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Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee is facing a torrent of criticism after he sent a disturbing tweet about the Minnesota gunman who murdered Democratic state former House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, and shot Democratic state Sen. John Hoffman, and his wife, Yvette.

On Sunday, as law enforcement officers were searching for the alleged murderer Vance Boelter, Lee tweeted an image of Boelter in the rubber mask he wore when he opened fire on the lawmakers. In text alongside the disturbing image, Lee wrote, “Nightmare on Waltz Street”—a misspelled reference to Minnesota Democratic Gov. Tim Walz, who was also on a list of Democratic officials Boelter wanted to kill.

An hour earlier, Lee had also tweeted another image of Boelter in the rubber mask with the text, “This is what happens/When Marxists don’t get their way”—a message he was so proud of he pinned it to the top of his page.

Lee sent the disturbing messages—which try to further the false GOP narrative that is painting Boelter as a Democrat rather than the President Donald Trump-supporting, anti-abortion zealot he is—as other politicians were calling for politicians to tone down the rhetoric in order to avoid encouraging more radicalized people to commit violence against elected officials.

“Today we speak with one voice to express our outrage, grief, and condemnation of this horrible attack on public servants,” the entire Minnesota congressional delegation wrote in a joint bipartisan statement. “There is no place in our democracy for politically-motivated violence.”

Criticism of Lee’s response was swift.

“When there’s political violence in western democracies it’s traditionally treated as a somber event for everyone to come together. That’s disappeared. The victims were gunned down just over a day ago and a US Senator is mocking the event and hinting at a deranged conspiracy,” independent journalist Lee Fang wrote in a post on X.

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Related | Right-wing media manufactures false connections in Minnesota shooting

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After the biggest manhunt in Minnesota history, authorities have detained 57-year-old Vance Boelter, who is accused of fatally shooting democratic lawmaker and former House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark in their Minnesota home early on Saturday in what authorities say were politically motivated assassinations. He is also accused of wounding state Senator John Hoffman and his wife Yvette at their home in a separate shooting.

“Melissa Hortman was an outstanding leader that was very loved and respected by many people, and what this means for us is that we lost a leader that was very important to us,” says Patricia Torres Ray, a former Minnesota state senator and a former colleague of both Hortman and Hoffman.

Police say they found three AK-47 assault rifles, a 9mm handgun and a hit list written by the gunman that contained the names of about 70 people, including prominent Democratic lawmakers and abortion providers and advocates. Flyers for Saturday’s No Kings rallies were also found, prompting many organizers in Minnesota to cancel their protests.

After Donald Trump launched an unprecedented offensive against prominent law firms, four of the firms chose to fight back against the president’s authoritarian-style assault. Given that the quartet filed separate lawsuits against the White House, and they’re undefeated in court so far, it appears they made the smart decision.

As The New York Times recently noted after one of the four firms’ court victories, “The ruling seemed to validate the strategy, embraced by a minority of firms, of fighting the administration instead of caving to a pressure campaign and making deals with Mr. Trump to avoid persecution.”

For the rest of the targeted firms, the consequences of their misjudgment have gone from bad to worse. Reuters reported:

A group of seven partners is leaving Willkie Farr & Gallagher, which struck a deal with U.S. President Donald Trump in April to avert an executive order targeting its business, to join Cooley, which is representing one of the law firms fighting Trump’s orders. … There was widespread dissatisfaction in Willkie’s San Francisco office over the firm’s agreement with the administration, according to a source familiar with the matter who said as many as 15 associates have expressed interest in leaving.

Other firms that chose a Trump appeasement strategy are facing similar problems: Damian Williams, the former top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, recently announced that he’s leaving Paul Weiss (one of the firms that struck a deal with the White House) and joining Jenner & Block (one of the firms that fought back).

Indeed, it’s been difficult to keep up with the number of partners who’ve abandoned Paul Weiss in recent weeks as a result of its Trump agreement.

In case that weren’t enough, The Wall Street Journal recently reported that at least 11 big companies “are moving work away from law firms that settled with the administration or are giving — or intend to give — more business to firms that have been targeted but refused to strike deals.”

The article added, “In interviews, general counsels expressed concern about whether they could trust law firms that struck deals to fight for them in court and in negotiating big deals if they weren’t willing to stand up for themselves against Trump.”

Let’s also not forget that some of these same firms are also starting to realize that their deals with the president are worse than they first realized.

The entire strategy has backfired spectacularly. From the firms’ perspective, appeasement was supposed to guarantee relative tranquility and client satisfaction. Instead, these firms are losing clients, partners, associates and credibility within the industry.

If that weren’t quite enough, The New York Times reported that the firms that have already prevailed against the White House have noticed that Trump and his lawyers haven’t even appealed their defeats in court.

W. Bradley Wendel, a law professor at Cornell who is an authority on legal ethics, told the Times, in reference to White House officials, “They knew that these were losing positions from the beginning and were not actually hoping to win in court, but rather to intimidate firms into settling, as many firms did. Now that they have racked up the four losses in district courts, it is not surprising that they are not appealing, because I don’t think they ever thought these were serious positions.”

The firms that tried to placate and pacify the president must be kicking themselves right about now. All they had to do was defend themselves, their profession, the law and the integrity of the system itself, and they could’ve avoided all kinds of problems.

But it’s also worth remembering that it might not be too late for the firms to course-correct. I’m reminded anew of a recent NBC News report about a progressive group that launched a media campaign targeting the firms that reached deals with the president.

‘Big law, stop bending the knee,’ reads a poster from the ‘Big Law Cowards’ campaign by the liberal nonprofit group Demand Justice. The group says the ads will be wheatpasted strategically around Washington on Thursday near the locations of the firms that have reached deals with the administration. The group will also have a mobile billboard circulating with ads criticizing the firms, along with a broader digital campaign.

The underlying point of these efforts isn’t to chastise the firms for making the wrong decision; it’s to remind those firms that it’s not too late to reverse course and join the ranks of the firms resisting Trump’s gambit.

Will any of the firms abandon their existing deals? If one firm does it, will others follow? Watch this space.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.

Two years ago, the Federal Communications Commission unanimously voted to require that wireless emergency alerts reach people in 13 languages and American sign language. Those are the alerts people get during climate disasters such as wildfires and hurricanes, as well as Amber Alerts. As of now, wireless emergency alerts only go out in Spanish and English. Yet, nearly 68 million Americans speak another language other than English at home, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

But some Democratic Congress members and nonprofits say since the Trump administration came into office, the FCC has delayed sending what’s called a report and order to the Federal Register. That starts a 30-month window for participating wireless providers, such as AT&T and Verizon, to update wireless emergency alerts in the 13 most common spoken languages in the U.S. (Spanish, Chinese, Tagalog, Vietnamese, Arabic, French, Korean, Russian, Haitian German, Creole, German Hindi, Portuguese, Italian and American sign language.)

California Congresswoman Nanette Barragán, a Democrat, says the FCC has already approved this change, which she notes FCC Chairman Brendan Carr backed in 2023.

“So as we go forward with this, I think there’s a lot that we can do to improve this, particularly around accessibility and making sure the system continues to work for everyone, so this item has my support,” Carr said right before the vote happened in April of that year.

Only one step remains: to publish the report and order in the Federal Register. That would require wireless providers such as AT&T and Verizon to install a template in each of the languages.

“ When an emergency alert comes in, people should be able to understand what it says and the instructions are being given on what to do,” Barragán says. “This is about saving lives, it’s about safety.”

It’s unclear why the FCC has delayed updating the wireless emergency alert system.

NPR reached out to FCC Chair Brendan Carr’s office and the agency’s Office of Media Relations for comment multiple times, but did not get a response.

But Barragán and nonprofits, like the AAPI Equity Alliance, point to one executive order signed by President Trump on his inauguration day called “Regulatory Freeze Pending Review” as the reason for the delay. The order prohibits executive departments and agencies from sending reports to the Office of the Federal Register until a designated Trump administration official approves the rule.

“ This is an independent agency,” says Barragán, who represents South Los Angeles. “There shouldn’t even be a requirement that somebody in the Trump White House has to review and approve any kind of action by an independent agency like the FCC.”

NPR reached out multiple times to the White House for comment, but did not receive a response.

FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez — nominated to the body by President Joe Biden — says the commission has adopted other rules and orders that have been published in the Federal Register since Trump took office.

“ So it’s not clear to me why there is a delay in getting this one published,” Gomez says.

When NPR asked if Trump’s Jan. 20 executive order is holding up the process, Gomez says it’s possible. “ It’s past time for the FCC to allow this process to move forward so that more people can receive the critical information they need in a language and format they understand,” she says.

Congress established the Warning Alert And Response Network (WARN) Act in 2006. That gave the FCC the ability to adopt technical standards, protocols and procedures so that mobile providers could send out emergency alerts during climate disasters and Amber Alerts.

The protocols allow federal, state and local governments to use wireless emergency alerts to send warnings to the public through their mobile devices through FEMA-approved software. Once that emergency alert is authenticated and validated, it goes through a distribution channel to wireless providers.

During the wildfires in Los Angeles earlier this year, wireless providers sent out evacuation messages to subscribers as long as they did not opt out of receiving emergency alerts.

However, a UCLA study found that over 12,000 Asian Americans in the four evacuation zones didn’t understand the evacuation alerts they were getting through their mobile providers.

Paul Ong is one of the study’s authors and directs UCLA’s Center for Neighborhood Knowledge. He says having multilingual wireless emergency alerts during the wildfires would have been extremely beneficial to the Asian community in L.A.

“Among Asian Americans, we find a huge diversity in languages,” Ong says. “Even among language groups such as Chinese, you have many, many different dialects.”

The Congressional Hispanic, Asian Pacific American and Black caucuses called on FCC Chair Brendan Carr to publish the report and order to start updating the multilingual wireless emergency alerts in a letter sent on May 26.

“Failing to implement this rule means denying millions of Americans access to potentially life-saving emergency alerts — whether for wildfires, earthquakes, hurricanes, active shooters, or other disasters — in a language that they understand. That is unacceptable,” the tri-caucuses wrote in the letter.

Hotter temperatures are already drying out vegetation in the west — making wildfires more likely. Hurricane season is already underway along the Atlantic coast. That’s why AAPI’s Equity Alliance’s executive director Manjusha Kulkarni hopes the FCC moves forward with implementing its updated emergency alert system.

“The language that any individual speaks really shouldn’t keep them from receiving necessary information to keep their families safe,” Kulkarni says.

Years ago, a woman in her 60s whom I had just met pulled out a stack of photos to show me how she had celebrated her dog’s birthday: in a neighborhood bar, with balloons and beer for the humans and a little cake made of Milk-Bones and chicken liver for the dog. Everyone, including the dog, looked like they were having a nice time. “Is this your only child?” I asked jokingly. She looked at me with a combination of scorn and pity. “He’s my dog, honey. I raised all my kids already.”

I thought of that moment recently when I saw the unexpectedly hilarious People magazine headline: “Kristin Chenoweth slams non–pet owners who say her dog isn’t her ‘baby’: ‘She came out of my vagina.’” The gist was this: Chenoweth, the showbiz dynamo who broke out as Glinda in the original run of “Wicked” and will play the title role in the much-anticipated musical “The Queen of Versailles,” is currently partnering with a dog-food subscription service called Nom Nom. This involves doing a lot of interviews about her relationship with her dogs, past and present. And that, in turn, has led to headlines taking Chenoweth’s joke both literally and very personally. 

There’s no question that Americans love pets: Statistics from the trade organization American Pet Products Association released in 2023 showed that 66% of Americans have pets, and that they spend significant amounts of money to ensure they’re living their best lives. But the question of whether “pet parent” is a legitimate identity (something that’s debated repeatedly and often angrily online) points to a discomfort with a world in which pets are no longer part of the family, but the family itself, full stop. The result is a sustained collision between unfettered consumerism, gender-role anxiety and entrenched beliefs about what kinds of love are valid and meaningful. 

There was a time when the phrase “pet parenting” was an acronym for a decidedly human enterprise called Parent Effectiveness Training. These days, it’s likely buried in search results under pages of goods and services marketed to enthusiastic pet owners that go well beyond contemporary expectations like doggy day cares, cat hotels and raw-food delivery services. Self-optimizing humans can now optimize their pets as well, with color-changing kitty litter that detects urine abnormalities, FitBark activity monitors and a range of button-training programs to hone interspecies communication; physical-therapy centers for aging and injured dogs offer healing modalities including acupuncture, massage and aquatherapy.

(L-R) Michelle Vicary, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Kristin Chenoweth and Shannen Doherty in the Getty Images & People Magazine Portrait Studio at Hallmark Channel and American Humane Society’s 2019 Hero Dog Awards at the Beverly Hilton on October 05, 2019. (Neilson Barnard/Getty Images for Hallmark Channel)

Pets and humans have ever-broader options for entwining their daily lives, routines and milestone moments. There are 23 states in America where your dog, cat — any pet who is willing to ink a paw, really — can be an official witness to your wedding, and a smaller number in which your pet can actually serve as a wedding officiant. A growing number of restaurants and cafés offer dog menus, and at a few, like San Francisco’s upscale Dogue, good boys and girls are the target customers for a menu of braised-beef short ribs and antelope-heart pastries. Human-sized pet beds, memory-foam mattresses and co-sleeping attachments all exist to make sure everyone’s on the same level and getting a good night’s sleep.

Reactions to this new normal have been very telling. In November 2023, the New York Times published a feature titled “When your significant other has four legs,” profiling several women who were quite happy to put down the dating apps and focus on their own lives, which include rewarding relationships with their pets. Comments on the piece brimmed with hostility for the very idea that a life prioritizing pets might be more joyous and meaningful than one spent searching for a suitable human. “This is gross. Sad. Abnormal,” read one. “Great story about taking the easy way out,” snarked another. 

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Because birth rates around the globe have been on the decline for more than a decade, trends in pet primacy are regularly framed as usurping the rightful role of human children. It’s not a spurious conclusion: Census data shows that the percentage of women aged 30–44 with no children is higher than it’s been since 1960. Millennial women, ushered into adulthood by the 2008 financial crisis with untenable student-loan debt and a front-row seat to a sh*tshow of school shootings, environmental destruction and educational defunding feel both less equipped to have children and less interested in navigating the economic challenges of doing so. Add in the reversal of Roe v. Wade, that’s turned planned-for and much-wanted pregnancies needlessly tragic, and it’s not difficult to see why starting traditional families isn’t a priority. 

But there seems to be some difficulty in understanding that choosing pets in the absence of either romantic partners or biological children isn’t the same as replacing either of those relationships. When women are the ones doing the choosing, though, there’s a thread of real anger at the idea that they are not only reneging on a social contract but rubbing it in the faces of those who haven’t. Friction between pet parents and so-called real parents abounds online, from TikToks that mock people who insist on bringing their dogs everywhere they go to Reddit threads that insist people who refer to their cats as “the kids” are stealing valor to longform stories of bad pet-parent behavior engineered to make everyone who reads them as angry as possible at everyone involved. 

Pitting groups of people against one another based on differences in lifestyles and beliefs (like, say, whether the term “fur baby” is ever acceptable to use) has always been a successful way to take the heat off of the political and institutional entities that exert the most control over how well both people and their pets live. There’s been a longstanding reluctance to connect, in plain language, diminished material choices with the global slump in birthrates; it’s much easier to point to overindulged pets than to reckon with social and economic factors that keep everyone from thriving. 

The chief complaint about pet parenting seems to be that it wastes valuable love that could go to a human child on a fuzzy facsimile of one, as though companionship is a zero-sum proposition. Even the late Pope Francis — who took his name from the patron saint of animals — had some harsh words in 2022 for adults who have pets but not children, suggesting that opting out of childrearing is “selfish” and “takes away our humanity.” (Spoken like a man who has never had to pay preschool tuition and failed to understand that wiping a butt is no different from scraping poop out of the grass with a hand covered in a purple, lavender-scented poop bag purchased at Whole Foods. Poop is poop, Francis.) 

It’s worth keeping in mind who benefits from ginned-up wars about what makes a legitimate parent — because it’s not the people who could, perhaps, once afford to have both children, pets and even a mortgage, but these days are lucky to be able to afford just one. The people who cast pet parenthood as sad or unnatural are people who aren’t actually interested in human quality of life. Instead, they are the techno-pronatalists scrambling to maintain a white-supremacist bulwark against immigration, and the conservative reactionaries like the authors of Project 2025, whose stated aim of “restor[ing] the family as the centerpiece of American life” works by taking choice, autonomy and dignity away from citizens. 

Which is why more of us might want to take Kristin Chenoweth’s path and lead with absurdity. Go ahead and Photoshop your cat into ultrasound photos; send your nosy in-laws a holiday card of you and your dog frolicking in the snow; celebrate the relationships you have instead of waiting around for the ones you don’t. Caring for living things, regardless of species, is always an act of hope. But trolling those who complain that you’re doing it wrong can be very satisfying.