“She behaved horribly.” That’s how President Donald Trump described Renee Good, the 37-year-old woman who was repeatedly shot and killed by an ICE officer on Wednesday, roughly one mile from where a police officer murdered George Floyd nearly six years ago. Speaking to the New York Times, the president then pushed the spurious narrative that Good had run over the officer, prompting him to shoot. “She didn’t try to run him over,” he said without evidence. “She ran him over.” The remarks are consistent with the administration’s impulse to defend, often with cruel vociferousness, the conduct of ICE officers as they detain, terrorize, sometimes with gunfire, and then brag about it. But its perpetuation by the president and his allies, now that a woman in Minneapolis is dead, is taking on new levels of impunity. “This vehicle was used to hit this officer,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem told reporters in New York on Thursday, where she had been addressing ICE operations in the city. “It was used as a weapon. The officer felt like his life was threatened.” As federal agents stood behind her, Noem appeared unmoved as reporters repeatedly referred to the multiple video angles that have essentially proven the outright falsehoods of the administration’s smear campaign. As for Good, who, by all accounts of those who knew her, was an exceedingly kind woman, Noem continued to charge her with “domestic terrorism,” just as Stephen Miller did on Wednesday when news of the shooting was only just unfolding. Together, the administration’s pervasive and reflexive disdain for facts—what can literally be seen without dispute—and the reflex to taint a woman now dead, crystallize a new level of ugliness for an administration that shamelessly admits: Violence is us. > Domestic terrorism. https://t.co/070fSKR8iX > > — Stephen Miller (@StephenM) January 7, 2026

This story was originally published by bioGraphic and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. In 1987, wildlife veterinarian Mark Pokras was in his office at Tufts University in Massachusetts when a colleague from New Hampshire called. “I’ve got a dead loon here,” she said. “If I bring it down to you, can you tell me how it died?”  Understanding what’s killing wild animals is often the first step to saving them, and over the course of his career, Pokras has necropsied everything from whales to hummingbirds. Yet this was his first loon—in part because common loons (Gavia immer) had only recently begun repopulating New England after being nearly extirpated by 300 years of hunting, pollution, and habitat loss. European settlers so disliked these “ill-shap’d” birds that nature writer Henry David Thoreau described his neighbors on Walden Pond in Massachusetts shooting them just for fun. By the early 1900s, common loons—which winter on the coast and spend summers nesting along inland lakes—had disappeared from their breeding grounds in Massachusetts and much of New Hampshire, and been reduced to a fraction of their former abundance elsewhere in New England. Places with names like Loon Pond didn’t see nesting loons for more than a century. With the banning of DDT and the passage of the US Clean Water Act in the 1970s, however, loons began returning to the region, and people came to see them as symbols of a recovering wildness. The birds’ red eyes and geometrically patterned black-and-white plumage are instantly recognizable, but loons are most beloved for their long, tremulous vocalizations. In the same way that a train whistle symbolizes the freedom and loneliness of travel, loon calls have come to represent a specific, nostalgic kind of northern wilderness: piney woods, the clean smell of a lake, perhaps a rustic cabin tucked away on shore. Flannel shirts, bug spray, an early morning fishing trip. Scientists say that smell is the sense most strongly connected to memory, but for people with a connection to such lakes, there’s nothing like the sound of a loon to conjure an entire place, an entire feeling. Some locals can identify individual birds by the sound of their voices. Pokras witnessed loons’ rebranding firsthand. As a kid in the 1950s, he remembers occasionally seeing and hearing loons while canoeing with his dad, but loons were no more or less popular than any other wild animal. Today, homes across northern New England display loon flags and loon mailboxes, and gift shops sell loon blankets, loon sweatshirts, loon wine glasses, and nearly any other item you can imagine with a loon on it. Maine residents can get a license plate featuring a loon, and one New Hampshire resident told me that people who grow up there often get one of three tattoos: the state area code (603), the state motto (“Live Free or Die”), or a loon. She chose the loon. Pokras doesn’t have a loon tattoo, nor any other tattoos for that matter. But he’d become enchanted by loons while volunteering to rescue seabirds after a series of oil spills in New Jersey, and when his colleague asked if he’d necropsy a dead loon on that otherwise ordinary day in 1987, he readily agreed.  Cutting into the bird, Pokras discovered that it had suffered from lead toxicosis, more commonly known as lead poisoning. Loons eat pebbles to help digest food in their gizzard, and this one may have mistaken a lead sinker left behind by a fisherman for a pebble, or perhaps eaten a fish with a lead sinker in its body. In Pokras’s X-ray, the sinker showed up as an unnaturally round ball amid a mess of partially digested fish and shellfish. After the bird ate it, the lead would have leached toxicants into the bloodstream, causing impaired vision, gastrointestinal distress, neurologic issues, and ultimately death. “This is weird,” Pokras remembers telling his colleague. “We’ll probably never see this again. But if you ever find another dead loon, give me a call.” > “This is weird. We’ll probably never see this again. But if you ever find > another dead loon, give me a call.” That sentence changed the trajectory of his life.  Today, Pokras and his colleagues have necropsied nearly 5,000 dead loons, mostly from New England. Other scientists and veterinarians have necropsied more from across the species’ breeding range, which extends across most of Canada and the northern United States. In nearly every place—from the Maritimes to Minnesota to Washington State—lead poisoning is the leading cause of death for adult loons in freshwater habitat. A loon that ingests a single 28 gram (1 ounce) lead sinker left behind by a fisherman will likely die in two to four weeks. The late poet Mary Oliver witnessed this loss. In a poem titled “Lead,” she wrote that “the loons came to our harbor / and died, one by one / of nothing we could see.” In an era when many species are declining because of multipronged, seemingly intractable problems, the solution to protecting loons is relatively straightforward. Anglers simply need to swap their old lead jigs and sinkers for tackle made from tungsten, steel, tin, or bismuth. Given loons’ immense popularity, you might think that would be an easy sell. But although conservationists have tried educating the public for decades—and although Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Massachusetts have laws regulating the use and sale of lead fishing tackle—lead is still responsible for around 25 to 30 percent of loon deaths in most states and provinces, and until recently, nearly 40 percent in New Hampshire. Why? The answer, at least in the United States, is entangled with gun rights. I meet up with Mark Pokras on a green, humid summer morning at the headquarters of the Loon Preservation Committee (LPC), a nonprofit based near Lake Winnipesaukee, the largest lake in New Hampshire. Though he retired from Tufts in 2015, Pokras facilitates an interorganizational effort to study loons and drives from his home in Maine to LPC’s wood-shingled building a few times a year to help run a summer research fellowship for graduate students. Today, two Tufts students, Brynn Ziel and Khangelani Mhlanga, are preparing to necropsy a female loon who had been brought to a wildlife rehabilitation center earlier. The loon had been alive but emaciated, with a length of fishing line emerging from her sinuous neck. Unable to save the bird, staff euthanized her, then sent her frozen body to LPC for examination. Now, the body is splayed on a stainless steel grate above a large, shallow sink, like the kind that might be used for dog grooming. The loon’s organs—esophagus, gizzard, liver, intestines—glisten in the fluorescent lights, and the interns’ nitrile-gloved hands are smeared with blood. Ziel uses forceps to pluck pieces of shellfish from the gizzard, while Mhlanga works on severing the head. The loon is surprisingly large up close—about the size of a goose. The digits on her webbed feet look like long, gnarled human fingers topped with black nails. Pokras occasionally chimes in with an observation, and Harry Vogel, LPC’s senior biologist and executive director since the late 1990s, looks on from across the room. We’re two hours into the necropsy, and the frozen bird is starting to thaw. The room smells a bit like roadkill. “They’re a lot prettier on the outside,” Vogel comments. “I’m biased,” Mhlanga says, “but I think they’re pretty on the inside, too.” The interns continue disassembling the bird’s internal architecture in silence, then Mhlanga pulls out a fishing hook as long as her finger. “Huh,” Pokras says, examining it. “This is the CSI part—the detective work…I’m looking at this and asking, ‘Is that the reason the bird is emaciated?’” Wildlife veterinarian Mark Pokras and Tufts University veterinary student Khangelani Mhlanga necropsy a female loon with a length of fishing line emerging from her neck. Krista Langlois Fishing hooks aren’t typically made of lead—it’s too pliable—so the team doesn’t suspect lead poisoning. Perhaps the hook inhibited the animal’s ability to hunt or swallow, leading to starvation. Still, the necropsy is valuable because it contributes to an ongoing record of the lives and deaths of New England loons across five decades. When Pokras first realized the scope of lead poisoning while necropsying loons in the 1990s, he imagined the problem would be solved relatively quickly. After all, once Silent Spring author Rachel Carson publicized the harm that DDT was causing to birds and other wildlife in North America in the 1960s, legislators and the general public mobilized against the agrochemical industry and worked to ban DDT in much of the world, saving the lives of countless birds and ensuring that springtime still resonates with their songs. Yet efforts by LPC and others to educate anglers about the dangers of lead tackle and convince them to switch to non-lead gear hardly moved the needle. And by the time conservationists took their work to Congress in the late 1990s, hoping for a federal ban, it was becoming harder to pass environmental legislation. Voters in the US were increasingly divided by party lines, and politicians were increasingly influenced by a powerful group: the National Rifle Association, or NRA. As Pokras and his colleagues were spreading the word about the dangers of lead fishing tackle in the ’90s, it just so happened that other conservationists had begun noticing that piles of guts contaminated by lead bullets and left behind by hunters were poisoning scavengers, like bald eagles and California condors. (The US Fish and Wildlife Service had banned lead shot—a type of ammunition used for bird hunting that consists of a spray of small pellets rather than a single bullet—for hunting waterfowl in 1991, but other types of lead bullets were still used for hunting larger animals, and continue to be used today.) Conservation groups across the country began lobbying for a federal ban on lead bullets. And the NRA responded in force. As one NRA website currently states: “The use of traditional (lead) ammunition is currently under attack by many anti-hunting groups whose ultimate goal is to ban hunting.” But how did the fight over lead bullets thwart efforts to regulate lead fishing tackle? Many hunting and fishing organizations have ties to the NRA, and they maintain that any effort to regulate tackle will open the door to regulating ammunition, and that any effort to regulate ammunition is an assault on Americans’ gun rights. “One of the unusual things about lead is there are very few other toxic materials that have a huge public lobby in favor of them,” Pokras says. “You don’t see a lot of members of the public out there campaigning [for] more DDT or neonicotinoid pesticides. But with lead there’s a huge, wealthy, politically influential contingent supporting it.” When Pokras retired in 2015, he had decades of data showing that lead fishing tackle was killing loons, along with some 7,500 peer-reviewed scientific papers that unequivocally show the dangers of lead for wildlife. When I asked why he continues to necropsy loons to amass new data despite this preponderance of proof, his answer is concise: “We haven’t solved the problem yet.” Lead—an element found not just on Earth but throughout the solar system—has always been attractive for human industry. The earliest known case of metal smelting can be found in 7,000-year-old lead beads found in Asia Minor. The Roman empire produced 72,000 metric tons of lead at its peak, much of it was used to make vessels for eating and drinking and pipes for moving water; the word “plumbing” comes from the Latin word for lead, plumbum. And lead has been harming people and animals for nearly as long as we’ve used it. Lead seeping from a Greek mine was already polluting the environment some 5,300 years ago, while an Egyptian papyrus from 3,000 years ago depicts a case of homicide by lead poisoning. Still, lead remains popular, used in everything from car batteries to computer screens. Global lead production increases annually, with more than 4 million metric tons (some 10 billion pounds) mined or extracted through recycling in 2024 alone. Before traveling to New Hampshire to seek out loons, I’d met with Elaine Leslie, the retired chief of biological resources for the National Park Service, at her home in rural southwestern Colorado. When Leslie was leading the Park Service’s biology department in the early 2010s under Barack Obama’s administration, she helped enact an internal ban on lead ammunition in all US national parks and preserves. Hunters and gun advocates weren’t thrilled—“I got death threats,” Leslie tells me matter-of-factly—but the US Fish and Wildlife Service followed suit by banning lead ammunition in certain national wildlife refuges, and began making moves toward a more comprehensive ban. The state of California also banned lead bullets in condor habitat in 2007, eventually followed by a statewide ban. For a while, it seemed as though scientists and conservationists were making progress. But when President Donald Trump took office in 2017, his administration largely reversed the Park Service’s ban on lead bullets. (Rangers must still use non-lead bullets when dispatching an injured animal.) It also restricted the agency from spending money on research, education, or other efforts to reduce lead impacts to wildlife and people. Such pushback is bolstered by gun advocates who claim there’s no research proving that lead has population-level effects on wildlife. In the case of California condors, they say, California’s lead ban hasn’t reduced mortality rates, so the lead in condors’ blood must be coming from a different source. (Scientists say it’s because condors regularly cross into states like Arizona and Nevada and eat meat left by hunters who used lead bullets.) Critics also claim that non-lead ammunition is more expensive, which used to be true but is becoming less so. And they allege that non-lead ammunition is less effective—another argument that has been disproved in peer-reviewed research. Still, the backlash against regulating lead at the federal level has only grown in recent years, with federal legislators introducing bills to protect hunters’ and anglers’ right to lead tackle and bullets. California remains the only state with a complete ban on lead ammunition. Sitting in the shade of her porch sipping iced tea, I asked Leslie, a wildlife biologist by training, if the science showing the dangers of lead to animals is well established. She let out an incredulous laugh. “There’s so much peer-reviewed science out there,” she said. “There’s study after study.” > “Those are the very top of the iceberg. Grizzly bears are impacted. Coyotes > are impacted. Ravens are impacted. Any animal that eats another animal can be > impacted.” For months after our meeting, Leslie sends me those studies by email. Research has shown lead poisoning in doves, whooping cranes, eagles, owls, and many other birds. And as Leslie points out, those are only the animals that are monitored. “I mean, those are the very top of the iceberg,” she says. “Grizzly bears are impacted. Coyotes are impacted. Ravens are impacted. Any animal that eats another animal can be impacted.” While not every animal that absorbs lead dies from it, the bioaccumulation may lead an animal to become sluggish or disoriented and get struck by a car or fly into a power line it would have otherwise avoided. Lead poisoning, Leslie says, is an underreported issue. While most animals killed by lead poisoning encounter the element from bullets, loons are predominantly killed by lead fishing tackle, which is theoretically less contentious to regulate—especially in progressive regions like New England. That’s why, beginning in the early 2000s, loon conservationists turned their focus to state-level laws. They also kept their efforts to ban lead tackle separate from efforts to ban lead ammo, in the hope that it might be an easier pill for lawmakers to swallow. New Hampshire became the first to ban certain types of lead fishing tackle in 2000, and subsequently strengthened its laws to become some of the most stringent in the nation. Vermont, Massachusetts, and Maine followed, though the details differ so much from state to state that education and enforcement remain challenging. “We thought great, problem solved,” says Vogel, the LPC director. “But then we realized the problem was not solved.” Today, even after the bans have been in place for years, LPC continues to receive loons each year who have died of lead poisoning. Vogel and his colleagues initially thought this was because the birds were swallowing old lead sinkers buried in the muck at the bottom of lakes. But after necropsies demonstrated that the months when most loons died of lead poisoning coincided with the months when freshwater fishing was at its peak, the team realized that the deaths came from current use. Fishermen were still using—and even purchasing—lead sinkers and spinners. Back at the LPC’s headquarters on the shores of Lake Winnipesaukee, Pokras shows me a lead lure that he picked up at a fishing store in Maine a few weeks prior. “This is actually a good thing,” Vogel chimes in, with characteristic optimism. It means conservationists don’t have to figure out how to remove old tackle sunk at the bottom of lakes. If they can just figure out how to keep new lead tackle from getting into the environment, the benefit to birds should be almost immediate. And fortunately, they’ve found a promising solution. After the interns finish taking samples of the dead loon’s organs to send off for testing, they seal what’s left of the body in a heavy-duty trash bag for disposal at the local dump. As they wrap up, I head upstairs to the education center and gift shop. A recording of loon calls plays softly, and educational exhibits share information about loons, including the fact that they can dive to depths of 60 meters (200 feet) to hunt for fish, and that their name comes from the Swedish word for clumsy, lom—a nod to loons’ notorious ineptitude on land. On one wall, a taxidermied loon appears to be suspended mid-swim in a glass case, its neck stretched out and its webbed feet splayed behind it like propellers. Affixed to the glass is a placard: “This loon died after ingesting lead fishing tackle.” A table below displays a jar half full of lead sinkers: “This small Mason jar contains enough lead fishing tackle to kill every adult loon found in New Hampshire!” Nearby, a wooden bowl carved in the shape of—you guessed it—a loon holds non-lead tackle that visitors can take home for free. Brochures urge people to earn credit for more new tackle by turning in their old lead gear. This is part of New Hampshire’s pioneering lead tackle buyback program. LPC gets generous donations from loon lovers, and along with support from the state’s department of fish and game, some of that money becomes $20 vouchers to sporting goods stores given to people who turn in lead tackle. Banners and flyers publicizing the lead buyback program are displayed at waste transfer stations, government offices, shops, and community lake associations, and Scouts can earn a badge for collecting lead tackle from their community. Since its launch in 2018, people have dropped off nearly 80,000 pieces of lead tackle; in 2024 alone, 78 kilograms (172 pounds) of lead tackle were turned in, marking a 119 percent increase over the prior year. Maine has taken the work a step further—in addition to buying tackle from individual anglers, the conservation nonprofit Maine Audubon buys stock directly from merchants, keeping lead tackle off the shelves and helping stores comply with newly tightened state regulations. For loons, the combination of legislation, education, and buyback programs seems to be working. Lead poisoning is no longer the number one killer of loons in Maine. And in New Hampshire, lead-related deaths dropped 61 percent between the late 1990s and 2016, and fell another 34 percent since then. “I suppose you could see New Hampshire as a leader,” Vogel says, “But that’s also driven by necessity. The problem was the most severe here.” Vogel is optimistic that states like Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Washington—all of which have significant loon habitat—will one day follow suit, along with his home country of Canada, where 94 percent of common loons breed. Canada already bans lead tackle and ammo in national parks and wildlife areas but allows it elsewhere. Resistance to a Canadian national ban seems to come from a more basic reluctance to change, rather than fear of losing gun rights, along with the fact that loons are so abundant in Canada that preventing lead poisoning feels less urgent. Europe, meanwhile, is far ahead. The European Union, Norway, and Iceland already ban lead in all wetlands, and the EU is considering a proposal to ban lead from all fishing and hunting gear. Denmark already has a complete ban, and the United Kingdom will enact one beginning in 2026. With the necropsy complete, I follow Vogel and Ashley Keenan, LPC’s field crew coordinator, to a small motorboat docked on Lake Winnipesaukee. The southern part of the lake bumps with party boats and Jet Skis, but these northern reaches are quieter, scattered with islands and ringed with coves where dark sweeps of pine forest feather the shore. Ashley Keenan, field crew coordinator for the Loon Preservation Committee, checks on a loon nest on an island in Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire. Krista Langlois Vogel and Keenan are tracking this year’s loon chicks. Unlike ducks and many other waterfowl, loons hatch only one or two eggs per year and don’t typically reproduce until they’re six years old, making population-level growth slow. Out of 32 nesting pairs of loons scattered across Lake Winnipesaukee’s 179 square kilometers (69 square miles) in the spring of 2025, 12 chicks had survived as of August. The figure is slightly below average, although survival rates fluctuate. (One year, 23 chicks survived, Vogel tells me; a few years later, only three did.) During Keenan’s last patrol, the eggs in one nest perched on a tiny island hadn’t yet hatched, and today she’s trying to find out if the chicks have emerged. Keenan steers toward the island, cuts the motor, and jumps into the shallows. She aims her binoculars at a cluster of lichen-splattered boulders. We wait in silence. Nothing. “Goddamn it,” she says, climbing back into the boat. One egg might still be there, but there’s no sign of the second egg or a living chick. She guesses it was picked off by a predator, perhaps an eagle. Vogel speculates that unseasonably hot summer weather contributed to the lower-than-usual survival rate. Loon parents who need to cool down by going for a swim must leave their eggs unguarded, opening them to predation or overheating under the blazing sun. Although common loon populations are holding steady or even growing slightly across their range, loons are increasingly susceptible to the impacts of climate change, as well as avian malaria, shoreline development, and collisions with recreational motorboats. And this region—one of the first in North America to be settled by colonists, and still one of the most densely developed on the continent—echoes with stories of species that have disappeared, from mountain lions to American chestnuts. People here know that survival is never guaranteed, and that keeping common species common requires effort, sacrifice, and care. For loons specifically, it means keeping as many adults of reproductive age alive as possible. “This is probably the most intensely managed species in New Hampshire,” Vogel says. “And despite that, we’re still having trouble maintaining reproductive success.” Just then, a white-haired woman in a kayak approaches our boat, waving her arms. “I’m just trying to find out what happened to my baby loon,” she calls out. Her name is Dotty Wysocki, and she’s been watching nesting loons near her summer cottage here for three decades. “We name ’em and everything,” she tells me in a thick Boston accent. “We really get involved. I’m constantly looking for them.” Wysocki tells us that she saw a newly hatched chick alive earlier in the week but hasn’t spotted it since. When Keenan affirms that the chick is likely dead, Wysocki lowers her eyes. She wishes she could have done more; when she was younger, she and her friends used to watch the chicks in four-hour shifts to scare off eagles and other predators. At the end of her poem about lead poisoning in loons, Mary Oliver wrote: “I tell you this to break your heart / by which I mean only / that it break open and never close again / to the rest of the world.” As Wysocki paddles away and Keenan starts up our motor, both seem dispirited, perhaps even a little heartbroken. But their concern for the fate of this one tiny chick nonetheless fills me with hope. It’s the kind of love that can save a species, and indeed, the only thing that ever has.

Four days after a shooting at Brown University killed two students and wounded nine others, neither the shooter’s identity nor motive is known. But that hasn’t stopped internet sleuths from insisting that they know who did it. Now, powerful influencers are amplifying their claims. Almost as soon as the shooting happened, conservative influencers were quick to blame the shooting on “leftist activists”—but as the days wore on and the details were still sparse, they latched on to a more specific narrative. By Tuesday evening, social media accounts began noting that Brown University had scrubbed the pages on its website that had referred to a third-year student who used they/them pronouns and was involved in pro-Palestine organizing on campus. It wasn’t long before internet sleuths went to work, even deploying AI gait monitors to attempt to match the grainy footage that exists of the shooter with the student in question. Early Wednesday morning, an account with the handle @MadeleineCaseTweets claimed in a widely circulated tweet that the shooter’s physical attributes closely matched those of a third-year student at the university. The account, which has 27,000 followers, also noted that the third-year student was involved in “activism” and included a photo of the student speaking into a bullhorn and wearing a keffiyeh, a checkered scarf often used as a symbol of solidarity with Palestine. Those claims only added fuel to unconfirmed rumors already circulating that the shooter shouted “Allahu akbar,” Arabic for “God is great,” before opening fire. It didn’t take long for a who’s who of powerful conservative influencers, including far-right activist Laura Loomer, podcasters Benny Johnson and Tim Pool, “Pizzagate” conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec, and feminist-icon-turned-Covid-conspiracist Naomi Wolfe, to take the narrative and run with it. “In the video below, notice how he holds his hands behind his back in the surveillance video released by Providence, Rhode Island, police yesterday,” wrote Loomer. “This is common in Middle East culture, and witnesses said it sounded like the shooter was speaking Arabic, in addition to screaming Allahu Akbar!” Other accounts on X have taken the rumors further still, calling the university itself “extremist” and baselessly suggesting that a professor of Palestinian Studies was also involved in the attack. In a press conference on Tuesday, Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha said there were “lots of reasons” that a university would take a page offline. He strongly rebuked the internet sleuths and influencers who were spreading rumors. “It’s easy to jump from someone saying words that were spoken, to what those words are, to a particular name, that reflects a motive targeting a particular person,” he said. “That’s a really dangerous road to go down.” In a statement, Brown University echoed those concerns, noting, “Accusations, speculation, and conspiracies we’re seeing on social media and in some news reports are irresponsible, harmful, and in some cases dangerous for the safety of individuals in our community.”

On Saturday, a gunman opened fire on the campus of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, killing two students and wounding nine more. The shooter escaped, and students sheltered in place overnight as authorities tried to track down a person of interest who had appeared in a low-quality security camera video. One suspect was apprehended, but on Sunday, authorities released him. On Monday, the shooter still had not been identified or apprehended—but that didn’t stop a host of conservative influencers from insisting on social media that the perpetrator must have been a disgruntled leftist. Why? Because one of the two victims, 19-year-old Ella Cook, a sophomore from Alabama, was president of the campus Republicans. (The other was identified as Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, an 18-year-old freshman from Virginia whose political beliefs thus far have not been reported on.) Cook’s tragic death was enough to whip the conspiracy machine into high gear. Early Monday morning, Elon Musk reposted to his 229 million followers a since-deleted tweet blaming the left for the shooting. He commented, “The murderous indoctrination needs to stop now.” The theory about the targeting of Cook seems to have gained significant traction from an X account with the handle @AutismCapital, which announced to nearly a million followers that “the police explicitly claimed it was likely a targeted attack to [Cook’s] family and that when he came in the room he looked specifically for her first before he fired?” The post didn’t mention that there has been no credible reporting about the shooters’ motive or his actions before he fired the first shot, only rumors on social media. After this, Katherine Boyle, a partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, reposted that tweet and added her own thoughts in a post to her 95,000 followers: “Now young men and women like Ella know they can be killed for their political beliefs on a college campus, even if they’re not provocateurs or influencers or public officials, just normal young people participating in a student club.” Shaun Maguire, a partner at the firm Sequoia Capital with 295,000 followers, also retweeted the post from @AutismCapital, commenting, “To the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and now to the tragic murder of Ella Cook, it’s impossible to shake the feeling that we’re not getting the truth fast enough from law enforcement and our media … when it doesn’t fit their narrative.” Far-right influencer and Trump favorite, Laura Loomer, tweeted to her 1.8 million followers, “Jewish and Christian conservative students and faculty targeted at Brown University and they want you to think western civilization isn’t under attack.” She also repeated an unconfirmed rumor that the shooter had shouted “Allahu akbar,” Arabic for “God is great,” before opening fire. Vickie Palladino, a conservative New York City councilwoman, posted to her 38,000 followers, “Very clear now that the attack at Brown was perpetrated by a leftist activist and targeted Republicans. The people who openly celebrated Charlie Kirk’s murder en masse and faced exactly zero consequences for it have been emboldened to kill more conservatives.” The tweet has since been deleted. Raw Egg Nationalist, a British far-right influencer, put his own spin on the leftism-run-amok theory. He implied in a post to his 309,000 followers that the shooting occurred because the left had not been sufficiently punished for conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s murder. “I hate to say it, but it’s true: Charlie Kirk’s murder has shown the left they can get what they want by killing right wingers,” he wrote. “They killed the most important young right winger in America, a surrogate son to the president, at basically no cost to themselves. Just one person arrested. No reprisals or even real threat of reprisals. Of course, there are going to be more murders.” Another unproven narrative making the rounds was that the attack was an act of antisemitic terrorism because the venue was a study session for a popular lecture class that happened to be taught by a Jewish professor. “Prof Rachel Friedberg, whose class at ⁦@BrownUniversity⁩ was targeted last night by a shooter, taught at Hebrew University and advised the Knesset on immigration to Israel, among other credentials,” Naomi Wolf, the feminist writer turned Covid conspiracy theorist, posted to her 489,000 followers. “I wonder who the shooter was and what could have possibly motivated him?” In response to the shooting, President Trump offered only a few terse words. “Brown University, great school,” he said. “Great, really, one of the greatest schools anywhere in the world. Things can happen.” Meanwhile, Trump took to social media to opine about the murder of film director Rob Reiner and his wife, Michelle, which occurred the day after the shooting at Brown. The president baselessly suggested that the Reiners’ progressive politics contributed to their untimely deaths. The murder was “reportedly due to the anger [Reiner] caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME,” Trump wrote on TruthSocial. “He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump.” Reiner’s son Nick, who has struggled with drug addiction, was arrested on suspicion of murder on Monday.

Phillip Abram, a Jewish Bondi resident, places flowers at a growing memorial near Bondi Beach following the Bondi Hanukkah terror attack.James West/Mother Jones

At least 15 people were killed, and more than three dozen were hospitalized, in a shooting at Australia’s famous Bondi Beach in Sydney on Sunday in what the authorities are calling a terrorist attack at a Jewish holiday celebration.  One gunman has been killed and a second suspect is in custody and in critical condition, police said.  The attack comes amid a surge in antisemitic violence in Australia, home to the largest proportion of Holocaust survivors outside of Israel. It is Australia’s worst mass shooting in three decades, a rare occurrence in a country with one of the lowest rates of gun-related deaths in the developed world. “This is a targeted attack on Jewish Australians on the first day of Hanukkah, which should be a day of joy,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese of Australia said, adding, “An attack on Jewish Australians is an attack on every Australian.” At about 6:45 p.m. on Sunday, police began receiving reports that multiple people had been shot. “The gunmen emerged from a small silver hatchback parked by a footbridge near the beach and began firing into the crowd celebrating Hanukkah,” according to The New York Times.  Emergency workers transport a shooting victim on a stretcher after an attack at Sydney’s popular Bondi Beach. Mark Baker/APMark Baker/AP A video showing a bystander—identified by Australian media reports as Ahmed al Ahmed, a 43-year-old Sydney man—tackling and disarming an assailant has gone viral. “That man is a genuine hero,” Chris Minns, the premier of the state of New South Wales, said, “and I’ve got no doubt there are many many people alive tonight as a result of his bravery.” Mal Lanyon, police commissioner for New South Wales, said there were also two improvised explosive devices found at the scene that were “active,” the Times reported. He described them as “rudimentary” and “fairly basic” in construction. Police offices around the world, from New York to London, said they would increase security presences in their cities following the attack. “We are deploying additional resources to public Hanukkah celebrations and synagogues out of an abundance of caution,” the NYPD said in a statement, adding that they “see no nexus to NYC.”  A rabbi lights a menorah during a vigil outside the Australian High Commission in central London, following the terrorist attack on a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach in Australia on Sunday. James Manning/PA Wire/APJames Manning/PA Wire/AP The rise in antisemitic attacks in the country began after the October 7, 2023, massacre and the onset of Israel’s war in Gaza. In May 2024, one of Australia’s largest and oldest Jewish schools in Melbourne was spray-painted with the phrase “Jew die.” In a series of incidents in October 2024, a Jewish‑owned bakery in Sydney was defaced with antisemitic graffiti, two men set fire to a brewery near Bondi Beach, and a kosher deli was deliberately set on fire. The attacks continued in 2025. One of the most serious incidents occurred this past July, when about 20 worshipers attending a Shabbat dinner at the East Melbourne Hebrew Congregation “were forced to evacuate through a rear exit after a man poured flammable liquid on the front door and set it alight,” as reported by Time.  These incidents, according to Daniel Aghion, the president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, are at “a level that we’ve never seen in the more than 30 years that we’ve been monitoring and collecting data.”  According to The Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh, the Bondi Beach shooting is the deadliest attack on Jews in the diaspora since the October 27, 2018, attack at the Tree of Life building in that city left 11 people dead. This past October, two people were stabbed to death at a synagogue in Manchester, England, on Yom Kippur. Sunday’s shooting is the deadliest in Australia since the Port Arthur massacre in 1996, which claimed the lives of 35 people and wounded 23 more. As the New York Times detailed, following that shooting—in which a gunman killed 12 of the victims in just 15 seconds—the countryessentially banned assault rifles, many other semiautomatic rifles, and shotguns. Authorities alsoimposed mandatory gun buybacks, melted down as many as 1 million guns, and imposed new registration requirements and restrictions on gun purchases.  Over the next two decades, there were no mass shootings in Australia. In an investigation published this past August, the Guardian warned that the gun landscape in Australia was shifting. “Gun numbers are on the rise,” the investigation noted, and, while the per-capita number of gun-license holders has gone down, “there is now a larger number of guns in the community per capita than there was in the immediate aftermath of the [Port Arthur] crackdown.”  Zohran Mamdani, the mayor-elect of New York City, said on X that one of the people killed in the attack, Rabbi Eli Schlanger, had deep ties to the neighborhood of Crown Heights. Mamdani called the attack a “vile act of antisemitic terror” and said it was “merely the latest, most horrifying iteration in a growing pattern of violence targeted at Jewish people across the world.” The Hanukkah celebrations at Bondi Beach on Sunday were being hosted by a local chapter of Chabad, a global organization based in Brooklyn. An invite to the event highlighted free donuts, crafts, face-painting, a “Grand Menorah Lighting,” music, games, and ice cream. Schlanger organized the Sydney celebration, according Chabad. This is a developing story.

Though it was hardly a national focal point of the 2025 elections on Tuesday, Maine became the twenty-second state to adopt a “red flag” law for regulating guns, with the approval of nearly 59 percent of voters. Starting in January, Maine will allow families to petition a judge to remove firearms temporarily from a family member who appears to pose a threat to themselves or others. It’s a notable development in a state with a strong gun and hunting culture, where even the Democratic governor, Janet Mills, opposed the measure.   The new policy stands as a clear response to the devastating mass shooting that took place in Lewiston, Maine, in October 2023 at the hands of a profoundly troubled man, whose worsening condition had long alarmed those around him. As I reported previously: > Army reservist Robert Card, the 40-year-old suicidal perpetrator who killed 18 > people and injured 13 others at a bowling alley and a bar on October 25, > displayed numerous warning signs far in advance. His erratic behavior going > back months included complaints he was hearing voices, angry and paranoid > claims about being smeared as a pedophile, punching a colleague, and > threatening to shoot up the Army base where he worked. Some of his family > members and supervisors sounded the alarm. After a two-week stay and a > psychiatric evaluation in July at an Army hospital, Army officials directed > that Card should not possess a weapon or handle ammunition. Despite the fact that people close to Card felt he was becoming dangerous, they had little possible recourse; at the time, the state had a weaker “yellow flag” law in place that allows only law enforcement to seek removal of guns—and only after the person of concern has been given a medical evaluation. As Card’s case showed, though, that is a high bar to taking action. A few weeks before the massacre, as I further reported, “the Sagadahoc County Sheriff’s Office, which had communicated with family members and Army authorities since May, attempted a wellness check at Card’s residence.” Unable to locate him, they alerted other agencies that he was “armed and dangerous” and should be approached with “extreme caution” based on his reported behaviors.    In other words, opportunity for intervention at an earlier stage of Card’s downward spiral, flagged by family members and others, was already gone. An investigation later published by the New York Times revealed that Card had suffered from serious brain injury connected with his military service. As red flag laws have spread throughout the country in recent years, research in California and beyond has shown that they can be effective for preventing suicide and mass shootings. (A majority of mass shootings culminate with the perpetrators ending their own lives.) California led the way with the policy in the aftermath of a 2014 mass killing near University of California, Santa Barbara. During my recent two-year investigation into that notorious case, violence prevention experts at the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office told me that in the decade since, the state’s red flag law has become “a key tool in a lot of, if not most of, the threat management cases that we’ve worked.” Evolving policy nationally on gun regulations and violence prevention remains a mixed picture, particularly since Donald Trump returned to the White House. He quickly issued executive orders aimed at rolling back years of progress on red flag laws, “ghost guns,” and more, and he has gutted key violence-prevention programs within the federal government. Some Republican allies of Trump at the state level have moved in a similar direction, including in Texas. That state has suffered several of the worst gun massacres in recent memory, from a Walmart in El Paso to Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, but nonetheless, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed the state GOP’s Anti-Red Flag Act into law in June. In stark contrast to Maine’s new policy, the use of such violence-prevention strategies—once backed even by Abbott himself—is essentially no longer an option in Texas.

Conservative influencer Charlie Kirk was shot in Utah on Wednesday, officials said. Kirk, 31, was speaking at Utah Valley University in the suburb of Orem, about 45 miles south of Salt Lake City, when he was shot. Videos circulating on social media appeared to show Kirk being struck in the neck while he was sitting on a stool addressing an outdoor crowd. Kirk’s condition was not immediately clear. FBI Director Kash Patel said in a post on X that agents will be dispatched to the scene. Utah Gov. Spencer Cox said he was being briefed by law enforcement, adding, “Those responsible will be held fully accountable. Violence has no place in our public life. Americans of every political persuasion must unite in condemning this act.” Kirk is the founder of Turning Point USA, an organization that tries to get young people into conservative politics. He is a close ally of President Donald Trump and spoke at the Republican National Convention last summer. Kirk is married and has two children. Officials on both sides of the aisle, including Trump and Vice President JD Vance, condemned the violence and called for prayers for Kirk. “A great guy from top to bottom. GOD BLESS HIM!” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Dear God, protect Charlie in his darkest hour,” Vance wrote on X. Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), whose husband was a victim of political violence, wrote on X: “Political violence has absolutely no place in our nation. All Americans should pray for Charlie Kirk’s recovery and hold the entire UVU community in our hearts as they endure the trauma of this gun violence.” Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.), who hosted Kirk on his podcast earlier this year, called the shooting “disgusting, vile, and reprehensible.” Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-Penn.) wrote on X: “The attack on Charlie Kirk is horrifying and this growing type of unconscionable violence cannot be allowed in our society.” Information on a suspect or whether anyone else was injured was not immediately available. Spokespeople for the university and state police did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Mother Jones. This is a developing story. Check back for updates.

When Trymaine Lee began writing his first book, he didn’t realize that the gun violence he was reporting on was such a central part of his own story. But then he began digging into his family history, only to fully learn about a series of racially motivated murders involving his ancestors. Lee’s book, A Thousand Ways to Die: The True Cost of Violence on Black Life in America, soon became more personal than he’d planned. He realized he needed to “speak honestly about what I now know to be crushing down on me, which is the weight of this family history.” On this week’s episode of More To The Story, Lee sits down with host Al Letson for part 2 of a conversation about generational trauma, the challenges of being a Black journalist in America, and how learning about his family’s history has changed how he writes and reports on Black Americans killed by violence. And if you haven’t listened to part 1, you can find that conversation here. Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. This following interview was edited for length and clarity. More To The Story transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Al Letson: You have this book that you finished right before this massive heart attack and then you dive back in to make your edits and to polish it up, but your experience just changed the whole trajectory of the book. Talk to me about that Trymaine Lee: Yeah, man. More than that, when I first turned that 90,000 word manuscript in it was really super rough. The book it is today is honestly about 25% of what it was into what it became. Initially, I was always going to hold the reader’s hand a little bit and speak to my own experiences. My grandfather’s murder in 1976 is this massive space in my life. It occupies a massive space in my family’s life. Two years before I was born, growing up seeing my family’s portraits of better days and people talking about his voice and his sense of humor and just how he moved through the world, I always knew that part. So part of the storytelling was even your friendly neighborhood journalists who you’ve come to know telling these stories has been touched by this thing, and here’s what it cost my family. What I had less of an understanding of was that my grandfather’s was not the first murder in our family. Going back to the rural South, Jim Crow Georgia in the early 1920s to discover that my grandmother, who was a baby at the time, had a 12-year-old brother who was shot and killed in a sundown town where the men came together, and this is documented in the newspaper, came together in Fitzgerald, Georgia to outlaw Black labor and Black voting in this community in the late 1800s, ’cause that sparked my family’s journey into the migration to Philadelphia first and then South Jersey only to have a second of my grandmother’s brothers shot and killed by a state trooper, and to for the first time look at those headlines where it says, trooper’s gun kills youth, as if this gun just hopped up and shot a Black teenager under these weird circumstances. Then 20+ years later, my grandfather’s murder. A prospective tenant. They owned an apartment in Camden, New Jersey and were going to rent it to a guy. He disappeared after leaving a deposit, wanted his money back, and my grandfather said, “No, I’ll see you in court.” He came back and murdered my grandfather. 20 years after that, my stepbrother’s shot and killed in Camden. A girl put a bullet in the back of his head. In the early 2000s, another cousin killed in Atlantic City. So, the psychic residue of what’s been passed down and me grappling with telling these stories that Black families across the country experience in terms of the violence of police in the system and the violence of the community and the systemic violence, again, that binds us all, wraps us all up, this became so much more personal. As you know, for a long time I was trying to be somewhat arm’s length, even though I was very close to telling these stories. Now, was time to drop all of that and speak honestly about what I now know to be crushing down on me, which is the weight of this family history. Yeah, as you were talking about it, it just made me think about my own family history and think our stories are so similar. My great-grandfather, the reason why my family ended up in New Jersey is because something happened to him in the South, and there are no records of it, but family lore is that he was lynched. I don’t have anything to prove that, but the family lore is that he was lynched and then that moved my family to New Jersey, and then all sorts of violent incidences happen there as well, and it just kind of seeps into you. The funny thing for me is that I had no idea about any of that until I started reporting on a story and I thought, let me look into my genealogy and just think about … and when I saw it all, I was like, wow, I am reporting on the story of my family and didn’t even know it. Time and again. Time and again. Time and again you find yourself in these horrible stories, sad stories about people that look like you and then you find out they are you, and it’s a heavy weight to carry. At Reveal we worked on this series called Mississippi Goddam, and I get choked up when I talk about it. I remember … ooh, God, man, I’m so sorry, I’m getting choked up. No, man. I remember feeling like it was going to kill me. My blood pressure was ridiculous. I would check my blood pressure in the morning and I thought to myself … literally the blood pressure thing would tell me to go to the hospital, because it was that high, but I couldn’t stop, because I had to turn in this story. I had to turn in this story and I felt like I … and I did. I don’t think this was wrong, but I felt like I owed this family and I owed the young man that I was telling the story about like I had to finish it, but also when I look back, I owe my children to be around if I can. But I couldn’t see it then, I just was like- Of course not. … “You got to get through this thing.” Oof, man, I’m so sorry. No, of course, man. But every time I sat down at that computer or to write these episodes and listening to this tape and looking at autopsy reports and all of that type of stuff, and graphic photos of this young man’s death, I felt like I had to keep doing it. The more I did it, the higher my blood pressure went, the more I thought … I literally would think I’m going to stroke out, but I don’t have a choice, I have to finish this, I have to finish this. I mean, just to be honest, Reveal, especially at that time, most of the people in that workplace were white, and I had worked so hard and championed the story for so long that I was finally getting a shot, and I knew I couldn’t drop it and just the amount of pressure and time it took. Then afterwards I realized like, bro, you acting crazy, so I went to a therapist that guided the therapy and I took three months off from Reveal. I just couldn’t do it, ’cause I thought it was going to kill me, and I think by the grace of God it didn’t, but carrying that, oh my God. Brother, that same feeling. Again, I feel like I’m looking into a mirror and I’m hearing a echo bounce from me to you and back to me. Those early days especially, there’s nothing like arriving at a crime scene and seeing someone that looks just like you, dressed just like you, got some Air Force 1’s fresh just like you with their brain matter splattered across the pavement. Yeah. The family and that look in a mother’s eyes that could be your mother, there’s zero things in this universe like that pain, and that we are the burden bearers of that and we have to be and we have always had to be. Ida B. Wells did not like this season either. Yeah. Her blood pressure was probably through the roof- Absolutely. … but it’s a reminder that we cannot report our way out of the pain, we cannot educate our way out of the pain, we cannot drink our way out of the pain. No. When you’re a young man, you can’t run around and have sex. You can’t sex it away, we have to engage with it. Until we have those conversations about what it means to carry that weight when you have to carry the weight, because no one else will and no one will care when we die of a heart attack, because it happens every single day, right? Yeah. No, absolutely. What you got me doing here, bruh? What you got me doing here? You got me. That’s what we need though, that’s what we need. [inaudible 00:09:49] Hey listen, I’m just mirroring you, bro, ’cause I’m sitting here talking to you with tears in my eyes trying to be like, “Brother, calm down. What are you doing, Mr. Letson?” So, to go back to trauma- Yeah, let’s do more. Yeah, let’s do more. One of the things in your book that I think about a lot, and again I’m giving so much personal information here. So my oldest son, I had no idea he was born. I didn’t find out about him until he was five years old and he lived all the way across the country. We had no communication or contact until I found out when he was five and I was 23. So I was 23, I was a kid when I flew out to get him, I was taking him home back to Florida and I didn’t know what to expect. I’d seen his picture, this was long before the days when we had video calls, so I talked to him on the phone a little bit. Back then my thing was with him when I found out about him, I started writing postcards and sending him … ’cause he was a kid and getting mail’s a big thing, right? I was a flight attendant, so I’d be in different places and sending him stuff. Anyway, I go to get my kid, first time meeting him in-person, and the thing that tripped me out is that he was so much like me at that age. I mean, things that he would say were things that I … really specific things. I’m a little bit older than you, but when I was young, we had this saying, I think it went something like up your nose with a rubber hose or something like that, right? I remember the first time I’m meeting my kid, he’s like, “Up your nose with a …” I was like, “What?” Then I brought him home to my mother and my mother who likes him more than me was like, “This is you as a kid.” He was so much like me. I tell that story to just say that I believe that DNA is way more powerful than we talk about. Yes, yes. That I believe that our family’s history is encoded in our DNA and we carry both the good, but also the trauma. You can’t get away from it, it is in you. It is in your blood, it is in your bones, it is who you are. I think especially for Black folks in this country whose ancestors have experienced a crazy amount of trauma, you carry it with you every day. So when you talk about going into your grandparents’ home and being at the spot where you know your grandfather died, can you talk to me about that? Yeah, man, there’s the ways that these moments reshape the way we raise our children and the way we move through the world, how we teach them to survive in America and teach them to carry a bit of this trauma, that’s one thing in a practical way, right? This moment changes everything, there’s the emotional pain that we experience. When you think about those epigenetics and that post-traumatic slave disorder, that we’ve arrived at that moment after a long series of these cuts and slices. There’s one part of the book that I had to shrink down for the sake of the story, but it’s the guns for slave cycle and a psychic connection to the violence and the pain. Not just a genetic one too, but there’s this other one, this ethereal psychic trauma that we carry from being bartered for guns, and that Europeans plied these regional African powers with guns and some would only trade in guns for enslaved people to create war instability. So this idea that we were forced out of Mother Africa with a muzzle of a gun at our back, and then we arrive at the hell of the Western world and experienced all this other violence and trauma that we then pass down for five, six, seven, eight generations to arrive on the South Side of Chicago, to arrive in Camden, New Jersey, to arrive in West Berlin, New Jersey where my grandfather was killed and stand in that spot, and then read in the newspaper about how the blood was smeared on my grandmother’s nightgown and what it means. How do we disrupt that? Is there any disrupting that? I think acknowledging it, that it exists and it’s not some sort of fantasy of our Hoodoo, Voodoo imaginations that we’re carrying that, but I think it’s something that we have to acknowledge it, because it’s there, and we know it’s there. We know it’s there, and I just don’t know how we reconcile that. Yeah, I mean, I think you’re right is that the key is talking about it, ’cause America will convince you it is not there. We’re I wouldn’t say the beginning, but maybe America has always been in the process of the great forgetting. America loves this idea of collective amnesia that it continually pushes on people, and so if you’re pushing the collective amnesia, we’re not engaging with all the things you just talked about. That’s right. If you don’t engage with it, it just gets bigger and it begins to guide your steps in the future, because you don’t know it’s there, so you have to talk about it. That’s right. One of my guiding, and this is a guiding principle for my journalism, but also for this book in particular, because this is not a very prescriptive book, this is not a policy book, this is about how we’ve been shaped and our experience with the violence, but it’s that ain’t nothing wrong with us. Ain’t nothing wrong with us. If you want to understand what’s wrong with us, let’s look at this machinery around us. Right. Right? Let’s look at what we’ve carried in us, what was sparked by this white supremacist violence and a society bent on our breaking, that’s what’s wrong with us. So even though the gun is certainly the vehicle and that kind of violence is the vehicle, for me it’s like this is how we arrived at this moment, this is how we got here. But ultimately there is nothing wrong with us except for how we’ve experienced this country. So, this country is moving. I’ve heard people say that this is unprecedented what we’re seeing right now. I would say that we saw all this at the end of reconstruction, and this is a rerun of reconstruction. Just the writers of America season five are pretty bad. This season- They really jumping the shark, man. This is crazy. This is like, what are you doing? We need new characters. But as we are living in this time period, and given all that you have reported on and gone through personally, where’s your work going to take you now that we’re here? You know what? I’ve been having these conversations a lot lately with Black men in particular, but Black people in general. Not unlike those post-reconstruction days when the nadir or the nadir … I’m from New Jersey, I say nadir. Yeah, right, right, right. I might be wrong. Nadir just sounds right to me, so nadir. But beating back our efforts at nation building and institution building, and finding for the first time some fullness, some fullness of what it means to be an American and solidify this conditional citizenship that we’ve had. I think now is the time that we build and collaborate and double down on telling our stories and telling the truth. So for me, I think this book is an important bridge for me. For more than 20 years, I’ve been a journalist in the newsroom, in print, in digital, in broadcast, in podcasting, now I have my first film coming out on the anniversary of Katrina on Peacock, I have the book coming out, I want to [inaudible 00:19:12] ways in which we speak to the Black American experience. This is not new or novel, but I think now is the time to continue to build in that catalog, because what’s going to happen is as they continue to try to erase us and erase our story, in 100 years when they’re on the fourth nadir, when they’re on the fourth burning down of any kind of reconstructive efforts, they have to understand that this is not unprecedented, that this is precedented, that this is the default position and this is how you survive it. Yeah. This is how you survive it is to look it square in it’s face and tell the truth as they’re renaming military bases after these fake Robert E. Lee. They’re so bent on making sure they honor- It’s so ridiculous. … the heroes of [inaudible 00:19:55] Can we just talk about the ridiculousness of white- That’s Robert Jenkins Lee. Right, exactly. Thing about this. We’ve been around long enough, we are just now comfortable enough to say white supremacist system, white supremacy. Oh my God, absolutely. We couldn’t say that- No. … we’re just there. It’s just that America’s understanding of what it means to be Black and how we see the world and experience the world, we haven’t caught up and journalism absolutely hasn’t caught up. Even among our friends and friends of the truth, there is an acceptable level of anti-Blackness in this country that is okay- It’s okay. … even among people who wish it would be different. Yep, it’s okay. But we’ve accepted it, it’s part of what this is, right? So that’s why you have to have an argument about whether the founders of this country, these transnational human traffickers are white supremacists or not. But the idea that my ancestors’ lives didn’t matter. One of the things that our friend Nikole Hannah-Jones talks about a lot is that you can’t have this history and it matter, and suddenly this history doesn’t matter. That’s right. It doesn’t make sense. That’s right. It doesn’t make sense. You got to own the whole thing America, you just got to own it. That’s right, that’s right, that’s right. Our friend Ta-Nehisi Coates, you can’t have the credits without the debits, right? Exactly. It has to be both, but also the idea that our existence and experience is kind of inconsequential when we are foundational in all of the ways. We were the economy- Absolutely, exactly. … we were our flesh. Exactly. But the fact that we’re still fighting to tell these stories. Exactly. You’d imagine a great nation would say, look how far we’ve come, and when we couldn’t do the right thing we did. Certainly this founding was A, B, C, or D, but we are such a great nation where look at the strides. The strides were made through bloodshed and sacrifice. Absolutely, absolutely. Come on. The truth, as we know, is so dangerous though, because the idea that … especially with Black people, this idea of liberation, but that America itself will be freed, finally freed, that’s a very dangerous proposition for those who don’t believe in our equality or humanity. Yeah. Yes, absolutely, absolutely. Trymaine, is there anything that you wanted to hit on the book before I let you go? I don’t think so, just that this truly is my life’s work. I have joked that this book almost killed me, which it did, but it truly is my life’s work and it finally became what it was supposed to be. I hope people not only find an understanding about how guns have shaped us and the industry that profits while there’s so much pain here, but that there is a healing and power and strength in facing down the hardest parts of what we harbor within, right? Confronting the violence, the silent, quiet violence from within. As men in particular, but in general, finding the strength and courage to face that down and live freely and live happily and find peace. That’s why this matters, because it hurts so bad what we’ve experienced, what we’ve carried in our genes, the psychic residue of the violence that we’ve experienced, the systemic violence and the actual violence. What it means to finally find peace within that, that to me I hope is the great strength and power of this book, and I hope it finds the audience that it deserves. Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Trymaine Lee was in the middle of writing his first book when the unthinkable happened. At 38, a massive heart attack nearly took his life. That near-death experience forced him to reckon with the toll his reporting has taken on his life, including the years he’s spent chronicling gun violence involving Black men in America, as well as his own family’s history marred by slavery, lynching, and even murder. “What I was feeling was death,” Lee says of his heart attack. “And that moment changed the book certainly, changed my life, but changed the way I view the violence that I had been writing about. I had been writing about bullets. But this blood clot in my heart was just as violent.” On this week’s episode of More To The Story, Lee sits down with host Al Letson for part 1 of a very personal conversation about the moment Lee thought he might be dying, the many challenges of being a Black journalist in America, and how his brush with death redirected the focus of his new book, A Thousand Ways to Die: The True Cost of Violence on Black Life in America. Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. This following interview was edited for length and clarity. More To The Story transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Al Letson: So this is your first book. I should say that as a journalist, you’ve been on this beat for a while. Obviously we know each other. I’ve been following your work for a minute, so how did it turn into this book? Trymaine Lee: No. The earliest seeds of this book were planted when I was just an intern at the Philadelphia Daily News in 2003. I was covering a case of a young brother who was 17, 18 years old, and he got shot in the back of the neck during a robbery. So some other guys tried to rob him for his Allen Iverson jersey. They ended up shooting him and he ended up being paralyzed. And I found my way into the hospital and this brother, despite being a quadriplegic, he couldn’t feel anything from the neck down, was so hopeful and so optimistic, and he told me that he had dreams about walking again and he’s like this hopeful bright light in the midst of what was clearly like a very dark moment for him and his family. But as he’s talking, I looked across his bed and I see his mother there, her eyes welling with tears and both realized that he would never walk again. And then she started to tell the story of what it would take to get him home. She said, “We need a new ramp. We need an ambulance, a van. We need a wheelchair. We need new outlets.” And they’re just a poor family from North Philly. And this idea of the great cost. Obviously he lost his mobility, he lost a certain kind of future, but also there was this financial cost. And so I started to think about this idea of nobody cares about that young brother or young brothers like him, but maybe you care that every time a bullet hits flesh, we’re all paying a price somehow some way in a literal dollar amount. And so I had this idea that I was calling Million Dollar Bullets, and so I had Million Dollar Bullets in my head and I pitched it. Everywhere I worked I was trying to pitch this story and I just couldn’t get it done. Until many years later in 2015, a book agent had approached me and said, “Listen, if there’s ever anything you want to do, come talk to me.” And so I pitched the idea and then it just made sense. The timing was right. It was right after Trayvon and Michael Brown, and so we were grappling with how violence is heaped upon young black men in particular, and there was all this gun violence and Freddie Gray, all this stuff was happening and it just felt like it was the right time. Now the book changed dramatically from those early seeds, but that was the beginning. I’m listening to it to the way you describe it, and it broke my heart. Literally we’re in this interview and I’m trying to piece my heart back together because it is just so sad to me that we as journalists have to think about angles to make people have empathy for, in this case specifically for young black people. We have to think of an angle and say to you, well, this bullet economically costs you money and maybe you will care more about the economics of this bullet and want to stop this stuff because clearly you don’t care about the people that are being impacted. That’s right. This idea … And you and I both know this well, the gut-wrenching exercise of humanizing our people, humanizing our people. Finding ways where other people, white people, white society might connect, might have some compassion for the violence that we experience every day, the literal violence, but also the systemic violence that keeps this whole thing together. It’s a terrible dance we have to do, but we have to do that because things are as they are, not as we want them to be. Right. Absolutely. That’s the work itself. It is what it is. And for people called to do it, that’s just the burden you have to carry. But still sometimes you just pull back a little bit and it’s like, “Wow. I have to make an economic case in order for this to matter to the general public.” Which is just wild to me. So you’re putting this book together, it’s your passion project and you’ve been working hard on it, and right after you turned in your first draft, life took a turn that you just did not see. At the age of 38, I had a heart attack eight years ago this past July, and it was one of those moments where in the midst of it actually happening, I wasn’t clear it was a heart attack, but I was clear my life felt like it was ending in that moment. For a few days, walking to the train … I live in New York and I was walking to the train and I feel a little pressure in my chest and I thought it was one of those times where I was just a little more out of shape than normal. I’m a former athlete and I usually stay in shape, but it was one of those times where I had been out the gym for a while, and so I didn’t think much of it. And then the day of the heart attack earlier that day, I went to have coffee with a friend of mine at work and I walked down the steps to meet her and I felt like I was going to pass out. And so I said, “I’m going to go to the clinic at 30 Rock at NBC just to get checked out.” And so I go in there and they listen to my heart and they put a little EKG thing on me and they said, “You know what, the left side of your heart is a little enlarged. At some point you should go see someone. A cardiologist. But it’s not like you’re going to go home tonight and drop dead.” Verbatim. Wow. I’m not going to drop dead. Then later that night I go home and my wife was cleaning the bedroom and so I was on the sofa sleeping and she woke me up and I went to the bedroom three minutes after I laid down this enormous pressure in my chest. The world was spinning, cold sweat, nausea. It felt like my entire body was breaking down, and in fact what I was feeling was death. I had a blood clot in my left anterior descending artery that was starving my heart. And that moment changed the book certainly, changed my life, but changed the way I viewed the violence that I had been writing about. I had been writing about bullets, but this blood clot lodged in my heart, lodged in my artery was just as violent. Before we go to the book, can you just talk to me about the weight of the heart attack and how it played out with your family. I just want to hear about the personal journey through that. So we’re at that age where … I was talking to a friend of mine recently and I was like, “We’re at that age where if you have kids, they’re still needing your guidance. If you have parents, they now need your guidance. Work is crazy, the economy is going nuts, you’re feeling crunched and you’re just trying to get through the best you can, and then something like this happens.” I’m sure it has to change your perspective about life. It sounds cliche to think that in that moment I was thinking about everything that I would miss. My daughter, who was six years old at the time, was this beautiful little inquisitive girl who is like my buddy to this day. She’s turning 13 this summer and to think about not … Yeah, man. Take your time. To think about not being able to walk her to school. The science project. She wants to be a journalist like us. So talking about the five W’s and having little conversations with her and seeing that she’s beginning to piece an understanding together and that I would miss that. It brought me to my knees in so many ways, but it also coming out of that, that I did survive, that I did live, it was an opportunity to live more fully and more honestly. And so in the beginning it was like, “You know what, let me get physically right because it’s going to take more than that to get me.” Definitely going to have to hawk me down. Absolutely. Absolutely. I’ve been through enough. I said, “You know what, I’m getting on this bike.” I started to meditate. I started to really be just mindful. But it also forced me to engage with a weight that I had not fully unpacked that I was carrying because my six-year-old daughter was asking me tough questions. How and why? And with no family history, no high blood pressure, no high cholesterol I had the misfortune of some soft plaque just breaking off and the clot filled this place. But there was another weight on my heart that I had never fully engaged with. As a journalist for my entire career operating on the edge of death and survival, black death and survival in particular, and a family history packed with early death and violence I had to engage with that in a way that I had never expected to fully. And so again, re-engaging with how I’m living, the idea idea of mortality also though. There was a moment was freeing in a way that though every night for years I went to sleep not knowing if I would wake up. And that was scary a little bit because it was like I started traveling again for work and I was like, “I don’t want to die in this hotel room.” Or if my wife had to go to work, I don’t want to die, my daughter comes in the room and finds me. That was one side. But the other side was this clarity that we know tomorrow’s not promised, but it truly is not promised. So how are we going to live? After that wave of a few years, I can honestly say that I haven’t experienced stress in the way I understood it before. I ain’t worried about nothing now. I’m really truly not. Come on now. So I feel free of some way where it’s like, man, it’s going to come at some point hopefully far down the road, so I’m going to do everything I want to do. Man, I’ll be fishing every chance I get. I’m chilling. I’m going to Martha’s Vineyard right now. Last year was my first year. I ain’t grow up with nobody going to Martha’s Vineyard. Give me the finger sandwiches. You going do it. How you pronounce this? Let me get some of that please. So as scary as things have been, honestly, there is a freedom, and I think in the reshaping of my life and the reshaping of my understanding of life and death and the reshaping of the book, there is something … I think clarity is the word. There’s a clarity now, man. With the story I was trying to tell in my life. A filmmaker that I know has a movie. It’s a movie, but it’s like four hours long. It was on PBS. But the title of the movie, it was based off an African proverb That was, you never know how alive you are until there’s a lion in the room. That’s right. When I go through stuff … Recently, one of my kids was really sick and it was really scary and he was in the hospital for almost four months. And that saying, I felt it. I felt it so deep. I understood it before, but when you are sitting in the room and you feel like death is on the other side you know there’s a lion in this room, and I got to squeeze life and get everything I possibly can out of it because we are not promised tomorrow. It is like you could walk outside now and it all be gone, or the people you love be gone and what did you do in the meantime? And we are not promised the nightfall. We are not promised that. No. So one more question about the family stuff. How did you explain this to your daughter? Because six is that age where they are beginning to understand life, but I don’t know if they truly have an understanding of death at that part. They understand life in the terms of life is good, mom and dad are here, we get to have fun, we do this, we do that. A little bit of sense of self maybe, but the idea that it could all go away is so foreign at that age. Well, two things. I think one, I don’t think most adults understand mortality because we don’t live as if it’s going to end. We don’t. And even when you have a proximity or a proximal relationship to death, you’ve experienced it through people and that’s a certain kind of pain of that loss. It’s hard for us to understand that we might not be here one day. That’s harder to fully conceptualize. And before I get to my daughter, I want to say one thing that was a moment. So the whole time … I just want to backtrack a little bit. Yeah. Please. So the heart attack happens and for about 10 minutes it feels like I’m separating from my physical form. This crazy … I can’t even explain how it felt, but I’m separating myself. And then it passes. Then the ambulance comes, the MTs, they take my vitals, they say, “Everything looks pretty good to us. Do you want to go to the hospital?” And I said, “My daughter has camp in the morning.” And this is how men … This how we … I said, “My daughter has camp in the morning. My wife has a trip. I’ll wait into the morning to get to the hospital. I don’t want to inconvenience my family. You’ve been in the hospital. I don’t want to have my baby in the hospital and my wife.” And so all night long I’m tossing and turning on the sofa with a 98% blockage in the main artery giving my heart blood. The next day we dropped my daughter off at camp and I go into urgent care. I don’t know why I’m going to urgent care, but I’m doubled over across the street. Bro, I tell them what’s going on. They said, “Yo, go to the emergency room now. What are you doing here? Get there.” So we get there and they’re still like, “You look so young.” They’re not sure what’s going on. After seven or eight hours, they finally take a blood test and find troponin, which is a compound or protein that’s released if you have heart damage. They said, “We think you might’ve had a heart attack. We’re going to prep you for the cath lab tomorrow.” So mind you, I still haven’t gotten in the cath lab yet. So they’re like tomorrow. And then fortunately my cardiologist, who is my cardiologist today said, “You know what, let’s get you in there now.” And so I’m on the table, there’s a big screen over my shoulder and they’re threading whatever it is through my wrist in the vein. And he’s tooling around in there and he pulls it out. He said, “You are a very lucky man.” He said, “You almost had a complete blockage. I put two stents in there to clear it.” And he said, “Where’s your wife? Let’s go talk to her.” And in that moment I started to smile because I was like, “Yo, your boy was almost out here.” I was so happy because I had had a heart attack. I survived it though. So I’m actually feeling pretty good, literally dodged one. But then the next day … And there’s another one of those moments that I get choked up thinking about, it’s my wife, my brother, my sister, my mother, and we’re all in the room. And I made a joke to my wife. I said, “Man, you almost became a thousandaire.” And then I was like, she almost had to collect death benefits from me, and I broke down sobbing like a baby in my mother’s arms because the reality was, again, all of that crashing down on you, how close of a call that really was. And then my family would have to collect benefits on me. So I’m in the midst of all that, and I still have this precious, beautiful little girl, this little smart little girl who she had been watching me in Ferguson, Missouri. She had been watching me in Baltimore. So she’s attuned and we have real honest conversations, as honest as you can possibly be with a six-year-old. And I was trying to explain that what happened to daddy’s artery is like a pipe with some gunk got stopped up and it almost stopped my heart. And that wasn’t good enough for her. Because she was already starting to ask about God. She started to ask about Jesus and religion a little bit. And I’m trying to be honest, like baby, I don’t know. I don’t know. Here’s the story. Here’s the thing, and we’re tapping into something bigger than ourselves, and I’m trying to … But with this, it really forced me to acknowledge what was bearing down in my heart. The stress of telling these stories of black life and death and survival and the spectacle of death. But also a family history going back a very long time to realize what we’ve inherited. But we never fully process as a young journalist running and gunning and hanging out and drinking. And when I was single, we’re dating and we’re moving around and we’re hitting the deadlines. And then after that we’re hanging out. Never fully engaging what it means to carry this specific kind of weight that black people in this country have had to bear. The violence certainly of the bullet, but the systemic violence that is necessary, that is a requisite for these ecosystems in which we experienced that other violence to actually occur. And so it blew my mind in that like, yo, what almost killed me was being black in America and that changed everything. I think as we turn to talk a little bit more about the book, that being a black journalist, especially in the time that you’re talking about in the time of Ferguson, in the time of Trayvon Martin, that reporting on it carried a weight for black journalists that I don’t think we talk about enough. I don’t even think we really acknowledge it. Because here’s the thing about acknowledging that working in journalism is that as a black journalist, this is just the truth. You have to be better. You can’t talk about you’re having trauma about this or that or the other thing. You have to just do the job because you talk about that type of stuff you’re not going to get work, you’re not going to get the jobs. You’re not going to be able to keep doing the reporting that you feel is important because nobody does this type of reporting because they want to. We do it because we’re called to do it because we see Mike Brown and we see ourselves, we see our cousins, we see our brothers, our sisters, all of that. When I see Breonna Taylor, Breonna Taylor looks like she could belong in my family. So for me, it’s like I got to tell that story because if I don’t, who will? So you’re drawn to it, but you also experience the trauma of it in a way that you can’t talk about really, except with other black journalists. And then we tend to not talk about it publicly because again, we want to get the job. I remember as a very young journalist, there was the Jayson Blair case, Jayson Blair, young black journalist from New York Times, who was perhaps one of the most fabulous plagiarists of all time back. He was saying he was in Oklahoma- Talk about setback. He was saying he was in Oklahoma and was in the sports department and it was just a mess. And there was this ripple effect I remember, a chilling effect of what it means to be black. Now are they going to see us like that? And other people saying the kinds of jobs that we were taking, some people didn’t want the so-called ghetto beat, which meant you were covering urban affairs and black life in cities. But I think for some of us, that’s the reason why we’re doing this, is to not just shine light in dark spaces to remind the world of who we are and tell our story because no one loves us but us. And that’s the bottom line. No one cares about us. We’re still grappling with the negro problem in this country. And so the weight that comes with of navigating these white newsrooms, it’s like the plantation. And every day we have to walk into the big house with our nice clothes paid for by the plantation and convince them that what’s happening in the back corner of the plantation matters. That every day when it rains people are getting sick because stuck in the mud and every day it can’t get the kids to school because the school, they got the hole in the roof because y’all haven’t … And they’re like, “Hmm, I know some black people back there, and I don’t know if that’s true.” And then you got to go back to the plantation and they’re like, “Man, you’re looking real clean. I see you in the big house. Look like you eating well.” And you’re like, “Yeah, my grandma and them from around here. Y’all know me.” I’m trying to tell them. So this dynamic. It is not just the dynamic of having to code switch and leave a part of you behind to go into this space and specifically be able to advocate for the stories that you’re trying to tell outside the space, it’s also coming to the space and them looking at you like … I don’t know. I don’t know. And you’re right, we haven’t fully talked about it. And all of us who as black journalists who tell these stories, who are mission-driven, who are purpose-driven, who our North star is telling the whole truth about how we experienced this country, there is also this assumption or this perceived bias. Because we understand the experience so well there has to be a bias. We have to have some jaundice vision because we see it too clearly. And so you have to be so good. You have to be so sharp, and you can’t make any mistakes because you will find yourself without a job. No. It’s a lot, man. But especially then, because there was this emotional heat of the moment, but there was also this fire. So we’re engaging with America tearing at its threads and what it means to value black life. And people say, enough is enough. And how do we cover that through the mainstream lens has never been easy. And I’m not sure we figured out a way to do it, except for to go out there time and the game and tell the truth. Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.