(Daily Signal)—Transgender activists tried to hound a Georgia real estate agent out of business because the realtor urged a public library to move a sexually explicit book out of the children’s section. When she sued, the judge dismissed her case and ordered her to pay the activists’ legal fees.
Now, the Georgia Court of Appeals has taken up her case and her attorney just filed her official brief Thursday, a copy of which was exclusively provided to The Daily Signal. Her supporters say the case may set a precedent that gets to the heart of cancel culture.
“They completely misstated, misquoted me in order to try and cancel me,” Julie Mauck, the realtor, told The Daily Signal in a Friday interview. “They actually filed an ethics complaint for hate speech against me” based on the misquote.
She also recalled activists attacking her as a “biblical terrorist.”
When Mauck filed a defamation lawsuit against the activists, a trial court judge struck down the lawsuit, claiming that it violated an anti-SLAPP law (a law designed to protect people from frivolous defamation lawsuits).
The Coalition for Liberty, a nonprofit organization, is supporting Mauck in her case. Doug Turpin, the coalition’s president, warned that the anti-SLAPP ruling sets a dangerous precedent.
“If somebody knowingly lied about you in a vindictive matter to try to get you fired from your job … and then you try to defend yourself by going to the courts for redress, then you would owe them their lawyers’ fees and lose in an anti-SLAPP even if what you were filing a lawsuit for is completely true,” he told The Daily Signal.
The Library Comments
The legal case stretches back to comments Mauck made at a Oconee County Public Library Board of Trustees meeting on July 10, 2023.
She argued that the library should move the book “Flamer” by Mike Curato—which includes images of naked teenage boys and descriptions of genitals, sexual behavior, profanity, and derogatory terms—from the kids’ section to the adults’ section of the library. She also noted that some pedophiles, who often describe themselves as “minor-attracted persons,” try to insinuate themselves into the “plus” part of the acronym LGBTQ+.
Mauck told The Daily Signal that she ultimately prevailed—the library board voted unanimously to move the book to the adult section.
A female transgender activist, who goes by either “Fiona Bell” or “Felix Bell” depending on the circumstances, stood behind Mauck during the meeting with a sign reading “JOY is ALL ages!”
The Attempt to ‘Cancel’ Mauck
Bell and another transgender activist, Danielle Carmella Bonanno, reached out to Mauck’s broker, Bob Allen, to complain about Mauck’s comments and suggest Allen should discipline her or terminate their relationship. (Real estate agents in Georgia must work with a broker to conduct business.)
Bonanno, a man identifying as a woman who says he is president of the Athens Pride & Queer Collective, sent Allen an email that very night expressing “deep concern” about what he described as Mauck’s “recent discriminatory behavior towards the LGBTQ+ community.” He claimed she referred “to LGBTQ+ individuals as pedophiles.”
“I would like to emphasize that this conduct is in clear violation of Article 10 of the [National Association of Realtors] Code of Ethics, which prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity,” Bonnano wrote. He suggested Allen take “disciplinary action.”
The next day, Allen informed Mauck that he would stop serving as her real estate broker, though he didn’t formally separate from her until Aug. 11.
Bell emailed Allen on July 13, falsely claiming that Mauck “made a public display of calling the entire LGBTQ community ‘pedophiles,’ along with calling for censorship of LGBTQ-related material.”
On the same day, Bell submitted an ethics complaint against Mauck to the Georgia Association of Realtors, repeating her claim that Mauck called “the entire LGBTQ community ‘pedophiles’” and supported censorship. She signed the ethics complaint as “Fiona Bell.”
Allen, Mauck’s broker, received the ethics complaint from the Georgia Realtors organization on Aug. 11, and formally ended his partnership with Mauck that day. David Steele became Mauck’s broker on Oct. 18, but between Aug. 12 and Oct. 17, she couldn’t work as a real estate agent.
While she only went without a broker for “a couple of months,” Mauck told The Daily Signal that she then “took a year to study and get my broker’s license,” effectively preventing her from doing business for over a year.
The Georgia Association of Realtors ruled that Mauck had indeed violated its ethics code, but when Mauck appealed, the association dropped the complaint.
“After I sent them a letter saying I was planning to go to the media and take legal action against GAR, they decided maybe she wasn’t actually guilty of this,” Turpin told The Daily Signal.
During the appeal process, a member of the GAR panel said Mauck violated Article 10 in part because pedophiles are a protected class. The association hasn’t formally stated that it considers pedophiles to be a protected class and Mauck’s successful appeal suggests it does not do so.
Bonanno reached out to Mauck’s new broker in an email on Jan. 16, 2024, repeating the claim that Mauck referred to “the LGBTQ+ community as pedophiles.”
The Lawsuit
Mauck filed the lawsuit in June 2024, claiming that Bonnano and Athens Pride “willfully disparaged ” Mauck “by false or misleading representation of fact,” even “knowing such conduct was deceptive,” in violation of Georgia’s Uniform Deceptive Trade Practices Act.
The lawsuit also claims that Fiona/Felix Bell violated Georgia law against “tortious interference with a business relationship” by filing the ethics complaint and emailing Allen. Finally, the suit accuses Bell of engaging in “libel per quod,” defaming Mauck.
A trial court judge dismissed the case under anti-SLAPP law on Nov. 11, 2024. Jonathan Vogel, Mauck’s attorney, told The Daily Signal Friday that anti-SLAPP laws serve an important purpose but that this dismissal represents an abuse of them.
Anti-SLAPP statutes “are meant to curtail lawsuits that are without merit and are just trying to stop people from exercising their First Amendment right of free speech or right to petition.” Such laws “address only those issues that are matters of public interest or public concern.”
“In this case, Julie brought this lawsuit against those communications that these individuals and organization had with her broker… and with the Georgia Association of Realtors,” Vogel added. “They were private interests—and really, a private vendetta—to try to get Julie terminated from her livelihood and disciplined by the Georgia Association of Realtors and unfortunately they were successful for a time.”
The lawyer noted that a recent Georgia Court of Appeals’ ruling in a similar case gives him reason to hope the court will resurrect Mauck’s lawsuit. In Stephanie Britt v. Savannah Sharks Cheerleading, the appeals court vacated the trial court’s dismissal of a defamation lawsuit on anti-SLAPP grounds.
Vogel said he is confident that the appeals court will vacate the trial court’s dismissal in Mauck’s case, as well, remanding the case back to the lower court to be resolved.
Getting to the Heart of Cancel Culture
“That’s going to be a very important precedent because it goes right to the heart of cancel culture,” Vogel said. “Attempts to defame people to their employers to get them fired are going to backfire if they cause damages.”
Turpin, the Coalition for Liberty president, noted a 2022 Rasmussen poll finding that 77% of respondents said they are concerned that “school-age children are being exposed to sexual material that is not age appropriate.”
Most Americans “do not think that highly sexual books should be available for five-year-olds. It’s a very common position,” he said.
The woke activists “cannot win and they know they can’t win because their opinions are very unpopular, other than through cancel culture. Our objective is to end cancel culture, end the knowing lies told about Americans just to get them fired from their jobs, destroy their reputations. We’re going to file lawsuits and hold them accountable.”
“We want everyday Americans to know Coalition for Liberty has got your back,” Turpin declared. “If somebody is doing this to you, we will file a lawsuit against them and make sure that they are named and shamed in the media.”
“It’s the greatest weapon of the Left,” he said of cancel culture. “We’re going to take that away from them.”
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
