North Carolina’s Randolph County chose to dissolve its entire library board rather than allow a book about a trans child to sit on the shelves. 

Last week, the county Board of Commissioners voted 3–2 to dismiss every single member of the library board, just weeks after they declined to reshelve or remove a picture book titled Call Me Max, a story about a transgender boy who wants to be called by his chosen name in class. 

Tami Fitzgerald, head of North Carolina Values Coalition, a conservative group that focuses on religious freedom and drew media attention to the library board’s decision, argued that the book “teaches children that their parents may be wrong about their gender, and that their gender is actually whatever they feel it is.” 

“Planting this lie in a child’s mind at a young age can lead them down a harmful path of social and medical transitioning,” she told The Washington Post. 

Kyle Lukoff, a trans man and the book’s author, thinks this is just another attempt from Trump’s GOP to muzzle his community. 

“Policies can be helpful, but this is ultimately a question of power,” he said. “If there are people in power who simply believe trans people don’t belong in their communities or the world at large, they will simply twist those policies to try and make it a reality.”

Randolph County went overwhelmingly for President Trump in the last election. This draconian reaction to a book about gender identity is par for the course in the petty culture war his base has been waging.  

Republicans in key swing states are peeling away from Donald Trump amid national backlash over his remarks about Rob Reiner’s murder.

Reiner was found stabbed to death in his Los Angeles home Sunday alongside his wife, producer Michele Singer Reiner. Their son, 32-year-old Nick Reiner, was taken into custody on homicide charges early Monday and is being held on $4 million bail.

But Trump chose to make the Hollywood icons’ tragic and untimely deaths all about himself, suggesting Monday that the When Harry Met Sally ... director wouldn’t have been killed if he had supported the MAGA agenda.

Doing so has seemingly come at a cost to critical support ahead of an already contentious midterm election cycle, as at least two conservative figures from swing states condemn the president’s comments.

“A father and mother were murdered at the hands of their troubled son,” wrote Oklahoma Representative Stephanie Bice, responding directly to a screenshot of Trump’s vicious Truth Social post. “We should be lifting the family up in prayer, not making this about politics.”

New York Representative Mike Lawler—who is a part of a coalition of House Republicans fighting party leadership to extend Affordable Care Act premium subsidies—felt similarly.

“This statement is wrong,” Lawler wrote, commenting on the same screenshot. “Regardless of one’s political views, no one should be subjected to violence, let alone at the hands of their own son. It’s a horrible tragedy that should engender sympathy and compassion from everyone in our country, period.”

The president’s remarks, in full, read:

“A very sad thing happened last night in Hollywood. Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away, together with his wife, Michele, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS.

“He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump Administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness, and with the Golden Age of America upon us, perhaps like never before. May Rob and Michele rest in peace!”

FBI Director Kash Patel is reportedly crippling the FBI’s counterintelligence capabilities, former bureau agents have told The Bulwark.

On Attorney General Pam Bondi’s first day in office in February, she terminated the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force in order to “free resources to address more pressing priorities, and end risks of further weaponization and abuses of prosecutorial discretion.” She also pared back the bureau’s enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, curbing investigations into alleged espionage. It’s probably not a coincidence that Patel failed to register under the FARA when he consulted for Qatar.

Under Patel’s leadership, 23 percent of the roughly 13,000 total FBI agents have been reassigned to work on immigration enforcement, which is not historically in the bureau’s purview. According to Democratic Senator Mark Warner, nearly 40 percent of agents in the FBI’s largest field offices have been made to work immigration cases. As a result, agents with expertise on foreign adversaries such as China, Iran, and Russia are now handling immigration cases on a rotating basis, according to former agents who left the bureau.

“It’s a disaster,” Robert Anderson, who ran FBI counterintelligence from 2012 to 2014, told The Bulwark. “I’m rooting for everybody because we’re all Americans, [but] Patel needs to wake up.”

As the FBI’s focus has shifted under Patel’s leadership, the House Intelligence Committee has put forth a bill that would place counterintelligence, including the FBI’s ranks of spy hunters, under the purview of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who has previously been criticized as a “Russian asset.”

Frank Montoya Jr., a retired FBI special agent who also served as director of the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive, told The Bulwark that putting DNI in charge could........

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