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      Public Workers Joined Ring That Stole IDs of Homeless People, D.A. Says

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      Eighteen people, including nine New York City public employees, were charged with joining a conspiracy that made ghost guns and defrauded a state Covid relief program.Eighteen people, including nine public employees, engaged in a broad criminal conspiracy that included the manufacture of ghost guns, burglary and defrauding a state pandemic relief program, according to four indictments filed Thursday by the Manhattan district attorney.The defendants include five employees of New York City’s Department of Homeless Services, a letter carrier for the U.S. Postal Service, a worker for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, an employee of the New York City Housing Authority and a school safety police officer.The Homeless Services workers were involved in a scheme to steal the personal information of homeless people to file for fraudulent benefits, the district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, said.“This kind of conduct by our public servants is unacceptable and, we allege, criminal,” Mr. Bragg said at a news conference on Thursday.The investigation began in 2022 with suspicions that two people were using 3-D printers to manufacture ghost guns — untraceable firearms that can be assembled at home — in an apartment in the East Village. Evidence uncovered after the execution of a search warrant confirmed that Craig Freeman, 56, and another defendant had used eBay and Amazon to purchase machines and materials to build illegal guns in their homes. Both were employees of the Barbara Kleiman homeless shelter in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn.In the summer of 2022, Mr. Freeman got a text message from a co-defendant saying, “We can make some serious bank.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Unbound: An Autocrat in Waiting?

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      More from our inbox:The Inhumanity of HomelessnessViolence Against InmatesCommunity CompostingThe extreme policy plans and ideas of Donald J. Trump and his advisers would have a greater prospect of becoming reality if he were to win a second term.Doug Mills/The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Second Term Could Unleash Darker Trump” (front page, Dec. 5):As the basic parameters of a second Trump presidency come into focus, I find myself growing increasingly fearful. As the article presents in detail, Donald Trump, if re-elected, could transform the American government into something close to a dictatorship.Because I am an old white guy, it seems unlikely that I would be targeted and jailed or condemned to one of his camps. But if you are a high-profile Democrat, a person of color, an undocumented immigrant or someone who has spoken out against him, he may very well have his sights on you.Mr. Trump must not be underestimated, and his goals should be taken both literally and seriously. The election in 2024 may very well be our last chance to stop him.Richard WinchellSt. Charles, Ill.To the Editor:A second Trump presidency not only would be more radical, but also seems inevitable. Donald Trump and his handlers have learned to exploit every weakness in our democratic system of government.Our founders must have assumed that those who gravitate to government service would essentially be people of good faith, and the rotten apples would be winnowed by our system of checks and balances. But here we are less than a year away from the election, and while Mr. Trump’s transgressions have drawn 91 criminal charges, there has been no justice yet.He has proved to have a serpentine instinct to capitalize on weak links ranging from the Electoral College to our justice system, gathering strength every time he flouts the rule of law.Robert HagelsteinPalm Beach Gardens, Fla.To the Editor:Re “Trump Wants Voters to See Biden as a Threat” (news article, Dec. 4):While former President Donald Trump is notorious for ascribing to others deficiencies that he himself manifests constantly, his latest exercise in projection — calling President Biden “the destroyer of American democracy” — should be dismissed as ludicrous if the issue were not so crucial to the future direction of our country.The list of Mr. Trump’s actions that subvert basic democratic norms makes it clear that he is the potential threat to democracy if he is elected to a second term.One can only hope that the more thoughtful of his devoted followers will finally understand the danger of electing someone to lead the country who either misunderstands the concept of democracy or is willing to undermine it to further his own ambitions.Patricia FlahertyDuxbury, Mass.To the Editor:Re “Trump Has a Master Plan for Destroying the ‘Deep State,’” by Donald P. Moynihan (Opinion guest essay, Dec. 2):Reading Professor Moynihan’s essay reinforced a fear that I have had since the Jan. 6 insurrection.Donald Trump just might win the next presidential election. But although I worry about what he would do to our government and our society while in office, there is another fear that haunts me.What would happen when his term ends? I believe that he would not step down. He would claim that he is entitled to stay on as president regardless of the results of the next election. I think he would assert his right to be in power for the rest of his life. And he has enough supporters that his coup might work.Judy HochbergStoughton, Mass.The Inhumanity of HomelessnessKhena Minor, who works for Houston’s Coalition for the Homeless, talks to Joe Cavazos, who has been homeless for six months.To the Editor:Re “Houston Shows How to Tackle Homelessness,” by Nicholas Kristof (column, “How America Heals” series, Nov. 26):Mr. Kristof’s column was both sobering and encouraging. As an I.C.U. nurse working during the cold winter months, I regularly see the inhumanity of relegating our most vulnerable citizens to the dangers and indignities of life on the streets.For those who don’t see this side of life, here are some examples of patients I’ve cared for: a patient found outside near death whose body temperature was 71 degrees, patients whose feet or hands are black and necrotic from frostbite, patients with severe burns all over their body because their makeshift heater ignited their tent, or patients with carbon monoxide poisoning from a camp stove used in their tent to try to keep warm.To the political and social leaders of Oregon, enough hand-wringing and placing blame on drugs, alcohol or mental health alone. Mr. Kristof’s statistics on Oregon’s failure to effectively organize and follow through on housing help are pretty damning.Let’s move past good intentions and follow Houston’s example of what works. I dream of a day when I won’t see patients come into my care frostbitten, burned or poisoned as they try to survive on the streets.Grace LownsberyWilsonville, Ore.Violence Against InmatesThe Federal Correctional Institution in Tucson, Ariz., where Derek Chauvin was stabbed.Alyssa Schukar for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “The Stabbing of Chauvin Is the Latest Failure to Protect High-Profile Inmates” (news article, Nov. 26):You link the stabbing of Derek Chauvin, the former police officer convicted of murdering George Floyd, to the special dangers that certain inmates face by virtue of their notoriety.The truth is that violence against prison inmates, no matter their level of fame, is a standard feature of the American mass incarceration system. Studies over an 18-year span show that deaths in state and federal prisons increased by 42 percent, even as absolute numbers of people imprisoned fell (a decarceration trend that was reversed in 2022). By the studies’ final year, deaths caused by homicide or suicide were at their highest levels ever recorded.The most callous among us might conclude that prison is a punishment and therefore rightfully harsh by design. But even the most staunch supporters might reconsider when faced with an often overlooked reality. In the federal prison system, almost 70 percent of defendants in cases from 2022 were held in pretrial detention — innocent until proven guilty, and already condemned to levels of violence that don’t distinguish by levels of fame.Anthony EnriquezNew YorkThe writer is vice president, U.S. advocacy and litigation, at Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights.Community CompostingSandy Nurse, a city councilwoman who chairs the Sanitation Committee, says that if the cuts go forward, 198 out of 266 food-scrap drop-off sites will close.  Jade Doskow for The New York TimesTo the Editor:“Composting’s Community of ‘True Believers’ Jilted as a Curbside Program Grows” (news article, Dec. 2) describes how devastating Mayor Eric Adams’s budget cuts will be to community compost organizations. But it also perpetuates the idea that community-scale composting is unnecessary with the rollout of the city’s curbside collection program.With the lack of trust in recycling, we need solutions that create many more true believers, such as those at the New York City Housing Authority, where residents drop off food scraps in return for fresh healthy vegetables.The city also needs good-quality compost to properly maintain the millions of dollars of green infrastructure that it has recently installed. When compost is applied to street trees, rain gardens, parks and community gardens, it makes the soil and plants healthier, reduces flooding and air pollution, provides summer cooling, and makes the city greener and cleaner.Instead of cutting community-scale composting, the city should be trying to increase the number of small-scale compost sites to enable a substantial percentage of our food scraps and yard waste to be transformed into a valuable neighborhood resource.Clare MiflinBrooklynThe writer is executive director of the Center for Zero Waste Design. More

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      Christine Quinn Fights for Migrants and the Homeless. Could It Destroy Her Dream?

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      Christine C. Quinn was impatient. The leader of New York City’s largest provider of shelter for homeless families with children, she peered over her fuchsia reading glasses at her team, assembled in a conference room, and rattled off a list of instructions.Listen to This ArticleListen to this story in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.It was a few weeks after she had helped persuade the City Council to pass some of the most consequential legislation on the worst homelessness crisis in New York City’s history, and a few days before Mayor Eric Adams would veto those bills.Ms. Quinn, the former City Council speaker, directed one of her staff members to offer to brief a deputy mayor on the legislation. She named a handful of journalists who might write more about the bills, a move that she knew would frustrate City Hall’s press office.She rolled her eyes at the mention of one advocacy group she considered especially ponderous, joking it would take months to release new data. And she snapped her fingers at no one in particular as she asked whether a meeting scheduled for the next day could be moved up to that afternoon, or even sooner.“I miss being able to pick up the phone and say, ‘Do this, do it now, get it done,’” she said later.It only takes a few minutes in Ms. Quinn’s presence to understand that she is itching to return to the action and authority of elected office.Once the city’s second-most powerful politician, Ms. Quinn is now a high-profile advocate on one of the most divisive issues in New York City — one that could threaten her chances with voters in the future.As protests against waves of migrants coming into the city grow louder and larger, and New York’s Democrats cannot seem to settle on a path forward, the city’s shelter population has exploded to over 100,000 people — all while affordable housing lags pitifully behind demand.Ms. Quinn has jumped into the fray.Over the past few months, she helped set the stage for the most contentious fight yet between the Council and Mr. Adams, after leading an effort to secure enough votes for the Council to override the mayor’s opposition to the bills.The package of bills that she helped create is part of a push to help free up space in shelters for asylum seekers. The bills will reduce the time homeless people need to wait to look for permanent housing after they enter a shelter, make more homeless people eligible for vouchers that help them pay rent for permanent housing and provide vouchers for those at risk of being evicted.Ms. Quinn, 57, has spent the last eight years using her knowledge of local politics to build an advocacy arm for Win, the shelter provider, and the organization has since become a frequent thorn in the mayor’s side — even as it receives most of its annual funding through contracts with the city.She may no longer run the Council, but she has become a kind of elder stateswoman on homelessness and housing for an especially green group of legislators.For a while after she lost the Democratic primary for mayor in 2013, it was weird to come back to City Hall, Ms. Quinn said. But these days, she embraces the Council’s security guard and janitor on her way into the building.Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesThough Ms. Quinn is firmly back in the mix of New York politics, there is only so much an advocate can do from the outside. The kind of power she really wants is still to be found elsewhere.Ms. Quinn was once considered the person most likely to become the city’s first female and first openly gay mayor. That expectation evaporated in 2013 amid a disastrous Democratic primary in which she went from front-runner to also-ran. For years afterward, she operated largely behind the scenes.Now, she is not coy about still wanting to be mayor one day.That aspiration has created a conundrum for Ms. Quinn: The better she is at expanding Win’s influence, the more she risks alienating the New Yorkers who increasingly view the influx of migrants as a strain on the city and say officials have done enough for them.“Quinn is trying to have a really hard conversation with New Yorkers,” said Christina Greer, a professor of political science at Fordham University. “She’s chosen an issue that is of great import but doesn’t really do her any favors” if she wants to run for any elected office in New York.Even as she says she has no plans to run in a primary against Mr. Adams, she has emerged as a prominent foil, challenging his warnings that the migrant crisis will “destroy” New York and protesting his push to weaken the city’s right-to-shelter law and his declaration that migrant families might be moved into mass shelters.She likes to tell a story about mothers at a Win shelter pooling their extra clothes to donate to migrants as proof that vulnerable families will not be pitted against each other.But the city’s twin homelessness and migrant crises defy such neat packaging.As she looks ahead, Ms. Quinn says she knows full well that these issues are stubborn, at the very least. Making a real dent in homelessness — to say nothing of the migrant crisis — would take a decade or more, Ms. Quinn says, a challenge no mayor can credibly promise to solve in two terms.She knows that voters are not always forgiving of her perceived stumbles. And she is not surprised that some regard her as a politician playing at advocacy before she runs again.For now, Ms. Quinn insists she is unconcerned.“When are you really going to use your capital, when are you really going to do something? In the next job?” she said. “You know, I thought I was going to get the next job. I didn’t.”Crossroads of powerWin, the nation’s largest provider of shelter for homeless families with children, operated shelters but did not have an advocacy arm when Ms. Quinn became its chief executive in 2015. She quickly set about changing that.Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesThe George Washington statue in the white marble lobby of City Hall stands at a crossroads of power.To the right are the Council’s offices, where Ms. Quinn long made her mark on the city.To the left is the mayor’s office, where she assumed she was heading as 2013 drew closer.That race was supposed to be Ms. Quinn’s coronation, as Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg was leaving an open seat for a Democrat to seize. By then, Ms. Quinn had earned a reputation as a pragmatic speaker who vastly expanded the Council’s influence, passing legislation in part by her sheer force of will, including the occasional burst of straight-up yelling.In the primary’s final stretch, her opponents cast her as the second coming of Mr. Bloomberg, a moderate at a moment that demanded something more radical. In what ended up being a fatal blow to her chances, Ms. Quinn had paved the way for Mr. Bloomberg to run a third time by helping overturn the city’s term limits law, a move that voters had soured on.To some, Ms. Quinn seemed to be saying she should be mayor simply because she really, really wanted to be.She finished third, losing to Bill de Blasio.Ms. Quinn spent the first few months of 2014 willing herself to leave her Chelsea apartment.After finishing a distant third in the primary, Ms. Quinn endorsed Bill de Blasio, the winner. She said she spent the next few months struggling to get out of bed.Ozier Muhammad/The New York TimesEventually, after a stint working as a special adviser for Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and a fellowship at Harvard, Ms. Quinn got a call from a headhunter about Win. Part of it felt like a homecoming. She had spent the early part of her career as a tenant organizer, and, as speaker, she successfully sued Mr. Bloomberg’s administration over its push to limit eligibility for shelter spots and made it easier for tenants to sue their landlords.When she took over in 2015, she quickly began trying to shift the public’s perception of homelessness. New Yorkers knew they were seeing mentally ill people on the streets, but they often did not realize that the majority of the city’s homeless population is made up of families with children, many of whom have 9-to-5 jobs.But there was no way to get people to listen without changing something about Win, which ran shelters but did not advocate on behalf of homeless families.Ms. Quinn began training her staff to become political activists. They have distributed iPads and other devices to 1,600 homeless students learning remotely and created a legal clinic to help migrants apply for asylum.Under her direction, Win — which employs 1,000 people with an annual budget of about $150 million — added seven new shelters and now operates 14. They serve about 7,000 people nightly, and, recently, over 270 families seeking asylum, including about 700 children. Ms. Quinn makes $424,000 a year, roughly triple what she made as speaker.While she has found her way back to a version of a life she never wanted to leave, some of her former peers or rivals have struggled to do the same. Several — Mr. de Blasio, Mr. Bloomberg, and her two successors as speaker — have run for other offices they did not win. Some of her male peers fell in sexual misconduct scandals, including Anthony Weiner, who helped topple Ms. Quinn in 2013.Ms. Quinn may be the only one of the bunch who still has a job that requires telling people things they do not want to hear, over and over.She is used to that.Nice until it wasn’tMs. Quinn visited children living at the Shirley Chisholm Family Residence, a new Win shelter in Park Slope that drew some opposition from local residents.Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesSome years ago, Ms. Quinn and an aide walked to the back of a restaurant and found James Gandolfini, the star of “The Sopranos,” waiting for them. He was unhappy. Ms. Quinn had been pushing to open a sanitation department garage in his TriBeCa neighborhood.Mr. Gandolfini, who died in 2013, told her if she did not reconsider, he was prepared to blanket TriBeCa with fliers criticizing her. She told him to do what he needed to do.“It was a nice conversation until it wasn’t,” Ms. Quinn recalled. “You can’t have a city that calls itself fair and equitable if only some parts of the city are doing their part.”That is particularly true when you are building homeless shelters in neighborhoods where many residents do not want them.Consider Win’s newest shelter, set to serve about 200 families on Staten Island.At a 2019 town hall, Ms. Quinn sought to explain that Staten Island needed a shelter in part so that the borough’s many homeless families could remain close to their children’s public schools. Residents appeared unmoved, and Ms. Quinn was greeted by “an aggressively pissed off” group, she recalled.Afterward, The Staten Island Advance published an opinion piece dismissing her chances amid rumors of another run: “Christine Quinn for mayor? Not after homeless shelter debacle.”It is a change for Ms. Quinn, who spent years fending off criticism from progressives who found her too cozy with Mr. Bloomberg and his conservative allies. Now, she is going up against a highly passionate force that is skeptical of new shelters. While the migrant crisis has prompted a reshaping of that movement to include more Democrats, it has been led by Republican politicians and advocates.Protesters rallied against a facility housing migrants on Staten Island in August. Demonstrations against migrant shelters have become larger in recent months.Stephanie Keith for The New York TimesRepresentative Nicole Malliotakis, a Republican, said Staten Islanders she represents are fed up with Democrats like Ms. Quinn “building shelter after shelter in communities that don’t want them” — particularly for migrants.But even some who might have been sympathetic to Ms. Quinn say they were turned off by the debate over the Win shelter, set to open later this year in an area that tends to vote Democratic.“You don’t poke a stick in the eye of a potentially favorable community,” said Michael Harwood, a member of the St. George Civic Association.Mr. Harwood said Win did not communicate effectively with residents about the impact of the shelter and noted that Ms. Quinn had opposed a new shelter in her own Manhattan district when she was speaker.Ms. Quinn says she has a new calculus for decision making.She acknowledges that some of her choices as speaker were made more because of future ambitions rather than the right policy, and she regrets it.So even as she weighs whether and how to return to elected office, she says she is focused on immediate goals: moving more families into permanent housing faster, raising more private money, making Win into a top developer of affordable housing with services for formerly homeless families — and continuing to shape city policy.But it does not always feel like enough.She recently remembered something that Judith S. Kaye, the late chief judge of New York State, once told her: She would have paid a million dollars to keep her job for just five more minutes.It was a joke, sort of. But it is how Ms. Quinn feels about being speaker, and the reason she is given to daydreaming about how much more she could accomplish on homelessness, the migrant crisis and housing if she ran the city one day.The idea of actually getting elected on the agenda of addressing those crises might seem like a bit of a fantasy.But Ms. Quinn believes, still, that there is a first time for everything in New York City politics.“In a way, it would be the greatest issue for a mayor to take on,” she said. “If you solve the unsolvable, you get credit.”Audio produced by More

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      Mayor Adams Turns His Back on Immigrants and New York’s Legacy

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      Since last year, tens of thousands of asylum seekers have arrived in New York City from the southern border and around the world, seeking a better life in a place that has welcomed generations of immigrants since its founding.What many of those migrants have found instead is a tepid welcome amid a housing crisis that has left the city barely equipped to offer them more than a meal in the hotels used to house a booming homeless population. They are lucky if they get a bed.In recent days, the slapdash system the city has built to address the crisis has broken down completely, leaving migrants sleeping on Midtown streets. The city says there is no more room for them, but advocates say it needs to try harder.And on Sunday, The Times reported that a shady contractor tapped by New York’s mayor, Eric Adams, to send asylum seekers upstate and provide them with services harassed them instead. The city’s taxpayers are footing the bill for this abuse, to the tune of $432 million. The curiously large, no-bid contract with DocGo, a medical services company, should never have been signed and needs to be terminated.It’s true, as Mr. Adams has repeatedly said, that this crisis is a national issue and requires action from the White House and Congress. Cities like New York, which has more than 100,000 people living in shelters, cannot be expected to welcome asylum seekers on their own. More than 90,000 migrants have arrived in New York City over the past year, many as part of a political stunt by Texas, Florida and Arizona. Though immigrants strengthen the U.S. economy and are a vital part of the fabric of the democracy, local governments can’t simply absorb tens of thousands of people without help — especially for housing — and their taxpayers, in New York and elsewhere, shouldn’t be expected to foot the bill.Still, there is something particularly disappointing about New York City’s official response to the asylum seekers, unfolding under the gaze of the Statue of Liberty in the harbor. Nearly four in 10 city residents were born outside the United States. Waves of immigrants — Dutch, Irish, Italian, Jewish, Chinese, Latino and Afro-Caribbean immigrants, along with many others — helped build this city. So did millions of Black Americans who chased dreams in the city after fleeing the tyranny of the Jim Crow South.That rich legacy doesn’t seem to be on Mr. Adams’s mind. Since the moment the migrants began showing up last spring, he has made clear he wants little to do with the practical or humanitarian issues their arrival has raised. The mayor has provided basic services for the migrants, and rightly so. But at every turn, he has done so grudgingly.Michael M. Santiago/Getty ImagesMr. Adams has complained loudly that the immigrants were a “burden” on the city’s resources. His administration shut down a welcome center at the Port Authority bus terminal where volunteers had for months helped connect asylum seekers to services.He said the migrants would cost the city $4.3 billion over the next two fiscal years, a figure New York’s nonpartisan budget watchdog said is probably $1.2 billion too high. He tried to undo a 1981 court decree that requires the city to provide shelter to anyone who needs it.He erected giant tents — now dismantled — to house the migrants in remote areas of the city inaccessible to public transit, then made it exceedingly difficult for nonprofit groups to provide critical services to this vulnerable population, like legal assistance and even help navigating the city and its laws. Such services could help migrants acclimate to life in New York City and could ease complaints from neighbors of the hotels the city is using to house many migrants.The Adams administration has been warehousing asylum seekers instead of putting the country’s largest municipal government to work helping them build new lives, in New York or wherever else they may want to go. This summer the Adams administration printed fliers to dissuade migrants from seeking new lives in New York, leaflets that sum up the mayor’s overall approach and betray the promise and spirit of New York as a home for people from around the world.New York’s leaders are supposed to be different. The city’s voters didn’t intend to elect a mayor who acted like Greg Abbott, the Texas governor who sent migrants to cities across the country, including New York. Nor did they vote for someone like Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, the presidential candidate who used asylum seekers for political sport, flying them to the resort island of Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts at taxpayer expense just to own the libs.New York can do better.First, it seems clear that Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York needs to step in and demonstrate the concern lacking from City Hall. It may be in the best interest of both taxpayers and the asylum seekers for the governor to name an expert manager to oversee the crisis, which is clearly too much for the mayor to handle — a kind of New York asylum czar.That wouldn’t free Mr. Adams to simply throw up his hands and walk away from the obligations the city has to these tens of thousands of people, whether they turn out to be temporary guests or newly minted New Yorkers.The mayor could make a big difference quickly by welcoming established nonprofit groups — not no-bid profiteers — to provide critical services where migrants are being housed. Those services should include English-language classes, as well as basic job certification courses to help asylum seekers find work.Despite Mr. Adams’s cold approach, many nonprofits and private volunteers and some municipal workers are engaged in this humanitarian work. In one small example, Dr. Theodore G. Long, a senior vice president at the city’s public hospital system, noticed many meals at the facilities used to house migrants weren’t being eaten, so he conducted a survey to find out why. The results? “We swapped out roast beef and did Italian food instead,” he told me. “I figured, let’s ask people what they want instead of guessing.”That’s the kind of welcome a city of immigrants provides.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Ron DeSantis Doesn’t Know Whether He’s Coming or Going

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      Gail Collins: Bret, about Ron DeSantis. Last week, I criticized him for weenie stuff like big book advances and questionable road repair materials. At the time, I definitely felt like I was carping.Then his people shared an ad on L.G.B.T.Q. issues that … wow.Bret Stephens: “Wow” just about covers it.Gail: It began with a clip of Donald Trump defending gay rights in days of yore, which was very clearly supposed to make viewers … hate Trump. Followed by praise for Florida laws DeSantis signed that “literally threaten trans existence.” Followed by a super-duper weird montage showing men flexing muscles, Brad Pitt in Trojan-warrior garb and Governor Ron with lightning flashes coming out of his eyes.Pete Buttigieg, who is President Biden’s secretary of transportation and one of the best-known gay figures in politics, rightly pointed out “the strangeness of trying to prove your manhood by putting up a video that splices images of you in between oiled-up, shirtless bodybuilders.”Any thoughts?Bret: I guess my main takeaway is that DeSantis isn’t going to be the next president. He makes Trump seem tolerant, Ted Cruz seem likable, Mitch McConnell seem moderate, Lauren Boebert seem mature and Rick Santorum seem cool. Not what I would have expected out of the Florida governor six months ago, but here’s where I confess: You were right about him, and I was wrong.Gail: My other takeaway is that Republicans are focusing more on L.G.B.T.Q. issues now that they’ve come to understand that attacking abortion isn’t a national winner — or even a state winner in most places.In the long run, stomping on gay rights isn’t going to do it either, because such a huge number of people — even conservative Republicans — have friends, family, colleagues who are gay. May take a while to come to grips with that, but once you realize someone you care about is gay, the idea of persecuting them presumably seems way less attractive.Just recalling how my conservative Catholic mother wound up, in old age, riding on a float in Cincinnati’s Gay Pride parade.Bret: As you mentioned last year in that wonderful column you wrote about Allen Ginsberg.Gay bashing is morally intolerable as well as politically inept. But a lot of people — including many Democrats and independents — have honest and serious concerns about some aspects of the trans issue, especially as it concerns the integrity of women’s sports, the morality of drastic medical interventions in teenagers and the anti-scientific denial of basic biology when it comes to questions of sex. I also detest terms like “bodies with vaginas” as a substitute for “women.” It isn’t a sensitive or inclusive use of language; it’s misogynistic and Orwellian.DeSantis could have addressed these issues in a sober and nuanced way. Instead, he went full Trojan, and I suspect his campaign will meet a similar fate to Troy’s.Gail: Full Trojan? Just like Brad Pitt in that ad!Bret: Switching topics, Gail, can we talk about homelessness? The problem just keeps getting worse, particularly out west, and it’s doing real damage to urban life. Your thoughts on what does and does not work?Gail: What works is pretty simple: more housing and outreach for the mentally ill. Both are difficult, of course, ranging from pretty darned to stupendously.Bret: What also works are ordinances forbidding “camping” on public lands so that homeless people are required to use shelter beds, which some liberal judges have blocked cities from doing. One of the problems of our public discussion of the issue is that we treat homelessness as a problem of the homeless only. It’s also a public safety issue and a quality-of-life issue. People ought to have a right to walk down urban sidewalks that haven’t been turned into tent cities and open-air toilets.Gail: New York is still dealing with a flood of new migrants, mainly from Latin America, who have been coming in huge numbers for more than a year. Most of them are ambitious and hopeful, and they could be a great shot to our local economy — if they had permanent places to stay.Bret: Completely agree. I also think the migrant problem is qualitatively different from the kind of homelessness issues that cities like San Francisco or Portland, Ore., are experiencing. Migrants are struggling with poverty but not, generally, mental health or drug-dependency issues. What migrants typically need is a room and a job.Gail: Eric Adams, the mayor of New York, has talked about finding some of them homes in the suburbs, where there’s obviously more room and housing prices are sometimes a lot lower. Said suburbs rose up in rage to stop an incursion of needy people. It’s so irritating, although I have to admit that my liberal Manhattan neighborhood — which has plenty of programs for the homeless — consistently rebels against talk of any big new housing projects for any income group.Your turn.Bret: I’m skeptical of the theory that we could solve the crisis just by building a lot more housing. First, because we can’t build quickly and cheaply enough to keep up with the growing number of homeless people. Second, because even when the homeless are housed, they often fall back into the kinds of behaviors that ultimately lead them to return to the streets.My own view is that people living on the street should be required to go into shelters, which can be built much more quickly and cheaply than regular housing, be required to get mental health screenings and be required to be treated if they have drug or alcohol dependencies.Gail: Well, if the mental health treatments were great, that might be an argument. But they often aren’t — just because there’s a terrific shortage of personnel.And the shelters are no picnic either. A lot of the people you see on the street have been, at one time or another, threatened by a mentally troubled co-resident, gotten into a fight as a result of shared emotional problems or in some other way come to feel that living on the street is safer.Bret: The other big story from last week, Gail, is the ruling by a federal judge that forbade the Biden administration to work with social media companies to remove content it didn’t like, mainly connected to alleged Covid misinformation. What the administration was doing seems to me like a serious infringement on people’s freedom of speech, but I’d like to know your view.Gail: Gee, I was under the impression one of the jobs of the executive branch was to make sure people were getting the right information about health issues. And it’s not as if the Biden folks marched in and removed a bunch of posts themselves. Conferring with the social media companies seems like something they ought to do.Bret: One good way of thinking about the issue is putting the shoe on the other foot. For instance, we now know that the Steele dossier was malicious partisan misinformation, secretly and illicitly paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, and that some of its most salacious allegations, like the pee-tape stuff, were false. How would you react if you had learned that the Trump administration had been putting heavy pressure on executives at MSNBC to forbid Rachel Maddow from ever mentioning it back when she had her show?Gail: Hey, it’s hot and humid outside. No fair trying to take me down the Hillary Clinton road. Look — the whole world changed with the advent of social media. If you’ve got influencers with millions of followers warning that, say, giving milk to babies is dangerous, you’ve got to do something more than issue a press release.Bret: I’m pretty sure we could get the word out that milk is generally fine for babies or vaccines are generally safe without setting a precedent that the federal government can work with Big Tech to censor individual speech.Gail: Of course I agree with you about freedom of expression. But in the process of protecting it, it’s natural to argue about specific cases with particular details. We will pursue this again soon. Well, forever probably.But let me be boring for a second and ask you about Congress. Just got through that deficit crisis, and another one will be coming around the bend this summer. What’s your long-term advice? Spend less? Tax more? Ignore the whole thing and figure it’ll work out somehow like it always does?Bret: My advice: Talk less, smile more. Seriously, what we need from Congress and the president is to get through the next 18 months without another manufactured domestic crisis. Between the war in Ukraine, Iran’s creeping nuclearization and China’s saber-rattling over Taiwan, we have more than enough to worry about abroad.Gail: Hmm. One writer’s manufactured domestic crisis is maybe another’s reasonable disagreement. And while Congress isn’t always fascinating, it’s at the top of the critical-if-possibly-boring ladder.Bret: Before we go, Gail, I have to put in a word for Penelope Green’s funny, fabulous obituary in The Times of Sue Johanson, a Canadian sex educator who died last month at 92. It has the single most memorable paragraph to appear in the paper for at least a month, if not a year. I have to quote it in full:Is it weird to put body glitter on your boyfriend’s testicles? Is it safe to have sex in a hot tub? Could a Ziploc baggie serve as a condom? If condoms are left in a car and they freeze, are they still good? Answers: No. No (chlorinated water is too harsh for genitals, particularly women’s). Definitely not. And yes, once they’ve been defrosted.I mean, after that, what else is there to say?The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Assessing Modi’s Leadership of India

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      More from our inbox:Trying to Make Sense of Donald Trump: ‘An Exercise in Futility’Depoliticize Helping the HomelessThose Annoying Noise Machines Doug Mills/The New York TimesTo the Editor: As an Indian American living in the United States for a long time, I have been a strong supporter of the media for their active stance against people like Donald Trump who engaged in egregious behavior while in office. But I’m totally aghast at the tirade against Prime Minister Narendra Modi in “During Modi’s Visit, Biden Plans to Focus on Common Interests” (news analysis, June 22).For the past year or so, you have published articles critical of Mr. Modi, accusing him of being authoritarian and anti-democratic. You seem to lump him in the same group as Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Viktor Orban.This article talks about a crackdown on dissent under Mr. Modi and India backsliding in democracy. Similar articles have pointed out large-scale incarceration of political opponents ever since Mr. Modi’s party has been voted to power.Are we living in an alternate world? I’ve not seen any mass jailing or subversion of democracy in India as is happening in other countries like Turkey.I can understand that the West is upset about India’s neutral stance in the Ukraine-Russia war and India’s continuing to buy oil from Russia despite Western sanctions. As S. Jaishankar, India’s foreign minister, has said, India will do what is good for India.Every country has an obligation to take care of itself first.Mudi RameshKensington, Md.To the Editor:Re “Modi’s India Isn’t What It Seems,” by Maya Jasanoff (Opinion guest essay, June 22):Like Professor Jasanoff, I am Indian American. For many years after Indian independence in 1947, except for a brief period when J.F.K. was president, Indo-U.S. relations were marked by misunderstanding and acrimony.Perhaps the lowest point was reached in 1971 when the U.S. Seventh Fleet sailed into the Bay of Bengal, threatening India during its war with Pakistan.For Indian Americans, the joint Indo-U.S. effort to finally acknowledge shared interests in a global order based on the rule of law is a welcome relief, and we are grateful to Prime Minister Narendra Modi for encouraging this initiative. However, all this has to be set against the erosion of civil rights that is ongoing in India today.The resilience shown by U.S. career officials against the authoritarian dictates of former President Donald Trump has been absent in India. The U.S. has to exert greater pressure to strengthen civil governance in India or all our mutual interests in good governance will come to nothing.Bharat S. SarathEast Brunswick, N.J.To the Editor:Prof. Maya Jasanoff makes some valid points about harassment of minorities, journalists, media, etc., and the sliding of democratic norms in India. But Narendra Modi becoming an autocratic ruler is far-fetched. The Indian public will not stand for it. Case in point: His party recently lost an election in the Indian state of Karnataka.In the mid-1970s Prime Minister Indira Gandhi imposed an emergency rule to subdue opposition. At the time I believed that the Indian populace would not stand for it. Sure enough, Gandhi’s party lost in 1977 when she called for an election. Having learned her lesson, she was back in power three years later.Mr. Modi is popular because he has provided a stable government and made substantial progress during the last 10 years. The general public cares about that and will ignore faults of his and his party’s rule. Opposition parties are splintered.With a country as large as India, there are bound to be some imperfections from our Western point of view. But I am confident that India will handle it as best as it can and prosper.Eswar G. PhadiaWayne, N.J.Trying to Make Sense of Donald Trump: ‘An Exercise in Futility’ Justice DepartmentTo the Editor: Re “To Jail or Not to Jail,” by Maureen Dowd (column, June 18):Everyone seems to be trying to make sense of Donald Trump’s disordered mind and unpredictable behavior. As if he did this because of this, and then this happened and he did/said this other thing.Trying to make sense of Mr. Trump is an exercise in futility. He is impulsive, irrational and thoughtless, lacks introspection and has no conscience. He acts on a whim, makes up things as he goes along, and everything is done in his own interest without concern or consideration for anyone else in the world. That’s it.If I were explaining him to a child, I’d say, “He’s a bad man.” And he is. Now, what are we going to do about it?Kathryn JanusChicagoTo the Editor:Maureen Dowd compares Donald Trump to Hamlet. But he’s more Macbeth or Richard III, men who violate higher moral laws to grasp power. And in many ways Mr. Trump ticks the boxes of the tragic protagonist: a man of high estate whose reversal of fortune flows from fatal flaws, usually overweening pride and blindness to his own weaknesses.What remains to be seen is if Mr. Trump’s downfall will bring about an anagnorisis, the tragic hero’s recognition that he brought it all upon himself. Will a playwright or opera composer or movie director portray him tragically? Or will he only inspire satire. “Springtime for Trump”?Arnold WengrowAsheville, N.C.The writer is professor emeritus of drama at the University of North Carolina at Asheville.Depoliticize Helping the Homeless Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesTo the Editor: Re “Policy to Fight Homelessness Becomes a Target of the Right” (front page, June 21):Everyone loses when we politicize our response to homelessness, especially those we say we are trying to help. It is shameful that in America nearly 600,000 people experience homelessness on any given night.I have worked as a shelter director and service provider for 25 years. To suggest that our policies are enough and our efforts are meeting the need is irresponsible, yet to throw them out is misguided too. We need to build upon what we have, open our minds, expand our options and listen to people with lived experience, rather than fighting about which solution is right.There simply is no one-size-fits-all solution to address homelessness. People experiencing homelessness are diverse, and our solutions need to match that diversity. Communities need more tools including shelter, treatment, employment and housing.I have worked with the right and the left, and common ground is possible if we move beyond labels toward an integrated response.Isabel McDevittPhiladelphiaThe writer is the former C.E.O. of Bridge House, a homeless services agency in Colorado, and co-founder of Work Works America, which helps communities address homelessness.Those Annoying Noise MachinesNoise Could Take Years Off Your Life. Here’s How.We used a professional sound meter to measure the din of daily life and talked to scientists about the health risks it can pose.To the Editor: Re “Chronic Noise Proves Deadly” (Science Times, June 20):The bane of suburbia is the gas-powered, two-stroke leaf blower. Not only do those infernal things emit an ear-piercing sound, but they also generate an incredible amount of exhaust. Ban them!!Mark MaddaloniCloster, N.J.To the Editor:Your analysis is much appreciated. In Brooklyn, the noise from helicopters heading to and from the Hamptons has gone from an occasional annoyance to a constant. To ferry, what, two or four people at a time, tens of thousands are subject to noise so loud that it sets off car alarms on the ground and scares children.On Friday and Sunday evenings their low-altitude flyovers happen dozens of times in the space of a few hours. Flying at such low altitude may save fuel and time for the carriers, but doing so over densely populated areas is the height of selfishness.John WilkensBrooklyn More

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      A Generation of Women Named for Connie Chung

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      More from our inbox:The Dangerous Debt Limit DebateRon DeSantis, AuthoritarianForming a Community With Homeless NeighborsU.S. Role in Sex Exploitation in South KoreaConnie Chung, center, is one of the most famous Asian women in the U.S. Connie Aramaki for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “I Got My Name From Connie Chung. So Did They,” by Connie Wang (Opinion guest essay, May 14), about the many Asian women named after the TV journalist:It feels strange to know that there are so many Asian Connies out there, all close in age range in our 30s and 40s. But it’s a good strange feeling. It feels as if I have serendipitously entered a vast sisterhood, where the profound bond among us was formed by the influence of one woman on our mothers over 30 years ago.In my family, watching Connie Chung host “CBS Evening News” in the early ’90s was a family event. There were barely any Asian faces on TV at the time, let alone on a major news program. Connie Chung stood out in every way.“You can’t be what you can’t see.” When Ms. Chung came on the screen, my mom saw what was possible for the next generation right in front of her, far from the sights of Asian women working in menial jobs that defined my mom’s day-to-day life as a new immigrant.So when I suggested Connie as my English name, my mother liked it right away. “Keep it. It’s good, it’s just like Connie Chung,” she would say. With that choice of a name, my mom had poured all her hopes for me. Little did I know then that across the country people were being named Connie for that very same reason.Times are different now. There is a lot more diversity in the media and other professions. While we still have much work ahead of us, let us take a moment to celebrate this progress.Connie WuSan FranciscoTo the Editor:My daughter was adopted from Guangdong Province, China, in 1998 when she was 13 months old. She has no memory of the following story except through my retelling.It was a spring afternoon in the year 2000 at the Museum of Life and Science in Durham, N.C. My toddler and I took our places on the open-air train for a ride through the grounds.“It’s who you think it is,” the ticket taker whispered, nodding over her shoulder. Two seats ahead, surrounded by visitors, were Maury Povich and Connie Chung.Celebrity watching prevailed over scenery and animal sighting during that ride. Afterward, as a cluster of visitors lingered with Mr. Povich, Ms. Chung strolled ahead alone. But not for long. My daughter, rarely more than an inch from my side, leery of all strangers, let go of my hand and trotted up to grab Connie’s leg. Surprised, smiling, Ms. Chung lifted my daughter into her arms.Connie Wang’s wonderful article describes the surprise that Ms. Chung expressed when told: “There are so many of us out here. Named after you.” Something about that surprise, of not knowing her effect on others, stays with me.Anne TooheyChapel Hill, N.C.The Dangerous Debt Limit Debate Kiersten EssenpreisTo the Editor:Re “Ignoring the Debt Limit Would Be Dangerous” (Opinion guest essay, May 15):I disagree with my longtime friend Michael McConnell about the politics of the debt ceiling.Of course Congress has the power of the purse. But the problem here is not Congress as a whole; it is a slim majority in the House. And that majority is controlled by a handful of its most extreme members.The debt ceiling debate is certainly not politics as usual. It is a threat to destroy the country’s finances and its position of world leadership unless the Senate and the president give in to that faction’s extreme demands.Neither the country nor the Constitution can function if every choke point in the system of checks and balances is exploited for maximum leverage without regard to consequences. If one side is willing to wreck the economy unless it gets its way, why not both sides? If one faction, why not many different factions with inconsistent demands?The House, the Senate and the president bargain over spending in the budget and appropriations process, not through threats to destroy the economy if I don’t get my way.Douglas LaycockCharlottesville, Va.The writer is a professor at the University of Virginia Law School.Ron DeSantis, AuthoritarianGov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has long been a presumptive but undeclared rival to former President Donald J. Trump.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesTo the Editor:The efforts by Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida to harass Disney for exercising its rights of free speech and to ban books from the classroom that do not support his political or racial beliefs are the mark of an authoritarian tyrant. They show that right-wing politicians are the perpetrators, not the victims, of “cancel culture.”Republicans should consider how they would react if a Democratic governor retaliated against a corporation for opposing a Democratic program or embarked upon a program to ban conservative books.This is not the sort of person who belongs anywhere near the White House, and this is not the sort of person whom anyone should support. Hard to believe that Mr. DeSantis attended two fine academic institutions — Yale and Harvard Law — and learned so little about free speech, democracy and American constitutional values.David S. ElkindGreenwich, Conn.The writer is a lawyer.Forming a Community With Homeless NeighborsIntensive mobile treatment teams meet mentally ill clients where they are. Chris Payton and Sonia Daley visited M in Lower Manhattan.To the Editor:“In New York City, Making the Invisible Visible” (The Story Behind the Story, May 7) yields a question: To what extent is the mental illness we see in homeless people the result of — not the cause of — their being homeless?Hundreds of people silently pass them by each day, turning away, ignoring a hand held out for a donation. In plain sight, day after day, they live in public solitary confinement, the sort that is now being attacked in the courts as an inhumane, cruel and unusual punishment that often leads to mental illness when used in prisons.A civic organization I belong to in Florida recently began refurbishing a public park, long known as the home of the homeless in our city, by organizing periodic cleanups by volunteers and painting a mural honoring a local eccentric woman, long dead.After a while, the homeless folks began approaching our volunteers and the painter, viewing the art and then striking up tentative conversations. One homeless woman turned out to be an amateur painter, and a small portion of the mural was turned over to her to design and paint.Within weeks, the homeless frequenting the park began policing it — picking up trash and chastising people who dropped it. And, most important, collectively and individually, some bizarre behaviors faded away, replaced by social interaction.I now wonder what the results would be if the public at large began acknowledging the homeless, even by saying, “Hello,” or “I don’t have any cash with me today, sorry,” rather than simply walking on.As someone who lived in New York City for 30 years, I know that the city is filled with visible-yet-invisible people and am, frankly, ashamed that I didn’t catch onto this notion earlier.Stephen PhillipsSt. Petersburg, Fla.U.S. Role in Sex Exploitation in South KoreaTo the Editor:Re “South Korea Created a Brutal Sex Trade for American Soldiers” (front page, May 3):As your article so painfully makes clear, the brutal forced prostitution of young and vulnerable South Korean women and girls was caused not just by the government of South Korea but by the United States as well.There is much that the U.S. can and should do. It should be paying reparations. The government and the armed services chiefs should offer apologies to the women who went through this and to their families.And those who are in charge of curbing sexual harassment in the military today should redouble their efforts as they grow to understand just how systemic sexual assaults and misogyny have been in the armed forces for so long.Jean ZornFort Lauderdale, Fla. More