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“I pray I am a fool so as not to be exposed as a coward,” wrote James Gillcrist in an extraordinary open letter to the Rockhurst High School community.

A theology and philosophy teacher, veteran, anti-racist advocate and lifelong advocate for the oppressed, Gillcrist was terminated last week in what he calls a clear retaliation for speaking truth to power. More than a local scandal—his firing indicates a chilling sign of the times we are in, and of the crackdown on dissent sweeping the nation.

Gillcrist’s words carry weight forged in the crucible of war. Reflecting on his time in Iraq, he confessed, “Of all that I experienced as a Light Infantry Officer in the Sunni Triangle, the decision to lie, to take the easy way out… haunts me the most.”

As an officer, he once fought for weeks to include unvarnished truths in his reports—truths that his superiors repeatedly demanded be altered to present an illusion of what he and his fellow soldiers were actually doing. Exhausted and demoralized after weeks of resisting these alterations, he eventually gave up the fight and submitted reports he knew to be false. He finally stopped being reprimanded by his superiors.

This searing moral clarity shaped Gillcrist’s career as an educator, where he sought to prevent his students from making the same mistakes. “I was hired at Rockhurst to teach virtue and help form young men that are committed to social justice,” he wrote. But in 2024, the fight for truth took a devastating personal turn when Gillcrist challenged the rhetoric and policies of Donald Trump.

The Battle for Truth in the Classroom

Gillcrist’s outspokenness came to a head after he recently condemned the president-elect’s fascist threats of mass deportations and crackdowns on dissenters.

This was not hyperbole, he later clarified in his letter, but a direct application of Jesuit values, rooted in justice and the defense of the vulnerable.

Rockhurst administrators labeled these statements “problematic.” But Gillcrist refused to apologize. “When you vote for a candidate promising mass deportation, you become an accomplice in the violation of human rights,” he asserted. For this and other acts of defiance, including social media posts critical of capitalism and police violence, his contract was terminated—via email.

A History of Resistance

Gillcrist’s history of confrontation with power is long and storied. During the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests in Kansas City, he was violently arrested by riot police. His crime? Exercising his First Amendment rights. “I said ‘fuck’ a lot,” he admitted unapologetically in his letter, refusing to downplay his anger in the face of systemic brutality.

Even in the classroom, his refusal to sanitize difficult truths set him apart. He openly challenged students who perpetuated misogyny, racism, and homophobia, and he was disciplined for discussing the scientific complexities of gender, as well as the systemic inequalities perpetuated by capitalism.

“I was written up when a parent complained of a social media post that was anti-capitalist and pro-socialist,” Gillcrist recalled. Yet, he remained steadfast: “I will not apologize for exposing the politics of hate.”

“First They Came…”

In one of the most striking moments of his open letter, Gillcrist updated Pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous poem “First They Came” for our modern era. Addressing his students, he read:

“First they came for the immigrants,
And I did not speak out
Because I am not an immigrant.
Then they came for the drag queens,
And I did not speak out
Because I am not a drag queen.
…Then they came for me,
And there was no one left to speak out for me.”

Gillcrist’s message was clear: fascism creeps forward with the complicity of silence. “Were I in Germany in the 1930s, how long would I have waited before speaking out? Were I convinced of the evil on the horizon, would I pause? Worry for my job? My livelihood?” His letter challenges us to confront these questions not as hypotheticals but as urgent moral imperatives.

A Chilling Warning

The firing of James Gillcrist is more than an administrative decision—it is a microcosm of the creeping authoritarianism engulfing institutions across America. His letter accuses Rockhurst of betraying its Jesuit mission, citing the removal of books critical of U.S. policies and its failure to denounce hate speech on campus.

His parting words to the community are both a warning and a rallying cry: “If and when [Trump] asks for ‘enemies from within,’ please mention me. I would rather be rounded up at the beginning of the persecution than silently survive.”

Gillcrist’s letter is not simply the manifesto of a fired professor—it is a prophetic document that demands we examine our own roles in a society sliding toward fascism. Will we speak out, as he has, or will we remain complicit?

For James Gillcrist, the answer is clear. And now, the question is ours to answer.

The post ‘I’d Rather Be Persecuted Than Silent’: Rockhurst Fires Teacher for Standing With the Oppressed & Resisting Fascism appeared first on The Kansas City Defender.

Though the remainder of Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur’s final season is set to hit the Disney Channel and Disney Plus some time next year, the studio is reportedly keeping one episode from airing because of its focus on a transgender character.

Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur has often touched on ideas about race, class, and issues like gentrification as it followed the adventures of genius 13-year-old Lunella Lafatette (Diamond White) and her pet dinosaur, Devil (Fred Tatasciore). But according to now-deleted social media posts from animators who worked on “The Gatekeeper” — an episode about Lunella and other members of her school’s volleyball team being terrorized by a transphobic adult — Disney has chosen to keep the episode from officially debuting because of its subject matter.

“The Gatekeeper” spends much of its runtime unpacking how no one has an issue with team captain Brooklyn (Indya Moore) being trans except for Greer (Amy Sedaris), a coach/parent from a rival school. It isn’t until Greer overhears that Brooklyn used to play on a boys’ soccer team that she tries to disqualify Lunella’s team on a technicality. Lunella, the other girls, and their own adult coach Hrbek (Tatasciore) can see (and explicitly say) that Greer is motivated by bigotry and an unfounded fear that her team will lose. But rather than taking that feedback to heart, Greer traps Brooklyn and most of the team in an escape room-like pocket dimension that looks like their locker room.

The episode (which The Verge has seen a leaked version of) features a couple of queer and trans pride flags, as well as a choice needle drop of Charli XCX’s “Unlock it (Lock It)” that’s fitting as the kids find themselves having to locate magical keys to free themselves. The episode’s messaging about embracing and celebrating people’s identities isn’t subtle, but it is fundamentally uplifting and clearly meant to emphasize the importance of respecting other people.

Reports of Disney pulling the episode comes a little over week after Donald Trump’s heavily transphobic presidential re-election campaign led him to victory and a year after Disney CEO Bob Iger insisted that he felt the studio’s project had become too message-focused. We’ve reached out to Disney for comment about whether it actually plans to keep “The Gatekeeper” from airing, and will update if and when we hear back.

Social network Bluesky, in a post on Friday, says that it has “no intention” of taking user content to train generative AI tools. It made the statement shortly ahead of competitor X implementing its new terms of service that spell out how it can analyze user text and other information to train its generative AI tools.

“A number of artists and creators have made their home on Bluesky, and we hear their concerns with other platforms training on their data,” Bluesky says in a post. “We do not use any of your content to train generative AI, and have no intention of doing so.”

Other companies could still potentially scrape your Bluesky posts for training. Bluesky’s robots.txt doesn’t exclude crawlers from Google, OpenAI, or others, meaning those companies may crawl Bluesky data. “Bluesky is an open and public social network, much like websites on the Internet itself,” spokesperson Emily Liu tells The Verge. “Just as robots.txt files don’t always prevent outside companies from crawling those sites, the same applies here. That said, we’d like to do our part to ensure that outside orgs respect user consent and are actively discussing within the team on how to achieve this.”

In another post, Bluesky notes that it uses AI to “assist in content moderation, which helps us triage posts and shield human moderators from harmful content.” It also uses it in the algorithmic Discover feed. “None of these are Gen AI systems trained on user content,” Bluesky says. The company also points to a page where you can find its terms of service, community guidelines, and other policy documents.

Bluesky has grown by more three million people in the past week, according to the platform’s safety account. The company says it’s seeing increased “spam, scam, and trolling activity,” and that it is bolstering its moderation team to support the increased load.

Bluesky just crossed 17 million users, according to a stat tracker, as users seek out alternative microblogging platforms to X. Meta’s Threads, one of its primary competitors, isn’t standing by. Threads boss Adam Mosseri said yesterday that the platform has already surpassed more than 15 million signups just this month, and Meta said today that it is testing custom feeds — a feature that Bluesky is already well known for. Unlike Bluesky, however, Meta recently acknowledged that it’s trained its AI models on almost everything you’ve posted publicly since 2007.