Yusef Salaam, of Central Park Five, Wins NYC Council Primary

Thirty-four years after being indicted by both the media and the criminal justice system, and sent to jail for a crime he never committed, Yusef Salaam of the Central Park Five has won the New York City Council primary elections, almost guaranteeing he will serve for the same city government that oversaw his unjust imprisonment.

Salaam was one of five Black and Latino teenagers falsely accused of assaulting and raping a white female jogger in Central Park in 1989. Now, decades later, after spending nearly seven years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit, Salaam is poised to represent his home district of Harlem, one of the most historic neighborhoods in New York City, and one that overlooks the north end of Central Park itself.

“This campaign has been about our Harlem community, who has been pushed into the margins of life and made to believe they were supposed to be there,” Salaam said on election night. “Having to be kidnapped from my home as a 15-year-old child, to be launched in the belly of the beast, I was gifted to turn that experience into the womb of America. I was gifted because I was able to see it for what it really was: a system that was trying to make me believe that I was my ancestors’ wildest nightmare. But I am my ancestors’ wildest dreams.”

Running for the city’s ninth district, which includes Harlem, Salaam far outpaced a field that included two elected officials currently representing the neighborhood. The race was the only one in which Mayor Eric Adams made an endorsement, backing state Assembly member Inez Dickens, who currently trails Salaam by over 25 points.

While the election was a primary race, Salaam is all but guaranteed to be elected to the council come November.

Since being released from his false imprisonment, Salaam has become a motivational speaker and board member of the Innocence Project, an organization dedicated to fighting against wrongful convictions and bettering the criminal justice system.

In 1989, amid the apprehension of the Exonerated Five, former President Donald Trump bought full-page advertisements in all four of New York City’s major newspapers, including The New York Times, calling to “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY.” He has still not apologized for doing so, even while all five of the individuals wrongfully arrested have been proven innocent.

In March, after twice-impeached Trump faced his first of now two criminal indictments, Salaam released a one-word response: “Karma.”

This article has been updated.

Getting away with crimes is difficult enough, but it’s even harder when you compulsively say out loud in very clear terms that you did them. Such is the lesson Donald Trump is learning, after the release of an audio recording corroborating the federal accusations the twice-impeached former president faces for stealing classified government information and flippantly showing them off to an array of non-cleared individuals.

Indeed, though the twice-indicted and liable for sexual abuse former president has the right to remain silent, he’s never really exercised that, has he? And the pattern continued during an interview with Fox News on Tuesday.

“I had a whole desk full of lots of papers, and mostly newspaper articles, copies of magazines, copies of different plans, copies of stories having to do with many, many subjects,” Trump said. “And what was said was absolutely fine, and very perfectly, we did nothing wrong. This is a whole hoax.”

As a reminder, Trump was indicted on 37 counts for mishandling classified documents, and is accused of even being “personally involved” in packing up boxes full of classified information as he departed the White House for Mar-a-Lago, where the boxes were then hidden everywhere from the ballroom to the bathroom. He allegedly showed the documents—sourced from agencies including the CIA and NSA—to staff members, writers, and even a representative of his PAC.

Court documents cited one recording in particular in which Trump allegedly showed individuals without security clearance “highly confidential” and “secret” documents related to a Pentagon plan for a potential attack on Iran. He notes in the recording he “could have declassified” them had he still been president. CNN released the recording in full on Monday, corroborating what the indictment already detailed: Trump is heard showing “a big pile of papers … off the record … [from] the Defense Department” to individuals without clearance.

Pretty straightforward, yes? You’d think. Yet Trump’s defense now involves doubling down, saying indeed he had tons of papers, copies of different plans, and it was all “absolutely fine, and very perfectly.”

That wasn’t enough though. Asked about his own voice on the recordings, Trump’s ego still somehow activated against the logic of the actual question. “My voice was fine. What did I say wrong?” he asked, before addressing the actual stakes of the question: whether he’s a criminal.

“We have a lot of papers, a lot of papers stacked up. In fact, you hear the rustle of the paper,” Trump assures us. Why, exactly, he’s reminding the public that he had “a lot of papers” and encouraging them to wonder what those “papers” were is unclear.

If it’s all to be performance art, Trump’s conclusion that “nobody said I did anything wrong other than the fake news, which of course is Fox too,” is a nice cherry on top.

Republican presidential candidate Francis Suarez is so qualified for the job, with such an extensive foreign policy repertoire, that he has simply never heard of a Uyghur before.

The Miami mayor declared his 2024 bid for president earlier this month, prompting nearly everyone to ask, “Who’s that?” And he only embarrassed himself further on Tuesday, during a radio interview with conservative talk show host Hugh Hewitt.

Hewitt asked the GOP candidate about his campaign’s stance on China’s human rights violations against the Uyghurs, a predominantly Muslim ethnic minority. China has built mass internment camps in the Xinjiang province, where most Uyghurs live, and more than a million Uyghurs (as well as other religious minorities) have been detained in the last few years. The United States has classified the mass persecution and targeting as genocide.

But Suarez seems to have no idea about any of it, or even about “what” a Uyghur is.

When asked about the Uyghurs during the radio show, Suarez was completely stumped. The exchange went like this:

Hewitt: Will you be talking about the Uyghurs in your campaign?

Suarez: The what?

Hewitt: The Uyghurs.

Suarez: What’s a Uyghur?

Hewitt:  OK, we’ll come back to that. Let me, you won’t be, you’ve got to get smart on that.”

Later in the interview, Suarez said, “You gave me homework, Hugh. I’ll look at a—what’s it called, a weeble?”

“The Uyghurs,” Hewitt repeated yet again. “You really need to know about the Uyghurs, mayor.”

“Uyghurs, I’m a good learner, a fast learner,” Suarez responded, seemingly making a joke of it all.

The mayor later tried to do damage control, blaming the mishap on lack of familiarity with the pronunciation Hewitt used.

“Of course, I am well aware of the suffering of the Uyghurs in China. They are being enslaved because of their faith. China has a deplorable record on human rights, and all people of faith suffer there. I didn’t recognize the pronunciation my friend Hugh Hewitt used,” Suarez said in a statement.

Hewitt, of course, used the common English pronunciation of the word.

Again, none of this should be a surprise to a presidential candidate. Both of the last two presidential administrations have accused China of committing genocide and crimes against humanity against the Uyghurs. The Chinese government has been accused of physical and mental torture, mass sexual assault, mass sterilization, and mass detention with the goal of changing people’s identities and religious beliefs.

There are an estimated 24 million people who identify as LGBTQ in America—a likely undercount, as more and more people grow comfortable embracing themselves. And yet, despite that progress, Republicans like Minnesota state Senator Eric Lucero are working overtime to turn back the clock.

“GLOBAL WARMING,” Lucero began in a tweet on Monday. “Our Creator hates PRIDE, and each of us as the creation will be held to account for our choices, eventually.”

“The 7-color natural rainbow is a reminder of His promise to never again enact worldwide judgment by WATER. The next worldwide judgment will be by FIRE.”

Neither the Bible nor any ancient religious text says anything about Pride Month, a modern-day celebration dedicated to people’s ability to love and live freely and wholly.

Deep theology aside, if there is a God or gods, they would likely be less concerned with their creations feeling the warmth of love, than, say, their creations degrading other creations around them.

As in, Lucero’s invocation of climate change as some sort of threat promised by God in response to “PRIDE,” might (shocker) be missing the mark of what God (or gods) is (or are) actually concerned with. Maybe, just maybe, the idea that global warming is spurred by relentless greed (an actual universally accepted sin) is more convincing than the idea that God is making the globe hotter because people are loving freely.

Lucero’s foolishness ought not be lost as Minnesota hosts some of the worst air quality in the world at this very moment due to wildfires made worse by climate change.

Not to be seen as an aberrant comment, Lucero’s tweet adds to a growing pathetic and creepish track record.

Last year, Lucero tried spreading fake rumors that schools were harboring litter boxes in bathrooms and uniforms with tails to accommodate kids who identify as cats.

On January 6, 2021, Lucero spoke at a “Storm the Capitol” rally in St. Paul, in support of the riots on the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. seeking to overturn the 2020 election results. “We are at the threshold of a Civil War … we need to purge. We need to pull the weeds,” one of Lucero’s fellow speakers said to the crowd.

Lucero, if nothing else, is a robotic outrage automaton, like many of his contemporaries. A day after Chaya Raichik posted a tweet displaying her complete lack of reading comprehension:

… Lucero tweeted essentially the exact same thing, showcasing his blithering desperation to be just like the other cool kids who see understanding words as a suggestion for, not a necessity to, daily life:

Over the weekend, videos of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. exercising circulated the internet. Groaning and glistening while donning tight jeans and no shirt, the presidential candidate earned the approval of an interesting array of people, namely far-right media and Twitter’s blue-check army.

“Getting in shape for my debates with President Biden!” Kennedy tweeted alongside a video of him squeezing through nine non–fully extended pushups.

“That’s a fit boy,” a voice said behind the camera.

Another video showcased Kennedy struggling through a similarly lackluster set of inclined bench presses at what appears to be a whopping 115 pounds—certainly nothing to dismiss on its own, but maybe not a performance to so excitedly cheer for if Kennedy’s body was as herculean as some have made it out to be (this was “his last drop set of the day,” the video tweeter assured the public).

Anyhow, the lovefest ensued.

The posts have also been part of a smear campaign against a prominent scientist who has been targeted for his support of vaccines. The implication being: Why trust a normal-looking scientist who supports vaccines when you have this red, meaty anti-vaxxer (who definitely doesn’t instead inject himself with steroids) right in front of you?

RFK Jr. prides his campaign on being health-centered in a way that no other candidate is, hence his latest strategy to showcase himself as uniquely fit relative to Biden (curiously, the comparison to the Republican front-runner, Donald Trump, has not been made by RFK Jr. or many of his ogling fans). But having a balanced diet and embracing physical activity certainly do not preclude someone from also taking rigorously studied vaccines against diseases that have killed millions of people.

Such revolutionarily basic logic unfortunately might not penetrate the force field humming around the freethinkers who have been led to believe that freethinking means free of thinking.

The sweaty Kennedy content was imposed so forcefully onto people’s Twitter timelines, it would not have been surprising if Elon Musk himself was juicing the numbers. And that might not be the only juicing relevant here. While Kennedy has prided himself on standing against vaccines researched and scrutinized by thousands of scientists around the world, one might not be out of bounds to question the particular puffiness of his stature.

It’s not bad for someone to take steroids, especially if they are proven to support one’s physical or mental health, or longevity. If only that logic would be extended to the millions of transgender people in this country, instead of for instance, Kennedy insinuating that chemicals in water are turning them trans.