A classic moral panic is growing in Utah. The target: furries. Or, rather, imaginary furries. A few middle school kids wearing headbands has been inflated into wild stories of kids in animal costumes rampaging through the school, bullying and harassing the conservative kiddos.

Last Wednesday, dozens of students skipped class to gather outside a Payson, Utah, middle school for hours and chant, “We the people, not the animals!”—a protest launched over the dramatic accusation that their classmates were running wild as “furries” and attacking other students without consequence.

Much of the hysteria, however, has been blown out of proportion.

Footage from the scene showed them hoisting signs declaring, “Compelled speech is not free speech,” “We won’t be compelled,” and “We just want to learn.” A fourth sign read, “You can’t ignore us,” with a drawing of an animal print covered with a prohibition sign.

“They’re sitting on all fours in class,” one student told conservative livestreamer Adam Bartholomew as the kids (and some parents) lined the road to Mt. Nebo Middle School. “They’re wearing animal costumes. They’re growling at us, barking at us in class, it’s very distracting.”

“It’s very sexual and inappropriate,” the pupil added of their tween classmates accused of being “furries,” a subculture that dresses up as anthropomorphic animals and which has become a conservative bogeyman.

“They’re wearing butt-plug tails underneath skirts. They’re wearing dog collars to school with leashes hanging off. It’s not OK.”

As you might guess from the right-wing buzzwords on the signs being paraded by the offended parents and their dutiful offspring, this is a ginned-up controversy. They’ve got Glen Beck and Libs of TikTok riled up, which is exactly what they want, but none of the ‘extreme’ events they’re talking about have actually happened.

“We’re not really sure how it exploded as quickly and as crazily as it did, but what we can tell you is there have been zero incidents of students biting, licking, all of those things that have been claimed,” Sorenson continued.
…
“We’ve never had any reports, either from students or any observations by teachers or administration,” Sorenson said. “We do have cameras in our buildings, so we can see literally every inch of the building. And we have not captured any of those types of events occurring. So those, as far as we’re concerned, are just completely fictitious.”

Sorenson said the district doesn’t allow kids to wear masks or costumes, but the accused “furries” were asked to stop wearing headbands with ears; they complied immediately.

Further, all you have to do is look at the parents to see where these stories came from, and why.

“I’m glad this is going to go national,” wrote Eric Moutsos, a dad and former cop who once made headlines for refusing to ride at the front of a Salt Lake City gay pride parade.

The chat also included Bartholomew’s wife Cari, who is running for the Utah State Board of Education and has decried the “hard left educational turn” in the state.

One parent of a student organizer insisted that her daughter single-handedly planned the protest and a petition that collected over 1,000 signatures. “If you are hearing otherwise, YOU ARE BEING LIED TO. #LIVE NOT BY LIES.”

Some messages, however, seemed to indicate the parents shaped the kids’ protest posters.

“The kids really want to hammer this home,” the woman wrote in an earlier message. “WE HAVE TO CHANGE OUR POSTERS. The message needs to be: I will not comply. Compelled speech is not free speech. Live not by lies.”

Pledger, in her own message, advised parents to tell their kids to remain calm and not engage in teasing or bullying. “THE OPPOSITION SIDE WANTS OUTRAGE!” she wrote.

I think I know who is benefitting from outrage, and it isn’t kids, or furries, or the school. Outrage is what the Libs of TikTok and far-right freaks live on, and if they have to, they’ll make shit up.

Caitlin Flanagan is one of those creepy conservatives who manages to get regularly published in so-called liberal magazines like The New Yorker and The Atlantic, and simultaneously is loved by right-wing free speech warriors. She gets away with saying things like this, somehow.

What, exactly, are these faculty members supposed to be arrested for? Is it for peacefully protecting the rights of minority students to express their political opinions? I thought that’s what we are supposed to do!

I mean, for decades now I’ve let creationists and far-right students state their beliefs in my classroom (of course, I would then tell them they were wrong, and why, but they could speak their minds). It would have been so much simpler if I could have just called campus security on dissenters from my holy opinions and had them hauled away. Do I get to do that now?

Tom Cotton has a plan to deal with those rioting students at Columbia.

The “mob” of “Jewish brethren” holding Seder.

Has anyone else noticed what a colossal ass Tom Cotton is?

If I lived a good bit further east, I’d be here this afternoon:

There have been several days of peaceful pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University and Barnard College, which is not surprising. That’s what students should do; if other students want to rally for Israel, that’s fine, too. Unfortunately, the administration does not understand free speech at all, adopting the right-wing definition that says you are only allowed to freely agree with them.

They turned the police loose on the students. Protest leaders were summarily dismissed from the university, and evicted from housing, given minutes to clear out and get out.

They attempted to shut down the campus radio station. They prohibited students from putting posters on their dorm room doors. They colluded with conservatives to silence any protests.

The students sat on the ground and sang as police in riot gear approached them. Eventually, more than 100 of them would be arrested; their tents, protest signs and Palestinian flags were gathered into trash bags by the police and thrown away. One video showed officers and university maintenance workers destroying food that had been donated to the encampment, making sure it would be inedible. According to student journalists reporting from WKCR, Columbia University’s student radio station, one arrested student protester asked the police to be allowed to go to their dorm to collect medication and was denied; as a result, they went into shock. The arrested students were charged with “trespassing” on the campus that they are charged more than $60,000 a year to attend.

The day before her administration asked the New York police department to storm their campus and arrest their students, Minouche Shafik, the Columbia University president, testified before Congress, saying that she wanted her university to be a safe and welcoming environment for everyone. But Shafik, who was called to testify after missing a hearing last year where the presidents of Penn and Harvard were each grilled on their insufficient hostility to pro-Palestinian students, appeared eager to please the Republican-controlled committee. The Penn and Harvard presidents who had testified each lost their jobs soon thereafter; Shafik clearly entered the hearing room determined to keep her own.

A “safe and welcoming environment,” hah. Shafik and others made a knee-jerk over-reaction to the existence of opinions that their moneyed conservative interests disliked, and suddenly they’re the Gestapo. Students have since occupied one of the lawns at the university with tents and banners flying, and you can guess how the administration is reacting.

In yet another sign of the ongoing division between students and faculty on one side, and administrators on the other, the Barnard and Columbia faculty members of the American Association of University Professors have loudly deplored the actions of the administration.

Joint Statement by the American Association of University Professors,

Barnard and Columbia Chapters

April 19, 2024

The American Association of University Professors has defined two central pillars of higher education in America: academic freedom and shared governance: the freedom to teach and do research without interference from entities external to the profession; and the “inescapable interdependence among governing board, administration, faculty, students.” In the last three days, Columbia University President Shafik and her administration have seriously violated both. We are shocked at her failure to mount any defense of the free inquiry central to the educational mission of a university in a democratic society and at her willingness to appease legislators seeking to interfere in university affairs. She has demonstrated flagrant disregard of shared governance in her acceptance of partisan charges that anti-war demonstrators are violent and antisemitic and in her unilateral and wildly disproportionate punishment of peacefully protesting students.

President Shafik’s testimony before the House Education and Workforce Committee on April 17 has profoundly disturbed us. In the face of slanderous assaults on Columbia faculty and students and of gross interference in academic practices by Congressional inquisitors, President Shafik not only did not object—she capitulated to their demands. Academic freedom was formulated from its very beginning to safeguard faculty from political or other non-academic sources of intrusion. President Shafik, the co-chairs of the Board of Trustees, and the former Dean of the Law School allowed this freedom for Columbia faculty to be publicly shredded. They effectively pledged, on the Congressional record, to end academic freedom at Columbia.

President Shafik’s decision on April 18 to call upon the New York Police Department to arrest over one hundred students for engaging in a peaceful protest is a grotesque violation of norms of shared governance. Section 444 of University Statutes, put in place after the police attacks of 1968, requires “consultation” with the University Senate executive committee before anything so drastic as yesterday’s attack would be permitted. President Shafik’s administration did not consult; they informed the committee of its decision. “The Executive Committee did not approve the presence of NYPD on campus,” said the Executive Committee Chair, adding that the Committee came to their decision “unequivocally.” President Shafik’s decision to invite the NYPD to campus was thus undertaken unilaterally, disregarding the very idea of shared governance.

In Wednesday’s hearing, President Shafik repeatedly claimed that she was inaugurating a new era at Columbia. Her actions thus far suggest that this era will be one of repressed speech, political restrictions on academic inquiry, and punitive discipline against the University’s own students and faculty. As the protesters’ chant rightly states, “Protest is democracy; this is a travesty!” AAUP Barnard and Columbia pledge continued support for our students’ right to protest and to speak freely, and for our colleagues’ right to teach and to write freely within their domains of expertise. We have lost confidence in our president and administration, and we pledge to fight to reclaim our university.

The administration is selling out the university and betraying faculty and students.

“It’s the most appalling thing I’ve ever seen,” said Nadia Abu El-Haj, an anthropology professor who was on the school’s lawn when the police entered. “The students were extraordinary. Chanting. Crying. It felt like a total violation of everything an academic institution is supposed to be.” She said the arrests were political theater aimed at appeasing Congress without concern that students were collateral damage.

“Palestine was always going to be the issue that broke this university,” said Ry Spada, 24, a history major who is Jewish and was part of the pro-Palestinian protest Thursday night, identifying as non-Zionist. “This year and this topic.”

James Applegate, an astronomy professor who is part of the executive committee of the Columbia University Senate, said he is more concerned about what happened on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, the ongoing loss of academic freedom and the culture on campus than he is about police making peaceful arrests of student protesters.

I don’t even understand that last comment. Students are being arrested, dismissed, and evicted — it’s important to stand on principle, but these are young people who are being actively harmed. I stand with the students and a liberated Palestine. This isn’t stopping, and shame on any college professor who supports the tyranny of Columbia University and Barnard College.

I’m so used to thinking of myself as a radical iconoclastic weirdo, but now you’re telling me that I’m actually holding traditional American values?

Maybe I am the real conservative here? This is messing with my identity.

It’s good to be reminded of what the general public finds important, and what it doesn’t.

Donald Trump is in the courtroom again, accused of 34 counts of falsifying business records.

“The People of the State of New York allege that Donald J. Trump repeatedly and fraudulently falsified New York business records to conceal crimes that hid damaging information from the voting public during the 2016 presidential election,” Bragg said in an announcement at the time. “Manhattan is home to the country’s most significant business market. We cannot allow New York businesses to manipulate their records to cover up criminal conduct. As the Statement of Facts describes, the trail of money and lies exposes a pattern that, the People allege, violates one of New York’s basic and fundamental business laws. As this office has done time and time again, we today uphold our solemn responsibility to ensure that everyone stands equal before the law.”

He’s guilty, guilty, guilty. Everyone knows it, but all it will take is one Trumpian idiot to get on the jury to get him off, and even if he is convicted, he’ll most likely get nothing worse than probation. Go ahead, talk about violations of basic and fundamental business laws — we know that the only real fundamental law is that if you’re rich enough, you’ll get away with it.

I’m not going to pay any attention to this trial. I don’t see the point.

Read this little story.

A New Hampshire county chair for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign lost his job as a police officer in 2006 after he threatened to kill his colleagues and rape the police chief’s wife in retaliation for his suspension for having a relationship with an underage high school girl, according to an internal report released last week upon orders from the New Hampshire Supreme Court. The findings regarding former Claremont police officer Jonathan Stone, which came to light due to a right-to-know lawsuit filed by InDepthNH.org, appeared to catch Trump’s New Hampshire campaign chair, Stephen Stepanek, by surprise. “I just found out about it this morning,” he told Huffington Post Wednesday. “He’s been a Trump supporter for a long time, and he’s been a state representative, and he had, as far as we were concerned, what looked like a great background.” Stone, who won a seat in the New Hampshire House of Representatives in 2022, was terminated from the Claremont Police Department after making the threats. He would go on to work as a Vermont prison guard and would open a gun store, according to InDepthNH, and gave Trump an AR-15 during his 2016 campaign. Neither Stone nor the Trump campaign’s co-managers, Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, responded to queries from Huffington Post. Stepanek said a decision on Stone’s future with the campaign was pending: “I think it will be handled by Mar-a-Lago, in consultation with me.”

Now tell me how surprised you are by every sentence about Jonathan Stone.