Do you remember Nate Vince? No one blames you if you don’t. He was a locksmith. Until he wasn’t. Then, he was again. Vince got fired from his position as Yosemite National Park's one full-time locksmith. But he spent more time touring Yosemite and posting photos of himself than actually working.
Vince wasn’t happy. His dream job of vacationing for most of the year was stamped out.
“We have endless things that need to be secured in various forms, and I’m the sole keeper of those keys, the one that makes the keys, the one that fixes the locks, installs the locks, and has all that knowledge of the security behind the park. And so it’s a critical role. And without it, everyone else in the park is handicapped,” Vince told the Post.
The horror. Someone could get locked in the pooper! Only Nate has the keys! Some heroes wear keys, not capes. In reality, Vince isn’t omnipresent. Like everyone, Vince takes breaks. Well, he took a lot of them. Mostly to El Cap and Half Dome and the like, but Rangers could in a pinch just call a locksmith from a local town.
To protest President Trump and specifically his firing, Vince and some buddies took a giant American flag up to El Capitan and hung it upside down. But they didn’t leave it hanging. They didn’t leave it up on the cliff face; they respected the flag. They didn’t let it touch the ground, and they took it down before sunset.
[T]wenty minutes before last light, the team folded it up. “We’d made our point and didn’t want to interfere with people’s experience of firefall,” Vince said. “We brought it up right before the sun lasered the falls. It really had a ceremonial feel.
Well, alrighty then. Vince did make his point. He wasn’t a National Park employee when he unfurled his big, beautiful flag, and he respected it. You might not agree with his point, but at least he wasn’t a total jerk about it. One cannot say the same about one Shannon Joslin. Sorry, that's "Doctor" Shannon Joslin.
She and a group of her chums did this:
Joslin was employed by the National Park Service as a "Quantitative Wildlife Biologist". Past tense. She was fired for her stunt.
The 35-year-old, who is nonbinary, and six other climbers, unfurled the 55-by-35 foot pink and blue flag one third of the way up the iconic granite monolith.
In doing so Joslin had 'failed to demonstrate acceptable conduct', the park's acting deputy superintendent Danika Globokar said in their termination letter.
The day after the stunt new legislation was brought in outlawing the display of large flags and banners on El Capitan and the rest of the national park.
That decision was part of a larger push by the government to limit the amount of political demonstrations on public lands.
In a social media post explaining the dismissal, Joslin described the role at Yosemite as being their 'dream job'.
'I hung the flag in my free time, off-duty, as a private citizen. El Capitan has had flags hung on it for decades and no one has EVER been punished for it. Only me.
Yes, Joslin, you were an identifiable Park Ranger pulling a political stunt. You didn't cover your face like the drag queen. You organized it and enlisted "Pattie Gonia" to pull on a Park Ranger uniform. You and your crew left that absurd flag up.
“It was on my own time!” Well that may be true Shannon but I have a feeling that when an employee walks into her employer's place of business, climbs up onto the merch, unfurls a gigantic trans banner and makes a video about it and then announces that's it's ok because "I'm on my break" – the employer might have a pink slip for they/them. And, it did. You flushed away your “dream job,” Joslin. You. No one else.
I looked up her profile on LinkedIn. She got her doctorate from UC Davis in August of 2024 after 8 years. She’s been employed with the park service for over four years.
Something I found ironic and interesting was something the “non-binary” they/them Dr. Joslin studied:
“Genome assembly, identification of sex markers and population genetics of endangered species of fish,” at UC Davis.
Joslin’s crew was pretty proud of themselves. Joslin in particular. She was front and center in the group photo on the cliff face.
“Pattie Gonia,” the drag queen Joslin enlisted to deliver the message, said that busting the trans banner out (that required tension wire and four anchor points) was to:
“Prove a point that trans is natural.”
Then Ranger Queen, dressed as a woman with a mustache and ghoulish makeup, claims that plants and animals change “sexes” - and that somehow proves how “natural” he is?
The May video closed with Joslin waving goodbye into the camera. Prescient.
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