NORTHEAST HARBOR, Maine (AP) — When Donald Trump was elected president earlier this month, Caroline Pryor’s mind turned immediately to the man who lives down the road — Leonard Leo.
The success moved Leo out of the shadows, turning him into a hero to conservatives and a villain to liberals. But for his neighbors on a sparsely populated island off the coast of Maine, the equation is more complicated. Leo and his family moved to Mount Desert Island in 2020, seeking a relatively anonymous life among its unpretentious year-round residents. A refuge it has not turned out to be.
The conservative’s presence — despite significant charitable giving to local nonprofits and big spending locally — has generated fissures in a place known for tranquility. That anxiety has only spiked since Trump’s victory.
“It feels very personal,” said Pryor, a 65-year-old who has lived on the island for four decades. “He comes to a small quiet community in the very northeast corner of the country and does this evil, far-reaching work that is going to affect so many millions of people, but he wants to just live this anonymous, quiet life.”
Leo draws protesters
Those feelings were on display on a brisk morning in October, just two weeks before November’s election. With sunlight flickering through the yellowing leaves, Pryor and a dozen other people — mostly women — gathered outside Leo’s estate to protest during the island’s annual marathon.
They came armed with a cartoonish life-sized puppet of Leo, a rainbow arch for runners to pass through and blue and pink chalk with which they scribbled slogans — “You Are Amazing, Leonard Leo Is Not” — across the road. They rang cowbells as a boombox blasted Dolly Parton, Taylor Swift and Queen.
“We are making people on the island aware of who he is, and they might question taking his money,” Mary Jane Schepers, one of the protesters, said as she urged runners to flip off Leo’s home. “They are taking dirty money.”
Leo, in response to a series of written questions, said he “had never really thought about” whether his move to the island would spur opposition.
“While I disagree with them and with what some of them do and say, they are people created by God with dignity and worth and their presence has been an invitation to pray for them,” Leo wrote. He declined an interview request.
Money sparks controversy
Leo, 59, and his family for decades have vacationed on Mount Desert Island, an idyllic island known for its rocky beauty, windswept beaches and the famed Acadia National Park.
In 2018, he purchased a $3.3 million, 8,000-square-foot Tudor-style estate in Northeast Harbor, one of Mount Desert Island’s wealthiest towns. Some of the country’s most influential and wealthy people — scions like John D. Rockefeller Jr., billionaires like Mitchell Rales and celebrities such as Martha Stewart — have sought privacy and anonymity on the island. Backlash swiftly followed Leo’s arrival. The next year, protesters descended on his home as he hosted a fundraiser for Republican Sen. Susan Collins. He soon drew more protests when he was invited to introduce the then-president of The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, at a nearby college, leading the institution to rescind the invitation.
The protests grew near the end of Trump’s first term and spiked after the conservative-dominated Supreme Court in 2022 overturned the constitutional right to abortion.
The activist’s initial goal was lofty: Convince Leo to leave. When that failed, they turned their focus to informing residents about the man in the Tudor-style mansion.
“He felt he could come here, and it would be a place to get away” from the negative attention he gets for his politics, said Murray Ngoima, a regular protester. “We have managed to draw attention to what he is doing. And that is a problem for him.”
The protests have compelled Leo to step up security at his estate. A protester was arrested in 2022, a confrontation with police that led to a lawsuit and $62,500 settlement over First Amendment violations.
Amid the protests, Leo has stepped up his charitable giving, telling The Associated Press that the activists have “strengthened our conviction to be as active as possible in helping various institutions on the island.” That has meant tens of thousands of dollars to local nonprofits.
He and his wife, Sally, gave over $50,000 in 2020 to the Island Housing Trust, an organization seeking to boost the amount of affordable housing on the island, according to the trust’s annual giving report that also listed Leo as a member of the group’s leadership committee. They made similar donations over the next three years, trustrecordsshow, consistently ranking them among the group’s top donors. Leo and his wife were also listed as donors to the Mount Desert Island Hospital. The Leos have also been listed as regulardonorsto theNortheast Harbor Library.
Some residents are suspicious of Leo’s donations
Those donations have raised suspicion, with protesters urging the groups to return the money and comparing the donations to the way Leo has used the money to influence Republican politics.
“He is a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” said Susan Covino Buell, an island resident. “We can’t just act like he is a regular person in our community.”
Buell, 75, resigned her position on the housing nonprofit’s campaign committee when Leo got involved with the charity. She had tried to convince the nonprofit to reject the money “because I just felt it was so tainted,” Buell said.
The trust’s executive director did not respond to the AP’s request for comment.
A group of anti-Leo activists also penned an open letter urging the hospital to return the donation because of Leo’s role in ending federal abortion protections.
Mariah Cormier, a hospital spokesperson, said the institution accepts “charitable donations that aid in strengthening the health and vibrancy of our community.”
Leo dismissed the idea his donations were aimed at buying acceptance from a skeptical community, saying people “can judge for themselves why I do what I do.”
It isn’t just Leo’s philanthropy that is controversial. His business at local establishments presents a quandary for shop owners and service workers. Many said they oppose Leo’s political positions, but they need his money to sustain their enterprises, allowing shops and restaurants that once closed during frigid winters to stay open longer.
Leo is such a sensitive topic that multiple shop owners declined to be interviewed about the wealthy conservative lawyer, explaining they did not want to damage their relationship with him by discussing how his views conflicted with their own and the internal conflict his business causes.
Leo, a devout Roman Catholic, has also used money to influence the island’s Catholic churches.
Sacred Spaces Foundation, a nonprofit that counts Leo as its president and sole member, purchased St. Ignatius of Loyola Catholic Church in Northeast Harbor for $2.65 million in 2023 from the Roman Catholic Bishop of Portland, according to records obtained from the county government. The church now holds one service a week during the summer, when Northeast Harbor is busiest.
Leo is a regular at another parish, Holy Redeemer, a large stone sanctuary in Bar Harbor where his wife is the head of the music ministry. His presence has driven off some longtime congregants, residents said.
Lindy Stretch, an 80-year-old who converted to Catholicism at Holy Redeemer over a decade ago, left the congregation because of what she said was Leo’s growing influence in the church. “I just couldn’t stand to watch that,” Stretch said.
Asked about people leaving the island church, Leo wrote he was “thankful for every person who takes the time to come to Holy Redeemer and is striving to be in union with the church and Christ, regardless of what they do or believe in their private lives.”
’He isn’t going anywhere’
Not everyone is upset about Leo’s Maine move. Though the island’s population is liberal — over 70% of residents voted against Trump in 2024 — Republicans in the state have come to Leo’s defense.
House Republican Leader Billy Bob Faulkingham, who represents a district just off the island, excoriated the protesters in an op-ed and heralded Leo in an interview for “sticking to his beliefs and donating to the causes he believes in.”
Those donations have only deepened the opposition to Leo among his most frequent protesters, they said.
Most who gathered in October to protest during the marathon have lost count of how often they have met outside Leo’s estate. They have come so frequently they have a routine — each standing in the same place, chanting the same slogans and waving the same signs.
Though energized, they have come to accept they may never drive Leo from the island.
“He is succeeding,” admitted Bo Greene, a 63-year-old who lives in Bar Harbor, citing the way nonprofits have taken his money. “We are making him uncomfortable, and he hates us,” she said. “But he is still here.”
After the last marathoner had plodded by, the women collected their trash and packed away their puppet and signs before heading home.
A few hours later, it was like they had never even been there.
Not even their chalk slogans on the road remained: Someone had washed them away.
___
AP researcher Rhonda Shafner in New York contributed to this report.
I am sorry but how does this protect any student or adult … it also includes higher education. Notice this part … About 3% of high school students identify as transgender, according to recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That is in a country of 337 million people.
This is only a hate bill based on the absurd idea that trans women want to assault girls. Notice it is always trans girls / women they talk about never trans boys or trans men. It is a made up problem that never happened so they have to destroy a small minority of people’s lives to prove a point of their bigotry. I am so sick of this posturing on the part of republicans trying to do to trans what they couldn’t do to the gays 30 years ago. It is the same tactics and hate they promote. If you want to know the real cost listen to the trans students who quit school because they had nowhere to go to the bathroom, or the trans students who were given approved bathrooms so far from their classes that they missed some and got bad marks for simply needing to pee before the class started. These bills have real world consequences for young people in every state. It is not just the bathroom issue but it makes a trans person a target even if there is a “trans bathroom” assigned. It means any student using it is outing themselves to the ones that want to target them for abuse.
Again this solves no problem but does promote hate and bigotry … and it is driven by religious bigotry because of the fundamentalist belief that their god created them male and female only. They are demanding we run our society, or 2024 understands on the book written by religious leaders 2,500 years ago. Think about it, these people had no idea of everything we take for granted today, yet the fundamentalist who demand we ;deny rights to trans people do it based on that book of people who did not even understand germs! These bills are designed to promote a religion and a religious view of life / morality in the public life. I am an old gay man, this still affects me. Because bigotry against one group’s rights is bigotry against all people’s rights! If these people get the right to exclude trans people from bathrooms what is next? Gay people on the same idea that we are a threat? Or hell watch about the old segregation idea that blacks are a threat to whites in bathrooms? See this is the same playbook. This is not different from black people shouldn’t be in white people’s bathrooms. Hugs
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine has signed a bill into law banning transgender students from using school bathrooms and locker rooms that match up with their gender identity.
The law requires people at Ohio K-12 schools and universities use the restroom that aligns with their gender assigned at birth. It also bans students from sharing overnight accommodations with people of the opposite sex from their assigned sex at birth at K-12 schools.
This does not prevent a school from having single-occupancy facilities and does not apply to someone helping a person with a disability or a child younger than 10 years old being assisted by a parent, guardian or family member.
The law will take effect 90 days after DeWine signed the bill.
Several transgender Ohioans, allies and educators called on DeWine to veto the bill. The Ohio Capital Journal recently talked to a family who plans on moving out of Ohio because of anti-transgender legislation at the Statehouse.
The bathroom ban (House Bill 183) was added to a bill that revises College Credit Plus (Senate Bill 104) in the eleventh hour of a House Session at the end of June before the lawmakers went on an extended break.
The American Medical Association officially opposes policies preventing transgender individuals from accessing basic human services and public facilities consistent with gender identity.
Slightly more than half of transgender and nonbinary youth in Ohio considered suicide in 2022, according to the Trevor Project.
About a third of LGBTQ+ students were prevented from using the bathroom that aligned with their gender and slightly more than a quarter were stopped from using the locker room that aligned with their gender, according to Ohio’s 2021 state snapshot by GLSEN, which examines the school experiences of LGBTQ middle and high school students.
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine gives his 2024 State of the State address in the Ohio House chambers at the Ohio Statehouse on Wednesday afternoon. (Pool photo by Barbara J. Perenic, Columbus Dispatch.)
Forty-two percent of transgender and nonbinary students were unable to use the bathroom that aligned with their gender and 36% couldn’t use the locker room that aligned with their gender, according to the Ohio GLSEN report.
Transgender youth who can’t use the bathroom that aligns with their gender are at a greater risk of sexual violence, according to a 2019 study published in the journal Pediatrics.
Florida, Oklahoma, Idaho, and Tennessee’s laws have all been challenged. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit blocked Idaho’s law last year.
North Carolina made history in 2016 by becoming the first state to ban bathroom access to transgender people. The law was quickly appealed in 2017 and settled in federal court in 2019, but the state ended up losing hundreds of millions of dollars as the NBA All-Star Game and NCAA events were moved out of state.
This is the hyper Fundamentalist Christian who is radically against trans people and the entire LGBTQ+. He has made it his mission in political life to push bigotry and hate to anything he thinks the Christian god hates while trying to promote Christianity as a state religion at every turn. So here he is trying to shut down a homeless shelter. Really what Jesus would ask his followers to do, right? No this is not based on religion or faith, this is about profit and who gives him money. He pushes religious stuff because his main benefactor and political protector is a billionaire fundamentalist Christian preacher who thinks the government should force every person to be a Christian with his views. And what about the homeless shelter … Well local business don’t like the look or the congestion so more donations to remove them … Get the point. The point is the wealthy people who support this … Ultra Christian simply don’t like the poor around. They want them to go away and never be seen. Hugs.
In this June 22, 2017, file photo, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton speaks at a news conference in Dallas. (AP Photo/Tony Gutierrez, File)
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit Tuesday seeking to shut down an Austin, Texas, homeless center, calling the charity a public nuisance.
The Sunrise Homeless Navigation Center says it’s the largest provider of homeless services in Travis County. According to its website, the center provides a number of services, including physical and mental health care, substance abuse care, harm reduction, housing interventions and benefits enrollment. The center has received over a $1 million from the city of Austin, according to Paxton’s complaint.
“In South Austin, a once peaceful neighborhood has been transformed by homeless drug addicts, convicted criminals, and registered sex offenders,” Paxton says in the complaint, filed in Travis County District Court. “These people do drugs in sight of children, publicly fornicate next to an elementary school, menace residents with machetes, urinate and defecate on public grounds, and generally terrorize the surrounding community.”
In his complaint, Paxton notes the center’s location across the street from an elementary school. The Texas Attorney General’s Office said in a statement on the lawsuit that the school has been forced into lockdown repeatedly due to violent behavior from people receiving services at the center.
Paxton also takes issue with the center allowing a clean syringe distribution program on its property, which he says amounts to facilitating drug use. Part of a “harm reduction” philosophy, clean syringe programs aim to help people who are already using intravenous drugs do so more safely. In Texas, such programs operate in a legal grey area, as they are not authorized by the state and Texas law criminalizes the possession of drug paraphernalia.
“Drug activity and criminal behavior facilitated by this organization have hijacked an entire neighborhood,” Paxton said in a statement. “By operating a taxpayer-funded drug paraphernalia giveaway next to an elementary school, this organization is threatening students’ health and safety and unjustly worsening daily life for every single resident of the neighborhood. We will shut this unlawful nuisance behavior down.”
Paxton seeks an injunction requiring the center to close for a year and prohibiting it from conducting operations within 1,000 feet of a school, playground or youth center. But in a statement, the center’s executive director Mark Hilbelink said the services will continue.
“It is regrettable that Attorney General Paxton took this route, especially during the week of Thanksgiving, but Sunrise intends to keep offering services to people in our community who need them,” Hilbelink said in a statement. “We are committed to being a good neighbor. We will continue to work, every day, to support Joslin Elementary School, our neighborhood, and our entire community.”
He also noted the center is a ministry of Sunrise Community Church and is therefore protected by the First Amendment, the U.S. Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act and the Texas Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
“These laws have been tested in court on multiple occasions, always with the same result: churches are protected to do work that is an expression of their religious practice,” Hilbelink said.
The Texas committee that examines all pregnancy-related deaths in the state will not review cases from 2022 and 2023, the first two years after Texas’s near-total abortion ban took effect, leaving any potential deaths related to abortion bans during those years uninvestigated by the 23 doctors, medical professionals and other specialists who make up the group.
Leaders of the Texas Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Review Committee said the change was made to “be more contemporary” — allowing them to skip over a backlog of older cases and review deaths closer to the date when they occurred, and therefore offer more relevant recommendations to policymakers. At least three women have died in Texas because of delays in care related to the abortion bans, according to reporting from ProPublica.
Ten Bears has made me Jealous. I wish I had found this first. But to give credit I think he can do more with it. If you don’t know ask him his work out regiment. If anyone who claims to be male thinks their bigotry can out male his actual being … I hope they never tell that to him face to face. I was in the military and even in my best fitness I don’t think I could have kept up with his regimen. Hugs
Again this crusade is marketed as protecting the children from sexualized content. What do they call sexualized content? Chest binders for teenage girls and drag queens! Neither are sexualizing for children. Drag queens can run the gambit from guys dressed as grandmothers to guys dressed as sexy sex workers. It depends on the venue, and minors are not allowed in adult entertainment events. That is already the laws. But to the fundamentalist any guy dressed in anything thought of as women’s attire is sexualizing and a threat to children. Why? Kids don’t care if a man wears pants or a dress. And chest binders are not sexualizing nor confusing. They are a medical assistance tool. If a girl identifies as a boy and hates her body, he needs to hide or remove the sign or his boob development. Would these people be so outraged at binders if it was a boy with gynecomastia, which is when boys grow breasts, uses a bind to feel better about themselves? No it is because the person transitioning is trans that outrages them. We are losing the discussion on this topic because we are let the vocal outraged right set the narrative such as all drag is sexual and confusing kids, and anything trans is forced on kids sexualizing them so it also confuses them. Remember when they said gays recruit boys by molesting them so they would turn gay? That was easily shown to be ridiculous. We went on the offense then and won. We need to go back on the offense and show the haters are repressively backwards in their thinking who don’t understand the changing evolving society. Hugs
Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, is rolling back its diversity, equity and inclusion policies, joining a growing list of major corporations that have done the same after coming under attack by conservative activists.
The changes, confirmed by Walmart on Monday, are sweeping and include everything from not renewing a five-year commitment for an equity racial center set up in 2020 after the police killing of George Floyd, to pulling out of a prominent gay rights index. And when it comes to race or gender, Walmart won’t be giving priority treatment to suppliers.
Walmart’s moves underscore the increasing pressure faced by corporate America as it continues to navigate the fallout from the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in June 2023 ending affirmative action in college admissions. Emboldened by that decision, conservative groups have filed lawsuits making similar arguments about corporations, targeting workplace initiatives such as diversity programs and hiring practices that prioritize historically marginalized groups.
Separately, conservative political commentator and activist Robby Starbuck has been going after corporate DEI policies, calling out individual companies on the social media platform X. Several of those companies have subsequently announced that they are pulling back their initiatives, including Ford, Harley-Davidson, Lowe’s and Tractor Supply.
But Walmart, which employs 1.6 million workers in the U.S., is the largest one to do so.
“This is the biggest win yet for our movement to end wokeness in corporate America,” Starbuck wrote on X, adding that he had been in conversation with Walmart.
Walmart confirmed to The Associated Press that it will better monitor its third-party marketplace items to make sure they don’t feature sexual and transgender products aimed at minors. That would include chest binders intended for youth who are going through a gender change, the company said.
The Bentonville, Arkansas-based retailer will also be reviewing grants to Pride events to make sure it is not financially supporting sexualized content that may be unsuitable for kids. For example, the company wants to makes sure a family pavilion is not next to a drag show at a Pride event, the company said.
Additionally, Walmart will no longer consider race and gender as a litmus test to improve diversity when it offers supplier contracts. The company said it didn’t have quotas and will not do so going forward. It won’t be gathering demographic data when determining financing eligibility for those grants.
Walmart also said it wouldn’t renew a racial equity center that was established through a five-year, $100 million philanthropic commitment from the company with a mandate to, according to its website, “address the root causes of gaps in outcomes experienced by Black and African American people in education, health, finance and criminal justice systems.”
And it would stop participating in the Human Rights Campaign’s annual benchmark index that measures workplace inclusion for LGBTQ+ employees.
“We’ve been on a journey and know we aren’t perfect, but every decision comes from a place of wanting to foster a sense of belonging, to open doors to opportunities for all our associates, customers and suppliers and to be a Walmart for everyone,” the company said in a statement.
The changes come soon after an election win by former President Donald Trump, who has criticized DEI initiatives and surrounded himself with conservatives who hold similar views, including his former adviser Stephen Miller, who leads a group called America First Legal that has challenged corporate DEI policies. Trump named Miller to be the deputy chief of policy in his new administration.
A Walmart spokesperson said some of its policy changes have been in progress for a while. For example, it has been moving away from using the word DEI in job titles and communications and started to use the word “belonging.” It also started making changes to its supplier program in the aftermath of the Supreme Court affirmative action ruling.
Some have been urging companies to stick with their DEI policies. Last month, a group of Democrats in Congress appealed to the leaders of the Fortune 1000, saying that DEI efforts give everyone a fair chance at achieving the American dream.
The bible lessons were pushed by Jonathan Covey [photo], head of the anti-LGBTQ hate group Texas Values, which has appeared here multiple times in the past. In February 2015, on the tenth anniversary of the Texas state ban on same-sex marriage, Texas Values held a “banniversary” celebration complete with a cake-cutting ceremony. The actual tenth “banniversary” wasn’t until November 2015, but Texas Values held their little party months early because they rightly feared what the Supreme Court would ultimately rule in June of that year.
I had a classmate tell me that Dems would do better if we dropped the “whole bathroom thing.” I educated him that this was not a fight we chose and that trans people have been around for decades using the bathrooms they fit in best. It was Republicans that made it a “thing.”
All of the “hot button social issues” are issues created and kept alive by Republicans. People are just trying to live their lives, and the GQP decides they’re doing it wrong.
Look, I genuinely don’t care who is in the bathroom with me, but the law you’re proposing says the person on the left should use the women’s bathroom and the person on the right should use the men’s bathroom https://t.co/isL1hCofbIpic.twitter.com/drWWVnSyIL
A Trump supporting, anti-trans, anti-gay Republican was elected commissioner of the county where I grew up. He won despite being in jail on election night for a sexual assault in Vegas. It’s now come out that the woman he assaulted was his daughter. fox59.com/news/indycri…
Three wives, adultery with an employee, and an alleged sexual assault is what Jesus would want.
Appearing on a Christian nationalist podcast last night, Pete Hegseth said he's creating a system of "classical Christian schools" to provide recruits for an underground army that will eventually launch an "educational insurgency" across the nation. https://t.co/OnW3oNXoDfpic.twitter.com/dSb0RB8Y5Q
Failure to provide anything close to real, immediate funding for Helene recovery is appalling. Instead, the GOP legislature used financial crumbs to cover for massive power grabs.https://t.co/dsAwcASthH
I spent today with local leaders, business owners, and volunteers in western North Carolina. Many people and communities are hurting and need our help. But instead of stepping up, the Republicans in the General Assembly are grabbing power and exacting political retribution. How…
Notice the similarity to US politicians? See how he lied to gin up outrage over the idea of woke left taking away a right of prayer from the people. It was a lie that he repeated to stir anger and win votes. Hugs
House Democrats are brushing off Republican attacks on Rep.-elect Sarah McBride after some GOP members made clear they would attempt to keep McBride from using the women’s restrooms in the Capitol. That’s because McBride told them to.
By Tuesday morning, Democrats had a clear message: Republican attacks on trans people were a distraction from other issues. Sources told NOTUS that McBride had made obvious in meetings that she wanted her colleagues to talk about policy — and what Republicans weren’t doing — instead.
The congresswoman-elect, one lawmaker said, reiterated that Republicans’ messaging was a “distraction” and that this isn’t “her first rodeo” dealing with anti-trans rhetoric. Another House Democrat said they’ve personally talked “extensively” with McBride and “she doesn’t want to be seen as a victim.”
Our incoming president elect remains butthurt over a Vanity Fair article (small hands) from over 30 years ago.
McBride brushes off direct personal attacks and wants us to focus on policy. Our incoming president wants SNL taken off the air because they told jokes.
In 2018 Virginia’s Danica Roem was the first out trans person elected to any state legislature, as a Delegate. Last year she was elected as a state Senator, and when that happened she became the second in the US to be elected to a state Senate, after Sarah McBride’s election in 2020. Interesting both mid-Atlantic, soon everywhere hopefully.
Greene and her ilk are beyond pathetic. As it happens, I’ve worked with and written about more than a usual share of trans people.
Their journeys and, in some cases, what they’ve endured to live their lives authentically and with joy are far greater than this.
McBride can let them spin in the sewer of their ignorance, immaturity, and hatred while McBride focuses on being a grownup. I applaud her response, and I have to say I’m not the least bit surprised.
The problem is that Democrats can’t avoid talking about trans people because Republicans won’t let us. We aren’t bringing it up. I don’t think it’s a big issue. Yes, it affects trans people but no one else is harmed by a small percentage of our population being treated fairly and decently.
Texas is a good example. Ted Cruz made trans girls playing sports a core issue in the campaign. Allred tried to avoid that topic but had to address it. And it didn’t matter. Never mind that Cruz used images of cis-gendered girls from Oregon in his ad because this is just not a problem in Texas. Nope. That’s not scary enough for the knuckle-dragging redneck assholes that show up to vote in Texas.
I agree we shouldn’t bring it up, but it’s naive to think that it’s an issue we can just ignore because Republicans are not going to shut up about it because they think it helped them in this year. Look for several more rounds of this shit. Trans girls in sports is the new gay marriage.
Scottie's Playtime 