If you’ve seen the latest star-studded ad campaign making the rounds on Twitter right now, you probably have a lot of questions. Like, what in the world does a WELL Health-Safety Seal even mean? Is it something that companies are given, or something they purchase? And why did Jennifer Lopez and Lady Gaga cosplaying The Hunger Gamesagree to be the face of this?

“If you want to get back to your favorite places and feel confident they have put your health and safety first,” Lopez says in a campaign video that made the rounds on Thursday. Shortly after her impassioned address, other celebrities including Michael B. Jordan, Lady Gaga, and Robert De Niro joined her. Then, each spokesperson started reciting the hypnotic mantra urging viewers to “look for the WELL Health-Safety Seal.”

De Niro tells us that if we see the WELL Health-Safety Rated logo outside a school, office, store, or restaurant, “Everything may look the same, but the WELL Health-Safety Seal means that your health and safety are top of mind.” But the ad offers little to no information on how the International WELL Building Institute (IWBI), which developed the rating, plans to guarantee the safety of an establishment.

Paul Scialla, a former Goldman Sachs partner and the founder of IWBI’s parent company, Delos, appears briefly in the video to clarify that the safety rating is informed by “years of research and input” from leading virologists, public health experts, epidemiologists, and health professionals. But — I cannot stress this enough — the ad doesn’t completely explain what IWBI is.

What in the New World order hell is this? pic.twitter.com/bbIr5gONXG

— Luke Rudkowski (@Lukewearechange) April 1, 2021

A deeper dive into the company offers some more specifics. In order for a building to receive the Well Health-Safety Rating, it must meet at least 15 of 22 criteria related to sanitization procedures, emergency preparedness programs, air and water quality, and health service resources. That said, this isn’t just a rating from a Health Department — if you want an evaluation and subsequent WELL Health-Safety Rating, there’s a cost. According to the company’s website, the designation costs anywhere between $2,730 and $12,600, depending on the size of the building and the revenue of its businesses. As of 2019, Delos was valued at $800 million, according to Forbes. (Which perhaps explains how this company brought stars like Lady Gaga onboard.)

But aside from whatever’s going on with IWBI as a company, it’s difficult to make sense of this specific campaign. Scialla attempted to explain his vision: “This is more than an awareness campaign; it’s meant to ignite a movement,” he said, according to Business Wire. “These ambassadors and cultural influencers are partnering with us because they truly believe in the mission, and how critical it is, to make buildings and shared spaces center on health going forward.”

Tony Antolino, Delos’ chief commercial officer, told Ad Age that he wanted the campaign to appear “very much in the style of a public-service announcement.” He said that he “developed the vision” himself before hiring — wait for it — Spike Lee to direct the minute-long video. Yes, you read that correctly: Award-winning filmmaker Spike Lee, who brought us She’s Gotta Have It and Da 5 Bloods, is the same mastermind who now brings us 60 seconds of celebrities saying, “Look for the WELL Health-Safety Seal.”

People online were eager to question (and mock) both the validity of the seal and the video itself.

“WHERE THE FUCK IS THE WELL HEALTH SAFETY SEAL LYNDSEY?” pic.twitter.com/xVD6lohyhC

— Dr. Anime (@AnimeMemeCom) April 1, 2021

To all the celebs who want to tell us what to do… pic.twitter.com/nPcQxBpl7Y

— Michael Beacon, President Elect of 7Legions (@7LegionsBeacon) April 1, 2021

The most damning comment, however, came from one user who took a screenshot of the video’s final frame. “The WELL Health-Safety Seal is awarded after an annual review of a building’s written policies and protocols,” a disclaimer reads. “Achievement of the WELL Health-Safety Rating does not guarantee that a space is safe or free from pathogens.” So… that’s comforting!

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Sure, every wedding has that one guest who gets a little too emotional and starts crying and ranting to anyone who will listen about the one that got away. But for one *lucky* couple that got married in Florida last weekend, that emotional partygoer was former president Donald Trump. And the rant was actually a wedding speech about his one that got away: the 2020 election.

At a Mar-a-Lago ceremony in celebration of John and Megan Arrigo’s marriage, Florida Man Donald Trump jumped at the opportunity to rag on Joe Biden’s performance as president. “They’re telling me about the border, they’re telling me about China, they’re telling me about Iran. How are we doing about Iran?” he asked. “The border’s not good. The border’s the worst anybody’s ever seen it.”

In a video obtained by TMZ, Trump went on to criticize the “humanitarian disaster” happening at the U.S. border, even though it was his administration that separated thousands of families under a “zero-tolerance” policy, and his administration that argued children at the border didn’t need toothbrushes, towels, dry clothing, or soap.

At one point, Trump just said: “So it’s a rough thing, and I just say, do you miss me yet?” The guests erupted into cheers.

Trump finished his speech by finally acknowledging the newlyweds. “A lot of things happening right now. I just want to say it’s an honor to be here,” he said, and then, “You are a great and beautiful couple.”

Although he hasn’t been leaving Mar-a-Lago too much these days, this might not be Trump’s last wedding appearance. This week, he launched a website that allows his supporters to invite him and former First Lady Melania Trump to events and engagements. The same site allows people to request specialized greetings and messages from the Trumps and share messages and thoughts. But this isn’t uncommon — the Obamas have a similar website, as does George W. Bush. Somehow, though, it’s difficult to imagine Barack Obama — or anyone else, really, other than your friend’s inebriated great-uncle — grabbing the mic at a wedding and rambling about election fraud.

Since he’s been forcibly removed from his social media platform of choice, Trump has had to find creative ways to speak his mind (and, more often than not, regurgitate lies about a “stolen” election). He spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference last month, and he’s also appeared on Fox News and dropped the occasional statement via DIY presidential letterhead. “I hope that everyone remembers when they’re getting the COVID-19 (often referred to as the China Virus) Vaccine, that if I wasn’t president, you wouldn’t be getting that beautiful ‘shot’ for 5 years, at best, and probably wouldn’t be getting it at all,” he wrote several weeks ago. “I hope everyone remembers!”

Through these dispatches, we’ve been able to see that Trump is definitely having a very seamless adjustment period into no longer being president. “We did get 75 million votes. Nobody’s ever gotten that,” he said at the wedding on Saturday. (As a reminder, Biden got 81 million votes.) “They said, ‘Get 66 million votes, and the election’s over.’ Well, I got 75 million, and you saw what happened. 10:30 in the evening, all of a sudden they said, ‘That’s a strange thing, why are they closing up certain places?'”

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This week, yet another gender reveal stunt turned deadly after a small plane, with an attached sign reading “It’s a girl!” abruptly crashed into the Caribbean Sea. On Monday, the plane’s two passengers were both found, but one was already dead; the other died of injuries while receiving first aid. The incident took place off the coast of Mexico, about 40 miles from Cancún, and is currently under investigation by Mexican aviation authorities, according to The Daily Beast. 

In a video shared by the New York Post, a group of family and friends are heard cheering from a boat as the plane, a Cessna 206, flies overhead. One attendee even jokes that a plane crash would be terrible, just moments before the aircraft nosedives into the water. “It’s all good as long as it doesn’t end up crashing into us!” they are heard saying.

Even the more harmless gender reveal parties add an unnecessary emphasis on the gender binary and, more often than not, stereotypes. They often end badly, even if they don’t end in death. And this week’s party gone wrong is just the latest example of how dangerous these gimmicks can get. In 2019, another plane crashed after dumping gallons of pink water onto the ground. The same year, a woman died after she was hit with a piece of metal from a pipe bomb that an expectant couple accidentally created. And then, the very next day, another couple set off an explosion that started a minor earthquake in Iowa.

Jenna Karvunidis, the blogger who threw the first known gender reveal party, has expressed several times that she regrets the phenomenon she inadvertently started when she filled a cake with pink icing. “It just exploded into crazy after that. Literally — guns firing, forest fires, more emphasis on gender than has ever been necessary for a baby,” she wrote in a 2019 post. “Who cares what gender the baby is? I did at the time because we didn’t live in 2019 and didn’t know what we know now — that assigning focus on gender at birth leaves out so much of their potential and talents that have nothing to do with what’s between their legs.” She also added that her child, the subject of that original gender reveal party, frequently opts to buck gender norms.

Karvunidis spoke out again after a 2020 gender reveal started a major forest fire in California, forcing thousands of residents to evacuate. “Oh my god NO. The fire that evacuated parts of California is from a GENDER REVEAL PARTY,” she wrote on Facebook. “Stop it. Stop having these stupid parties. For the love of God, stop burning things down to tell everyone about your kid’s penis.” 

There’s a lot to celebrate about pregnancy, and a lot of ways to do it. But igniting wildfires, crashing planes, and causing freak accidents in the name of announcing an unborn child’s genitalia is at once strange, harmful, and life-threatening. There’s nothing wrong with a normal baby shower.

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During a Tuesday Q&A, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez challenged the language used around immigration, particularly as outlets and prominent Republicans like Sen. Ted Cruz continue to discuss and emphasize a “surge” of migration.

“This is not a surge. These are children, and they are not insurgents and we are not being invaded, which by the way, is a white supremacist idea,” she said in an Instagram Story, adding that the word “surge” is often used to invoke a militaristic way of looking at immigrants. “The idea that if an other is coming in the population, that this is like an invasion of who we are.”

These comments came after a follower asked why Ocasio-Cortez hasn’t been “addressing the border crisis” as much as she used to. She proceeded to break down the myriad ways other issues relate to the situation at the U.S. border. “Well, we’re talking about it, they just don’t like how we’re talking about it. Because it’s not a border crisis. It’s an imperialism crisis, it’s a climate crisis, it’s a trade crisis,” the congresswoman explained. “Also, it’s a carceral crisis. Because as I have already said, even during this term and this president, our immigration system is based and designed on our carceral system.”

.@AOC summing up the systemic problems in our immigration system in a minute and a half. pic.twitter.com/bFY20ne6Gb

— Sawyer Hackett (@SawyerHackett) March 31, 2021

Ocasio-Cortez has been an outspoken critic of both Donald Trump and Joe Biden’s approaches to immigration and incarceration. “This is not okay, never has been okay, never will be okay – no matter the administration or party,” she wrote on Twitter after The Washington Post reported that a migrant facility had been opened under the Biden administration. “Our immigration system is built on a carceral framework. It’s no accident that challenging how we approach both these issues are considered ‘controversial’ stances.”

However, many Republicans have shown outrage at the state of immigration under Biden — for opposite reasons. A group of a dozen GOP senators recently visited a facility in Texas, and although Cruz also drew attention to the inhumane living conditions, he denounced the “influx of migrant crossings” and described the people he encountered as smugglers and cartel members. Biden has responded to claims about increased migration, arguing that the “significant increase in the number of people coming to the border… happens every year.”

Ocasio-Cortez says, however, says that if Republicans are really concerned about immigrants, they should consider that this topic is multipronged. Take the issue of climate change. “The U.S. has disproportionately contributed to the total amount of emissions that is causing a planetary climate crisis right now,” she said on Tuesday. “It’s South Asia, it’s Latin America that are gonna be experiencing the floods, wildfires, and droughts in a disproportionate way, which ding ding ding, has already started a migration crisis.”

Instead of creating fear-mongering around migration, we should focus on fixing these issues. Ocasio-Cortez has also created, along with Rep. Pramila Jayapal and several others, an immigration reform resolution called the Roadmap to Freedom. The proposal calls for a fair immigration process with a path to citizenship, policies that protect communities living at the border, and modernized laws with humane, community-based alternatives to detention centers.

“Sometimes I see people respond to our current immigration policy with, ‘Well, what else can we do?'” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted in February. “There’s a lot we can do.”

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Ten months after he killed George Floyd by holding a knee to Floyd’s neck for eight minutes and 46 seconds, former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin is finally on trial. He faces three charges: second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter. “At the end of the day, justice is a conviction,” Floyd’s brother, Philonise Floyd, told CNN. 

On May 25, Floyd was handcuffed and arrested by Chauvin and three other officers for reportedly spending a counterfeit $20 bill at a Minneapolis corner store. During the arrest, Chauvin pressed his knee to Floyd’s neck, ignoring Floyd’s repeated cries for help. According to USA Today, Floyd said that he couldn’t breathe more than 20 times. 

Floyd is far from the first or last Black American to be killed by a member of law enforcement. According to the Mapping Police Violence database, 1,127 people were killed by officers in 2020, and Black people are three times more likely to be killed, despite also being 1.3 times more unlikely to be unarmed. Floyd’s case garnered national attention, however, as video of his killing gained traction and sparked a nationwide series of protests in support of Black lives.

Chauvin’s trial began on Monday with opening statements. Prosecuting attorney Jerry W. Blackwell also played video footage of Chauvin kneeling on Floyd as bystanders shouted and implored him to stop. “Mr. Derek Chauvin betrayed this badge when he used excessive and unreasonable force upon the body of Mr. George Floyd,” Blackwell said. “That he put his knees upon his neck and his back, grinding and crushing him until the very breath — no, ladies and gentlemen — until the very life was squeezed out of him.”

On Tuesday, six witnesses, including a nine-year-old, recounted the trauma of watching the police kill a man and knowing they were powerless to stop it. Several of them cried, including 18-year-old Darnella Frazier, who recorded the viral video of Floyd’s killing. “It’s been nights I stayed up apologizing and apologizing to George Floyd for not doing more and not physically interacting and not saving his life,” she said. “But it’s not what I should have done. It’s what [Chauvin] should have done.”

Alyssa, a high school senior who also witnessed the killing, said that she decided to start recording after she heard Floyd’s screams. “I almost walked away at first because it was a lot to watch. But I knew that it was wrong and I couldn’t just walk away, even though I couldn’t do anything about it,” Alyssa said, before describing the experience of watching Floyd lose consciousness. Her friend, another witness whose name is unknown, added he looked “limp” and “purple,” as if he wasn’t getting enough circulation. 

Genevieve Hansen, a trained firefighter and EMT, said that she was off-duty when she witnessed Floyd’s death. Concerned, she approached the officers and asked to check his pulse. “I tried calm reasoning, I tried to be assertive. I pled and was desperate,” Hansen said. “I was desperate to give help.” Eventually, she called 911.

Eric Nelson, Chauvin’s attorney, claimed that shouting and interference from witnesses impacted the police’s ability to do their job. At the same time, however, Nelson has maintained that Chauvin was doing his job correctly. “You will learn that Derek Chauvin did exactly what he had been trained to do over the course of his 19-year career,” Nelson said in his opening statement. “The use of force is not attractive, but it is a necessary component of policing.” (Over the past year, it has been mind-boggling to watch people try to defend both Chauvin and the police as an institution by arguing in one breath that his behavior was an aberration, and in another that he was just doing his job.)

The defense has also tried to argue that Floyd was under the influence of drugs, and that he died due to an overdose paired with complications from a heart condition. On Wednesday, 19-year-old Christopher Martin, who was working at Cup Foods, said that Floyd appeared to be high when he entered the store on May 25. Martin recognized that Floyd had paid using counterfeit money, and he originally planned to just accept the money, believing that Floyd “didn’t really know it was a fake bill.” However, after talking to his manager, his boss asked him to bring Floyd back into the store. When Floyd declined, someone at Cup Foods called the police.

“If I would have just not taken the bill, this could have been avoided,” Martin said, before describing the “disbelief and guilt” he felt as he watched Chauvin arrest Floyd.

Floyd’s sister, Bridgett Floyd, commented on the defense’s arguments. “They would find any way possible for this police officer to not look bad. But, the whole world saw what happened to him,” she told ABC News. “The drugs that they say they found in his system did not kill him… [it] was the pressure that was kneeled down in his neck. It’s not surprising to me, but one thing’s for sure. The world [has] seen how my brother left this world.”

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Sometime after a man supposedly found shrimp in his Cinnamon Toast Crunch and before Amazon bots started taking over Twitter (again), Chet Hanks introduced us to a concept that seemed fated to become an even bigger meme than those images of the Suez Canal: White Boy Summer. “Look, guys, I just wanted to tap in really quick. I just got this feeling, man, that this summer, it’s about to be a white boy summer. Take it how you want,” Hanks said in an Instagram video. “I’m not talking about Trump, you know, NASCAR-type white. I’m talking about, you know, me, Jon B., Jack Harlow-type white boy summer. Lemme know if you guys can vibe with that.” 

The video has been viewed over 400,000 times, and Hanks has since shared several follow-up videos, “rules and regs” for White Boy Summer, and even a new line of merch (which was criticized for using a font similar to one used by white nationalists). In some ways, it’s unsurprising that this video took off: We’re living in a golden age of TikTok humor and himbo aesthetics, and Hanks’ general social media presence offers both. Plus, there’s something funny about watching the son of renowned actor Tom Hanks take serious care to denounce plaid shirts and the word “smokeshow.”

But some have wondered how on earth the words “white boy summer” could possibly signal something positive. As several Twitter users pointed out, the idea sounds… borderline threatening?

Hanks has doubled down, though. Along with White Boy Summer, he’s started verbalizing his support — and selling merchandise — for Black Queen Summer. (Which, he clarified, is actually an “all year-round” thing for him.) But people have pointed out that it feels weird and inappropriate for Hanks, a white man, to benefit from the sales of merch for and in celebration of Black women. And although Hanks has said that prejudice, discrimination, and racism are decidedly “not White Boy Summer,” there’s no way those WBS shirts won’t end up purchased by white supremacists, right?

Hanks’ behavior has crossed the line into cultural appropriation and racism before, specifically when he tried to use Jamaican Patois at the Golden Globes and defended his right to say the n-word. (He later apologized for using the n-word, blaming his previous problems with drugs.) But even more concerning are the court documents with claims that Hanks abused his ex-girlfriend, Kiana Parker. According to Parker, Hanks broke her phone, physically pushed and grabbed her, and threatened to jump off a balcony if she left his hotel room. Parker recalled Hanks saying, “He was Chet Hanks and I wasn’t shit, no one would believe me, I was just a ghetto Black bitch.” In another incident, he reportedly verbally abused her, wielded a knife, and chased her around their house in Sugar Land, TX. In January, Parker was granted a temporary protective order.

According to the Blackburn Center, 31.5% of all women will experience domestic violence at some point in their lives. For Black women, that percentage jumps to over 40%. Some might think Hanks is just another milkshake duck (that is, someone who goes viral for a very silly or innocuous reason, and turns out to be violent, offensive, or abusive —  again, see Cinnamon Toast Crunch Shrimp Guy), but it’s deeply, uniquely disturbing to learn about Hanks hurting a Black woman as he’s profiting and building a brand off something called “Black Queen Summer.”

The memes were entertaining, but White Boy Summer isn’t. And neither are those shirts — but at least, maybe they’ll remind people who to avoid in public once bars reopen.

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Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz is under investigation for reportedly violating sex trafficking laws by engaging in a sexual relationship with a minor and paying for her to travel with him. According to The New York Times, the probe is just one part of a bigger investigation into Joel Greenberg, a former Florida GOP official tied to Gaetz who currently awaits trial for 14 charges including and related to sex trafficking. In an attempt to clear things up, Gaetz appeared on Fox News to discuss the investigation with Tucker Carlson, but now we have even more questions. Specifically: What is going on?

In an odd segment that Carlson then described as “one of the weirdest interviews I’ve ever conducted,” Gaetz denied the allegations, claimed the probe is a part of an ongoing extortion attempt, and attempted to throw Carlson under the bus twice. He told Carlson that any claims that he was involved with or traveled with a 17-year-old girl are “verifiably false” and “merely intended to bleed my family out of money.” Gaetz went on to clarify, “What is happening is an extortion of me and my family involving a former Department of Justice official.”

Gaetz says he and his father, Florida politician Don Gaetz, received a message several weeks ago from a person demanding $25 million “in exchange for making sex trafficking allegations go away.” According to Gaetz, his father wore a wire in a meeting with a former official from the Department of Justice, and Gaetz is convinced that audio footage from this meeting would clear his name. 

The former DOJ official, whom Gaetz identified as lawyer David McGee, has denied Gaetz’s accusation. “This is a blatant attempt to distract from the fact that Matt Gaetz is apparently about to be indicted for sex-trafficking underage girls,” McGee told The Daily Beast, adding that allegations of his involvement in any kind of extortion are “completely, totally false.”

As if that weren’t enough, Gaetz also tried to implicate Carlson in the ongoing investigation. “I can say that actually, you and I went to dinner about two years ago, your wife was there, and I brought a friend of mine, you’ll remember her,” Gaetz said. “She was actually threatened by the FBI, told that if she wouldn’t cop to the fact that somehow, I was involved in some pay-for-play scheme, that she could face trouble.” Carlson said that he did not remember this specific dinner or friend. 

At another point in the interview, Gaetz turned on Carlson again. “I’m not the only person on-screen right now who has been falsely accused of a terrible sex act,” he said. “You were accused of something you did not do, so you know what this feels like.” It is unclear what Gaetz was talking about here; it’s possible he was referring to a claim that Carlson, along with two other Fox personalities, sexually harassed a guest last year. Carlson quickly clarified that a person he had apparently never met accused him of a sex crime “20 years ago” before moving on with another question.

Tucker Carlson responds to Matt Gaetz casually mentioning that someone accused him of a sex crime. Yikes. pic.twitter.com/GkcCP1yZnZ

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 31, 2021

Before his Fox News appearance, Gaetz told the Times that he was involved in an investigation but did not know any specifics about the probe. “I only know that it has to do with women,” he said. “I have a suspicion that someone is trying to recategorize my generosity to ex-girlfriends as something more untoward.” He reiterated this same sentiment to Carlson, emphasizing that it is not a crime to purchase plane tickets and hotel rooms for girlfriends of legal age.

Gaetz made a name for himself as one of former President Donald Trump’s staunchest allies. He’s made headlines for bizarre reasons several times: In November, people speculated that he was dating Tiffany Trump after he appeared to flirt with her on Twitter. Many have also struggled to make sense of his relationship with Nestor, a 19-year-old college student who Gaetz says is his son. (Nestor is not biologically or legally related to Gaetz.) And he’s had several other controversies and viral moments that, in retrospect, are even more concerning, including that time he was the only “no” vote on a bipartisan anti-human trafficking bill and this unfortunate tweet that, for some reason, has not yet been deleted.

Gaetz closed his interview with Carlson by asserting that he is a “well-known, outspoken conservative” and implying that the attacks against his character were politically motivated. What he failed to mention was that his investigation has been ongoing for months, and began under former Attorney General William Barr and the Trump administration. For possibly the first time ever, Carlson might have put it best in his post-interview remarks:  “I don’t think that clarified much. But it certainly showed this is a deeply interesting story.”

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After his vacation-gone-wrong during Texas’ deadly winter storm, Sen. Ted Cruz returned to Mexico this week to investigate the ongoing crisis at the U.S. border. “So it’s past midnight. I’m standing on the shore of the Rio Grande,” Cruz said in a video shared to Twitter. “I’m down at the Texas border along with 18 senators who made the trip to see the crisis that is playing out.” He signed the video with the hashtag #BidenBorderCrisis.

Immediately, people began joking about Cruz’s last trip to Mexico — that is, when he headed to the Ritz Carlton in Cancún during a weather crisis that left millions of Texans without power and clean water. “Can anyone point me to Cancún?” responded California Rep. Eric Swalwell. Another congressman, Rep. Ruben Gallego of Arizona, wrote: “50% chance this is outside the Ritz Carlton Cancún.”

In a series of dispatches from the border, Cruz described the humanitarian crisis, which he said is President Joe Biden’s fault. “That’s Mexico, and you can see there’s three smugglers right there, standing on the Mexican side, looking at us. They’re shining their flashlights at us, they’re yelling at us,” Cruz said in a blurry clip. In another tweet, he decried the “influx of migrant crossings” and inhumane housing for children and families, and he claimed that he and his fellow senators were subjected to “heckling” from cartel members.

Beto O’Rourke, who ran against and lost to Cruz in the 2018 Senate race, took issue with Cruz’s assertions that he was in any kind of real danger. “You’re in a Border Patrol boat armed with machine guns. The only threat you face is unarmed children and families who are seeking asylum (as well as the occasional heckler),” he wrote. “If you’re looking for a crisis to cosplay Senator for, I’m happy to point you in the right direction.” O’Rourke went on to criticize Cruz’s failure to support gun safety measures, health insurance for his constituents, and a livable minimum wage. 

But most importantly, as O’Rourke noted, it’s hard to view Cruz’s reactions as genuine when he previously refused to criticize Donald Trump’s harmful anti-immigration policies. Under Trump, a record number of migrant children were detained in government custody and legal immigration to the U.S. declined by 49%. When Cruz was asked about Trump’s family separation policy, he shifted blame onto Barack Obama and the families seeking safety and asylum. “I visited the Obama camps that he set up to detain little boys and little girls who crossed the border illegally. Illegal immigration produces human tragedies that are wrong,” he told reporters in 2018. “I don’t think we should have any children that are brought across the border illegally, many times by drug cartels and coyotes who abuse those children, and sexually assault, physically assault those children.” 

To be clear, Obama, Trump, and Biden all bear responsibility for the inhumane conditions at the border. But, just like his unnecessary, fear-mongering language about “smugglers” and cartels, and his excuse for traveling to Cancún back in February, the reasoning behind Cruz’s sudden outrage about the crisis is all too transparent — he only cares about crises when he’s the one being affected.

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It’s been months since Donald Trump was banned from social media and Joe Biden was inaugurated into office — gone are the days of opening Twitter and watching in real-time as the U.S. President reminds North Korea he has a nuclear button. Thankfully, Biden has opted to use Twitter in a much tamer way, but some of his social media tactics are still worth wondering about. Namely, how much time do Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris spend walking around the White House?

Since his first week in office, Biden has taken to sharing weekly slow-motion videos of himself, Harris, other politicians, and guests of the administration walking around the White House grounds with purpose. Usually, the videos are paired with captions like “51 days down” or “Another week in the books.” In a recent post for Equal Pay Day, he shared a clip of U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team athletes Megan Rapinoe and Margaret Purce strolling down a hallway side by side. “Equal Pay Day is a big deal around here,” he wrote. “Right, @mPinoe and @100purcent?”

Harris hasn’t posted any slow-motion videos, but she’s clearly supporting the Administration’s social media strategy, usually with images. “It’s been a busy few weeks,” she wrote in February, alongside a photo of herself walking outside. “Ready for the next one.”

Equal Pay Day is a big deal around here. Right, @mPinoe and @100purcent? pic.twitter.com/wYdJkp9QYa

— President Biden (@POTUS) March 25, 2021

One week down. pic.twitter.com/yxrkWAXlkL

— President Biden (@POTUS) January 28, 2021

It’s unclear why, exactly, the Biden administration has made these kinds of videos so integral to its Twitter brand, especially since they’re very easy to mock. Some users have wondered about Harris and Biden’s FitBit numbers. Others have sardonically noted that we still don’t have broad student debt forgiveness, but at least we have dramatic videos of our President, masked-up and smiling, celebrating another week in office. “Feeling like shit,” one person joked. “Could really go for a pic of Kamala & Biden walking down a hallway rn.” Or perhaps everyone at the Biden White House is just a big fan of what Vogue‘s Emma Specter wrote about in a recent article: “the silly little walk,” which, she notes, is “good exercise, and its mental health benefits are myriad, but mostly, it’s the perfect way to be alone, together.”

According to body language expert Patti Wood, M.A., author of SNAP: Making the Most of First Impressions, Body Language, and Charisma, Biden’s videos signal that he’s in control. Take his March 5 video, for example. Wood notes that he’s carrying books and binders, indicating how busy he is. “And the funny thing is, even though it’s in slow motion, you see his arms move and his shoulders move, so he looks like he’s in action,” Wood told Refinery29. “See the sweep of his shoulders back and forth, and the swing of the arm. It gives the impression of, ‘Wow, he’s going so fast and moving so powerfully that we have to slow this down.'”

Another week in the books. pic.twitter.com/Q2u8fSS86Q

— President Biden (@POTUS) March 6, 2021

The slow-motion effect also serves another purpose: It allows viewers to focus on details including Biden’s intentional movements, bold suits, and his facial expressions, which are sometimes harder to discern from underneath a mask. Wood, who led training sessions on how to visibly smile above the mask, said that we can usually spot Biden’s smile, even though half of his face is covered. “That is his baseline, he smiles quite a bit of the time anyway, and the fact that you can see that above the mask is comforting to us,” she explained. “And so in this case, the slowing down of the video allows you to say, ‘I think he’s smiling,’ and then examine it.”

Maybe “comfort” is another motive. Much of Biden’s campaign — and now, his presidency — hinged on unity and a purported return to normalcy, so it’s very possible that these videos are supposed to somehow reassure us that Biden is still hard at work and still determined to let us know every time he’s gotten another week down. Make fun of them all you want, but they’re something we’ve come to expect, and the same can’t be said about our last President’s erratic online habits.

51 days down. pic.twitter.com/DGsWdxEkz1

— President Biden (@POTUS) March 13, 2021

Or maybe, the idea of movement itself is symbolic. “I think part of it is what they’re trying to get across, that he’s a man of action, he’s a man on the move, he’s doing things,” Wood said. “He’s moving forward.” Literally.

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Bernie Sanders & Amazon Are In A Twitter War

On Wednesday, Senator Bernie Sanders announced that he would be flying out to Birmingham, Alabama to meet with workers at an Amazon warehouse. Employees at the trillion-dollar company are currently on the precipice of a historic vote that will determine whether or not they’ll unionize, despite Amazon’s repeated attempts to dissuade workers from doing so.

But then, Amazon’s corporate overlords responded to the Senator’s planned trip. Dave Clark, Amazon’s Senior Vice President of Worldwide Operations, weighed in: “I often say we are the Bernie Sanders of employers, but that’s not quite right because we actually deliver a progressive workplace,” Clark wrote on Twitter. “If you want to hear about $15 an hour and health care, Senator Sanders will be speaking downtown. But if you would like to make at least $15 an hour and have good health care, Amazon is hiring.”

Unsurprisingly, Clark’s attempts to school the Senate’s resident champion for workers’ rights backfired. First, Sanders confirmed his plan to visit. “All I want to know is why the richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos, is spending millions trying to prevent workers from organizing a union so they can negotiate for better wages, benefits and working conditions,” he added. Clark then replied with an accusation that Vermont’s $11.75 minimum wage is lower than Amazon’s $15 an hour. But that argument doesn’t make sense for several reasons: Amazon implemented the minimum wage after pressure from supporters of the Stop BEZOS Act, a piece of legislation introduced by Sanders. Vermont also has a Republican governor, and because Sanders is not a state legislator, his home state’s minimum wage is not exactly under his jurisdiction. What Sanders can do is fight for a higher federal minimum wage, which he’s been doing. For ages.

I am proud to stand in solidarity with Amazon workers in Alabama who are fighting for better wages and better working conditions. If they win, they will improve the lives of workers at the warehouse in Alabama and all over this country. pic.twitter.com/w3luS3vjyP

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) March 25, 2021

The heated back-and-forth only continued to unfold when others got involved. Clark’s Twitter mentions were — and still are — a mess, with users sharing article after article about Amazon’s exploitative, disturbing working conditions. “Hey Dave Clark, remember that time you lied to millions of Americans about people dying of COVID at Amazon?” wrote one person. Fight for 15, a workers’ rights organization, shared another link to a Guardian story about warehouse workers dying (of reasons unrelated to COVID, prior to the pandemic) — employees have alleged that they’ve watched coworkers die of heart attacks, and by suicide, and then been instructed to get back to work as if nothing had happened. Several people even cited a Fortune article about Clark, which alleges that he was nicknamed the “Sniper” because he admitted to hiding “in the shadows” at Amazon’s warehouses in order to find slackers he could fire.

But what really took this Twitter war to new heights was responses claiming that workers are forced to pee in bottles and trash cans. These allegations have floated around for a while, with several workers and undercover employees in both the U.S. and the U.K. sharing that because there weren’t any nearby bathrooms, workers would pee wherever they could so as to not miss their “targets” and get fired. But according to a U.S. staffer who spoke with Business Insider in 2018, workers caught peeing in cans were fired anyway. “Paying workers $15/hr doesn’t make you a ‘progressive workplace’ when you union-bust & make workers urinate in water bottles,” Wisconsin Rep. Mark Pocan wrote on Twitter.

A verified Amazon account responded to Pocan’s statement. “You don’t really believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you?” wrote @AmazonNews, adding that “if that were true,” nobody would work for Amazon. But New York Rep. Mondaire Jones put it best: “‘If that were true, nobody would work for us.’ Imagine if our economy made it that easy. That’s why we need unions.”

Amazon executives have been accused of working overtime to prevent employees from unionizing and even gone so far as to hire intelligence analysts to monitor “labor organizing threats.” Recently, the company was accused of deleting the profiles of hundreds of thousands of entry-level employees from an online staff directory, which some people viewed as an attempt to cut communication between workers. (An Amazon spokesperson denied that this change was related to unionization efforts.)

The decision of whether to form a union will be determined by a mail-in election. Workers began voting in February, and the National Labor Relations Board will start tallying results on March 30. Refinery29 has reached out to an Amazon representative for comment.

Sanders has been a longtime critic of Amazon’s labor conditions and surveillance practices. “The fact that Amazon has decided to heavily invest in systems to retaliate against freedom of expression about unsafe and unhealthy working conditions, and to refer to organizing efforts as threats against the company equal to those posed by hate groups and terrorism, is unacceptable,” Sanders, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and two other Senators wrote in a letter to CEO Jeff Bezos last October.

And on Thursday, he once again reiterated his support for warehouse workers: “In the case of Amazon, let’s be clear. You’re dealing with an enormously profitable corporation owned by the wealthiest guy in America, Jeff Bezos,” Sanders said in a video shared to Twitter. “They can afford to pay their workers living wages and provide decent health benefits.”

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Miya Ponsetto — also known as SoHo Karen, or that one girl who wore a “Daddy” hat while talking to Gayle King — is now facing a lawsuit for racially profiling and attacking 14-year-old Keyon Harrold Jr. According to the suit, Ponsetto “chased” Harrold Jr. around the hotel, “tackled” him, and “began to grab at his pants and rummage through his pockets in an attempt to steal his phone.” Ironically, Ponsetto did this because she claimed that the teenager stole her phone. Harrold Jr.’s family is also suing the Arlo Hotel and manager Chad Nathan, who “aided and abetted” the crime, for negligence.

“The episode was yet another instance of African Americans being harmed by baseless accusations while going about their daily life,” said the lawsuit. “In this case, racial profiling spiraled into a violent and frightening assault against an innocent African-American child.” 

On December 26, Keyon Harrold Sr., the victim’s father and a Grammy Award-winning trumpeter, shared a video of Ponsetto lashing out at his son. “This person quote on quote ‘lost’ her iPhone, and apparently, my son magically acquired it,” Harrold Sr. wrote on Instagram. “This incident went on for five more minutes, me protecting my son from this lunatic. She scratched me; she tackled and grabbed him.” In the video, which went viral, an Arlo Hotel manager failed to deescalate the situation and even pushed Harrold Jr. to pull out his phone. Minutes after the confrontation, Ponsetto’s iPhone was found by an Uber driver.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Keyon Harrold (@keyonharrold)

Ponsetto was arrested on January 7, and faces charges of attempted assault, grand larceny, attempted robbery, and acting in a manner injurious to a child. She has gone to great lengths to dodge accountability, especially in a mind-boggling conversation with Gayle King. At one point in the CBS This Morning interview, she put her hand up and said “enough” in an attempt to silence King; at another, she asked, “How is one girl accusing a guy about a phone a crime?” She said she was “sincerely” sorry if Harrold Sr. and Harrold Jr. “feel as if I assaulted him” or if she “hurt his feelings.” Ponsetto is due back in court on March 29.

Per the lawsuit, Harrold Jr. struggled with physical and emotional pain, embarrassment, and “an increased sense of vulnerability” in the aftermath of the attack. His parents said that he is currently working through feelings of sadness and confusion in therapy.

“Thank God that this strong Black father was there, and stood up for his child,” Benjamin Crump, the Harrolds’ attorney, said at a press conference on Wednesday. “Imagine if he had resisted. What might have happened if the NYPD showed up and saw a Black man defending himself against a white woman? What would have happened?”

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Egypt’s Suez Canal — one of the world’s busiest and most important waterways — is currently blocked, thanks to a massive, 224,000-ton container ship called the Ever Given. The vessel became lodged in the canal on Tuesday, causing a large-scale traffic jam and clogging almost the entire width of the passageway. 

The canal, which connects the Red Sea to the Mediterranean and provides an essential passageway between Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, is responsible for transporting around 12% of all global trade. According to The New York Times, tankers with about 10% of a day’s total global oil consumption are now stuck, causing a 4% spike in oil prices. 

The Ever Given, which is 59 meters wide and 400 meters long, was en route to the Netherlands when it got stuck. The ship entered the trade passage on Tuesday, and according to Suez Canal Authority spokesman George Safwat, a sandstorm in northern Egypt caused high winds and “an inability to direct the ship.”

But even once the Ever Given is dislodged, it will take a while for traffic to resume and global trade to recover. “At present, the number of ships waiting could reach 100, which will increase over time,” an Egyptian official told CNN. “The disruption of navigation is expected to cause ship congestion, which takes two to three days to normally restore traffic order.”

Although strategists worry this could have a negative impact on the oil economy and movement of consumer goods, everyone on the Ever Given (and the nearby vessels) is reportedly safe. Eight tugboats are trying to free the vessel from the canal, which has proven difficult given its size. A front-end loader is also trying to dig the ship out from where it’s wedged into a sandbank.

The real kicker, though, is that the ship charted an, uh, interesting course before becoming trapped. Behold:

just to reiterate: about 10 percent of world trade has been at a standstill for 2 days because a cargo ship drew a giant dick in the Red Sea then wedged itself sideways in the Suez Canalhttps://t.co/hlN1PcmMhW pic.twitter.com/wfSKdrtpkj

— Matthew Champion (@matthewchampion) March 24, 2021

Good morning especially to the megaship #EVERGIVEN, which as of a few minutes ago, is still stuck sideways in the Suez Canal, and is also the metaphor we need for life in 2021. pic.twitter.com/feDSA1jeqk

— Maryn McKenna (@marynmck) March 24, 2021

Hoping they are able to clear the Suez Canal soon 🙏 pic.twitter.com/eX88ZbEbfR

— John W. Rich (Fake Tech Exec) (@Cokedupoptions) March 24, 2021

pic.twitter.com/ElEdlyzZ4q

— Arnthor Asgrimsson (@addiiceland) March 24, 2021

Im sooooo stressed out for the person driving that stuck Suez Canal boat. Imagine the entire world watching you park your car? Humiliating stuff

— amil (@amil) March 24, 2021

pic.twitter.com/kWa3qh1YAh

— Brandy Jensen (@BrandyLJensen) March 24, 2021

As many have mused, the blockage of the vulnerable, narrow Suez Canal and its ensuing domino effects feel pretty representative of everything we’ve gone through this past year. Trying to keep everyone healthy and safe, spirits high, and the world afloat during a global pandemic has been a little bit like trying to dig a 200,000-ton ship out of a sandbank and push it through a very thin passage. It’s time to think bigger.

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