The Dictatorship

‘Million-dollar bullets’ devastate communities — and drain us all

Published

10 months ago

September 8, 2025

‘Million-dollar bullets’ devastate communities — and drain us all

It was late July 2003 inside a small, dimly lit room at the Jefferson Moss-Magee Rehabilitation Hospital in downtown Philadelphia. And Kevin Johnson, 19, was telling me, an intern at the Daily News barely older than he was, about his nightly dream. In it, he’s on a basketball court, dribbling, passing and cutting through the lane. Then he flies through the air like he has jet packs strapped to his legs.

“It’s like I’m really playing, because I can feel everything,” he said with a toothy smile and a wheezy laugh. “I’m still paralyzed, but it doesn’t stop me.” Then, as tears tumbled down his mother’s cheeks, he said, “I’m going to try to live a regular life.”

As tears tumbled down his mother’s cheeks, he said, ‘I’m going to try to live a regular life.’

A little more than a month earlier, a group of teens tried to rob Kevin for his $150 Allen Iverson basketball jersey. He and a cousin were waiting at a trolley stop in Southwest Philly when they told him to “give it up.” When he refused, one of them pressed a gun to the back of Kevin’s neck, just inches below his skull, and pulled the trigger.

That one bullet changed everything. It knocked Kevin off his feet and into paralysis.

Something inside of me was left frozen, too. From his bedside to the writing of these words, my life and journalism career have been tethered to his spirit and the shock of all that he’d lost.

Kevin’s infectious buoyance and his courageous fight to stay alive stuck with me in deep, meaningful ways. But what I haven’t been able to escape is the incalculability of the cost that he and his family would pay for the bullet lodged in his spine. He paid with his freedom, his mobility and any future he and his family had ever hoped for. And for what? The robbers that shot him never even got the jersey they wanted so badly. The bloody rag had to be cut off Kevin’s back by paramedics.

But what they took was priceless. They robbed his mother of a loving son who was just finding his footing in the world, his siblings of an adoring brother who’d chase them up and down the block, and the world of whoever Kevin would’ve grown to become, unbound by a wheelchair.

But there were other costs, too. From the moment that bullet dug into Kevin’s body, the tally began to tick. His medical bills mounted quickly. Before the rehab facility would discharge him, the family’s bi-level row house would need to be renovated: a special outlet for his breathing machine needed to be installed, a wheelchair ramp would need to be erected, door frames needed widening, and the bathrooms needed to be overhauled. All of that or they’d have to move out. Or the unthinkable: sending Kevin to a nursing home.

He would require 24-hour care to keep him alive and a specially equipped van to transport him and his hulking new wheelchair. That was just to get him home.

Within months of the shooting, his family’s meager savings were exhausted.

The cascade of costs and consequences sparked by a bullet, purchased for as little as $0.25 a round, started an avalanche of millions.

The shooting threw off the family’s orbit in so many intangible ways. But the financial blow was a secondary injury that none of them had anticipated. In the coming years, the costs related to Kevin’s medical condition would be staggering, in the millions. There were the big-ticket items like the several-thousand-dollar wheelchair ramp and his wheelchair, which cost $35,000. Some of his medications were a few hundred dollars a month. There were adult diapers and supplies needed to keep his tracheostomy and breathing tubes clean.

The family scraped together what they could to pay some of these bills out of pocket. Kindhearted strangers helped a lot. But the bulk of the financial costs to keep Kevin alive were paid by taxpayers through public insurance. His mother, Janice, quit her job and took on the full-time job as Kevin’s caregiver.

Just one bullet. The cascade of costs and consequences sparked by a bullet, purchased for as little as $0.25 a round, started an avalanche of millions. Not just for families like Kevin’s but for all of American society.

Economists Philip Cook and Jens Ludwigwho years ago did some of the most foundational work on the economic impact of gun violence, place the societal cost of a single gunshot injury at more than $1 million. Every gun death costs us more than $5 million. Consider the approximately 100,000 people who are shot in the U.S. in any given year and the price tag becomes staggering. The vast majority of gunshot victims will survive, but many, like Kevin, will suffer catastrophic injury requiring costly medical care and rehabilitation for the rest of their lives. Thanks to medical advancements, these victims are living longer lives, multiplying those costs.

Ted Miller, an economist with the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluationsays that when accounting for much broader direct and indirect societal costs, gun violence costs an astonishing $557 billion a year. Some conservative estimates put these costs at 2.6% of the U.S. GDP.

American taxpayers from the burbs to the battle zones shoulder millions every single day to satisfy the myriad costs of bullets hitting flesh. Taxpayers, survivors, their families and employers pay an average of $7.79 million in health care costs every day and another $30.16 million every day in police and criminal justice costs, according to Everytown for Gun Safety.

American taxpayers from the burbs to the battle zones shoulder millions every single day to satisfy the myriad costs of bullets hitting flesh.

The same group has found that employers lose about $1.47 million a day in productivity, revenue and costs to replace gun violence victims, and society writ large loses $1.34 billion daily in quality-of-life costs related to gunshots.

While these figures are mammoth, they obviously don’t consider the many hard-to-account-for costs: lives lost or ruined, homes wrecked, communities divided, emotional trauma.

Of all the questions that I had standing there in Kevin’s hospital room, listening to his mother running through the seemingly insurmountable costs of keeping Kevin alive, there is one that has begged itself from that moment to this one: How much are we willing to pay?

I’ve spent much of my career asking that same question of police, politicians, victims and perpetrators of violent crime. I’ve asked it in cities across the country. I rephrased it and reconsidered it as I grew from a cub reporter to a seasoned veteran. The question took on greater significance in the era of the Black Lives Matter movement, when the philosophical and rhetorical value of Black life was being debated in the streets and in the media in the wake of the shootings of unarmed Black men and women by police. In wrestling with these ideas, I think about Kevin’s plight and the plight of so many other young Black people in poor and working-class communities, those who suffer a disproportionate number of daily shootings.

In 1993, Ralph Green, a 16-year-old gunshot victim from Brooklynwas called before a congressional panel on gun violence. Before the shooting, he was a promising athlete whose prowess earned him starting spots on the varsity football and basketball teams as a freshman in high school. Then one day, his life came crashing down — with a bullet. In the year between the shooting and being asked to testify in Washington, he underwent 14 surgeries, including the amputation of his left leg. His hospital costs at that point had already climbed higher than $1 million.

“How many million-dollar bullets will it take before someone wakes up?” the teen asked the panel. “Aren’t these gunshots loud enough?”

The story I wrote about Kevin was one of my first front-page stories. The Philadelphia Daily News published a full front-page photo of his smiling face. I’m not sure I’ve ever been so moved by a smile as I was that day.

At the end of 2006, a malfunction with Kevin’s breathing machine left him brain-dead. It was a little more than a week before Thanksgiving, and his family made the hard decision to take him off of life support. The NBA star Allen Iverson, whose jersey Kevin was wearing when he was shot, covered the costs of his funeral.

Yet Kevin’s family continues to pay an unpayable debt.

“If I could put a cost on my feelings, my emotions, it would be in the millions,” Janice tells me, more than 15 years after Kevin was shot. “Because I lost so much when Kevin passed away, and it feels like I’m losing more every single day.”

This is an adapted excerpt of Trymaine Lee’s book, “A Thousand Ways to Die: The True Cost of Violence on Black Life in America,” which goes on sale Tuesday, Sept. 9.

Trymaine Lee

Trymaine Lee is a Pulitzer Prize and Emmy Award–winning journalist whose focus is the intersection of race, power, politics and violence. He’s an BLN contributor and author of “A Thousand Ways to Die: The True Cost of Violence on Black Life in America.”

The Dictatorship

Friction between President and Republicans growing…

Published

17 hours ago

June 20, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Friction between President and Republicans growing…

WASHINGTON (AP) — The relationship between President Donald Trump and Senate Republicans neared a breaking point this week as he upended their efforts to speedily confirm one of his own nominees and said he would not sign the renewal of a key surveillance law unless they agree to new terms.

Trump’s overnight social media post Wednesday that he was delaying Jay Clayton’s nomination to become national intelligence director, just hours before the U.S. attorney’s confirmation hearing, further strained relations between the Senate and White House that have been worsening for weeks. Later that day, some Republican senators who have been hesitant to challenge the president directly on the Iran was were blunt in their criticism of his deal to end it.

“This is the worst foreign policy blunder in decades,” Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., said in a post on X.

The open tensions are an almost complete reversal from a year ago when Senate Republicans worked closely with Trump on a complicated effort to push through his massive package of spending and tax cuts.

At the time, criticism of the president was almost nonexistent among Republicans on Capitol Hill, and they planned to highlight passage of that bill in the midterms. But as the November election draws closer and Republicans are trying to defend their majorities, Trump is instead needling Congress with his demands and reversals, driving several Republican senators to disparage his actions publicly for the first time.

“I think somebody’s not dialing the president into the complexities of what he’s done here,” Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., said Wednesday after Clayton’s confirmation was postponed. “I mean, my God.”

The slow unraveling of what once seemed like an airtight alliance between the executive and legislative branches in a Republican-led Washington extends to their policy priorities.

Trump appears to have lost interest in most of the GOP agenda and has become almost singularly focused on his voting legislation to require proof of citizenshipwhich has almost no chance of passing. At the same time, he has asked members of Congress to fund parts of his White House ballroom projectallow a temporary intelligence director that none of them like and cede their powers on the Iran war.

The growing rift has brought much of the Senate’s business to a halt and put Republicans who are up for reelection this year on the defensive. It has also put pressure on Senate Majority Leader John Thune, who has been up-front with Trump about what he can and cannot do in the Senate.

Trump pressures Thune on voting bill

Trump has pressured Thune relentlessly to scrap the filibuster and pass the strict proof-of-citizenship legislation, called the SAVE America Act. Thune, R-S.D., has told Trump publicly and privately that the votes are not there for either step. Still, Trump has kept up the push.

In a social media post Thursday, Trump said he would be “the last Republican president” if the voting bill does not pass.

“Senate Majority Leader John Thune, and the Republican Senate, must not let this ‘carnage’ happen,” Trump said. “They will go down on the wrong side of History, as will all Republicans who just stood by and watched.”

Nonetheless, Trump has yet to go after the well-liked Republican leader on a personal basis, as he often did with Thune’s predecessor, Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.. Trump once called McConnell a “ dour, sullen, and unsmiling political hack.”

Trump and Thune talk frequently, even as Thune is sometimes giving the president news he does not want to hear. As Trump pushed for the voting bill, Thune scheduled weeks of floor time to consider it, an effort to make clear that the Senate was supportive, even if the votes are lacking.

Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt, one of the president’s closest allies in the Senate, said he has never heard Trump say anything negative about Thune.

“It’s a difficult position,” Schmitt said of Thune’s role in the Senate. “I think they have a good working relationship.”

One of Thune’s closest allies, Republican Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota, said the even-keeled leader is the “right person at the right time.”

“In the Capitol today, he is the stable force,” Rounds said. “In Washington, D.C., today, he is the stable force.”

No signs of revolt among Senate GOP

There were no signs of a revolt within the GOP conference, for now, despite Trump’s pressure.

Thune “has managed it better than anyone else could manage it,” said Cassidy, who has become a more frequent Trump critic since a primary loss to a Trump-backed challenger.

Criticism of Trump has at times surfaced even among his closest Senate allies, especially with his proposed $1.776 billion settlement fund for his political allies and his pick for acting intelligence director, Bill Pulte, who has no known intelligence experience.

But the rift with Trump has also stoked some new internal tensions.

Several Republican senators criticized Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, who has waged an online campaign to eliminate the filibuster and pass the SAVE America Act, in a private conference lunch this week for stoking dissension within the party in an election year.

Unbowed, Lee has kept up his social media campaign, including a post Friday on X in which he said that giving up because Republicans lack the votes is a “recipe for failure.”

Texas Sen. John Cornyn, one of those who spoke out at the meeting, replied that it is Lee’s job to find the votes, “if you can.”

“Can’t just complain about others,” Cornyn posted. “Prove us wrong.”

Trump’s dwindling number of allies

Some Senate Republicans have made clear they have no plans to separate themselves from Trump.

As several of his colleagues criticized Trump’s agreement with Iran this week, first-term Sen. Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio, aggressively defended it on social media.

“Let’s get the Nobel Peace Prize ready!” Moreno posted on X.

But Trump has far fewer of those Senate allies than he did when they narrowly passed the tax and spending cuts legislation a year ago. That is in part because he has picked off some of the most loyal Republican votes himself.

Both Cassidy and Cornyn lost in primaries last month after Trump endorsed their opponents. Tillis announced he was not running for reelection last year after Trump repeatedly criticized him on social media.

Now all three have become frequent critics.

Shortly after his election loss, Cornyn posted on social media a fable about a frog and a scorpion. The scorpion asks the frog to carry it across a river, according to the fable, and then stings the frog in the middle of the river, “dooming them both.”

“The dying frog asks the scorpion why it stung despite knowing the consequence,” Cornyn’s post read. “To which the scorpion replies: ‘I am sorry, but I couldn’t help myself. It’s my character.’”

___

Associated Press writer Kevin Freking contributed to this report.

The Dictatorship

Jay-Z sees yet another Black boycott as a chance for him to make money

Published

22 hours ago

June 20, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Jun. 20, 2026, 6:00 AM EDT

ByDarryl Robertson

From the start, Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter has been consistent that his primary concern in life is making even more money. “I’d rather die enormous than live dormant,” he raps on “Can I Live?” That’s one of the songs on his 1996 debut masterpiece, “Reasonable Doubt,” which is mostly about him making the transition from drug dealer to musical artist. And “Can’t Knock the Hustle,” the first song on that album, is his declaration that no one can criticize him for how he accumulates wealth.

But 30 years later, people are knocking Jay-Z’s hustle. The hip-hop legend and media mogul is partnering with Target to push out a new collector’s item: a 30th-anniversary edition of “Reasonable Doubt” on vinyl. When Target ended its diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives during the first days of the second Trump administration, Levy Armstrong to some Monique Cullars-Doty and Jaylani Hussein, stood outside Target’s headquarters in Minneapolis and announced that a nationwide boycott would begin on Feb. 1, 2025. Later, the Rev. Jamal Bryant, a prominent Black pastor in Atlanta, also called for a boycott. Target suffered declining store traffic and significantly fewer sales.

“Can’t Knock the Hustle” is his declaration that no one can criticize him for how he accumulates wealth.

In March, when Bryant announced an end to the boycott, Levy Armstrong wrote in an op-ed for MS NOW that Bryant had “no authority” to end the boycott and that it continues. “Why should we end the boycott now when Target hasn’t changed any of the policies that caused us to launch the boycott?”

This isn’t the first time Jay-Z has seen an opportunity for himself with an institution catching the brunt of Black people’s anger. As many Black people were boycotting the NFL for its mistreatment of quarterback Colin Kaepernick after he kneeled during the national anthem, Jay-Z’s Roc Nation brand announced a partnership with the NFL to plan its Super Bowl halftime shows. “I think we’ve moved past kneeling,” Jay-Z said then. “I think it’s time to go into actionable items. I don’t want people to stop protesting at all. Kneeling is a form of protest. I support protests across the board. We need to shed light on the issue, and I think everyone knows what the issue is.”

Jay-Z has consistently shown that he will choose partnership over principles, as “Point of View” host Natalya Somers recently noted: “We’ve seen when Colin Kaepernick was going through it with the NFL, and ended up being blackballed, and didn’t come to his defense. And now, right in the middle of his very own people being in the middle of a Target boycott, he is partnering with Target.”

Minneapolis-based Target has not only been criticized for abandoning its DEI initiatives but also has been accused of not standing up for immigrant communities during the ramped-up ICE raids in Minnesota earlier this year.

As impressive as Jay-Z’s ability to rap is, and as powerful as his story is about his rise from drug dealer to billionaire, he is a prime example of why we shouldn’t treat entertainers as political leaders, especially not an entertainer who candidly rapped, “I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man.”

Jay-Z isn’t the only Black music artist to partner with Target. J.Cole partnered with the retail giant to exclusively sell vinyl copies of his latest album, “The Fall-Off” and to sell the 10th anniversary of 2014’s“Forest Hill Drive.” Kendrick Lamar’s 2024 album “GNX” is also being sold on vinyl exclusively at Target. But Jay-Z has enough money and clout to play by his own rules. He could have chosen another retailer if he had wanted to.

Jay-Z made a guest appearance on a 2006 song by Nas called “Black Republican.” In the chorus, we hear him say, “I feel like a Black Republican, money I got comin’ in / Can’t turn my back on the hood, I got love for them.”

The part about money coming in is obviously still true. But some of his decisions should make us question his claim that he can’t turn his back on the hood.

Darryl Robertson

Darryl Robertson is a freelance writer, a research assistant for The New York Times, a section editor for Souls and a student at Columbia University. His research interests include hip-hop and understanding how the Black Power movement services its communities. He is also interested in understanding how social, geographical and historical factors contribute to hip-hop.

The Dictatorship

Elon Musk’s right-wing cheerleaders are deeply offended by criticism of his trillionaire status

Published

22 hours ago

June 20, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Jun. 20, 2026, 6:00 AM EDT

Elon Musk’s new status as the world’s first trillionaire has unsurprisingly generated strong criticismmuch to the horror of his loudest fans, who view pretty much any criticism of Musk as an attack on freedom and prosperity.

Some Musk detractors lamented the very existence of a trillionaire as an obscenity, when millions of Americans live one broken bone or illness away from financial ruin. Surely if a rising tide lifts all boats, then one man becoming a trillionaire — roughly tripling his net worth since bankrolling President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign — ought to mean there’s enough wealth to trickle down to provide basic social services for the tens of millions of Americans struggling to make rent every month? Perhaps if one man’s businesses have been subsidized for years by billions of dollars from U.S. taxpayersand whose net worth exceeds the GDP of all but 19 countriesthen maybe there’s enough left over for average Americans to receive the kind of basic health coverage that’s a staple of every Western capitalist democracy but our own?

No! That’s just jealous, parasitic commie talk from people who hate “the accomplishments of great men,” say Musk’s right-wing fans — who are often beneficiaries of billionaires’ largesse themselves.

Among the self-parodic headlines: the National Post’s “Here’s how to properly love Elon Musk, the world’s greatest entrepreneur,” The Spectator’s “Why can’t Elon Musk’s critics just be pleased for him?”, The Federalist’s “Leftist Freak Out Over Elon Musk’s Trillionaire Status Embodies Their Hatred For Success.”

Joel Berry, former managing editor of The Babylon Bee (MAGA’s one-joke answer to The Onion), posted to X, “The government takes over one trillion every year from hardworking taxpayers to fund welfare recipients. Elon has never taken a single cent from me.”

In fact, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF, — the cash payments that are commonly referred to as “welfare” — pays out just over $8 billion per year. Families below the poverty line receive anywhere between $162 to $915 per month, depending on the state, according to a 2024 report by the Congressional Research Service. Meanwhile “in 2024 alone, federal and local governments committed at least $6.3 billion to Musk’s companies, the highest total to date,” according to reporting by The Washington Post.

That’s just jealous, parasitic commie talk from people who hate “the accomplishments of great men,” say Musk’s right-wing bootlickers — who are often beneficiaries of billionaires’ largesse themselves.

The reality of one man being roughly three times richer than the next plutocrat is, as Musk is wont to say, “concerning.” That this man’s wealth is inextricably tied to businesses with sweetheart government contracts and miniscule tax rates, even more so. The fact that this same man is a manic poster on social media, where he frequently endorses racist tropes and amplifies right-wing conspiracy theories, is written off by many Musk apologists as just the price of working with a capitalist visionary. But Musk is legitimately dangerous.

After his money helped Trump take back the White House, the president authorized Musk to create the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which recklessly destroyed many legitimate agencies that provided real, tangible value to America and its security — and not just stock holders’ bottom lines. The destruction of the U.S. Agency for International Development (which had a budget of about $34 billion a year) is estimated to have led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of peoplehindered America’s (and the world’s) ability to respond to public health crises (like the recent Ebola outbreak) and created a power vacuum in many parts of the world that was quickly filled by local warlords religious extremist groups and China.

Musk is attempting to impose his extreme politics outside the U.S. as well. A giddy booster for the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfDwhose members he implored to get over their guilt for their nation’s not-too-distant Nazi past, Musk has since turned his sights on the U.K., where last year he told a crowd of over 100,000 at a far-right rally, “Whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die, that’s the truth, I think.” Just last week, Musk egged on racist, far-right mobs rampaging through Belfasteven using his Nazi-friendly platform X to post locations for the mobs to organize.

The Verge recently published an article by TC Sottek titled, “The world’s first trillionaire is a killer.” This sparked performative outrage from some of Musk’s right-wing influencer pals, who accused the outlet of “hoping to inspire the next Luigi Mangione” and referred to Musk’s critics as “vile soul-sucking wreckers who despise all excellence.”

But Sottek makes a good case to back up the article’s provocative headline. Musk, he notes, called USAID a “criminal organization” that he was “feeding … into the wood chipper” — evoking a gruesome murder in the film, “Fargo.” Musk’s killing of USAID led to what experts estimate is close to a million deaths in a little more than a year, mostly children, due to preventable diseases.

Sottek continues:

The intentional destruction of the ability to save lives and reduce suffering is psychopathic behavior — the kind that would prevent any rational, kind person from giving power to anyone capable of it. But here we are. And while there has always been a class of mega-rich menaces, including horrible racists in power who are indifferent to suffering, we seem to be crossing the Rubicon with Musk. Few people in history, if ever, will have accumulated the same combination of wealth, media power, and government influence.

I’m having trouble spotting a falsehood in that passage. And I cannot take seriously the protestations from groupies of the richest and most powerful people in the world, who claim that strident criticisms of their heroes — including the use of labels like “Nazi” and “fascist” — are tantamount to inciting violence.

On Wednesday, Musk referred to the Federal Trade Commission “as modern day Mengeles, an utterly evil organization.” You see, the MAGA civility cops’ ethos holds that any comparisons between them and Nazis and killers should be criminalized. But at the same time, their enemies — including people just a little weirded out by the fact that the world’s first trillionaire is such an unstable and vicious person — are so dangerous that no softer descriptions will suffice.

That’s how they justify likening Musk’s critics to both Nazis and communists, while simultaneously claiming Musk’s life is threatened because those critics noted the fact that his reckless actions, in fact, did lead to pointless death and unspeakable destruction.

It’s hard to choose what’s more distasteful — treating the world’s richest man, whose wealth is increasingly tied to the fortunes of the U.S. government, as some kind of heroic, revolutionary figure, or whitewashing the consequences that his thoughtless, erratic, grievance-based decision-making has wreaked on some of the world’s most vulnerable people. Either way, Musk’s superfans continue to outdo themselves in the field of caping for power while somehow attempting to pose as “anti-elites.”

Anthony L. Fisher is a senior editor and opinion columnist for MS NOW.