we've got a little bit of everything this week, but not much of it was very fun. i'm posting this at 4:20 PM Eastern so please feel free to Blaze It as you peruse the news! also, special thanks to @astral for helping me troubleshoot this new format for accessibility!
A new, deadlier strain of mpox
OLYMPICS FALLOUT: Gold medalist boxer Imane Khelif has filed a legal complaint
Oklahoma Republicans are demanding an investigation
HOMOPHOBIA WATCH '24: I was on right-wing media duty this week, so I am here to report that far right propagandists are still pieces of shit.
Roger Stone straight up called Tim Walz a faggot this week Blazing Saddles quote for plausible deniability or whatever. It's part of the plan to pull an "I know you are, but what am I?" on the whole "Republicans are weird" strategy from the Harris/Walz campaign. One cannot sew a Howard Dean scream moment out of whole cloth, alas. Truly, you couldn't make Blazing Saddles today, because your biggest fan would also be Richard Nixon's biggest fan.Also you may have heard that J.D. Vance was photographed in a skirt and wig at a Yale Halloween party, and look: I'm no fan of the liberal "haha, they're all secretly gayyy, look at this mural of Trump doing sloppy makeouts with Putin" shit, which just reproduces homophobia for the benefit of Democrats. But I won't pass up a chance to point out that Republicans, now more than ever, believe in nothing except cruelty and the pursuit of power. Matt Walsh made that exceptionally clear on his own show really drag" etc. because that's missing the point; we are talking about a very clear double standard, and the desire to return to the model of policing queerness many of us grew up with. This has been what Republicans have looked like all my life and I will remind people what spiteful, amoral cowards they are every time. OKAY LET'S MOVE ON.
I'm the daughter of a librarian, so I know that weeding -- the process by which a library gets rid of outdated, unusable, or unwanted materials -- is a normal part of maintaining a collection. But that doesn't mean I'm chill about throwing away perfectly good books, as happened at the New College of Florida this week, where the school seemingly threw every book related to its now-defunct gender studies program in a dumpster. not part of the library's collection , but which had rather been donated to the campus Gender and Diversity Center. Administrators may also have lied about the rationale for throwing away books rather than reselling them, per local reporting. It's all according to plan -- Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' plan, that is, who staged an effective coup of the school board in early 2023 and has been reshaping what used to be a bastion of progressive schooling into Chris Rufo's wet dream. At least some of the books were reportedly saved for donation by people in the area.
thanks for reading tgirl journalism!
