UNC Student Paper Front Page Captures Horrors of Living Through School Shooting

The front page of the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill’s student newspaper has gone viral for showing the terror of being caught in a school shooting.

Print managing editor Caitlyn Yaede posted the front page of the latest print edition of The Daily Tar Heel on X, formerly known as Twitter, Tuesday night. The front page is filled with haunting text messages from UNC students and their loved ones during a lockdown that occurred on Monday due to an active shooter on campus.

Messages like “Guys I’m so fucking scared,” “Multiple voices and loud banging,” and “Texts won’t go thru” were printed in black and red font, taking over the newspaper’s entire cover.

“I shed many tears while typing up these heart-wrenching text messages sent and received by UNC students yesterday,” Yaede wrote on X. “Beyond proud of this cover and the team behind it.”

The Daily Tar Heel also provided updates on the shooting for its campus community while on lockdown.

One faculty member was killed in the shooting, which took place in the center of the campus and left the school in lockdown for hours. The motive remains unclear, and the suspect has been taken into custody.

Georgia’s far-right state Senator Colton Moore suggested that a civil war will break out when Donald Trump goes to trial for trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

Trump surrendered to Georgia authorities last week on charges of felony racketeering for trying to overturn the state’s election results. He will be arraigned next week—and Moore is already sounding the alarms.

“I told one senator, I said, ‘Listen … we’ve got to put our heads together and figure this out. We need to be taking action right now. Because if we don’t, our constituencies are going to be fighting it in the streets,’” Moore said Tuesday on Steve Bannon’s War Room.

“Do you want a civil war? I don’t want a civil war. I don’t want to have to draw my rifle. I want to make this problem go away with my legislative means of doing so.”

Moore has also urged his fellow legislators to defund Fani Willis, the Fulton County District Attorney who investigated Trump. Moore called two weeks ago for a special session of the Georgia state legislature to investigate and potentially impeach Willis. Only a handful of other lawmakers have backed his proposal, which is unlikely to work and has been shut down by Georgia’s Republican Governor Brian Kemp.

There is reason to be concerned about how people will react to Trump’s trial. A poll conducted by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution found that 61 percent of likely Republican Party primary voters believe the 2020 election was fraudulent. A lawmaker talking about civil war is dangerous and incredibly irresponsible.

Frighteningly, Moore is now at least the third Republican to mention civil war in relation to Trump’s many indictments. Sarah Palin called for people to “rise up” and potentially start a civil war over Donald Trump’s arrest in Georgia. And Trump himself mused about a potential civil war during a recent interview with Tucker Carlson.

Republicans’ tacit condoning—and sometimes explicit encouragement—of violent attacks is dangerous. Political violence has been steadily increasing in recent years, and it can be directly traced back to this kind of rhetoric.

Canada has issued a travel advisory for LGBTQ people thinking of going to the United States, warning them about the increasingly restrictive local laws.

At least 495 bills attacking LGBTQ rights have been introduced in states throughout the country since the start of the year, according to the ACLU. These include laws banning drag performances, banning transgender people from using the bathroom that matches their gender identity, banning discussion of gender and sexuality in schools, and banning gender-affirming health care for trans and nonbinary minors.

“Some states have enacted laws and policies that may affect 2SLGBTQI+ persons. Check relevant state and local laws,” the Canadian government said in the advisory, which was issued Tuesday. “2SLGBTQI+” refers to people who identify as two-spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer/questioning, intersex, and more.

The advisory does not mention specific states or laws. Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freedland said it is not politically motivated but instead is intended to protect Canadians traveling abroad.

“Even as we work hard on that government-to-government relationship, every Canadian government, very much including our government, needs to put at the center of everything we do the interests and the safety of every single Canadian and every single group of Canadians,” Freedland said at a press conference Tuesday.

“That’s what we’re doing now.”

Canada has become a popular destination for Americans fleeing the U.S. out of fear that they will be persecuted for their identity. And it’s no surprise: Republicans and GOP-led states are increasingly embracing extremist stances on LGBTQ rights, curbing them every chance they get. Several of the Republican presidential candidates have openly embraced anti-LGBTQ stances.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s administration officials opposed the College Board’s new Advanced Placement African American studies course due to its lack of “opposing viewpoints” on slavery.

A new report from the Miami Herald sheds more context on Florida’s fight against the College Board and Black history specifically.

According to internal state comments, the reviewers believed the A.P. course’s depiction of chattel slavery did not promote both sides of history. One lesson on how Europeans benefited from trading enslaved people “may lead to a viewpoint of an ‘oppressor vs. oppressed’ based solely on race or ethnicity,” reviewers noted.

The DeSantis administration successfully got the College Board to water down its A.P. African American studies course earlier this year. The new curriculum cut lessons on critical race theory, reparations, Black Lives Matter, and several prominent queer Black writers.

Florida officials’ objection to the lack of “opposing viewpoints” on slavery occurred numerous times and was not previously reported.

“There is no other perspective on slavery other than it was brutal,” Mary Pattillo, a sociology professor and the department chair of Black Studies at Northwestern University, told the Miami Herald. “It was exploitative, it dehumanized Black people, it expropriated their labor and wealth for generations to come.”

Earlier this summer, Florida unveiled new social studies school curriculum that teaches students that enslaved people benefited from slavery and that Black people were also perpetrators of violence during race massacres.

The DeSantis administration also approved curriculum for public schools from the right-wing advocacy group PragerU last month. Course content includes a lesson in which Frederick Douglass calls slavery a “compromise.”

The Tennessee House of Representatives burst into chaos Tuesday when Republicans voted to adjourn a special session on public safety, after ignoring widespread demands for increased gun control.

The state legislature convened the special session last week in response to a mass shooting in March, when a gunman opened fire on an elementary school and killed three children and three adults. State Republicans have insisted that there is nothing they could have done or could do differently to prevent such a tragedy—and they appear determined to make good on that claim.

The Senate had adjourned earlier Tuesday, closing the chamber until January. House Republicans forced through a motion to adjourn the chamber, also until January, moments before Democratic Representative Justin Jones—one of the formerly expelled Tennessee Three—could call for a vote of no confidence of Speaker Cameron Sexton. When Sexton gaveled through the motion adjourning the House, the chamber erupted.

Spectators began to chant, “Vote them out!” and “Shame!” As Sexton tried to leave, Jones and Democratic Representative Justin Pearson, another member of the Tennessee Three, followed him, waving protest signs. At one point, Sexton’s shoulder appeared to bump Pearson. Another Republican blocked Pearson from getting closer, while Sexton wheeled around and shouted at him, waving his finger in Pearson’s face.

Jones then went up to the speaker’s podium, banged the gavel, and shouted, “This House is out of order!” Pearson joined the protesters outside the chamber in the Capitol rotunda.

Democrats were infuriated by Republicans’ refusal to pass any gun control measures. “No one should leave this building today saying we made Tennessee safer,” Senate Minority Leader Raumesh Akbari said. “Because that is simply not true. We didn’t enact any new policies, we didn’t meet the needs of these parents, who are just crying out for us to do something.”

“How long? How much longer will we allow ourselves to remain in this state?”

The special session has been tense from the start, when Republicans tried to ban signs from the House chamber, a direct response to the many protesters demanding increased gun control. Republicans also voted Monday to silence Jones for the day, prompting Democrats to walk out of the session in solidarity.

This was not the first time Republicans had tried to silence Jones. The GOP voted in March to expel Jones and Pearson, both of whom are Black, for allegedly breaking House rules by joining thousands of pro–gun control protesters. Republicans fell one vote short of expelling Gloria Johnson, a white woman, who also joined the protest.

Jones and Pearson were unanimously reinstated by their district councils and then reelected in landslide victories in a special election earlier this month.