Someone Called the Cops to a Massachusetts School … Over a Book

Free speech advocates are slamming a police officer going to a Massachusetts middle school to search for a single book.

On December 8, an anonymous caller contacted the police department in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, to complain that an obscene book was available to eighth grade students at the W.E.B. Du Bois Regional Middle School. An officer was sent to investigate.

The book in question is Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe. The memoir does contain sexually explicit illustrations and language, but more importantly, it discusses the writer’s confusion about and understanding of gender.

The police alerted the school district superintendent and the Du Bois principal, but no one told the teacher accused of having the book. The principal escorted the police officer to the English teacher’s classroom after school let out, catching the teacher by surprise. The book was nowhere to be found.

The American Civil Liberties Union condemned the fact that a police officer was sent to look for a book. The organization said it could not remember this happening before.

“That’s partly what is so concerning,” Ruth A. Bourquin, the senior and managing attorney for the ACLU of Massachusetts, told The Berkshire Eagle. “Police going into schools and searching for books is the sort of thing you hear about in communist China and Russia. What are we doing?”

Justin Silverman, the executive director of the New England First Amendment Coalition, was worried that this won’t be the last time the police are asked to get involved in school literature. “While it might be rare now, it doesn’t mean that it will be rare in the future,” he said.

More than 100 students and teachers in the state organized a walkout last Friday to protest the police involvement in the incident. Some students said they suspected the larger issue was the LGBTQ themes in the book, not the sexual images.

Gender Queer is generally recommended for ages 14 and up, but it really depends on the maturity level of each individual reader. The teacher who had it in her classroom has remained anonymous, but she did initially write about the investigation on social media.

She noted that she has many years of experience as an English teacher. “How on earth is a cop more qualified to decide what books are OK to be in an educational setting for teens?” she wrote.

The Du Bois school librarian, Jennifer Guerin, pointed out that the point of having such a book around is “not about forcing a book into students’ hands” but making sure that such a resource is accessible.

“It’s about the freedom to read,” she said. “It’s about providing voluntary access to a well-written, highly acclaimed resource in a safe place for a teenager who might want or need it.”

Rudy Giuliani filed for bankruptcy on Thursday, faced with insurmountable debt after he was found liable for defaming two Georgia state election workers.

The bankruptcy filing shows that Giuliani owes as much as $500 million in debt but has only up to $10 million in assets. The documents also include a list of people that Giuliani owes money.

The man once affectionately known as “America’s mayor” owes money to multiple law firms for unpaid legal fees. Several of Giuliani’s former lawyers, including his longtime attorney Robert Costello, have sued Giuliani for failing to pay their legal fees.

Giuliani also owes money to an accounting firm after he failed to pay them for helping in his most recent divorce. Giuliani’s ex-wife says he owes her more than $260,000 for her country club memberships, condominium fees, and health care as part of their divorce settlement, but she is not mentioned in the bankruptcy filing.

Electronic voting machine companies Smartmatic and Dominion are listed, though. Giuliani helped spread lies in the wake of the 2020 elections that the companies’ voting machines were used to rig the election results.

What’s more, Giuliani owes money to Dominion employee Eric Coomer. A right-wing conspiracy claims that Coomer participated in an “antifa conference call” ahead of the 2020 election, during which he said he “made f-----g sure” that Donald Trump wouldn’t win.

Giuliani owes money to Daniel Gill, a man who was charged with assault after he approached Giuliani last year in a Staten Island grocery store, slapped him on the back, and said, “What’s up scumbag?” The charges against Gill were ultimately dropped, and he then sued Giuliani for pressing baseless charges against him.

Another of Giuliani’s listed creditors is Noelle Dunphy, one of his former associates. Dunphy sued Giuliani in May, accusing him of promising to pay her a $1 million annual salary but instead sexually harassing and abusing her over two years.

Giuliani owes money to Hunter Biden, too. Although the filing only says it is for a “lawsuit” and does not provide further details, Biden sued Giuliani in September for allegedly trying to hack his laptop.

And of course, Giuliani owes money to Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, the two election workers. Giuliani was found liable in August for defaming the women, after he accused the pair of manipulating ballots in Georgia during the 2020 election. The women have been subjected to months of harassment and death threats.

A judge ordered Giuliani on Friday to pay Freeman and Moss $148 million in damages. This was the straw that broke the camel’s back and prompted Giuliani to file for bankruptcy. But he has been struggling for cash for a while now.

Giuliani listed his Manhattan apartment for sale in July and began representing himself in court to save on legal fees. In August, after he was indicted in Georgia, Giuliani asked his social media followers to donate to his defense fund.

He also flew to Mar-a-Lago to beg Trump to pay him for working as Trump’s personal attorney. That didn’t work, but Trump did agree to host a fundraiser dinner for Giuliani. Entry cost $100,000 a plate.

A Colorado court’s decision to remove Donald Trump from the 2024 Republican primary ballot may have unfurling implications across the nation.

On Thursday, California’s Lieutenant Governor Eleni Kounalakis called on the secretary of state to “explore every legal option to remove former President Donald Trump from California’s 2024 presidential primary ballot,” leveraging the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision as a precedent.

“This decision is about honoring the rule of law in our country and protecting the fundamental pillars of our democracy,” Kounalakis wrote in the letter. “California must stand on the right side of history. California is obligated to determine if Trump is ineligible for the California ballot.”

“There will be the inevitable political punditry about a decision to remove Trump from the ballot, but it is not a matter of political gamesmanship. This is a dire matter that puts at stake the sanctity of our constitution and our democracy,” she concluded.

Kounalakis’s call will likely incense some of the state’s voters, more than 34 percent of whom supported Trump in the last presidential election. Still, California could soon become a part of a growing movement of states that have formally tried to kick Trump’s name out of their voting booths, including Arizona, Rhode Island, Michigan, Maine, and Minnesota. The GOP front-runner’s hold at the top of the primary ballot is also facing legal challenges in more than a dozen states, including Alaska, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, South Carolina, Texas, West Virginia, Wisconsin, Wyoming, Vermont, and Virginia.

The Colorado court’s 3–4 ruling dually determined that Trump participated in insurrection on January 6, 2021, and that his bid for the Oval Office violates the U.S. Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment, which bans insurrectionists from holding public office.

And while Colorado’s decision is the first of its kind, its challenge is also likely to be appealed up to the overwhelmingly conservative U.S. Supreme Court, stacked with three Trump-appointed judges. That will pin the nation’s highest court as an even more integral component of the 2024 presidential election than it had already primed itself for following the decision to hear several high-profile reproductive rights cases.

Republicans, meanwhile, have balked at the nation’s turn on their favorite, ironically slamming state’s decisions to decide for themselves what they consider to be constitutional despite their traditional, states-rights party philosophy.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene accused President Joe Biden of treason, just hours after appearing to commit sedition herself.

Greene first raised the allegation during a Tuesday podcast interview, when she said Republicans should expand their Biden impeachment efforts to include undocumented immigration.

“I’m starting to think impeachment is not enough. I think these people should be held accountable for treason over what is happening at our southern border,” Greene said.

Treason is defined as “the betrayal of one’s own country by attempting to overthrow the government through waging war against the state or materially aiding its enemies.” Allowing migrants over the border doesn’t really seem to qualify.

Nonetheless, Greene doubled down on her treason accusation Wednesday, writing on X (formerly Twitter), “Joe Biden is guilty of treason and the Democrat Party has opened a door they should have NEVER opened.”

“They should be forced to live by their own rules,” she wrote.

Except the leg she’s standing on was weakened somewhat by the fact that, just six hours earlier, Greene had called for a “national divorce” on X.

This isn’t the first time Greene has called for a national divorce. She first spewed the far-right rhetoric in February, saying the United States needs to “separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government.”

Just a few days later, she went even further. During an interview on Fox News, Greene claimed America was heading toward a civil war.

A pair of Republican leaders have stayed noticeably mum on the Colorado Supreme Court’s Tuesday decision to keep Donald Trump off the 2024 election ballot.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Senator John Thune—the number two Republican in the upper chamber—haven’t made a peep about the state judiciary’s historic decision that would effectively prevent the GOP front-runner from winning a single Colorado vote, on the basis that Trump violated the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment when he spawned an insurrection on January 6, 2021.

The pair’s silence suggests that the Republican anti-Trumpers foresee a better Republican Party without the wannabe despot, who is currently leading the GOP primaries by more than 50 points above his runner-up, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, according to aggregated polling data by FiveThirtyEight.

When the Senate voted to acquit Trump of his impeachment charges, McConnell only agreed to do so on a technicality, arguing that Trump had already left office by the time they were arguing its merits in the Senate in February 2021.

“There is no question that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of that day,” McConnell said at the time.

Thune, meanwhile, has argued that when Trump wins, Republicans lose.

But others have taken note of the pair’s recent silence—including Trump’s family.

“Mitch McConnell, John Thune and John Cornyn remain silent. Of the 4 most senior members of Senate Republican leadership, Barrasso is the only one with the courage to weigh in against what the radical left is trying to do to my father,” Donald Trump Jr. wrote on X, referring to the Senate GOP conference chairman.

The Colorado court’s decision is the first in U.S. history to keep a candidate, let alone a presidential one, off the ballot. Its ruling has now put immense pressure on the federal Supreme Court, which, after taking on several high-profile abortion cases, has already primed itself to play a pivotal role in the 2024 election cycle.

Despite that, the Colorado ruling could also prove majorly influential to courts and election officials considering similar measures in other states, potentially narrowing the ability for Trump to win a majority in the first place.