How the right spread ‘brutal and cruel’ misinformation after Minnesota lawmaker killings; The Guardian, June 17, 2025

Rachel Leingang and Joseph Gedeon, The Guardian; How the right spread ‘brutal and cruel’ misinformation after Minnesota lawmaker killings

[Kip Currier: The money quote from this Guardian article: 

"Lee didn’t say much, according to Smith, and seemed surprised to be confronted."

 Bullies often are surprised when people stand up to them and call them out.]

[Excerpt]

"Tina Smith, a Minnesota senator confronted Mike Lee, a Utah senator, on Monday to tell him directly that his social media posts fueled ongoing misinformation about a shooting that killed her friend.

Lee’s posts, which advanced conspiracies that a Minnesota assassin was a “Marxist” and blamed the state’s governor for Melissa Hortman’s death, were among many threads of false or speculative claims swirling online after the killings.

Smith told Lee his posts were “brutal and cruel,” according to CNN. “He should think about the implications of what he’s saying and doing. It just further fuels this hatred and misinformation,” she said. She wanted him to hear from her directly how painful it was to see his words after the brutality her state endured. Lee didn’t say much, according to Smith, and seemed surprised to be confronted...

Elon Musk, a frequent poster of unverified rightwing claims, amplified the narrative to his 200 million followers, quote-tweeting claims that “the left” killed Hortman and saying “the far left is murderously violent”...

Boelter’s own recorded sermons expose his extremist views. Preaching in Congo in 2023, he is recorded as saying: “The churches are so messed up, they don’t know abortion is wrong.” He ranted against LGBTQ people as “confused,” claiming “the enemy has gotten so far into their mind and their soul”. His alleged hit list included abortion providers and pro-choice advocates."

Suspected Minnesota Shooter Is Not a Left-Wing Democrat; NewsGuard's Reality Check, June 17, 2025

Chiara Vercellone , NewsGuard's Reality Check; Suspected Minnesota Shooter Is Not a Left-Wing Democrat

"What happened: Conservatives are baselessly claiming that Vance Boelter, the man who allegedly shot two Democratic lawmakers and their spouses in Minnesota, is a registered Democrat. Others have inaccurately described him as a “leftist.”

Context: In the early hours of June 14, Boelter, posing as a law enforcement officer, allegedly fatally shot Democratic Minnesota State Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, and seriously wounded Democratic State Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, at their respective homes, authorities said.

A closer look: Within hours, conservative social media accounts began claiming that Boelter, who was taken into custody on June 15, was a member of the Democratic Party and a leftist, in an apparent attempt to cast Democrats and liberals as violent and to deflect any claims that he was a conservative.

• Conservative commentator Ann Vandersteel, a self-described “citizen journalist” who has more than 360,000 followers on X, posted: “The man who just assassinated Democrat Rep. Melissa Hortman is also HIMSELF A DEMOCRAT.” The post garnered 45,500 views and 1,100 likes in two days.

• Anonymous conservative X account @amuse posted on June 16: “His Democrat roommate insists (without evidence) that Boelter, a registered Democrat, is a huge Trump supporter.” The post received 44,800 views and 1,000 likes in less than one day.

Others, including X owner Elon Musk and Republican Sen. Mike Lee, claimed that Boelter is “far left” and a “Marxis[t].”

Actually: Friends of Boelter, voting records, government officials, and an alleged manifesto that authorities said was found in Boelter’s vehicle show that he was not a Democrat or liberal and may have voted for Donald Trump."

Mike Lee Draws Outrage for Posts Blaming Assassination on the Far Left; The New York Times, June 16, 2025

Annie Karni and Megan Mineiro , The New York Times; Mike Lee Draws Outrage for Posts Blaming Assassination on the Far Left

[Kip Currier: Sen. Mike Lee's social media posts, in the wake of the recent political assassinations and killings in Minnesota, show and tell us everything we need to know about his character and core values.]

[Excerpt]

"Scarcely 24 hours after a Democratic lawmaker in Minnesota was assassinated in her home, Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, posted a pair of politically charged messages mocking the attack.

“This is what happens When Marxists don’t get their way,” Mr. Lee wrote on Sunday on his personal X account, a message accompanied by photographs of the suspect released by law enforcement officials.

An hour later, in a second post showing the suspect, Mr. Lee wrote: “Nightmare on Waltz Street,” in an apparent reference the Democratic governor of the state, Tim Walz.

By the afternoon, amid outraged responses to his postings, Mr. Lee issued a very different message on his official Senate account in which he hit all of the sober notes one would expect from an elected official reacting to a political assassination."

Klukwan Library goes from 35 hours a week to 4 following federal funding loss; Alaska's News Source, June 15, 2025

Justin Mattson , Alsaka's News Source; Klukwan Library goes from 35 hours a week to 4 following federal funding loss

"Along the Chilkat River in Southeast Alaska lies a small, ancient Alaska Native village, Klukwan. The village of Klukwan is in the Hoonah-Angoon Census Area and has a population of around 100. It has one library that serves the community. Following the termination of their federal grant funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the needs the library met are underserved.

“With that funding, we were doing workshops such as drum making, paddle board carving, we’ve done moccasin making in the past, we were also using it to pay stipends for presenters,” Co-Director of the Klukwan Library, Jamie Katzeek, explained.

Other programs that have been cut are designed to help keep the community engaged in reading.

“Our summer reading program has been cut,” Katzeek said. “The library is the hub of our community, and so without it, there’s just a lot of intergenerational learning and activities that have been eliminated because we just don’t have the funding.”...

“We went from two staff people, part-time, we were working. The library was open 35 hours a week, and now we’re down to just myself at 4 hours a week,” Katzeek said. “The two ILMS grants that we got funded most of our staff time.”

For now, the future of the Klukwan library is uncertain, but nothing is set in stone. They have appealed the decision to attempt to have the grants reinstated and are working with the State of Alaska to help fill the void left by the loss of the federal grants."

'We had lots of dreams'; Idaho's library system ends, restructures programs amid federal funding cuts; Idaho Press, June 14, 2025

LAURA GUIDO , Idaho Press; 'We had lots of dreams'; Idaho's library system ends, restructures programs amid federal funding cuts

[Kip Currier: The Digital Equity Act of 2021 would have helped millions of Americans -- like the millions of Idahoans referenced in this Idaho Press article -- to finally have high quality Internet access.

Sadly, those Internet access plans all came crashing down when the Trump administration declared the Act unconstitutional and "racist". As PBS reported on May 25, 2025:

"One program distributes laptops in rural Iowa. Another helped people get back online after Hurricane Helene washed away computers and phones in western North Carolina. Programs in Oregon and rural Alabama teach older people, including some who have never touched a computer, how to navigate in an increasingly digital world.

It all came crashing down this month when President Donald Trump — on his own digital platform, Truth Social — announced his intention to end the Digital Equity Act, a federal grant program meant to help bridge the digital divide. He branded it as “RACIST and ILLEGAL” and said it amounts to “woke handouts based on race.” He said it was an “ILLEGAL $2.5 BILLION DOLLAR giveaway,” though the program was actually funded with $2.75 billion.

The name seemed innocuous enough when the program was approved by Congress in 2021 as part of a $65 billion investment meant to bring internet access to every home and business in the United States. The broadband program itself was a key component of the $1 trillion infrastructure law pushed through by the administration of Democratic President Joe Biden."

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/the-digital-equity-act-tried-to-close-the-digital-divide-trump-targets-it-in-his-war-on-woke 

 

[Excerpt]

"Digital Access for All Idahoans

The commission has ended its nearly four-year effort to improve internet accessibility across the state following the termination of a grant from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration; the current presidential administration declared the grant, first awarded to Idaho in 2022, unconstitutional.

“On May 9, everything was canceled, and that was a pretty major initiative we’ve been undertaking,” Deputy State Librarian Dylan Baker told the board. “We were really … on the cusp of working through the subgrant process.”

The library commissioners first announced the Digital Access for All Idahoans plan in 2021, with a plan to use the federal grant to both improve access to the internet and improve the skills to navigate it confidently — the libraries focused primarily on the skills aspect of access.

Idaho had been awarded $6.3 million total, with more than $2.3 million slated to go to the first round of subgrantees that included libraries, community colleges, nonprofits and other state agencies, according to board documents.

Nearly 200,000 Idahoans were expected to be reached in 61 cities and towns in 30 counties, the board documents said."

Close Trump Allies Sponsored the Military Parade, Raising Ethical Concerns; The New York Times, June 15, 2025

Minho Kim, The New York Times ; Close Trump Allies Sponsored the Military Parade, Raising Ethical Concerns

"Federal regulations prohibit the use of public office for the private gain of officeholders or their friends, relatives or nongovernmental affiliates, said Richard W. Painter, who served as the chief ethics lawyer in the White House Counsel’s Office under President George W. Bush.

“The parade is being used for advertising by these entities with close business ties to the president,” Mr. Painter said in an interview. “You’re in a situation where the U.S. government has been used to endorse a product.”

If he had been Mr. Trump’s chief ethics lawyer, he added, he would have not wanted the sponsorships at all. Such an arrangement would be acceptable only if the companies were to pay for the entire event, Mr. Painter said, allowing the government to host the celebration without paying any tax dollars. The military parade was estimated to cost up to $45 million."

MyPillow’s Mike Lindell ordered to pay $2.3m in voting machine defamation trial; The Guardian, June 16, 2025

Rachel Leingang, The Guardian; MyPillow’s Mike Lindell ordered to pay $2.3m in voting machine defamation trial

 "MyPillow CEO, Mike Lindell, has been ordered to pay $2.3m to a former employee of a voting machine company who sued him for defamation, adding to the legal woes the prominent election denier faces.

A Colorado jury decided the case and amount after Eric Coomer, who formerly worked in security and voting technology strategy for the voting machine company Dominion, filed a lawsuit against Lindell and a host of others who spread false conspiracy theories that upended his life. Coomer’s attorneys had originally requested $62.7m...

Coomer testified that he had gone into hiding and experienced death threats as a result of the persistent lies about him. An expert hired by his side said it would cost about $2.8m for him to repair his reputation, according to Colorado Public Radio.

“Ultimately it’s to try to regain some semblance of my life. I didn’t just lose my livelihood, I lost my life as a direct result of statements by Mr Lindell accusing me of being a traitor,” Coomer said.

Using defamation law to go after people and companies trafficking in election lies have become more common after 2020. Several lawsuits have been settled, including a claim Coomer brought against conservative outlet Newsmax, while juries have awarded damages in others, including a major judgment against Rudy Giuliani."

Trump’s Cuts to N.I.H. Grants Focused on Minority Groups Are Illegal, Judge Rules; The New York Times, June 16, 2025

 Zach Montague, The New York Times ; Trump’s Cuts to N.I.H. Grants Focused on Minority Groups Are Illegal, Judge Rules

"A federal judge on Monday declared some of the Trump administration’s cuts to National Institutes of Health grants “void and illegal,” accusing the government of racial discrimination and prejudice against L.G.B.T.Q. individuals.

Ruling from the bench, Judge William G. Young of the Federal District Court for the District of Massachusetts delivered a damning assessment of the Trump administrations’ motives in targeting hundreds of grants that focused on the health of Black communities, women and L.G.B.T.Q. people. He ordered the government to restore much of that funding for now, pending an appeal.

“This represents racial discrimination and discrimination against America’s L.G.B.T.Q. community,” he said. “That’s what this is.”

Judge Young, a Reagan appointee with 40 years of experience as a federal judge, said the government’s rationale for canceling some of the grants, which also supported research into topics such as gender identity and equity in health care, appeared to be rooted in prejudice. He cited the administration’s very public efforts to eliminate any trace of diversity and equity initiatives from the federal government, as well as its attacks on transgender people.

He said that over the course of his career he had “never seen government racial discrimination like this,” and that he felt duty bound to state his conclusion about the government’s intent.

“I would be blind not to call it out,” he said...

Kenneth Parreno, a lawyer representing the American Public Health Association, called the government’s actions part of a campaign to ban what the administration saw as “forbidden topics” in science by canceling grants related to race or transgender health."

‘I’m an American, Bro!’: Latinos Report Raids in Which U.S. Citizenship Is Questioned; The New York Times, June 15, 2025

Jennifer Medina , The New York Times; ‘I’m an American, Bro!’: Latinos Report Raids in Which U.S. Citizenship Is Questioned

"Viral videos on social media of the Montebello incident and other instances of agents questioning Latino residents in Los Angeles have heightened anxiety that the federal immigration crackdown has entered a new phase. The fear is that agents, including those who are themselves Hispanic, are now racially profiling Hispanic residents and questioning citizenship on the street. Mr. Ramirez recently started carrying his passport with him because he feared being stopped, Mr. Gavidia said."

Watchdog Finds Trump Administration Broke Law by Withholding Library Funds; The New York Times, June 16, 2025

Tony Romm , The New York Times; Watchdog Finds Trump Administration Broke Law by Withholding Library Funds

"The inquiry concerned the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which serves as the federal government’s primary source of funding for libraries, museums and archives. In March, Mr. Trump sought to sharply curtail the agency as part of an executive order focused on the “reduction of the federal bureaucracy,” prompting legal challenges from states, librarians and other opponents.

The accountability office, an arm of Congress that keeps watch over the nation’s spending, concluded on Monday that the library agency ultimately “ceased performing” its functions after the president’s directive, and withheld funding that lawmakers had previously appropriated to carry out its mission.

Ethics officials ultimately classified the interruption in aid as an illegal impoundment, which is prohibited under a 1970s law meant to restrict the president and his ability to defy Congress on spending. The White House maintains that those limits are unconstitutional, and the president and his top budget aide, Russell T. Vought, have sought to test that theory as part of their dramatic and chaotic reorganization of the federal government."

The Bureaucrat and the Billionaire: Inside DOGE’s Chaotic Takeover of Social Security; The New York Times, June 16, 2025

Alexandra Berzon, Nicholas Nehamas and Tara Siegel Bernard , The New York Times; The Bureaucrat and the Billionaire: Inside DOGE’s Chaotic Takeover of Social Security

"Throughout the early months of this Trump presidency, Mr. Musk and his allies systematically built a false narrative of widespread fraud at the Social Security Administration based on misinterpreted data, using their claims to justify an aggressive effort to gain access to personal information on millions of Americans, a New York Times investigation has found.

Their work has led to the departures of thousands of employees, thinning an already overstretched work force and setting off a wave of public anxiety over the state of an agency administering politically sacrosanct retirement benefits that Mr. Trump has vowed to protect.

Mr. Musk has left Washington amid a blowup with Mr. Trump, and some of his top aides at DOGE have also departed, leaving federal workers and the public to assess what Mr. Musk’s tornadolike path through Washington yielded. At Social Security, Mr. Musk’s efforts amount to a case study in what happened when his team of government novices ran a critical government agency through misinformation and social media blasts."

‘Extremely disturbing and unethical’: new rules allow VA doctors to refuse to treat Democrats, unmarried veterans; The Guardian, June 16, 2025

 Aaron Glantz, The Guardian; ‘Extremely disturbing and unethical’: new rules allow VA doctors to refuse to treat Democrats, unmarried veterans

[Kip Currier: As The Guardian article's aptly references, these new V.A. treatment rules are "extremely disturbing and unethical". 

The right to exercise one's religious beliefs is a fundamental constitutional right. However, one has to marvel at the dearth of basic decency of a healthcare provider who refuses to treat someone based on their gender, or whether they're married or an LGBTQ+ person.

Is it too much to expect someone who enters the healthcare professions to be able to commit to helping any veteran who needs care, no matter what that healthcare provider's religious beliefs are or are not?

The answer is and should be an emphatic NO.]

[Excerpt]

"Doctors at Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) hospitals nationwide could refuse to treat unmarried veterans and Democrats under new hospital guidelines imposed following an executive order by Donald Trump.

The new rules, obtained by the Guardian, also apply to psychologists, dentists and a host of other occupations. They have already gone into effect in at least some VA medical centers.

Medical staff are still required to treat veterans regardless of race, color, religion and sex, and all veterans remain entitled to treatment. But individual workers are now free to decline to care for patients based on personal characteristics not explicitly prohibited by federal law.

Language requiring healthcare professionals to care for veterans regardless of their politics and marital status has been explicitly eliminated...

In interviews, veterans said the impact of the new policy would probably fall hardest on female veterans, LGBTQ+ veterans and those who live in rural areas where there are fewer doctors overall."

“He Will Bring All The Power He Can”: Terry Moran on Trump’s Attacks On The Free Press and His Firing From ABC; The Bulwark, June 16, 2025

TIM MILLER AND 

TERRY MORAN

, The Bulwark ; “He Will Bring All The Power He Can”: Terry Moran on Trump’s Attacks On The Free Press and His Firing From ABC

"Journalist Terry Moran was fired from ABC after a tweet criticizing Stephen Miller sparked an overblown backlash from the Trump administration. But Moran isn’t done. He joins Tim Miller to talk about Trump’s attacks on the free press, his Trump interview and what comes next."

No Kings; Thinking About..., June 16, 2025

TIMOTHY SNYDER, Thinking About... ; No Kings

"It was a thrill to march at the No Kings Rally in Philadelphia on Saturday with friends and about a hundred thousand people. On the stage, I led a chant of "no kings -- freedom," and I tried to explain three things that slogan or that sequence can mean.

1. The logic. We don't want kings -- or autocrats or oligarchs -- because they will represent themselves or their families or those who finance them rather than us, the people. They will take away not only our rights but the functionality of our government, the safety of our streets, the possibility of social mobility, and the integrity of our environment. So freedom means no kings -- but is also means all of the good things. It means a government that works, it means the right of people to be left alone, it means the American dream, it means harmony with nature...

Philly was wonderful and it was big, but it was just one of thousands of protests in which about five million people took part. There were probably more people just in Philly alone than at Trump's birthday parade in DC. All in all there were about one hundred times more protestors on Saturday than there were people watching Trump's self-celebration. We can be proud of that. And then do the next thing."

Why a professor of fascism left the US: ‘The lesson of 1933 is – you get out’; The Guardian, June 16, 2025

Jonathan Freedland , The Guardian; Why a professor of fascism left the US: ‘The lesson of 1933 is – you get out’

"But when Trump won again last November, there was no doubt in her mind. However bad things had looked in 2016, now was worse. “So much had been dismantled … the guardrails, or the checks and balances, had systematically been taken down. The supreme court’s ruling on immunity; the failure to hold Trump accountable for anything, including the fact that he incited, you know, a violent insurrection on the Capitol, that he encouraged a mob that threatened to hang his vice-president, that he called up the Georgia secretary of state and asked him to find votes. I felt like we were in much more dangerous territory.”

Events so far have vindicated those fears. The deportations; students disappeared off the streets, one famously caught on video as she was bundled into an unmarked car by masked immigration agents; the humiliation of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, as Trump and JD Vance ordered the Ukrainian president to express his gratitude to them, even as they were “abusing” him, an episode, says Shore, “right out of Stalinism” – to say nothing of Trump’s regular attacks on “USA-hating judges” who rule against the executive branch. It adds up to a playbook that is all too familiar. “Dark fantasies are coming true.”...

She also worries that instead of fighting back, “people become atomised. The arbitrariness of terror atomises people. You know, people put their heads down, they go quiet, they get in line, if only for the very reasonable, rational reason that any individual acting rationally has a reason to think that the personal cost of refusing to make a compromise is going to be greater than the social benefit of their one act of resistance. So you get a classic collective action problem.”"

National Parks Are Told to Delete Content That ‘Disparages Americans’; The New York Times, June 13, 2025

Lisa Friedman, The New York Times; National Parks Are Told to Delete Content That ‘Disparages Americans’

[Kip Currier: These Interior Department directives of the Trump administration are censorious and should not be normalized in a democracy.

Historical facts and accounts are communal and collective in nature. Historical narratives and chronicles are not the property of an administration to cherry-pick, deselect, deny, clean up, and cover up. Yes, history is interpretative in nature. But history belongs collectively to all of us, not the administrative government in charge at a particular time: the good, the bad, and the ugly aspects of history.

Sanitization and censorship of history is what totalitarian and autocratic states do. It's what the current Russian regime has done in whitewashing and rehabilitating the reputation of Stalin and Soviet Russia by closing down museums that present facts the Putin government does not approve of. It's what the present one-party state in China has done in squelching any mention of the Tiananmen Square student-led protests of 1989. It's also what Donald Trump has done in referring to the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol as a "day of love" and calling the insurrectionists "hostages". And it's what the Pentagon has wreaked in purging historical figures from its websites and removing books from its academy and military base libraries.

George Orwell's 1984 (published in 1949, four years after the Allied nations' defeat of the fascist Axis powers in 1945) warns us where this kind of state-sanctioned censorship can lead. A 2024 Smithsonian article ("What Does George Orwell's '1984' Mean in 2024?") on the 75th anniversary of the book identifies its most important themes as:

"the denial of objective truth, which we see everywhere about us, every war that’s currently taking place anywhere in the world and in quite a lot of domestic political situations, too; the manipulation of language … and the use of words to bamboozle people; and the rise of the surveillance society. … That to me, is the definition of the adjective ‘Orwellian’ in the 21st century.”

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-does-george-orwells-1984-mean-in-2024-180984468/

1984 describes the fictional Oceania totalitarian super-state's so-called Ministry of Truth: a department and policy approach that rewrites and represses history. It spreads propaganda. It inverts truth: 

"War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

 

Will more teachers and faculty members, historians, university and college administrators and boards, librarians, museum curators, archivists, and other U.S. citizens speak out against this administration's autocratic sanitization and suppression of history?]

[Excerpt]

"The Interior Department plans to remove or cover up all “inappropriate content” at national parks and sites by Sept. 17 and is asking the park visitors to report any “negative” information about past or living Americans, according to internal documents.

It’s a move that historians worry could lead to the erasure of history involving gay and transgender figures, civil rights struggles and other subjects deemed improper by the Trump administration.

Staff at the National Park Service, which is part of the Interior Department, were instructed to post QR codes and signs at all 433 national parks, monuments and historic sites by Friday asking visitors to flag anything they think should be changed, from a plaque to a park ranger’s tour to a film at a visitor’s center.

Leaders at the park service would then review concerns about anything that “inappropriately disparages Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times),” according to slides presented this week at a meeting with park superintendents. By Sept. 17, “all inappropriate content” would be removed or covered, according to the presentation."

NEVER SAY GOODBYE; The New York Times, June 13, 2025

Susan Dominus ; Videos by Singeli Agnew, The New York Times; NEVER SAY GOODBYE
"StoryFile frequently works with foundations and museums, but it has already made interactive videos for several individual clients. In the future, the company intends to release a generative-A.I. app in which customers can create avatars that answer questions not provided in advance, by uploading a person’s emails, social media posts and other background material.
Matt and Joan preferred what they signed up for, which would be an avatar of Peter who answered only the questions that were posed while he was alive. Everything he said, they would know, was something he believed to be true, rather than an extrapolation. “It won’t change the reality that I’ve lost my father,” Matt said. “But it lessens the blow ever so slightly, knowing that when he does die, it won’t be the last time I’ll ever have a conversation with him.”...
Matt felt a tension between being moved by how real the experience felt yet also being reminded that it was a rendering. ...“It was a reminder that this is a human I love that I want to console. But you can’t console a video clip.”

Yancey residents plan lawsuit in response to July 1 library takeover by county over Pride display; Asheville Citizen Times, June 13, 2025

Johnny Casey, Asheville Citizen Times; Yancey residents plan lawsuit in response to July 1 library takeover by county over Pride display

"Edwards pointed to the multiple protests in which residents marched on Burnsville Town Square in support of the local library, and said the local library has been a bright spot for many residents dealing with hardships, particularly during the county's Tropical Storm Helene recovery.

"I care that the little boy with Down Syndrome who gets his therapy at the library won't start his session without getting a hug from me," Edwards said. "I care that a woman who lost her father turned to reading and rediscovered a passion for reading to help her cope.

"I care about the thousands and thousands of people we've helped after Helene find resources, fill out forms, send paperwork to agencies, and mostly just by listening to their stories. I never once asked somebody who walked through those library doors who they voted for, who they pray to or who they have at home that they love. Every patron interaction starts with a simple question: 'How can I help you?'...

Landon Beaver is born and raised in Yancey County and has been following the library takeover in his hometown since 2023, when the commissioners proposed the takeover.

Beaver is helping organize a First Amendment lawsuit in order, according to the Our Voice Our Library website, "to try to prevent the Yancey County Board of Commissioners from wresting control of the library for political purposes...

According to the Our Library Our Voice website, the team hopes to set a legal precedent that will protect libraries like Jackson County and Yancey County all across North Carolina.​"