Westerly culture war erupts again

After victory for trans student rights in Cumberland, all eyes turn to Westerly

Steve Ahlquist

Credit: Mel Woods/Xtra

As the Cumberland School District wrestled with and ultimately declined to pass changes to its transgender student policies last week, Westerly School Committee Solicitor William Nardone provided a freewheeling and imaginative overview of a recent United States Supreme Court decision, West Virginia v. B.P.J., regarding the eligibility of transgender athletes in female sports at last Wednesday’s meeting during his “solicitor’s report.”

In the decision, SCOTUS ruled that under Title IX and the Equal Protection Clause, schools may maintain women’s and girls’ sports teams based on “biological sex.” The decision permits—but does not strictly mandate—the exclusion of trans girls from female sports, said Solicitor Nardone. The solicitor advised the School Committee that the district should align itself with the court’s decision, even though the ruling did not affect Rhode Island General Laws or the Department of Education’s mandated Guidance for Rhode Island Schools on Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Students.

Nardone went even further than the court’s decision, interpreting the ruling’s “umbrella” to apply to spaces such as locker rooms and bathrooms. Christian nationalist Committee member Peter Nero was quick to point out the difficulties of enforcing a ban based on “biological sex,” noting that birth certificates can be legally altered in many states. Solicitor Nardone dismissed the concern and noted that the Supreme Court decision does not address the issue of verification, and that the “day-to-day” policing of the policy is up to the district administration.

Committeemembers Seth Logan and Lori Wycall cited Mirabelli v. Bonta, the case that was at the center of the kerfuffle in Cumberland. Unaware that Cumberland would conclude that altering their policy was, at the very least, premature (if not dangerous for the health and well-being of students), they suggested the district ensure parents are informed if a student begins to socially transition at school (that is, adopt names, pronouns, or the dress of a gender different from the one assigned at birth. Committeemember Logan is fairly new to the Committee, but Committeemember Wycall has long wanted to impose policies to discriminate against trans children. (See: here, here, and here.)

Though the opponents of trans girls playing sports couch their arguments in terms of competitiveness, safety, and fairness, their true agenda is Christian Nationalism, complete with Christian prayers and Bibles in public schools.

Committeemember Peter Nero formerly served as the Superintendent of the Cranston Public Schools until his retirement in 2012. During his tenure, an atheist student, Jessica Ahlquist (full disclosure, Jessica is my niece), was a plaintiff in a successful case brought against the city by the RI ACLU to remove a Christian prayer banner from the auditorium wall of Cranston High School West:

“We wanted to keep the banner,” said Committeemember Nero at Tuesday night’s meeting. “We thought it was the relic. It was Christian, and I’m a practicing Catholic, so I didn’t find a problem with it. We ended up getting a pro bono [lawyer] from the Diocese, but the [ACLU] won the case…

“…if the Supreme Court was empowered back in 2012, that prayer banner would still be up … because you can see now they’re putting Bibles in some schools, Bible studies… I had the prayer banner cut down from the wall, and I’ve had it hidden. And someday, if [the Supreme Court] turns that around, I’ll have it put back up.”

Here’s the transcript of the relevant parts of the committee meeting. You can watch the video here.

Why we have the Second Amendment

 

Public opinion on abortion has shifted 4 years after Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade

We're more polarized than ever

Laurel Elder, Hartwick College; Mary-Kate Lizotte, Augusta University, and Steven Greene, North Carolina State University

It’s been four years since the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturned Roe v. Wade, ending the federal constitutional right to abortion.

In the immediate aftermath of the decision, national attention centered on implementation of state bans and a rapidly shifting legal landscape.

But four years later, one of the most impactful developments has been less visible: a significant, sustained and politically consequential shift in public opinion. In the wake of Dobbs, the debate over abortion rights did not simply return to the states. It fundamentally altered how many Americans think about the issue and how they vote.

Why did energy-saving tips disappear from the Energy Department website?

Spite

Kate Yoder, Senior Staff Writer

"This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist's weekly newsletter here."

If you wanted to save some money by learning how to check your home for air leaks, poor insulation, and power-hungry lightbulbs, the Department of Energy’s website was ready to help. And if you needed an expert, the site guided you to another page for help lining up a professional energy assessment, a well-established first step to cut utility bills and curb pollution at the same time. 

That is, until this summer, when both of those resources vanished from the agency’s site, each now redirecting to “Page not found.” They were taken down by July 3, around the same time that the Department of Energy deleted more than 1,600 pages from the Energy Saver section of its site, gutting a resource for people looking to conserve energy and lower bills.

“I can’t remember another time that, with DOE specifically, we’ve seen an entire domain go down the way that [it] has been reported on now,” said Izzy Pacenza, who monitors government websites for the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative. Over a 30-day span this summer, as swaths of the country suffered under heat waves, more than 300 of the webpages had received 160,000 page views, according to an analysis from The Guardian.

The news coverage of the missing websites has focused on the disappearance of one recommendation in particular. Ahead of a heat wave that roasted New York City with 100-degree temperatures earlier this month, Mayor Zohran Mamdani asked businesses and residents to set their AC to 78 degrees to conserve energy, drawing the ire of Republicans who mocked the restrictions as “socialism.” 

Internet sleuths were quick to notice that similar guidance had vanished from the Department of Energy’s website, which used to direct people to keep their thermostat between 75 and 78 degrees. The timing suggested that the agency might have removed the pages as a rebuke to Mamdani’s advice.

The purge looked suspiciously timed for another reason:  On July 2, the Energy Department announced a proposed rule to make it harder for future administrations to approve energy efficiency standards for household appliances, saying it would “permanently end Green New Scam appliance mandates.” The move was part of the Trump administration’s broader attack on energy efficiency requirements.

Dear Leader has an ingenious plan to end school shootings

Guess you still have the right to choose

Who's responsible?

Jim Mageau critiqued for false information

Charlestown's leading Trumper strikes a nerve

Philip Eil

Some people know exactly why this mural was funded. (April 10, 2026)

By now, the Great Providence Mural Kerfuffle is mostly over.

The in-progress mural of Iryna Zarutska on a downtown building has been permanently discontinued. The owners of The Dark Lady, the LGBTQIA-friendly bar that greenlit the project, have said they are “deeply and sincerely sorry.” A smaller mural of Zarutska has been completed on the wall of Opa, a Lebanese restaurant on Atwells Ave. And some excellent reporting on the affair has been published by the Boston Art Review and The Providence Eye (where I’m a board member), among other outlets.

But there are still aftershocks reverberating in the local media. And one of them is worth mentioning.

Mageau (left) is Charlestown's most prominent Trumper

On April 25, the Providence Journal published a letter from a reader named James Mageau in Charlestown who expressed outrage at the way the first mural on the wall of The Dark Lady was halted. The letter – written in response to the Journal’s coverage of the brouhaha – made a lot of bad points, which is hardly noteworthy for Journal letters.

But it also included a significant error of fact. In the last lines of his letter, Mageau wrote:

I believe the controversy rests primarily among the left-wing socialist, communist and progressive community. They are having nervous fits over it because Elon Musk is helping to underwrite the costs of painting murals of victims attacked by undocumented immigrants. [Emphasis added]

This is not true.

EDITOR'S NOTE: That Jim Mageau twists the truth beyond recognition is no surprise to Charlestown residents who have been subjected to Mageau's bullshit for decades. We've cited Mageau's confabulations for much of that time, even giving him his own "Topics" tab (click HERE) that links to almost 200 Progressive Charlestown articles.  - Will Collette

Two Presidents speak...

Thanks to a MAGA gun nut, Charlestown and South County are about to become a culture war battleground

Charlestown to get ripped up over guns

By Will Collette

Dave Levesque has created 40 pro-gun Rhode Island
PACs and is targeting Democratic women in South County

Rhode Island just experienced its second mass shooting this year. First, Brown University and now the mass shooting at a Pawtucket hockey rink.

Quick to respond was Republican House Minority Leader Mike Chippendale (R-Foster). First, he gives us the rote thoughts and prayers line and then shifts to deflecting away from guns to mental health and the MAGA-inspired national controversy over gender.

Here’s a key section from Chippendale’s statement:

In the immediate aftermath of events like this, public officials often reach for simple explanations. When leaders say this tragedy was “caused by gun violence,” they are transparently reducing a complex human failure to a single talking point. In cases like this, the firearm was the means, not the cause, and violence of this nature almost always involves deeper factors – severe or untreated mental health struggles, instability, isolation, and warning signs that were missed or ignored. If we are serious about prevention, those realities must be part of the conversation.

Granted, there is always a reason, rational or not, why a person takes a gun (or two or more) and kills people. And yes, it is important to look at those reasons and try to figure out how to prevent them from sparking more carnage.

But Chippendale is wrong to dismissively say “the firearm was the means, not the cause."  The decision to kill for whatever reason combined with easy access to guns is what makes the United States the gun murder capital of the world.

This wrenching issue is about to become a central part of Charlestown’s political culture between now and at least through the September 8 Democratic primary.

Send lawyers, guns and money

I went over the end-of-year campaign finance disclosures for Charlestown’s four major political committees to see how they look at the start of the 2026 election year when they engage in the biennial struggle over control of the town.

I also took a look at the campaign figures for House District 36, held by incumbent Rep. Tina Spears. Gun lobby-backed Leah Boisclair is the figurehead candidate for the League of Rhode Island Businesses (LORIB) seeking to defeat Tina in the September 8 Democratic primary.

Just based on the money, it looks like the District 36 race will be Charlestown's first major election event, focused as it is on the Democratic primary that takes place two months before the General Election.

The LORIB candidate Boisclair is running as a Democrat despite having no known ties to the party. Her sponsor, entrepreneur Dave Levesque, set up 40 political action committees (PACs), one for each municipality plus a statewide PAC, to promote his pro-gun agenda. 

He’s also a devoted MAGA dude who vehemently opposes taxes on the rich such as the state’s new Taylor Swift law that levees a state surcharge on high-priced absentee-owned property.

Levesque is running MAGA-style candidates against virtually EVERY Democratic woman in South County. That includes Charlestown’s state senator Victoria Gu. Levesque is backing MAGA nut Westin Place (R) – Victoria beat him handily in the last two elections.

Levesque is putting a lot of cash behind Carolina resident attorney Leah Boisclair, most of it coming from other LORIB PACs and from pro-gun groups. Boisclair’s campaign finance report shows around $25,000 came in during the final quarter of 2025, leaving her with a balance of $20,519.85 to start the year.

You should take a good look at who gave to each campaign because the numbers tell you a lot about the two candidates. As the adage goes, “follow the money.”

Tina Spears with Sen. Victoria Gu.
 Gu is also a LORIB target

Rep. Tina Spears support

Rep. Tina Spears begins the campaign year coming within $200 of matching Boisclair's gun cash. She has cash on hand of $20,306.21. She raised around $15,000 in the final quarter of 2025.

Of that $15,000, only $1,250 came from political action committees, including the state AFL-CIO, the RI Good Government PAC and PACs representing firefighters, construction and public employees.

There were lots of donations from people who appeared to be family, friends, colleagues from non-profits serving children and people in the district.

This list includes a number of well-known local leaders. Among them:

• ·       Charlestown Town Council President Deb Carney
• ·       Lifelong Charlestown activist Frank Glista
• ·       Former Charlestown Democrats chair Kathleen Marra
• ·       Rep. Carol McEntee, South Kingstown
• ·       Tomaquag Museum director Loren Spears
• ·       Jane Merner from Earthcare composting
• ·       Rob Lyons from Ocean House Marina

I’ll be on the list for the next report.

Very different funding profile for Boisclair

Leah Boisclair reported $25,000 raised in the last quarter of 2025. Here’s where her money trail takes us.

She donated $2,500 from her own law practice. According to her website, she focuses on defending clients charged with some very unsavory crimes. In a later article, I will dive in more deeply into the choices she made with her law practice. Meanwhile, here’s how she describes her specialties:

She reported $1,650 from the water and wastewater industry – five different companies including local firms AB Hoxie and Benn Water. She may have won with this business sector’s allegiance through a 2022 Ashaway case (detailed HERE). She represented a residential landowner who wanted to put in a large-scale commercial water distribution well. Benn Water was one of the project’s biggest promoters, but the Town of Hopkinton rejected the proposal.

Several metro lawyers have written checks to Boisclair’s campaign.

The two main hardcore Rhode Island gun PACs, the Gun Owners PAC and the 2^nd Amendment PAC, kicked in $4000.

Very little of her cash comes from Charlestown or the other towns in District 36. One of the rare local donations came from Bill Coulter, owner of Stony Hill Cattle and former chair of the Charlestown Republican Town Committee. Does that mean there won’t be a Republican contender in this race?

The biggest single block of Boisclair’s cash - $10,500 – came from six of Dave Levesque’s League of RI Businesses (LORIB) PACs. They all give their address as a law office at 1410 Reservoir Ave. in Cranston. This includes the so-called Charlestown LORIB. The other five PACs contributing to Boisclair are the ones purporting to be in Westerly, South Kingstown, North Kingstown, Newport and Block Island.

In the Secretary of State’s corporate database, there is only one registration and that’s for the umbrella organization:

As for the financial reports for the PACs themselves, the search trick is to use “The League” when using the Board of Elections database. Other variations don't work.

Then you will find all of them each with basically identical CF-1 Notice of Organization filings naming Levesque as Treasurer. They are all located in Moretti and Preetti's law office shown above, the same incorporator and the same borad.

The Charlestown LORIB PAC is no exception as the screenshot below shows. It's not located in Charlestown and there’s no one from Charlestown on it.

There is a lot of money shuffling among the LORIB PACs. For example, Charlestown’s LORIB donation to Leah Boisclair appears to be a pass-through from the Narragansett LORIB PAC. Narragansett is where Levesque lives. Narragansett LORIB pays Charlestown LORIB who then funds Leah Boisclair. That’s along with five other Levesque PACs.

It’s an elaborate web but what I see is this: It's all about Levesque. Vote for one of his candidates and you are voting for him. A vote for Boisclair is a vote for Levesque’s pro-gun, anti-tax-the-rich MAGA agenda.

Boisclair used to use her Facebook account as a promotional site for gun-nut groups in Rhode Island. She scrubbed those posting, but not before they were captured on screenshots. I have those images. You can count on seeing a lot of them between now and September 8 Democratic Primary where this race is headed. Between now and then, I plan lots more coverage of this important race.

The General Election funding race

As for the General Election, the campaign finance reports for Charlestown’s four major political committees yield few surprises. The four committees go into the 2026 election with the following cash balances:

• ·       Current town leader Charlestown Residents United (CRU), $2,391.90
• ·       Former town leader Charlestown Citizens Alliance (CCA), $9,170.15
• ·       Charlestown Democratic Town Committee (CDTC), $182.15
• ·       Charlestown Republican Town Committee (CRTC), $3,583.08

None of these committees raised almost nothing in the final quarter of 2025. Charlestown Democrats brought in $15. The other three committees reported no income.

That’s not unusual since in the past, Charlestown’s real campaigning rarely started before July 4.

Finally, the matchups for Charlestown’s two Senate seats shows:

• Incumbent Sen. Victoria Gu (D) who has represented Charlestown south of Route One goes into the year with $28,299.50.
• Her opponent for the third straight time is MAGA nut Republican and LORIB-endorsed Westin Place who goes into the race with $566.66. He hasn’t gotten his infusion of LORIB and gun money yet.

Our embarrassing state Senator Elaine Morgan (R-MAGA) is again running for reelection to represent the northern half of Charlestown. She carries a cash balance of $3,248.27 into the year.

She faces a strong opponent in Samantha (Sam) Wilcox (D), Richmond Town Council President. Sam goes into election year with $7,533.71. I’m proud to say I am on her donor list.

After "Melania" flop and performer boycott, Trump plans Kennedy Center shutdown

Family of JFK Call BS on Trump Shuttering of Kennedy Center

Stephen Prager for Common Dreams

The descendants of former President John F. Kennedy are denouncing Donald Trump’s order to shutter the Kennedy Center and calling bullshit on his reasons for doing so.

On Sunday, Trump abruptly announced on Truth Social that beginning on July 4, the performing arts center in Washington, DC, which he recently renamed after himself, would shut down for two years for “Construction, Revitalization, and Complete Rebuilding.”

Trump said the decision was based on input from a group of “many Highly Respected experts,” who said the center was “tired, broken, and dilapidated” and needed to be shut down for a facelift.

However, the family of the center’s namesake said it has more to do with the recent pullout of talent in protest after it became the “Trump-Kennedy Center” last year and the president began asserting control over its programming, which included the world premiere of a hagiographic documentary about his wife, First Lady Melania Trump, this weekend.

In a post on social media, JFK’s niece, Maria Shriver, gave what she said was a “translation” of Trump’s comments about the center’s sudden closure.

She suggested the president meant to say: “It has been brought to my attention that due to the name change (but nobody’s telling me it’s due to the name change), but it’s been brought to my attention that entertainers are canceling left and right, and I have determined that since the name change no one wants to perform there any longer.”

Speaking as Trump, she continued: “I’ve determined that due to this change in schedule, it’s best for me to close this center down and rebuild a new center that will bear my name, which will surely get everybody to stop talking about the fact that everybody’s canceling... right?”

Hey MAGA gun fans! Surprise! Donald Trump is coming for your guns!

Plus Kid Rock and Ted Nugent

Christmas in America

 

School shootings dropped in 2025 - but schools are still focusing too much on safety technology instead of prevention

US owns almost half of all the guns in the world, around 500 million

James Densley, Metropolitan State University

Wrong questions. Wrong answers

Active shootings represent a very small percentage of on-campus university violence.

But among those that do happen, there are patterns. And as law enforcement officials continue to investigate the Dec. 13, 2025, Brown University shooting, similarities can be seen with other active shooter cases on college campuses that scholar James Densley has studied. “They tend to happen inside a classroom, and there tends to be multiple victims,” Densley explains.

The Brown University tragedy, in which a shooter killed two students and injured nine more, marks the fourth deadly shooting at a U.S. university in 2025.

The Department of Education in Rhode Island, where Brown University is located, said on Dec. 16 that it is urging local elementary and secondary schools to review safety protocols.

Amy Lieberman, the education editor at The Conversation U.S., spoke with Densley about how schools have been given what he describes as an “impossible mandate” to try to prevent shootings.

What is the overall trajectory of school shootings over the past few years?

K-12 school shootings appear to be trending downward, at least in the past two years. But we actually saw the largest jumps in this type of violence in the three to five years leading up to 2024, which trends closely with the broader rise in homicide and violent crime we saw in the pandemic era.

In 2025, there have been 230 school shooting incidents in the U.S. – still a staggeringly high number. This compares with 336 school shootings in 2024, 352 in 2023, 308 in 2022, and 257 in 2021.

How this relates to an increase in schools trying to institute security measures to prevent shootings is an open question. But it’s true that many schools are experimenting with certain solutions, like cameras, drones, AI threat detection, weapons scanners, panic apps and facial recognition, even if there is only weak or emerging evidence about how well they work.

Schools are treated as the front line, because the larger, structural solutions are too difficult to confront. It is much easier to blame schools after a tragedy than to actually address firearm access, grievance pathways – meaning how a person becomes a school shooter – and the other societal problems that are creating these tragedies.

Conflicting Advice on Covid Shots Likely To Ding Already Low Vaccine Rates

Don't listen to Bobby Jr. - get your COVID shot because it works

Phillip Reese

More than three-quarters of American adults didn’t get a covid shot last season, a figure that health care experts warn could rise this year amid new U.S. government recommendations.

The covid vaccine was initially popular. About 75% of Americans had received at least one dose of the first versions of the vaccine by early 2022, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data shows. 

But only about 23% of American adults got a covid shot during the 2024-25 virus season, well below the 47% of American adults who got a flu shot. The vaccination rates for flu, measles, and tetanus are also going down.

Yet covid remains a serious, potentially deadly health risk, listed as the primary cause of death on roughly 31,400 death certificates last year. By comparison, flu killed about 6,500 people and pneumonia, a common complication of the flu, killed an additional 41,600, CDC data shows.

Supreme Court blocks transgender people from updating passports

The relentless attack on transgender people

This story was originally reported by Kate Sosin of The 19th. Meet Kate and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.

Emily Scherer for The 19th

The Supreme Court will allow the Trump administration to bar transgender people from changing the gender markers on their passports, it announced in an order Thursday. The order is the latest in a back-and-forth on the policy as the country debates the right for its transgender citizens to live openly.

LGBTQ+ advocates quickly called the order dangerous and discriminatory. 

“This decision will cause immediate, widespread and irreparable harm to all those who are being denied accurate identity documents,” said Jessie Rossman, legal director of the ACLU of Massachusetts. “The Trump administration's policy is an unlawful attempt to dehumanize, humiliate and endanger transgender, nonbinary and intersex Americans, and we will continue to seek its ultimate reversal in the courts.”

Transgender people have been able to change the gender markers on their passports since 1992. Gender markers delineating nonbinary people as “X” became available in 2021. The Trump administration sought in January to block gender changes in passport updates, declaring that the federal government would recognize only “male” and “female” and saying these could not be changed after birth. 

You Can’t Learn from History If You Cover It Up

To Trump, nothing is sacred

By Jim Hightower

Our country’s magnificent National Park System has been called “America’s greatest idea.”

These 433 treasures — along with our rich diversity of national museums and historical sites — each have their own stories to tell. But the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, for together they express America’s egalitarian spirit and “little-d” democratic possibilities, urging us to keep pushing for economic fairness and social justice for all.

And that’s exactly why Trump and his cabal of moneyed elites and right-wing extremists are out to purge, erase, and officially censor the parks’ historical presentations. After all, it’s hard to impose plutocratic autocracy if such tangible examples of historic truth and democratic rebellion are openly displayed!

This is an actual ad posted by ICE showing their
keen grasp of American history

Thus, as dictated by the GOP’s secretive anti-democracy clique, Project 2025, Trump’s ideological Thought Police have set themselves up as an Orwellian “Ministry of Truth” to sanitize and Disney-fy the telling of our people’s real history.

For example, Trump complains that parks and museums hurt America’s self-image by telling “how bad slavery was.”

Donald, that’s not an image — its reality. It’s as central to our national character as our historic commitment to equality. And the explosive conflict between ugly repression and flowering egalitarianism is ever present today.

Consider the push by Senator Eric Schmitt (R-MO) and others in the GOP’s Christian Nationalist movement to deny the unifying principle that “all men are created equal.”

There’s not enough whitewash in the world to cover up the deep ugliness of slavery, and it’s self-destructive for the government to try. The fundamental purpose of recording our shared history is to learn from it.

OtherWords columnist Jim Hightower is a radio commentator, writer, and public speaker. This op-ed was distributed by OtherWords.org.

Trump’s Education Department Is Working to Erode the Public School System

Trump said it himself: "I love the poorly educated"

by Megan O’Matz and Jennifer Smith Richards for ProPublica

Education Secretary Linda McMahon has been clear about her desire to shut down the agency she runs. She’s laid off half the staff and joked about padlocking the door.

She calls it “the final mission.”

But the department is not behaving like an agency that is simply winding down. Even as McMahon has shrunk the Department of Education, she’s operated in what she calls “a parallel universe” to radically shift how children will learn for years to come. The department’s actions and policies reflect a disdain for public schools and a desire to dismantle that system in favor of a range of other options — private, Christian and virtual schools or homeschooling.

Over just eight months, department officials have opened a $500 million tap for charter schools, a huge outlay for an option that often draws children from traditional public schools. They have repeatedly urged states to spend federal money for poor and at-risk students at private schools and businesses. And they have threatened penalties for public schools that offer programs to address historic inequities for Black or Hispanic students.

McMahon has described her agency moving “at lightning rocket speed,” and the department’s actions in just one week in September reflect that urgency.

The agency publicly blasted four school districts it views as insubordinate for refusing to adopt anti-trans policies and for not eliminating special programs for Black students. It created a pot of funding dedicated to what it calls “patriotic education,” which has been criticized for downplaying some of the country’s most troubling episodes, including slavery. And it formed a coalition with Turning Point USA, Hillsdale College, PragerU and dozens of other conservative groups to disseminate patriotic programming.

Officials at the Education Department declined to comment or answer questions from ProPublica for this story.

Can't imagine why