin Pearson tried to bring up gun reform while discussing an unrelated bill, Republican Speaker Cameron Sexton told him to keep to the measure at hand.

Republicans hold a supermajority in the Tennessee legislature as well as the governor’s office. Governor Bill Lee and other Republicans have skated around the fact that they are directly responsible for helping create the circumstances that allowed Monday’s shooting to occur.

Lawmakers failed two years ago to pass a red flag law that would have prevented Monday’s shooter from legally acquiring seven guns, three of which were used in the attack. In the past few years, they also loosened gun restrictions and focused their energy instead on attacking LGBTQ rights.

While evading criminal offenses and campaigning for the third presidential cycle in a row, the twice-impeached former president has been asking advisers for ideas about how to attack Mexican drug cartels, with or without Mexico’s permission, reports Rolling Stone.

And Trump appears to have a menu of options.

One such idea, Rolling Stone notes, comes from a policy paper titled “It’s Time to Wage War on Transnational Drug Cartels,” which outlines strategies for America to “fundamentally [reorient] its posture” and wage “war against the cartels.” The paper says that such a war should “invoke the spirit of the Monroe Doctrine” and that the U.S. would not tolerate “narcoterrorists” infringing upon its sphere of influence.

The paper seemed to downplay the reciprocity inherent to the Monroe Doctrine—that the U.S. would aim to avoid interfering in other spheres too. Because while the paper encourages the U.S. to request collaboration from Mexico, it also notes that “it is vital that Mexico not be led to believe that they have veto power to prevent the US from taking the actions necessary to secure its borders and people.”

“‘Attacking Mexico,’ or whatever you’d like to call it, is something that President Trump has said he wants ‘battle plans’ drawn for,” a source told Rolling Stone. “He’s complained about missed opportunities of his first term, and there are a lot of people around him who want fewer missed opportunities in a second Trump presidency.”

Among these missed opportunities? Well, according to former Defense Secretary Mark Esper’s memoir, Trump had asked him if the U.S. could “shoot missiles into Mexico to destroy the drug labs,” then lie and pretend it was not behind the attack. Just weeks ago, House Oversight Committee chairman and Fox mainstay James Comer said it was a “mistake” that Trump didn’t go ahead and send out those bombs.

Is such a wild notion limited to Trump? Surprise: As with most radical policies, the whole Republican Party is implicated. After all, the policy paper was written by former Trump official and now Ron DeSantis endorser Ken Cuccinelli.

Wheels are turning in the halls of Congress too. In January, Congressmen Dan Drenshaw and Michael Waltz introduced a bill to approve an Authorization for Use of Military Force that would approve military action in Mexico to target cartels (months before the Senate finally voted to sunset the 1991 and 2002 Iraq AUMFs). And on Wednesday, Senator Lindsey Graham introduced a bill to designate the cartels and other organizations as foreign terrorist organizations, laying the groundwork for such war authorizations.

So while bombing Mexico—without its permission, or even lying about doing it at all—may have earlier been a more Trump-specific craze, the entire Republican apparatus is now full speed ahead in looking to keep the military machine’s cogs slicked up and spinning.

Heck, even 2024 candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has declared he would use “military force to decimate the cartels, Osama bin Laden–style.”

Russia’s main security agency announced Thursday it has detained an American journalist, whom it has accused of espionage.

Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was detained by the Federal Security Service in the eastern city of Yekaterinburg. He is the first American journalist detained on spying accusations since the Cold War.

The FSB said it had “stopped the illegal activities” Gershkovich was conducting and that an espionage case had been opened against him. The agency alleged that Gershkovich, “acting on the instructions of the American side, collected information constituting a state secret about the activities of one of the enterprises of the Russian military-industrial complex.”

The Journal “vehemently” denied the accusations and said it “seeks the immediate release of our trusted and dedicated reporter.”

“We stand in solidarity with Evan and his family.”

Gershkovich has worked as a reporter in Russia since 2017. International media watchdog Reporters Without Borders, or RSF, said he was investigating the Russian military company Wagner, a mercenary group that has played a prominent role in several of Moscow’s foreign operations, including the war in Ukraine.

RSF warned that Gershkovich’s arrest “looks like a retaliation measure of Russia against the United States.”

Russia has also cracked down on information about and dissent against the Ukraine war. The government passed a law last March that makes it illegal to publish information that authorities deem false about the invasion of Ukraine.

Many domestic news outlets stopped publishing or left the country to avoid legal troubles, while multiple foreign outlets withdrew much of their staff and cut back on reporting inside Russia’s borders.

This post has been updated.

Economists told a California state task force Wednesday they estimate that Black residents are owed more than $800 billion in reparations for harm caused by centuries of slavery and systemic racism.

The case for reparations has been made many times in recent years, particularly after the murder of George Floyd in 2020. California was the first state to establish a task force to determine how to compensate for the legacy of slavery and racist policies made after the practice of enslaving people was abolished, both of which have crippled Black people’s economic mobility.

Economists presented the task force with a preliminary estimate Wednesday that does not include either a recommended $1 million lump sum to each older Black resident for health disparities or compensation to people who had property unjustly taken by the government or a business devalued.

The reparations committee is due to give a final report on July 1. Until then, it can accept or reject proposals, including the economists’ budget.

“We’ve got to go in with an open mind and come up with some creative ways to deal with this,” Assembly member Reggie Jones-Sawyer, who sits on the task force, told the Associated Press.

The task force can make suggestions in its July report, but the final call rests with the state legislature and Governor Gavin Newsom. It’s unclear when—or if at all—Black Californians will start receiving payments, because the preliminary estimate is 2.5 times more than California’s annual budget.

“How do you compensate for hundreds of years of harm, even 150 years post-slavery?” Senator Steven Bradford asked.

Critics of reparations in California argue that it’s unreasonable to pay in a city or state that never enslaved Black people. But advocates note that the majority of data and historical evidence shows that after slavery ended in 1865, policies and practices across the nation helped curb the rights of Black Americans.

San Francisco was the first major city to propose a reparations plan, putting forth a sweeping draft in December that includes eliminating personal debt and tax burdens, a guaranteed annual income for 250 years, and family housing for just $1. The city’s reparations committee has until June to produce a final report.

The Chicago suburb of Evanston was the first city to begin paying reparations, while Boston and Asheville, North Carolina, are also considering compensation measures.

Texas Representative Sheila Jackson Lee introduced a bill in 2021 to develop a reparations study task force. President Joe Biden has expressed support for studying reparations, but he has yet to back Lee’s bill, and the issue has yet to be seriously discussed at the federal level.

On Wednesday, President Biden kicked off his “Summit for Democracy” with a panel of explicitly undemocratic world leaders. Panel members included India’s Narendra Modi, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, and Italy’s Giorgia Meloni.

While the summit overall hosted leaders from all over the world, this specific panel was focused on “Democracy Delivering Economic Growth and Shared Prosperity.” All three far-right leaders pretended to care about democracy, while ignoring their own records.

During the summit, Indian Prime Minister Modi sermonized on how India was “the mother” of democracy. “Democracy is not just a structure; it is also a spirit. It is based on the belief that the needs and aspirations of every human being are equally important,” Modi said. “That is why, in India, our guiding philosophy is ‘Sabka Sath, Sabka Vikas,’ meaning ‘striving together for inclusive growth.’”

Modi, of course, has been at the helm of an extremist rise in Hindu nationalism in India. As chief minister of the Indian state of Gujarat in 2001, Modi oversaw a massive riot rumored to have been spurred by government and police officials who sought to target Muslims. The riot left more than 1,000 people dead—some 75 percent of whom were Muslim.

His authoritarian tendencies have only increased since he rose to power as prime minister in 2014. In recent months, Modi has blocked the airing of a BBC documentary questioning his leadership during the Gujarat riots; conspired with Twitter CEO and billionaire Elon Musk to conduct a mass censorship campaign against dissidents, including imposing a mass internet shutdown across the state of Punjab; and overseen the arrest of an opposition leader for “defamation.” This doesn’t even include basic features of Modi’s reign, like being the first Indian leader to not take questions at press conferences, or the ongoing Hindutva nationalist campaign that targets Muslims and other religious minorities.

Netanyahu, meanwhile, on Wednesday proudly assured that “Israel was, is, and always will remain a proud democracy at the heart of the Middle East.” He went on to dismiss the massive protests against his judicial overhaul plan, which would help cement power for his own government and potentially help him avoid corruption investigations, as “a very intensive public debate.”

Israel, of course, is not a thriving democracy, as it operates on a system of apartheid that targets millions of Palestinians. It would be laborious to summarize all the cruelties of this occupation here, or Netanyahu’s role in furthering them, but so far this year, Israeli forces have killed at least 90 Palestinians, 17 of whom were children (that’s an average of at least one Palestinian a day).

Italian Prime Minister Meloni spoke glowingly of how “only a democratic system” can guarantee “growth, justice, equality, [and] legality.” But she opposes abortion rights and same-sex marriage and has said she wants to make it unconstitutional for gay people to adopt a child. She has opposed a 1993 law that punished people involved in racial, ethnic, and religious discrimination or the incitement of hate crimes. She holds rampant anti-immigrant and nationalist views and has stoked antisemitic and racist conspiracies related to George Soros and the “great replacement” white nationalist theory.

Meloni has also attended the Conservative Political Action Conference—a bastion of the most radical figures in American society—twice, once in 2019 and again 2022. She peddled more of her fearmongering around immigrants and “globalism” while there.

Almost too spot-on, Meloni has called Modi the “most loved leader in the world,” and she tried to assuage fears of her extremism during her 2022 campaign by likening herself to Netanyahu’s Likud Party in Israel and America’s Republican Party.

Other world leaders who spoke on Wednesday’s panel carry their own baggage. Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis’s administration, in Modi-like fashion, has carried out a surveillance campaign against members of the press and politicians. Kenyan President William Ruto was previously charged by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity after he allegedly orchestrated postelection violence that killed more than 1,300 people.

That these leaders were deemed appropriate to speak on democracy is an indictment not just of the White House but of international political conventions. Such traditions allow anti-democratic states and leaders (including America) to posture as beacons of democracy anyhow, and they desensitize the rest of us from clear-as-day authoritarianism.