The Dictatorship
‘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 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.”
PROVO, Utah — There were three of them that first day, milling about outside Utah’s Fourth District Courthouse, after failing to secure one of the 14 seats reserved inside for the public. I had taken to calling them the Freedom Ladies; named for their shirts and other merch emblazoned with the word freedom, like the one conservative activist Charlie Kirk had been wearing when he was killed last September at a debate event.
We agreed to stick to first names as they didn’t trust the mainstream media and said they didn’t know how I’d spin what they would tell me. The Freedom Ladies — Brandy, Jamie, and Hayley, Utahns in their 40s — had each been in the crowd at Utah Valley University, watching Kirk speak when he was shot.
“We’re trauma sisters,” Brandy told me, wrapping her arm around Jamie.
They had driven to Provo this week for the preliminary hearing of Tyler Robinson, the 23-year-old the state has charged with Kirk’s murder. They were there, Jamie told me, looking for answers. The government’s story just didn’t sit right with them: that Robinson found Kirk’s right-wing politics hateful, and so drove 250 miles with his grandfather’s WWII-era rifle and a bunch of bullets etched with internet memes, climbed onto a campus rooftop and shot Kirk in the neck.
Prosecutors would spend the week laying out that case in a small fourth-floor courtroom, using DNA evidence, surveillance video, and several confessions the state alleges Robinson made, to ask a judge to send the case to trial. Robinson has yet to enter a plea.
Outside, the Freedom Ladies — part of a small, passionate crowd of lookie-loos, true-crime junkies, Charlie Kirk fans, and conspiracist creators — were weighing alternative narratives, assembled mostly online, that were unfounded yet felt to them somehowmore true: that Robinson had been set up, a patsy in conspiracist speak; or that Kirk’s own organization, Turning Point USA, was involved in his death; or that Israel, perhaps, was pulling the strings. The one thing nearly everyone I spoke to seemed to agree on was that Erika Kirk, Charlie’s widow, was somehow involved — suspect at best.
“She’s evil,” Jamie said of Charlie Kirk’s widow.
Rarely do I get to spend a week around people who traffic in conspiracy theories as they’re shown, up close, evidence that flies in the face of their beliefs. While the state made its early case against Robinson, I watched from the jury box, alongside a dozen other reporters who’d landed media seats. And when I wasn’t in the courtroom, I was with the believers: waiting out in the middle of the night beside people camped in the public linetalking during breaks to the members of the public who’d made it inside, trailing conspiracist creators as they lingered in the parking lot after court. I was also searching for an answer to a question of my own: What would change someone’s mind?
***
Almost immediately following Charlie Kirk’s killing, the conspiracy theories began. Since the 2012 massacre of school children at Sandy Hook Elementary School, it’s become expected in the face of mass tragedy or high profile shootings that a cadre of fabulists will deny the event outright and spin up a narrative to counter the official ones. But Kirk’s killing widened the audience of people who were willing to believe such things well beyond the usual fringe, to elected officialspopular right-wing influencers, and Kirk’s closest friends and allies.
Candace Owens, a former Turning Point employee and friend of Kirk, has since led the conspiratorial charge. Less than a week after his death — days after Robinson turned himself in and was arrested for the murder, authorities said — Owens branded herself an investigative journalist and set out on her next crusade: finding out who really killed Charlie Kirk.
As difficult as these last few days have been, it brings our family comfort to know that the world has witnessed the overwhelming evidence of what occurred to Charlie that day.”
statement from the family of charlie kirk
Early episodes of her popular online show included “Charlie Kirk Shooting Suspect Charged. Something Isn’t Right…” and “Who Ordered The Hit On Charlie Kirk?”
Owens had been clawing her way back to the spotlight after she was fired by The Daily Wire for veering from culture-war podcasting into open antisemitism and conspiracist content, including a ham-fisted deep dive into the debunked theory that the first lady of France is secretly a man. With the Kirk investigation, Owens’ YouTube audience grew fourfold overnight; her channel now has over six million followers.
Since September, Owens’ theories about Kirk’s death have expanded, and she and much of her rabid audience have decided that the case against Robinson is rigged. Across thousands of podcast episodes and online posts, a network of conspiracist creators — with Owens at the top — has implicated state prosecutors, federal agencies, foreign governments, and TPUSA in a plot against Robinson.
“I know this is controversial,” Brooke Johnson, an Orem native and Utah Valley University graduate, told me around 2 a.m. as she waited in the overnight line for one of the 14 public courtroom seats, “but there are certain questions that Candace has asked that need to be answered.”
Owens dismissed the court proceedings before they began.
“Today the Tyler Robinson show trial begins,” she posted.
But a preliminary hearing is not a trial. It exists to determine whether the state has enough evidence to move a case forward to trial. And for five days, prosecutors tried to prove it, one exhibit and witness at a time. I watched them from two perspectives: one focused on the evidence and another on what the far-out internet, led by Owens, would make of it.
The state’s first witness was a campus police officer who had been working an overtime shift on the day Kirk spoke. Officer Christopher Bagley said he saw Kirk being shot, recognized the sound of a rifle, and climbed to the roof of a building with a clean line of sight down onto the stage, where he found a screwdriver and a disturbance in the gravel: the distinct impression, he said, of someone laid out flat, in “sniper position.”
Prosecutors showed video from campus surveillance cameras they said tracked Robinson — a young man with a slim build and a baseball cap pulled far down onto his brow — as he moved across campus four separate times that day: in his car, arriving in a maroon shirt and shorts, leaving and then returning on foot in different clothes, walking with a heavy limp to conceal a long gun. In the footage the state played in court, a young man climbs a stairwell, crosses a walkway, rolls over a railing onto the roof, drops into position, and, after the shot that killed Kirk, runs back across the roof and disappears off campus and into the trees.
Online conspiracists claim the videos showed nothing; they were too blurry, shot too far away. They had been doctored by authorities, some said. Others posited that the videos had been engineered on purpose, using decoys who looked just enough like Robinson to frame him.
“This is a psyop for the general public,” wrote Jose “Chille” DeCastro under his X account Project Constitutiona self-described YouTube cop watcher turned Kirk conspiracist creator who has been cited by Owens on her show. “The feds and their media lapdogs are trying to convince people this blurry, unidentifiable footage proves Tyler did it.”
Sgt. Jennifer Faumuina of the Utah Department of Public Safety testified that she oversaw the securing of the crime scene and the evidence. Prosecutors showed photos of a rifle wrapped in a towel and stuffed behind a tree near campus, and a spent .30-06 cartridge case — the brass from a fired round — alongside three unfired bullets, each engraved with a message. They showed photos of the same kind of ammunition recovered in a search of Robinson’s home, along with paper targets and a round from his bedroom etched with the words “test shot.” And they showed results of DNA testing that linked Robinson to the screwdriver found on the roof, the towel, the rifle and to a tool prosecutors say Robinson used to scratch the messages into the bullets.
I feel so bad if it really does turn out that Tyler Robinson did this. I’ll feel like such an asshole.”
Brooke johnson, Utah Valley University graduate
Some online conspiracists have pushed an unfounded theory and framed the rifle as a distraction from the real murder weapon: Kirk’s microphone.
“We don’t know what Robinson’s actual role was, but Charlie was taken out by an exploding lav mic,” offered Stew Peters, a well-known antisemitic conspiracy theorist.
Then there were the alleged confessions. The state presented evidence – text messages, a group chat, a physical note, and testimony – that they claim shows Robinson repeatedly confessing to the killing.
“I had the opportunity to take out Charlie Kirk and I’m going to take it,” Robinson allegedly wrote in a note to his boyfriend and roommate, Lance Twiggs.
“I had enough of his hatred,” Robinson allegedly texted to Twiggs. “Some hate can’t be negotiated out.”
In a recorded interview played in court, Twiggs told prosecutors that Robinson confessed in person the day after Kirk’s killing.
“He started crying a little bit and said he wishes he hadn’t done it,” Twiggs said in the video.
Baron Coleman, an attorney turned YouTuber, who Owens describes as the “after party” to her show, suggested on X that the note hadn’t been written by Robinson because it lacked commas.
***
Resting the state’s case, Chief Deputy Utah County Attorney Chad Grunander said, “the evidence is overwhelming. It’s devastating.”
Owens’ response was predictable.
“The ‘evidence is overwhelming’ campaign has begun!” Owens posted on X Friday. “This is all so pathetic. And obvious. And [sic] utter disaster of a non-existent case.”
The people I spent the last week with were a little harder to read.
One court-watcher who declined to be named had arrived certain that Robinson was being framed, and that Twiggs was in on it. But she told me the evidence presented in court had gotten to her. Watching Twiggs on the screen, she’d started to believe him. He was a kid, she said, “without a fully formed brain” who was in over his head. Kirk’s killing was starting to look less like a conspiracy and more like a tragedy, she said.
Johnson, who told me on Monday that Erika Kirk seemed “suspect,” had softened by Friday. She still saw holes in the case, but said she was hesitant now to cast blame — on Erika Kirk especially, whom she’d been seated behind on the last day of court, and had watched as the widow and her mother-in-law embraced and cried while prosecutors showed surveillance video of the man they say was Robinson crouching on a roof before shooting Charlie Kirk.
“You never want false accusations,” Johnson said. “I feel so bad if it really does turn out that Tyler Robinson did this. I’ll feel like such an asshole.”
The Freedom Ladies didn’t come back into court to watch the defense try to poke holes in the state’s forensic science and cast doubt on the completeness of the state’s investigation.
Jamie told me she’d changed her m ind about Erika Kirk, too — but she wouldn’t come back to court. Another person in their group had made national news for a moment of sympathy shown toward Erika Kirk, and Candace Owens had called her outsuggesting she’d be the next target of her show. Jamie didn’t want to be next.
The Kirk family released a statement on Friday.
“As difficult as these last few days have been, it brings our family comfort to know that the world has witnessed the overwhelming evidence of what occurred to Charlie that day,” it read. “Nothing will ever undo the loss of our beloved Charlie. As this case moves into its next phase, we pray that truth will continue to be heard through a process that is fair, transparent, and grounded in the facts.”
One conspiracist creator, popular within Owens’ network, told me after court on Thursday she was having second thoughts about the case. On camera and on social media, she leaned into the narratives being pushed by her colleagues online. But in private — and asking me not to use her name —she conceded that the state’s case was strong. She might even step back from the conspiracy world, she said, “but not yet.”
“I gotta do it slowly,” she told me. “I don’t want to make people mad.”
Brandy Zadrozny is a senior enterprise reporter for MS NOW. She was a previously a senior enterprise reporter for NBC News, based in New York.
ByMichael Steele
It should have been an occasion for a great patriotic speech.
Instead, the short address said America faced “enemies from within,” casting routine political disagreements as an existential crisis of Christianity against communism and calling for the “twisted warped thinkers” of the opposition to be swept from the national scene.
The year was 1950. The politician was Sen. Joe McCarthy. And the occasion was a dinner marking Abraham Lincoln’s birthday.
That speech has become infamous for helping launch the Red Scare, long considered a stain on American history. But as President Donald Trump stood at Mount Rushmore on the eve of the nation’s 250th anniversary, he matched it beat for beat in remarks that preyed on his base’s religious devotion to falsely paint Democrats as communists:
These are not mere political disagreements, like differences over taxes or regulations. Communism is a mortal threat to American liberty. … The godless communist morality states that anything is justified to bring about inhuman visions. … They don’t want good, they don’t love God, and they don’t want God.
Trump’s speech comes at a very different time than McCarthy’s, however. The West won the Cold War decades ago; the remaining communist countries, such as China and Vietnam, have mixed economies, and even Cuba has adopted some market reforms. The “communists” Trump is attacking are democratic socialists who want to do things like expand Medicare and start city-run grocery stores in needy areas, not seize the means of production.
The times are also different. The month before McCarthy delivered that 1950 speech, personal income was $6.5 billion higher than the year before. The prior decade saw homeownership grow by a staggering 55%, according to the 1950 Census. The ensuing decade would see the median wage grow by 62%.
Americans within the sound of McCarthy’s voice that night in Wheeling had a reason to be optimistic about their economic futures and to see capitalism as a system worth protecting. The senator preyed on that vigilance.
Trump doesn’t have that luxury of optimism. A YouGov poll from late last month found that 71% of Americans rate the economy as “fair” or “poor.” A Gallup poll from this past April found only that 25% of non-homeowners expect to buy a home in the next five years, and 67% said it was a bad time to buy a home — even as Trump still hasn’t signed a bipartisan housing reform bill overwhelmingly passed by Congress.
That shouldn’t come as a surprise, because time and time again, Trump has blocked Congress from making Americans’ lives easier. Instead, he’s attempted to strong-arm the economy like it’s a Republican incumbent seeking his endorsementusing the same government intervention that his party — my party — once stood against.
In fact, if anyone is trying to create a government-run economy, it’s not the democratic socialists; it’s Trump himself.
The president has imposed illegal tariffs and is now subsidizing farmers suffering under those tariffs to the tune of $44 billion by the end of this year. He spearheaded partial state ownership of private companies. As recently as this week, the administration even announced so-called “Freedom Fuel” centers to offset uncertainty at the pump caused by Trump’s war with Iran, which he entered without congressional approval.
All the while, Trump has not only insulated his own riches from the disastrous economic policies he’s implemented, but he’s multiplied them.
Even more sinister, the president has embraced the same authoritarian tactics associated with actual communist leaders. Since Day One of his second term, his administration has worked overtime to purge the federal workforce of anyone he suspects of disloyalty. His Homeland Security Department has detained people for writing op-eds and flooded cities with masked federal agents. His Justice Department has targeted perceived enemies with the full might of the U.S. criminal justice system.
The communists didn’t do it. He did; and that’s exactly why Trump won’t be able to sell a new Red Scare any better than he was able to sell red meat.
It’s not just because fearmongering about communism only reminds Americans that the man is 80 years old and mentored by the biggest architect of McCarthyismRoy Cohn.
It’s not just because half of Americans weren’t even alive when the Soviet Union was still an existential threat to the United States.
It’s because they’re fed up with politicians performing one moral code in public while living a diametrically opposite one in private. They’re tired of a politics that says it’s communist to feed the poor and Christian to starve them. They’re sick of confronting a real red scare every time they check their bank balance while an octogenarian yelling about communism gets billions of dollars richer.
America deserves a debate about the proper role of government in a free society. We deserve an honest discussion about capitalism, markets, regulation, public investment and individual liberty. Those conversations become impossible when every dissenting voice is derided as a communist.
History is complicated. Political philosophy is nuanced. Reasonable people can and likely will disagree. But democracy is strengthened when our leaders negotiate those differences rather than exploiting them.
That night in Wheeling, McCarthy did say one thing that holds up now, though probably not the way he intended:
It has not been the less fortunate or members of minority groups who have been selling this Nation out, but rather those who have had all the benefits that the wealthiest nation on earth has had to offer — the finest homes, the finest college education, and the finest jobs in Government we can give.
For a living example of that, stop by 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Look for the man in the red hat.
For more thought-provoking insights from Michael Steele, Symone Sanders Townsend and Luke Russert, watch“The Weeknight”every Monday-Friday at 7 p.m. ET on MS NOW.
Michael Steele
Michael Steele is a co-host of “The Weeknight,” which airs Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. ET on MS NOW.
ByRoey Hadar
The quarterfinals of the FIFA Men’s World Cup are underway. And the tournament’s most consequential actor has not been a star player, like Argentina’s Lionel Messi, or even President Donald Trump. No, the most important figure has been the post of video assistant referee, or VAR.
The premise is simple: Should the referee on the field make a “clear and obvious error,” or if there is a “serious missed incident,” another referee sitting off-site in a room with myriad camera feeds can help the in-stadium ref review and correct the mistake.
Nowadays, nearly every burst of joy from a goal is tempered for several minutes by a lengthy wait, either for referees to decide whether they will review it or by the review itself.
It’s a great idea on paper. But the perfect has become the enemy of the good. Instead, even as VAR has been increasingly used in soccer over the past decade, it has become a byword for long reviews and questionable officiating. And its use at this World Cup has felt arbitrary, at best a minimal improvement over human judgment.
At least three dramatic moments in this tournament were altered by VAR.
Croatia’s dramatic last-second equalizer in its round of 32 match against Portugal was called back after VAR used sound-wave technology inside the ball to decide that the goal scorer was offside due to a nearly invisible touch of the ball from a teammate.
The day before, in the round of 32 game between the U.S. and Bosnia and Herzegovina, VAR’s input led to the on-field referee showing U.S. player Folarin Balogun a red card, resulting in an automatic ban. The fallout was compounded when FIFA suspended the ban after Trump called FIFA President Gianni Infantino.
Remarkably, an even greater VAR-related controversy emerged in the round of 16. When Egypt took a 2-0 lead over Argentina, the goal was nullified after review for a foul committed at the other end of the field. Egypt would score again minutes later, only for Argentina to win 3-2 — with the go-ahead goal coming after what Egypt believed was a foul. Afterward, Egyptian soccer’s governing body released a statement criticizing the VAR process for raising “profound questions about the consistency and fairness of decisions.”
Soccer is a game that builds to just a handful of dramatic, emotionally explosive moments. But nowadays, nearly every burst of joy from a goal is tempered for several minutes by a lengthy wait, either for referees to decide whether they will review it or by the review itself.
The waits alter the momentum of the game, seemingly more sometimes than the goals themselves.
It’s one thing when VAR corrects a mistake, even a small one like Croatia’s goal. It is an annoying decision, but it is the correct one.
But was Balogun’s tackle a “clear and obvious” red card? That seems hard to argue, especially since the review process may have incorrectly used slow-motion replays to determine the forcefulness of Balogun’s foul.
In the NFL, replay reviews have left fans baffled, as players, broadcasters and officials seem to never be in agreement over what constitutes a catch.
And was Egypt’s would-be goal obviously given in error, when the supposed foul took place more than 15 seconds beforehand? I again would say no, particularly when VAR did not even ask the on-field referee to review a similar sequence of events in the run-up to Argentina’s winner.
Soccer isn’t the only sport struggling to implement video review technology. The final minutes of NBA games have always been exhausting, full of timeouts, fouls and other pauses. But the prospect of several multi-minute reviews can sap any remaining late-game drama. In the NFL, replay reviews have left fans baffled, as players, broadcasters and officials seem to never be in agreement over what constitutes a catch.
Sometimes these systems can be both effective and quick. Pro tennis has, for almost two decades, used technology to provide a near-immediate computerized review of whether a ball lands inside or outside the lines on the court. The NFL already adopted the same technology for first-down markers before the 2025 seasonand many soccer competitions (including the World Cup) use it to judge whether a ball crossed the goal line.
This year, Major League Baseball has also added similar technology to allow for quick, efficient challenges of an umpire’s initial call of a ball or strike. They have also put tight limits on the number of challenges and how long players have to initiate the process. It has created a system that fans and players alike have generally welcomed.
These systems increase the accuracy of calls without disrupting the game, and a better VAR system would reflect that. My proposal: The VAR process must conclude in a set short amount of time. From the first stoppage of play, the video referee gets 30 seconds to determine whether the on-field referee should look at the footage; the latter then gets another 30 seconds to make the final call. If the error is visible in that time, it meets the criteria of “clear and obvious.” If not, then it’s too inconclusive to change. Just keep the game moving.
When referees, officials and umpires have the technology to quickly review calls and correct obvious errors, that should always be welcome. VAR, however, has been arbitrary, inconsistent and anything but quick. Continuing with the current system is a clear and obvious error.
Roey Hadar
Roey Hadar is a TV news producer with experience at MS NOW, Scripps News, PBS, and ABC News, and author of “I’m Curious,” a newsletter on sports and more.
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- Change my mind: Searching for reality in Charlie Kirk’s murder case
- Trump is trying to start a new Red Scare
- Video review has become the story of the World Cup for all the wrong reasons
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