To Catch a Cheater (Sunshine Films Florida, Studio TF1 America, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, February 15) I watched a couple of movies on Lifetime, both of them rather grim thrillers with surprise twist endings. The first one was To Catch a Cheater, a story about three women who each gave birth to their daughters on the same day and thereafter formed a bond that lasted until … well, until the story began nearly 18 years later. The three older women are Monica Jackson (Kate Watson), Bridget Lewis (Sheila Leason), and Kim (Jessie Pettit), whose last name, if it were ever mentioned, I didn’t catch. Their daughters are Hannah Wilson (Jordan Kennedy), Charli Lewis (Valentina Rivas), and Megan (Lily Bowen). The movie begins with Charli proposing a so-called “cheaters’ pact” with Hannah and Megan to see if their boyfriends are pursuing opportunities for extra-relational activity. The way this pact works is sort of like Mozart’s (and Lorenzo da Ponte’s) opera Cosi fan Tutte with the genders reversed: each of the women will go online and assume a phony identity to see if they can attract each others’ boyfriends’ attention for transitory hook-ups. Accordingly Megan stands up her boyfriend and sends Hannah to try to seduce him instead. Only the evening ends in tragedy: Hannah slips and falls down outdoor stairs and ends up dead on the rocks on the beach below. Needless to say, Monica is less than thrilled at the sudden death of her daughter just as she’s about to turn 18 and graduate from high school to college and a better life. Monica’s estranged husband David (Philip Boyd) – they appear to have separated but not divorced, though David is living and working in another city and before she croaked Hannah mentioned an upcoming weekend she had to spend ßwith dad – returns to the scene and he and Monica reunite to determine what happened to their daughter.

The police rule Hannah’s death an accident, but both Monica and David are convinced it was murder. But who? As the grim story takes its course we learn that Kim’s husband Doug (Roy Lynam) was having an affair with Bridget. We also learn that Kim and Bridget had launched a company that, though all it appears to make is little scent or chemical bottles they display on their living-room table, is about either to get sold to a major company or do an initial public offering (IPO) which will make both of them millions. Only Bridget is hyper-concerned that nothing happen to them that would jeopardize their deal and cause a scandal that could derail it. (Maybe she should have thought of that before she got sexually involved with her partner’s husband.) Monica gets a series of threatening letters from anonymous sources warning her to stop investigating her daughter’s death, and in the end we learn that the real killer is [spoiler alert!] Kim, who offed Hannah because Hannah had caught Kim’s husband Doug and Bridget making out in their SUV. Kim demanded that Hannah remain silent about this and, when Hannah refused, Kim pushed her down the flight of stairs and thereby killed her. Written by Rachel Morton and directed by old Lifetime hand Damián Romay, To Catch a Cheater is a good example of a Lifetime movie that could have been a great deal better if the Lifetime writer had known when to ease up on the passion pedal. (The metaphor comes from Roald Dahl’s short story “The Great Automatic Grammatisator,” in which a couple of computer scientists invent a machine than can write – essentially artificial intelligence decades early – including a set of organ-like pedals that control the amount of passion in the final text.) The idea of an estranged couple suddenly having to deal with the death of a daughter on the cusp of adulthood could have been a very interesting and moving drama, but writer Morton pushed too hard on the melodramatics and the result was another piece of Lifetime sludge – stylishly directed sludge (Damián Romay definitely knows his way around a camera), but sludge all the same.

Girl Who Vanished (Maverick Film, MarVista Entertainment, Lifetime, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The second Lifetime movie I watched last night (Sunday, February 15) – and my husband Charles joined me for most of it – was called Girl Who Vanished, and like previous Lifetime telecasts Lost Boy in 2015 (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2015/07/lost-boy-legrand-productions-lifetime.html) and The Boy Who Vanished a.k.a. The Forgotten Son (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2025/06/the-boy-who-vanished-aka-forgotten-son.html), it’s about a long-lost child who was supposedly kidnapped eight years earlier who seemingly returns to the fold. In this case the mother is Kate Tanner (Chelsea Gilson), the father – who divorced Kate over the trauma of losing their daughter and who, like his opposite number in To Catch a Cheater, returns to the family to help acclimate their daughter on her homecoming – is Matt (Jon Eric Hoffman). The returnee is Emily (Isabella Carlsen) and the younger sister who wasn’t kidnapped and has had to live the past eight years traumatized by her mother’s overprotectiveness is Lily (Rylee Reagan, top-billed). The film opens with Lily sneaking into the Tanners’ home after a night out with her age-peer girlfriends and Kate catching her and grounding her. Then Emily shows up, insisting that she’s really the Tanners’ long-lost daughter and supplying a wealth of background information to make the identity convincing. Emily even takes a DNA test which says she’s the Tanners’ biological offspring. Kate is overjoyed at the return of her daughter, but Lily is sure something is “off” about her and the new girl, whoever she is, is not Emily.

The police assign a psychiatrist, Dr. Salazar (Lisha Hackney, one of the heavy-set African-Americans Lifetime likes to cast as authority figures), to treat Emily and help her over the traumas of adjusting to her new environment – Emily says she spent the intervening eight years living with a single man who just wanted a child of his own to raise. Only Dr. Salazar is nonplussed that Emily doesn’t show the usual signs of trauma one would expect from a child who was actually kidnapped and forced to live with strangers for that long a time. Lily asks for an appointment to discuss Emily’s case with Dr. Salazar, but the day she’s supposed to meet her Dr. Salazar is found dead in her office, which is apparently a live/work space. Next Emily does an interview with podcaster Naomi Ackerman (Jessica DeBonville), who specializes in stories about traumatized kids, only Naomi holds back on airing the interview because she’s suspicious of Emily’s lack of affect during it. Lily calls Ackerman and makes an appointment to see her, but when she goes to the scheduled meeting place Ackerman, too, is dead, murdered in what was apparently a robbery gone bad. Next Lily is accosted by John Norris (Phil Talamonti), a former police detective who worked Emily’s disappearance when it happened, only he became convinced that Emily had been murdered by one or both of his parents. (Was writer Daniel West thinking of JonBenet Ramsey here? One of the most mysterious aspects of that case was that the only people who could have had access to her were her parents, and yet they had no discernible motive because they were making tons of money exploiting JonBenet in children’s beauty pageants and her death would end that gravy train.)

Norris’s efforts to implicate the Tanners in Emily’s disappearance ended up costing him his job; he drifted into alcoholism but he hung around the scenes, still convinced that one or both of the adult Tanners did in Emily. Norris contacts Lily and asks her to notice any parts of the Tanners’ home that had been changed since the days before Emily’s disappearance. Kate had kept the house exactly the same as it was before Emily left, including the décor of her room which was adorned with posters for boy bands like the “Boulevard Boys” whom Emily especially liked. Unfortunately, the same mystery killer who knocked off Dr. Salazar and Ackerman strikes against Norris, sneaking into his car, strangling him from the back seat, and planting liquor bottles in the car so it will look like he killed himself accidentally while driving drunk. But the information Norris gave Lily allows her to find out the one spot in or around the house that had been changed – a new mini-garden Kate planted after Emily’s disappearance – and Lily starts digging it out and finds [spoiler alert!] the remains of her real sister. It turns out [double spoiler alert!] that Kate actually killed the real Emily during an argument (though director David Benullo inserted a brief closeup that hinted that the killer might have been Emily’s dad Matt), then covered it up by burying her in that newly planted mini-garden. The false “Emily” turns out to be Rachel Sullivan, who concocted the scheme along with a scapegrace boyfriend who only appears in one scene and then is dispatched by the dauntless Kate, who burns him to death by spilling gasoline outside the van in which he lives and then igniting it with a flair.

The two of them researched the real Emily from the press interviews the Tanners gave after her “disappearance” and coached Rachel to pass as Emily. The DNA test was faked from Lily’s own, which Rachel obtained from Lily’s retainer. Lily caught her out with one of the classic strategies used in impersonation stories: inventing a false memory (in this case, a treehouse where the two sisters supposedly played) and catching “Emily” out on it. The film ends with a brutal confrontation between Kate and Lily at the real Emily’s gravesite, though luckily the police arrive and arrest both Kate and Rachel (my husband Charles wondered why Rachel was arrested), though Lily ultimately visits Rachel in prison. Girl Who Vanished was a decent enough Lifetime thriller, though as with To Catch a Cheater one gets the impression that it could have been a lot better if writer West had cooled it on the melodramatics and not taken the easy way out by making mom the killer, thereby creating the problem Fritz Lang identified with the trick ending he was forced to use in his last American film, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt. In that film the supposedly innocent man, a reporter who frames himself for murder to prove how easy it is to convict the innocent on circumstantial evidence, turns out actually to be guilty of murder, and as Lang complained to his producer, you can’t create a central character, make the audience identify with and feel for them, and then in the last two minutes drop the switcheroo on the audience and reveal that they’re really evil.

The Dating App Killer: The Monica White Story (P. F. Birch Productions, Röhm Feifer Entertainment, Studio TF 1 America, Lifetime, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, February 14) Lifetime showed a TV-movie that was, to say the least, an odd choice for Valentine’s Day: The Dating App Killer: The Monica White Story. It was actually based, at least loosely, on a true story: Monica White (Lela Rochon), a divorcée whose 18-year-old son Isaiah (Trezzo Mahoro) has been her only companion since her divorce from her scapegrace husband Daniel (whom we never meet as an on-screen character, nor do we learn much about him or why they broke up), is encouraged by her best friend Layla to log onto a dating app called Connections. Monica lives in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, where she teaches pre-school and has to deal with a particularly obnoxious boy named Rayleigh who keeps bullying a Black girl named Tracy. (The reason I’m not supplying more names for the actors involved is so far imdb.com’s credit list has only four names on it.) Meanwhile, Anthony Eugene “Tony” Robinson (the darkly handsome Jarod Joseph) is trolling Connections looking for women he can pick up, not for sex but to kill them. His modus operandi is to meet them in bars after having set up a date via Connections, take them to a nearby motel, kill them by strangling them in the middle of the sex act, then load their bodies into shopping carts and abandon them in the middle of parking lots. Tony lives in Washington, D.C. and works as a garbageman (which gives him a convenient way of disposing of his victims’ bodies) until he gets fired midway through the movie by a typically obnoxious boss for being chronically late to work. Writers Miriam Van Ernst and David Weaver don’t give us much of an explanation as to what Anthony’s motives are. Midway through the movie, when he and Monica finally meet face-to-face, he tells her that he had a girlfriend named Skye Allen who suddenly and without warning dropped dead of a heart attack, but we suspect that’s a B.S. story he just made up. (The reporting on the case in The Washington Post stated there was a real Skye Allen who died in a hospital, and her death was ruled accidental but there’s the possibility that Anthony killed her.)

The film was expertly directed by Elisabeth Röhm, who as an assistant district attorney on Law and Order for five years (2001 to 2005) certainly learned something from working in Dick Wolf’s atelier on how to do suspense. Also, since February is Black History Month, this is one of Lifetime’s “race movies” in which the central characters are Black; the only significant white role is that of the no-nonsense woman police chief in Fairfax County, Virginia who leads the investigation when the body of one of Anthony’s victims is found in her jurisdiction. I didn’t catch her name but I did the racially ambiguous male detective who’s working under her, Det. Lareto. The cops pull the case when a white store clerk working the parking lot picking up shopping carts discovers the body of Tonita Smith (Princess Davis) in one as he’s on duty. The local media immediately dub the unknown murderer “The Shopping Cart Killer” and writers Van Ernst and Weaver can’t resist planting a few clues. When Isaiah learns from his mom that she’s met a man online, he says, “He could be a serial killer,” having no idea that he’s right. Also cinematographer Tony Gorman carefully lights Anthony in shadow as he sits in a spartan room with a bank of computers, while Monica gets full light as she goes about her daily routine, hangs out with Layla and hears out her complaints about Layla’s boyfriend Jaden, and summons Rayleigh’s mother Beverly to school for a parent-teacher conference about Rayleigh’s behavior. Beverly is instantly hostile and pulls the how-dare-you-summon-me-when-I-need-to-be-at-work routine, but Monica and we both notice a bruise on her chest that signals that Beverly is being abused at home by Rayleigh’s dad and that’s the reason for Rayleigh’s bad behavior. There are a few close calls, including a woman in a red dress who meets Anthony at a bar but is so weirded out by his odd behavior she bails on him in mid-date and we’re of course thinking, “Lucky her.”

When Anthony and Monica finally meet in person he immediately wants to move in with her, and she’s appalled but allows him to sleep on her couch. When they finally do have sex together, for what’s her first time since her divorce, he literally can’t get it up and the implication is that only by killing his partner can he have a release. There’s an intriguing story on the real Anthony Robinson on the Arts & Entertainment Web site (https://www.aetv.com/articles/monica-white-shopping-cart-killer) which suggests that he was into S/M (the only hint of that we get in this movie is a scene towards the end in which Monica references his previously expressed desire to tie her up, surprises him and ties him up instead) and he was also Bisexual and once expressed his anger at Monica by literally peeing in her bed. In the movie there’s no hint of that, but Monica gets a complaint from her 19-year-old niece Jasmine that Anthony hit on her at Monica’s 50th birthday party. She immediately orders Anthony out of her house, and he responds by waiting outside until he’s able to find an unlocked door, let himself back in, and threaten her. Just then the police arrive; that quite imposing woman police chief in Fairfax has figured out his identity by discovering a surveillance photo of him taken with Tonita way back when as he was escorting her from the bar to the motel room where he killed her. Anthony tries to escape by taking a Silver Streak bus back to D.C., but the woman police chief and Det. Lareto are onto him. They have the bus re-routed off the highway and order the driver and all the other passengers off so they can arrest Anthony. Anthony Robinson is due to be sentenced in May 2026, and the real Monica White told The Washington Post that she’s been too scared by the whole experience to date again. The Dating App Killer: The Monica White Story is actually pretty good Lifetime fare, redeemed by Elisabeth Röhm’s direction and an appropriately chilling performance by Jarod Joseph as Anthony. It’s true that this is yet another Lifetime movie in which the hottest, sexiest guy in the cast is the villain, but Joseph brings the role a kind of smoky intensity that makes his performance special even though of course we can’t stand him. Just as I got a used videotape of the 1996 film The Phantom because I’d been so impressed by Billy Zane’s performance as the bad guy in James Cameron’s Titanic I wanted to see a movie in which he’d been the good guy, so I’d love to see a film in which Jarod Joseph played a character I could root for and lust over!

The Kate: Karl Denson's Tiny Universe (Connecticut Public Television, American Public Television, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, February 13) I switched channels after the Winter Olympics telecast went on a half-hour hiatus to accommodate the all-important 11 p.m. news shows and put on KPBS for The Kate, the latest episode of the intriguing music show from the Katharine Hepburn Cultural Center in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, the late movie legend’s home town. I’ve compared this series to the local San Diego show Live at the Belly Up, which features similar club-sized attractions at the Belly Up Tavern in Solana Beach, but this one hails from the other end of the country. This time the featured attraction on The Kate was a band called Karl Denson’s Tiny Universe. Denson’s Web page lists the personnel as Karl Denson, alto sax, flute, and vocals; Ricio Fruge, trumpet, flugelhorn, and vocals; Ricky Giordano, guitar and vocals; Rashon Murph, keyboards (a Hammond B-3 organ, Rhodes electric piano, and assorted electronica); Parker McAllister, bass; and Alfred Jordan, drums. There were definitely two guitar players on the program and I don’t know who the other one was, but they did some quite good and interesting duels. One irony was that Karl Denson, an African-American alto saxophonist and flutist with a shaved head and white goatee beard (which will give you an idea of how old he is), talked a much better set than he played. He mentioned that his first exposure to music came from his parents, first Motown and then James Brown, and later he got into artists like Marvin Gaye (who was on Motown but pushed the limits of their formula until in 1970 he created his masterpiece, What’s Goin’ On?). Still later he acquired an interest in jazz via John Coltrane and especially Rahsaan Roland Kirk – and if you’ve never heard of Rahsaan Roland Kirk, get on YouTube and look him up right now. (A good sample of Kirk on the Ed Sullivan Show is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRO1W5twBes&list=RDjRO1W5twBes&start_radio=1.) Kirk was a blind reedman who was famous for playing up to five saxophones at once – one of his most stunning records was a cover of Duke Ellington’s “Creole Love Call” in which he reproduced Ellington’s entire sax section on his own and in real time. He mounted his horns, including such oddball sax variants as the manzello and the stritch, on a rack so he could move his mouth between them. Kirk also doubled on flute, as did Coltrane on his very last album (Expression, recorded in February and March 1967, just four months before Coltrane died), so Denson took up flute. He also said he realized that all the great jazz musicians had their roots in the blues, so he started listening to blues greats like Son House. Denson said he picked up on the fact that all the white British bands in the 1960’s had learned from the great African-American blues players.

He was in Lenny Kravitz’s original band until he left in 1993, and in 2014 he got a call from a blocked phone number that turned out to be Kravitz’s reaching out to him to ask if he’d be interested in doing a tour with a major British band. The major British band turned out to be The Rolling Stones. He’s also played with or opened for Stevie Winwood, The Allman Brothers, the late Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead, and George Clinton’s Parliament/Funkadelic combo. Denson recalled being asked how it felt to play before an audience of 65,000 at a Rolling Stones concert, and he said he was really playing for just four people: Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Ron Wood, and the late Charlie Watts. Denson said he was actually more comfortable playing in a club before an audience of 500 to 600 because then he’s playing his own music. Oddly, Denson talked a much better set than he played; in the hour-long time slot of The Kate, he did nine songs and all but one of them featured Denson’s singing, which isn’t bad but it’s a typical funk-soul rasp that got wearing after a while. Basically Karl Denson and Tiny Universe play the sort of funk-soul that was popular in the mid-1970’s and evolved (or devolved) into disco. They opened with a song called “Shake It Out” and then played an instrumental that defeated The Kate’s chyron writers but was the best thing in the show. Denson began it quietly and lyrically on the flute before he put it aside, picked up his alto sax, and turned up the tempo and volume. The instrumental featured solos by Denson, Fruge on flugelhorn, one of the two guitarists, Murph on the Hammond B-3 (the organ that Jimmy Smith popularized and made the go-to sound for jazz, pop, and rock organists), and McAllister on electric bass. Then Denson played a batch of good but pretty indistinguishable songs, all featuring his foghorn vocals, with generic titles like “I’m Your Biggest Fan,” “Change My Way,” “Time to Pray,” “Satisfied,” “Gossip,” and “Hang Me Out to Dry.” In between “Change My Way” and “Time to Pray” the band was heard playing a brief snatch of something called “Gnomes and Badgers” which Denson explained was a reference to the current American political situation and particularly the polarization between the Republican and Democratic political parties. That could have made for a more interesting song than any of the ones Denson actually sang on the show, but alas we were only allowed to hear it under the interview. (Playing musical selections under interviews, so it’s hard to hear or enjoy either, is one of my pet peeves about music documentaries, and blessedly the producers of Live at the Belly Up avoid it.) I enjoyed the music but with reservations, and I think my husband Charles put his finger on the problem when he said, “It’s too raucous for me in my current condition.” I could see his point; I could have used Denson playing a song or two that was slower, gentler, more jazzy, and one that used a different singer (his Web site lists Danielle Barker as a second vocalist but there weren’t hide nor hair of her on the show) or was an instrumental.

The Librarians (Radical Gaslighters LLC, Doc Society, Arizona Rising Productions, Cuomo Cole Productions, Good Gravy Films, ITS International, Independent Lens, Independent Television Service, K. A. Snyder Productions, Pretty Matches Productions, The Brandt Jackson Foundation, The Harnisch Foundation, Two Chairs Productions, World of Ha Productions, iDeal Partners Film Foundation, 2025)

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

On Monday, February 9 PBS aired a powerful and unflinching 2025 documentary called The Librarians, about how librarians are being dragged into the culture wars being waged by an ascendant radical Right (it’s really a perversion of language to call these people “conservative” when their political, cultural, social, and moral ambitions are anything but “conservative”). Their ultimate goal is to turn the U.S. into a Christian theocracy, and one of their immediate goals is to eliminate any opinions they disagree with from public discourse, including critiques of racism, sexism, and homophobia.

The Librarians, directed by Kim A. Snyder in collaboration with Janique L. Robillard, Maria Cuomo Cole, and Jana Edelbaum, tells the story of how librarians across the country, especially (though not exclusively) in Southern states, have essentially been drafted into the culture war. They’ve been torn between the ethics of their profession, which among other things call them to oppose censoring the content of their libraries simply because other people don’t like certain books; and the increasingly vociferous demands of organizations like the well-funded, powerful nationwide group “Moms for Liberty” which demanded that school libraries in particular censor books with anti-racist or Queer themes.

Moms for Liberty was founded on New Year’s Day 2021 by three Right-wing activists in Florida. They were originally opposed to mask requirements instituted in 2020 to slow the spread of the virus that causes COVID-19, but their agenda soon broadened to include running candidates for local school boards who were pledged to support their racist, anti-Queer agenda. In 2022 their campaigns were successful in 11 Texas school districts, including one in a town called Granbury that became a major focus of the film.

The campaign was started by a Texas state legislator called Matt Krause, who in October 2021 released a list of 850 books he wanted banned from Texas public school libraries. Krause also said his list was not all-inclusive and he reserved the right to add future titles. Krause explained that the books he wanted removed from state school libraries were ones which “might make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex.” That seemingly unexceptional statement is actually radical-Right code-speak for anything which “might make white people uncomfortable by pointing out that the U.S. built its prosperity on the backs of enslaved Africans.” (For more information see https://www.npr.org/2021/10/28/1050013664/texas-lawmaker-matt-krause-launches-inquiry-into-850-books.)

Krause included with his blacklist a demand that the Texas Education Agency and school districts throughout the state asking each individual he sent it to whether their schools had any of the books on his list. He also asked for a detailed accounting of where the books were and how much money had been spent on them. Among the books cited by Krause and other would-be Texas censors were Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Nikole Hannah-Jones’s The 1619 Project, Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Anti-Racist, Peggy J. Parks’s How Prevalent Is Racism in Our Society?, a picture book put out by Amnesty International illustrating the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, and novels like Tim Federle’s The Great American Whatever, Jonathan Evison’s Lawn Boy, and “Pink Is a Girl’s Color” … and other silly things people say, a children’s picture book by Stacy and Erik Drageset.

One of the key people involved in the radical-Right takeover was successful school board candidate Courtney Gore. She was a prominent activist in the area with solid Right-wing credentials. After the school district removed 130 books from school libraries on grounds they were “pornographic,” Gore did something unusual for someone with her background. Instead of meekly going along with the pressure from her colleagues and funders to ban whole lists of books as “pornographic,” she actually read them and realized they weren’t pornographic at all. Though Gore maintains that she still considers herself a “conservative,” she posted on Facebook in May 2022 that “I’m over the political agenda, hypocrisy B.S. I took part in it myself. I refuse to participate in it any longer, it’s not serving our party. We have to do better.”

Another quirky story told in the documentary concerns Granbury parent Monica Brown, one of the leaders of the book-banning movement. What made her story unusual is that the oldest of her nine children, son Weston Brown, is Gay. When he came out to her at age 23, she immediately and irrevocably banned him from any Thanksgiving dinners and other family functions. Weston ultimately moved to San Diego, found a partner named Andrew, and agreed not to have anything to do with the birth family that had raised him, homeschooled him, and kept him as insulated as they could from any intimation either that Queer people existed or he might be one.

Then he saw Monica Brown testifying before the Granbury school board on a social-media video that had gone viral. “It was one thing when my parents’ beliefs were causing this rift between us and it was just a family matter,” Brown told NBC News. “But seeing now that she’s applying those same views to public activism, at a time when so many basic rights are being challenged, I couldn’t stay quiet about that.” The Librarians includes a scene in which Weston Brown spoke to the Granbury school board and pleaded with them not to ban Queer-affirming books like the one he says turned him around, George M. Johnson’s All Boys Aren’t Blue.

"It’s been nearly five years since I came out to my family,” Weston Brown told the Granbury school board. “I'm not allowed to join in family celebrations or holidays, or be part of my eight siblings' lives, all because I’m not straight. I’m here to implore you to listen to librarians, educators and students, not those speaking from a religious perspective or at the bidding of a political group. If you choose to marginalize differences and remove representation, you will only cause harm.” Monica Brown immediately followed her disowned son to the podium and spewed the usual radical-Right nonsense. She ignored everything her son had said and didn’t have anything to do with him – until the meeting ended. Then, as Weston was being interviewed by a reporter in the parking lot, she walked up to him and started filming the interview herself with her cell phone.

As I’ve noted in previous posts about the American radical Right and its position on Queer issues, one thing most pro-Queer people don’t understand about the radical Right is that it doesn’t believe in the existence of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, or Transgender people. They believe we are all naturally heterosexual and cisgender, and any people who express themselves as homosexual or Transgender are either deliberately rebelling against God or suffering from “trauma-induced sexual sin.” Weston Brown recalls that when he came out to his parents as Gay, “They thought that I was mentally ill or demonically possessed.” This is the ideology behind so-called “reparative therapy,” the various attempts to “cure” Queer or Trans people from their “trauma-induced sexual sin” and turn them into cisgender heterosexuals.

One thing we’ve learned about the radical Right since its political ascendancy, which predated the Presidencies of Donald Trump but was kicked into high gear by the Trump phenomenon, is the thug-like way they go after their enemies, especially ones like Courtney Gore who were formerly on their side. Gore reported receiving death threats. So did Amanda Jones, a 20-year veteran librarian in Louisiana who in 2021 won the School Librarian of the Year award from School Library Journal. The award was in recognition of an innovative program she devised during the COVID-19 lockdown. She reasoned that as long as students couldn’t go to the outside world, she would use computer technology to bring the world to them by presenting virtual tours of other countries.

Then in 2022 Jones ran afoul of the would-be book banners. In July 2022 she spoke publicly against censorship at a meeting of the Livingston Parish Public Library Board. (In Louisiana, counties are called “parishes.”) As a result, she got viciously attacked by various organizations, including Citizens for a New Louisiana and Bayou State of Mind. Bayou State of Mind accused Jones of "advocating teaching anal sex to 11-year-olds.” Citizens for a New Louisiana put out a leaflet showing a photo of Jones inside a red circle with a white border, and captioned it, “Why is she fighting so hard to keep sexually erotic and pornographic materials in the kids’ section?” She was, of course, doing no such thing, as any member of these organizations who’d actually read the books in question the way Courtney Gore did in Granbury, Texas would have found out.

Since then Jones, who is still a librarian at the same school in Louisiana she attended as a child, has published a memoir called That Librarian detailing her struggle against book-banning and the attempts of the radical Right to turn librarians into censors. She still gets awards, but now they have names like the Association of School Librarians’ Intellectual Freedom Award and the Louisiana Library Association’s Alex Allain Intellectual Freedom Award. When Jones was honored at the National Book Awards in 2023, Oprah Winfrey said, “Amanda Jones started getting death threats, all for standing up for our right to read ... but she's not stopped fighting against book bans, or stopped advocating for access to diverse stories.”

Librarians, especially in schools, have become one of our principal lines of defense against the Radical Right’s depressingly successful campaign to end America’s experiment in self-governance and make the U.S. a neofascist dictatorship. They already control the Presidency, both houses of Congress, and the U.S. Supreme Court. They also have organized at the state and local levels in ways progressives can barely dream about. They want a world in which Blacks are once again in the back of the bus, women are once again stuck in the kitchen, Queers are still in the closet, Fundamentalist Christianity becomes a state religion, and giant corporations are able to extract maximum surplus value from their workers without any nonsense about health, safety, or decent pay.

The Librarians is a chilling account of how a handful of individuals are courageously fighting an often lonely battle to maintain and expand America’s and Americans’ freedoms in the face of a well-organized, well-funded campaign to destroy them. It deserves to be seen by every American who wants this country to remain a democratic, secular republic.

Songs of Black Folk (Orange Grove Films, 100 Percent, Stay in the Music LLC, GBH, WNET, KQED, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, February 10) at 11 p.m. my husband Charles and I watched a half-hour show on P.O.V. Shorts on PBS called Songs of Black Folk, about an intriguing event that took place on June 16, 2021 in either Seattle or Tacoma, Washington (the narration wasn’t clear about just where it took place) to commemorate former President Joe Biden signing a bill making “Juneteenth” – the day in 1865 when slaves in Texas learned a fact that had been carefully concealed from them: that the Civil War was over, the South lost, and they were legally free – a national holiday. The event was promoted by two members of the same family: Black church pastor Leslie Braxton and his nephew, Ramón Bryant Braxton. Ramón was raised by his grandmother because his father had spent most of Ramón’s childhood in prison for one offense or another (the show didn’t say just what he was in for, though it really didn’t matter). Ramón’s grandmother forbade him from playing football but encouraged him to study music, and after exploring other instruments Ramón settled on piano. He became good enough that in 2002 he gave a school recital as a classical pianist, which was rather shakily filmed by someone with a hand-held camera from the audience. When Biden signed the bill making Juneteenth a national holiday both Leslie and Ramón decided to promote a concert commemorating it and making people in the Pacific Northwest aware of the major musical heritage of African-Americans even though, as the narration noted, there are surprisingly few Black musicians of note from there. (The one real legend is Jimi Hendrix, who was part-Black, part-Native, and came from Seattle.) The two assembled an orchestra and choir and performed a rather sedate-sounding concert featuring Ramón’s arrangements of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” and “We Shall Overcome.” What made the event especially poignant was that while preparations were underway Ramón’s grandmother was in a nursing home with dementia and was clearly on her last legs. Often Ramón had to tear himself away from rehearsals to go see the woman who’d raised him when he still could, and he expressed hope that she would last long enough for him to give the concert while she was still on this plane of existence. She died the day after the concert, on the actual June 17 Juneteenth holiday. Incidentally, it’s worth noting that under the command of our current President, Donald Trump, U.S. national parks no longer offer free admission on Juneteenth or on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday – but they do offer it on Donald Trump’s birthday, yet another example of the personality cult America’s Führer is building around himself.

Super Bowl LX Halftime Show (National Football League, Apple, aired February 8, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday (Sunday, February 8) my husband Charles and I both stayed in and watched Super Bowl LX (“60” in those oppressive Arabic numerals New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani has forced all New Yorkers to use – that’s a real Right-wing meme I’ve seen online). The Bears San Diego were having a Super Bowl watch party but it was in El Cajon; the AWOL Bar in Hillcrest was also doing a Super Bowl watch party but I decided not to go and instead watched the game here at home with Charles. At least I got in three walks during the day, including a short one just before the game’s official start time at 3 p.m. – though the kickoff wasn’t until 3:40 because there were all the extended preliminaries before actual play began. (I wonder if the ancient Romans put the crowds at the Colosseum through this sort of thing.) I was particularly anxious to see the much-ballyhooed and, in Right-wing media circles, much reviled Super Bowl halftime show featuring Puerto Rican singer and rapper Bad Bunny (true name: Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio: “Martínez” is his family name and “Ocasio” his matronymic), which turned out to be marvelous. I wish it had been subtitled so we monolingual English speakers could have understood it, but otherwise it was vividly staged and as strong as I could have hoped for. It began with a crew of campesinos (Latin farmworkers) doing something with a crop that grew in high stalks; at first I thought it was corn but it turned out to be sugar cane, the main cash crop of Bad Bunny’s native Puerto Rico. There were nice traveling shots (courtesy of NBC’s drone camera, which also made periodic appearances during the Super Bowl itself) that came to rest in front of a barrio street set. Midway through Bad Bunny’s number he cut to two other singers, a blonde woman performing in English and a man with a guitar singing in Spanish. Once again I was put off by the lack of chyrons to tell us who they were – the woman was Lady Gaga and the man was Ricky Martin – but the music itself was so powerful and the vibe so strong I enjoyed it all anyway.

This morning I saw a clip from the so-called “All-American Halftime Show” put on by Turning Point USA, the Right-wing political organization formerly chaired by the late Charlie Kirk and headed since his murder by his widow Erika. The clip I saw was from Kid Rock’s performance, and even though it was nominally in English it was just as unintelligible as Bad Bunny’s and considerably meaner, nastier, and more in-your-face. At least part of the problem was that for some reason Kid Rock decided to lip-synch to a pre-recording instead of performing live. I was a bit disappointed in the cast list for the alternative halftime show because Brantley Gilbert, a country singer who attracted my attention for being the only person on Tim McGraw’s Academy of Country Music show Tim McGraw and Friends on May 19, 2013 to use a pedal steel guitar in his band, was on it. (This once-paradigmatic country instrument has been pretty much relegated to the sidelines as most modern country acts play music closer to the 1970’s “Southern rock” sound of Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Allman Brothers than the music of Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams, or Johnny Cash – though, come to think of it, Cash never used the pedal steel guitar either.) It’s taken me a while to realize why I like Bad Bunny’s music even though he raps (in Spanish) through most of his songs when I strongly dislike most rap. After the last Grammy Awards show I think I’ve figured it out: Latino rappers like Bad Bunny rap over a much more interesting, more complex set of rhythms derived from Latin vocal and instrumental music instead of the strict militaristic style in which most Black and white rappers perform. (“Hip-hop,” the alternative term for rap used by people who like it, reportedly comes from the strict cadence of military drill, which to an old peacenik like me is one more reason not to like it.)

I’ve seen a report that at the viewing party Donald Trump hosted for the Super Bowl at Mar-a-Lago (he didn’t attend in person, reportedly because he was afraid of being booed) he kept his TV on the regular halftime show instead of the “All-American” one, though of course he let rip with a nasty tweet on his so-called “Truth Social” site afterwards. Bad Bunny had already been causing Right-wing snits when he used his acceptance speech at the Grammy Awards to denounce the tactics of Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) squads in Minneapolis and elsewhere in the country, though he ended his speech with the ennobling words, “The only thing more powerful than hate is love.” He used those words in his Super Bowl performance, too, projecting them on giant screens over the Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California where the San Francisco 49’ers regularly play their “home” games (even though Santa Clara is 45 miles southeast of San Francisco). Bad Bunny even included a real-life (straight) wedding in his show; both Charles and I assumed it was play-acting but later we learned from online sources that it was a real bride, a real groom, and a real officiant marrying them to each other. And one thing I loved about this year’s Super Bowl is that Bad Bunny was not the only performer they hosted who was guaranteed to draw hackles among the Trumpsters: in the pre-game concert the 1990’s punk band Green Day performed four songs, including their signature tune, the anti-George W. Bush song “American Idiot.” And before Charlie Puth sang the national anthem (surprisingly well; he managed the song’s notorious high notes adequately if not spectacularly), “out” Lesbian singer Brandi Carlile, one of my favorite modern-day country music performers, did an intense acoustic version of “America, the Beautiful.”

As for the game itself, the Seattle Seahawks beat the New England Patriots 29-13, though the relatively high score was deceptive because it was mostly a defensive battle. Seattle made four penetrations deep into New England territory in the first half but had to settle for field goals each time. Indeed, Seattle’s field-goal kicker, Jason Myers, set a new record for most field goals kicked (five) in a Super Bowl. I made a joke about the ad for TD medication, which (specially produced for a football telecast) made a pun on the fact that “TD” stands for both “touchdown” and “tardive dyskinesia.” Alas, the ad ran at a point in the game when neither team had scored a touchdown! Much of the play reminded me of the 1936 film Pigskin Parade, a largely forgettable movie except that it was Judy Garland’s first feature and it had a great voice-of-reason performance by Patsy Kelly in which she hears out newly appointed coach Stuart Erwin’s lament that his players know how to play basketball but not football. “Then teach them to play basketball-football!” she tells him. It was advice both coaches in last night’s game seemed to have taken to heart, since there were plenty of passes that were broken up and rendered incomplete by a defender leaping up and batting the ball away from the intended receiver in mid-air. Seattle running back Kenneth Walker III was named most valuable player of the game even though his most spectacular play, a 49-yard touchdown run, was nullified by a holding penalty. Still, he gained 135 yards on 27 carries. It’s been a long time since I followed football – it’s a game that has left behind too many brains permanently damaged by concussions for my comfort – though put me in front of a TV broadcasting a game and it all comes back to me from my childhood when my mother, stepfather, brother and I all kept track of the NFL. I’ve been to both baseball and football games “live” and I long ago came to the conclusion that baseball is more fun live than on TV while for football it’s the reverse. The reason, I suspect, is that the action in baseball is spread out over the entire expanse of the stadium, whereas in football it’s centered around wherever the ball happens to be at that moment.