September 10, 1897 Nineteen unarmed striking coal miners were killed and 36 more wounded in Lattimer (near Hazleton), Pennsylvania, for refusing to disperse, by a posse organized by the Luzerne County sheriff. The strikers, most of whom were shot in the back, were originally brought in as strike-breakers, but later created their own union. The background and details
September 10, 1963 Twenty black students entered public schools in Birmingham, Tuskegee and Mobile, Alabama. The Governor George C. Wallace had ordered Alabama state troopers to stop the federal court-ordered integration of Alabama’s elementary and high schools. President John Kennedy responded by calling out the Alabama National Guard to protect the students and to see the order enforced. President Kennedy spoke that day at American University’s commencement, saying, “Peace need not be impractical, war not inevitable . . . There is not peace in many of our cities because there is not freedom.”
September 10, 1996 Sheryl Crow’s second album was banned from Wal-Mart stores because the song she co-wrote with Tad Wadhams, “Love Is A Good Thing” opens with “Watch out sister, watch out brother, Watch our children while they kill each other With a gun they bought at Wal-Mart discount stores….” Read more about this eventand an update
As a reminder, Trump has publicly floated Loomer to be his next White House press secretary and he has reposted hundreds of her tweets on Truth Social.
Molson Coors joins Ford, Harley Davidson, Lowes, Tractor Supply, John Deere, and the maker of Jack Daniel’s in retreating from diversity and pro-LGBTQ programs.
Coors beer, once the subject of a nationwide boycott by gay bars over its founder’s anti-LGBTQ stance, has been prominent at Pride events in recent years. Last year, for example, Coors Light was the main sponsor of Denver Pride despite attacks by the cult.
In 2015, when the company was called MillerCoors, its chairman and then-US Senate candidate Pete Coors, dropped out of a speaking gig at the convention of Legatus, the ex-gay and pro-ex-gay torture Catholic group, after widespread criticism.
The company’s current brands include Coors, Coors Light, Blue Moon, Icehouse, Miller, Miller Light, Keystone, Molson, and dozens of others.
Barbara Gittings was a lover of books. She realized, from a young age, that she also loved girls. So when, in 1949, she left Wilmington, Delaware to attend Northwestern University, she did what any bookish young lesbian would do: research homosexuality in the school’s library. What Gittings found was not comforting. The vast majority of sources were written by medical professionals and described homosexuality as an illness or a perversion. She became so consumed with spending time in various Chicago libraries that she neglected her coursework and flunked out of school. But as a result of the discouraging information she found, an activist was born. With passion, determination, and what she would come to refer to as “gay gumption,” Gittings would spend the rest of her life working, in various ways, to correct those lies she found in the pages of books and scientific journals on the library shelves.
Gittings moved to Philadelphia in 1950 and supported herself with part-time clerical work. She continued to read everything she could find on homosexuality and, as part of her search, discovered Donald Webster Cory’s The Homosexual in America: A Subjective Approach, originally published in 1951. Gittings was particularly impressed with Cory’s arguments that gays and lesbians constituted a large unrecognized minority who deserved civil rights and his attempts to cultivate empathy in his readers by outlining the difficulties faced by American homosexuals. She wrote to Cory’s publisher and discovered he lived in New York City. The two met on several occasions, and Cory informed Gittings of a newly-formed gay organization in Los Angeles: the Mattachine Society, founded in 1950 by Harry Hay.
In the summer of 1956, when she was on vacation from her office job, Gittings boarded a plane to Los Angeles and visited the office of ONE, Inc., a homophile organization who had amicably split from the Mattachine Society in 1952. The members of ONE, Inc. informed her of the existence of a San Francisco-based organization for lesbians, the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), founded in 1955 by lesbian partners Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon.
Gittings once again boarded a plane, this time bound for San Francisco. The DOB were, fatefully, having a meeting that very evening in a member’s apartment. The meeting was the first time in her life Gittings would interact with a group of lesbians outside of a bar setting. Two years later, in 1958, Gittings officially joined the DOB and was tapped by Martin and Lyon to start an East Coast chapter of the organization based in New York City. With her co-founder, Marion Glass, Gittings built the chapter into the largest in the country.
In 1963, Gittings, whose enthusiasm and knowledge of literature left an impression on Martin and Lyon, was tapped to be the editor of The Ladder, the DOB’s national magazine for gay women. Gittings transformed The Ladder from what was essentially a newsletter to a national magazine respected within gay circles. With the help of her partner, Kay “Tobin” Lahusen, whom she met in 1961 at a DOB picnic in Rhode Island, Gittings replaced the amateurish illustrations that typically adorned the cover of The Ladder with photographs taken by Lahusen of actual lesbians who appeared confident and happy.
Gittings began to take The Ladder in an increasingly militant direction, reporting on protests, questioning the merits of various activist strategies such as picketing, and engaging in debates with so-called “experts,” arguing that homosexuality was a social and cultural problem, not a psychological problem. The activist bent of The Ladder under Gittings’ editorship alarmed the West Coast leadership of the DOB. When Gittings, amidst her many activities on behalf of gay rights, was late with the August 1966 issue, Martin and Lyon used her tardiness as an excuse to oust her as editor.
Gittings would also find a kindred spirit in Frank Kameny, who she credited as the first person to articulate a fully coherent philosophy of gay rights. She and Lahusen partnered with Mattachine Washington, of which Kameny was a co-founder, working alongside other lesbians and gay men to directly challenge the federal government. Gittings participated in the first picket of the White House for homosexual rights on April 17th of 1965.
Gittings worked with Kameny and other activists to lobby the American Psychiatric Association (APA) to remove homosexuality as a diagnostic category from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM). At the APA’s 1972 conference, held in Dallas, Texas, Gittings, Kameny, and Lahusen created a display entitled “Gay, Proud, and Healthy: The Homosexual Community Speaks.” The exhibit, which featured photographs of gay couples taken by Lahusen, was adorned with the word “LOVE” in bold letters and portrayed gay people as healthy and happy, not as patients who were tormented and in need of a cure. In December of 1973, the APA board of trustees voted to pass a resolution to remove homosexuality from the DSM, effectively declassifying it as a mental illness.
Gittings was a lifelong bibliophile, and though she recognized the importance of taking on the federal government and institutions such as the APA, she never lost sight of the “lies in the libraries” she discovered as a college freshman and the importance of gay representation. In 1970, she joined the American Library Association’s (ALA) newly-formed Task Force on Gay Liberation (TFGL). The TFGL, whose mission was to provide support for gay librarians within the profession and increase gay representation in libraries, was glad to have a veteran activist like Gittings join their ranks.
With the help of Israel Fishman, the first coordinator of the TFGL, Gittings organized a gay kissing booth — titled “Hug-a-Homosexual: Free Kisses” — for the 1971 ALA conference in Dallas, Texas. While the group could have created a nice display featuring gay books, periodicals, and their bibliography, they instead decided to make their presence known by showing gay love live. The publicity was better than Gittings and the TFGL could have imagined, and continued to spark discussions within the ALA over the next year.
In 1999, in honor of her contributions to create more visibility for gays and lesbians in libraries and in the profession, Gittings was awarded a lifetime membership at the annual ALA conference, held that year in New Orleans, Louisiana. The ALA also named an award after Gittings as part of their Stonewall Book Awards, sponsored by the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Round Table (GLBTRT), the contemporary iteration of the TFGL. The Stonewall Book Award-Barbara Gittings Literature Award is given annually for works of fiction that exhibit “exceptional merit relating to the LGBT experience.”
Barbara Gittings died on February 18th, 2007 at the age of 74 after a long battle with breast cancer. In a 1999 interview with American Libraries magazine, she summarized her career as a gay activist with the wit and wisdom she was known for:
“As a teenager, I had to struggle alone to learn about myself and what it meant to be gay. Now for 48 years I’ve had the satisfaction of working with other gay people all across the country to get the bigots off our backs, to oil the closet door hinges, to change prejudiced hearts and minds, and to show that gay love is good for us and for the rest of the world too. It’s hard work — but it’s vital, and it’s gratifying, and it’s often fun!”
(Now that things have calmed down media-wise, and there is solid information, here’s a post. I’m glad to see the parent and gun owner held accountable; for this, and always. I am never in favor of charging a minor as an adult, though there should be consequences laced heavily with rehabilitation. But the parent and gun owner should be fully responsible because they’re actual adults, and the parents (some child shooters will not have parents, so this goes to the caregiver.) Gun owners should always know that their guns are secure, and tell law enforcement when they’re not secure. Others’s mileage with these things may vary, and you’re welcome to chime in!)
Colin Gray faces four involuntary manslaughter, two second-degree murder and eight cruelty to children counts
The father of the teen suspected in the Georgia school shooting has been arrested, the Georgia bureau of investigation has said.
Colin Gray, 54, was arrested by the bureau in connection to the shooting at Apalachee high school. Colin is the father of Colt Gray, the 14-year-old who is suspected of fatally shooting two students and two teachers with an assault-style rifle at the high school on Wednesday.
He is charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter, two counts of second degree murder and eight counts of cruelty to children, the Georgia bureau said.
“His charges are directly connected with the actions of his son and allowing him to possess a weapon,” Chris Hosey, director of the Georgia bureau of investigations, told reporters on Thursday evening.
“What are we facing? Heartbreak. A young person brought a gun into a school, committed an evil act and took lives, and injured people not just physically but mentally,” said the Barrow county sheriff, Jud Smith, during the news conference.
The teenager has been charged as an adult in the deaths of the school students Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, both 14, and educators Richard Aspinwall, 39, and Christina Irimie, 53, Hosey said.
At least nine other people – seven students and two teachers – were taken to hospitals with injuries and all are expected to make a full recovery, Smith said.
Colin Gray is being held at the Barrow county detention center.
More than a year ago, the alleged shooter was interviewed by Georgia police after they received tips about online posts threatening a school shooting. Police did not have enough probable cause to arrest him then, according to the Georgia bureau of investigation.
In that 2023 inquiry, the father said he had hunting guns in the house but that his son did not have unsupervised access to them, and the son denied making the threats online, the FBI said.
Georgia state and Barrow county investigators say the younger Gray used an “AR platform style weapon”, or semiautomatic rifle, to carry out the attack in which two teachers and two 14-year-old students were killed.
It remained unclear how the shooter obtained the weapon.
Investigators have yet to comment on what may have motivated the first US campus mass shooting since the start of the school year.
Jackson county sheriff’s investigators closed the case after being unable to substantiate that either Gray was connected to the Discord account where the threats were made, and did not find grounds to seek the needed court order to confiscate the family’s guns, according to police reports released by the sheriff’s office on Thursday.
“This case was worked, and at the time the boy was 13, and it wasn’t enough to substantiate,” Janis Mangum, the Jackson county sheriff, said in an interview. “If we get a judge’s order or we charge somebody, we take firearms for safekeeping.”
The younger Gray was taken into custody shortly after the shooting and was being held without bond at the Gainesville regional youth detention center, Glenn Allen, the Georgia department of juvenile justice communications director, said on Thursday.
His arraignment is set for Friday morning before a Georgia superior court judge in Barrow county by video camera.
While parents are not usually held criminally liable if their child shoots someone, recent high-profile events are evidence that they could face charges in the future. In November 2023, Deja Taylor of Virginia was sentenced to 21 months on two federal charges after her then six-year-old son shot his teacher in January.
The elder Gray’s arrest also comes months after the unprecedented conviction of the parents of a Michigan high school student who shot and killed four students on 30 November. In February, Jennifer Crumbley was convicted on four counts of involuntary manslaughter. The next month, her husband, James Crumbley, was convicted on the same charges. The pair was sentenced to serve at least 10 years in prison.
“I didn’t really think about what precedent it was setting,” Karen McDonald, the prosecutor for Oakland county who brought the case against the Crumbleys, told CNN on Thursday. “If nothing else I would’ve hoped that the highly publicized details of this case would steer parents and make them think twice.”
“It’s enraging that this could still happen when it’s so easily preventable,” she continued.
This article was amended on 6 September 2024. An early version said Deja Taylor was sentenced to 21 years, not 21 months.
Benjamin Netanyahu is as obtuse as Donald Trump Read on Substack
Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth has revealed that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu killed a ceasefire and hostage release agreement last July. The report is based on a document the newspaper obtained. Bibi killed the deal by proposing a raft of new demands at the 11th hour.
Among those demands was that Israel retain control of the Egypt-Gaza border area – a condition Netanyahu has since portrayed as non-negotiable, including at a press conference on Wednesday.
Last week, the Israeli Defense Force found six dead Israeli hostages. Yedioth Ahronoth also reported that at least three of the six hostages, Carmel Gat, Aden Yerushalmi, and Hersh Goldberg-Polin were due for release as part of the May draft agreement.
The other three hostages murdered are Ori Danino, Almog Sarusi, and Alex Lobanov.
An Israeli source familiar with the talks said Netanyahu’s demands were to blame for the deaths of the hostages over the weekend. Netanyahu, who’s already a war criminal wanted by the International Criminal Court, is responsible for the deaths of at least 40,000 Palestinians. I have to look the number up every time I write about this because it keeps rising.
Much like Vladimir Putin, Netanyahu bombs civilian targets.
The inside source told CNN that when Netanyahu put the obstacles up and said no to the deal, “The hostages died because he insisted.”
The Hostages Families Forum said the deaths are a “direct result of Netanyahu’s thwarting of the deals.”
Donald Trump does not care about people who died for our nation. When he visited Arlinton National Cemetary, he stood next to graves for a political photo-op of him giving his patented thumbs-up. Trump saw dead soldiers as a tool for his campaign.
Netanyahu, who’s as fascist, corrupt, heartless, and as selfish as Trump, sees dead hostages as a tool for his campaign…his campaign of war. Bibi refuses to end this war. In the current round of ceasefire negotiations, one of Bibi’s demands is that he can resume indiscriminately bombing Gaza anytime he wants. It’s a ceasefire for only one side to cease firing.
Hamas is a terrorist organization. We can’t forget that they’re murderers and kidnappers. There wouldn’t be any hostages to negotiate for if Hamas hadn’t kidnapped them. But we also can’t forget that Hamas is NOT Palestine. Palestinian civilians shouldn’t be cannon fodder for Netanyahu.
When Hamas attacked Israel on October 7 last year, it was a gift for Netanyahu.
Drawn in 30 seconds: (go watch it on his page, linked here and up above.)
Starlink, the satellite broadband company led by Elon Musk, said on Tuesday that it would comply with a court order and block access to X in Brazil. It marked yet another surprising twist in a wild saga that has been simmering all year but boiled over this weekend when a Brazilian judge single-handedly moved to ban X in the country.
Today let’s talk about how a personality clash between two powerful men led to tens of millions of Brazilians being prevented from accessing X — and how the move could be used to justify further restrictions on internet freedom around the world.
In April, I wrote here about how Musk had decided to risk a ban of X in Brazil over a court’s order that the platform ban a number of accounts belonging to right-wing users. Musk decided to restore the accounts in defiance of a powerful Supreme Court justice named Alexandre de Moraes, who subsequently opened an inquiry into the billionaire.
Musk, who has said he bought Twitter to turn the platform into a bulwark of free speech, positioned the move as a defense of liberty against an extremist government. Moraes, for his part, called Musk an “outlaw” whose X would “allow the massive spread of disinformation, hate speech and attacks on the democratic rule of law, violating the free choice of the electorate, by keeping voters away from real and accurate information.”
After Musk’s April outburst, X quickly reversed course, and said it would comply with the judge’s order. But the accounts that Moraes sought to terminate remained active, and last month X said he threatened to arrest a local employee for the platform’s failure to comply with his order. (The court wouldn’t comment, but threatening platform employees with jail time is an increasingly common and typically quite effective means of allowing government agents to moderate content as they see fit.)
Typically, threatening an employee with jail is all it takes to get a company to reverse course. Musk, on the other hand, said X would close its offices in Brazil.
In a highly unusual move, Justice Moraes also said that any person in Brazil who tried to still use X via common privacy software called a virtual private network, or VPN, could be fined nearly $9,000 a day.
Justice Moraes also froze the finances of a second Musk business in Brazil, SpaceX’s Starlink satellite-internet service, to try to collect $3 million in fines he has levied against X. Starlink — which has recently exploded in popularity in Brazil, with more than 250,000 customers — said that it planned to fight the order and would make its service free in Brazil if necessary.
Moreover, while he quickly reversed course, Moraes initially ordered Apple and Google to block X at the level of the app store in Brazil, as well as blocking VPN apps that let users circumvent geographic barriers to app usage.
While moves like these are common in authoritarian countries such as Russia or China, they are extraordinary to see in democracies, which typically place a higher value on free expression.
What makes the story of Brazil and X such an unusual tech policy story is the way it has been driven almost entirely by two people.
On one side is Musk, who has often claimed the mantle of free speech warrior in public while capitulating to government requests in private. One analysis last year found that under Musk, X had given into 83 percent of requests from authoritarian governments to remove content. And he appears more willing to accede to the requests of right-wing governments, such as India’s.
In 2021, it seemed possible that India would be the first democracy to ban Twitter, after the company fought court orders to remove political dissent — including from left-wing opponents to the government of Narendra Modi. But relations have warmed between Musk and the Modi government since he stopped fighting those battles.
“The rules in India for what can appear on social media are quite strict, and we can’t go beyond the laws of a country,” Musk told the BBC last year. “If we have a choice of either our people go to prison or we comply with the laws, we will comply with the laws.” At another point in the interview, Musk said: “If people of a given country are against a certain type of speech, they should talk to their elected representatives and pass a law to prevent it.”
Brazil once again gave Musk the choice of sending an employee to prison or complying with its laws. This time, he chose not to comply.
Musk’s defiance likely would have sparked a backlash in most countries where X operates. But he has found a particularly pugnacious opponent in Moraes, a hugely powerful and controversial figure within Brazilian politics who came to prominence during the tenure of former president Jair Bolsonaro. Bolsonaro, a Trump-like figure who threatened to undermine Brazil’s democracy, lost the 2022 election and left office after a violent riot at the capitol by his supporters last year.
Both during and since Bolsonaro’s presidency, Moraes has used the unusual powers of his office to order people arrested over their social media posts, account bans on the platforms where they posted, and even temporarily removing a governor from office. At X, he has sought the removal of at least 140 accounts, the Times reported, and often delivers his orders in sealed documents that do not specify any rationale for his decision.
Moraes is not the first government agent to make overbroad legal requests of a tech platform. Google, Meta, and other companies receive thousands of requests like these every year, and disclose them in aggregate in annual transparency reports. The reason they publish those reports is to serve as a check on governments that seek to abuse their power by seeking information from platforms for surveillance and other potentially problematic uses.
Crucially, Google and Meta also fight against overbroad requests in court. Sometimes, they win. The result is a kind of dance between platforms and governments that leaves everyone at least somewhat disappointed but is also the reason that so many people around the world can speak freely online.
I don’t post on X any more myself, and I will not lament its passing when it disappears. But whatever role the 140 X accounts in question in Brazil may have played in threatening Brazil’s democracy, they cannot have threatened it more than silencing the 20 million or so Brazilians who have been using it regularly. Particularly when Brazil’s move will be seen by autocracies as justification to enact ever more onerous speech restrictions of their own.
Like Pavel Durov before him, Musk appears to have thought he could escape the reach of regulators indefinitely. This weekend, he began to learn the same lesson Durov has: you can’t outrun the legal system forever. Had Musk fought for his users in court earlier, he might have avoided a ban. Instead, as he has before in so many other things, Musk chose to do it the hard way.
Defendants Are Senior Leaders of Hamas Responsible for Planning, Supporting, and Perpetrating Hamas’s October 7 Terrorist Attacks in Israel Resulting in the Brutal Murders of More Than a Thousand Innocent Civilians, Including Over 40 American Citizens
The Justice Department announced today the unsealing of terrorism, murder conspiracy, and sanctions-evasion charges against six senior leaders of Hamas, a designated foreign terrorist organization. The charges relate to the defendants’ central roles in planning, supporting, and perpetrating the terrorist atrocities that Hamas committed in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 (the October 7 Hamas Massacres), involving the murders and kidnappings of countless innocent civilians, including American citizens, which was the culmination of Hamas’s decades-long campaign of terrorism and violence against Israel and its allies, including American citizens. The defendants are either deceased or remain at large.
“The Justice Department has charged Yahya Sinwar and other senior leaders of Hamas for financing, directing, and overseeing a decades-long campaign to murder American citizens and endanger the national security of the United States,” said Attorney General Merrick B. Garland. “On October 7th, Hamas terrorists, led by these defendants, murdered nearly 1200 people, including over 40 Americans, and kidnapped hundreds of civilians. This weekend, we learned that Hamas murdered an additional six people they had kidnapped and held captive for nearly a year, including Hersh Goldberg-Polin, a 23 year old Israeli American. We are investigating Hersh’s murder, and each and every one of Hamas’ brutal murders of Americans, as an act of terrorism. The charges unsealed today are just one part of our effort to target every aspect of Hamas’ operations. These actions will not be our last.”
“Yahya Sinwar and the other senior leaders of Hamas are charged today with orchestrating this terrorist organization’s decades-long campaign of mass violence and terror — including on October 7th. On that horrible day, Hamas terrorists viciously massacred nearly 1,200 innocent men, women, and children, including over 40 Americans, kidnapped hundreds more, and used sexual violence as a weapon of brutality,” said Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco. “Since that horrific day, we have worked to investigate and hold accountable those responsible, and we will not rest until all those who kidnapped or murdered Americans are brought to justice. Our thoughts continue to be with the families of all the victims of this barbaric terrorist attack.”
“From the moment Hamas launched its horrific attack on October 7, the FBI has been dedicated to identifying and charging those responsible for these heinous crimes,” said FBI Director Christopher Wray. “The FBI has and will continue to relentlessly investigate these attacks on civilians, including Americans. Hamas is a Foreign Terrorist Organization with a long history of violence, and the group’s actions have resulted in increased terrorism threats in the U.S. and against American interests throughout the world. Countering terrorism remains our number one priority, and our work continues.”
“The core mission of the National Security Division is to protect Americans from violent terrorists and extremist organizations like Hamas,” said Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen of the Justice Department’s National Security Division. “The atrocities committed by Hamas in Israel on October 7 are intolerable, and the Justice Department will not rest in our pursuit to hold Hamas accountable for perpetrating its campaign of terror, death, and destruction.”
“For decades, Hamas and its leadership have dedicated themselves to the eradication of the State of Israel, and to murdering, maiming, and brutalizing anyone — including dozens of Americans — who stood in their way,” said U.S. Attorney Damian Williams for the Southern District of New York. “The October 7 Hamas Massacres – in which over 40 American citizens were murdered – is only the latest act of savagery carried out by Hamas. This office has long been dedicated to serving as a bulwark against terrorism, and striking blows against its leaders. Our commitment is clear: if you hurt one member of our community, you hurt all of us — and we stand with all victims of Hamas’ reign of terror. We will bring justice to this terrorist organization from the top down for the atrocities they have committed.”
According to court documents, Harakat al-Muqawamah al-Islamiyya, commonly known as Hamas, is a terrorist organization that was founded in 1987, and has been designated as a foreign terrorist organization (FTO) by the United States since 1997. From its inception, Hamas’ stated purpose has been to create an Islamic Palestinian state throughout Israel by eliminating the State of Israel through violent holy war, or jihad. Hamas also promotes attacks against the U.S. and its citizens and, over more than two decades, Hamas has murdered and injured dozens of Americans as part of its campaign of violence and terror. (snip-More)
About a month before Arizona’s July primary, Pima County Recorder Gabriella Cázares-Kelly and her older sister Elisa Cázares were driving around Three Points, a rural community between Tucson and where they grew up on the Tohono O’odham Nation, dropping off flyers for the recorder’s reelection campaign. Some 5,000 people live in Three Points, which leans conservative. The properties, an assortment of mobile homes and ranch-style houses, are separated by chain link fences, but their yards blend into the Sonoran desert landscape of mesquite trees, saguaros and chollas.
They stopped at a trailer whose address popped up on a canvassing app on Cázares-Kelly’s phone, programmed to scan voter rolls and identify homes of registered Democrats who voted in the last election. Old Volkswagens were rusting in the yard. There was a “beware dog” sign attached to the fence. No one came out to greet them, so Cázares-Kelly left her campaign materials wedged outside. Her sister made a note of it on the phone as a “lit drop.”
At the second stop, Cázares-Kelly — dressed in tennis shoes, distressed jeans and a black shirt that says “Elect Indigenous Women” in big white letters — had just tucked fliers under a car’s windshield wiper when a little girl opened the door of the house, followed by a woman sporting a slightly wary expression.
“Hi. My name is Gabriella. I’m actually the county recorder. I’m running for reelection and just sharing some information about my campaign,” Cázares-Kelly said warmly through the fence, the sun beating down on her long black hair.
Cázares-Kelly, who is Pima’s first Indigenous person to hold a countywide seat, quickly explained that part of her job is to be responsible for early voting, mail-in voting and voter registration. She was there soliciting voters for herself and also canvassing for her best friend April Ignacio, who was running for a Pima County Board of Supervisors seat. They grew up together on the Tohono O’odham Nation and got into politics to bring more rural and Indigenous representation to a county where about 4 percent of the residents identify as Indigenous and whose votes could help decide a closely-contested November election in a battleground state.
Over the loud barks of two dogs, the woman explained that she can’t vote because she has felonies on her record. Cázares-Kelly’s demeanor shifted as she began talking about her favorite subject: voting rights. She told the woman about a free legal clinic provided by the county’s public defenders where she might be able to restore her voting rights and that all the information is on the recorder’s website.
“Oh really?” the woman responded, her eyes lighting up. “That’s the only reason I haven’t is because it costs so much money.”
“They’ll help you fill out the paperwork,” Cázares-Kelly said reassuringly.
Cázares-Kelly headed back to the car and reported to her sister about the possible voter education win. “That was cool,” she said.
Her sister noted the interaction in the app and looked for the next address.
Most stops resulted in lit drops at homes whose residents don’t seem to trust strangers walking up to their doors. At one, Cázares-Kelly was already on the front steps when the word “shotgun” on a sign caught her eye. She turned to the Ring camera and explained why she was there before briskly getting off the porch, entering the car and telling her sister to book it.
To Cázares-Kelly, each conversation feels like a small victory. It’s rare to have politicians canvas in these harder-to-reach communities, including those on Indigenous lands; almost everyone perks up once she explains who she is and what she’s doing.
Gabriella Cázares-Kelly goes through old Pima County records at her offices in Tucson, Arizona. (Ash Ponders for The 19th)
She doesn’t really need to get the vote out to be reelected; in solidly Democratic Pima County, it’s extremely unlikely that a Republican would flip her seat. But as a member of the Tohono O’odham Nation, whose broad territory extends along 62 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border, she knows the obstacles to participating in elections. It’s the whole reason she ran in 2020: to represent people who were being ignored by the democratic system and denied the right to vote.
But Indigenous voters can swing election results in this battleground state, home to 22 federally recognized tribes. In 2020, President Joe Biden won Arizona by just 10,457 votes. That year, Democrats garnered 10,657 more votes from inside Native American reservations than they had in 2016.
Now, as a presidential election draws near, Cázares-Kelly is working to ensure that every eligible resident has a chance to cast their ballot.
At one of the last homes she approached that day, an older woman named Ann Gail opened the front gate to chat, her eyes shielded by dark sunglasses. She said she stopped believing in mail-in ballots after the fake narrative of a stolen election pushed by former President Donald Trump and his Republican allies took hold in 2020. When it comes to her own ballot, she said, “I feel like it needs to be counted and I need to see it.”
Cázares-Kelly tried to reassure her. “Vote by mail is very safe,” she said. “But I absolutely respect your decision to vote on Election Day.”
“As an elected official, and as a candidate, we need people to trust in the system and to recognize it’s non-partisan,” Cázares-Kelly continued. “Today I’m here on a partisan basis, but when I’m working, it is not partisan. It is about everybody voting.”
Gail assured her that she’ll be voting and will “get everybody in my neighborhood” to vote, too,” she said. “It’s so important. My grandson turns 18 in July, and I’ve told him, ‘You have to vote.’”
Cázares-Kelly jokes that she got into voting rights work by accident. In 2016, she was an academic adviser at the Tohono O’odham Community College when her friend and colleague Daniel Sestiaga, a member of the Fort Yuma Quechan Indian Tribe, approached her about a favor. He had been recruited by the American Indian Higher Education Consortium, which represents the interests of tribal colleges across the country, to register students to vote. He asked Cázares-Kelly if she could help. She knew all the students by name and was “just like a changemaker on campus,” he said.
On the first registration day, Sestiaga got pulled into a meeting, so Cázares-Kelly had to do the work by herself. Despite not having any training, she thought, “It’s probably not that hard. I’ve registered myself and other people. Like, it’ll be fine.”
Instead, she recalled, “It turned out to be really hard.”
One of the challenges is that voter registration isn’t set up for the realities of tribal land. “The problem on the reservation is if you’re asked for your physical address, you just kind of make it up,” she said. “Because there is nothing you can really reference.” Instead of a street name, one might describe where they live in relation to a landmark or a mile marker. For example, the college’s address was Highway 86, milepost 125-and-a-half, she said.
The form also includes a spot to draw where you live. “Well, my nation is the size of Connecticut,” Cázares-Kelly said. “Are you asking for the shape of my nation and a star? Like, what are you looking for here?”
All of this can create confusion for residents who sometimes just list their PO boxes, which don’t count as physical addresses. That will delay their registration, Cázares-Kelly said.
Non-native students had issues, too, particularly if they were from out of state. Some students didn’t have driver’s licenses. “Every single person’s situation was so completely different,” she said. “It ended up being incredibly complex.”
She took her questions to the office of then-recorder F. Ann Rodriguez. She had so many that, at one point, she bumped her sister’s number off her speed dial list and replaced it with the number for Rodriguez’s office.
And the work was just beginning. “People started getting the voter registration cards back, getting their voter IDs in the mail, and they were so excited to show me or thank me for helping them register,” she said. But then it became, “My mom wants to register now, my auntie, my boyfriend, my uncle. How do I get them a form?” Cázares-Kelly realized she didn’t know. “It was like I pulled a thread from a sweater and all of a sudden this sweater started unraveling.”
One of the things she learned is that the post office on the reservation should have voter registration forms available, but hadn’t stocked them in years. “Having no influence and no title and no anything, I reached out to the postmaster, I reached out to the recorder’s office, and I connected the two,” she said. Soon, the forms were where they should have been all along.
Cázares-Kelly’s voting advocacy quickly turned into an obsession, Sestiaga said. One day, he recalled, “We were cruising through the village on a lunch break or something and she said, ‘If there was a way that I could make a full-time job out of getting people registered to vote, I would do it.’” Teasing her, he told her she’d just have to become the next county recorder. “She was like, ‘Get out of here! Like, I have no interest in politics. I have no interest in campaigning.’”
But she also recognized there was a need for better outreach, particularly on the Nation, he said. So when Rodriguez announced in 2019 that she was going to retire after 28 years of service, it felt a little bit like fate to Sestiago. A lot of other people who knew Cázares-Kelly had a feeling she would go for the seat. “I remember seeing that headline, and I just thought to myself, ‘Oh my goodness, she’s going to run for this,’” her husband, Ryan Kelly, said.
Cázares-Kelly wasn’t sold yet. She was, first and foremost, an educator. She had no desire to be a politician, and the thought of raising campaign money made her uncomfortable.
But it nagged at her how long it had taken to build a relationship with the current recorder’s office. She thought about having to do that all over again once Rodriguez left office. And what if the new recorder was anti-Native? “I was worried,” she said. “Eventually, I recognized that I care about this office and I understand a lot about the needs that are not being met, and I have a sense of duty to at least try.”
Gabriella Cázares-Kelly works in her office in Tucson, Arizona. (Ash Ponders for The 19th)A wall displays framed portraits of Pima County Recorders, including Cázares-Kelly, at her offices. (Ash Ponders for The 19th)
She launched her campaign in 2020, right at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. That meant having to canvass neighborhoods with social distancing measures in place, doing no-contact lit drops and outreach through Zoom forums and virtual fundraisers.
Worse, a candidate who wanted to win her community would need to do a lot of driving — and her car was having engine problems. She needed money to get back on the road. When she was registering voters, she sold banana bread to pay for gas. But fixing the car would take a much bigger sum, and she felt bad asking for money from people who might not have any to spare. A friend assuaged her guilt: “I think you’re saying, ‘Hey, community, I’ve invested in you,’” she recalls him telling her. “Now you’re asking, ‘Can you invest in me?’”
She set up a GoFundMe for $3,500 and quickly met the goal. “It was just shocking to me that people would give me money,” she said. But it didn’t surprise her husband, a former teacher who is now a labor organizer with the AFL-CIO. Because she never wanted to get into politics, she had won community support just by being herself, he said. “Gabby walked into the race already having so many meaningful community relationships,” he said.
Those ties had deepened in 2017, when she, her longtime friend April Ignacio and a few others co-founded an advocacy organization called Indivisible Tohono. They have organized everything from sock drives to candidate forums to Pride events on the Nation.
That network of friends was ready to spread the word about her campaign. It helped that she made a TikTok video that went viral, showing her speeding by the National Mall in Washington, D.C. on an electric scooter while wearing a traditional red dress and yelling, “Excuse me, I’m Indigenous, coming through!” That moment became part of her campaign slogan and bumper sticker design.
So when Election Day came, her supporters were hopeful that she might have a shot. “We had a good group of people who are really all rooted in the community,” her husband said. “I think we quietly suspected that it was going to be a landslide victory.”
And they were right. She beat her opponent by more than 80,000 votes.
Ignacio said it was a barrier-breaking moment for Cázares-Kelly. “As a rez girl growing up, we didn’t have the idea that we could do this. We didn’t have people in our community who were doing things like this,” she recalled. “For me to watch my best friend make history, it’s still very emotional. And I think that she’s the star who she’s always been.”
Cázares-Kelly followed the canvassing in Three Points with a Juneteenth event in Tucson, where she gave the land acknowledgment at the opening ceremony, recognizing tribes like her own that have stewarded the land. Then she stayed to mingle with the crowd. As she strolled by the booths — some selling lemonade, others representing the gun reform group Moms Demand Action and the African American Democratic Caucus — people stopped her to shake her hand and fangirl about meeting her.
She’s something of a local celebrity, which she didn’t expect as an elected official doing an administrative job. When she ran, “it wasn’t a sexy position,” she said. “Most people didn’t care about the recorder’s office.”
Two things contributed to her popularity. One is that Cázares-Kelly, despite her initial shyness, is charismatic and funny and beloved by Pima County voters, who cast more votes for her than any other Democratic countywide candidate in the July primary. The other, a more somber reality, is that the 2020 election raised the profile of county recorders after the Trump administration spread unfounded conspiracy theories that votes in Arizona weren’t being counted.
That fundamentally changed how she had to run her office. She immediately created a communications team to counter disinformation and teach people how voting works. In May, they invited a small group of community members and journalists into a highly restricted part of the office to see how ballots are counted. She also recently hosted a series with the Pima County Interfaith Council, visiting five churches to talk about a “day in the life” of the ballot. She draws inspiration from educational programs like “Mr. Rogers” and the “How It’s Made” videos about crayons or peanut butter. “I think people just want to know those types of things,” she said.
She also uses social media to spread information about voting, tailoring the messages to the medium. Twitter is for journalists and other “nerds,” as she put it, so she tends to be wonkier there. Facebook and Instagram are for people like her sister, who don’t really care about the granularity of politics, but might be enticed if she can explain what her office does.
Pima County voters cast more votes for Cázares-Kelly than any other Democratic countywide candidate in the July primary. (Ash Ponders for The 19th)
“I think people have for a really long time been very dismissive of social media,” she said. “But we can very much see a parallel between what happens on Twitter and Instagram and what happens in person.” For example, she said, when Kari Lake, a far-right Republican who ran for governor in 2022 and is now running for the U.S. Senate, sent out a tweet suggesting ballot counting was being slow-rolled to prevent her from winning, “it results in physical phone calls to my office.”
Voter outreach will matter a lot this year, in what former recorder F. Ann Rodriguez describes as a “big election” for both the county and the nation. She points out that Pima is Arizona’s second most-populated county, after Maricopa, which happens to be one of the fastest-growing counties in the United States. And several hot-button issues will bring out voters: This year both abortion rights and the wages of restaurant workers are on the Arizona ballot.
For now, a lot of Cázares-Kelly’s work happens at events like this one, where she can answer questions in person. At the booth for NextGen America, which focuses on getting out the youth vote, she chatted about how the work was going and offered a pro tip learned from years of dealing with registration hassles: Instead of asking if someone is registered to vote, ask if they are registered at their current address. (Sometimes people move without updating it.)
Two booths down, at the Saavi Services for the Blind tent, she talked to Mohammed Falah about a tool called a ballot marking device — a machine that helps people with disabilities vote. It can read a ballot to a person through headphones, offers functions for large print or color contrast and has a controller that people with hand mobility issues can use to select their voting option. She said her office would be happy to demonstrate it for his organization.
The county had the machines before she came into office, but, she said, much of the staff didn’t know how to use them. “They were like a nice decorative thing on the side of the room and if somebody asked to use it, [staff] would have to take out the instruction booklet and troubleshoot,” she said. “Then that person’s having to wait. And often it would lead to people feeling discouraged and embarrassed. And, you know, they may choose not to participate.”
Listening to what the community needs, Cázares-Kelly said, “makes it better for everybody.” Sometimes it’s as simple as having a table with chairs at early voting locations. Older people started requesting that accommodation, she said, “but then we would see people who come in with a boot on their foot.” Once, she watched a mom sit down to breastfeed her child while voting.
Her office has taken other accessibility measures, like making sure that PDF documents are compatible with a screen reader, a tool that can read text aloud or translate it into Braille. All of her social media communications include an image description for the same reason.
As of 2016, there were about 175,600 visually impaired people in Arizona, and the population is aging, Falah said. This means more people will soon need these accommodations. “We are a retirement state,” he said. “If we do not tackle it now, then when?”
A few weeks later, Cázares-Kelly was standing in front of a class of soon-to-be graduates from a training program that helps Indigenous people overcome the unique challenges they’ll face while running for office. Native politicians are often some of the first from their communities to either run or hold their positions and that usually comes with a fair amount of pushback or skepticism.
Cázares-Kelly opened her talk by greeting the students in the Tohono O’odham language. Switching back to English, she said, “You are on O’odham land.” Then she added, with a smirk, “So — you’re welcome.” The group burst into laughter. It felt like a cheeky inside joke for a group of people who’ve likely been asked to do land acknowledgements for non-Native audiences. But the lighthearted moment quickly turned serious as Cázares-Kelly launched into the story of how she became involved in voting rights work thanks to her earliest influence, her grandmother.
Cázares-Kelly grew up in two different communities in the Tohono O’odham Nation. One is called Kupk, a remote place where she spent her summers. The rest of the year, she lived in the village of Pisin’ Mo’o, which had some services, like a bus stop. She lived next door to her grandmother, Catherine Josemaria. Cázares-Kelly refers to her affectionately as her Hu’uli-bat, which is O’odham for “my dearly departed mother’s mother.”
They would communicate across their two languages, her grandmother in her broken English and Cázares-Kelly in her broken O’odham. They were always together, she said. Her grandmother showed her how to harvest traditional foods and she recalls watching her grind corn and clean tepary beans in the kitchen.
But she also remembers another tradition: her grandmother’s voting ritual. It was a right Josemaria did not have until she was 30 years old. She was born in 1918 and granted citizenship six years later, but it wasn’t until 1948 that Native Americans won the right to vote. Even then, for decades, voting barriers like literacy tests specifically disenfranchised non-White and Indigenous people.
But that didn’t stop Josemaria from being politically active. “She was a brilliant woman and she was a community leader,” Cázares-Kelly told the group. “We had visitors every single day of my youth, people wanting to hear her stories and her gossip — she was the gossip queen — and get her advice and have political discussions with her.”
On election days, Cázares-Kelly would comb and braid her grandmother’s long gray hair and pin it up in a bun. Her grandmother would don a dress and a little purse, and Cázares-Kelly would help her into the passenger seat of her car. Cázares-Kelly was too young to legally drive, but it was pretty common to start driving young on the reservation — and extremely important to get her grandmother to the polls. It only occurred to her later that what her grandmother was doing was a big deal, an act of defiance. “She would not have had the full freedom of having a language translator until the mid 1970s, which isn’t that long ago,” she said.
Once they returned home, her grandmother would go to her bedroom and tack her “I voted” sticker on the vinyl faux wood wall next to other stickers she had collected over the years. The oldest ones, Cázares-Kelly remembers, were yellow and worn.
The importance of those stickers stayed with her. They serve as reminders to vote and are a source of pride. It’s part of the reason why in 2022, Cázares-Kelly’s office released new stickers for early voters with the words “I voted” written in English, Spanish and O’odham, one on top of the other.
Her office has also expanded the role of the Tohono O’odham outreach coordinator to spend more time in the field talking to tribal residents and made it a priority to reinstate an early voting site for the Pascua Yaqui Tribe. The tribe had sued the previous county recorder after she closed the site in 2018 just a few weeks before an election. (A judge sided with the decision to close the site, saying there wasn’t evidence that closing it made it harder to vote.)
Sestiaga recently told Cázares-Kelly how crucial that voting center has been for him. Even though he’s not a member of that tribe, voting at a site where people look like him makes him feel safer. He used to vote at a church in a predominantly White neighborhood and “going in as the young, Brown-skinned, darkest person in the room, I got looked at. I felt like people were watching me, like I was getting judged.”
Sestiaga is able to vote at that site due to a change the county government made in 2022: Instead of having to go to a specific precinct, a resident can vote at any center in the county. Eleven other Arizona counties use this model and its popularity is spreading. According to the Voting Rights Lab, an advocacy organization, voter centers are more convenient, widely popular and could increase turnout.
The centers also make voting easier for people on the reservation. As with any rural area, if someone shows up at the wrong precinct, it can be a long drive to the right one. And not everyone can afford that kind of error, said Cázares-Kelly. Many people don’t have cars or can’t afford to spend extra money on gas. Public transportation systems aren’t reliable, if they exist at all.
As she wound down her speech at the leadership conference, Cázares-Kelly reminded the students that running for office is about advocating for their communities — not just when it comes to voting rights, but other policy decisions that are shaped by elected officials, like in health care or infrastructure.
“It’s our duty to protect our community,” she told them. “And if that means that we’re not doing it in the traditional way, but we’re having to learn the language of government and policy and funding to protect our people, then it’s our duty to at least try.”
A few weeks after she announced she would run for president, Kamala Harris held a rally in Glendale, Arizona, a sprawling suburb just outside Phoenix. As she watched one of the opening speakers, the governor of the Gila Indian River Community, come up to the stage, Cázares-Kelly exclaimed, “There’s hella Natives up in this piece!”
Harris and vice presidential nominee Tim Walz talked about some of the most pressing issues in Arizona: immigration and abortion restrictions. Harris also promised to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would strengthen protections against discriminatory voting practices.
Cázares-Kelly was happy to hear it. But on the drive back home, she said that some of the things she heard at the rally didn’t resonate with her, like when Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly talked about the “army” Democrats need to win the next election. Her tribe, whose ancestral lands straddle both sides of the border, is heavily surveilled by the border patrol, which has a history of harassing and even deporting tribal members. The military rhetoric, she said, “doesn’t make me feel safe.”
Though she is a registered Democrat and a delegate at the Democratic National Convention, she stands to the left of the Harris-Walz ticket and has felt conflicted by its more moderate stances. Also, as an Indigenous person, her identity is inherently political. One of her idols, Minnesota Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan, a citizen of White Earth Band of Ojibwe, once put it this way: These political systems were not designed to include people like her, but to eradicate and assimilate Indigenous people.
Gabriella Cázares-Kelly poses for a portrait before a Harris Walz campaign rally at Desert Diamond Arena in Glendale, Arizona. (Caitlin O’Hara for The 19th)
“So we’re still fighting the structure of white supremacy and anti-Indigenous sentiment and all of these other issues,” Cázares-Kelly said, “and we’re having to change the culture about what our role is in that.”
Eventually, the conversation turned to her own political future. Already, people have been speculating about whether she’d consider a higher office, but she promised herself she’d stay in the role for at least two terms. “I don’t know how I’ll feel in another four years, but four years has flown by for me,” she said.
It was past 10 p.m. and she was still making her way home. But the long day hadn’t sapped the energy in her voice or her enthusiasm for the job.
“There is so much work to do,” she said.
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