US Politics

Two students in Michigan have filed a lawsuit against their school district after they were banned from wearing “Let’s Go Brandon” sweatshirts.The slogan is widely understood as a coded euphemism for a profane curse towards Joe Biden and is popular with conservatives.The lawsuit, filed by the two middle-school students through their mother, accuses Michigan’s Tri County Area school district of “censoring the students’ peaceful, non-disruptive political expression in school”.According to the lawsuit, one of the brothers wore a “Let’s Go Brandon sweatshirt” to Tri County middle school last February. The sixth-grader was stopped in the hallway by the school’s assistant principal who asked that he remove the sweatshirt, saying that it was equivalent to “the F-word”.The boy, fearing further punishment, took off the sweatshirt, the lawsuit said.The boy then wore the sweatshirt again a few weeks later “to express his opposition to President Biden”. to which a teacher responded, “Take the sweatshirt off. I’ve told you before and won’t tell you again.”The lawsuit states that the slogan “conveys the same opposition to President Biden, sanitized to express the sentiment without using profanity or vulgarity”, adding that the sweatshirt “did not disrupt class, cause disturbance among students, or invade the rights of others”.A few months later, the boy’s older brother also wore the sweatshirt to the same school. The eighth-grader was removed from class and was asked to remove his sweatshirt, which he did.“Despite prohibiting ‘Let’s Go Brandon’ apparel, the school district permits students to wear apparel expressing other political and social messages, including but not limited to apparel expressing support for LGBTQ+ rights,” the lawsuit said.The school district has defended its decision to prohibit the slogan. Its attorney Kara T Rozin said: “The commonly known meaning of the slogan ‘Let’s Go Brandon’ is intended to ridicule the president with profanity. At least one of the students … has acknowledged knowing what this slogan means, and a simple Google search confirms the slogan means ‘Fuck Joe Biden’.”She added that although the school district “does not prohibit students from the right to express their political views or from wearing clothing with political slogans”, its student code prohibits “language or clothing containing language that is offensive, vulgar or profane”. More

There were a lot of questions floating around after Fox News unceremoniously dumped rightwing firebrand Tucker Carlson on Monday morning.Among them: can the conservative news channel effectively replace its most popular host, a grievance-filled firebrand who drew in more than 3 million viewers every night?The answer, on this week’s evidence, is no.Every night this week it has filled Carlson’s slot with Brian Kilmeade, an eager substitute who, in his regular role on the Fox and Friends morning show, serves as an excitable, unthreatening everyman.Every night viewers have given an unforgiving verdict on Kilmeade’s efforts: by turning off in their droves.It’s a shame for Kilmeade, but a clue as to how he might be received had already come early on Monday.“Join me tonight at 8 pm!” he tweeted an hour before his show started a now Tucker-free Fox News line-up. It turned out that not only did people not want to join Kilmeade, they were furious that he was going to be on air in place of their fallen hero.“Not a chance in hell ya sellout,” was one of the more polite online responses, while someone else noted: “I’d rather watch grass grow.”Undeterred, Kilmeade kicked things off on Monday with the briefest of references to the man he was temporarily replacing.“As you probably have heard, Fox News and Tucker Carlson have agreed to part ways. I wish Tucker the best, I’m great friends with Tucker and always will be,” Kilmeade said.“But right now, it’s time for Fox News Tonight, so let’s get started!”For some people, it was time to get started on switching channels. On Monday the audience for Kilmeade, a less angry, less charismatic, apparently less race-obsessed host, was 47% of the number Carlson had attracted a week earlier, according to the Los Angeles Times.It isn’t just that Carlson’s departure has turned off viewers. The hastily renamed Fox News Tonight show appears to have actively driven people to Fox News’ competitors, with Newsmax in particular, seeing record ratings.Watching Kilmeade’s shows this week, it is clear that he is rather one-note. That note is attacking Joe Biden, which he has done enthusiastically, but with none of the vitriol of his predecessor.“Let’s get started!” Kilmeade declared (again) on Tuesday evening.“80-year-old Joe Biden is officially running for president again,” he said.“Big surprise. This morning he released the single most divisive campaign ad we’ll see in a long time, I hope ever.”When Biden ran in 2020, Kilmeade said he “campaigned on the idea that police are racist”. This was news to this observer, but never mind, because according to Kilmeade: “He’s not talking about that anymore.”Kilmeade pointed out – accurately – that the number of police officers in Seattle had declined. Crime has not gotten significantly worse: “The violent crime rate for the city of Seattle increased from 729 per 100,000 in 2021 to 736 per 100,000 in 2022,” but drug deaths, in common with the rest of the nation, have increased.Kilmeade said that the state of Washington is struggling to pass new drug laws, after a previous law was ruled unconstitutional by the state supreme court. As it stands drug possession will become legal in the state on 1 July.“The result of all that is that fentanyl is flowing into Washington state big time,” Kilmeade said, ignoring the fact that he’d just told us the law was in place through the end of June, and offering no source for the big-time increase.With Carlson, this would have been read as a deliberate misdirection. With Kilmeade, it’s not clear if he just got confused.After some more stuff on fentanyl – inevitably the blame was laid at Biden’s door, despite the Washington law being state, not federal – Kilmeade returned to Biden’s announcement.“Joe Biden announced today that he’s running for president, again. If he wins, he’ll be 82, when he’s done at the end of his term he’ll be 86,” Kilmeade said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“In his announcement video today Joe Biden was as divisive, in my view, as he possibly could be. He said if you don’t vote for him, you are not interested in protecting democracy,” Kilmeade said of Biden’s ad.He apparently hadn’t seen Donald Trump’s ad, from earlier in April, in which the former president said he was running against “radical left lunatics”. In an ad from August 2022, three months before he announced his bid for the presidency, Trump talked ominously about “the tyrants we are fighting”.Kilmeade invited Marianne Williamson, the health guru and sometime vaccine skeptic who ran for the Democratic nomination in 2020, to take a pop at Biden.Instead he effectively gave Williamson four minutes of airtime to give a campaign speech, in which she touted universal healthcare and free college tuition. It’s hard to imagine Carlson doing the same.By Wednesday, there was a distinct sense that Kilmeade and his writers were running out of ideas.“Good evening and welcome to Fox News Tonight,” Kilmeade chirped at the top of the show.“Glad you’re here. You know, we told you last night about Joe Biden’s big 2024 campaign announcement video.”Kilmeade did not add: “Well giddy up, because we’re going to tell you all about it again,” but he might as well have done. He told viewers they should go on YouTube – “like I did today” – and look at the comments under Biden’s video.The comments were not kind, Kilmeade said, and he excitedly read a few out, after announcing that “the Democrats have embraced totalitarianism”.There followed a sort of whip-around, tick-the-boxes analysis of Biden’s presidency so far, featuring China, inflation, fentanyl, immigration and the government’s efforts to attract and retain women to engineering jobs.“It’s social engineering, not real engineering,” Kilmeade quipped.In sticking to his attacks on Biden, Kilmeade is on safe ground. But it isn’t going to excite a Fox News audience who Carlson has filled with a lust for blood.The appeal of Carlson wasn’t just that he didn’t like Biden. It was that there were loads of other things that upset him too: trans people, people of color, immigrants, many women, and the idea that white people may no longer rule the US with impunity.Perhaps Kilmeade just isn’t as angry as Carlson.He certainly doesn’t seem it. He isn’t as good a performer either – throughout the week the extent to which he was obviously reading the autocue became distracting, and viewers may have missed Carlson’s patented angry eyes, open-mouthed look.With Kilmeade, so far, proving unable or unwilling to plumb the same depths as Carlson, it’s hard to see him becoming a permanent replacement.Carlson’s great skill was giving the audience a wide variety of things to hate and fear. By contrast Kilmeade, with his comparatively milquetoast focus on Biden, is stuck in first gear. More

It was a short letter. John Roberts, chief justice of the US supreme court, was brief in his missive to Democratic senator Dick Durbin, who chairs the Senate judiciary committee. Citing “separation of powers concerns and the importance of preserving judicial independence”, Roberts declined to appear before the committee to discuss disturbing recent revelations of ethics violations at the court.Congress is meant to exert checks on judicial power – to investigate or even impeach judges who abuse their office or interpret the law in ways that violate its spirit, and to affirm that the elected branches will hold more sway over policy than the appointed one. But the chief justice’s show of indifference to congressional oversight authority reflects a new reality: that there are now effectively no checks on the power of the court – at least none that Democrats have the political will to use – and that the justices can be assured that they will face no repercussions even if they act in flagrant violation of ethical standards. It seems that they intend to.The committee summoned Roberts to testify because it appears that he’s not exactly running a tight ship. On 6 April, an investigation by ProPublica found that Justice Clarence Thomas had, over decades, accepted millions of dollars’ worth of private plane flights, “superyacht” trips and luxury vacations from the Texas billionaire and conservative megadonor Harlan Crow – and that, in alleged violation of federal ethics law, he had not disclosed almost any of it.Subsequent reporting revealed that Crow had in fact bought Thomas’s childhood home in Savannah, Georgia, where the justice’s elderly mother still lives, along with several plots on the block. After paying Thomas for the real estate, the billionaire cleared local blight, made significant renovations to the house and allowed Thomas’s mother to continue living there, rent-free.None of those transactions had been detailed on Thomas’s ethics forms, either. In addition to the soft influence Crow would have been able to buy with his extensive largesse, the billionaire’s generous gifts also seem to have created a direct conflict of interest for Justice Thomas: Crow’s firm had business before the US supreme court at least once, and Thomas did not recuse himself from the case.It is not Thomas’s first time in ethical hot water. He was famously accused of sexual harassment by multiple women, including Anita Hill, during his time in the Reagan administration as head of the employee-rights protection watchdog, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. He has been accused of having perjured himself in his subsequent testimony about his behavior toward Hill at his confirmation hearings.During his long tenure on the court, he has repeatedly had trouble filling out his financial disclosure forms correctly. Once, he failed to report more than half a million dollars in income that his wife, the conservative activist Ginni Thomas, received from the rightwing Heritage Foundation. He said at the time that he had misunderstood the forms. That was also his excuse regarding Harlan Crow’s largesse.Thomas claims that he was advised that he did not have to report “hospitality”. It is a loophole in the ethics code that is meant to relieve judges of having to report, say, barbecue dinners at the homes of their neighbors – not, as Thomas claims he took it to mean, luxury yacht tours of Indonesia.Although Thomas may be uniquely prolific in his alleged ethical violations, the problem isn’t unique to him. Politico revealed this week that just nine days after his confirmation to the US supreme court in April 2017, Justice Neil Gorsuch sold a log cabin in Colorado to Brian Duffy, the chief executive of the prominent law firm Greenberg Traurig. Before Gorsuch’s confirmation, the justice and the other co-owners of the home had tried for two years to sell it, without success.Since the sale, Duffy’s firm has had business before the court at least 22 times. Gorsuch did disclose the income from the sale on financial disclosure forms, but failed to mention that the buyer was a big shot at one of the country’s largest law firms who would regularly bring cases before Gorsuch at his new job.It’s certainly possible that Duffy simply liked the house, and that the convenient timing of his purchase so soon after Gorsuch’s confirmation to the court was a mere coincidence. And it seems reasonable to believe Thomas and Crow when they say that they are sincere friends, if less reasonable to believe Thomas when he claims that he misunderstood his disclosure obligations. But corruption need not be as vulgar and direct as a quid pro quo: it can be the subtle machinations of influence and sympathy that occur in these relationships, inflected both by money and by closeness, that lead the justices to see cases as they otherwise wouldn’t, or act in ways contrary to the integrity of their office and the interests of the law.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBad intent by the justices need not be present for the mere appearance of corruption to have a corrosive effect on the rule of law, and both Gorsuch and Thomas have allowed a quite severe appearance of corruption to attach itself to the court. Both have claimed that they are such intelligent and gifted legal minds that they should be given lifelong appointments of unparalleled power, and also that they have made innocent mistakes on legal forms that they are too dumb to understand.The claim strains credulity. What it looks like, to the American people who have to live under the laws that the supreme court shapes, is that Thomas has long been living lavishly on the dime of a rightwing billionaire who wants rightwing rulings, and that Gorsuch conveniently managed to sell a house he didn’t want at the precise moment when he became important enough to be worth bribing.The chief justice doesn’t seem very worried about this appearance of impropriety. In light of these alarming ethics concerns, Roberts’ curt rejection of the committee’s invitation to testify speaks to an evident indifference to ethical standards, or a contempt for the oversight powers of the nominally coequal branches. Ironically enough, his nonchalance has made the reality even more plain than it was before: the court will not police itself. The other branches need to show the justices their place.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

Fox News has finally broken ties with its most popular star, Tucker Carlson. His ousting has been bemoaned by some commentators, who have taken Carlson to be a rebellious anti-war populist, evading easy political characterization. But is it really so complicated to classify Carlson’s political ideology?In late February 2022, then Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson, in the face of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, began a pro-Russia monologue urging his audience to ask themselves the question: “Why do I hate Putin so much?” The gist of Carlson’s comments about Russia’s leader is that Putin should not be regarded as an enemy. Instead, the real enemies of America are those who call white Americans racist, those who teach so-called critical race theory in schools, business elites who ship jobs abroad, and those who imposed Covid lockdowns on the United States.In short, Carlson urged, the real enemies of America are internal – racial minorities, doctors and politicians, professors and educators, and large corporations who shift jobs to other countries. Carlson has been resolutely against US support for Ukraine. Insofar as Carlson has since that point gone to war, it has rather been against these supposed internal enemies.So, is Tucker Carlson hard to classify? On the one hand, he spreads tropes central to neo-Nazi propaganda, such as “white replacement” theory, suggesting that leftist elites seek to replace “legacy Americans” by foreign non-white immigrants. On the other hand, he denounces media, intellectual and political elites, as well as US intervention in Ukraine, platforming those who identify as the “anti-war left”, such as Jimmy Dore. How should we best understand this set of views? If Carlson has fascist sympathies, as do, quite inarguably, many of those who applaud him, how do we understand his firm stance against US military and financial support for Ukraine? Surely, historically speaking, fascism is not compatible with the isolationist position Carlson has urged.We should look to history as our guide here. But the history that best informs us in this case is not European history, but American history. Before the beginning of the second world war, all of America’s pro-fascist parties opposed US intervention on the side of its allies against Nazi Germany. Often, the opposition to the US supporting Britain against Nazi Germany was represented as “isolationism”.There were openly fascist organizations during this time, such as the German American Bund. Somewhat more ambiguous was the America First movement. As the historian Bradley Hart recounts, in a packed America First rally in Madison Square Garden in 1941, the Montana senator Burton K Wheeler denounced “jingoistic journalists and saber-rattling bankers” who were pushing the nation into war against Germany.While the agenda of some members of the America First movement at the time might have genuinely been pacifist, it’s quite clear that the main agenda was in fact support for Hitler. The America First movement had strong support from American fascist movements of various stripes. Its most prominent spokesperson, Charles Lindbergh, published the following words in support of his anti-war position in an essay entitled “Geography, Aviation, and Race” in Reader’s Digest in 1939:
… It is time to turn from our quarrels and to build our White ramparts again. This alliance with foreign races means nothing but death to us. It is our turn to guard our heritage from Mongol and Persian and Moor, before we become engulfed in a limitless foreign sea. Our civilization depends on a united strength among ourselves; on strength too great for foreign enemies to challenge; on a Western Wall of race and arms which can hold back either a Genghis Khan or the infiltration of inferior blood; on an English fleet, a German air force, a French army, an American nation, standing together as guardians of our common heritage, sharing strength, dividing influence.
It is simply inarguable fact that American racial fascism has a clear isolationist tradition, especially when the wars in question are against fascist opponents.But is Putin’s Russia fascist? In Russia, opposition politicians and journalists are regularly imprisoned or murdered. Russia has passed harsh laws against LGBTQ+ communities. Russia’s ideology is based on a militarized Russian nationalism, and its war against Ukraine is quite clearly genocidal in nature. Just as Nazi Germany represented itself as the defender of Christianity and Europe’s classic traditions against an existential threat posed by leftist atheist Jews, Putin represents Russia as the sole defender of the European Christian traditions against similar existential threats, such as “gender ideology”.Putin’s Russia is the international leader of the global far right, promoting ultra-nationalism, religious traditionalism and anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment across the world. If Russia is not fascist, then even Nazi Germany in the 1930s was not fascist. As the historian Timothy Snyder has urged, “we should finally say it”: Russia is fascist.Just as claims to be isolationists by American inter-war fascists were quite rightly taken to be expressions of support for Nazi ideology, there is good reason to take Carlson’s similar claims not as denunciations of American militarism but as expressions of support for Putinism, which he seems largely to share.What about Carlson’s scorn for the media, intellectual, financial and political elite, which he lacerates with regularity on his show? Here too there is little ambiguity. Carlson does not scorn all elites – after all, he himself was making as much as $20m a year from Fox news. He only targets certain elites. In the ideology of American fascism, the elites he targets are associated with liberal democracy and Jewish control.American fascists have always denounced the media, intellectuals and politicians. Carlson is careful to avoid explicitly antisemitic statements. But his show is the home of anti-Soros conspiracy theories. The antisemitism in his programming is clearly dog-whistled, and Jewish organizations have been among the first to cheer his ousting. Indeed, if Carlson did not regularly denounce media, intellectual, financial and political elites, regular targets of Nazi ideology, the case for calling him an American fascist would be much less clear.Nazi ideology supported strict gender roles – one of the central targets of the first mass Nazi book burning on 10 May 1933 was Magnus Hirschfeld’s collection of LGBTQ+ literature, the largest in the world and the largest documentation of gender fluidity (Hirschfeld coined the term “transsexual”). Carlson has used his platform to denounce transgender Americans as existential threats to Christianity. Fascists target cosmopolitan ways as existential threats to masculinity – a viewpoint Carlson also clearly shares.Finally, fascism praises violence against democracy, valorizing violent street mobs attacking democratic processes and institutions as martyrs to the nation. Here too Tucker Carlson fits perfectly into the tradition.It is not difficult at all to classify Tucker Carlson’s political ideology. He is an American fascist, only the latest in a long historical line. More

Florida Republicans are on the verge of passing new restrictions on groups that register voters, a move voting rights groups and experts say will make it harder for non-white Floridians to get on the rolls.The restrictions are part of a sweeping 96-page election bill the legislature is likely to send to Governor Ron DeSantis’s desk soon. The measure increases fines for third-party voter registration groups. It also shortens the amount of time the groups have to turn in any voter registration applications they collect from 14 days to 10. The bill makes it illegal for non-citizens and people convicted of certain felonies to “collect or handle” voter registration applications on behalf of third-party groups. Groups would also have to give each voter they register a receipt and be required to register themselves with the state ahead of each general election cycle. Under current law, they only have to register once and their registration remains effective indefinitely.Groups can now be fined $50,000 for each ineligible person they hire to do voter canvassing. They can also be fined $50 a day, up to $2,500, for each day late they turn in a voter registration form.Those restrictions are more likely to affect non-white Floridians. About one in 10 Black and Hispanic Floridians registered to vote using a third-party group, according to Daniel Smith, a political science professor at the University of Florida who closely studies voting rights. Non-white voters are five times more likely to register with a third-party group in the state than their white counterparts, “a fact likely not lost on those pushing the legislation”, Smith said.“This will likely be the final nail in the coffin for third-party groups to be able to register voters in Florida,” added Smith, who has served as an expert for groups challenging similar new restrictions.The bill passed the Florida senate on Wednesday and is expected to clear the Florida house later this week.The measures are the latest in a wave of new restrictions Florida Republicans and DeSantis, who is on the verge of a presidential bid, have enacted in a little over four years. After the 2020 election, the state passed sweeping legislation making it harder to request and return a mail-in ballot. Republicans have also made it nearly impossible for Floridians with a felony conviction to figure out if they are eligible to vote. Last year, DeSantis created the first of its kind state agency to prosecute election crimes.The new measure marks the second time since the 2020 election that Florida Republicans have raised the maximum fine for third-party voter registration organizations. In 2021, the legislature raised the maximum fine groups could face in a year from $1,000 to $50,000. The new bill would increase the maximum fine to $250,000.The higher fines will probably cause some groups to stop registering voters, said Cecile Scoon, the president of the Florida chapter of the League of Women Voters, which frequently hosts voter registration drives.“I think there are a lot of small organizations that don’t feel they can play in that league of fines,” said Scoon. “I think you’re going to get a lot of people that say, ‘hey we can’t handle this. We’re just a little church. We’re just a little chapter of a sorority. We don’t have the resources.”Republicans dispute that the bill will make it harder to vote.“This bill does not and will not hinder anyone’s right to vote, nor would I ever subscribe my name to something that could even remotely be concluded to be voter suppression. There is nothing in this bill that makes it harder for a lawfully registered voter to cast their ballot,” state senator Danny Burgess, a Republican who chairs the state elections committee, said during debate on the floor, according to the News Service of Florida.The office of election crimes and security, a new office created under DeSantis to target voter fraud, has targeted voter registration groups during its first year in operation. In 2022, the agency levied $41,600 in fines against voter registration groups, and made several criminal referrals.A spokesman for the Florida department of state, which oversees the agency, did not provide a detailed breakdown of the groups fined or their offenses.In an annual report filed with the Florida legislature, the office said that it had reviewed “a large number of complaints” involving voter registration applications that were turned in late.The new legislation would make it even harder for groups to turn in applications on time, giving them four fewer days to do so. That cut increases pressure on groups that take time to review the applications they collect to ensure that the information in them is accurate and that the voter is eligible.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhen a group hosts a registration drive, they will often get people signed up from many counties who pass by. But a law passed in 2021 makes it so voter registration groups have to turn in applications they collect to the county in which the voter resides – they previously could return it anywhere – making it even more difficult to turn in the forms on time.“You’re either gonna burn gas and find the time to drive an hour or two hours to wherever it’s located from wherever you are. And where your volunteer is. Or are you gonna put it in the mail and cross your fingers,” Scoon said.Burgess, the Republican pushing the bill, said that it would ensure voters can get on the rolls.“The reality is if a third-party voter registration organization fails to submit timely somebody’s voter registration, that voter is disenfranchised,” he said, according to the Tallahassee Democrat.The language in the bill barring non-citizens from participating in third-party voter registration groups will also make it harder to reach immigrant communities, said Andrea Mercado, the executive director of Florida Rising, a non-profit group.“When we do our work to help register new citizens, it makes sense to hire people who come from that community. Sometimes they’re on the path to getting their US citizenship, but they don’t have it yet,” she said. “That doesn’t mean that they’re not excellent at reaching out to other people in the Colombian community, in the Venezuelan community, in the Jamaican community and talking to them about why voting matters and why you should be registered to vote.”The bill also appears poised to cause even more confusion about voting eligibility for people with felony convictions. The measure would change the language on the card people in Florida receive after registering to confirm their addition to the voter rolls to say that possession of the card is not proof of eligibility to vote. Republicans are making the change after reporting revealed that 19 people with felony convictions who were charged with illegal voting last year had received voter registration cards in the mail and had not been warned they were ineligible to vote.The sweeping changes are the latest move to restrict voting rights for people with felonies after Floridians approved a constitutional amendment in 2018 expanding the right to vote to many people with criminal histories. After the measure passed, the Florida legislature passed a law that required those with felonies to pay off any outstanding debts before they can vote again. Florida has no centralized database where people can look up how much they owe, and the state has been backlogged reviewing the applications.“Changing the law and adding such a disclaimer to Florida’s voter ID cards is a direct admission by the state that it is unwilling to or incapable of creating a centralized voter system to determine voter eligibility,” the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, the main group that pushed the constitutional amendment in 2018, said in a statement.The bill is an alarming attack on voters in Florida, Mercado said. “It represents a really dangerous trend in Florida and across our country that is moving away from democracy,” she said. More

Drug-related deaths surged by 41% in San Francisco in the first quarter of this year – with one person dying of an accidental overdose every 10 hours, as the fentanyl crisis continues to ravage the US west coast.San Francisco saw 200 people die of overdoses in the past three months compared to 142 in the same months a year ago, according to reports by the city’s medical examiner.Those living on the streets were particularly hard hit – with twice as many unhoused people dying of overdoses between January and March compared to a year earlier.Fentanyl was detected in most of the deaths. The city’s minority populations were particularly hard hit. A third of the overdose victims were Black, despite Black people making up only 5% of the city’s population.“It’s a crying shame that a city as wealthy as San Francisco can’t get its act together to deal with overdose deaths,” said Dr Daniel Ciccarone, a professor of addiction medicine at the University of California San Francisco, who said the city’s increasingly punitive approach to handling drug users has only heightened their overdose risks.“We’re a politically divided city between the people who have a lot of money and want the streets swept and those who think a compassionate, science-based, health approach is appropriate,” he said.The spike in deaths began in December and was particularly apparent in January, when 82 deaths put the city’s overdose fatalities at an all time high. This came just after the city government closed a key outreach center, where drug users were using with medical supervision, and increased policing in San Francisco’s drug-plagued Tenderloin district.Last summer, voters recalled the city’s liberal district attorney and the San Francisco mayor London Breed appointed a new district attorney, Brooke Jenkins, who vowed to take a law-and-order approach to the problem and has since stepped up arrests of drug dealers.Then in December, Breed closed the Tenderloin Center, a facility designed to provide daytime shelter for the unhoused, along with housing referrals, food, addiction treatment and health services. The center had unofficially allowed drug use in a supervised outside area. Attendants used Narcan to reverse more than 330 opiate overdoses in the 11 months the center was open, according to city data.The center, which served more than 400 people daily, was opposed by some in the community, who said it was drawing drug users to the already-impacted neighborhood.Breed said in December she had been disappointed by the low number of visitors at the center who ultimately accepted help to get off of drugs. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, fewer than 1% of visits resulted in someone getting connected to addiction treatment services.Since closing the center, Breed has sought $25m to increase police overtime with the priority of arresting drug dealers.“We are dealing with multiple serious public safety challenges locally, from a fentanyl-driven overdose epidemic, open-air drug dealing, property crime in our residential and commercial neighborhoods, increasing gun violence and prejudice-fueled incidents,” she said in a March letter seeking more federal help in policing and prosecuting cases.Last week, the California governor, Gavin Newsom, promised to send in resources and personnel from the national guard and the California highway patrol to bolster policing.Gary McCoy of HealthRIGHT 360, the nonprofit that ran the drug overdose prevention portion of the Tenderloin Center, said the government’s law-enforcement focused approach is backfiring and is instead pushing drug users into isolation, where they are more at risk of overdose deaths.“Something that has been sold to folks as a strategy that is going to work and help tackle the overdose crisis is having the exact opposite effect,” said McCoy, adding that the police tactics create dangers that go beyond the fact that health officials no longer have the chance to witness and reverse overdoses at the Tenderloin Center.“When people don’t have a safe place to go, when they’re using in doorways and public places and they’re afraid of getting caught and put in jail, they tend to rush and use more substance,” he said. “And when they rush, there’s a higher risk of overdose.”Ciccarone said other safe use centers around the world, including one in Melbourne Australia that opened five years ago, have shown to reduce overdoses, bring drug use off the streets and help get addicts into treatment. But he cautioned it takes far longer than 11 months to see the results.“People expected too much from it too soon,” he said of San Francisco’s center. “It gave the outward appearance that people were congregating to consume drugs. But here we have it closed for three months and the first three months show a tremendous rise in overdose deaths.”The city’s supervisors have pushed to replace the Tenderloin Center, which was designed as a temporary measure, with 12 smaller “wellness hubs” around the city. These would provide health and shelter services, as well allowing supervised drug use to prevent overdose deaths.But last summer, Newsom vetoed legislation that would have allowed supervised drug use centers in three California cities, including San Francisco. And the plan for the wellness hubs stalled, after San Francisco’s city attorney raised the objection that the city could wind up bearing significant legal liability.Breed has said she supports the wellness hubs.“These are difficult situations because this involves legal advice, significant criminal liability which we cannot just ignore,” said the mayor, according to KTVU news. Nonprofits are now seeking a way to fund the overdose prevention portions of their operations without city funding.In a statement, the San Francisco Department of Health (SFDPH) said it has undertaken a host of measures to prevent overdoses, including adding hundreds of new beds for addiction recovery treatment, expanding neighborhood street care teams and making Narcan and medication-assisted addiction treatment options more available.“SFDPH recognizes that any overdose death is one too many and mourns the loss of each of these lives,” the department said. It added the department is also looking for legal ways to open supervised use clinics. “These deaths drive us to find more ways to prevent overdoses and reduce the harms caused by fentanyl.”Breed and the new district attorney have touted increased arrests and jail time for drug dealers. In a April blog post, the mayor said police made 162 arrests for drug possession for sales in the last three months of 2022, an 80% increase, and are seizing dozens of kilograms of narcotics.“These enforcement actions will continue, while our street outreach teams continue to go out and offer services and treatment,” wrote Breed.But Alex Kral, an epidemiologist at the independent nonprofit research institute RTI International, who led an evaluation of the Tenderloin Center, said the drug dealing arrests actually make the drug supply more dangerous by forcing users to go to people they don’t know for their drug supply and forcing users into hiding.“You’re making an unpredictable drug market even more unpredictable,” he said.“We’ve spent the last 50 years trying to arrest our way out of this and it’s clearly not working. The conditions on the streets are getting worse, the drugs are becoming more dangerous and the health of the community is much, much worse with increased policing.”According to San Francisco supervisor Hillary Ronen, who has championed the idea of wellness hubs, the city has failed to come up with any new tactics to deal with a “horrific crisis”.“We closed the Tenderloin Center with no plan in place to replace it,” she said. “Fentanyl is corrupting every part of the drug supply and all the social problems that underlie the drug addiction crisis continue – widespread poverty, trauma with no access to mental health care, inequality, and homelessness.”“What did we expect to happen?” More

Joe Biden finally launched his much anticipated re-election bid for 2024 this week. For the next year, news networks will cover extensively his campaign, and those of candidates running against him, but there will be an interesting shift in who exactly will be leading that coverage. In surprise news anchor exits, Tucker Carlson was fired from Fox News and Don Lemon from CNN, and there are rumours that Carlson might even run for president himself.
Jonathan Freedland is joined by the political analyst and pollster Cornell Belcher to discuss the headlines from a big week in US politics

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