Hello, everyone! Welcome to the new edition of
Please take a moment to complete the following three-minute survey so that we can better deliver you Insider in your inbox.
QUOTE OF THE DAY
"You're the kind of customer I'm happy to lose." —Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos responding to a guy named Dave who ripped him for supporting Black Lives Matter
WHAT'S HAPPENING
- Minneapolis's City Council actually did vote to disband the city's police force and reallocate the budget to other community services. The vote is "veto-proof," but there are no concrete plans yet.
- Congressional Democrats released their own police-reform legislation. It would ban choke holds and create a nationwide database of police misconduct, among other things.
- Sen. Mitt Romney is being widely praised (in some circles) for marching in a Black Lives Matter protest. Trump, of course, is trashing him.
- Stocks started up again. The Nasdaq reached an all-time high. Amazon hit $2,500 for the first time, 1,667 times its 1997 IPO price.
BLODGET & PLOTZ
Protesters need a better slogan than "defund the police."
Most people chanting "Defund the police!" don't actually want to eliminate police. Maybe some do — the mayor of Minneapolis, for example, was chased from a protest yesterday after saying he did not want to abolish police. But most people who say "defund the police," I think, just want police budgets reduced and the money instead invested in other emergency, health, and community services.
In some jurisdictions, this probably makes sense. The killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Eric Garner, and other innocent Americans, as well as the absurdly aggressive police response to the current protests, show that militarized police often don't "serve and protect." Instead, they frequently shoot, gas, batter, choke, attack, and kill.
So reallocating a portion of some police budgets to more helpful and peaceful community services would be smart.
But eliminating police would be ludicrous.
Humans do commit crimes sometimes. People beat each other up. People crash cars, drink and drive, kill each other, and rob banks.
Communities need someone to call when these things happen. Someone needs to investigate, gather evidence, and make arrests. If we eliminate the police, we'll just have to create new service providers to do these things and call them something else.
So protesters who are justifiably enraged by police brutality need a better slogan. (Though, in this one's defense, it has certainly helped raise awareness of a real problem). —HB
Also, "defund the police" would likely help Trump. The more protesters chant "defund the police," the easier it would likely be for President Trump to persuade swing voters that the Democrats want an America in which "looters and rioters" are forever ransacking the country. No matter how well meaning the protesters, in other words, the slogan "defund the police" will help bring about the protesters' biggest nightmare: Another four years of a president who loves militarized police and wants to "dominate" the citizenry. —HB
TAKE OF THE DAY: The Trump presidency is collapsing.
The implosion of the Trump presidency has been wrongly predicted since before it began, so why would now be the moment it really happens? New York Times columnist Jennifer Senior thinks this may finally be the Trump "tipping point" because he's flailing, his traditional divisive tactics aren't working, old allies are loudly defecting, and there doesn't seem to be a white backlash against the protests.
In The Atlantic, Franklin Foer likens what's happening to peaceful revolutions against authoritarian dictatorships, where small acts of rebellion — Twitter footnoting Trump's tweets, local officials standing up to the White House — reveal the weakness of the bully, and give cover for widespread defections, and eventual collapse. —DP
Why art has been so effective during these protests. In DC, city workers and activists painted a monumental "Black Lives Matter" mural on the street leading to the White House, infuriating Trump and inspiring similar murals in cities across the country. The murals are simple yet brilliant political theater, creating unforgettable images for
When the administration built a fence around the White House, demonstrators immediately decorated it with BLM posters, crosses, banners, and murals — turning exclusion into a memorial installation. There have been glorious moments of mass singing and mass dancing.
Protesters have also vanquished old art, pulling down — or persuading authorities to pull down — statues of hated, racist figures. It is a good reminder that protesting isn't a utilitarian request for policy change, but something much richer, and more complicated. Humans express themselves most powerfully not with reasoned arguments — though the protesters have plenty of those too — but with acts of communal creation. —DP
OTHER NEWS
Shutdowns saved millions upon millions of lives. Lockdowns prevented 60 million cases of COVID-19 in the US and saved more than 3 million lives in Europe, according to a pair of studies in Nature. They also prevented 285 million cases in China. That's not just good. That's great! Preventing suffering and death are worth a monumental amount. But the studies can't answer the question the world faces now, which is whether we'll be able to restore economic activity while maintaining the amount of distancing needed to keep the pandemic in check.
BUSINESS & ECONOMY
CHART OF THE DAY: Back in the dark days of the Great Recession, Insider called this "the scariest jobs chart ever." Now it's even scarier. The chart is from Bill McBride at Calculated Risk. It maps job losses in every recession since World War II. The job losses are presented as a percentage drop in the number of jobs from the peak.
As you can see, in most recessions, jobs dropped 2% to 5% and took one to four years to recover. In the Great Recession, in blue, jobs dropped 6% and took six years to recover. In the current recession, in red, jobs have already dropped 13% (so far) in three months. How long do you think they'll take to recover?SARS changed Chinese shopping habits quickly and permanently. COVID-19 could do the same in the US. The 2003 SARS epidemic pushed Chinese commerce online almost overnight, and turned Alibaba and JD.com into retail ecommerce giants. This pandemic appears to be reshaping American shopping habits in the same way, with ecommerce expected to surge 60% this year. It's like Black Friday every day. Will it persist? If American habits change, it would be cataclysmic in ways that it wasn't in China. That's because the US economy is so dependent on brick-and-mortar retail. It has five times as much retail space per capita as Europe, and nearly 10 times as much as China.
LIFE
"We, the NFL, believe Black Lives Matter." Commissioner Roger Goodell apologized to NFL players for opposing their earlier protests. The NFL standing up for Black Lives Matter is a 1,000% sign that it's now a safe, mainstream opinion.
Cat owners are buying off-brand remdesivir on the black market to treat their pets. They're paying obscene amounts for Chinese knockoffs of the COVID-19 drug to treat a fatal illness called feline infectious peritonitis, which is also caused by a coronavirus.
PHOTO OF THE DAY
US Marine veteran Todd Winn stood at attention or kneeled, in full-dress uniform, outside the Utah State Capitol building in scorching heat for three hours, "I can't breathe" taped over his mouth, a "Justice for George Floyd" poster in his arms. He stood there so long the soles of his shoes melted.
THE BIG 3*
Here's that profane email to Jeff Bezos from Dave, a customer unhappy with Amazon's support for Black Lives Matter. Dave ranted away, like many racists do, and he threw in the N-word, too. Bezos responded, "Dave, you're the kind of customer I'm happy to lose."
GoFundMe suspended the black conservative Candace Owens. She'd raised $200,000 for an Alabama bar owner who called George Floyd a "thug." GoFundMe said Owens "spread hate, discrimination, intolerance and falsehoods against the black community." The bar will still get the money.
27 details you probably missed in the Harry Potter movies. Such as the cereal called Cheeri-Owls, the Beauxbatons' girls dancing the Macarena, the early appearance of the deathly hallows symbol.
*The most popular stories on Insider today.