Caffeinated Politics

Pip: Welcome to Caffeinated Politics, where the coffee is strong and the school boards are occasionally doing their best impression of a cautionary tale.

Mara: Gregory Humphrey has been busy this week — covering a Wisconsin music controversy that backfired spectacularly, the ongoing question of LGBTQ+ protections in the state, pardoned insurrectionists back in the headlines, childhood obesity policy, and a farewell to late-night television. Let’s start with the story out of Watertown.

When Censorship Books Its Own Defeat

Pip: The Watertown School Board set out to suppress an instrumental piece about LGBTQ+ history and ended up making it the most talked-about cultural event in the region. That’s the core tension here — what happens when the attempt to silence something becomes the loudest advertisement for it.

Mara: The post frames it exactly that way. The piece in question is A Mother of a Revolution!, composed by Omar Thomas, and the setup is that the board blocked the high school band from performing it at their spring concert. Here’s the line that captures the irony: “Their attempt to suppress the music only amplified it. Now the piece will be performed anyway. Not in the school gym, but in a church with much media attention.”

Pip: So the board wanted a quiet burial and got a composer flying in from the University of Texas-Austin to conduct the performance himself. That’s not a backfire — that’s a controlled demolition of your own position.

Mara: Thomas dedicated the work to Marsha P. Johnson, a key figure in the 1969 Stonewall Uprising, and told WTMJ-4 he wrote it to “honor the bravery and the strength of the trans people in my life.” He also said he’s proud of the Watertown students for handling themselves “beautifully.” The students had been rehearsing the piece all school year.

Pip: Which makes the board’s move land even harder — these kids put in the work, and a handful of adults decided sheet music was a threat.

Mara: The conversion therapy post sits alongside this one and deepens the stakes. Governor Tony Evers responded to two right-wing groups demanding repeal of Wisconsin’s ban on conversion therapy for LGBTQ+ clients. Evers wrote that it was “disappointing” that the organizations support “a long-disavowed and outdated practice” responsible for harms including depression, suicide, and posttraumatic stress.

Pip: Both stories are really about the same reflex — the instinct to suppress or correct something that was never wrong to begin with.

Mara: That’s the throughline. Every credible medical and mental-health organization has rejected the idea that sexual orientation can be changed. The post argues that conversion therapy violates the foundational medical principle of doing no harm — and that the harm it produces is consistent and predictable.

Pip: From a school parking lot to a governor’s letterhead, the pattern holds.

Mara: The Watertown performance is at Immanuel Evangelical Lutheran Church, Wednesday at 7 P.M. — which brings us to a different kind of lawlessness making headlines.

Pardons Don’t Come With Rehabilitation

Pip: When a January 6th insurrectionist who was pardoned by Trump turns up in a church parking lot allegedly brandishing a firearm, the post’s argument is that this was entirely predictable.

Mara: Ryan Nichols, pardoned along with roughly 1,500 others on the first day of Trump’s second term, was arrested in Harleton, Texas, after allegedly displaying a handgun during a confrontation. The sheriff’s office statement notes that “the victim advised that he was in fear for his life due to this action.” Nichols had previously acknowledged attacking officers with pepper spray on January 6th and recorded himself saying he was going to bring violence.

Pip: The post’s point is that a pardon resets the legal clock but not the underlying behavior — and that treating insurrectionists as patriots told them exactly what the rules were going forward.

Mara: That pattern of behavior is the real subject. Which connects to a very different kind of harm being argued in the next piece.

The Weight of Parental Responsibility

Mara: The childhood obesity post makes a deliberately uncomfortable proposal: that severe, preventable nutritional neglect should be expanded into the legal definition of child abuse. The argument is that the harm is just as real as other forms of neglect we already intervene on.

Pip: The post puts it plainly: “We already accept that failing to provide enough food is abuse. Somehow, failing to provide nutritious food has been treated as a lifestyle choice.” The annual direct medical cost cited is fourteen billion dollars, and the estimated lifetime incremental cost per obese child compared to a healthy-weight peer is around nineteen thousand dollars.

Mara: The case isn’t about shaming parents — the post explicitly acknowledges food deserts, poverty, and structural factors. But it draws a firm line: when the harm is metabolic rather than visible bruising, the instinct has been to look away, and the post argues that needs to stop.

Pip: A policy argument that’s less comfortable than it sounds — which is sort of the point. Speaking of things ending on a complicated note.

The Night the Porch Light Went Out

Pip: Stephen Colbert’s Late Show aired its final episode, and the post is as much an elegy for CBS News as it is for the host.

Mara: The farewell post closes with Colbert’s own sign-off line: “This is not a goodbye, it’s a thank you.” But the larger argument is that CBS hollowed itself out long before Colbert left — through what the post calls Paramount’s corporate deference to the Trump administration, the spiking of a 60 Minutes segment on deportations, and the dismantling of CBS Radio News after nearly a hundred years.

Pip: Colbert was apparently the last program in that household still watched on CBS. His exit is framed not as a retirement but as one more institution flinching.

Mara: The post ends with a prediction that Jimmy Kimmel becomes the primary late-night voice left standing — “the latest national porch light,” as it puts it.

Pip: A school board, a governor, a pardoned insurrectionist, a childhood health crisis, and a late-night farewell — the week’s posts keep circling the same question of who holds the line when institutions flinch.

Mara: That tension isn’t going anywhere. More next time.