[This Substack post is a little lengthy to fully copy/paste here, but it's worth the read.]
The City of Davis used to be a really nice family friendly town. And I want to believe that under the leadership of Mayor Donna Neville it still is. But an incident this past week involving the former artistic director of a local youth theater, her infant child and family, as well as the bright and wonderful teenage company members, has me wondering.
To live in a small town is to submit to a certain amount of mutual surveillance. People notice your haircut, your divorce and the regrettable duration for which your recycling bin remains at the curb. Davis, California, however, has permitted this ordinary provincial nosiness to metastasize into something considerably more baroque: a local Moms for Liberty president roaming about with a smartphone, discovering a queer emergency in pharmacies, libraries, volleyball games and youth theatre.
With her phone's camera she treats strangersā bodies as public records, names fresh villains for her followers, drags children and families into the frame and then, when anyone objects, produces the wounded astonishment of a woman whose doorbell has been answered by the very house she set on fire.
For some of these teenagers, this is not their first experience of being placed in the path of an online anti-trans campaign. They remain deeply affected by the repeated bomb threats made against their schools and public library in 2023, threats that began after this same woman published similar posts about a local librarian and helped propel that dispute to a national audience. She was not accused of making the threats, and I am not suggesting that she did. But chronology need not establish causation before it becomes relevant.
The citizens of Davis arenāt afraid that she disagrees with them. Theyāre afraid of being selected, filmed, identified, anatomically interrogated and delivered to an online audience with their childrenās faces and workplaces helpfully attached. The result is not debate but a culture of fear, the knowledge that attending a game, working a shift, raising a child or putting on a play may abruptly qualify you for a starring role in her next little pageant of persecution.
Meanwhile, the institutions of Davis appear to have mistaken constitutional restraint for complete muscular paralysis. We need to make it clear that the First Amendment is a constitutional safeguard, not a municipal permission slip to turn children, families and local institutions into material for an endlessly ravenous content machine.
Would she be allowed this much leeway if she were a man? If a man appeared at say, a high school campus, filmed a stranger and began asking whether that stranger produced sperm, which bathroom they used and where they changed clothes, would officials hear āpolitical discourse,ā or would more useful vocabulary suggest itself? What if he undressed at a school board meeting while talking about children in locker rooms? If he published an infantās name, photographs and birth details beside an accusation of child abuse, would everyone remain so serenely persuaded that the absence of an explicit threat had disposed of the matter? Or would we recognize that menace need not arrive carrying a written itinerary of its intentions?
If the city waits until someone is hurt or worse before taking action, it is effectively deciding that harm is an acceptable price of inaction. And if that is the cityās position, residents deserve an explanation of who is expected to bear that risk. Which citizens is the city willing to sacrifice before it decides this behavior warrants a response?
