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- [00:00]
Hannah Berner
Hannah Berner. Are those the cozy Tommy John pajamas you're buying?
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John Law
Paige desorbo. They are Tommy John. And yes, I'm stocking up because they make the best holiday gifts.
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Hannah Berner
So generous.
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John Law
Well, I'm a generous girly, especially when it comes to me. So I'm grabbing the softest sleepwear, comfiest underwear and best fitting loungewear.
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Hannah Berner
So nothing for your bestie?
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John Law
Of course I'm getting my dad Tommy John. Oh, and you, of course, it's giving.
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Hannah Berner
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Ari Weitzman
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Hannah Berner
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Hannah Berner
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Ari Weitzman
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Hannah Berner
Of $45 for three month plan equivalent to $15 per month required. New customer offer for first three months only. Speed slow after 35 gigabytes of networks busy taxes and fees extra. See mintmobile.com. From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle.
- [02:04]
Ari Weitzman
Good morning, good afternoon and good evening and welcome to the Tangle podcast. The place where you get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking and a little bit of our take. I'm your host for today, Tangle managing editor Ari Weitzman. And we're going to be covering the Brown shooting today. It's a little bit of a tough one. We have a lot of emotions to sift through. I know I do. And we have a lot happening today outside Providence, Rhode island, and we're going to cover it all in our standard format. And might I add, if you enjoy Tangle's format and what we do to deliver the news to you, devoid of partisan slant, and devoid of outrage machine bias, then please subscribe to Tangle. If you haven't already, you can become a paid subscriber today. We'll leave a link in the show notes or you can just recommend us to your friends. We think we do a pretty good job of delivering the news to you, and if you agree, then please help us out by subscribing. We're a little bit short of our annual goal and every little bit helps. So if you never want to hear us ask you to do this again, tell as many people as you can about Tangle so we don't have to worry about it. All right, I'm going to send it over to John to get us started with everything you need to know for today.
- [03:21]
John Law
Thanks, Ari, and welcome everybody. Here are your quick hits for today. First up, President Donald Trump announced a blockade of sanctioned oil tankers entering and leaving Venezuela. The proclamation follows the US Seizing a sanctioned oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela last week. Number two After House Speaker Mike Johnson indicated that he would not hold a vote on expiring Affordable Care act subsidies, four House Republicans signed a discharge petition led by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and supported by all House Democrats, giving the petition the 218 votes required to force a vote on extending the subsidies. Number three, Vanity Fair published an article based on 11 interviews with white House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, in which Wiles shared candid assessments of key figures in the Trump administration, including the president. Among several notable quotes, Wiles said that President Trump has an alcoholic's personality, that Attorney General Pam Bondi completely whiffed on handling the Epstein files, and that Vice President J.D. vance has been a conspiracy theorist for a decade. Wiles called the article a disingenuously framed hit piece. Number four, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the US economy added 64,000 non farm payroll jobs in November, exceeding economists estimates. However, it also estimated a loss of 105,000 jobs in October. The unemployment rate rose higher than expected to 4.6%. And number five, the Trump administration added Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, South Sudan and Syria to its list of countries whose citizens are banned from immigrating to or entering the United States in virtually all cases, bringing the total number of countries covered by the ban to 39, in addition to Palestinian nationals. Furthermore, 15 countries were added to the list of partial bans, meaning their citizens will not be able to apply for tourist or student visas.
- [05:22]
Ari Weitzman
Crime Courts what would happen Tonight?
- [05:24]
John Law
Public safely locked the doors that we.
- [05:25]
Ari Weitzman
Could not lock and then we locked ourselves in.
- [05:28]
Hannah Berner
It just feels really surreal. Parents, staff members and students all reacting to the mass shooting at Brown University that killed two and injured at least nine others.
- [05:38]
John Law
On Saturday, a gunman killed two Brown University students and wounded at least nine others in an attack on the university campus in Providence, Rhode Island. According to authorities, the shooter entered a classroom where students were reviewing for a final exam and opened fire before fleeing. The suspect has not been caught and a manhunt is underway. The shooting began shortly after 4pm Eastern Time in the Barrison Holly Engineering Building, where an introductory economics class was wrapping up a final exam review session. Eyewitnesses said that a masked man burst into the room and started shooting while shouting something unintelligible. The shooter had left the building by the time first responders arrived. Providence police issued a shelter in place order while law enforcement searched for the shooter, and the order remained in effect until early the next morning. Morning on Sunday, FBI Director Kash Patel wrote on X that authorities had detained a person of interest at a hotel in Rhode island based on a tip provided to the Providence police. Later that day, however, Providence Mayor Brett Smiley announced that there was insufficient evidence to justify the person's continued detainment and that he would be released soon. On Monday, authorities released photos and video of a new person of interest, described as a 58 male with a stocky build. The FBI is offering a $50,000 reward for information leading to the shooter's arrest and conviction. The two students killed were Ella Cook and Mohammad Aziz Umerzikov. Cook was a 19 year old sophomore from Alabama majoring in French and mathematics Economics who was vice president of the Brown College Republicans. Umerzikov was an 18 year old freshman from Virginia majoring in biochemistry and neuroscience whose family immigrated to the United States from Uzbekistan when he was a child. Much remains unknown about the shooting and the suspect. Authorities say they do not know how the shooter accessed the first floor classroom and have not confirmed the weapon he used, though they believe it was a handgun. Furthermore, the Providence Police Department's video monitoring system was not linked to any video feeds at Brown University on Saturday, leaving them unable to track the shooter in real time as he left the scene. Today we'll share views from the left, right and the Brown community and then Managing editor Ari Weitzman will give his take.
- [08:00]
Ari Weitzman
We'll be right back after this quick break.
- [08:04]
John Law
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Hannah Berner
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- [09:48]
John Law
Alright, first up, let's start with what the left is saying. Many on the left see the shooting as the latest example of gun violence in America. Others criticize FBI Director Patel for his communications about the event. In the Philadelphia Inquirer, Will Bunch said the shooting is a gutting reminder that no one is safe until we tackle America's gun crisis. The only real difference in this shooting from Uvalde or Leland was a personal one, picturing mentally the moments of horror inside the building where college friends like my junior and senior year roommate and my girlfriend learned to build everything from artificial limbs to nuclear power plants. Just blocks from the newsroom where I had toiled until 2am Putting out the Brown Daily Herald, bunch wrote, is a shooting on an Ivy League campus bound to get more media attention than one at an HBCU homecoming, let alone a working class community. Sure, but a mass shooting at Brown is also a grim reminder of a cross that we all bear every class, race and religion in a nation that's jumped onto the wrong track. Donald Trump, after honing his uncanny nag for making things worse by posting and unposting incorrect information on Truth Social, told reporters on a tarmac that all we can do right now is pray for the victims and for those who were very badly hurt. No, Mr. President, that is not all you can do, bunch said. You could, for starters, ask Congress to ban the kinds of assault weapons that aren't used to hunt deer yet are all too effective at mowing down college students or grade schoolers. Something that actually happened imperfectly but with positive results in this country from 1994 until 2004. In Lawfare, Olivia Maines and Benjamin Witts asked, why can't Kash Patel shut up? At 11:38am Eastern on Dec. 14, Patel tweeted an apparent breakthrough in the case. No breakthrough in the case had taken place, Mains and a reader who might have reasonably thought that phrases like as a result, early this morning and a detained person of interest in a hotel room suggested that FBI spade work had resulted in a dawn assault on a hotel room where the killer was holed up, that the investigation had successfully netted a suspect and that the people of Providence were thus safe, might have missed the fact that the person of interest who had been detained quickly turned out to be a person of only very passing. Interesting. It is not correct to say that the FBI director should always keep his mouth shut with respect to pending investigations. There are times when public safety requires communication from the Bureau's leadership, and yet in an FBI director, discretion is most of the time and in most circumstances the better part of valor. Premature disclosures have civil liberties implications for people who may turn out to be innocent, mains and Wits wrote. Perhaps most importantly, they also have credibility implications because you can only announce so many times that you've caught a suspect in a major case, only to release them before the word of the FBI to the public and to the courts starts being meaningless. Alright, that is it for what the left is saying. Which brings us to what the right is saying. The right pushes back on calls for gun control after the shooting, noting that Rhode island already has strict gun law. Others say the outstanding questions about the shooting are perplexing and concerning. In the Washington Examiner, Peter Laffin wrote, democrats blame guns, not evil for Bondi beach and Brown University shootings the United States and Australia suffered horrific mass shootings over the weekend. Governor Kathy Hochul referenced both tragedies in an ex Post Sunday afternoon while decrying the epidemic of gun violence and marking the Sandy Hook anniversary. Senator Cory Booker also invoked Sandy Hook in response to the Brown shooting, lamenting that we've done far too little to stop these recurring attacks, laffin said. To ascribe fundamental blame to guns or gun laws in either case is deeply disconnected from reality and cynically manipulative. Rhode island consistently ranks among the top states for strict firearm regulations, according to gun control advocacy groups with universal background checks, red flag laws, an assault weapons ban and high capacity magazine limits. Brown University, meanwhile, is a gun free zone, meaning that good guys with guns are unable to intervene in such instances, laffin wrote. The US famously has more guns in circulation than people, including tens of millions of untraceable firearms on the black market. There is no way to ban guns, as progressives like to pretend, or to enact a government buyback program that wouldn't disarm law abiding citizens or while leaving armed criminals with non registered guns. In National Review, Jim Garrity explored the less than reassuring answers in the Brown University shooting. Now, perhaps it's entirely coincidental that the professor of the class targeted was part of the university's program in Judaic studies and has ties to Israel. And perhaps it is also a coincidence that the vice president of the school's College Republicans is among those killed. Perhaps the shooter is just some nut, garrity said. But after the assassination of Charlie Kirk and all the post 10-7- Anti Semitism rampant on college campuses, these are not irrational thoughts about potential motives and why the shooter selected this particular time and place for his rampage. Law enforcement has a difficult job, but at least according to what we're hearing from witnesses, an individual brought either a long gun or a 9 millimeter handgun onto a college campus on Saturday afternoon and at some point slipped on a mask, went on a shooting rampage firing more than 40 rounds, killed two people and injured nine more, was at no point confronted by anyone in law enforcement or campus security, managed to not have his face captured by any surveillance camera, and escaped the scene leaving little or no clue to his identity or motive. Garrity said it is hard to begrudge the communities of Brown University or Providence for feeling less than safe. Alright, that is it for what the left and the right are saying. Which brings us to what the Brown community is saying. Students in the Brown community mourn their classmates and describe the shock they feel. Others say the sense of safety on campus may be permanently shattered. In the Free Press, Victoria Zhang, a Brown student, described the night a shooter came to my as students at Brown, our lives are forever changed. We now find ourselves on a list of schools that grows longer by the day, a list no one wants to be on. I'm used to reading about shootings in the news every single time I pray first for the students and then that my school is not next. I can't pray for that anymore, zhang said. There will be so much to say and do in the aftermath of this day, whether through legislation, self defense classes or better security and vigilance in our communities. But in the meantime, I am endlessly grateful to the police, Providence Mayor Brett Smiley, the FBI, Brown President Christina Paxson, and everyone who was just as shell shocked as we were, but who worked nonstop over those dark hours to ensure our safety. In a couple of weeks, students will return to campus. Nothing will be the same. We've lost members of our family. We've lost our sense of safety, of assurance that we can go to school without our lives being put at risk. When we think of certain locations on campus, locations that used to be associated only with happiness, friendship and, yes, occasional stress, we will now think of sirens screaming and terror, zhang wrote. Over time, we will heal. For now, all we can do is stick together. Tonight, at a park in Providence that was originally meant to be a menorah lighting to ring in the first night of Hanukkah will now also be a ceremony to remember the classmates we've lost. In the Providence Journal, Nidhi Bhaskar, a Brown alumna and current Brown medical student, wrote about memories of tranquil days at Brown now shattered. I took my introductory physics course in Barrison, Holly, the scene of Saturday morning's shooting. I spent many evenings cramming in Lecture Hall 166, a place now inseparable in my memory from the shooting that occurred there yesterday, bhaskar said. Before this week, as I continued to live in Providence through my undergraduate years and then chose Brown again for medical school, I described my beloved Providence as the safest place in the world. This city and this campus is not where a senseless tragedy is supposed to happen. I heard from colleagues and mentors at Rhode Island Hospital preparing to receive victims in an emergency department that was already inundated on a Saturday. Saturday night. And like everyone else, I watched and waited as confusion and chaos parlayed into answers and devastating news, bhaskar wrote. And yet it does happen. Over and over again in communities all around the world. Rhode Island's gun laws are among the strongest in the nation, and still violence found its way here. A new law is yet to go into effect banning automatic rifles, but in our nation alone, there have been over 390 mass shootings this year. And that is not something that thoughts and prayers are going to change. Alright, let's head over to Ari for his take.
- [18:48]
Ari Weitzman
Thanks, John. That brings us to my take. What's left to say at this point? We've gone through something like this so many times that we have the quote right. Reaction down to a rote checklist. First, of course, is the frustration with the fact that these shootings are so common and our reactions can be so standard that we have a checklist. So frustration. Step one. Okay, check. Second for us is to urge everyone to try to think of the victims and their families first, which is easier said than done. Muhammad Aziz Umurzikov, 18 years old, wanted to be a neurosurgeon. Ella Cook, 19, vice president of the College Republicans. Two families forever broken and scarred. Nine people traumatized by scars they will carry with them physically and mentally for their entire lives. Brown University, a campus that will now forever share a sentence with schools like Virginia Tech. Ann Columbine High School. Ann Sandy Hook Robb elementary. Parkland High School, University of Texas, Michigan State, unlv, Florida State, just to name a few. Community of students who will now question if they are safe at the school where they are beginning their own independent lives. Faculty and staff, from university president to dining hall workers who will require an unknowable amount of time to learn to carry the memory of gunshots or alerts on their phone, or the frantic, hurried footsteps of their peers as they all come to understand what's unfolding around them. The human toll. Indescribable. Ungraspable. A gray wall in our heads and hearts that protects us from truly feeling what it means to be splintered, fundamentally altered forever. Empathy expressed. Okay, check. I'm being glib here, but at this point I can't help but feel like all the empathy I can muster is futile. I think we all feel that. For myself, even after seeing firsthand the devastation that mass shootings can wreak after I still feel this unavoidable rottenness. I can tell you about my experience when my cousin was among those killed in the Tree of Life shooting in Pittsburgh in 2018. I can tell you that I know Brown's campus decently well. I coach the University of Vermont's ultimate frisbee team and we travel to Providence every spring for a regional tournament. I can tell you that I know several of the young men who compete on Brown's team personally. They're good kids, hard working competitors who make the kids I coach better. They deserve so much more than bullets during finals week. I can tell you all that. I can try my best to access feeling for these kids and this campus and get you to feel the same. And then what? I write my piece, record it for tangle, Then I'll go about my day. You can listen to it and go about yours. We can link Isaac's excellent We are broken piece. You can go read it. We can grit our teeth until our gums bleed and feel the frustration mount just a little more and then we will do nothing. Third is perhaps the most immediately impactful thing we can do, which is to exercise caution and be careful not to jump to conclusions, especially when sharing information online. Here's what we know. The deceased are an Uzbeki American young man and a young woman from Alabama. They, along with those injured were all attending the same Econ 110 finals review session in the same classroom. Understandably, we have questions. Why was this classroom targeted? Was either deceased student targeted specifically? Who was the shooter and what motivated him? Right now a lot of new information is circulating online that may or may not be meaningful. Some Internet sleuths found that the public profiles of a student were scrubbed online. This student came from a family of Palestinian refugees and discussed how his time on the university's pro Palestinian encampment informed his worldview. Laura Loomer, a known merchant of let's call them the impressionistic truths, alleges that the shooter shouted Allahu Akbar before opening fire. The profile of this particular student is magnetic and divisive. If the student is the shooter, he would obviously neatly fit into our culture war and political debates. As of right now, though, we don't know if any of that matters and how much of it is true. The university said in a statement that one of its students was being dangerously doxxed and described any discussion about his involvement involvement as conspiracies, accusations and speculation. Gate analysis from anonymous keyboard warriors sitting behind monitors isn't going to tell us whether or not this shooter and this student are the same person. Laura Loomer doesn't know what happened at the crime scene. We would be wise to wait and listen and learn more before coming up with grander takes that connect the dots to form a picture of the quote, real villain of our cultural decay. And even when we do get that reliable information. We need to remember that this is just one data point in a country unfortunately rich in data points of mass shooters that anyone can now find some trend line to support their priors. So exercise caution and patience. Check. Unfortunately, no. We can't say right now that our top law enforcement leader is exercising appropriate restraint. Morning after the shooting, FBI Director Kash Patel tweeted a long update that included the announcement that a person of interest was in custody. Patel's implication here obviously was that the FBI acted with aplomb, and as a result of its ingenuity and efficiency, the community could breathe a sigh of relief. But instead, that person of interest was released hours later, inviting questions of why this person was detained and whether or not danger continued to lurk around the corner. And this is a trend with cash. Patel speak first, try to perform competence and then incompetently backtrack later. This matters because the family and friends and community members of the victims are all looking to our institutions to provide needed encouragement that the broader community, the town, the state, the country, even the federal government has their backs right now. I can personally attest to this. In the immediate aftermath of the 2018 synagogue shooting, watching authorities give boring but measured press conferences provided a bizarre form of comfort when the FBI director tweets out messages that give false assurances, which are then rescinded. Not by him. Though the Rhode Island Attorney General set the record straight, Patel did not take any accountability. That fractures that confidence. It does not allow a community still actively experiencing this trauma to begin the work of healing. We can and we should expect better. For now, we should still continue to wait and learn and be skeptical. The best thing you could do is double check what you read online. Don't spread false information. It may be harder than it sounds, but it's a lot easier than what the Brown University community is going through right now. And if you are a member of that community, please take care of yourself right now for whatever it could possibly be worth. Know that we at Tangle in some abstract way have your back. Otherwise, what else is there to do? No legislation or change or reckoning with our culture is coming. Today is Brown University. Tomorrow it'll be somewhere different. Just hope it's not where you are.
- [26:00]
John Law
Foreign. We'll be right back after this quick break.
- [26:09]
Ari Weitzman
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Ari Weitzman
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Hannah Berner
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- [27:36]
Ari Weitzman
All right, that's it for my take on the brown shooting. Rough one to cover brings us to your questions answered and today's question comes from Levi in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Levi asks, Just wanted to shoot a message asking about the Uyghurs in Xinjiang and what new developments have occurred in the, I believe, four years since it was last featured on Tango. Is there a greater level of certainty around what was done or is being done? I assume the imprisonments have not stopped, but I haven't heard about it from my news sources in a while, since we covered the atrocities in China in February and August 2021. So yes, four years. Two notable developments have occurred. First, the United nations released an assessment of China's treatment of its Muslim Uyghur population in the Chinese autonomous region of Xinjiang and Tibet, concluding that the Chinese government has committed human rights violations in the name of counter extremism and counterterrorism. Second, in August 2024, the UN updated its assessment to conclude that the policies that drew its initial condemnation remain in place. According to the State Department, China's human rights abuses against the Uyghur population include arbitrary mass detention, forced labor, population control, and religious persecution. Meanwhile, China has opened the region up to diplomatic tours that have been described differently by different visitors. The Syrian and Iranian ambassadors to China said in 2022 that the government was making remarkable steps toward modernization and called the allegations against China lies. Others, including a Uyghur returning from abroad, and a delegation from Princeton University said those visits were transparently propaganda. Reliable statistics of Uyghurs detained and killed at the hands of the government are inaccessible due to the Chinese Communist Party's control of information into and out of the country. However, the nonprofit Genocide Watch describes China's treatment of the Uyghur population as an ongoing genocide. One last development here that's drawing attention to the situation the Trump administration detained a Chinese citizen who fled the country after gathering information about the human rights violations, and that person is now at risk of being deported back to China. All right, that's it for your questions and also that's it for me today. I'm going to send it back over to the good hands and sultry tones of John Law for the rest of our podcast.
- [30:01]
John Law
Thanks, Ari. Here's your under the Radar story for today, folks. On Tuesday, authorities in Massachusetts announced that Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Nuno FG Luredo had been shot and killed at his home on Monday night. Originally from Portugal, Loreto taught nuclear science, engineering and physics at mit, and he directed the school's Plasma Science and Fusion center, one of its largest labs. The Norfolk County District Attorney's Office said that there have been no arrests made in the case, calling it an active and ongoing homicide investigation. In a statement, MIT President Sally Kornbluth said, this shocking loss for our community comes in a period of disturbing violence in many other places. The New York Times has this story and there's a link in today's episode Description. Alright, next up is our Numbers section. Brown University was founded in 1764. The number of undergraduate students at Brown is 7272. The number of graduate students at Brown is 3130. According to the Mass Killing database, the number of mass killings in the United States in 2025 as of December 2 is 17. Mass killings are defined as incidents where four or more people are intentionally killed in a 24 hour period. According to the Gun Violence Archive, the number of mass shootings in the US in 2025 as of December 15 is 393. Mass shootings are defined as shootings that injure or kill four or more people, not including the shooter. According to the Sandy Hook Promise Action Fund, the number of mass shootings in Rhode island since 2020 is 2, according to a CNN analysis. The number of school shootings in the US in 2025 as of December 13th is 75, and of those shootings, the number that were on college campuses is 43 and last but not least, our have a nice day story. Scimitar Horned Oryx, a species of antelope native to the Sahel Sahara region of North Africa, were once widespread before being designated extinct in The Wild in 2000. At the same time, the Sahara Desert has expanded, reducing a vital available cropland and potentially leading to food and water shortages. However, following a decades long effort to reintroduce the species to parts of the Sahara, researchers have found early signs that the oryx may also help slow desertification. Vegetation seems to improve where the oryx is introduced, and researchers are examining whether the animals grazing and seed dispersal could be contributing to this. Without them, you're missing something fundamental from the ecosystem system, conservation scientist Tania Gilbert said. The BBC has this story and there's a link in today's episode Description alright everybody, that is it for today's episode. As always, if you'd like to support our work, Please go to readtangle.com where you can sign up for a newsletter membership, podcast membership or a bundled membership that gets you a discount on both. We'll be right back here tomorrow. For Isaac, Ari and the rest of the crew, this is John Law signing off. Have a great day. Day y'.
- [33:02]
Ari Weitzman
All.
- [33:04]
John Law
Peace. Our Executive Editor and founder is me.
- [33:08]
Ari Weitzman
Isaac Saul and our Executive Producer is John Lowell. Today's episode was edited and engineered by Dewey Thomas. Our editorial staff is led by Managing.
- [33:16]
John Law
Editor Ari Weitzman with Senior Editor Will K. Back and Associate Editors Hunter Casperson.
- [33:21]
Ari Weitzman
Audrey Moorhead, Bailey Saw Lindsay Knuth and Kendall White.
- [33:25]
John Law
Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 70.
- [33:28]
Ari Weitzman
To learn more about Tangle and to sign up for a membership, please visit our website@retangle.com.
- [33:43]
John Law
This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home and autopilot. Try it@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states.
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Ari Weitzman
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John Law
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