Pittsburgh artist speaks out after second mural vandalized across the country
'When I went to prime the mural, it had the n-word and had a swastika,' said Holbrook, who is the Executive Artist for the MLK Mural Project.
Holbrook has over 300 pieces of art in Pittsburgh. After the recent attacks on his murals in Oakland, California, and Miami, Florida, he wants people to know the mission of this work.
'I choose to do art that speaks to certain issues and draws attention and memorializes, such as the Negro League's mural. It's memorializing a lost, at the time, part of American History,' said Holbrook
The vandalism showed antisemitic symbols and racial slurs over his works about autism and black athletes.
Holbrook said, 'For this to happen to me with two different murals within two weeks…this is something that's going on in society.'
He hopes his artwork will remain safe as he continues his mission for peace.
'I don't want people to be scared. It's important to show strength,' said Holbrook.
He was able to go to Oakland to fix his work and plans to go to Miami to do the same.
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Atlantic
26 minutes ago
- Atlantic
Well, What Did You Think Would Happen?
So what was that all for? President Donald Trump emerged today from his summit with Russia's Vladimir Putin without a deal and without much to say. Trump rarely misses a chance to take advantage of a global stage. But when he stood next to Putin at the conclusion of their three-hour meeting, Trump offered few details about what the men had discussed. Stunningly, for a president who loves a press conference, he took no questions from the reporters assembled at a military base in Alaska. In his brief remarks, Trump conceded that he and Putin had not reached a deal to end the war in Ukraine or even pause the fighting. 'There's no deal until there's a deal,' the president said. He characterized their three-hour meeting—vaguely—as 'very productive.' Of the outstanding issues between the two sides, he admitted that 'one is probably significant,' but he didn't say what that was. 'We didn't get there but we have a very good chance of getting there,' Trump insisted. The Russian president, for his part, made mention of 'agreements' that had been struck behind closed doors. Yet Putin also provided no elaboration, leaving the distinct impression that it was a summit about nothing. If anything, Putin seemed to make clear that his demands regarding Ukraine haven't changed. In his usual coded way, he said an agreement could be reached only once the 'primary roots' of the conflict were 'eliminated'—which means, basically, that Ukraine should be part of Russia. 'We expect that Kyiv and European capitals will perceive that constructively and that they won't throw a wrench in the works,' Putin said, in what sounded like a warning. 'They will not make any backroom dealings to conduct provocations to torpedo the nascent progress.' As Putin and Trump boarded their respective airplanes for their flights home, Ukraine and Europe were left guessing as to what the coming days will bring. Will more missiles fly toward Kyiv? Will a second meeting involving Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky occur? Trump was equally as vague in a Fox News interview taped after the summit, though he did suggest that the next steps in the process would be up to Zelensky. What was clear today was that Trump, who had once promised to bring the war to a close within 24 hours, left the summit empty-handed. 'Summits usually have deliverables. This meeting had none,' Michael McFaul, an ambassador to Russia under President Barack Obama, told me. 'I hope that they made some progress towards next steps in the peace process. But there is no evidence of that yet.' At their last summit, in Helsinki in 2018, Trump and Putin captivated the world when they took questions, revealing details of their private discussions as the American president sided with Moscow, rather than his own U.S. intelligence agencies, over Russia's 2016 election interference. This time, they quickly ducked offstage as reporters shouted in vain. When the two men did speak, they mostly delivered pleasantries. Putin even repeated Trump's talking point that Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 would never have happened had Trump been in office then. And Trump, once more, said that the two men 'had to put up with the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax.' That the summit happened at all was perceived by many as a victory for Putin, who, after years as an international pariah, was granted a photo with a U.S. president on American soil—on land that once belonged to Russia, no less. And he was greeted in an over-the-top, stage-managed welcome that involved a literal red carpet for a man accused of war crimes. Putin disembarked his plane this morning moments after Trump stepped off Air Force One, and the two men strode toward each other past parked F-22 fighter jets before meeting with a warm handshake and smiles. After posing for photographs, and quickly peering up at a military flyover that roared above them, the two men stepped into the presidential limousine, the heavily fortified vehicle known as 'the Beast.' The White House had announced earlier in the day that the two men would not have a previously planned one-on-one meeting, but would instead have a pair of sit-downs flanked by advisers. But here, in the back seat of the Beast, Putin had his time alone with Trump. As the limousine drove off the tarmac to the summit site, Putin could be seen in a rear window laughing. Putin and Trump were scheduled to have a formal meeting at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, followed by lunch. But after the first meeting ran long, extending to more than three hours, reporters were abruptly rushed to the room where the press conference would be staged. The second meeting had been canceled. Had there been a breakthrough or a blowup? Putin sported the better body language: He almost glowed as he spoke to the press, offering a history lesson about Alaska, while praising the 'neighborly' relations between the men. And, oddly, he got to speak first, even though Trump was the summit's host. Trump, in contrast, seemed subdued, only perking up when Putin ended their media appearance by suggesting that their next summit be in Moscow. 'I think Trump did not lose, but Putin clearly won. Putin got everything he could have wished for, but he's not home free yet,' John Bolton, who was a national security adviser in Trump's first term, told me. 'Zelensky and the Europeans must be dismayed. And I thought Trump looked very tired at the press event. Putin looked energetic.' Putin seemed eager to broaden the conversation beyond Ukraine. He brought Russian business leaders to Alaska, hoping to play to Trump's hopes of better economic relations between the two countries, and perhaps strike a rare-earth-minerals deal. He also suggested earlier this week that he would revisit a nuclear-arms agreement, perhaps allowing Trump to leave the summit with some sort of win that did not involve Ukraine. But nothing was announced on those fronts either. The fear in Kyiv and across Europe was that Trump is so desperate for the fighting to stop, he might have agreed to Putin's terms regardless of what Ukraine wants. That did not happen, which was cheered across the continent, and Trump said that he would soon consult with Zelensky and NATO. But Putin has shown no sign of compromising his positions. He wants Russia to keep the territory it conquered, and Ukraine to forgo the security guarantees that could prevent Moscow from attacking again. Those terms are nonstarters for Ukraine. The Europeans and Ukrainians had good reason to be nervous about today's summit. Trump has spent most of his decade on the global stage being extraordinarily deferential to Putin, which continued when he returned to the White House this year. He initially sided with Russia—even blaming Ukraine for causing its own invasion—before slowly souring on Putin's refusal to end the war. This summit came together in about a week's time; final details were still being arranged even as some of Putin's delegation arrived in Alaska yesterday. Trump's personal envoy, Steve Witkoff, made several visits to Moscow in recent months. He had been in the Middle East when he received word through a back channel that Putin might finally be willing to come to the table given Trump's more hostile rhetoric toward Putin and threat of sanctions. After a series of meetings with key Trump senior aides and multiple flights across the Atlantic, Witkoff met again with Putin and accepted the offer of a summit. (He also accepted a twisted gift: Putin presented Witkoff with an Order of Lenin award to pass along to a senior CIA official whose son had been killed in Ukraine fighting alongside Russia.) Summits, particularly those as high-stakes as ones between American and Russian presidents, usually take weeks if not months to plan. Everything is carefully choreographed: the agenda, the participants, the ceremony. Normally, the outcome is more or less predetermined. In the days before the actual summit, aides hash out some sort of agreement so the two leaders simply need to show up and shake hands to make the deal official. That was clearly not the case today—or in other Trump-Putin meetings. Trump had met with Putin seven previous times, all but one coming on the sidelines of larger summits and all friendly. The first was at the G20 in Hamburg, Germany, in 2017, when the two men sat next to each other for an hours-long leaders' dinner. Their last meeting, at the G20 in Osaka, Japan, in the fall of 2019, ended with Trump mockingly warning Putin to never interfere again in American elections, with a sarcastic smile and an exaggerated finger wag. But Helsinki is the headliner. It came against the backdrop of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into possible ties between the Trump campaign and Moscow. I was one of the two American journalists called upon to ask a question, and I posed to Trump whether he believed Putin or his own U.S. intelligence agencies about Russia's interference in the 2016 election. Putin glared at me. Trump sided with Moscow. The eruption on both sides of the Atlantic was fierce and immediate, and even some loyal Republicans said they thought Trump's answer was a betrayal of American values. Some of Trump's top aides—including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Chief of Staff John Kelly—were photographed with pained expressions on their faces. Fiona Hill, Trump's Russia adviser, told me later that she nearly faked a heart attack in a desperate attempt to get the summit to stop. Anchorage wasn't Helsinki. For that, Europe can be grateful. Trump didn't give away Ukrainian land to Russia or demand that Zelensky take a bad deal, at least immediately. But Putin did get much of what he wanted, including a high-profile summit and, most of all, more time to continue his war. When he boarded his plane to leave Alaska, he was spotted smiling again.
Atlantic
28 minutes ago
- Atlantic
The Culture War Over Nothing
'You know the LIBS are seething over this,' Joe Kinsey, an editor at the sports website OutKick, wrote on X while reposting a video of sorority girls doing a choreographed dance. Many of the girls were wearing red-white-and-blue outfits, though some were dressed as hot dogs. They waved American flags in front of a banner that read We Want You Kappa Delta. 'Credit to these ladies for pumping out patriotism to kick off the 2025 school year,' Kinsley wrote. It wasn't only the display of patriotism that supposedly made liberals seethe. 'The purple hair lesbians have to be furious that SEC sororities ARE BACK,' Kinsey wrote while reposting another sorority-dance video. This one had no clear Americana element aside from the matching trucker hats all of the dancing girls were wearing. Kinsey's two posts were viewed nearly 40 million times. Many other such videos have been shared on X in the past couple of weeks, as sororities have begun recruiting for the new school year. The videos come from TikTok, where sorority dance videos have long been popular. But they've been presented on X with a new gloss: Democrats, liberals, and leftists are enraged by pretty, mostly white young women who are dancing happily. It drives them up the wall when a woman is blond! Do not let a liberal see a woman smiling while wearing a short denim skirt. The only thing that is missing is evidence of seething libs. Search around social media, and you might be surprised how difficult such reactions are to find. In fact, I couldn't find a single one. When I asked Kinsey where he got the idea that people were angry about the sorority-recruitment videos, he didn't point me to any specific examples. He noted that many people replied to his posts saying that they weren't mad about the TikTok dances. But, he said, 'I don't believe that.' By now, this is all familiar. Recall the recent controversy over an American Eagle ad starring Sydney Sweeney, in which the actress hawked denim jeans by making a pun about her genes. A small number of people on social media did get very angry, and posted about how the ad sounded like a eugenics dog whistle. Their reaction was then amplified by right-wing commentators eager to make the point that the left hates hot women. The fact that the situation involved Sydney Sweeney, a celebrity who had already been evoked in culture-war debates in the past, drove even more attention. It turned into a full-blown news cycle. (I am confident my grandmother heard about this.) In both cases, this burst of bizarre posting is less a story about American politics than it is a story about social media and, specifically, X. Whatever else you may say about Elon Musk's platform, it is the best place to watch a fake drama unfold. Both of the videos that Joe Kinsey shared—of the girls with the flags and the girls with the trucker hats—were originally posted on their respective sororities' TikTok accounts. But the versions he shared had been uploaded to X by what appears to be an account called 'Calico Cut Pants,' which seemingly exists to move short-form videos from one platform to another. The account follows no one and is named after a sketch from the Tim Robinson Netflix show I Think You Should Leave. Other sorority dance videos have been pulled from TikTok and posted by an account called 'Big Chungus,' which also posts almost nothing but videos from other sites, paired with incendiary rhetoric. Accounts like these can bring in money by driving engagement on X, thanks to a revenue-sharing program that debuted after Musk took over the site. Both Big Chungus and Calico Cut Pants have Premium badges, which means they can get paid for generating activity, including likes and replies. According to X's Creator Revenue Sharing guidelines, the company maintains some discretion in calculating the true 'impact' of posts. For instance, engagement from other paid accounts is worth more than engagement from an unpaid account. It stands to reason that the best way to make money is to elicit some reaction to your content from the people who enjoy X enough to pay for it. Social media is replete with political outrage, and playing to either a liberal or conservative audience is likely to draw attention. (Certainly, plenty of accounts decrying MAGA values, real and exaggerated, exist.) But X, in particular, is a much more right-coded platform than it was a few years ago, and it makes sense to pander to the home crowd. Consider 'non aesthetic things,' an account that has 4.9 million followers on X, all from posting short-form videos—sometimes relatable, sometimes nostalgic, generally just mind-numbing. Its bio links to an Instagram page that is full of ads for the gambling company Stake. (None of these accounts responded to requests for an interview.) The non aesthetic things account shared a video of sorority girls at Arizona State University who were performing in jean shorts, most of them quite short, and cowboy boots. The X caption makes reference to 'their JEANS'—a subtle nod to the Sydney Sweeney panic. This pairing of footage and wink was a solid bet to produce a big reaction. Given all the attention the Sweeney dustup received, returning to it is logical for engagement farmers. 'BREAKING,' wrote a pro-Trump account called 'Patriot Oasis' that almost exclusively posts short-form videos, 'Sorority at the University of Oklahoma wearing 'Good Genes' is going VIRAL showcasing pure American beauty. Liberals are OUTRAGED online.' The caption suggested that the sorority is participating in some kind of activist response to the villainization of Sydney Sweeney, though there is no reason to believe that. The girls in the video never say anything about politics, Sydney Sweeney, genes, or even jeans. The sorority has been making similar dance videos for years. Nevertheless, the right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk reposted Patriot Oasis to his 5.1 million followers and asked, 'Do you see the difference between conservative and liberal women?' Underneath his post, a Community Note generated by other users pointed out that the video doesn't reveal whether the women are conservative or not. But that hardly mattered. Many others made the same argument in the replies to Kirk's post, driving up engagement. Although the original post has since been deleted, Kirk's repost has more than 3.8 million views. Sorority dances worked well on social media even before they were inserted into a fake culture-war debate, because they are briefly hypnotic due to the weirdness of so many people moving in the same way while wearing such similar outfits. They offer the muted thrill of a flash mob. But plucked from their original context, they offer more. Someone finds them and puts them on X with just a phrase or two of framing and they blow up. People watch the videos of young women dancing and gleefully share them, writing, for example, 'nothing is more triggering to leftists,' and 'at what point do you just give up if you're a lib?' and 'America is BACK and Democrats hate it.' There is no need to point to an actual instance of a leftist or lib or Democrat being triggered. It is easy enough to imagine how triggered they are.
NBC News
32 minutes ago
- NBC News
South Korean and U.S. militaries begin annual summertime drills to cope with North Korean threats
SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea and the United States began their annual large-scale joint military exercise on Monday to better cope with threats by nuclear-armed North Korea, which has warned the drills would deepen regional tensions and vowed to respond to 'any provocation' against its territory. The 11-day Ulchi Freedom Shield, the second of two large-scale exercises held annually in South Korea, after another set in March, will involve 21,000 soldiers, including 18,000 South Koreans, in computer-simulated command post operations and field training. The drills, which the allies describe as defensive, could trigger a response from North Korea, which has long portrayed the allies' exercises as invasion rehearsals and has often used them as a pretext for military demonstrations and weapons tests aimed at advancing its nuclear program. In a statement last week, North Korean Defense Minister No Kwang Chol said the drills show the allies' stance of 'military confrontation' with the North and declared that its forces would be ready to counteract 'any provocation going beyond the boundary line.' Ulchi Freedom Shield comes at a pivotal moment for South Korea's new liberal President Lee Jae Myung, who is preparing for an Aug. 25 summit with President Donald Trump in Washington. Trump has raised concerns in Seoul that he may shake up the decades-old alliance by demanding higher payments for the American troop presence in South Korea and possibly reducing it as Washington shifts its focus more toward China. Tensions on the Korean Peninsula remain high as North Korea has brushed aside Lee's calls to resume diplomacy with its war-divided rival, with relations having soured in recent years as North Korean leader Kim Jong Un accelerated his weapons program and deepened alignment with Moscow following Russia's invasion of Ukraine. 'What's needed now is the courage to steadily take steps toward easing tensions, grounded in a firmly maintained state of ironclad security readiness,' Lee said during a Cabinet meeting on Monday. South Korea also on Monday began a four-day civil defense drill involving thousands of public workers, often scheduled alongside the allies' summertime military exercises. Seoul's previous conservative government responded to North Korean threats by expanding military exercises with the United States and seeking stronger U.S. assurances for nuclear deterrence, drawing an angry reaction from Kim, who last year renounced long-term reconciliation goals and rewrote the North's constitution to label the South a permanent enemy. In his latest message to Pyongyang on Friday, Lee, who took office in June, said he would seek to restore a 2018 inter-Korean military agreement designed to reduce border tensions and called for North Korea to respond to the South's efforts to rebuild trust and revive talks. The 2018 military agreement, reached during a brief period of diplomacy between the Koreas, created buffer zones on land and sea and no-fly zones above the border to prevent clashes. But South Korea suspended the deal in 2024, citing tensions over North Korea's launches of trash-laden balloons toward the South, and moved to resume frontline military activities and propaganda campaigns. The step came after North Korea had already declared it would no longer abide by the agreement. When asked whether the Lee government's steps to restore the agreement would affect the allies' drills, the South's Defense Ministry said Monday that there are no immediate plans to suspend live-fire training near the Koreas' disputed western maritime border. While the allies have postponed half of Ulchi Freedom Shield's originally planned 44 field training programs to September, U.S. military officials denied South Korean media speculation that the scaled-back drills were meant to make room for diplomacy with the North, citing heat concerns and flood damage to some training fields. Dating back to his first term, Trump has regularly called for South Korea to pay more for the 28,500 American troops stationed on its soil. Public comments by senior Trump administration officials have suggested a push to restructure the alliance, which some experts say could potentially affect the size and role of U.S. forces in South Korea. Under this approach, South Korea would take a greater role in countering North Korean threats while U.S. forces focus more on China, possibly leaving Seoul to face reduced benefits but increased costs and risks, experts say.
