Tyre Nichols’s Mother: “They Beat My Son Like a Piñata … I Feel Sorry for Them”

“Where was the humanity? They beat my son like a piñata.”

Friday morning, CNN’s Don Lemon interviewed Tyre Nichols’s mother, RowVaughn Wells, and stepfather, Rodney Wells, about the violent police beating to death of her son, Tyre.

On January 7, Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man, was reportedly pulled over about 250 feet away from his home by Memphis police officers. A police statement said Nichols was pulled over for suspected reckless driving, after which a “confrontation” ensued. Five officers were involved in beating Nichols to the brink of death; he succumbed to his injuries three days later from said “confrontation.” He died in the hospital.

The five officers were fired nearly two weeks after the traffic stop; each was arrested and charged with numerous crimes, including second-degree murder, on Thursday.

In an interview following the indictment of the five officers, Nichols’s mother revealed that police had initially blocked her from seeing her dying son at the hospital because he was “under arrest.”

Nichols was “already gone” by the time she and her husband arrived at the hospital, she said. “They had beat him to a pulp.”

After losing their son to such heinous violence dealt by those supposedly meant to “protect and serve,” Nichols’s family now is just trying to make sense of such senselessness.

“Where was the humanity?” Nichols’s mother asked. She described the shocking imbalance—her 150-pound son, afflicted with Crohn’s disease, being beaten to death by five police officers.

She actually feels “sorry” for the officers. She described the harm and shame the officers have brought to their own families and to the Black community. “They didn’t have to do this.”

“I don’t hate anybody, that’s not in my nature,” she said. “I just feel sorry for them because they did something horrendous.”

To hear Nichols’s mother is to attempt to understand the profoundly difficult burden she now holds. Mired in the grief of such unspeakable violence, she speaks to the severe lack of humanity that plagues our structures of policing, and the vicious consequences of that poison.

Watch the CNN interview here.

Gay and bisexual men would no longer have to abstain from sex before donating blood under rules changes the Food and Drug Administration proposed Friday, but only if they are in monogamous relationships.

Men who have sex with men, or MSM, were initially banned from donating blood during the HIV/AIDS crisis in the 1980s. The FDA relaxed those rules, first in 2015 by deciding MSM could donate after remaining celibate for a year and then again in 2020 by changing the abstention period to three months.

Under the newly recommended changes, all potential blood donors—regardless of gender or sexual orientation—would report whether they had seen multiple sexual partners or a new partner in the past three months. If so, they would be asked if they had anal sex. If they have, they would have to wait before they can donate blood.

There will be no change in deferral time for people taking PrEP or PEP, landmark HIV-prevention drugs, for people who consistently wear condoms during sex, or for people who present a negative HIV test.

The American Medical Association, blood banks, and LGBTQ rights organizations have urged the FDA for years to change its rules for blood donation. Health experts say the current regulations are homophobic, outdated, and don’t actually work to keep the nation’s donated blood supply safe.

Some experts worry that the proposed changes would still single out MSM, many of whom say they have felt like pariahs for decades because the FDA rules make them feel as if they are seen as untrustworthy or merely disease transmitters.

The Human Rights Campaign hailed the potential changes as “an important first step toward dismantling an antiquated and discriminatory blood donation policy.”

But “while today’s announcement is a victory, it’s not the end of the road,” HRC President Kelley Robinson said in a statement, calling on the FDA to adopt “an approach rooted in science, not identity.”

The FDA proposal will be open for public comment for 60 days, after which the agency will review the comments and make a final decision.

Twitter has a seemingly ever-changing layout and algorithm. Now there’s the “For You” timeline, the default setting instead of a timeline of people one follows. And more often than not, people are finding tweets on that new timeline to … not really be “for them,” or at least they wouldn’t think so. And now, for some reason or other, the algorithm appears to curiously be pushing Derek Guy, an innocuous menswear writer, onto a not insignificant number of people’s timelines.

Algorithms can work in strange ways. The preponderance of Guy’s posts on people’s timelines could be explained by any number of reasons: His posts often have high engagement, which is good for the algorithm, or perhaps many of the people being pushed toward Guy’s posts are in concentric Twitter bubbles, so posts recommended to one person are recommended to another—and the whole coincidence is just socially manufactured and self-fulfilling. Maybe it’s all the workings of a lone, fun-seeking Twitter engineer.

The mystique behind why Guy’s appearing on the timelines of many has become a bit of a meme, but the intrigue in his virality somewhat overshadows what Guy actually wants to talk about: the labor crisis born from fast fashion, the ways liberalism may have influenced clothing consumption, and how we can adopt a more thoughtful approach to fashion. Guy and his posts are more than just an accidental discovery from an algorithm. But still, he knows what everyone is asking. Why is he suddenly showing up on their Twitter feed?

“I don’t have any secret insight into their code,” Guy says, shruggingly. “But my guess is that the stuff that I post gets a lot of likes and comments.” Whatever the reason, Guy has seen the impacts, gaining some 30,000 of his now 110,000 followers in the past month.

The man behind the handle is more than a manifestation of the oddities of Elon Musk’s Twitter, though. Guy, in fact, seems to embody characteristics antithetical to the algorithms of our time, which thrive on high-octane emotion and short attention spans. Peppered with good-natured quips, most of Guy’s online activity involves explaining strategies for how to dress well, sustainably, and efficiently—in great detail and care.

“I love wearing clothes,” Guy chuckles. “It sounds absurd, but I do like clothes.” As he grew up, Guy was surrounded by friends in the music scene, collecting items like vintage Polo Ralph Lauren. He began reading and writing about clothing, reading more and more blogs in the 2000s. French cinema, jazz, and blues led him to get more interested in suits and tailoring, specifically.

“I got my horn-rimmed glasses—sounds so corny, but I was young and I was really into jazz and French New Wave—because of Bill Evans and Malcolm X,” Guy says. “I thought those two guys were supercool.”

Guy began spreading his passion to Tumblr, posting waves of menswear photos on a site where people would typically post one or two. The positive responses prompted him to write short posts about the photos, which would garner even further positive responses, beckoning him to write even more. Soon, Jesse Thorn, editor of menswear site Put This On, asked him to write for the site.

That chance set him on his path to become a prominent voice in the space, writing for sites like Put This On, The Washington Post, and Esquire.

All this dedicated time and effort has led Guy to reflect on how fashion represents one’s cultural background and the broader cultural forces connected to those backgrounds.

“Just yesterday I saw this older woman who was wearing a black cardigan, but the pockets and trims were a furry, leopard material, and she decorated her walking stick with the tinsel you’d use for a Christmas tree and she was wearing really brightly colored shoes,” Guy recalls. “And that was like a nice thing to see. It’s nice to see someone who’s older who takes such joy in daily dress. You know, to wrap tinsel around something that is sometimes considered like a handicap.”

That kind of intentionality and ingenuity is what Guy is concerned society is losing. He worries that the infinite amount of choices consumers have has led some to buy cheap, freely—without much concern for longevity or for the material conditions of those who made the clothes.

“In my heart, the thing that worries me most about fast and cheap fashion is the squeezing of labor,” Guy says. “When I read about the lives of garment workers, that’s what gets me most emotional.”

Guy believes capitalism alone isn’t to blame. Liberalism, though obviously positive in relieving people of certain social constraints and granting them freedoms, may have also helped lead to a rise in fast fashion. “The infinite number of identities” people are now able to explore both embodies the freeing nature of liberalism and also perhaps opens the door for people to enter into wasteful tendencies with their wardrobes.

Guy is not some social regressive. But he has tips for people on how to both mitigate the crisis of fast fashion and enhance their wardrobes while doing it: things like building wardrobes over time, shopping vintage, and buying fewer things for more money. He explains how exploration—whether attempting to pull off rugged, or preppy, or a niche Japanese brand—can be done as effectively with one pair of trusty jeans.

Guy argues that buying things with more intention and being willing to spend slightly more ensures a higher return if and when you choose to sell them secondhand, or at least ensures that someone else will take them after you. The tendency to rely on donating clothes, while perhaps well intentioned, is misguided. If an item doesn’t get picked up by someone, “the end point for that garment is typically the landfill, or the rag market in Africa, where it destroys local economies,” Guy says.

The crisis of fast fashion, and how to solve it, is rife for debate and discussion. But Guy wants at least to offer people an “entry point” to fashion. Especially with his newfound audience, he describes feeling extra cautious about even the jokes he makes. “I wouldn’t want someone to walk outside and think, ‘Oh, do people think my shoes are lame?’ That’s dumb, and it’d be dumb for me to make someone feel that way,” he says flatly. He says he’s leaning more into posting informative threads, like style for men with larger figures. Ultimately, he is concerned with accessibility for fashion in terms of both aesthetics and ethics.

He describes how he’s advocated for J Crew as an accessible pathway for newcomers into menswear, in the same fashion that Howard Zinn’s work has offered an accessible pathway into politics and theory for people. “There are different paths up the mountain.”

“It’s so cliché, but, like everyone says, politics is in everything,” Guy continues. “It’s especially true in clothes. It deals with material production, so we have wages. We have environmental impact, because of the end life of the garments. And then on our very bodies, we wear clothes to project identity, which is inherently political.”

The State Bar of California announced Thursday it is seeking to disbar former Donald Trump lawyer John Eastman for trying to overturn the 2020 election.

Eastman is accused of engaging “in a course of conduct to plan, promote, and assist then-President Trump in executing a strategy, unsupported by facts or law, to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election by obstructing the count of electoral votes of certain states,” the California bar said in a statement.

The bar association filed 11 charges against Eastman for making false statements about the nonexistent election fraud, including at the January 6, 2021, rally in Washington, D.C., that turned into the insurrection at the Capitol.

“The Office of Chief Trial Counsel (OCTC) intends to seek Eastman’s disbarment before the State Bar Court,” the bar said.

Eastman helped lead Trump’s legal efforts to undermine the election results and prevent certification of the votes, including by appealing directly to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Eastman was court-ordered in November to hand over certain emails to the House January 6 investigative committee, with the judge arguing the exchanges showed evidence of potential criminal activity.

At first Eastman resisted, but eventually he and his team complied—and, cartoonishly, included a live Dropbox link to emails from Trump’s legal team discussing how to overturn the election. Media outlets were able to access the emails and share them with the public.

Eastman was also a major player in efforts to pressure then–Vice President Mike Pence into refusing to certify the election results. In actuality, vice presidents hold a mainly ministerial role in the certification and have no power to overturn an election (nor should they).

The Asian American community is reeling from two consecutive mass shootings in California that targeted mostly Asian spaces. The tragedy has been made all the more difficult by the revelation that both gunmen were older Asian men.

Many on the right have been quick to seize on this detail, with Donald Trump Jr. accusing media outlets of failing to cover the massacres because they don’t “work for the narrative” of white supremacy. This isn’t true: The story was covered extensively by most major media outlets, but that didn’t stop people from amplifying the lie.

There are real reasons to talk about race when looking at what happened in California. The two shootings have compounded the trauma of Asian American communities, who have already been suffering from a meteoric rise in anti-Asian rhetoric and crimes the last few years, fueled in large part by Trump Jr.’s father, former President Donald Trump, and his language about the Covid-19 pandemic.

The gunmen’s race is an anomaly when looking at the history of mass shootings in America. But focusing on their race alone, without taking into account the larger context of gun violence in the country, does us a massive disservice.

“Multiple factors can be true, and one does not negate the other,” said Cynthia Choi, the co-executive director of Chinese Affirmative Action and the co-founder of the coalition Stop AAPI Hate.

But “in America, race always does matter,” she told The New Republic. “We have had to deal with multiple forms of hate and violence, and that includes coming from outside the community, within the community, amongst our other community members.”

Huu Can Tran, 72, is suspected of looking for his ex-wife when he killed 11 people and injured nine others in Monterey Park. Chunli Zhao, 66, is believed to have been targeting his workplace when he killed seven people and wounded another in Half Moon Bay. We may never know their true motives, but the suspected ones are completely typical for mass shooters in the U.S.

Tran and Zhao also are not the only senior Asians to commit mass shootings: In May 2022, 68-year-old David Chou entered a church in Laguna Woods, California, that was hosting a congregation from the Irvine Taiwanese Presbyterian Church and opened fire, killing one person and wounding five others.

These three shooters indicate a chilling trend of increased radicalization among older Asian Americans.

Sylvia Chan-Malik, a professor of American Studies and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University, said Asian elders increasingly get their news from videos—either found online or shared through chat platforms such as WeChat—instead of Asian-language newspapers.

“They’re kind of engaging the same media landscape” as the rest of us, which is increasingly digital, she explained to TNR. “Except because of the limited range of media they can consume because of language barriers, YouTube and these content creators become the primary source of a lot of their media consumption.”

Algorithms feed viewers suggestions, which include videos rife with mis- and disinformation tailored specifically for immigrant communities. “And all of a sudden, it’s not really news, it’s ideology,” Chan-Malik said, noting she’s “found that this is true across all sorts of communities of color.”

She also pointed out that Asian immigrants come from a wide variety of backgrounds, but they are all being convinced there is truth in extremist views.

But Tran, Zhao, and Chou’s jump from ideology to action is unusual—and uniquely American. The Asian American Pacific Islander, or AAPI, community has one of the lowest rates of gun violence in the U.S., and almost 60 percent of those gun-related deaths are suicides. This tracks with gun-related deaths in Asian countries, which have low rates of mass shootings.

A major difference is how easy it is to acquire a firearm in the U.S., as well as the spread of ideology around guns.

“What we’ve seen in the last couple of years is people mainstreaming the idea that guns keep us safe. It’s not true,” said Josh Horwitz, the co-director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions.

Gun regulations vary by locale nationwide, making it easy for someone to slip through one state’s tight restrictions and purchase a firearm elsewhere, as was the case in Monterey Park. What’s more, after a mass shooting, gun sales actually increase as people fear for their own safety and believe owning a gun will protect them.

Mass shootings are most often the result of “pure, individual grievances,” Horwitz explained to TNR. Some, such as the shootings in Buffalo or El Paso, are fueled by clear-cut white supremacist ideology. But there’s a litany of other reasons, from perceived injustice to relationship problems and domestic violence. Authorities in Half Moon Bay say Zhao seemed to be targeting specific individuals.

According to Horwitz, there’s been a “concerted effort” to push the idea that individual force has a place in decision-making, particularly for political decisions.

“We often see very individualized grievances now getting into the idea that guns can solve” those grievances, he said. “There’s too many people who buy into the ideology that guns will keep us safe and save lives. And then in moments when they’re not doing well, they have lots of guns in their hands.”

There have long been calls to tighten gun regulations in the United States. The vast majority of Americans, about 71 percent, support doing so, according to a poll conducted in August by the University of Chicago and the Associated Press. But efforts have repeatedly been blocked by Republican lawmakers.

Unfortunately, race plays a role here too: Opposition to gun control has historically been rooted in racism. In their 2015 paper, “Racial Resentment and Whites’ Gun Policy Preferences in Contemporary America,” University of Illinois Chicago political science professors Alexandra Filindra and Noah Kaplan argue that “racial prejudice colors all aspects of the debate regarding gun policy.”

Not all current gun-control opponents necessarily are prejudiced, but racial prejudice helped give rise to the anti-gun regulation stance.

Post–World War II, gun ownership began being cast as a “right,” according to Filindra and Kaplan. The NRA actually supported gun control until 1977, when the group underwent a leadership change and began actively lobbying for increased gun ownership among Americans.

“We strongly suspect that such a change in gun policy attitudes among whites was possible because guns have been a marker of white privilege throughout American history,” Filindra and Kaplan wrote. For much of its history, the Second Amendment did not even apply to nonwhite people.

None of this, however, can fully explain what drove the gunmen. Instead, at the core of everything is a community that is grieving and struggling to process what happened. After almost three years of fear, this Lunar New Year—one of the most important holidays across the Asian diaspora—was supposed to be an especially fresh start.

Celebrations were planned after being canceled during the first years of the pandemic, and California recently declared Lunar New Year a state holiday.

“Our community is reeling,” Choi said. After the past three years, “we don’t feel safe going anywhere.”

The start of the New Year festivities “was just such a joyful moment,” she said. “And that feels like that was taken from us once again.”