Category: You Should See This

oy crazy” was what people called it. “She was so boy crazy,” I would hear about my girlfriends. I never heard the reverse, that a boy was “girl crazy.” Girls having crushes, sneaking out at night to have fun: It seems innocent enough. But in my small, conservative town, a “wrong” choice at a young age could cut girls off from their future dreams, leaving them mired in despair.

The class had come from a Catholic school, and, a few days later, the teacher wrote to the Daily Inter Lake, a local newspaper, saying how “shocked and grieved” she was by the presentation of a book about “homosexual marriage.” She argued that “such a controversial topic” should not be introduced to “innocent children.” Flathead County had always trended conservative, and harbored clusters of Ammon Bundy extremists, but its mainstream politics, until recently, tended toward a live-and-let-live libertarianism. The weeks that followed stunned library staff. Newell, who is openly bisexual, was harassed: “I had people get in my face, yell, and spit, and scream an inch from my face.” At an outreach event, another librarian was grabbed by a man complaining of the “library’s agenda about transgenderism.” In April, a queer-youth support group met, as it often did, in the library basement. Afterward, several men waiting outside chased two of the teens down the street, yelling, “Fucking faggots.”

As Sandvik saw it, that was all she could do in the face of an overwhelming digital threat. “There is just no guarantee for us that we’re never going to be hacked,” she said. “The question is, just how difficult are we going to make it for the attacker?” Sometimes, information security comes down to keeping a record of small technical adjustments. “It’s the right thing to do,” she said. She shrugged. “Also, no one else is going to do it.”

For First Nations communities, the “accounting of Indigenous death feels relentless,” wrote Erica Violet Lee, a nêhiyaw writer, scholar, and member of Thunderchild First Nation, in the Guardian. “Our grief and our lives are not reducible to numbers or statistics.” Since the summer of 2021, First Nations across Western Canada have located possible unmarked graves of hundreds, if not thousands, of children on former residential school grounds. It wasn’t until then that, for many Canadians and much of the world, the country’s dark colonial legacy was brought into sharp focus and laid bare.

This chilling peroration by Trump followed his December call, in a post on his Truth Social platform, for “termination” of the Constitution, if that is what it would take to return him to power. The two statements, taken together, sum up his campaign like no other. Termination and retribution are the reckless pillars on which Trump is running. Why not, finally, take him at his word?